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The World’s Banker
Paul Wolfowitz is an inspired choice

DAVID FRUM

Say this for President Bush: The man has a sense of style. Critic after critic howls for the heads of the architects of the Iraq war, and above all for the head of the man the European media call “Paul Vulfovitz,” as though he were a villain in a John Buchan novel. So what does the president do? He names this Vulfovitz to run the World Bank — a job that the world’s do-gooders and bleeding hearts have long regarded as their exclusive domain. Take that!

And just to add extra torque to the nomination, there is this irony: Even the president’s detractors have been constrained to admit that Wolfowitz is likely to prove an excellent choice — maybe more excellent than is entirely comfortable either for the bank, for its clients in the underdeveloped world, or for its constituencies in the advanced industrial democracies.

The foreign-aid industry has long been under fire from the free-market Right. The great Hungarian-born economist Peter Bauer published his searing essay “Dissent on Development” all the way back in 1971. Bauer’s work was bitterly controversial at the time, but in the three
and a half decades since, it has evolved into something close to orthodoxy: Bauer himself ended his days as a member of the British House of Lords.

In the 1990s, the old attack from the Right was reinforced by a new challenge from the anti-globalist Left. This new wave of protesters objected to the World Bank’s record of supporting dams, mines, highways, and airports rather than the traditional life of primitive villages — and to its even more alarming habit of expecting its loans to be repaid. In the face of this unexpected onslaught, the bank’s image-conscious chairman James Wolfensohn hastily retreated. He gave speeches declaring that he shared the protesters’ goals. He promised to consult environmental activists before funding future dams. He declared that poverty reduction would replace traditional big-project development as the bank’s main priority.

These lofty words did not, alas, translate into actual progress against poverty. In a fascinating and important new book about Wolfensohn, The World’s Banker, Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post observes that the condition of the poor in much of the world actually deteriorated in the 1990s. Between 1987 and 1998, the number of people living on less than $1 per day increased by 100 million. The growing population of desperately disadvantaged was obscured, however, by a counterbalancing statistic: Over those same years, the number of Chinese living on less than $1 per day declined by about 100 million. Net-net, as the bankers say, there was global progress — but only because one smashing success story could be set against disappointment throughout much of the rest of the poor world.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the World Bank justified its role by arguing that only a subsidized multinational lender like the bank could be counted on to fund essential projects in the developing world. The experience of the 1990s discredited that old claim. In the post-1989 globalization boom, capital flooded into Latin America and East Asia. And despite shocks, disappointments, and crises, the money keeps coming: Developing countries attracted $255 billion in foreign direct investment in 2004, 42 percent of all foreign direct investment that year — the highest level since 1994.

When the developing world offers opportunities, entrepreneurs and investors will eagerly seize them. The trouble of course is that much of the developing world does not offer opportunities. And the reason for that glaring lack is politics, bad politics: war, civil strife, corruption, oppression, and lawless government. Why is Zimbabwe plunging into famine? Not for lack of fertile land or willing workers — but because of a greedy and brutal dictator, Robert Mugabe. Variants of this story can be told from West Africa to Andean South America — and throughout too much of the Islamic world, from Mali to Pakistan.

If Paul Wolfowitz is known for any one thing, it is his insistence that Middle Eastern terrorism can be traced back to Middle Eastern tyranny — that the region cannot know security until it enjoys freedom. This insight has, if possible, even more relevance to the problems of global poverty and Third World development.

The World Bank has in the past eschewed such political thinking. It is after all an institution owned and controlled by governments. The United States is the bank’s single biggest funder and accordingly holds the most votes — about 16.4 percent — but bank management cannot easily avoid responding to other large shareholders such as France (4.3 percent) or China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia (2.78 percent each). Any suggestion that tyranny is an important cause of poverty can be counted on to offend large voting blocs.

No wonder then that the Wolfowitz nomination has stirred the pot. But isn’t it long past time that this particular pot be stirred? Fifty-plus years since the World Bank went into business, there is precious little verifiable evidence that it has as yet done its supposed beneficiaries any real or enduring good — and considerable evidence that its willingness to underwrite projects that flunk the market test has done real and enduring harm. If the day should ever come, though, when the bank reinvents itself as a force for clean and representative government in the Third World; if it could offer incentives to encourage peace and stability in conflict-wracked places like Sierra Leone or Iraq; if it could be a force for democracy-led development: then its long disappointing record would at last change for the better. Paul Wolfowitz is heart and soul committed to this task — and so is the president who has again defied international complacency to give Wolfowitz his backing. It’s a great choice by a gutsy president who stands by friends — and has the right enemies.

National Review

Come the Revisionists
Self-flattering, self-deluded — almost desperate

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON


Will the second Bush administration be less bellicose, more multilateral? That’s what some of the president’s critics are suggesting, after his much-publicized visit to Europe. Joseph S. Nye, author of Soft Power, thought he saw in Bush a new convert who had belatedly, but wisely, forsaken flawed concepts such as unilateralism and preemption and adopted instead the tenets of Nye’s own volume. “The most striking thing at this point in Bush’s second term,” Nye recently intoned, “is his belated discovery of the importance of diplomacy and soft power.”

Clinton NSC veteran Nancy Soderberg recently expressed worry that Bush’s policies — often the opposite of those of the Clinton administration and thus antithetical also to the precepts of Soderberg’s just-released but ill-timed The Superpower Myth — well, might just work. “It’s scary for Democrats,” she stammered on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, “I have to say. . . . Well, there’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s still hope for the rest of us. . . . There’s always hope that this might not work.” But later, when asked by Bill O’Reilly to explain her curious remarks, she echoed this strange new theme that Bush was finally getting it right: “I think there’s a second-term conversion going on with the Bush administration. I’d like to think it’s because they read my book. I think it has more to do with the fact that reality has seeped in. They’re starting to talk well of the French.”

At first glance, this is all counterintuitive. Almost immediately after the inauguration, President Bush made a number of appointments that reflected confidence in the course of his prior four years. John Bolton, the hawk on North Korea, was named ambassador to the U.N. This was not a gesture calculated to show that a contrite United States was now seeking accommodation with the U.N. hierarchy; Bolton is expected, rather, to deploy his tough talk and iron spine to shake up a corrupt institution reeling from scandals. Nor was Paul Wolfowitz relegated to the World Bank as punishment for his neo-Wilsonian stance in the Middle East: He was elevated to the institution’s presidency precisely to inject that same sort of democratic idealism into determining the extension or withdrawal of international loans.

Similarly, Condoleezza Rice is no ambivalent Colin Powell type; she is a powerful spokesman for the president’s own views that place democracy and idealism in the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. She has already expressed disagreement with the Europeans’ desire to sell arms to Communist China; canceled a meeting with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, to remind him to release dissidents and hold multiparty elections; skipped a visit to Canada, on news that the government there had backed out of the U.S.-led missile-defense project; and recalled the U.S. ambassador from Damascus, in displeasure at Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. The U.N., EU, NATO, and the Democratic leadership played little role in the flurry of her first few weeks in her new post.

Indeed, rather than following the multilateral approach called for by John Kerry in the recent campaign, Secretary Rice seemed to be seeking strong new bilateral ties with India, Taiwan, and Japan. They all appreciate American idealism and power, and the willingness of the U.S. to open its economy, and to warn a newly aggressive China to tread carefully around the region’s democracies.

Given this reality, what is behind the new revisionist notion that the second, softer Bush administration is a corrective to the harder first? The most obvious explanation is simply the angst of those out of power. Liberals and Democrats now write “should have done it my way” books in lieu of wielding real influence. They witness the world now operating according to principles that leave them privately aghast. What do they make of the president’s controversial isolation of Arafat — now that it has, indirectly, led to immediate West Bank elections upon Arafat’s death? What explains the conversion of Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who cut his teeth damning the U.S. but now confesses, “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world”? After the democratic agitation sweeping the Middle East, following the successful elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, even the most ardent Bush-haters might admit that the static world of Oslo, U.N. embargos, and no-fly zones had more in it of appeasement than of principle. The now-famous New York Times editorial of March 1 pointed out that “the Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances.”

American idealism, backed with force and conviction — not soft power, multilateralism, Europeans, or the U.N. — ended the rule of the Taliban, and of Saddam Hussein. The often-lonely vision of George W. Bush ushered in elected governments in their places, and inspired the disenfranchised elsewhere to begin agitating for change. Those in Lebanon know that it was an American president, not Kofi Annan or Gerhard Schroeder, who both shares their aspirations and is willing to stand up to their oppressors.

Among the critics of the first George W. Bush administration — and especially among the architects of the feeble U.S. response to terrorism in the 1990s — the present reality must be either denied or spun. The former is impossible when Arab radicals themselves credit Bush with being a catalyst for reform. That leaves the latter alternative of spin as the only recourse: Bush erred by going alone and is now changing to our point of view and thus basking in the world’s appreciation.

The second reason we are witnessing these false claims of a new direction in foreign policy is simply the changing tides of war, and the facts on the ground in the Middle East. The turn to offense after 9/11, the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, coupled with reconstruction and preparation for the establishment of democracy, occupied almost all of the attention of the Bush-administration years between 9/11 and the second inauguration.

But now, both tyrannies are gone. Counter-democratic forces are waning, and the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq are gaining strength. While hyper-critics talked of “taking our eye off bin Laden,” and listened to the pessimism of Richard Clarke, Michael (“Anonymous”) Scheuer, or Joe Wilson, the U.S. military, unheralded, was systematically routing al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, retaking Fallujah, and killing thousands of insurgents in Iraq. Those unsung American heroes empowered U.S. diplomats with new leverage against enemies (such as Syria and Iran) and erstwhile friends (such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt). If insurrectionists in Iraq once emboldened reproachful Europeans, successful voting there has now embarrassed them.

So there have been ripples from such American resolve that remind us that force need not be perpetually applied, once the credibility of one’s willingness to resort to it has been unambiguously reestablished. In short, George W. Bush can play good cop/bad cop with the Europeans in Iran, invite multilateral parties to adjudicate the crisis in North Korea, and work with France in Lebanon, because no one doubts that the alternative could well be worse: American unilateral action to disarm rogue nuclear states or stop Syria’s promotion of terrorist enclaves in neighboring countries.

That very lack of credibility was the tragedy of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy of warmed-over Carterism, under which we waited nearly a decade to remove Milosevic, withdrew in defeat from Somalia, gave up a chance to have bin Laden extradited — and treated terrorism as essentially a criminal-justice matter, with military actions amounting to a few cruise missiles and stern-sounding press conferences. Perhaps Europeans, Arab dictators, Yasser Arafat, and Kofi Annan all liked Bill Clinton far more than they do George W. Bush — but whether they respected, feared, or trusted him more is another matter altogether.

We went through a similar cycle of easily lost and then laboriously restored deterrence with the successive administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan — when after the Communist expansion in Afghanistan and Central America, genocide in Cambodia, and hostage-taking in Iran, the U.S., under a demonized but intrepid president, recovered to unravel the Soviet Union.

This characteristic liberal laxity was chided by Leslie Gelb, no fan of George W. Bush, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Gelb’s lecture to liberals — who, he wrote, “portray the rest of the world as just a bunch of misunderstood bunny-rabbits” — began with, “The Democrats need a Dick Cheney, especially on foreign policy.” Gelb remonstrated that “Cheney sees the dark side of the world, a reality that largely eludes Democrats but not most Americans. He understands power and knows how to wield it, as opposed to the soft-power prose of intellectual Democrats.”

The “soft power” advisers to John Kerry in the last election and the craftsmen of Democratic foreign policy now play a similar role to the administration that Europe enjoys with the U.S. itself. Like the Europeans, the soft-power advocates can talk all they want about nice-guy diplomacy and the need for multilateral institutions, but they will have to realize that their approach enjoys such validity as it does only because the Bush administration has done the hard part: braving the melee when corpses piled up and thugs were on the rampage.

Sadly, too many leftists still don’t have a clue what brought this all about. Consequently, they are peddling this bizarre notion that what led us into the mess culminating in 9/11 is what will now save us. One would think that they had been comatose the last three years, if they had not been so vocal in opposing what actually worked.

Anybody can appear kinder and gentler when the bad guys have been taken out and high noon has passed. Only then can the cowering townsfolk pour back onto Main Street to slap the sheriff on the back, applauding that his smoking gun is now safely and properly holstered — and all those nasty outlaw corpses are conveniently out of sight at the undertaker’s.

Brace yourself: They are all coming out right now.

No compelling reason to kill Terri Schiavo

March 27, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST


A couple of decades back, north of the border, it was discovered that some overzealous types in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been surreptitiously burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. The prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, shrugged off the controversy and blithely remarked that, if people were so upset by the Mounties illegally burning down barns, perhaps he'd make the burning of barns by Mounties legal. As the columnist George Jonas commented:



''It seemed not to occur to him that it isn't wrong to burn down barns because it's illegal, but it's illegal to burn down barns because it's wrong. Like other statist politicians, Mr. Trudeau . . . either didn't see, or resented, that right and wrong are only reflected by the laws, not determined by them.''

That's how I feel about the Terri Schiavo case. I'm neither a Floridian nor a lawyer, and, for all I know, it may be legal under Florida law for the state to order her to be starved to death. But it is still wrong.

This is not a criminal, not a murderer, not a person whose life should be in the gift of the state. So I find it repulsive, and indeed decadent, to have her continued existence framed in terms of ''plaintiffs'' and ''petitions'' and ''en banc review'' and ''de novo'' and all the other legalese. Mrs. Schiavo has been in her present condition for 15 years. Whoever she once was, this is who she is now -- and, after a decade and a half, there is no compelling reason to kill her. Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo -- something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of -- would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough. It would be one thing had a doctor decided to reach for the morphine and ''put her out of her misery'' after a week in her diminished state; after 15 years, for the courts to treat her like a Death Row killer who's exhausted her appeals is simply vile.

There seems to be a genuine dispute about her condition -- between those on her husband's side, who say she has ''no consciousness,'' and those on her parents' side, who say she is capable of basic, childlike reactions. If the latter are correct, ending her life is an act of murder. If the former are correct, what difference does it make? If she feels nothing -- if there's no there there -- she has no misery to be put out of. That being so, why not err in favor of the non-irreversible option?

The here's-your-shroud-and-what's-your-hurry crowd say, ah, yes, but you uptight conservatives are always boring on about the sanctity of marriage, and this is what her husband wants, and he's legally the next of kin.

Michael Schiavo is living in a common-law relationship with another woman, by whom he has fathered children. I make no judgment on that. Who of us can say how we would react in his circumstances? Maybe I'd pull my hat down over my face and slink off to the cathouse on the other side of town once a week. Maybe I'd embark on a discreet companionship with a lonely widow. But if I take on a new wife (in all but name) and make a new family, I would think it not unreasonable to forfeit any right of life or death over my previous wife.

Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He's forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: She is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously? The legal deference to Mr. Schiavo's position, to his rights overriding her parents', is at odds with reality.

As for the worthlessness of Terri Schiavo's existence, some years back I was discussing the death of a distinguished songwriter with one of his old colleagues. My then girlfriend, in her mid-20s, was getting twitchy to head for dinner and said airily, ''Oh, well, he had a good life. He was 87.'' ''That's easy for you to say,'' said his old pal. ''I'm 86.'' To say nobody would want to live in an iron lung or a wheelchair or a neck brace or with third-degree burns over 80 percent of your body is likewise easy for you to say.

We all have friends who are passionate about some activity -- They say, ''I live to ski,'' or dance, or play the cello. Then something happens and they can't. The ones I've known fall into two broad camps: There are those who give up and consider what's left of their lives a waste of time; and there are those who say they've learned to appreciate simple pleasures, like the morning sun through the spring blossom dappling their room each morning. Most of us roll our eyes and think, ''What a loser, mooning on about the blossom. He used to be a Hollywood vice president, for Pete's sake.''

But that's easy for us to say. We can't know which camp we'd fall into until it happens to us. And it behooves us to maintain a certain modesty about presuming to speak for others -- even those we know well. Example: ''Driving down there, I remember distinctly thinking that Chris would rather not live than be in this condition.'' That's Barbara Johnson recalling the 1995 accident of her son Christopher Reeve. Her instinct was to pull the plug; his was to live.

As to arguments about ''Congressional overreaching'' and ''states' rights,'' which is more likely? That Congress will use this precedent to pass bills keeping you -- yes, you, Joe Schmoe of 37 Elm Street -- alive till your 118th birthday. Or that the various third parties who intrude between patient and doctor in the American system -- next of kin, HMOs, insurers -- will see the Schiavo case as an important benchmark in what's already a drift toward a culture of convenience euthanasia. Here's a thought: Where do you go to get a living-will kit saying that in the event of a hideous accident I don't want to be put to death by a Florida judge or the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals? And, if you had such a living will, would any U.S. court recognize it?

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazin ... ml?cnn=yes

Europe's Way of Death
The Terri Schiavo case has provoked a fierce debate about euthanasia in the U.S. — and a sense of bafflement among many Europeans

The way Terri Schiavo's private tragedy has become a political issue in the U.S. estranges many people in Europe. But Europeans, too, have struggled to find the proper balance between the right to life and the right to die. In 1974, Dutch mother-to-be Ineke Stinissen fell into a deep coma after problems with the anesthetic administered during her caesarean section. A year later, her husband Gerard asked that her feeding tube be removed, seeing no hope of her regaining consciousness. Stinissen's doctors refused on ethical grounds. Amid impassioned public debate, Gerard fought for his wife's right to die until late 1989, when a Dutch court ruled that tube feeding constitutes a medical treatment that can be withdrawn when there is no reasonable chance of recovery. Gerard found another doctor who, after determining that his wife was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), agreed to remove the tube. Eleven days later, Ineke Stinissen died.

These days in the Netherlands and across much of Europe, divisions over euthanasia have largely healed. Polls in the U.K. and France show up to 80% support for legal changes that would allow patients enduring extreme suffering from a terminal illness to request medical assistance to shorten their lives. "The consensus in the Netherlands is that we don't prolong life just because we technically can," explains Johan Legemaate, legal adviser to the Royal Dutch Medical Association. "When a treatment does not improve the patient's situation, a doctor is obliged to stop it."

By this measure, the Schiavo case is straightforward. The patient has no chance of recovery, her husband has asked for her feeding tube to be removed, and Schiavo's doctors and the Florida state courts have approved that request. In the U.S., though, religion and faith-based politics intervene in a way that baffles Europeans. "It would have been handled very differently in Europe," says Wim Distelmans, chairman of the Federal Commission of Euthanasia in Belgium, where euthanasia is permitted if performed by a doctor after an adult patient clearly states a wish to die. "Because of the politics, it's now impossible to have a sensible debate on the issue in the U.S." Writing in the Times of London last week, foreign editor Bronwen Maddox said the Schiavo case "shows just how emphatically the U.S. and Europe are moving on different paths" on moral and social issues.

The debate in Europe centers less on whether euthanasia is right or wrong than on how to regulate it. Yet there are striking differences in terminology and approach. In the Netherlands, a medical treatment can be terminated when it is no longer "meaningful." In Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal under certain conditions, euthanasia is still forbidden. In practice, though, voluntary euthanasia — when a doctor ends a patient's life with his or her consent — is common. A 2003 University of Zurich study showed that 7 out of 10 terminally ill Swiss resorted to voluntary euthanasia by, for example, ingesting a lethal dose of drugs or asking to have life-support systems disconnected. The practice remains illegal in France, though a draft "right-to-die" law was passed last November in the National Assembly and will be debated by the Senate later this year. If approved, it will "essentially give permission for doctors to stop treatment," says Dr. Jean Cohen, chairman of France's Association for the Right to Die with Dignity.

The French law was drafted in the wake of the controversial case of Vincent Humbert, who was left blind, paralyzed and mute after a 2000 auto accident. "France's general perception of what is going on in the Schiavo case is similar to the general mood with Humbert," says Cohen. "Most here have compassion for the patient, and are in favor of allowing death because they understand there is no point in living in this state." There is a difference, though. Vincent Humbert expressed a clear will to die. He dictated an acclaimed book, I Ask the Right to Die, by using small movements of one thumb. Terri Schiavo has given no such indication, according to her parents, though her husband claims she would want to be allowed to die. Still, says Cohen, "if there is no change in the state of a person for 15 years, enough is enough. You have to let go."

That's also the feeling in Britain, where courts must decide on a case-by-case basis whether nutrition and hydration can be denied to patients in a PVS. Courts are also involved in resolving disagreements on whether treatment should be withheld from critically ill patients. Last year, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, president of the High Court Family Division, ruled that doctors had the right to deny 9-month-old Luke Winston-Jones mechanical ventilation if he stopped breathing, despite his mother's insistence on intervention. Winston-Jones was born with a rare genetic condition that left him with holes in his heart. If his condition deteriorated, doctors wanted to allow Luke to die; last November he did. A similar case is currently going through the British courts involving Charlotte Wyatt, a 17-month-old girl suffering from serious brain, lung and kidney damage. Physicians say the child, who's already been resuscitated three times, should not be revived again; the parents disagreed and have been back to court with evidence that the baby's condition had improved. A ruling is expected in April.

The Schiavo case could not happen in Germany, according to Dr. Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, president of the Federal Chamber of Doctors, because treatment would only be withdrawn when a patient has clearly expressed the wish to die. "We agree with the part of Schiavo's family that wants life-saving treatment to be continued because at the moment she is not terminally ill," Hoppe says. "If it could be proved that [Schiavo] had expressed a wish that treatment should be stopped, that would be a different matter."

Some Europeans argue that removing Schiavo's feeding tube is cruel. "Being starved and dehydrated is not a death with dignity," says Tara Flood, spokesperson for Britain's Disability Awareness in Action. Others would welcome more American-style pro-life passion. Italy's Minister for European Affairs, Rocco Buttiglione, who last year was forced to withdraw his candidacy as the European Union's Commissioner for Justice after making controversial remarks on homosexuality and the role of women, applauds American politicians' intervention in the Schiavo case. "It's moving to see a great participation of the American people and great movement for life," Buttiglione told Time. "It will strengthen the position of those opposing euthanasia in Europe and start a debate here."

But so far, there is little evidence of one. Ten years ago, Pope John Paul II signed the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which deemed euthanasia a "crime that no human law can claim to legitimize." "There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws," the encyclical reads. "Instead, there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection." Many Europeans, though, seem content to leave harrowing decisions like those in the Schiavo case to the consciences of families and physicians.

Terri Schiavo will never recover. She had let her husband know she would not want to go like this. She would not want to remain an undiginified, motionless slab of meat, which she is, for 15 years.

My condolences to her family. My moral support - to her husband.

From CNN (http://edition.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/29/s ... index.html)

Felos also countered accusations that a brain scan has never been performed on Terri Schiavo.

He said CAT scans of her brain were introduced in trials in 2000 and 2002, showing that her cerebral cortex was "gone."

Felos said Michael Schiavo decided to come forward with the autopsy plans for Terri Schiavo after "opponents to carrying out her wishes" suggested Michael Schiavo had an ulterior motive in his plans to cremate his wife

No need to prolong life incapable of any emotion, joy, thought, chance for recovery.

The Democrat Party

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opini ... ssuserland

The Republican Party

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opini ... ssuserland

The Wall Street Journal

A Silicon Valley Operator's Manual

By RICH KARLGAARD
March 31, 2005

Palo Alto, Calif.

Twenty years ago a friend and I started a Silicon Valley civic organization, the Churchill Club. We invited Robert Noyce to address our first event. Co-inventor of the semiconductor chip, founder of Intel, Noyce had put the "silicon" in the valley. Writer Tom Wolfe said Noyce looked like Gary Cooper in "High Noon."

Before a packed house, the fetching Noyce strode to the Churchill Club podium and gave . . . a stinker of a speech. He carped about Japanese competition. He called for trade barriers to save America's memory chip business. He yelped about fiscal and trade deficits.

In short, Noyce tried to play politician. His life stood in contrast to this garbage -- bold inventor, entrepreneur, adventurer and risk taker. (For sport, Noyce flew Navy seaplanes.) To take Noyce's political rant at face value was to ignore everything real about the man.

Silicon Valley has not changed. It's a mistake to make much of its politics. True enough, the Valley can mimic a respectable political language -- if only to snag Davos invitations or to keep Washington off its back. In their souls, Valley businesspeople are wild libertarian crazies who want nothing more than to forget the Beltway even exists. The news is full of talk about the great divide between political left and right. Silicon Valley could care less. The axis that counts here is incumbent vs. disrupter.

Incumbents are the bad guys. They are Microsoft, Gray Davis, Hollywood studios, telephone companies, big pharma and Social Security. Disrupters are Google, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Napster, WiFi, biotech and personal savings accounts. Incumbents are big, slow, rude and authoritarian. Disrupters are nimble, new, cute and libertarian.

Political labels mean zilch here. The most popular Silicon Valley politician of the last 30 years was a Republican, U.S. Congressman Ed Zschau. He scored high marks from the libertarian Cato Institute. Elected in 1982 and again in 1984, Rep. Zschau had a lifetime seat in the Valley if he wanted it. But he gambled all, ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1986, lost a squeaker to incumbent Alan Cranston and retired.

Prior to running for Congress, Mr. Zschau was a lobbyist for the American Electronics Association. In 1978 he worked with Bill Steiger, a Republican U.S. Congressman from Wisconsin, to cut the capital gains tax from 49% to 28%. The Steiger Amendment passed and touched off a 25-year Silicon Valley boom. This was pure heroic disruption. Democrats controlled both houses and the presidency in 1978. That didn't scare Rep. Zschau. He wore a straw hat, played the banjo, serenaded Congress with a song he wrote called "The Risk Capital Blues" and won the day.

The other great Silicon Valley disruption of 1978 was the success of the Apple II, the first fully manufactured personal computer. Apple chief Steve Jobs was not a Republican. He was a Northern California hippie. He had quit college, dropped acid and hiked barefoot around India in search of the truth. His hero was John Lennon; he named his company Apple after the Beatles record label.

Mr. Zschau the Republican and Mr. Jobs the Democrat were both incumbent slayers. Mr. Zschau beat Tip O'Neill and the Harvard economics department. Mr. Jobs took on IBM. This is why Messrs. Zschau and Jobs are revered in Silicon Valley by conservatives and liberals alike. If all this sounds confusing, here is a 10-point primer on Valley politics to help you:

1. Silicon Valley is 30 miles from San Francisco but a galaxy away in politics. San Francisco is old left. It cross-dresses libertarian but always sides with unions, rent control, "living wages" and undemocratic court fiats. Silicon Valley, while voting Democrat of late, is more right than it appears. It celebrates capital formation, hard work, and unequal outcomes from equal chance.

2. San Francisco loves Barbara Boxer and laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Valley likes Arnold and loathes Barbara.

3. Right leaning libertarians in Silicon Valley vote Republican. But they hate Washington. This is funny as their party is in power. Right-lib Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, blasts the Republican Congress and its restrictions on skills-based immigrants. He rails against Washington's war on stock options. President Bush's picks of aluminum and railroad barons to head Treasury seem weird.

4. Lefty libertarians vote Democrat and also hate Washington. This makes perfect sense. There is not a single libertarian Democrat pol east of the Potomac. Valley Democrats pegged John Kerry as patronizing, slow-moving, risk-averse, old money -- every value Silicon Valley fights. Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, a donor to the Clinton and Gore campaigns, said he was sickened by Sen. Kerry's tirades against free trade.

5. On the whole, the Valley favors looser laws on copyrights and patents. For every carp about China ripping off our tech, one hears 10 complaints about Hollywood thwarting progress. On the MGM v. Grokster divide, Valley liberals and conservatives see Grokster as the disrupter and MGM as the slow-footed shuffling beast.

6. In Washington, Republicans are the daddy party and Democrats are the mommy party. But out here, Republicans are the hardware party and Democrats are the software party. Intel's Mr. Barrett and Cisco's John Chambers sell gadgets and vote Republican. Google's Eric Schmidt and Oracle's Larry Ellison sell vapor and vote Democrat.

7. Republicans like to say the Valley was built on Moore's Law and risk capital. Democrats say the Valley was built on dreams and rebellion.

8. Valley Democrats and Republicans agree on: free trade, China optimism, the need to lift Congressional quotas on skills-based immigration, hatred of Sarbanes-Oxley and trial lawyers, the woeful state of K-12 education, the need for more federal science funding, the "they don't get it" obtuseness of telephone companies, cable companies and Hollywood studios, and the predictable failure of outsider CEOs such as John Sculley at Apple and Carly Fiorina at H-P.

9. They disagree on: the Iraq war, cultural values, the intelligence (i.e., math SAT scores) of George W. Bush, whether abolishing estate taxes will help small business or wreck meritocracy, and how to fix the K-12 system.

10. Silicon Valley has no clout in Washington.


Mr. Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes magazine.

The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

Yeah and don't forget that Abraham Lincoln was a top trial lawyer of his day.

One no longer remembers what Republican roots were. As one Republican guest at Bill Maher (!!!!) show said, "we used to be libertarians".

Now, Republicans are the Jesus Crew

I guess we all ought to pattern our laws after Euros.

After all they are so "successful"



welfare, medicare & employement rates...

Eugene = Bull fertilizer expert

:P :P :P

Bill Maher knows as much about Libertarians in particular and politics in general as your average Leftie, i.e. big fat zero:)

I'd be willing to guess that his guests (there is at least one conservative on the panel there as a rule) do. But then, does it really matter? Leonid here thought that Bill Maher said it!

Besides, "an average leftie" knows more about politics than a rightwinger. At least, a leftie went to college.

surnami wrote:I guess we all ought to pattern our laws after Euros.

After all they are so "successful"



welfare, medicare & employement rates...

Eugene = Bull fertilizer expert

:P :P :P

Aha, and that has to do with libertarians exactly how?

Suri, please look in the vocabulary to see what a "libertarian" is. And then we'll discuss a libertarian opinion about education, welfare and medicare.

I was referring to your

Europes way of death post....

Surnami

Had you readthe article in its entirety, you would have seen that even Europe allows a lot of variance in it's "Right to Die" laws.

In any case, the article has served its purpose - it educated those who cared about the European laws on the subject (like me) and pricked those who have their eyes closed (like you).

The Wall Street Journal

WMD Redux

By FRED C. IKLE
April 1, 2005

But I'd shut my eyes in the sentry box, so I didn't see nothin' wrong.

--Rudyard Kipling

The report published yesterday by the WMD Commission will delight all policy wonks who have a collector's passion for intelligence failures. Equipped with a rearward-looking telescope called hindsight, hunting down other people's mistakes is a fun sport -- enjoyed by policy wonks as well as the media. But prudence suggests we should also have a forward-looking telescope to warn us of policy failures on the road ahead.

Congress, unfortunately, has a knack for noisily debating past intelligence failures, the better to distract the public from its chronic policy failures. Recall what happened to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission late last year. Those who itch to blame every enemy attack on an intelligence failure banged their drums, clamoring for an "absolutely essential" reorganization of the entire intelligence bureaucracy, and insisting this multilayered cake had to be topped off with an intelligence czar.

Their clamor drowned out all the other measures that the 9/11 Report called for. Congress thus got away without living up to the recommendations that it consolidate its multiple and redundant committees, legislate reliable ID cards and biometric passports, redirect airport screening toward explosives rather than nail-clippers, and reform the broken system for visitors' visas.

The WMD Commission was given a far more restrictive charter than the 9/11 Commission. It was told to focus exclusively on the intelligence community. Fortunately, the commissioners had the wisdom to look beyond an indictment of past failures. To their great credit, they offer not merely a good read for Monday morning quarterbacks, but also a profound analysis of the unique problems that afflict U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

These problems will not go away. The worldwide proliferation of WMD capabilities can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. It is high time that our body politic took this unpleasant fact on board. The globalization of science and technology will gradually, but ineluctably, spread the wherewithal for building mass destruction weapons. We are thus fated to confront a threat of a kind we have never faced before. And intertwined with this dismal fate is another predicament: Whatever the intelligence community can contribute regarding the WMD threat is severely limited by the unique aspects of mass-destruction weapons.

I shall try to explain this predicament for the busy readers who cannot peruse the 500 page report. To start my tutorial, I need to distinguish between tactical and strategic intelligence. (The Commission's reference to "current intelligence" and "strategic" or long-term analysis addresses a different issue.) An example of tactical intelligence that would have greatly reduced the horror of 9/11 is a hypothetical FBI alert sent out Sept. 10, 2001, informing the Boston airport authorities that several foreign hijackers, armed only with knives and Mace, will try to board United Flight 175 and American Flight 11 the next morning. It is bliss to have such tactical intelligence and worth great effort to obtain it. It is utterly irresponsible to count on it.

Strategic intelligence prior to 9/11, by contrast, could have been gleaned from open sources, and if acted upon, might well have prevented 9/11. We knew all along how Israel's airline protected cockpits from hijackers. And in 1994 we were shown a "smoking gun": Algerian terrorists, who had hijacked a French passenger plane, landed in Marseille and demanded (unsuccessfully) to have it refueled, evidently to enhance the inferno they wanted to cause by crashing the plane into a Paris landmark. For the U.S. government to ignore this highly visible strategic warning was a policy failure, not an intelligence failure.

With this strategic/tactical distinction in mind, we can now see why the intelligence task regarding WMD is the most difficult of all intelligence missions. To obtain valuable tactical intelligence of a major aggression with conventional arms is much easier, because the enemy's preparations are more visible. For instance, in July 1990, a few days before Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, both the Pentagon's intelligence and the CIA had compelling evidence of Iraqi preparations for an attack across Kuwait's borders.

But an enemy planning a clandestine, terrorist attack with mass destruction weapons would not have to deploy large forces that we could detect. To cause mass casualties far exceeding those of 9/11, he could send just one competent and trustworthy courier -- someone not on America's long list of suspects -- with a few vials of an easily dispersible biological agent that would propagate into a pandemic. Or if the enemy's choice of WMD were nuclear, two smuggled bombs could inflict on American society an unimaginable social, political and economic disaster. Should we be so fortunate as to receive tactical intelligence of either of these kinds of attack, it would either be due to immense enemy stupidity or to an improbable stroke of luck.

We must not let the illusory quest for "reliable and timely" tactical warning blind us to strategic intelligence in plain sight. Keep in mind, taking advantage of strategic intelligence is standard procedure for the development of vaccines to protect us from natural viruses as well as from biological weapons. U.S. health authorities do not delay the production of vaccines until they receive a frantic report from Los Angeles airport that passengers with a lethal bird flu have landed, or from New York that smallpox has been spread in a crowded metro station.

Strangely, however, to protect America against a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon, our government has been unresponsive to strategic intelligence. Such intelligence is all around us. We know that terrorist groups have tried to acquire nuclear weapons, we know that North Korea has them, we realize the safety of Pakistan's sizeable nuclear arsenal may hang by the thread of President Musharraf's survival. Yet, the policy makers keep neglecting the need for better instruments to detect and disable a smuggled nuclear bomb. Defense scientists have offered promising recommendations to this end since 1997. Nothing was done for seven years. The bureaucratic molasses began to heave only recently, with throngs of officials holding dozens of meetings. Of course, what would help prevent nuclear terrorism are not meetings in Washington but a vigorous, generously supported research program by scientists working in their laboratories. The WMD Commission agrees. Alas, at the speed with which this endeavor is proceeding, we will be lucky to have a useful capability deployed in 2020.

At the end of the day, the best tactical and strategic intelligence is worthless unless the policy makers find a way to make use of it. And both types of intelligence usually leave the user with multiple uncertainties. How likely is the predicted event? How closely will its key aspects resemble the picture drawn by the intelligence community? Would it be prudent to ignore the ambiguous warning, instead of launching a pre-emptive military strike against the presumed terrorists or the rogue nation harboring them? On which side of this knife will the president be blamed for reaching a very costly and dangerous decision?

* * *
To realize the gravity of these questions for the coming decades, it helps to consider another disturbing piece of strategic intelligence that is now in plain sight: the possibility of a widespread and prolonged electrical blackout caused by a single, relatively low-yield nuclear weapon. To shed more light on this threat, Congress established a commission which was staffed by highly competent scientists. The report by these experts was published last summer. It explained how the electromagnetic pulse from a high-altitude explosion of a nuclear weapon can deprive a large region of electricity and permanently disable electric equipment, thus shutting down the Internet, traffic lights, gasoline stations, food storage, police cars, fire engines, and municipal water and sewer systems. Without protective measures, such a vast and disabling blackout could last for months and cause near anarchy with huge casualties.

The media barely noticed this story. But scientific papers published in Russia and China indicate that the physics of such a blackout are no secret. Could North Korean scientists and engineers learn how to carry out such an attack? One can hope that their capability would not (or will never) be up to this rather complex task. Perhaps so.

In any event, whether under the influence of hope or fear, the buck stops not with the intelligence community but with the policy makers. It is the president and Congress who must decide to take costly and dangerous actions, or accept the risks of inaction. It is these elected policy makers who must rally the people to give first priority to the survival of our country. Most Americans prefer to believe that the United States will have a bright future and think prophets of doom belong to decaying nations. This healthy frame of mind puts a ceiling on our tolerance for intelligence warnings about all sorts of cataclysmic terrorist attacks. Fair enough. As long as we don't shut our eyes in the sentry box.


Mr. Iklé is author of "Every War Must End" (Columbia Univ. Press, 2005) and is finishing a book at the Center for Strategic & International Studies on technology as a threat to democracy. He was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Reagan administration, and is currently a member of the Defense Policy Board.

Those who speak of intelligence failure have one thing in mind - distracting the public and redirecting blame from the White House.

Eugene

What accounts for all your intelligence failures?

:P :P :P

Considering you intelligent is my main intelligence failure.

"Eugene

What accounts for all your intelligence failures?"

The right-wing conspiracy of Karl Rove, Richard Perle and Dick Cheney. Them and His Almighty:)

If you say so, I am not the one to complain.

Eugene wrote:Besides, "an average leftie" knows more about politics than a rightwinger. At least, a leftie went to college.

What a sweeping generalisation, Eugene. That certainly hasn't been my experience; true, the atmosphere at University (mine is no exception) is generally left-leaning because of a few silly lecturers who are not grounded in "realpolitik", and not aware that they shouldn't be trying to use the university as a platform to air their views.

However, I guarantee you that out of those students who are influenced by their leftist lecturers, quite a few will change their views as they get a little older and wiser.

All but a few of my cousins, parents, siblings are University educated and only 1 of them is even slightly left-leaning (and even SHE voted tories for a short-time in the 80s).

That is so true, those damn right-wingers never go to colleges, certainly not Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice.

Or, Edward Teller and college....what a preposterous idea.

There is no need to mock Eugene, he always does the job himself:)

Marko wrote:

Eugene wrote:Besides, "an average leftie" knows more about politics than a rightwinger. At least, a leftie went to college.

What a sweeping generalisation, Eugene. That certainly hasn't been my experience; true, the atmosphere at University (mine is no exception) is generally left-leaning because of a few silly lecturers who are not grounded in "realpolitik", and not aware that they shouldn't be trying to use the university as a platform to air their views.

However, I guarantee you that out of those students who are influenced by their leftist lecturers, quite a few will change their views as they get a little older and wiser.

All but a few of my cousins, parents, siblings are University educated and only 1 of them is even slightly left-leaning (and even SHE voted tories for a short-time in the 80s).

I do not know about England, but here in the states this does hold. There are certain groups and areas that are more likely to get higher education and it seems, these groups and areas are leaning left.

On the other hand, the areas with lowest percentage of higher education per capita (the Bible Belt) are leaning right.

In my whole family, only the in-laws are right-leaning. And, surprise, surprise - no college education there. But, in any case, one's family can not be used as a true sample.

A recent study here in Norway during the 2003 election was unable to draw such a line between left and right. However, it suggested that the average education was higher for Socialist Left Party, Liberal Party and Conservative Party voters, while the Labour Party and the Progress Party had the lowest average education among their voters. Christian People's Party and Centre Party voters scored higher than Labour and Progress voters, but still considerably lower than the three parties on top. (The study did only consider the major seven parties.)

Looks like all over the map...

Yeah Eugene, not really saying that my family are representative of the nation - they aren't (thankfully for the UK - dealing with them and petty squabbles every xmas is bad enough:P). But of the people I've met, there are educated people on both sides, and it seems to be true in Norway too from what Boye says.

I have no reason to believe those stereotypes about America and the so-called uneducated Bible-belt are true. A lot of Europeans do believe such things though, which makes me feel the American left are doing a fine job convincing everyone.

I'm not religious at all but sometimes this stuff goes too far. Attacking the so-called "bible belt" is often attacking decent, and educated hard working families. People should save their ire for those who deserve it.