From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Butterfield
Battlefield
"The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq
has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush,
with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February,
according to American military officers in Iraq," reports the New York
Times:
The detainee increase comes, they said, because American forces are operating in areas where they had not been present for some time, and because more units are able to maintain a round-the-clock presence in some areas. They also said more Iraqis were cooperating with military forces.
In other words, Iraqi jails and prisons are filling up despite improving security in Iraq. It's a paradox!
Military officials tell the Times that 85% of the detainees are Sunni, and that a sizable minority of the Sunni detainees--roughly 3 in 8--are either al Qaeda or self-identified "takfiris, or Muslims who believe some other Muslims are not true believers":
Those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order--a movement that drew from former Baath Party members and security officials who had served under Mr. Hussein--and has become religious and ideological.
But the officers say an equally large number of Iraqi detainees say money is a significant reason they planted roadside bombs or shot at Iraqi and American-led forces.
"Interestingly, we've found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government--the vast majority are inspired by money," said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces' detainee operations. The men are paid by insurgent leaders. "The primary motivator is economic--they're angry men because they don't have jobs," he said. "The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education."
Now, let's flash back to 2002. On Oct. 21 of that year, we noted a story from London's Times: "Iraq began to empty its overcrowded jails yesterday after President Saddam Hussein ordered an amnesty of all prisoners to celebrate his 100 per cent triumph in last week's Orwellian presidential referendum."
Two days later we noted that few if any political prisoners seemed to have been among those released. In other words, a few months before his overthrow, Saddam released a large number of common criminals into Iraqi society. Today the "insurgency" is getting crucial support from losers who are, essentially, common criminals. One wonders how many of them were beneficiaries of Saddam's 2002 amnesty.
Friedman
to Bush: Don't Ape My Paper
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman--whose stuff is still behind the TimesSelect
wall--faults the Bush administration for poor public relations in the war on
terror:
Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians--men, women and babies--who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis.
And what was the Bush team's response to this outrage? Virtual silence. After much Googling, the best I could find was: " 'We're looking at Al Qaeda as the prime suspect,' said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman." Wow.
Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off? Even if we don't know the exact perpetrators, we know who is inspiring this sort of genocide--Al Qaeda and bin Laden--and we need to say that every day.
Although it is the view of this column that the Bush administration often gets a bum rap, we are not going to defend its PR effort, which is self-evidently flawed given that the administration so often gets a bum rap.
Nonetheless, a question for Friedman: What do you mean "we," kemo sabe? Here is how the Times article we quoted in the preceding item describes al Qaeda: "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led."
This is in keeping with Friedman's paper's official policy of using circumlocutions to keep alive the notion that al Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq. The authors of the Times stylebook could do worse than to take some guidance from the paper's esteemed foreign-affairs columnist.
Save
86,061 Lives? Why Bother?
"The government's terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners
as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year," the Washington
Post reports:
But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list's effectiveness. . . .
Slightly more than half of the 20,000 encounters last year were logged by Customs and Border Protection officers, who turned back or handed over to authorities 550 people, most of them foreigners, Customs officials said. . . .
David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy organization, said the numbers "suggest a staggeringly high rate of false positives with respect to the identification of supposed terrorists." He added that "this really confirms the long-standing fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool."
So it's ineffective because it only stopped 550 people? Well, let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, shall we?
The attacks of Sept. 11 were perpetrated by 19 men. According to a September 2006 CNN estimate, the attacks killed 2,973 people. That amounts to just over 156 victims per terrorist. If 550 terrorists were able to pull off something proportionate, they would kill roughly 86,061 people.
Of course it's possible that not all of the 550 were actual terrorists, but that's not what critics like David Sobel are worried about today. They're concerned that too few people are being arrested or denied entry as possible terrorists. If the ratio went up, though, is there any doubt that the critics would be complaining that the government is casting too wide a net and ensnaring the innocent?
Coolidge
Without the Cool
We don't have much to say about Alberto Gonzales's resignation as attorney general.
He always struck us as ineffectual, and thus we're not unhappy to see him go;
but the Democrats' attacks on him of late have been so over the top that we're
not happy that he may be going for the wrong reason.
Which isn't much, but it's more than John Edwards is saying. From his campaign Web site:
Chapel Hill, North Carolina--Commenting today upon the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Senator John Edwards released the following statement. Edwards first called for Gonzales' resignation on March 13, 2007.
"Better late than never."
As we noted Aug. 14, Edwards did essentially the same thing when Karl Rove resigned, putting out a press release with an introduction many times as long as his "statement," which read simply "Goodbye, good riddance."
It occurs to us that Edwards may be attempting to imitate the famously terse Calvin Coolidge. In one typical, though probably apocryphal, story, Coolidge returns from church and his wife asks him what the sermon was about. "Sin," he replies. She asks what the minister said. "He was against it."
Of course, unlike Edwards, there was nothing petulant or vicious about Coolidge's laconic pronouncements. But then again, here's a point of similarity. When Edwards drops out of the presidential race, it will be very easy to imagine someone saying--as Dorothy Parker did on hearing of Coolidge's death--"How could they tell?"
Meet
the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
London's Sunday Telegraph reports on the continuing crisis in the Palestinian
territories:
Human rights groups and ordinary Gazans say Hamas is committing exactly the same crimes as its Fatah predecessors, whose corruption and brutality were one of the main reasons why support for Hamas grew. "We are receiving reports of political detentions every day," said Mahmoud Abu Rahma, of the Gaza City-based Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights. "Hamas is conducting wide sweeps and interrogations to collect information. The interrogations include harsh treatment, and in many cases, torture and beatings."
At a protest in Gaza City on Friday, Hamas gunmen broke up a demonstration by Fatah loyalists by firing on the crowd and smashing journalists' cameras. Similar treatment is often meted out in the opposite direction in the Fatah-controlled West Bank, where dozens, if not hundreds, of Hamas activists have been jailed--but since Hamas has long portrayed itself to the Palestinians as an upright alternative to decades of corrupt Fatah rule, such behaviour rankles all the more.
Fighting among Palestinian Arabs has only escalated as Israel has diminished its presence by withdrawing from Gaza and erecting a security fence to separate itself from the West Bank.
The tragic condition of the Palestinians underscores the lack of realism behind the view that the Middle East's problems could be solved if only Israel were willing to make peace. At this juncture, the Palestinians simply do not have a political culture capable of producing peace, even domestically. There is nothing "pro-Palestinian" about those who accept this state of affairs and seek to blame Israel for the Palestinians' problems.
The People's Senate
Our Thursday
and Friday
items on the procedures for amending the Constitution brought this interesting,
tangential reply from reader John Truslow:
Your comments over the last few days regarding the Washington Post's misunderstanding of constitutional procedure made me long for you to address a core tenet of republican (small "r") ideals now missing from the public dialogue: the absence of true federalism in our system, the same mortally wounded by the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I believe that there is a demonstrable need to repeal this amendment and return a long-lost power to the states via the procedural method you describe. There are a number of books and Web sites focused on this idea, and I believe you would be doing our constitutional system a great service by occasionally taking up the cause in your article.
The 17th Amendment is the one providing for popular election of U.S. senators, and its repeal is just the sort of interesting proposal we like to mull over in a contrarian spirit. But in the end we favor popular election of senators, and we do so in a contrarian spirit.
In the original constitutional scheme, the House of Representatives was the only popularly elected part of government. State legislatures chose U.S. senators, and in many states also picked presidential electors. The idea was that the House would represent popular passions while the Senate would act, in a metaphor attributed to George Washington, as a cooling saucer.
Some argue that the 17th Amendment tipped the balance too much in favor of popular democracy, but in our view there has been a countervailing trend: gerrymandering. State legislatures lost the power to select senators, but have used the redistricting process to assert a high degree of control over the selection of House members.
Legislators in most states draw districts to protect incumbents or to maximize their own party's representation. If a state loses a seat in reapportionment, the legislature may target a specific House member for elimination. In 2003 Texas Republicans, having just captured the state Legislature, replaced their Democratic predecessors' gerrymander with one of their own, changing Texas' house delegation from majority Democratic to majority GOP.
The result of all this is that House elections are actually less democratic--that is, sensitive to changes in public opinion--than Senate ones. In fact, as Jay Cost noted last year, since the 17th Amendment was ratified, there has never been an election in which the House changed parties and the Senate didn't--even though all House seats but only one-third of Senate seats are up every two years.
So we'll stick with the 17th Amendment until someone comes up with a nationwide solution to gerrymandering.
Oh, and Homer nods again: The provision that the chief justice presides over an impeachment trial of a president is in the Constitution's Article I, Section 3, not Section 8 as we wrote Friday (since corrected).
The
Nativists Are Restless
What's wrong with this picture? A monument to Martin Luther King is being built
on Washington's National Mall, but some are objecting to the monument committee's
choice of sculptor--in part because of the color of his skin. The Associated
Press reports:
A loose-knit but growing group of critics says a black artist--or at least an American--should have been chosen to create the King memorial between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials in the nation's capital. They have been joined by human rights advocates who say King would have abhorred the Chinese government's record on religious and civil liberty.
The sculptor, Lei Yixin, is a Chinese national who has also carved sculptures of the late tyrant Mao Tse-tung. Among those objecting to the choice is Gilbert Young, an Atlanta painter, who has set up a Web site called KingIsOurs.com:
I'm willing to yell at the top of my lungs my disgust at the decision made by the King Memorial Foundation to choose a Chinese artist to sculpt the image of Martin Luther King Jr., for the first ever national memorial to an African American man.
Where are those who are supposed to protect the ideals and champion the cause? Among those pretending to be in charge are obviously too many who can not see the travesty of justice in having the "national treasure of China," Lei Yixin--that's Communist China--sculpt the center piece of the most important African American monument, in recognition of the most important African American movement in the history of the United States. A movement that never could have taken place in China. I am appalled. . . .
"The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by Lei Yixin"
Whose artistry and history will that plaque honor 300 years from now? The answer is NOT OURS.
It seems unfair to blame Lei for having been born in a country with an oppressive government. And on the surface, at least, the racial profiling of sculptors would seem to run counter to Dr. King's most famous pronouncement: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
But then again, he did say, "my four little children"--not yours or Mr. and Mrs. Lei's. Young argues for a narrow conception of Dr. King's significance, seeing him as a champion not of universal ideals but of justice for his own people:
For those whose only belief is that King belonged to the world--that his work, his words, and his stance was international in scope--you need only take a few moments to review history. Watch the films and look at the photographs that show what was going on in African America that prompted King to become the icon he became. The images of "White Only" signs on drinking fountains and movie houses; scores of people marching and protesting bigotry, prejudice, Jim Crow, and segregation. Look again at the black men hanging from trees lit by Klan fires. See the young black men and women and children being hosed in their faces, bitten by dogs and dragged through the streets by police. Watch the men carrying out the bodies of those four little girls.
King's message became universal because only the truly ignorant would not accept and acknowledge that all men are created equal and deserve to be respected and allowed the right to freedoms promised in this country's Constitution. We are still fighting for those rights. King's message may have been for everyone, but everyone wasn't for King. He was killed for speaking up for black people.
You won't be surprised to hear that this column takes the side of the universal King rather than the black-only King. The best argument we can think of is this: the third Monday in January. That is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday, not merely a "black" holiday.
He's
Not the Least Bit Healthy!
"Cuba Foreign Minister Says Castro Health Rumors Untrue"--headline,
WTVJ-TV Web site (Miami), Aug. 24
The
Netroots Get Even Nastier
"Kos Mayor Knocked Out by Irate Resident"--headline, Kathimerini (Greece),
Aug. 25
Finally,
the Solution for Global Warming!
"Hot Weather Supposed to Bring On Cooler Temps Forecasters Say"--headline,
Herald Leader (Lexington, Ky.), Aug. 27
Plastic
Surgery Gets Cheaper All the Time
"$100 Bill to Get High-Tech Face Lift"--headline, Associated Press,
Aug. 26
'Those
Aren't Real'
"Fake Money Doesn't Fool Tenn. Strippers"--headline, Associated Press,
Aug. 26
Good
News for Blues Fans
"Tough Times for New Orleans Musicians"--headline, Associated Press,
Aug. 26
Where
Else Would It Be?
"Huge Hole Found in the Universe"--headline, Space.com, Aug. 23
As
if They Didn't Have Enough Trouble Finding Dates
"Scientists Bringing Bad Breath Out of the Closet"--headline, Reuters,
Aug. 25
Please,
Don't Do It! What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Experts Gather to Discuss Suicide"--headline, Irish Times, Aug. 27
Look
Out, Turkey and Greece
"Hungary Devour Italy"--headline, Khaleej Times (Dubai, United Arab
Emirates), Aug. 24
Breaking
News From 674
"Greek Fire Toll Climbs to 37"--headline, Agence France-Presse, Aug. 25
Breaking
News From 1814
"Dominant Defense Helps U.S. Rout Canada"--headline, Associated Press,
Aug. 26
Breaking
News From 1827
"Composer Beethoven May Have Died Accidentally"--headline, Houston
Chronicle, Aug. 25
News You Can Use
- "Action Line: Courtesy Goes a Long Way in Neighborhood Tiffs"--headline,
San
Jose Mercury News, Aug. 25
- "Cat Stew Legal, May Not Be Safe: Health Dept"--headline, ABC News (Australia), Aug. 27
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Fred Thompson Backers Look for Old Truck"--headline, Associated
Press, Aug. 27
- "Nevada Chancellor Won't Donate $3M"--headline, Associated
Press, Aug. 25
- "Woman Stung by Jellyfish"--headline, Post
and Courier (Charleston, S.C.), Aug. 26
- "Jessica Alba Has the Perfect Wiggle, Study Says"--headline, Daily
Telegraph (London), Aug. 25
- "L.A. Bus Stops Short, Jostling Passengers"--headline, Los
Angeles Times, Aug. 24
- "Brzezinski Embraces Obama Over Clinton for President"--headline, Bloomberg, Aug. 24
Legal
Drinking Age
"Lawyers at some of New York's top firms are billing $1,000 an hour,"
reports the ABA Journal:
The move was a reluctant one for some law firms, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports. "We have viewed $1,000 an hour as a possible vomit point for clients," a partner at one New York firm told the newspaper. . . .
Barry Ostrager of Simpson Thacher says he's worth the high price. "I haven't personally experienced resistance to my billing rates," he told the newspaper. "The legal marketplace is very sophisticated."
ABA blogress Molly McDonough reports on another way in which some of these sophisticated professionals are tempting another possible vomit point:
Thanks to the blog Cranking Widgets, we now know of a new way to enjoy Law & Order. . .with friends and drinks.
Blogger Brett Kelly, who describes himself as a huge L&O fan, has identified a series of "drink triggers" when certain situations arise, such as when Jack McCoy or his assistant are served with a motion to suppress. Or when the phrase "end-run" is used by either the prosecution or defense.
There surely are ways to improve upon the game and other legal shows that could be so adapted.
So we wondered, what Law & Order "drink triggers" would you identify? Or how would you make a game--drinking or otherwise--out of your favorite legal TV show?
How about this: Every time our lawyer tries to charge us $1,000 an hour, we drink three shots. But only if he's buying.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Jane Vawter, Chip George, Michael Segal, Daniel Simon, Jason Shanker, Dan O'Shea, Stephen Clarke, Jeff Hurd, Jared Silverman, Matt Franck, Christopher Chardo, Scott Hemmen, Paul Gross, Michael Throop, Ernie Vasiloff, David Hopson, Doug Black, Tim Willis, Jerry Rhoden, Taylor Dinerman, Rod Pennington, Scott Wright, Andrew Strada, Evan Slatis, Clark Goodwin, Mark Kellner, William Katz, Steve Karass, Chris Simpson, John Nernoff, Thomas Mobley, Jan Niacholas and Ken Hennesay. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: The "Blue Dog" moment: So far, they're spending like other Democrats.
- John Fund: State certification boards are supposed to help consumers. They often stifle competition instead.
- The Journal Editorial Report: A transcript of the weekend's program on FOX News Channel.
