"Daddy, can you read me the Mearsheimer bedtime story where Goldilocks, the mama bear and the baby bear gang up on the papa bear and take his porridge?"
"The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette endorsed Sen. Specter this year because "he would be in a position to block some of the ideologically extreme federal judges likely to be nominated by President Bush in a second term, some of them for the Supreme Court." With all due respect to Sen. Specter's journalist pals, but the Constitution makes it clear that the Senate's role is to "advise and consent" when it comes to judges, not "block and dissent."
"Iraq’s new government should simply announce that as of a date certain, it will establish a new national investment fund — call it The Iraqi People’s Freedom Trust — which will be credited with a major share of all future Iraqi oil earnings. A popular real world model might be the Alaska Permanent Fund, which grants a share of that state’s oil revenues to every citizen. Revenues directed to Iraq’s Freedom Trust could be invested in Iraqi government bonds, keeping a small cash reserve to provide for cash withdrawals from the Trust by individual Iraqis.
All 27 million Iraqis — men, women and children — would be eligible for an equal, personal account in the Freedom Trust simply by proving Iraqi birth and pledging their allegiance to the government. With assistance from coalition allies, registration for ownership shares in the trust could go hand in hand with registering citizens for the upcoming national elections. Any adult citizen of Iraq would then be free, at any time, to ask for a calculation of their account’s value and withdraw up to their full balance — no questions asked."
"After the colonial powers departed at the end of World War II, oil provided the newly independent governments of the Middle East a veritable windfall--either through concessions or later through outright ownership of their country's oil facilities. With their new income, the states' kings, emirs, and sheiks were no longer dependent on their countries' merchants or workers for tax income. They could finance their governments entirely out of oil revenues. They could also use these oil revenues to buy off the citizenry through social-welfare systems, state jobs, land grants, and lucrative contracts. Their citizens became passive recipients of government largesse--paying no taxes and receiving no representation."
"For the first time in the history of Iraq, indeed of oil nations generally, the new government would be offering each and every citizen a real, guaranteed ownership share in an asset that has been long since nationalized and regarded as a public patrimony. Establishment of the Freedom Trust would dispel the fantasy that this war was waged by the U.S. to somehow steal Iraqi oil. The Freedom Trust would instantly offer a stark contrast with the Saddam regime’s practice of stealing and wasting oil revenues on weapons, palaces and luxuries for a tiny elite of privileged cronies."
"There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude of "romantic paternalism" which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage...As a result of notions such as these, our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes. Neither slaves nor women could hold office, serve on juries, or bring suit in their own names, and married women traditionally were denied the legal capacity to hold or convey property or to serve as legal guardians of their own children...It can hardly be doubted that, in part because of the high visibility of the sex characteristic, women still face pervasive, although at times more subtle, discrimination in our educational institutions, in the job market and, perhaps most conspicuously, in the political arena...It is true, of course, that when viewed in the abstract, women do not constitute a small and powerless minority. Nevertheless, in part because of past discrimination, women are vastly underrepresented in this Nation's decisionmaking councils...this underrepresentation is present throughout all levels of our State and Federal Government"
"Law students are usually taught that it is the job of courts to pro-tect what United States v. Carolene Products [304 US 144, 152, n.4, (1938)] called 'discrete and insular minorities.' These are groups that have suffered a long history of discrimination, are relatively politically powerless, and are unable to protect themselves in the political process. This portrait is quite misleading. In general, courts will protect minorities only after minorities have shown a fair degree of clout in the political process. If they are truly politically powerless, courts may not even recognize their grievances; and if they have just enough influence to get on the political radar screen, courts will usually dismiss their claims with a wave of the hand. Conversely, as a reform movement for minority rights gains prominence through political protest and legislative lobbying, courts will increasingly pay attention to minority rights and take their claims more seriously." (1551-1552)
"[L]egal elites...usually respond to ‘disadvantaged’ groups only after a social movement has demanded a response. Ironically then, a status group must display some degree of political power—whether at the ballot box or in the streets—before it can be considered ‘politically powerless’ and hence deserving of legal protection...[G]roups that are truly politically powerless usually do not even appear on the radar screen of legal decisionmakers—including courts—because the status hierarchy is so robust that few in power even notice that there is a problem."
"Judges are sort of like place kickers in football. Most place kickers are pretty bad at making an open-field tackle to stop a speedy running back returning a kickoff. But place kickers can help pile on after the other players have tackled or slowed down a runner. That is sometimes how I imagine courts and their relationship to social change: They see the running back lying on the ground, groaning under the weight of a huge pile of linebackers. The judges say to themselves, 'It’s time for us to do some justice!' and they throw themselves on the pile." (1549)
"Politically, the insurgents have significantly advanced what could be called the Sunni persecution strategy: That is, to gather recruits, material, and political support for the insurgency by aggravating the sense among Sunnis that they have no future in the U.S.-sponsored political process. The only Sunni political party in the Allawi government has quit in protest and the largest Sunni religious organization has formally called for their adherents to boycott the January elections. One member of the Iraqi Islamic Party who refused to resign his position--and who has since been renounced by the party--explained his decision: "It will be a big mistake not to have the Sunnis' participation in the election. We would have problems for decades to come."
Exactly. That's the insurgents' strategy: Ensure that the U.S.-backed process takes on an overwhelmingly sectarian character, with the Shia dominating outright alongside a restive Kurdish delegation waiting in the wings to seek independence. Since the insurgency will by all estimates continue on into January, a Shia victory sets the stage for pushing the vicious cycle of Sunni alienation and violent resistance forward. That is why attacks have been occurring in Shia areas like Karbala and Najaf, and why, except for the occasional outburst by Moqtada Al Sadr, no Shia are coming to the aid of Falluja this time. Understood through this prism, the Sunni insurgency is in a revolutionary situation, viewing itself as far more likely to gain what it seeks--restored domination of Iraq and the removal of U.S. forces--through violence than through any political settlement. Much of the Sunni insurgency appears to be figuring that they can win a civil war, and as such are looking to start one."
"However, the Bush administration is putting its political staying power ahead of economic responsibility - indeed it is weakening the independence of those very institutions on which Americans rely to check economic radicalism. For example, the current Republican congressional leadership is trying to override the constitutional design whereby the Senate acts as a brake on the executive branch and on the self-interest of “majority faction”. Bill Frist, senate majority leader and George Allen, the Republican senate campaign committee chair, said their unprecedented direct campaign against Tom Daschle, the defeated Senate minority leader, should warn moderate Republican and Democratic senators not to be “obstructionist”, even though that is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended the Senate to do.
… Markets tend to assume that the US political system will prevent lasting extremist policies so, even now, observers discount the likelihood of the Bush administration fully pursuing - let alone passing - this economic agenda. If the thin blue line of Democrats and the responsible Republican moderates in the Senate bravely fulfil their constitutional role, perhaps the damage will be limited. If not, we can foresee the US economy following the path to extended decline of the British economy in the 1960s and 1970s and of Japan in the 1990s."
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
"I can't even count the times have we heard this administration said it was fighting a war against terrorism — not an intelligence and law enforcement endeavor. I think this critique hits the nail on the head. The Bush administration is waging a war on Al Qaeda. But it continues to use metrics better suited for law enforcement in measuring its success in that war. To date, the administration has not devised a grand strategy for measuring political, moral, economic or strategic progress against Al Qaeda, much less what victory might look like. And thus, we measure our success using crude metrics like the body count — something which is ananthema to most military planners today, but still used in the prosecutorial context by officials who measure their success by convictions and imprisonments."
"I think Al Qaeda has suffered substantially since 9/11, and it may have slowed down its operations, but to take the two-thirds number as a yardstick is a fantasy.[...] To say that they have only one-third of their leadership left is a misunderstanding. That is looking at it from a law enforcement perspective. They pay a lot of attention to leadership succession, and so one of the main tenets of Al Qaeda is to train people to succeed leaders who are captured or killed."
The order that accompanies this opinion provides: (1) that, unless and until a competent tribunal determines that Hamdan is not entitled to POW status, he may be tried for the offenses with which he is charged only by courtmartial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice; (2) that, unless and until the Military Commission’s rule permitting Hamdan’s exclusion from commission sessions and the withholding of evidence from him is amended so that it is consistent with and not contrary to UCMJ Article 39, Hamdan’s trial before the Military Commission would be unlawful; and (3) that Hamdan must be released from the pre-Commission detention wing of Camp Delta and returned to the general population of detainees, unless some reason other than the pending charges against him requires different treatment.
AT DAWN ON Tuesday, a few hours before Americans began voting, Sudanese police and soldiers arrived at a camp for displaced people in South Darfur. They set fire to huts, beat people with truncheons and shot an unknown number; then, as The Post's Emily Wax reported, they loaded 250 families into trucks and drove them away. They did all this, moreover, at a camp just eight miles from a contingent of Nigerian cease-fire monitors, whose job is supposedly to deter such war crimes. Meanwhile the United States is leading an international response to Darfur's crisis. Its principal goal is to deploy more African Union monitors of the sort that failed Tuesday.
For a while over the summer, the world's response to Darfur seemed to be gathering momentum. A series of high-level visits to the region, including stops by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, put pressure on Sudan's government to stop murdering civilians; the U.N. Security Council passed two resolutions condemning the abuses; Congress and then the Bush administration determined that the systematic killing of ethnic Africans met the definition of genocide. Sudan's government responded by allowing relief workers to bring food and medicine to displaced people and by agreeing to the presence of African Union troops. All this progress was unforgivably slow, and tens of thousands of people died waiting for it. But it was still progress.
Now the momentum has fizzled. Preparations for an African Union force continue, but the violence in Darfur has flared to the point that it's not clear what 3,500 outsiders can accomplish in an area the size of France. Tuesday's attack on civilians was just one of many, and anti-government rebel groups are growing more violent and numerous.