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Still a shameful response to Sudan

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| Fri Apr. 1, 2005 2:41 PM PST

Ah, so I had a post on the current Sudan crisis all ready to go, railing on the current UN resolutions and noting that yesterday's bickering over the ICC completely misses the point. The point, of course, is that the genocide and the starvation and the humanitarian crisis going on right now need to be stopped, and the only way to stop it is to send in an intervention force. But after reading this article by Eric Reeves, I sort of realized that my rant was a bit inadequate. So please read his.

At the moment, it doesn't appear that either the U.S. or Europe will take any sort of serious action to halt the violence in Darfur. Reeves suggests this might partly be out of fear of jeopardizing the recently-signed peace treaty halting Sudan's other civil war between north and south, separate from Darfur, that raged on for the past 20 years or so. (Without insinuating too much, that civil war involved Christians in Sudan's south, and hence attracted a lot more attention.) Nevertheless, the present UN measures against the Khartoum government, and the janjawid warriors carrying out the mass slaughter, has been shamefully, shamefully inadequate.

Some observers have suggested strengthening the African Union (AU) forces in Sudan to enforce the ceasefire. But even if the AU force was upped to 6,000 or so, and even if it was given a mandate to actually protect civilians in Darfur, the AU would still be inadequate for the region's security needs. At the very least, the UN Security Council needs to enforce no-fly zones across the region, using United States airpower, so that Khartoum can't use its planes to bomb and strafe Darfur villages. More realistically, ground forces will need to disable or destroy Khartoum's air force. Meanwhile, UN security forces will need to be sent in to protect refugees, secure humanitarian corridors, and forcibly disarm the janjawid.

But the UN hasn't shown signs that it is willing to do any such thing, and instead contents itself with passing half-measures like setting up a committee that will dawdle for 90 days (90 days of genocide!) before deciding who the war criminals are and then freezing their assets abroad. Woo-hoo. It's near-impotent, and unfortunately, the National Islamic Front in Khartoum knows full well the West lacks all political will for serious action. Which means that the body count—some 300,000 at this point—will continue to rise. So much for "never again."

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Lawsuits over mercury

Fri Apr. 1, 2005 2:20 PM PST

The EPA's new mercury cap-and-trade rule is now officially—and predictably—under legal attack. On March 29th, one day after the rule was published in the Federal Register (PDF), nine states sued the EPA over its decision to take mercury emissions from power plants off the list of air toxins. (They did this so that they could regulate mercury using a cap-and-trade approach, which is forbidden for toxic chemicals under the Clean Air Act.)

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Down with the ship!

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| Fri Apr. 1, 2005 2:12 PM PST

Now that Tom DeLay's scandal woes are finally hitting the big time, the big question is whether or not the Democrats are actually going to capitalize on all this.

The other day I started fretting that liberal groups were failing to tie DeLay's corruption woes into a larger story about the way the Republican Party in general has conducted itself over the last four years. The new anti-DeLay ads, after all, offer congressional Republicans a chance to "wash their hands" of DeLay. The worry here is that the GOP will just purge the House Majority Leader, carry on with its rule-bending, K Street-cozying business, and life would carry on as ever before. Well, it's probably safe to set those fears aside. First the Washington Post reports that conservative groups are all holding hands and lining up behind their fearless leader. Then, over at TAPPED, Garance Franke-Ruta notes that the GOP is doing everything humanly possible to make DeLayism synonymous with the Republican Party. So I stand corrected! It's not often that the rats actually lash themselves tightly to the sinking ship, but hey, who's going to complain here...

Invade Syria, Krauthammer edition

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| Fri Apr. 1, 2005 1:01 PM PST

I see in the Washington Post today that Charles Krauthammer wants to go to war with Syria. Well, good for him. Not a whole lot to say here, except perhaps this. When the U.S. went to war with Iraq, please remember, policymakers had only the foggiest idea what Iraq's internal structure was like—the social dynamics, the nuances of the Shi'ite community, the intricate tribal structures, the longstanding feuds and rivalries. And, please remember, that ignorance led to a lot of horrific mistakes very early on that left a lot of people dead. But in the case of Iraq, we at least had the exile groups and our Kurdish pals to give us some information about what was going on. In Syria, we don't even have that. Just, you know, throwing that out there.

Meanwhile, Justin Logan notes that, at least according to Gen. John Abizaid, "it's unclear whether or not there's been any Syrian government complicity in [abetting insurgents]." Not that that will stop Krauthammer from getting ready to lock and load on the way to Damascus, but it would be nice if facts played a role here once in a great while...

New jobs any day now...

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| Fri Apr. 1, 2005 12:37 PM PST

Kash at Angry Bear dives into the poor job numbers released today and finds: more bad news. Key quote: "The most disappointing part about the US economy's poor job creation right now is that we may well be pretty much at the peak of economic growth for this business cycle." So what do we do once the economy starts to slow over the next two years? Clearly it's time for more tax cuts.

...one other note. The newspapers, while rightly dour, are noting that the employment number bounced up to 5.2 percent, down from 5.7 percent a year ago. That's true, but the employment-to-population ratio, which also counts up all those people too discouraged from even looking for work, is only at 62.4 percent. That's only slightly up from a year ago (62.2 percent) and far lower than the 64.7 percent in 2000. Oh, and wages keep declining.

Update: On the other hand, not everyone's faring so poorly...

Still more torture evidence

Fri Apr. 1, 2005 11:31 AM PST

As noted below, the ACLU has been filing endless Freedom of Information Act requests to get its hands on various torture memos. Nevertheless, as Matt Welch writes in Reason today, we're still a long ways from seeing the full stash of prisoner abuse photos and videos that the Pentagon has in its possession.

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Is Sanchez guilty of perjury?

Fri Apr. 1, 2005 11:28 AM PST

The ACLU yesterday made public a September 2003 memo, signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top military commander in Iraq, authorizing "29 interrogation techniques, including 12 which far exceeded limits established by the Army's own Field Manual."

As numerous bloggers have already pointed out, the memo contradicts Sanchez' earlier Senate testimony on the subject, when he said he "never approved any of those measures." Guilty of perjury? The ACLU has already sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales calling for an investigation. It will be interesting to see if the Bush administration tries to defend Sanchez by claiming that the commander obscured the truth to protect national security interests. After all, the authorization memo above was originally classified for "national security" reasons, and Sanchez might try to claim that he was unable to divulge its existence during his testimony.

Tax jackpot!

—By

| Fri Apr. 1, 2005 11:02 AM PST

The New York Times reports today that states are relying increasingly on gambling revenue to fund their governments. Indeed, this has been the trend for some time, as states slash income and corporate taxes while making up their losses with "sin taxes" that fall largely on low-income families. It's not hard to come up with reasons why depending on sin taxes are a bad idea—they provide an unreliable revenue base, for one—but most disturbingly, they tend to put state governments in the odd position of promoting activities like gambling and drinking. Just listen to Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner: "We have legislators every day who propose opening new venues, like a big casino on the waterfront in Wilmington or a floating barge in the Delaware River."

Interestingly enough, the "anti-tax" contingent in Washington—led by Grover Norquist, of course—doesn't much object to all this Last summer, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry proposed to hike state sin taxes in exchange for a cut in property taxes, Norquist stayed quite silent on the matter. Some people, apparently, deserve to pay taxes more than others. More to the point, many conservatives have actually come to embrace regressive taxation over the years. Back in November 2002, the Wall Street Journal denounced America's "lucky duckies": those poverty-line taxpayers who pay no or minimal income tax. (Never mind that these workers still pay payroll, sales, and excise taxes; the Journal has no time for facts.) The only way to get these workers' "blood boiling with tax rage," and hence vote Republican, was to tax them more. So, on with the sin taxes.

Media: What is it good for?

Thu Mar. 31, 2005 1:22 PM PST

Are government-funded "news" broadcasts legal? Are they propaganda? California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Bush administration have both come under quite a bit of fire regarding their use of pre-packaged "public releases," which are basically government-produced video segments made to look like independent reporting. The General Accounting Office (GAO) called the segments "propaganda," but that whip-cracking hardly seemed to faze the Bush administration, which has made it clear it will continue with its "news" production.

It would be easy to rant on about the evils of government propaganda, but an even more disturbing issue is at work here. The Bush administration has refused to stop producing these news videos, it seems, because they don't see anything wrong with them, and don't think that independent media serves any unique purpose. After all, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card said back in January that he didn't think the press had a "check and balance function." Likewise, the president himself once told a reporter, "You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that."

Unfortunately, the White House has more or less made these assertions true. The fact that the administration was able to buy off journalists like Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus nicely illustrates that many journalists really don't represent the public. And with news networks failing to make amply clear that these "news" segments they broadcasted were funded by the government, the media's function as a check-and-balance goes out the window too.

The warlord option?

—By

| Thu Mar. 31, 2005 1:11 PM PST

Meanwhile, in other "Iraqi vs. Iraqi" news, Pamela Hess reports that Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq are starting to turn against many of the more vicious Iraqi insurgents—both foreign and homegrown. Hess notes that the U.S. military commanders have actually been encouraging the intra-Sunni violence of late: In Fallujah, for instance, after insurgents killed Lt. Col. Sulaiman Hamad Ftikan, a member of the Dulaimi tribe, Marine Col. Jean Toolan says, "We tried to sanction a little bit of tribal interest in finding out who was responsible for Sulaiman's death, specifically." It worked, and the Dulaimis hunted down and murdered the culprits.

Judging from Hess' reporting, it seems that this sort of approach is likely to become more common in the future. There are real divisions among the Sunni tribes, and rivalries among different tribes, all of which can be exploited by the U.S. Something along the lines of: "We'll give you money and guns if you stop supporting these foreign fighters; if you don't, we'll go talk to these rival sheikhs." Indeed, security experts like Daniel Byman have suggested this sort of strategy in lieu of a real counterinsurgency campaign, which would require far more troops than the U.S. can possibly commit to Iraq.

The only problem here is that these tribal sheikhs aren't at all willing to work with the U.S.—or the Shi'ites or Kurds—on the larger goal of a unified Iraqi government. In essence, then, the U.S. would be promoting the warlordization of Iraq, as it did in Afghanistan, in order to weed out the most immediate enemy—namely, the ex-Baathists and foreign jihadists who are leading the anti-American fighters in Iraq. In other words, they tamp down the insurgency at the risk of locking in the rule of the gun and possible sectarian strife.