Anti-Abstinence Culture on the Left

William McGurn, at the Wall Street Journal, discusses the left's response to a research report on abstinence-only pledges out last week from John Hopkins University:

The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don't. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."

Here's the rub: It just isn't true.

In fact, the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that "virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold."

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

- These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

- These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

- These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

- When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 -- compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

- And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste -- amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let's put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: "Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge."

Or, more to the point, a deeply-flawed study tells us little about the efficacy of abstinence-only pledges. McGurn cites the mass-media frenzy over the results, but I was almost sick to my stomach over the outright cheering for this report on the radical left.

AmericaBlog jumps for joy in "Religious Right "Virginity Pledges" Do Not Work":

I'm sure the lunatic right will do their best to ignore the results. The big question here is whether Obama and the new Congress will put an end to funding this waste of money or if they will buckle under yet again to the anti-science, anti-rational American Taliban.

This is the kind of "smart" discourse we see among those of "the reality based" community. Here's some of the roundup I found last week on Memeorandum (Macmind's and Outside the Beltway are the rational outliers):

* Maria / Jezebel: "No Sh-t: New Study Finds ‘Virginity Pledges’ ..."

* Matt Corley / Think Progress: "Study: Premarital abstinence pledges are ineffective.»"

*Cecile Richards / The Huffington Post: "Can You Hear Me Yet? — Today's Washington Post features yet … "

* Scott Swenson / RHRealityCheck.org blogs: "Virginity Pledges Fail Says Johns Hopkins Study."

* PERRspectives / PERRspectives Blog: "Study Shows Teens Unfaithful to Virginity Pledges."

* Josh Rosenau / Thoughts from Kansas: "Abstinence pledges still don't work, still encourage unprotected anal sex."

* Jeff Fecke / Alas, a blog: "Sun Rises in East, Sets in West."

* Michael J.W. Stickings / The Reaction: "Captain Obvious! Your story is up!"

* Pam Spaulding / Pam's House Blend: "Study: teen virginity pledges don't work."

* Maha / The Mahablog: "Be Prepared — There's another new study out saying … "

* Steve Benen / Washington Monthly: "ABSTINENCE PROGRAMS STILL DON'T WORK.... I don't want to alarm anyone ... "

* Mac Ranger / Macsmind: "Flawed Study on Virginity Pledges."

* James Joyner / Outside The Beltway: "Virginity Pledges Don't Work, Except When They Do."

Gender Difference and Gay Marriage

I thought I'd share an exchange that came at the end of my post, "Kids Need Opposite-Sex Parents."

Conservative Ken Davenport is exasperated:

The left wants to rewrite history, biology and physics to fit their ideological orthodoxies. Unfortunately, it seems to be working. They've been doing it in Europe for generations, and we now see a continent in denial about its past and its present. Now it seems to be coming to America in all its secular revisionist glory.

We have same sex marriage and parenting in the name of tolerance, because the left believes that there is no real difference between boys and girls - only the presence of "love" is needed.

Puhhhhlease.

Anyone who has had kids knows two things: 1) that boys and girls are wired differently from birth and require the influence of both mothers and fathers to develop fully and 2) that moms and dads bring decidedly different (and important) parenting skills to the child's life. Men and women are not interchangeable just because the left wishes it to be so. This isn't an issue of same sex equality - its an issue of what is best for children. And on that score, traditional marriage wins hands down.

We are headed to an America where the minority is in charge, largely because the majority is disorganized and lacks the courage of its convictions. Any reasonably educated person knows that kids belong in a stable family with a mom and a dad. But in the face of the culture wars, where everyone is afraid of being labled "sexist", "racist", "homophobic" or worse, we've been reduced to jelly. Its a shame.

Sadly, common sense is dead. How do I know? Because Al Franken will be the U.S. Senator from Minnesota.

Need I say more?

My occasional lefty commenter, JBW, responds:

Jesus Ken ... Nobody of any psychological or anthropological repute on the left is saying that "there is no real difference between boys and girls" ...

Of course boys and girls are wired differently: it's how we've evolved as a species. And yes, the ideal situation is obviously for every child to have a loving and supportive mother and father. Was your childhood ideal? Because mine wasn't and I would wager that most people can say the same of their own.

If the left's argument was that we should remove children from families with straight parents and force them to be raised by gay parents then I can see why you would get so bent out of shape but no one is suggesting that at all.

What they are suggesting ... is that absent your happy idyllic fantasy world, children having loving parents of the same sex is still preferable to having stupid, racist, abusive, prejudiced or crazy parents of the opposite sex or even worse, no parents at all.

And if you think the minority gay, leftist agenda or even Al Franken are the only things keeping kids out of stable families with a mom and dad then you'd better pull your head out of the sand because the reality is a lot uglier than you can possibly imagine.

All people like you accomplish with your archaic and outmoded views of what constitutes an acceptable society is to destroy dedicated and loving families. I hope your own children have it a lot easier than those of the families you would tear apart in the name of "traditional values"; I truly do.

Shorter JBW: Abuse isn't the problem, gender and hetero stereotypes are...

Now, check out Helen Rittelmeyer's more complex analysis of gender differences and gay marriage, "If She Says She Wants “Equality, Not Sameness,” She’s Lying," especially this part:

A culture that cannot acknowledge gender differences has hobbled itself: it can’t speak the truth and, if we know one thing about truth, it’s that it always comes out one way or another. If we can’t talk about gender, we can’t develop helpful ways to deal with it; if we can’t deal with it, we guarantee that, when gender differences do surface, it will be in unhealthy ways. If gay marriage consigns us to that slow, unpleasant declension—and it does—it’s something to think twice about.

That's snipping out a whole lot of Rittelmeyer's context, but what can you do in a quick link-love post like this.

See also, Robert Stacy McCain and Memeorandum.

Palestinians Suffer Because of Hamas

The New York Daily News features a must-read editorial this morning, "The Fury of a Bereaved Palestinian Mother Captures Evil of Hamas in Gaza":

The collateral damage that has been inflicted on the residents of Gaza is a sorrowful consequence of living under the rule of rocket-firing fanatics. It is because of Hamas, and only Hamas, that Palestinians are suffering.

At least some of them know the identity of their tormentors. A New York Times dispatch captured an excruciating moment that took place in a hospital morgue, where a mother had just found half of the body of her 17-year-old daughter.

"May God exterminate Hamas!" screamed the woman in crystal-clear understanding that the terrorist band's reckless, inhuman actions had brought death to her child.

There will likely be more tragedies as Israel presses an assault on Hamas by air and, now, on the ground. Each will trace to Hamas' refusal to desist, once and for all, from raining rockets onto Israeli soil. And, perversely, each will increase pressure on Israel to stand down prematurely.

There's more at the link.

The New Foreign Policy Online

My January/February issue of Foreign Policy came in the mail over the weekend.

I always get a little rush when my journals arrive, and I feel lucky if I have a few minutes right then to skim over the contents and read an article or two (International Security, which publishes full-blown academic research, requires some set-aside time, however).

Well, as I skimming through Foreign Policy last night I noticed a blurb for the magazine's new website redesign, which included an announcement that Daniel Drezner would be joining Foreign Policy in-house. I started blogging because of Drezner (after reading his page for a year or two), so the announcement caught my attention. Of course, as I've noted recently, academic bloggers rarely put their necks out too far - especially on issues requiring moral clarity - and Drezner's been stupendously wrong on some of the big questions in international relations lately. So, it'll be interesting to read him a little more often in the future.

Still, Foreign Policy's web upgrade is pretty hip. As far as I can tell, the website's abandoned subscription-only access to its current articles (or they need to make free access permanent, as the Atlantic did sometime last year). This will be a boon to bloggers, who will now have a (larger) trove of cool resources for discussion and dissemination

What's particularly interesting is that some major political scientists will be joining Drezner as in-house bloggers. Stephen Walt, one of the top scholars in international security, will be blogging at Foreign Policy. Walt made the "realist" case against the war in Iraq, in "An Unnecessary War." (Note that foreign policy realists of late have been drawn from the liberal and paleoconservative camps, and they are policy nemeses of neoconservatives.) To balance this, Peter Feaver's apparently another of the bevy of political scientists who have signed up. Feaver, who's also a top scholar of international relations, writes periodically at Commentary.

Joshua Keating's got the official scoop at Passport.

(Note to readers: Try not to blow off Foreign Policy as "academic." The fact that the magazine's bringing on so many political scientists as bloggers indicates the influence of regular bloggers like us.)

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Sin is Deliberate Treason Against the Creator

Clueless Emma's got a great post up today, "The Power of His Resurrection."

The entry discusses "Paul's prayer for the Ephesian believers," and links to The Berean Call. I like this passage:

At its heart, sin is deliberate treason, open and defiant rebellion against the Creator and Ruler of the universe. We need to remember this fact. Most Christians who, when convicted by conscience, fall on their faces and confess their sins are not really confessing the horror of what they've done. It is not enough to repent of the deed. We must confess also that, no matter how trivial we think the act was, we have repeated Adam and Eve's treason against the Lord God. Without that admission deeply felt as a conviction in our hearts, the confession is incomplete.

Be sure to read the whole thing, here.

Michael Goldfarb Responds

Even more so than usual, there was some serious unhinging on the left this weekend on Israel-Gaza, in this case as it relates to Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard. Goldfarb applauded Israel's targeted assassination of Nizar Rayan last week, which generated an exceptionally despicable (and effusively effluvial) rant from Glenn Greenwald (and RawMuscleGlutes joined in here).

Here's Goldfarb's response:

Glenn Greenwald, as hysterical and long-winded as ever, accuses me of possessing "the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes. It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings." Another blogger accuses me of endorsing terrorist ethics, and the Atlantic's in-house gynecologist calls me a thug.

In fact, I was explicitly questioning whether such violence can be effective against a group like Hamas. The target of this strike had already sent one of his own sons into Israel as a suicide bomber. Greenwald presumes that I see Palestinians "as something less than civilized human beings" because I question whether they can be deterred "like us." But I wasn't talking about Palestinians in general, I was talking about the Hamas leadership in particular. If Greenwald believes that Hamas, a terrorist group, is itself the avatar of the Palestinian people, then he is the one who sees the Palestinians as less civilized than the rest of us. If not, then I wonder whether he is illiterate or simply disingenuous. But the Hamas leadership is not like us: Americans may send their sons to war, but they do not send them to certain death for the sake of slaughtering civilians.

It's also striking that Greenwald and his fellow travelers would use words like terrorist and thug to describe me while defending the rights of Hamas, an organization comprised of genuine terrorists and thugs. It's become common for the left to describe its ideological opponents as thugs, and the result, apparently, is the inability to recognize real thuggery when it's staring them in the face.

There is no doubt that Israel has the right to strike Nizar Rayan, even at the cost of killing so many women and children -- these civilians were not intentionally targeted. The question is whether or not this strike, in addition to eliminating a leader of Hamas (and the weapons depot in which he chose to house his family), will also deter Hamas from so brazenly ending the next cease fire. The fact that Greenwald & Co. would react so bizarrely to the mere posing of that question is precisely why their voices are being ignored in this debate. Just the other day Greenwald wrote of how he was perplexed by a poll showing that a majority of Democrats shared his views on Israel's assault, but still the Democratic party was almost uniform in its support for the action. Well, its possible for large numbers of people to hold views that simply aren't serious -- though of course a plurality of Americans still supports Israel's actions in Gaza -- and on this issue, like on telecom immunity and warrantless wiretapping, a large portion of the left simply isn't serious.

Extermination of the Jews, Then and Now

Via Gates of Vienna, a flyer calling for the global extermination of the Jews is being distributed by the mulitcultural left in Denmark:

Recall yesterday that Victor Davis Hanson reported that the worldwide demonstrations in support of Hamas are "nauseating."

It's frankly unbelievable to think that from San Francisco to New York to Copenhagen to Damascus and beyond, we're witnessing the open call on the left for the extermination of Israel and the Jews. It's unreal, but the global situation facing the survival of the Jews is in many respects more terrifying than the European anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s.

Ron Rosenbaum, discussing the program of Hamas, offers a very disturbing historical comparison between the public reactions to the eliminationism of Adolph Hitler and the Palestinian jihad of Hamas:

The people of Germany supported Hitler, yet many still claim the Germans didn’t really know what he was doing to the Jews, gays, gypsies or his plans for other ethnic minorities. Or they say that they suppported Hitler for other reasons. Some believe the German people shouldn’t be held accountable for Hitler’s crimes, some think it’s naive to believe they didn’t know and shouldn’t be held responsible. The people of Gaza voted Hamas in by a larger percentage than Hitler ever got. They knew that the Hamas charter called for genocide and supported Hamas attempts to kill as many Jews as they could.

Should they – and the Americans who believe in “even-handed” treatment of a pro-genocide party be held responsible for Hamas and what Hamas has brought upon the land, the way some believe the German people should be held responsible for the destruction Hitler brought upon Germany? Should the German people who supported Hitler have been treated with the “proportionality” we are supposed to reserve for the Gazan people who support Hamas?

I don’t know the answers to these difficult questions. I just wanted to clarify things so no one was making any false analogies between Hamas and Hitler and ignoring the fact that Hamas was more extreme than the Nazis.

Read the whole thing, here.

Kids Need Opposite-Sex Parents

I've been visiting with in-laws over this New Year's weekend.

A bit of catch-up news finds that a good friend of the family is in the late-second trimester of a surrogate pregnancy. She was hired for $25,000 to bear a baby for a gay couple. One of the men had his sister donate an ovum egg cell, which was then fertilized by his partner (in-vitro) - thus the baby would have the sperm of one of the partners and the family DNA of the other. The total costs for all the fertility medical work was expected to be around $100,000. (I'm hearing this third-hand, so the numbers could be off.) I asked how our family friend is feeling: she's delivered two babies of her own, and the emotions must be intense? Will it be difficult for her to give up the new baby after carrying the little thing for nine months? I didn't even ask about the political morality of all of this: I still think that a child grows up best with a mom and a dad. I'm sure two gay guys can lovingly care for a baby, but it's quite unorthodox, and it just seems kind of wierd, frankly, that the child will have no mother in its life and upbringing.

Anyway, Janice Shaw Crouse has a related piece over at American Thinker, "Girls Need a Dad and Boys Need a Mom":

The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.

Not surprisingly, the study also found that communication is an essential building block for all family relationships -- family interactions are the crucible for attitudes, values, priorities, and worldviews. Beyond the shaping and modeling of these essential personal characteristics, the family shapes an individual's interpersonal system and self-identity.

Further, stable homes include specific talk about religion and support for children's involvement in religious activities. These families create high-quality relationships by specific communication behaviors, such as openness, assurance, and dependency. Those same characteristics, not incidentally, are powerful predictors for marital success or failure.

The authors, G.L. Forward, Alison Sansom-Livolsi, and Jordanna McGovern, stress the fact that a family is more than merely a group of individuals who live under the same roof. They cite numerous studies indicating that parents play a crucial role in a child's personal and social development. In fact, a child's relationship with his or her parents is the single most important factor in predicting that child's long-term happiness, adjustment, development, educational attainment, and success. Beyond that general information, studies indicate that girls get better support from the family than do boys. Girls feel closer to their parents, perhaps because parents converse with and express emotion more readily with daughters than with sons. In general, mothers spend far more time with daughters than with sons. Likewise, fathers spend more time with sons than with their daughters. Yet, father-daughter and mother-son relationships tend to have greater impact on a child's future intimate relationships than their relationship with the same-sex parent.

There's more at the link.

Related: Michael Medved, "Changing Marriage Itself."

Hamas Helpers: Intifada by the Bay

Zombie has the video from San Francisco's pro-Hamas rally on January 2, 2009:

At 22 seconds, pro-Hamas demonstrators lunge at five pro-Israel protesters standing on the other side of a police barricade. After the cops break it up, one of the pro-Israel activists says, "I'm a little spooked."

I'll say, and checking the comments we see this:

Here’s a big F**K YOU to all the ZIONIST SCUM who think that dropping U.S. BOMBS out of US WARPLANES and KILLING INNOCENTS – mothers, babies, and non-violent GAZA SUFFERERS is a good thing. What if the tables were turned and the ISRAELI COWARDS only had non-guided, big bottle-rockets to fire at their OPPRESSORS?? What then? Would JEWS world-wide be TERRORISTS for FIGHTING FOR THEIR HUMAN RIGHTS?

Actually, Hamas doesn't care about it's own "mothers, babies, and non-violent GAZA SUFFERERS."

As Alan Dershowitz recounted the other day:

In a recent incident related to me by the former head of the Israeli air force, Israeli intelligence learned that a family's house in Gaza was being used to manufacture rockets. The Israeli military gave the residents 30 minutes to leave. Instead, the owner called Hamas, which sent mothers carrying babies to the house.

Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it. They also knew that if Israeli authorities did not learn there were civilians in the house and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead. Israel held its fire. The Hamas rockets that were protected by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson says the global reaction is "creepy":

It is now clear that the so-called and much praised "international community," the hallowed U.N., the revered EU, all pretty much are indifferent to the survival of a democratic Israel, or are actively supportive of its terrorist Hamas enemy. Only the U.S. (for now) stands by a constitutional state in its war against a murderous terrorist clique, with annhilation its aim and religous fascism its creed.

Yossi Klein Halevi's Son Goes to War

Yossi Klein Halevi discusses the moral responsibility of being Israeli:

"I just heard on the news that Gavriel's base has been shelled," my wife, Sarah, said to me last Tuesday, referring to our 19-year-old son, a member of an Israeli army tank unit waiting on the Gaza border for the order to enter. And, she added in a deliberately calm tone, "A soldier was killed." We texted Gavriel, and within five minutes he called, safe. How, Sarah asked, did families survive war before cellphones?

For days we waited for a cabinet decision: Will there be a land invasion or a new cease-fire? The politicians began to bicker while our soldiers waited on the border, in the rain and the mud. Anything but this, I said to Sarah. Not another Lebanon War, which, like Gaza, began with an impressive show of Israeli air power but ended with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah predicting the imminent end of "the Zionist entity." If we don't win this time -- deliver an unambiguous blow if not topple Hamas entirely -- our deterrence will further erode, inviting more rocket attacks and encouraging the jihadist momentum throughout the Middle East.

And then I caught myself: How can I be hoping for an outcome that will send my son into battle? This is my first experience as the father of a soldier, and now, after 26 years of living in Israel, I finally understand the terrible responsibility of being an Israeli. I had assumed that I'd become initiated into Israeliness when I myself was drafted into the army as a 34-year-old immigrant in 1989. But perhaps only now have I become fully Israeli. Zionism promised to empower the Jews by making them responsible for their fate; the price for that achievement is to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for one's commitments.

This section is powerful:

For the past eight years, Israel has fought a single war with shifting fronts, moving from suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Katyusha attacks on Israeli towns near the Lebanon border to Qassam missiles on Israeli towns near the Gaza border. That war has targeted civilians, turning the home front into the actual front. And it has transformed the nature of the conflict from a nationalist struggle over Palestinian statehood to a holy war against Jewish statehood. Except for a left-wing fringe, most Israelis recognize the conflict in Gaza as part of a larger war that has been declared against our being and that we must fight.

Overreacting to Hamas Attacks?

Here are some early morning thoughts on Israel-Gaza. First, a "Let's Play Pretend" video exercise via Carl in Jerusalem:

Next, let's go to Noah Pollak's CNN fact-check:

On CNN a few moments ago, Christiane Amanpour, in the midst of an otherwise completely warped report on the Gaza war, said that over the past year only two Israelis were killed by Hamas rocket fire. Her point in the segment was to insinuate that Israel is overreacting to Hamas attacks that have been largely harmless. In order to do that, she had to abstain from mentioning important facts and context, such as that Hamas’ attacks in 2008 more than doubled — to 3,278 — from the 2007 number. And this figures in the six-month “lull” period, during which “only” around 100 rockets were fired. She also did not mention that the range and deadliness of Hamas’ rockets increased as well, putting around 15 percent of the Israeli population under Hamas’ missile umbrella. (The “disproportionality” fetishists also never get around to noting that Israel has conducted less than a thousand air strikes in response to over 7,000 Hamas rocket attacks since 2005.)

Thus is the history of this episode of the conflict re-written almost in real time, from one of a gathering danger to one of a boring nuisance. Oh, and eight Israelis, not two, were killed by Hamas in 2008. Amanpour’s “errors” always seem to work in one direction, don’t they?

Check Astute Bloggers for lots more on "disproportionality" and this "boring nuisance."

Cease-Fire Erodes Israel National Interest

Israel's campaign in Gaza continues with the anticipated ground incursion today. There are some questions, however, as to what the Olmert/Livni/Barak triumvirate hopes to achieve strategically. I doubt we can expect a Sherman march to Egypt, for example, although that's what I'd prefer to see. 

Caroline Glick's got a big essay up on Israel's war aims. It turns out that they're not as unconditional as we might expect given the ferocity of the initial airstrikes:

Since Tuesday it has become clear that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has decided to end the war with Iran's Hamas proxy army in Gaza as quickly as possible. That is, the government has decided to lose the war.

Most Israelis are unaware of this state of affairs. In an obvious attempt to bolster the popularity of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ahead of the February 10 general elections, the local media have spent the six days since the government launched Operation Cast Lead praising the government's competence and wisdom, and declaring victory over Hamas after every IAF sortie in Gaza.

What the media have declined to notice is that the outcome of the war will not be determined by the number of Hamas buildings the IAF destroys. The outcome of this war - like the outcome of all wars - will be determined by one factor only: Which side will achieve the goals it set out for itself at the outset of the conflict and which side will concede its goals?

Depressingly, the current machinations of the Olmert-Livni-Barak government demonstrate that when the fighting is over, Hamas and not Israel will be able to declare that it accomplished its goals.

Israel is entertaining a proposal from the European Union for a cease-fire, and here's Glick's key section:

BEFORE THE Olmert-Livni-Barak government accepts the EU cease-fire, it is worth noting three strategic problems with what they are doing. Taken together and separately, all three will lead Israel to defeat in this confrontation with Hamas.

The first problem with the EU proposal is that it takes for granted that all of Hamas's demands must be met in full. That is, Israel is beginning these negotiations from a point of weakness whereby it has already effectively accepted Hamas's demands and conceded its own.

The second problem with the decision to accept EU mediation is that by doing so, the government is compelled to ignore and indeed justify the EU's underlying and deep-seated hostility toward Israel. The very fact that the EU accepted Hamas's demands from the outset demonstrates clearly that the EU cannot be an honest broker between the warring factions.

Here it is important to recall just what Hamas is. Hamas is an illegal terrorist organization and an Iranian proxy that is conducting an illegal terror war against Israel. The EU is arguably committing a war crime by accepting Hamas as a legitimate side to a dispute. In turn, by accepting the EU as a legitimate interlocutor, Israel itself gives credence to the view that Hamas is a legitimate actor.

On a practical level, by accepting the EU's authority to mediate under these conditions, Israel has effectively foregone from the outset any chance of achieving its own cease-fire demands. After all, to reach a cease-fire with Hamas that includes Israel's demands that Hamas end its weapons smuggling operations, forgo control over international borders and end its missile offensive against Israel, the EU would have to throw out the draft it just voted to accept. And it would have to reverse its political direction and abandon Hamas in favor of Israel. The chance that this will happen is quite close to zero.

The third strategic failure inherent in Israel's decision to negotiate a truce is Israel's demand for an international monitoring force to verify compliance with the cease-fire agreement. This demand is self-defeating because such a force will only harm Israel's national interests. This is the clear lesson of both the EU's past monitoring mission at the Rafah terminal and of UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon.

In the case of the EU monitors at Rafah, as The Jerusalem Post recalled in an editorial on Wednesday, during the period when they were deployed at the terminal, the EU monitors turned a blind eye to the very terror traffic they were supposed to be preventing. At the same time, they condemned Israel for taking any action to defend itself and downplayed the threat Hamas constitutes for Israel. In short, the EU monitors sided with Hamas against Israel at every turn.

In the case of UNIFIL forces in Lebanon, the situation is little different. UNIFIL routinely condemns the IAF for carrying out reconnaissance flights over Lebanon aimed at keeping tabs on Hizbullah arms smuggling operations that UNIFIL does nothing to prevent. They also demand that Israel surrender the town of Ghajar to Lebanon despite the fact that it is part of sovereign Israel. Beyond that, UNIFIL forces have sat back and allowed Hizbullah to rearm and reassert control over some 130 villages along the Israeli border. Far from enforcing the UN-mediated cease-fire, UNIFIL acts as a shield behind which Hizbullah prepares for its next round of war against Israel.

IN LIGHT of all of this, it is apparent that today the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is conducting cease-fire negotiations from a position of great weakness. It has accepted the mediation of a hostile interlocutor. And its primary demand in those negotiations is antithetical to the national interest.

Andrew Sullivan and Gaza

Andrew Sullivan, as far as I'm concerned, long ago went over to the dark side. So I find it interesting that Yaacov Lozowick (who is a new blogger to me) is suggesting that Sullivan's new to peddling some serious moral equivalence. From Lozowick:

For those of you who are interested in such things (if you're not, that's also fine): Andrew Sullivan is crossing over to the anti-Israel camp. He has made larger changes in the past, as he moved from supporting George Bush to drawing his information from Juan Cole, but when it came to Israel, he's been alright. No longer. He's wavering hard, and it's pretty clear which side he's going to fall to once he stops wavering.

He's not wavering, actually, but see Noah Pollak's post for a explanation of what this is all about (via Memeorandum).

Obama Must Recognize Evil

Publisher's Note: My friend, Norman Gersman of New York, has accepted my invitation to write a guest essay. It is my honor to publish it here:

*****

My wife and I enjoyed a dinner with another couple about two weeks before the election. We had all agreed before hand that when we discussed politics it would be kept civil with no name calling so we could stay friends. They are Obama supporters, Israel supporters, and active in their synagogue. When the issue of Obama and Israel came up I was assured over and over again that Obama would support Israel. Israel has nothing to worry about. The fact that Obama hung for many years with people who looked forward to a Palestinian victory was of no importance. “Don’t worry” I was told.

I had a telephone conversation just a few days ago with one member of this same couple and was told that they think Israel could have began Operation Lead Cast now, before the end of current President’s term of office, because Israel is not sure of Obama’s support. I asked: “you told me that Obama will support Israel, so why should Israel worry?” The response was: “we think Obama will support Israel, but we are really not sure what he will do or say.” I ended the conversation quickly before I could say something regrettable. They think, do they ... so flippant when millions of lives are at stake. My anger has not subsided.

So now our President-Elect has returned from his vacation in Hawaii to the cold gray skies of Washington D.C. He must realize that a huge chunk of the American electorate is waiting to find out where he will take American foreign policy in the Middle East, but Obama fails to say a word. He says that we have only one President at a time and therefore it is not appropriate for him to say anything until he is President. Yeah, right. His failure to speak on this issue is a loud and clear statement in itself. This is a clueless man, who now having won the Presidency only has a tiger by its tail.

I look forward to how Obama deals with an organization like Hamas and its leaders. I don’t think he realizes that the leaders of Hamas are not rational people like most of us. Negotiations and truces are instruments to be used only to further their aim of Israel’s destruction. “There is no solution for the Palestinian people except Jihad” states the covenant that created Hamas. This is a bloodthirsty organization that rules over its own people by intimidation, death and the barrel of a gun. I think that Obama will fail to recognize their evil, or the evil of radical Islam to the western world.

Israel will not fall if the Obama administration fails to support her. My only fear is that Israel will lose its humanity if forced to stand alone with no allies. When a catastrophe occurs anywhere in the world Israel is always among the first to offer and send equipment, medicine, people ... whatever is needed to help.

Today, Israel fights a war with both hands tied behind its back to limit civilian casualties. I just read that Israel is using a sound bomb just to scare people away from a building before it is destroyed. At some point Israelis will fight with both hands and we shall lose a compassionate people, they will become hard.

A failure by Obama to recognize evil and destroy Hamas will mean that America and the free world will be leaderless during the next four years. Our ship of state will crash upon some big rocks. It is time for the President-Elect to take a stand .... now. We must know if our leader has a moral compass.

Anti-Americans in Our Midst

This photo, from This Ain't Hell, shows protesters in Washington, D.C., marching at a rally sponsored by INTERNATIONAL Answer. That's a Hamas flag in the middle. A pro-Palestinian activist attacked a counter-demonstrator at the event.

These people are neo-Stalinists allied with militant Islam to destroy the West. There's no other way to put it. Folks on the left are mounting deathly moral equivalence. They place the onus on Israel and are more than willing to condone, even encourage, the deaths of Palestinian civilians if that brings international condemnation on the Jewish state. I've written about this many times, so folks know where I stand, and you can be sure I'll continue to bring updates. Meanwhile, Scott at Powerline has a great piece up, "America's Fifth Column":

The United States obviously has a substantial number of citizens and residents who support America's Islamist enemies. Many of them are to be found on the leftover left, which has embraced a weird alliance with radical Islam.

Many of them are to be found among Arab and Muslim immigrants who identify with our enemies. Among these some are to be found within the Arab/Muslim "civil rights" and charitable front groups such as the late Holy Land Foundation, CAIR, and other of the unindicted co-conspirators in the criminal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation. The flow of immigrants who identify with America's enemies should have been stopped in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

When the Fort Dix Five were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers, CAIR and the American Muslim Union attacked the jury's verdict. "Many people in the Muslim community will see this as a case of entrapment," the executive director of CAIR's New Jersey chapter told the local media. The president of the American Muslim Union also questioned the jury's decision. He asserted that the defendants didn't "actually mean to do anything." According to him, "they were acting stupid, like they thought the whole thing was a joke."

As I wrote in "Coming clean about CAIR," CAIR is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that was founded as a Hamas front group. Bill Roggio points out that four current and former senior leaders of the American Muslim Union were associated with a mosque established by the Holy Land Foundation. The Holy Land Foundation was of course the American fundraising arm of Hamas.

Israel's offensive against Hamas has naturally brought some of these folks out into the streets. CAIR and other Islamist groups have been organizing public expressions of support for Hamas and condemnation of Israel in the United States. We noted one such demonstration led by CAIR in Minneapolis earlier this week. Now Phyllis Chesler has compiled an account of other such demonstrations supporting Hamas elsewhere around the United States.

Check the link for the video at Powerline.

Supporting Obama (Grudgingly) is About America Winning

Dan Nexon just about flipped his lid when I wrote my election night (meltdown) post on Barack Obama's eminently dishonest victory on November 4th. Since then I've repeatedly stated that while I couldn't disagree more with Barack Obama and the far-left agenda that he represents (or that'll he'll implement via his cabinet appointees and his extreme left legislative agenda), I will nevertheless support Barack Obama as my president AND in time of emergency I would not hesitate to serve my country while a Democratic administration resides in Washington.

A lot of conservatives aren't going to accept Obama under any circumstances, considering his surreptitious campaign, his history of radical training, ideology, and activism, and the media and popular personality cult that's metastasized around him. Having said all this, I have to agree with Nikki's post on the need to support the Democratic administration come January 20th:

I WANT MY COUNTRY TO SUCCEED, under this administration and any other. Its not about my party being in power or my agenda winning, its about America winning. Strange concept isn't it? Americans winning regardless of who is in power. A President is not like your favorite sports team. You should never cheer for the failure of any sitting President as you have done with this one. I am officially the opposite of a democrat ... objective and fair. I will not rip for the sake of ripping. I will give honest and well-researched opinion even if it means I am a RINO to my cohorts. Few are the courageous who speak without caring what their own colleagues will think and dems are squeamish little pansies when it comes to truth. The opposite of policy will not be mine. My opinions are not written to win friends and influence people. Its what I think ... you can tell me where I am wrong, which I rarely am ... HA! So take it up the shoot like a colonoscopy dems, you are now accountable. I hope you can take the heat, at least my heat will be honest and not out of derangement. MWAH!

I know a lot of my readers cringe at the thought of supporting this administration (and I can think of a few who are "not so courageous"), but Nikki's right: We will support the government of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, even if for all intents and purposes we'll have a facsimile of such at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

God bless this country, now and for eternity.

Death of Nizar Rayan Marks Return of Targeted Killings

The Israel missile strike that killed senior Hamas leader Nizar Rayan may signal the state's return to a policy of targeted killings, the Los Angeles Times reports:

An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed a major Hamas political and military leader Thursday, and most of his family, as the militant group continued to launch rockets deep into Israeli territory.

The dueling strikes came amid rising international calls for an end to the bloodshed, which has killed at least 418 Palestinians and four Israelis.

The attack on Nizar Rayan, confirmed by Israeli officials, family members and Hamas, may signal a shift in Israeli tactics as the assault on Gaza enters its sixth day. After nearly a week of pounding police stations, security compounds, rocket-launching cells and cross-border tunnels, the Jewish state could be reviving its practice of assassinating Hamas leaders.

Rayan, 49, is the most senior Hamas official killed since the movement's co-founders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantisi died in Israeli airstrikes less than a month apart in 2004, said a senior Hamas official speaking on condition of anonymity.

An Islamic scholar and university instructor, Rayan was a force in both the political and military wings of Hamas. The hulking, bearded imam was a hard-line theologian and military commander.

"This is a difficult hit for Hamas. Even they admit it," said Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman. Leibovich declined to comment on whether the strike on Rayan represented a formal return of the assassination policy.

The battle-hardened militant group has proved adept at replacing leaders, calling into question the effectiveness of the tactic. After the killings of Yassin and Rantisi, Hamas regrouped stronger than ever around a new command structure based in both Gaza and Damascus, Syria.

In January 2006, it won Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating its bitter rival, the U.S.-backed Fatah faction. When a brief Fatah-Hamas unity government collapsed in summer 2007, Hamas fighters routed better-equipped Fatah forces in Gaza in four days and have controlled the territory since.

Despite Hamas' demonstrated adaptability, Rayan's death is a clear loss on multiple levels.

He was uniquely popular and respected among the military wing; unlike most of the movement's civilian leadership, Rayan fought alongside troops in battles with Israeli soldiers and tanks.

He advocated suicide bombings, and his own son, 22, died in such an attack on an Israeli settlement.

Although most senior Hamas leaders went into hiding when the Israeli air barrages began, Rayan made a point of living openly in his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp. He encouraged other leaders to follow suit.

"He refused to leave his house; he preferred to be a martyr," the Hamas official said.

Thirteen members of Rayan's family, including all four of his wives, were also killed in the strike, his teenage son Baraa told The Times.

Two more children are missing and presumed buried under the rubble of their family home.

See also Brietbart's item, "On Eve of His Death, Hamas Leader in Gaza Predicted Victory," via Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: "Nizar Rayan, center, was killed at his home in Jabaliya, along with his four wives and other family members. The Gaza professor advocated suicide attacks against Israel. (Sept. 15, 2007 photo)," Los Angeles Times.

Richard Falk and the Left's Construction of Gaza

Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international relations at Princeton and a hard-left anti-American and anti-Israel peace activist. I vaguely remember reading some of Falk's research during my graduate school training. What sticks out about him in my memory is that he was never a major thinker and his work was always at the margins of mainstream discourses driving important paradigmatic debates in the field.

In any case, I mention this as a preface to Falk's essay at Huffington Post, "Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe":

For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot. During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle.

Israel also refused exit permits to students with foreign fellowship awards and to Gazan journalists and respected NGO representatives. At the same time, it made it increasingly difficult for journalists to enter, and I was myself expelled from Israel a couple of weeks ago when I tried to enter to carry out my UN job of monitoring respect for human rights in occupied Palestine, that is, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza. Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months.

As always in relation to the underlying conflict, some facts bearing on this latest crisis are murky and contested, although the American public in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly pro-Israeli media lens. Hamas is blamed for the breakdown of the truce by its supposed unwillingness to renew it, and by the alleged increased incidence of rocket attacks. But the reality is more clouded. There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom. Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort to do so.

All of this is pure propaganda. I have no need to rebut the points any further, but the part about "no substantial rocket fire" would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Readers should visit Gateway Pundit to get a bit of "substantial" reality about what's really happening in the Middle East.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

Bill Ayers' "Mind-Blowing" Idiocy

Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers has a post up at Huffington Post lamenting the missed opportunity of appointing Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education in an Obama administration.

Just reading the post gives one an idea of what the U.S. would be like if the "progressive" left were to gain majoritarian power in U.S. politics:

I would have picked Darling-Hammond, but then again I would have picked Noam Chomsky for state, Naomi Klein for defense, Bernardine Dohrn for Attorney General, Bill Fletcher for commerce, James Thindwa for labor, Barbara Ransby for human services, Paul Krugman for treasury, and Amy Goodman for press secretary. So what do I know?

Now that's a progressive cabinet, a true anti-American nihilist dream team! Of course, this is also the nightmare conservatives hoped to prevent by defeating the shady Chicago socialist at the polls. It's a good thing that "The One" had enough sense to foresee immediate repudiation in the Senate in the event that such a cabinet be appointed.

But Ayers continues with the progressive left's education agenda in the years ahead:

In the realm of education, there is nothing preventing any of us from pressing to change the dominant discourse that has controlled the discussion for many years. It's reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy, but how? Surely school leaders in fascist Germany or communist Albania or medieval Saudi Arabia all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matters, so those things don't differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, and that is a belief that the fullest development of all is the necessary condition for the full development of each; conversely, the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

Democracy, after all, is geared toward participation and engagement, and it's based on a common faith: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights, each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions---Who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed? --- and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Democratic educators focus their efforts, not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Democratic teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy should be characteristically eye-popping and mind-blowing - always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools here and now measure up to the democratic ideal?
Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There's no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt. While many of us long for teaching as something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press now for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving schools of needed resources and then blaming teachers and their unions for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating "educational debt," the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served. All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified and generously compensated teachers. So let's push for that, and let's make it happen before Arne Duncan or anyone else grants us permission [emphasis added].

As someone who's actually in the trenches with inner-city kids, a majority of whom can barely read, it's really is breathtaking to read this.

Keep in mind, of course, that when Fox News approached Ayers in October asking for an on-camera apology for his past terrorist acts, this "mind-blowing" champion of "anti-imperialist free thinking " called the cops to protect him from the free press, the key institution of open societies which we might call one of the "hallmarks of a truly democratic society."

The kids in this country really need to go to school if they fall for this guy's baloney.

Mainstream Democrats Love Obama, Netroots on the Outs

Glenn Greenwald is up in arms again this morning. He's cherry-picking Rasmussen's poll findings on Israel-Gaza, which hold that the public's "divided" over Israel's Gaza attacks. Actually, folks aren't all that divided when you break down the findings, and note this statistic on what political scientists call "attentive publics" (folks who pay attention to news and public affairs):

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of those who say they are following news out of Gaza Very Closely support Israel's military action, while 30% favor diplomacy.

Greenwald's constant meme is how members of both parties completely disregard public opinion in order to shill for Israel.

The guy's a joke, frankly, and it's interesting that today's Gallup's tracking poll on Barack Obama finds near-unanimous support among mainstream Democrats (called "liberals" at the article), while roughly 7 percent of those on the left are apparently unhappy with the direction Obama has taken during the presidential transition:

Gallup Poll Daily tracking finds support for Barack Obama among liberal Democrats holding steady at 93% despite news reports that his core supporters are disappointed with some of his cabinet appointments and other decisions. Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Obama's ratings have improved among conservative Republicans, up from 23% to 29%.

More than 9 in 10 liberal Democrats have expressed confidence that Obama will make a good president since Gallup began tracking these opinions after the election last November. Moderate and conservative Democrats show nearly as high levels of confidence.

Obama's recent decision to have conservative preacher Rick Warren deliver the invocation at the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration and his choices of Republicans Robert Gates and Ray LaHood for cabinet positions have been controversial among members of the political left. Additionally, women's groups have been reported as expressing disappointment that Obama has not selected more women for cabinet-level positions in his administration. But these decisions apparently have not shaken liberal Democrats' confidence in Obama to any perceptible degree, according to aggregated data of thousands of Gallup Poll daily interviews from the immediate post-election period (Nov. 5-30), early December (Dec. 1-17) after he announced many of his cabinet choices, and in recent days (Dec. 18-28) after announcing Warren's role in the inauguration, arguably his most controversial action to date.

The number in the table at the poll for "liberal Democrats" and Obama's "favorable" ratings is 96 percent. It's the nihilist leftists who are most upset about things like Rick Warren and the lack of "diversity" in the cabinet. I'd be surprised if they actually made up the four percent or so who aren't in that figure, although keep in mind that the hard-left forces are extremely vocal and overrepresented on liberal media outlets. They thus make up for their small overall numbers with their outsized personalities and demands, while being enabled by the fawning media attention of a prostrate media cabal.

Notice, by the way, the numbers of "moderate" and "conservative" Republicans who are giving Obama the benefit of the doubt ("a slim majority of moderate and liberal Republicans, 51%, say they are confident Obama will be a good president"). Maybe Obama's "centrism" is paying off with a pre-inaugural bipartisan honeymoon?

The Crash of 2008 and the Decline of the West?

Roger Altman, at Foreign Affairs, argues that the collapse of the American economy in 2008 will accelerate the decline of the United States and Europe as the leading actors in the international balance of power. I'm always skeptical of the decline thesis. In Altman's case he makes dramatic claims of America's lost hegemony, then concludes the article with a number of points that weaken his arguments. In particular, Altman makes emphatic claims that China is now the main beneficiary of U.S. economic woes, and that Beijing - with trillions of dollars in surplus reserves - will be the next global "lender of last resort." Yet then he proposes strengthening U.S.-dominated world financial institutions like the IMF, which were American creations at the end of World War II. He also concedes at the conclusion of the article that the U.S. "will remain the most powerful nation on earth for a while longer." Such an initial dramatic case for American decline and inevitable international systemic change ends up having as much firepower as a pop-gun.

I've written on this topic plenty of times (see the discussion of Robert Lieber's counter-thesis, in "Resurgent Declinism in International Relations). Still, Altman's essay does include a penetrating explanation for the collapse of financial markets in 2008. So, considering my post yesterday, I'll leave readers with that:

Conventional wisdom attributes the crisis to the collapse of housing prices and the subprime mortgage market in the United States. This is not correct; these were themselves the consequence of another problem. The crisis' underlying cause was the (invariably lethal) combination of very low interest rates and unprecedented levels of liquidity. The low interest rates reflected the U.S. government's overly accommodating monetary policy after 9/11. (The U.S. Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate to nearly one percent in late 2001 and maintained it near that very low level for three years.) The liquidity reflected, among other factors, what Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has called "the global savings glut": the enormous financial surpluses realized by certain countries, particularly China, Singapore, and the oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf. Until the mid-1990s, most emerging economies ran balance-of-payments deficits as they imported capital to finance their growth. But the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, among other things, changed this in much of Asia. After that, surpluses grew throughout the region and then were consistently recycled back to the West in the form of portfolio investments.

Facing low yields, this mountain of liquidity naturally sought higher ones. One basic law of finance is that yields on loans are inversely proportional to credit quality: the stronger the borrower, the lower the yield, and vice versa. Huge amounts of capital thus flowed into the subprime mortgage sector and toward weak borrowers of all types in the United States, in Europe, and, to a lesser extent, around the world. For example, the annual volume of U.S. subprime and other securitized mortgages rose from a long-term average of approximately $100 billion to over $600 billion in 2005 and 2006. As with all financial bubbles, the lessons of history, including about long-term default rates on such poor credits, were ignored.

This flood of mortgage money caused residential and commercial real estate prices to rise at unprecedented rates. Whereas the average U.S. home had appreciated at 1.4 percent annually over the 30 years before 2000, the appreciation rate roared forward at 7.6 percent annually from 2000 through mid-2006. From mid-2005 to mid-2006, amid rampant speculation in the housing market, it was 11 percent.

But like most spikes in commodity prices, this one eventually reversed itself -- and with a vengeance. Housing prices have been falling sharply for over two years, and so far there is no sign that they will bottom out. Futures markets are signaling that, from peak to trough, the drop in the value of the nation's housing stock could reach 30-35 percent. This would be an astonishing fall for a pool of assets once valued at $13 trillion.

This collapse in housing prices undermined the value of the multitrillion-dollar pool of lower-value mortgages that had been created over the 2003-6 period. In addition, countless subprime mortgages that were structured to be artificially cheap at the outset began to convert to more expensive terms. Innumerable borrowers could not afford the adjusted terms, and delinquencies became more frequent. Losses on these loans began to emerge in mid-2007 and quickly grew to staggering levels. And with prices in real estate and other asset values still dropping, the value of these loans is continuing to deteriorate. The larger financial institutions are reporting continuous losses. They mark down the value of a loan or similar asset in one quarter, only to mark it down again in the next. This self-reinforcing downward cycle has caused markets to plunge across the globe.

The damage is most visible at the household level. Americans have lost one-quarter of their net worth in just a year and a half, since June 30, 2007, and the trend continues. Americans' largest single asset is the equity in their homes. Total home equity in the United States, which was valued at $13 trillion at its peak in 2006, had dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and was still falling in late 2008. Total retirement assets, Americans' second-largest household asset, dropped by 22 percent, from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008. During the same period, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion and pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. Taken together, these losses total a staggering $8.3 trillion.

Such large and sudden hits have shocked U.S. families. And because these have occurred amid headlines reporting failing financial institutions and huge bailouts, Americans' fears over the safety and accessibility of their deposits are now more pervasive than they have been since 1933. This is why Americans withdrew $150 billion from money-market funds over a two-day period in September (average weekly outflows are just $5 billion). It is also why the Federal Reserve established a special $540 billion facility to help these funds meet continuing redemptions.

There's more at the link.