China's 17th National Party Congress Opens in Beijing

The Chinese Communist Party is holding its 17th National Party Congress this week in Beijing. Here's the background:

Delivering the opening address at the ruling Communist Party’s 17th National Congress today, President Hu Jintao promised to address social fissures, a degraded environment and rampant corruption during his second term as China’s top leader, but he all but ruled out more than cosmetic political reform.

Mr. Hu spoke extensively about his “scientific view of development,” a set of lofty, vague principles supporting harmonious economic, social and political development.

The congress will enshrine the phrase “scientific view of development” into the party’s constitution alongside the political slogans of Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and Jian Zemin, elevating Mr. Hu into the pantheon of leaders as he begins the second and final term as party general secretary, head of state and military chief.

This speech kicked off the week-long event held once every five years to extol past leaders and welcome a roster of younger officials newly elevated to leadership roles.

Party members have described the succession contest, conducted in secret, as fractious. But the congress proceedings, which are purely ceremonial, present a facade of seamless unity and continuity.

In the main auditorium of the Great Hall of the People, under a giant hammer and sickle, Mr. Hu appeared on a rostrum with all the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee and the Central Committee arranged in precise hierarchical order. They were joined by party elders including Mr. Jiang, Mr. Hu’s direct predecessor, and at least two stalwarts of an earlier era, Wan Li and Song Ping, both more than 90 years old.

In keeping with tradition, Mr. Hu’s address, which lasted two and half hours, stressed the correctness of the rhetoric and guiding philosophies of the past. Though the text of the address ran to 64 pages, Mr. Hu discussed few specific government programs and provided only broad hints about what he intends to do between now and 2012, when under party retirement rules he will make way for a new top leader.

“China is going through a wide-ranging and deep-going transformation,” Mr. Hu told the 2,200 party delegates and a national television audience. “This brings us unprecedented opportunities as well as unprecedented challenges. On the whole, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.”

Mr. Hu tweaked one well established goal, which was to quadruple the economic output of the year 2000 by 2020, saying that the party would now aim to increase “per capital GDP” four-fold in the same period.

The switch to a per capita target reflects Mr. Hu’s emphasis on enhancing the benefits that the Chinese people derive from economic growth. But given that China’s population will likely increase by about two hundred million during the 20-year period, the new goal suggests that Mr. Hu now expects the economy, which has sustained double-digit growth for more than five years, to expand at an even faster pace than he and his predecessors forecast at the last party congress in 2002.

He called the international situation favorable to China, saying a “trend toward a multipolar world is irreversible.” He offered to hold peace talks with Taiwan, the self-governing island China claims as its territory, as long as the island’s leadership sets aside independence goals. The offer broke no new ground, but his tone was slightly softer than in the past.

Read the whole thing.

Considering the dramatic impact China's having on the world capitalist economy, it's good to remember that the Chinese political system remains a throwback to the era of Cold War rivalry between Communism and Western liberal democracy.

I see a little nostalgia for the old balance of power system in Hu's comments about the coming of a multipolar world. If Beijing gets its way, that balance of power system will ultimately shift to favor China, validating that country's long period of national mobilization designed to strengten the nation's power position on the world stage.

China's rigid, one-party authoritarianism combined with the country's dynamic, increasingly high-technology economy will continue to pose challenges to the contemporary global system. With all our attention on the Middle East, let us not forget that the time-honored tradition of balance of power jockeying continues in the background.

No Warrant Required in Illegal Immigrant Detentions

The New York Times has this interesting report on the warrantless search and detentions of illegal aliens:

LONG ISLAND officials protested when federal agents searching for immigrant gang members raided local homes two weeks ago. The agents had rousted American citizens and legal immigrants from their beds in the night, complained Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau County police commissioner, and arrested suspected illegal immigrants without so much as a warrant.

“We don’t need warrants to make the arrests,” responded Peter J. Smith, the special agent in charge in New York for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency that conducted the raids.

His concise answer helps explain the friction that the Bush administration’s recent campaign of immigraion enforcement has caused. Last week, immigration officials announced that they had made more than 1,300 arrests across the country over the summer when they went looking for gang members. Since the raids were carried out under immigration law, many protections in place under the American criminal codes did not apply. Foreign residents of the United States, whether here legally or not, answer to a different set of rules.

Immigration agents are not required to obtain warrants to detain suspects. The agents also have broad authority to question people about their immigration status and to search them and their homes. There are no Miranda rights that agents must read when making arrests. Detained immigrants have the right to a lawyer, but only one they can pay for.

While criminal suspects are generally sent to jails near the courts that hear their cases, immigration agents have discretion in deciding where to hold immigrants detained for deportation. Many suspected illegal immigrants who were detained in Nassau County, for example, were quickly moved to York, Pa., distant from family and legal advice.

This parallel course for noncitizens is not new. But it has come into fuller view as the enforcement drive has swept up record numbers of illegal immigrants, also reaching legal immigrants and citizens. In answer, a barrage of lawsuits is challenging both the laws and their enforcers.

“Buried within the proud history of our nation of immigrants, shrouded but always present, there exists a distinct system,” wrote Daniel Kanstroom, a law professor at Boston College, in his book “Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History,” which traces the history of the immigration code. To begin with, he writes, the Constitution does not specifically address the government’s power to control immigration. This is “not a small problem for a nation of immigrants,” he notes.

Immigration law remains founded on the notion that immigrants are not full members of American society until they become citizens, writes Professor Kanstroom, who is also a practicing immigration lawyer. The reduced protections in modern-day law were shaped by some of the darker episodes of the 20th century, he writes, including the prosecution of immigrant dissidents, like the Australian union leader Harry Bridges, in the 1930s; and the mass roundups of Mexican workers in the 1950s.

Arising from that landscape, the courts that handle immigration cases are part of the Justice Department, not the judiciary. Even immigrants who have lived here legally for many years, lawyers said, can run afoul of the immigration laws with minor infractions or misdemeanors. A late filing of visa renewal papers or a shoplifting citation can quickly spiral into an order for the ultimate penalty: deportation. Immigrants who fight the orders have more limited bail rights than American criminals and can spend years behind bars while their cases inch through the overburdened court system.

The immigration laws have gained new influence in everyday life because of the record number of immigrants — 37.1 million, according to census figures — now living in the United States. Of those, more than 22 million are not naturalized citizens and remain subject to the immigration system, including about 10 million legal residents and 12 million illegal immigrants, by estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington. Increasingly, immigrants live in mixed-status families that include illegal and legal residents as well as citizens.

Over the last two years, ICE has grown more aggressive, entering factories and communities, hunting down foreign fugitives ranging from convicted criminals to workers whose visas have expired. Last year, the agency deported 195,000 people, another record. After President Bush’s immigration overhaul failed in Congress in June, the administration has vigorously pursued the enforcement-first policy that Republicans demanded.

Being a New York Times story, you have to know they'll cite as their main expert a leftist open-borders type willing to trash any systematic effort to control illegal access to the United States.

Yet, as the conclusion to the article notes, while this year's immigration reform initiative failed, we're now seeing more and more reports of stepped-up enforcement of existing laws, so there's a silver lining in all of this.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is Crippled

Thomas Ricks and Karen DeYoung report on the U.S. military's success in decimating al Qaeda in Iraq, the main terrorist group in the country:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq....

There is widespread agreement that AQI has suffered major blows over the past three months. Among the indicators cited is a sharp drop in suicide bombings, the group's signature attack, from more than 60 in January to around 30 a month since July. Captures and interrogations of AQI leaders over the summer had what a senior military intelligence official called a "cascade effect," leading to other killings and captures. The flow of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq has also diminished, although officials are unsure of the reason and are concerned that the broader al-Qaeda network may be diverting new recruits to Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The deployment of more U.S. and Iraqi forces into AQI strongholds in Anbar province and the Baghdad area, as well as the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters to combat AQI operatives in those locations, has helped to deprive the militants of a secure base of operations, U.S. military officials said. "They are less and less coordinated, more and more fragmented," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said recently. Describing frayed support structures and supply lines, Odierno estimated that the group's capabilities have been "degraded" by 60 to 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the Joint Special Operations Command's operations in Iraq, is the chief promoter of a victory declaration and believes that AQI has been all but eliminated, the military intelligence official said. But Adm. William J. Fallon, the chief of U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is urging restraint, the official said. The military intelligence official, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity about Iraq assessments and strategy.

Senior U.S. commanders on the ground, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, have long complained that Central Command, along with the CIA, is too negative in its analyses. On this issue, however, Petraeus agrees with Fallon, the military intelligence official said.

For each assessment of progress against AQI, there is a cautionary note that comes from long and often painful experience. Despite the increased killings and captures of AQI members, Odierno said, "it only takes three people" to construct and detonate a suicide car bomb that can "kill thousands." The goal, he said, is to make each attack less effective and lengthen the periods between them.

Right now, said another U.S. official, who declined even to be identified by the agency he works for, the data are "insufficient and difficult to measure."

"AQI is definitely taking some hits," the official said. "There is definite progress, and that is undeniable good news. But what we don't know is how long it will last . . . and whether it's sustainable. . . . They have withstood withering pressure for a long period of time." Three months, he said, is not long enough to consider a trend sustainable.

That's key: American troops are definitely making progress.

See also yesterday's post on the Washington Post's editorial noting the undeniable success on the ground. Some on the left (here's one) are just squirming to find some bad news in all of these upbeat progress reports, but the denial game's got to be tough when the pattern of military progress is proving the defeatists badly wrong.

Check Memeorandum for more commentary.

Better Numbers in Iraq

The Washington Post published an important editorial today on the improved situation in Iraq:

NEWS COVERAGE and debate about Iraq during the past couple of weeks have centered on the alleged abuses of private security firms like Blackwater USA. Getting such firms into a legal regime is vital, as we've said. But meanwhile, some seemingly important facts about the main subject of discussion last month - whether there has been a decrease in violence in Iraq - have gotten relatively little attention. A congressional study and several news stories in September questioned reports by the U.S. military that casualties were down. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), challenging the testimony of Gen. David H. Petraeus, asserted that "civilian deaths have risen" during this year's surge of American forces.

A month later, there isn't much room for such debate, at least about the latest figures. In September, Iraqi civilian deaths were down 52 percent from August and 77 percent from September 2006, according to the Web site icasualties.org. The Iraqi Health Ministry and the Associated Press reported similar results. U.S. soldiers killed in action numbered 43 - down 43 percent from August and 64 percent from May, which had the highest monthly figure so far this year. The American combat death total was the lowest since July 2006 and was one of the five lowest monthly counts since the insurgency in Iraq took off in April 2004.

During the first 12 days of October the death rates of Iraqis and Americans fell still further. So far during the Muslim month of Ramadan, which began Sept. 13 and ends this weekend, 36 U.S. soldiers have been reported as killed in hostile actions. That is remarkable given that the surge has deployed more American troops in more dangerous places and that in the past al-Qaeda has staged major offensives during Ramadan. Last year, at least 97 American troops died in combat during Ramadan. Al-Qaeda tried to step up attacks this year, U.S. commanders say -- so far, with stunningly little success.

The trend could change quickly and tragically, of course. Casualties have dropped in the past for a few weeks only to spike again. There are, however, plausible reasons for a decrease in violence. Sunni tribes in Anbar province that once fueled the insurgency have switched sides and declared war on al-Qaeda. The radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr ordered a cease-fire last month by his Mahdi Army. Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top day-to-day commander in Iraq, says al-Qaeda's sanctuaries have been reduced 60 to 70 percent by the surge.

This doesn't necessarily mean the war is being won. U.S. military commanders have said that no reduction in violence will be sustainable unless Iraqis reach political solutions -- and there has been little progress on that front. Nevertheless, it's looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus's credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq's bloodshed were - to put it simply - wrong.

See also my previous post on the debate surrounding the Pentagon's $190 billion supplemental budget appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008.

Also blogging: Captain's Quarters, Bits Blog, Blue Crab Boulevard, Don Surber, Hot Air, Jawa Report, Macsmind, Middle Earth Journal, Outside the Beltway, Prairie Pundit, Red State, Right Voice, Sweetness and Light, Take Our Country Back, Weekly Standard, Wizbang.

Pay Any Price? Supplemental War Spending Set at $190 Billion for 2008

Today's opinion section over at the Los Angeles Times asks "The $190 Billion Question":

The Bush administration will request $190 billion for fiscal year 2008 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Opinion asked four national security experts whether this was a wise use of U.S. resources. If not, we asked, how would they propose spending $190 billion to reduce the strength and appeal of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda?

The experts are listed in alphabetical order: Anthony Cordesman, James Dobbins, Frederick Kagan, and Winslow Wheeler.

Their comments are brief, but revealing. Here's Kagan's response, "Spend Whatever it Takes on the War on Terror":

Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is vital to U.S. national security, and we must spend whatever it takes to win in both places. The $190 billion requested for this year is still less than 1.5% of our gross domestic product, a small burden given the enormity of the stakes. We are in a desperate war against terrorists who have vowed to destroy us, yet our military remains about the same size as it was in the 1990s.

America's top priority for weakening Islamist terror groups should be to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is the increasingly important offshoot of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It cannot be allowed to grow stronger. Already, Al Qaeda has used the Soviet failure in Afghanistan and U.S. retreats from Somalia and Lebanon as proof of the strength of its ideology. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, head of Lebanese Hezbollah (whose agents are supporting Shiite extremists in Iraq), has said that the U.S. will withdraw in shame from Iraq as we did from Vietnam. We must not allow that prediction to come true.

Some people say we must get out of Iraq immediately because our presence there serves only to recruit more people to the ranks of theradical Islamists. But honestly, the presence of American forces in any numbers in a Muslim land can serve as a recruiting tool. It doesn't matter to the terrorists if there are 160,000 Americans in Iraq or 160 -- the propaganda about "U.S. occupation" will be just the same. It does matter if they can claim to have defeated us again.

Other critics would abandon Iraq and shift resources to Afghanistan. Current efforts to fight Al Qaeda inside Afghanistan must be stepped up. But how would we actually rout Al Qaeda from its bases in the tribal areas of Pakistan? Shall we invade Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state with 125 million people? Using American forces to defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan would be extremely difficult and dangerous, but we are already defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq. It makes no sense to abandon a critical effort in Iraq that is going well to start a riskier campaign from scratch in Pakistan.

Moreover, Iraq is a potentially wealthy country in the heart of the Middle East; Afghanistan is an isolated land with few resources and central to nothing. Al Qaeda would happily trade Afghanistan for Iraq -- indeed, it has done so, funneling its own resources into Iraq to fight us where we are strongest. Ceding either Iraq or Afghanistan to them would be a tragic mistake.

Cordesman and Dobbins also see a continued U.S. presence in Iraq as crucial to American national security, but they're both critical of the wisdom of the war, and they seem resigned to a prolonged deployment rather than heartened by the improved situation on the ground (the credentials of both Dobbins and Cordesman are impeccable). I've never heard of Wheeler. His comment is no more than an antiwar rant. I'm surprised he was even included in the symposium.

Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and Women in Power

The October 15 edition of Newsweek is a "Women in Power" issue. The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffiington's on the cover (and the contents page, etc., etc.), and the volume includes a number of topical essays and first-person testimonies from prominent women in politics, industry, and sports.

I was particular interested in Liz Cheney's personal vignette, which is included in the symposium, and especially her comments on Hillary Clinton. Liz Cheney is Vice President Dick Cheney's eldest daughter. She's an attorney specializing in international law, and has served in prominent positions at the U.S. State Department, with specializations on Middle East policy. Most of the women Newsweek profiles are on the left (way left in the case of Huffington), but Cheney's got solid-gold GOP credentials, and I was especially impressed by her comments on Hillary Clinton. Cheney's been highly critical of Clinton, especially on Iraq, but she's fair in recognizing her historical significance:

I don't agree with Senator Clinton's views on the issues, but I think it's terrific that she is a credible presidential candidate. It's a measure of progress in this country that she will be judged not on the basis of her gender, but on whether she is right or wrong on the issues, whether she is up to the task of being president. That says a lot about us as a nation. It's about time we got to that point.

To an amazing degree, Cheney's sentiments capture my own feelings about Hillary Clinton. While I disagree with the senator's policies, I admire her political success, and especially her political perseverance and learning. As Clinton will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, the debate and political polarization on her candidacy will undoubtedly get nasty. I frequently post on Clinton. I'm especially disturbed by her wishy-washy positions on the war. But I will not demonize her, and I will distance myself from conservative attacks on her integrity which fall outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

But let me be clear: While I'm intrigued by the historical significance of Hillary's presidential campaign - and especially the possibility of the United States electing a woman as president for the first time in history - I utterly reject any hard-left feminist political agenda that might naturally find a home in a Hillary Clinton administration. While Clinton has certainly moderated her overall political ideology - and she's emerged as the quintessential Washington insider - given her history of supporting the hardline feminist agenda, a Clinton presidential administration in 2009 is naturally prone to capture by hard-left forces, and particulary the male-bashing cohorts of militant feminism.

Clinton's entry over at the Discover the Networks has this on her radical feminist propensities:

Throughout her adult life, Mrs. Clinton has embraced the worldviews and ideals of radical feminism. Following the February 2006 death of Betty Friedan, the longtime communist who co-founded the National Organization for Women , Mrs. Clinton said that Friedan's activism and writing had "opened doors and minds, breaking down barriers for women and enlarging opportunities for women and men for generations to come. We are all the beneficiaries of her vision."

Some hardline feminists reject the idea that Hillary will implement a radical women's rights agenda. Barbara Erhenreich, a well-know progressive author and feminist, has rejected Hillary Clinton as a standard-bearer of the militant feminst political agenda. Note thought that Erhenreich's opposition is mostly based on Clinton's recent policy positions. In the larger sense, with Clinton's known feminist history - and especially her extremely malleable political positions - voices like Erhrenreich's are likely to get a prominent hearing in a Hillary presidency. This larger context is key.

So in summary let me say once again that I will not politically demonize Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Like Liz Cheney, I see Hillary Clinton as highly qualified for the office of president. However, I'm fully aware of the political implications of a Hillary presidency for the direction of American cultural politics. I believe that a reform feminism - which notes the inherent diffences between the sexes, but recognizes historic practices of gender subjugation - represents a reasonable approach to fostering women's progress. Conversly, a radical feminist agenda - rooted in revolutionary feminist demands, and often accompanied by the ideology of feminist separatism - would be a disaster for American politics. It will join with all of the other strands of antiwar leftism, multicultural ideology, moral relativism, and terrorist appeasement to continue a hegemonic project of the destruction of the traditional American way of life.

The Political Culture of the Anglosphere

Michael Barone covered the "Five Best" book section this week at WSJ's Weekend Journal. Each week "Five Best" offer capsule reviews of five books within a subject area, and Barone looks at the shared cultural heritage of the United States and Britain.

Here's what he says about James C. Bennett's, The Anglosphere Challenge (2004):

James C. Bennett coined the term "Anglosphere" to describe countries where English is the native language or (as in India) serves as a lingua franca for the well educated. But language is not all that America, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other places have in common. Bennett argues that the peculiar island history of England produced a set of institutions that other advanced nations in Europe and Asia lacked - the common law, respect for private property, continuous representative government, a culture that nurtures civil society and entrepreneurial enterprise. It is thus no accident that the Anglosphere has excelled in innovation and economic growth and, Bennett believes, will continue to do so.

I haven't read the Bennett volume, but my lectures in comparative politics develop the theme of the "cultural requisites for democracy," and the British political experience is held out as a model of gradual, pragmatic political development.

There seems to be a fundamental set of cultural attributes conducive to the consolidation of a democratic regime - attitudes toward authority, conceptual understandings on knowledge and progress (belief systems), feelings of attachment to nation (a sense of belonging), and basic values (religiosity, freedom, equality). When these attributes lean in a postive direction (feelings of national belonging and community rather than alienation), and when a nation resolves its crises of development (establishment of a constitutional order before the onset of mass mobilization) early in the country's history, a more lasting political order is the result. (See Lawrence Mayer, Comparative Politics: Nations and Theories in a Changing World, 3rd Edition, for the full theory.)

The Anglo-American history is the epitome of these processes, and as Barone notes in his remarks on Bennett, "Anglosphere" greatness is likely to continue far into the future.

Does the Nobel Prize Vindicate Al Gore?

From the New York Times: "With Prize, Gore Is Vindicated Without Having to Add President to Résumé." Here's an excerpt:

Al Gore's seven-year journey from loser to laureate began in bitterness, settled for a time into self-imposed exile and led him in the end to rediscover his voice on climate change.

The question now is what he will do with the prestige and attention that comes to him with the Nobel Peace Prize. The answer appears to be that he will neither embrace nor reject another quest for the presidency, but harness the speculation about his intentions to become a more formidable force on environmental policy and a power within the Democratic party.

Mr. Gore’s close friends and advisers said Friday that he had no desire to be drawn into the race for the presidency but that he saw the clear advantage of leveraging the acclaim. The clearest expression of his true feelings, they said, was his brief statement of thanks for the prize in an appearance in Palo Alto, Calif., where he talked about planetary politics and uttered not a word about the kind unfolding in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“This obviously turns everybody toward the presidency, but I think he’s saying what he means,” said Paul Begala, a political adviser in the Clinton White House who prepared Mr. Gore for his 2000 presidential debates against George W. Bush. “He knows there’s a Democratic field that Democrats are happy with, and that they don’t need a white knight riding in.”

Democrats also said Mr. Gore’s entry into the messy world of politics would undermine the stature that comes with the prize and his role as a wise man and conscience among many liberals.

“Why would he run for president when he can be a demigod?” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, who was a top aide in the Clinton White House. “He now towers over all of us because he’s pure.”

Michael Feldman, a Gore strategist who was meeting with him on Friday near San Francisco Bay, also said that Mr. Gore was not entering the 2008 race. “He’s focused on trying to solve the climate crisis,” Mr. Feldman said.

The speculation that Mr. Gore would win a Nobel Peace Prize began soon after the success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary on global warming he starred in that won an Oscar.

But Mr. Gore’s close aides said they did not believe it would come to him as soon as this year. When his phone failed to ring early Friday morning, Mr. Gore assumed he had been passed over. He and his wife, Tipper, then turned on CNN to see who had been awarded the prize, only to learn it was him.

Although he shares the award with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it was in many ways a personal victory for Mr. Gore, one achieved beyond the shadow of the disputed 2000 election and outside the orbit of the couple to which he has been linked for so long as a partner and a rival, Bill andHillary Rodham Clinton.

The presidency was within Gore's reach in 2000, but after his disastrous presidential campaign - where he stiff-armed Bill Clinton, who was leaving office with approval ratings in the 60 percent range - Democratic insiders snubbed their former standard-bearer. If there's any vindication here, it has more to do with the distant memory of Gore's incredibly poor political skills during his White House bid (rather than the controversy surrounding the Florida recount). To his credit, though, at least Gore didn't wind up like Michael Dukakis, who still wallows in that special ignominious obscurity reserved for presidential losers.

I blogged on Gore's Nobel win on Friday. With its history of controversy, I doubt the Nobel Prize committee will ever be vindicated (and I'm not alone).

Band of Brothers Vets Have New Book Forthcoming

William "Wild Bill" Guarnere and Edward "Babe" Heffron, two veterans of the U.S. Army's "Easy Company," have a new memoir forthcoming. The story of Easy Company was told in the HBO miniseries, "Band of Brothers (which was adapted from the Steven Ambrose book).

Here's the background on the Guarnere/Heffron book (via Blue Crab Boulevard):

After parachuting into Europe during World War II, battling along a strip of road called Hell's Highway in the Netherlands and surviving the freezing woods of Bastogne surrounded by German troops, William Guarnere and Edward Heffron do not consider themselves heroes.

Guarnere, 84, and Heffron, 84, are among the surviving members of the fabled Easy Company memorialized in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers." To them, the real heroes are the men whose bodies stayed buried in that foreign soil and the mothers who sent their sons off to war, praying for a safe return.

It is so their sacrifices are not forgotten that Guarnere and Heffron have written "Brothers in Battle: Best of Friends," recently published by the Berkley Publishing Group.

"Sitting there in the plane, you wonder why you're up there," says Heffron. "You could be home, but then when you land there, and you go through these villages and you look at those people's faces … now you know why we're here."

Heffron sits in Guarnere's Philadelphia house, surrounded by pictures of soldiers the two served with and mementos emblazoned with the Screaming Eagle of the 101st Airborne Division, of which they were part.

The book, with a foreword by actor Tom Hanks, one of the miniseries' producers, tells the story of how the two young men from South Philly became paratroopers, fought in some of World War II's major battles and survived to form a lifelong friendship……

……Guarnere's voice has a raw, unvarnished "tell it like it was," quality while Heffron's is an often-introspective look at the war and life. But neither is sanitized or rosy-eyed. Both speak plainly about killing German troops, the looting that sometimes occurred and the drinking and partying that went on after the war and when they were on leave.

But they said it was important to give as an accurate picture as they could about what they experienced, saying that they were simply trying to do their job the best they could and protect their friends.

"Once you start lying and trying to change things, it's no good," Guarnere says. "You tell the truth, and that's it."

I wish Guarnere and Heffron success with their new book - it sounds like a great read!

I have "Band of Brothers" on DVD, and I always try to take time out to watch the episodes when they run on the History Channel. A new 10-part miniseries from Steven Spielberg, focusing on the war in the Pacific, is tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release.

"Saving Private Ryan" is my favorite movie, and I think Spielberg's film productions have been phenomenally important in keeping World War II history alive for younger generations of Americans.

Ann Coulter's Anti-Semitism: Too Dangerous to Ignore

I've never been a big fan of Ann Coulter. I don't disagree with all of her points, but generally she's too abrasive, and frankly, often seems unhinged. Commenters to my posts dissecting the radical left often say that those on the far right are just as bad. In Coulter's case, they've got a point. She's basically a ideological hack, and one apparently whose books aren't worth the ink and paper used to publish them. I don't read Coulter, though that's what Tim Rutten argues in his article today on Coulter's recent outburst of anti-Semitism. It's a good read:

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.

Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift.

The National Jewish Democratic Council weighed in with a petition asking other broadcast news organizations not to give Coulter a forum. "While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment," said council Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "Just as media outlets don't invite those who believe that Martians walk the Earth to frequently comment on science stories, it's time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics." (Sadly, too many Americans now believe the only way to confront offensive or dangerous speech is to silence it.)

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that Coulter's "remarks that Jews needed to be perfected and America would be better off if everyone was Christian are deeply offensive and have been the classic language of anti-Semites throughout the millennia. She may have been a guest on CNBC's 'Big Idea,' but what she invoked is the oldest 'Bigoted Idea,' and she should apologize." (Good luck on that one, rabbi.)

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.

It's a scandal that in this pluralist nation it falls to the voices of organized Jewry to make this case, because it is a case whose outcome is of the greatest consequence to us all. For too long we've pretended that the brutal political rhetoric that now characterizes our partisan politics can be quarantined, that it won't inevitably leach over into every other aspect of our lives. In fact, it's doing just that, and soon the coarse and vituperative language of the war between red and blue -- with it's instantaneous imputations of bad-faith and utter disrespect for minimal civility -- will begin to color aspects of our civil society where mutual respect is too crucial and hard won to tolerate this sort of risk.

It would be hard to find a better statment on how I feel about this. As a blogger, I'm a participant in this vituperative "war between red and blue," and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not into conservative bigotry, however. I simply think that powerful argumentation is more effective than hare-brained ideological baiting.

While people can disagree on whether Coulter's anti-Semitic or stupid (Dennis Prager, a radio commentator and practicing Jew, defended her), Coulter didn't just misspeak: She crossed a line into sentiment that I can never condone.

UPDATE: Angevin over at The Oxford Medievalist also wrote about Coulter. I like this:

Besides being offensive, her problem, however, is two-fold. One, she's way too outrageous and abrasive, in a way that suggests that, whatever she says is solely meant to drum-up controversy and book sales.

Burma and International Relations

First Lady Laura Bush published a Wall Street Journal commentary Wednesday denouncing the Burmese junta's gross human rights violations against the country's pro-democracy forces:

The generals' reign of fear has subdued the protests - for now. But while the streets of Burma may be eerily quiet, the hearts of the Burmese people are not: 2007 is not 1988, when the regime's last major anti-democracy crackdown killed 3,000 and left the junta intact. Today, people everywhere know about the regime's atrocities. They are disgusted by the junta's abuses of human rights. This swelling outrage presents the generals with an urgent choice: Be part of Burma's peaceful transition to democracy, or get out of the way for a government of the Burmese people's choosing.

Whatever last shred of legitimacy the junta had among its own citizens has vanished. The regime's stranglehold on information is slipping; thanks to new technologies, people throughout Burma know about the junta's assaults. The public mood is said to be "a mixture of fear, depression, hopelessness, and seething anger." According to reports from Rangoon, "The regime's heavy-handed tactics against the revered clergy and peaceful demonstrators have turned many of the politically neutral in favor of the recent demonstrators."

Read the whole thing. The First Lady argues that the weight of moral legitimacy rests with the monks, the political opposition, and the people:

The regime's position grows weaker by the day. The generals' choice is clear: The time for a free Burma is now.

For more background on the crisis in Burma, and the global context shaping the international community's push to force democratic change on Burma's authoritarian regime, see "Asia's Forgotten Crisis," from the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. Here's a snippet:

After General Than Shwe became chair of the junta in 1992, repression grew more brazen. Thousands of democracy activists and ordinary citizens have been sent to prison, and Suu Kyi has been repeatedly confined to house arrest, where she remains today. Since 1996, when the Burmese army launched its "four cuts" strategy against armed rebels -- an effort to cut off their access to food, funds, intelligence, and recruits among the population - 2,500 villages have been destroyed and over one million people, mostly Karen and Shan minorities, have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands live in hiding or in open exile in Bangladesh, India, China, Thailand, and Malaysia. In 2004, the reformist prime minister Khin Nyunt was arrested. Two years ago, Than Shwe even moved the seat of government from Rangoon (which the junta calls Yangon), the traditional capital, to Pyinmana, a small logging town some 250 miles north -- reportedly on the advice of a soothsayer and for fear of possible U.S. air raids. And this past summer, the government cracked down brutally on scores of Burmese citizens who had taken to the streets to protest state-ordered hikes in fuel prices.

Burma's neighbors are struggling to respond to the spillover effects of worsening living conditions in the country. The narcotics trade, human trafficking, and HIV/AIDS are all spreading through Southeast Asia thanks in part to Burmese drug traffickers who regularly distribute heroin with HIV-tainted needles in China, India, and Thailand. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Burma accounts for 80 percent of all heroin produced in Southeast Asia, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has drawn a direct connection between the drug routes running from Burma and the marked increase in HIV/AIDS in the border regions of neighboring countries. Perversely, the SPDC has been playing on its neighbors' concerns over the drugs, disease, and instability that Burma generates to blackmail them into providing it with political, economic, and even military assistance.

Worse, the SPDC [State Peace and Development Council] appears to have been taking an even more threatening turn recently. Western intelligence officials have suspected for several years that the regime has had an interest in following the model of North Korea and achieving military autarky by developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Last spring, the junta normalized relations and initiated conventional weapons trade with North Korea in violation of UN sanctions against Pyongyang. And despite Burma's ample reserves of oil and gas, it signed an agreement with Russia to develop what it says will be peaceful nuclear capabilities. For these reasons, despite urgent problems elsewhere in the world, all responsible members of the international community should be concerned about the course Burma is taking.

The article suggests a change in approach to Burma, shifting to greater engagement with the regime at the highest levels, more forcefully pushing the junta toward political reform and human rights protection, while at the same time toughening the international sanctions regime impelling the junta toward democratic reforms.

But check out the guys at Maggie's Farm, who place the crisis in Burma in the context of Al Gore's Nobel Prize win.

Obama, Edwards Hammer Clinton on Iran Vote

The Los Angeles Times reports that two top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination have hammered rival candidate Hillary Clinton for her recent vote to categorize Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization:

Five years after she voted to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is coming under attack from rivals in the presidential race for a recent vote that they say could bring the nation closer to war with Iran.

On Thursday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) added his voice to the criticism, comparing Clinton's vote on the measure to the "blank check" that he said she gave President Bush to wage war against Iraq.

Last month, Clinton joined a majority of senators in voting for a resolution that labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a government-sponsored military organization, a terrorist group. Obama said Bush could use the measure to justify a military strike against Iran.

Efforts by Obama and fellow Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to highlight Clinton's Iran vote come as the two are struggling to break her campaign momentum by reviving questions about her 2002 vote authorizing U.S. force in Iraq. Clinton has refused to call that vote a mistake.

"They've been trying, and they haven't found a way that works," said Donald F. Kettl, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "My sense is that she's done a pretty masterful and smooth job in making the transition she needed to make from the original vote to the position she has now, which is more strongly antiwar." Clinton says that as president, she would immediately start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, and that her goal would be to have them all out by the end of her first term.

Read the whole thing. Since it's not especially likely that the U.S. will be going to war with Iran any time soon, Clinton's vote was actually a safe bet. But by ripping into Clinton - far and away the frontrunner in the Democratic field - Obama and Edwards are hoping to chip away at her inevitability.

What I find interesting is Clinton's ability to have her cake and eat it too. With this vote she can claim firmness toward toward Iran, but should hard-left criticism kick up, she'd be safe enough to deny the terrorist-labeling legislation indicated increasing U.S. bellicosity.

Indeed, the vote illustrates Clinton's essential waffling on the issues, saying or doing whatever's best to fit the political circumstances of the moment. A week or two back, the Times ran a story on Hillary's squishiness, "Clinton's 2008 Lead is Clear, Though Her Policies Often Aren't." Over the course of this year, many voters have become frankly flummoxed over Hillary's flexibility, which the article calls "nuance." In other words, Clinton's so ambiguous, her White House bid's getting to be this year's "Where's the Beef" campaign:

After 10 months of campaigning, Clinton has built an image among Democratic voters as a skilled and experienced leader, propelling her to the top of the opinion polls. But her policy positions are sometimes unclear. In some cases, Clinton has made statements on the campaign trail or cast votes as a senator that put her on different sides of the same issue. At times she has avoided specifics, leaving her options open.
Clinton says that Social Security is in jeopardy. But pressed in a recent debate on how to shore up the system's shaky finances, Clinton refused to offer any remedy. "I don't think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president," she said. "You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with."

On free trade -- a top-tier issue for labor unions and core Democrats -- her position is murky. Clinton has voted for at least three tariff-lowering trade deals, but voted against one. Appearing before free-trade supporters, she has praised the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement, which is loathed by many unions. But speaking to a union audience as a presidential candidate, Clinton said NAFTA hurt workers.

To counter criticism that she is beholden to special interests, Clinton has cited her work on a bill signed in 2005 overhauling bankruptcy laws. But others say that work is an example of something else: straddling an issue. She opposed the bill as first lady, voted for a later version as senator, then switched again to oppose it before a family crisis kept her from voting on the final bill.

Some people watching Clinton believe she owes the voters more answers....

Clinton's approach to the war is one issue where she has sent a nuanced signal.

"Are you ready to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home?" she called to the audience outside the New Hampshire statehouse over Labor Day weekend. A sure-fire applause line at Democratic rallies, Clinton works it into many of her speeches.

The New Hampshire crowd roared.

Later in her remarks, Clinton added that "we should end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home safely and responsibly and as soon as possible." But she did not lay out how much time it might take to withdraw "safely and responsibly." Nor did she mention something she had said in a debate one month earlier: that she thinks the U.S. would need to retain military forces to keep terrorists "on the run" in Iraq.

Bob Williams, 65, of Chichester, N.H., came out to the statehouse for Clinton's address. Asked whether he came away with an idea of when a full troop withdrawal might happen if she were president, Williams said: "I'm not sure." He later said he had heard little from Clinton in the way of "specific plans or commitments" for extracting the U.S. from Iraq.

There you have it!

Hardly anyone can figure out what Hillary's all about, at least in terms of policies. Politically, it's no surprise that she's all about power - that is, about winning-without-principle. After 2000, she made a reputation for herself as an accommodating centrist in the Senate. Her Iraq vote in 2002 was the right thing to do. Now, though, worried about the hard-left's grip on the party, and mindful of the electorate's pull to the center in the general election, Hillary satisfies herself with vapid evasions on the truly important question facing the voters in this campaign.

What Next for Conservatives?

How can conservatives move forward, in this age of apparent liberal ascendancy? That issue was addressed today by Yuval Levin and Peter Wehner in an essay over at the New York Sun:

Conservatives today are in a funk. The strains of governing, the challenges of war, and the frustration of an unsuccessful mid-term election have contributed to unease and unhappiness. But deeper than these issues is an intellectual fatigue and uncertainty about where the attention of the conservative movement now should be directed.

What domestic issues can unite and motivate conservatives to great political exertions, and can win the allegiance of the public?

In this respect, the right is partially a victim of its own successes. If 25 years ago you had asked an American conservative to name the preeminent domestic policy challenges of the day, you probably would have gotten back, along with a general worry about cultural decline, some combination of welfare, taxes, and crime.

Few conservatives today would name any of these three as the foremost problems, and even on the cultural front they could point to some advances. This is due, in large part, to a series of conservative successes that have transformed American politics and made conservative theories of economics, law enforcement, and welfare the accepted wisdom. Success has not been complete in any of these areas, of course, but the struggle over first principles, over which way to go in general, has been won.

Today the left — which for decades fought vigorously on all three fronts — offers scant opposition on any of them. No leading Democrats are arguing that we undo conservative achievements on welfare and crime. And even on taxes, which liberals want to increase, no Democrats are arguing that we return to the days when the top rate of taxation was 70%.

But what now? On what issues can conservative principles point to popular reforms today? The most prominent domestic policy concerns of the day would seem, at first glance, to favor the left. Health care, income inequality, and the environment, among other issues, have long been identified with American liberals, and conservatives have been uncomfortable taking them up.

But the notion that the left owns these issues is not a fact inherent in the problems themselves; rather, it is a failure of conservative imagination. In fact, it is precisely these kinds of issues that should now be front and center on the conservative agenda, not only because the public cares about them, but also because the left is far more vulnerable on them than it seems. Conservatives should fight precisely on what is perceived to be liberal turf, as they have done successfully before.

The authors argue that the success of the 1996 welfare reform initiative demonstrates how conservative ideas provide powerful alternatives to statist policies of top-down, bureaucratic management. With health care emerging as one of the great new items on the agenda, conservative ideas on invigorating markets and increasing access should be driving the debate.

This is also the case with economic inequality. Levin and Wehner - citing Arthur Brooks' research on the superior compassion inherent in conservative values - suggest that the debate on equality needs to shift toward a focus on upward mobility:

The problem with the gap between the rich and the poor, after all, is not that the rich are rich, but that the poor are poor. The solution, then, is not best understood through the prism of economic equality — a meaningless notion, good only for fanning envy and disillusion — but through the prism of economic mobility.

The key steps toward mobility have long been clear: school, work, and marriage. Conservatives know how to make that case and translate it into policy. They must do so, and again make clear the basic difference between their notion and the left's notion of freedom and the role of government.

I would add to this that such programs should also reach out to minority communities, specifically African-Americans and Hispanic Americans (economic programs with universal appeal, those seeking to lift all groups, will generate greater public support, and they'll benefit conservatives politically). The conservative emphasis on the importance of family on the life chances of the young is more vital than ever, especially when the headlines repeatedly report the crime, violence, poverty, and social disorganization of inner-city communities.

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Former Vice President Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to build and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made global warming. The award will be shared equally with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Washington Post has the story (see also Memeorandum):

Former Vice President Al Gore Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today, along with a United Nations panel that monitors climate change, for their work educating the world about global warming and advocating for political action to control it.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee characterized Gore as "the single individual who has done most" to convince world governments and leaders that climate change is real, is caused by human activity, and poses a grave threat.

Gore has focused on the issue through books, promotional events and his Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a joint project between the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, has been monitoring evidence of climate change and possible solutions since 1988.

The science showcased by the panel and Gore's advocacy have helped to "build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change," the committee said.

"Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced clear scientific support."

As with last year's award to Bangladeshi banker Mohammad Yunus, whose pioneering use of small loans to the very poor contributes to the stability of developing nations, this year's prize focused on an issue not directly related to war and peace, but seen as critical to maintaining social stability.

The panel said that global warming "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Highlighting those risks, and the role people play in both creating and potentially mitigating them, has defined public life for Gore since he lost the closely fought 2000 presidential election to President Bush.

From that difficult race, in which he won the popular vote but lost the electoral college in a case ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, he emerged as a controversial figure -- ridiculed by opponents as an environmental extremist, and hailed by supporters as "the Gore-acle" for his foresight on issues like the Internet and climate change.

In a statement, Gore, 59, said he was honored to receive the prize. He said he would donate his share of the $1.5 million award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit he chairs that works to educate the public about climate change and mobilize global support for action.

The article also notes that Gore's Nobel win is generating intense speculation that he'll enter the 2008 presidential race. Gore dismissed the notion, as well he should. It's very late in the season, and as Gore has not been involved in the normal pre-primary activites - especially fundraising - a late entry into the race would be unlikely to knock Hillary Clinton from her frontrunner status (see also The Politic and Dan Balz).

This presidential speculation's fascinating. It's normally the case that a former president (and not a presidential loser) wins the Nobel, like Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002 for his administration's diplomatic legacy, and his work for Habitat for Humanity. (Carter's humanitarianism is arguably more deserving of the prize, not being bogged down in the same kind to pseudo-scientific controversy as Gore's "Inconvenient Truth".)

I'm sure there'll be loads of commentary on this over the weekend, so I'll just note that the political motivations of the Nobel Committee have long been suspect.

UPDATE: Damian Thompson at London's Daily Telegraph asks, "What has Al Gore done for world peace?":

Climate change is a threat to the environment, not to "peace" and international order. The prize has gone to some sleazy recipients in the past, but at least you can make a case that their actions staved off bloodshed.

Rollback: An Update on School Desegregation Efforts

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an update on the politics of school desegration efforts across the country. It turns out that in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in June striking down voluntary desegration orders in Seattle and Louisville, a number of localities around the country have continued the use of school assignments plans in an effort to foster greater integration and more equal educational outcomes:

Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I "just don't feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school," he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional. Without the backing of the Supreme Court, Mr. Keating says his effort wouldn't have "much of a standing."

Five decades ago, federal courts began forcing reluctant districts to use race-based assignments to integrate schools. But in June, a bitterly divided Supreme Court reversed course, concluding that two race-based enrollment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle were unconstitutional. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts declared.

Now, in an era when schools nationwide are becoming increasingly segregated, the ruling is affecting local school districts in ways large and small. Some districts are sidestepping the ruling by replacing measurements of race with household income. But many others, such as Milton, are adjusting their programs in the face of opposition that's been emboldened by the Supreme Court decision.

Read the whole thing.

I'll be writing more on the politics of race here at American Power. In particular, at some point I'll lay out in some detail the neoconservative position on the black freedom struggle and racial progess.

I will say for now though that, in one sense, utlimately, racial integration is the key to black upward mobility. Here my position reflects that of the NAACP's judicial protest strategy of the 20th century that sought to break down the old Jim Crow system of American racial apartheid.

Traditionally, civil rights activists held that historically separate facilities for the races were inherenty unequal, and in addition, many argued that integrating blacks into mainstream Anglo-White institutions would facilitate preparation for success in the dominant socio-economic system with its white-majority norms of attainment. Yet, in the post-civil rights era, we no longer have legally-imposed segregation of the races. To the extent we could describe today's racial separation as "segregation," we should think in terms of de facto circumstances leading to the concentration of minorities in particular residential areas (but see Abigail Thernstrom on the racial grievance industry's interest in pepetuating claims of "racial segregation" as a means to extract more public funding for schools in the post-forced busing era).

So, while I still think the goal of integrating the races is laudible - at least in the abstract sense of equalizing expectations across groups - there's really little justification for school assignment plans other than to promote "diversity" through racial balancing policies. Indeed, today's mandatory racial balancing plans in fact represent the exact opposite of the goal of the historic civil rights movement (the elimination of state-sponsored racial discrimination). The Supreme Court advanced this notion in its June ruling:

Although the push to integrate public schools is often associated with the civil-rights movement, these days many school administrators want to integrate schools for a more practical reason: to raise test scores. Studies show black and other minority students tend to perform better academically when they learn alongside white classmates. Districts face the threat of losing government funds if school test scores fail to meet a certain threshold.

But the Supreme Court's June ruling handed opponents powerful ammunition, and some experts say the ruling could further accelerate the resegregation of America's schools. While the famous 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education concluded that racially segregated schools are "inherently unequal," a string of federal court decisions in the 1990s curbed desegregation plans. In 2004, 73% of black students nationwide attended schools where minorities were the majority, compared with 66% in 1991, according to the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In 2000, a group of parents sued the Seattle school district because their white children were denied admission into certain popular schools. Officials at those schools had imposed a racial quota to reflect the district's racial composition. Three years later, a group of white parents sued the Louisville school district for basing admissions on a plan that aimed to maintain black enrollment at any school between 15 percent and 50 percent.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that in both cases -- Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Crystal D. Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education -- the student-assignment systems were in violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, which says that "No state shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The statistics on racial imbalance are very interesting, as such numbers will likely reflect the dynamics of racial diversity in America's schools in the future. Rather than focusing on continuing the disruptive practices of school racial balancing programs, blacks need to look within, to the level of the black family, and begin to reverse the cultural aversion to educational success that's holding back members of the race.

Newfound Optimism in Iraq

Victor Davis Hanson just returned from a week in Iraq. He toured suburban areas outside of cities such as Baqubah, Ramadi, and Taji, and reports a newfound optimism among the citizens there. Especially noteworthy has been the tremendous increase in the willingness of everday Iraqis to assist American forces in hunting down and eliminating the terrorists in their midst:

Why the change?

Officers offered a number of theories. The surge of American troops, and Gen. David Petraeus’s risky tactics of going after the terrorists within their enclaves, have put al Qaeda on the run. Likewise, in the past four years, the U.S. military has killed thousands of these terrorists and depleted their ranks.

Sunnis — angry over their loss of power to the historically discriminated-against Shiites — discovered their al Qaeda allies to be worse than their Shiite rivals. We forget that jihadists drew in not merely religious fanatics but also repulsive common criminals and psychopaths who extort, butcher, and mutilate innocents.

Iraqis of all tribes and sects are also growing tired of the nihilistic violence that is squandering the opportunity for something better than Saddam’s rule. The astronomical spike in oil prices has resulted in windfall profits of billions of dollars for the Iraqi government — and with it the realization that Iraq could someday become a wealthy advanced state.

Iraqis told me that their widely held fear that Americans are going to leave soon has galvanized Sunnis to finally step up to secure their country or face even worse chaos in our absence.

The result is that ordinary Iraqis are increasingly willing to participate in local government and civil defense. Such popular engagement from the bottom up offers more hope than the old 2003 idea that a democratically elected government could simply mandate reform top down from their enclaves in the Green Zone.

So we are at yet another turning point in the constantly changing saga of Iraq. On this recent trip to Iraq, I rode on highways that just a few months ago were nearly impossible to navigate without being blown up by improvised explosive devices. Soldiers now train Iraqi security forces as often as they fight terrorists.

But there is also a new sense of urgency on the part of the military that Iraqis must seize this new opportunity before it fades. Unless the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government steps up to reconcile with the Sunni provinces and begins funding social services, the insurgency will only rekindle.

The Iraqi army must be freed up to police its porous borders with Iran and Syria. That’s impossible without a national police force inside Iraq’s cities that is both competent and law-abiding. So far the police are not quite either.

The Shiite community must appreciate that it has won the political struggle and finally achieved political power commensurate with its numbers. This majority must now take on Shiite death squads and their sympathizers inside the Iraqi government. Otherwise, an intolerant Shiite-run Iraq will either become a pawn of Iran or fight a perpetual war with the country’s Sunni provinces.

Meanwhile, the American military, after four years of hard fighting in Iraq, is strained, its equipment wearing out. America’s finest citizens, fighting for an idealistic cause that has still not been well explained to the American people, continue to be killed by horrific murderers.

If the unexpectedly good news about the surge has given Gen. Petraeus another six months to improve further the situation, the political debate at home has changed only from “Get out now!” to “Victory still isn’t worth the cost in blood and treasure.”

Lost in all this confusion over Iraq is the fact that about 160,000 gifted American soldiers are trying to help rebuild an entire civilization socially, politically and economically — and defeat killers in their midst who will murder far beyond Iraq if not stopped.

It is indeed amazing how much things have changed since the end of last year. I suggested last November that if we didn't see improvement on the ground within a year, I would come out forcefully in favor of the drawdown option. Yet throughout this period I've never wavered in my support for the deployment, and for good reason.

Strategic Interests and American Maritime Power

Seth Cropsey, over at the Weekly Standard, argues that the United States cannot ignore its strategic interests as the world's leading maritime power:

CHINA HAS BEEN expanding the size of its naval fleet for the same length of time--about 25 years--that the U.S. has been decreasing its Navy. A Congressional Quarterly article warned ominously that China will possess nearly twice as many submarines as the U.S. in 2010, and is likely to surpass the total size of the U.S. fleet five years later--if we do nothing.

In the two years since that article appeared China has continued its decades long annual double-digit defense budget increases: we have done nothing. Notwithstanding several efforts over the past decade to stabilize the diminishing size of the U.S. Navy, the current fleet of 274 combat ships is the same size as it was on the eve of World War I. Even if shipbuilding can be sustained at 7 vessels per year, we will eventually possess a fleet whose numbers equal those achieved just after the Russo-Japanese War. The presidential debates that began half a year ago have considered expensive haircuts and federal support for the renovation of Soldier Field in Chicago. But the fact that the U.S. Navy today is less than half the size it was during the Reagan administration continues to escape serious, sustained attention at the national level.

There are lonely exceptions. The redoubtable House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, from Missouri, a state with no oceanic coast, has called current fleet numbers "shocking." Retired Army general, Barry McCaffrey, told Congress this past spring that "the monthly burn rate of $9 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused us to inadequately fund the modernization of the U.S. Air Force and Navy If this continues," he said, "we will be in terrible trouble in the coming decades when the Peoples Republic of China emerges as a global military power--which we will then face in the Pacific with inadequate deterrence."

Unfortunately, no one is listening. The long descent that our naval forces find themselves in today continues despite China's naval growth, its emphasis on modernization and training, its effort to develop a system that can wield ballistic missiles against ships at sea, and Beijing's overall objective of building a force that can deny the U.S. Navy access to the Western Pacific. More important, our national policy is blind to the element of the strategic equation that does not change, the fact that the United States is surrounded by oceans, that the future of the world's growing commerce depends on safe transit through the seas, and that one of the most fundamental measures of national power remains the strength of a nation's navy.

Cropsey's especially good at linking the balance of naval power to the fight against rogue nations and transnational terrorism:

At some point the U.S. will face the choice of maintaining naval supremacy or yielding it to others. Because decades are needed to build, train, and deploy powerful naval forces, climbing back after falling off strategically is a long process. In fact it is an historically unprecedented feat--one that would require the passive benignity of another power that had surpassed ours.

There is no inevitability to our enmity with China, but we strongly prejudice the case against a secure and balanced East Asia by encouraging a serious power vacuum in the form of our departure as the region's first naval power. Russian saber-rattling can be dismissed today. But the Russians remain an ambitious people with a yearning for the international recognition they once enjoyed. India strives to build a naval force to control the ocean bearing its name, the one through which much of the world's oil is transported. It is only a question of time until jihadists attempt to use the seas as a more effective alternative to the air routes whose assault has now been complicated by threatened nations' measures. The flexibility of powerful, wide-ranging naval forces offers protection for the civilized world against weapons of mass destruction in the hands of fanatics armed with long-range missiles. In each case, a strong Navy protects U.S. maritime interests which are now virtually inseparable from the broadest national security interests. The sum of these interests today, and all the more so in the future, amounts to this nation's future as the world's great power.

This is an important warning, although Cropsey's discussion of China focuses too much a raw measues of comparative naval tonnage, rather than the balance of technological sophistication. For some perspective, check out Barry Posen's pathbreaking article on America's enduring strategic primacy in the air, land, sea, and space: "The Command of the Commons." Posen argues that "Unipolarity and U.S. hegemony will be around for some time."

Also, on the unfavorable trends in China's balance of demographic power relative to the United States, see Mark Haas, "A Geriatric Peace? The Future of U.S. Power in a World of Aging Populations."