Archives for August 2002

John Robb suggests that Bush’s year-old stem-cell research policy — hailed by some at the time as a Solomonic compromise — is a failure, one that will bite back at the president in future elections, as voters with ailing relatives who might have been helped by robust research turn on him.

As I argued at the time (and Michael Kinsley later echoed), the policy — which is built around Bush’s stated conviction that all embryos are sacred and the government should act to protect them — is baldly hypocritical. Vast numbers of embryos are created and discarded every year during fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization. If Bush actually felt this was profoundly immoral, he’d do something to stop it. But since such fertility treatment touches the lives of a huge swathe of the electorate, the president wouldn’t think of banning it. Couples who are stuck with extra embryos as a byproduct of such treatment typically have no choice but to dispose of them; stem cell research offers a way to make good use of them for the betterment of all. Why not allow that? Why not, in cases where it doesn’t conflict with people’s religious beliefs, encourage that?

Slate’s Jack Shafer has done some good sleuthing on the identity of Laurent Murawiec, the Rand consultant who told the Bush Pentagon that Saudi Arabia was a hostile nation, and whose report was leaked to the Washington Post. Seems Murawiec spent at least some of the 1980s in the orbit of fringe fascist and paranoid perennial presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche. He was invited to give his talk by the defense policy world’s leading Iraq hawk, Richard Perle. Shafer has also posted Murawiec’s entire Powerpoint presentation, “Taking Saudi out of Arabia.”

Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, in the Guardian, “suggested Mr Bush was just as much of a danger to world peace as Saddam Hussein, adding: ‘It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv.'” (Via Nick Denton.)

A Rand Corporation analyst came to the Pentagon and suggested that Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the U.S., the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The article points out that this is not the government’s policy or view, but rather an independent analyst’s perspective; it also suggests that this perspective has growing currency within the Bush administration.

I heard Defense Secretary Rumsfeld fulminating on NPR’s top-of-the-hour news about this Pentagon leak. “Unprofessional,” he fumed. It did not represent the government’s point of view. It was obviously “leaked by someone who wants to feel important.” The leaker, he concluded, should go to jail.

This is the Bush administration’s reflex every time there’s a leak exposing a policy rift: Which traitor broke ranks?

Isn’t it time Rumsfeld and his colleagues grew up and admitted that leaks like this happen only when there is genuine disagreement among policymakers, and one of them, vying for position, chooses to send up a flare in the press? (I’m not subscribing here to the darker conspiracy-theory view that these leaks are in fact orchestrated by the administration even as it disavows them. That can happen, but I don’t think it happens often, and I don’t think it’s happening now.)

Rumsfeld may not like that way of doing business. It is arguably not a good way of doing business. But it’s not about “wanting to feel important.” There’s a real issue at stake here: How do we deal with the fact that Saudi Arabia’s government is both an ally and in many ways a backer of the radical Islamism that we find ourselves fighting?

Since we’re nominally “at war” and American lives are actually and potentially at stake, those policy conflicts ought to be debated in full public view, not left purely to the “professionals.” Instead, the Bush administration’s first resort is to demand that leakers go to jail.

Which former Republican administration does that remind you of? Right — one that ended in resignation and disgrace. Rumsfeld knows all about the Nixon crew’s way of dealing with leaks, of course; he got his start in politics with them.

There’s an interesting debate going on among Glenn Reynolds, Nick Denton and Dave Winer about the following proposition: “the US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime mainly because the West needs to humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millenial fantasy.”
Doc Searls has the full recap, and a perspective that I find persuasive. …And as Farhad points out in the comments, taking Saddam out doesn’t achieve the goal of humiliating Islamism because Saddam isn’t an Islamist: “If we wanted to crush Islamism, we’d crush Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.”