Back of the Envelope

I hadn't even heard about this one, but Parableman does an excellent job of both explaining the issue and dissecting Obama's argument.

A lot of people are discussing Barack Obama's recent off-the-cuff remarks about the Bible and same-sex civil unions. I want to delve a little bit into the contrast he draws between the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 1. The gist of his statement is (1) the Sermon on the Mount is more central to Christian faith than an "obscure" passage in Romans, and (2) the Sermon on the Mount should influence our attitudes toward civil unions in some positive way.

Generally arguing about how the Bible should be interpreted is the wrong way to win people who believe the Bible to your side. This is not because the Bible-believers are not open to multiple interpretations, but rather because, after 2000 years, there are very few new interpretations. The argument that the Sermon on the Mount is more important than Paul's letters is one I've heard before, especially when the argument is that the most central part, the lens through which the entire Bible should be read, is through the two greatest commandments, loving God and loving your neighbor. This then, especially the loving your neighbor commandment, is seen as justification for letting your neighbor do whatever he wants. Oddly, the loving God part gets left by the wayside, ignoring the fact that it means listening to his word and obeying it, not tossing it out as if loving God is merely having positive feelings towards him. Even though I agree that all commandments should be interpreted in light of the two greatest, it's still not a convincing argument, as love has always required correction.

So the primary season has gone on forever. It seems like we've been talking about who the presidential nominees would be since 2006. I'm afraid that my interest in the whole process started to wane around mid-2007, and I've only been paying minimal attention since then. It looks like we'll get either Obama or Clinton on the Democratic side, and McCain appears to have the Republican nomination all but cinched up. The problem is that I don't really like any of the candidates. Hillary is, well, Hillary, and frankly, I could do without another four years of a Clinton or a Bush in the White House. Obama talks a lot about unity, but as he has the most liberal voting record in the Senate, I don't think he means compromise by that. Usually when someone highly partisan talks about unity, they mean that everyone else should stop arguing with them and do what they say. And finally, there's McCain. Ugh. He's not quite Republican in Name Only, but he's close. The famed maverick gave us McCain-Feingold, the travesty of a civil liberties violation which bears his name. He also sounds more like a Democrat than some Democrats when it comes to global warming, terrorist interrogations, and stem cell research. There is one big issue where I agree with him, and that's the war. Hillary and Obama both intend to withdraw from Iraq in short order, without much concern for whether the nation collapses in our wake. Regardless of your view on whether we should have gone there in the first place, that's irresponsible, and McCain at least realizes that. And despite his spottiness on how we should deal with the terrorists we have captured, he at least agrees that we should continue to capture them. So, while I don't like my choices, I have to say that there's really only one choice.

However, I suspect that the Republicans are looking at defeat this year. It may be that a Democratic convention meltdown would cause a lot of Democrats to sit this one out, but barring that, I don't really foresee a Republican victory.

This is an old but interesting article (hat tip to Mark Steyn in the Corner), although not everyone may like its conclusion:

Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.

Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this particular social system -- which involves far more than simple male domination -- maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn't were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a comeback.

...

Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation. Of these, among the most important is the stigmatization of "illegitimate" children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example.

Under patriarchy, "bastards" and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers' name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, "legitimate" children become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers' family, and not to their mothers', which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they produce at least one son.

Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women few desirable alternatives.

To be sure, a society organized on such principles may well degenerate over time into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in both ancient Greece and Rome. In more recent times, the patriarchal family has also proved vulnerable to the rise of capitalism, which profits from the diversion of female labor from the house to the workplace. But as long as the patriarchal system avoids succumbing to these threats, it will produce a greater quantity of children, and arguably children of higher quality, than do societies organized by other principles, which is all that evolution cares about.

As you see, the basic idea is that the patriarchy, defined as the societal model where children are seen as part of the father's family, is the most successful when it comes to producing a large number of children. There are several reasons for this. The first is that this gives men an incentive to invest in their children, and frowns on illegitimacy. So marriage is highly encouraged, and women with children are better supported and thus having more children is less of a burden. Which is the positive way of putting it. The negative way of looking at this is that women are stigmatized for any lifestyle which does not produce children. I think that this social structure has both good and bad qualities. The author of the article does not attempt to make any moral judgement on patriarchy as a system, although he points out that it does not have to be oppressive. Instead, his premise is not moral but statistical: non-patriarchal societies tend to be overtaken by patriarchal ones, simply because over several generations, non-patriarchal societies simply cannot keep up population-wise. Mixed societies, such as the US, tend to become more patriarchal over time, as the less patriarchal elements are eventually outnumbered. In the US, where the patriarchal elements are Christian conservatives, this won't destroy American society, despite the paranoid fears of "theocracy" professed by many liberals. In Europe, where the patriarchal elements are increasingly radical Muslims, there's a much greater risk that European society a hundred years from now will bear little resemblence to its current state.

I've been staying out of the immigration debate. I've said some stuff on it before, mostly to the tune that the worker visa isn't really a bad idea, but it's tricky to implement. And having absorbed more of the debate before, it's obvious that the enforcement side is really, really tough, and we do a terrible job of it. In other words, I'm torn between the two sides without any substantial investment in either, which makes me just dead tired of the debate and the amazing level of venom involved. I really think that Jonah Goldberg gets it right in his USA Today article:

Conservatives normally take great pride in the caliber of our intramural debates. But this is a shameful moment.

Oh, to be sure, there are racists, bigots, xenophobes and the like among the critics of immigration reform. Of this I am quite sure. I am also certain there are people who believe that the marketplace is the highest source of values, and the bottom line is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.
...
But you know what? Even if these are the overriding motives for all of the combatants in the debate over immigration reform, none of them is publicly using these arguments to justify his position. No one — of any consequence at least — is saying we need to keep the Mexicans out because they're racially inferior. No one is openly pushing amnesty as a vital first step toward the nullification of the U.S. Constitution.

Perhaps chief among the many problems with these sorts of accusations is that they help no one, advance nothing. Only those already convinced cheer the unsubstantiated charges of villainy. Indeed, crying racism to delegitimize an opponent's legitimate arguments is typically a left-wing tactic, and conservatives do not color themselves with glory by mimicking it.

So can we please calm down and discuss this more rationally, and without the name-calling?

Now this is interesting. It's supposedly a press release from the Jews living in Iran in support of their government (hat tip Michael Rubin in The Corner):

The Association of Iranian Jews…renewed its commitment in a message issued on the threshold of the Jewish religious festival of the Passover, which starts Monday night.

"In obedience to the instructions of Jesus, in the new Iranian year, which has been declared year of national unity and Islamic solidarity, Iranian Jews voice their readiness to defend all national interests of Iranians and to observe the guidelines set by Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei) for the sake of strengthening national unity and solidarity in the fight against present-day pharaohs," the message said.

Notice the reference to Jesus. Now, I'm hardly an expert on Iranian Jews, but to quote Jesus not just approvingly, but as a source of authority who should be obeyed, does not represent orthodox Jewish beliefs. While there could very well be Christian Jews in Iran, I doubt they're in charge of the Association of Iranian Jews. So what can we make of this? Pure propaganda written by the Iranian government, whose knowledge of Judaism and Christianity is equally abysmal, or, as Michael Rubin suggests, are "Iranian Jews living in the Islamic Republic (there are still around 20,000) ... signaling that something is very wrong"? Either way, it fails to convincingly demonstrate the support of Iranian Jews for the revolutionary government.

In an article at National Review, Thomas Sowell explains why price controls are a bad thing:

Prices force you to limit your claims on what other people have produced to the value of what you have produced for other people. Prices force you to limit how much of product A you buy because you need to keep some money to buy product B.

While prices convey these limitations, they do not cause them. No economy — capitalist, socialist, feudal or whatever — can keep consuming more than it produces. Producing more of product A means using up resources needed to produce product B.

Simple and obvious as all this may seem, politicians blithely ignore it when they promise to make the prices of housing or health care or other things “reasonable” or “affordable.”

Nothing is easier for any government than to impose price controls. Governments have been doing that for thousands of years. What governments cannot control are the underlying realities expressed through prices.

What does the history of thousands of years of price controls tell us?

The first thing undermined or destroyed is self-rationing. When you pay the full price of going to a doctor, you go there when you have a broken leg but not when you have the sniffles or a minor skin rash. When the government makes health care “affordable,” you go there for sniffles and a minor skin rash.

The underlying reality has not changed, however. The doctor’s time is still limited, and the time that you take up with your sniffles or skin rash is time that somebody else with a broken leg — or perhaps cancer — has to wait to get an appointment.

Government-run health-care systems in countries around the world have longer waits — sometimes months — to get medical attention. In other words, the rationing goes on, but more haphazardly, because prices do not force people to ration themselves according to the seriousness of their problem.

This often comes up in the area of pharmaceuticals. It is expensive to produce drugs. On average, it costs $800 million to produce a new drug, according to Sowell's article. Canada has price controls on drugs. It still costs the pharamaceutical company $800 million to produce the drug, but now it can only charge $10 per bottle, meaning that a lifetime supply for people who have the condition the drug treats runs around $1000. If only 50,000 people have the condition, that's a mere $50 million, well short of the cost to produce the drug. The only way the pharmaceutical company can make money is to sell its product to a country which doesn't have price controls for a much higher amount, say $800 a bottle. And thus, US residents pay a lot more than Canadian residents. What would happen if the US paid the same price, either by buying the drugs through Canada, or by instituting price controls here? Well, then, either Canada's drug prices would go up, or the company would go out of business, and the drug would no longer be available. Certainly, no other company would have the incentive to produce the next wonder drug which cures a disease which only a small percentage of the population suffers from.

The only way to lower prices and to keep producing the wonder drugs is to lower the cost of creating them, and that means taking an entirely different approach. Tort reform--limiting the amount lawsuits could take from drug companies which make good faith mistakes--would go a long way, as a lot of the production cost goes to paying the price when something inevitably goes wrong with another drug. Reducing FDA regulation would do the same. This approach carries its own risk, of course. But everything involves tradeoffs.

This one's been floating around the blogosphere. In an article on Clarence Thomas, Jan Greenburg argues that all the stereotypes of him being Scalia's lackey are wildly off target:

From the beginning, Justice Thomas was an independent voice. His brutal confirmation hearings only enforced his autonomy, making him impervious to criticism from the media and liberal law professors. He'd told his story, and no one listened. From then on, he did not care what they said about him.

Clarence Thomas, for example, is the only justice who rarely asks questions at oral arguments. One reason is that he thinks his colleagues talk too much from the bench, and he prefers to let the lawyers explain their case with fewer interruptions. But his silence is sometimes interpreted as a lack of interest, and friends have begged him to ask a few questions to dispel those suggestions. He refuses to do it. "They have no credibility," he says of critics. "I am free to live up to my oath."

But the forcefulness and clarity of Justice Thomas's views, coupled with wrongheaded depictions of him doing Justice Scalia's bidding, created an internal dynamic that caused the court to make an unexpected turn in his first year. Justice O'Connor -- who sought ideological balance -- moved to the left. With the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the court now is poised to finally fulfill the hopes of the conservative movement. As George W. Bush told his legal advisers early in his presidency, he wanted justices in "the mold of Thomas and Scalia." Interestingly, on President Bush's marquee, Justice Thomas got top billing.

It's an interesting article, and I look forward to seeing where the court goes next.

With all the talk about the surge in Iraq, you may be wondering how I'm feeling. I've always been cautiously optimistic about Iraq, since the very first stages of the war. Even when things seemed to be going very well right afterwards, and after the first couple of elections, my optimism was still cautious. And when thigns were going bad and violence was surging, I was still optimistic, if more subdued. You have to look at the long-term trends rather than get bogged down in the day-to-day events. It's difficult to make sense of the day-to-day events, with the media calling Iraq a failure no matter what happens, and the military putting its own spin on things.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people are wondering why Bush is only doing this now, after the midterm elections, when he should have done it a long time ago. And frankly, I think it's because Bush's attitude is close to mine. Through 2005, things seemed to be going pretty well in Iraq. Granted, there was still violence, but Iraq had its own government, and it looked like soon the Iraqis would be able to take charge. Things only turned nasty in 2006, and while Bush may have wanted to try a different approach, Rumsfeld and the generals on the ground didn't. Bush had put his trust in these folks, and they had been pretty successful so far, and they were there and knew the situation better than anyone, so I can understand his reluctance to get rid of them. An uptick in violence for a few months did not make Iraq a catastrophe any more than the previous upticks had. Only when the long-term trends made it clear that Rumseld's and the generals' methods weren't working, and they showed no sign of being willing to change them, did he make the decision to replace them with people who would get the job done. Unfortunately, midterm elections probably had a role in this, and for numerous reasons, Bush didn't want to be seen as changing tactics right before the election. For one, it would have been seen as a political ploy rather than a serious bid to change the course of events in Iraq. And maybe he did fear it would cost Republicans some votes, although everyone else was arguing the opposite. I still don't know whether it's such a bad thing that the Republicans lost big. I think that, to some degree, having an opposition government has made Bush freer. He doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected, and now he doesn't have to worry about keeping his party in power by not doing anything to offend the "moderates" whose votes they depended on. Granted, the Democrats will try to stop this, but they're pretty limited in what they can do. It's one thing to call for troops to return, but they lack the Constitutional authority to actually force that to happen, and not too many will be willing to actually stop funding the war. It's one thing to oppose sending troops, another thing entirely to abandon those now there.

Anyway, that's the political side. Do I think we should be doing this? Ever since we caught Saddam, I've believed we were doing the right thing in Iraq. Before the war started, I wasn't so sure, as I was always a bit iffy on the whole WMD issue. But once Saddam was caught and we'd completed our initial mission, the question was do we just leave and let a society rent apart by a tyrannical dictator further destroy itself, or do we stay and try to help them create a new society. We had what we wanted, and what we had to gain by staying was very idealistic: a civil society in the Middle East that would hopefully be a model for others. That's all. For all the talk of blood for oil, I don't see it. We decided to stay, and it was the right thing to do. A very hard thing, true, but the right thing. And if we're going to do it, we need to do it right, and that means winning. I don't think our former strategy could accomplish that, but I think this one might. It's not guaranteed, but let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic.

This is an interesting argument, and one that strikes me as containing some truth. From Jonah Goldberg, at the Corner:

Did feminism undermine socialism? I'm just thinking out loud, but think about it. When women weren't part of the workforce in large numbers, the idea of organizing society and politics around our jobs was enormously popular. Syndicalism, socialism, trade unionism, corporatism, Veblenism, Swopism, big chunks of social democracy, etc etc, were premised in large parts on the idea that your job was your identity. "Workers of the world unite" and all that jazz. When women who didn't work for a wage claimed that they were citizens — or fully entitled to citizenship — it undermined the view that You Are Your Job. And as women entered the workforce, the willingness of men to identify themselves solely by their work tended to erode. Perhaps sexism drove men to say that they were more than their job if a woman could do their job just as well (or well enough).

There's more, but as Jonah himself notes, you have to be careful. While the old-style "Workers of the world unite!" socialism may have died, the new style nanny-state socialism is clearly alive and well. I think his analysis misses a big point, though, which is that women are less willing than men to be defined by their jobs. While a man can derive much of his identity from work, women tend not to, which means that they are less sympathetic to that old-style socialism. Thus, when the unionization efforts had to recruit women, they needed to take a different tact, which ultimately played a part in changing the tone of the labor movement.

There were other issues as well, although most of the ones I'm thinking of weren't real influences until the mid-20th century, which was after old-style socialism's heyday.

Well, all the hawks on Iraq are feeling mighty depressed this week. The Democrats won Congress, and in response, Bush fired Rumsfeld, and seems to be replacing him, and much of the rest of his inner circule, with a bunch of realpolitik, deal-making-with-Middle-Eastern-despots Bush 41 guys. And now the Democrats are planning to vote for withdrawal the moment they're sworn in. Mark Steyn's particularly pessimistic, saying that the American Moment is over, and we'll soon be joining Europe in the long slide into irrelevancy.

They may be right. Then again, they may not. One thing I've always admired about Bush is his ability to stick with his guns. The firing of Rumsfeld was far from his greatest moment (the day after the election, just a couple of weeks after saying Rumsfeld would stay), but the same crowd that's now condemning how it was done were calling from Rumsfeld's resignation just a week ago (before the election, not after). The bottom line, though, is that Rumsfeld had to go. Now, I liked Rumsfeld. However, he couldn't have survived this Congress, which is going to start the year looking for a head (Democrats have been promising impeachment hearings for years now), and Rumsfeld would have spent the next two years testifying before Congress. That is less important, though, than the fact that he wasn't getting the job done in Iraq. That may not be a fair criticism--it may be that, if given free reign, he could have done it. However, more than once he's stood in the way of getting things done in the manner the president wanted them done. He's been one of the most vociferous opponents of more troops, arguing most strongly for the need to let the Iraqis handle things, when at the end of the day, the Iraqis have proven themselves incapable of doing so. Now, ultimately, the Iraqis will have to take over, but for now the brunt of the work needs to be done by US forces, and the Iraqi forces will have to operate under US supervision, and Rumsfeld wasn't managing that. So I think there's good reason to believe that replacing Rumsfeld is a step in the right direction.

As for Congress forcing us to withdraw from Iraq--I don't think that's likely. The Democratic leadership is planning for the Senate to vote on a nonbinding resolution calling for withdrawal from Iraq in 2007. The last time this was brought up for a vote it was defeated overwhelmingly. But the mood of the electorate has changed, and the large number of Senators who follow the polls rather than their own consciences may be enough to turn the vote around, despite the exit polls saying that 70% of the voters were voting against corruption, not against the war. In the end, though, it's a nonbinding resolution, not a law, which means it's little more than a statement of opinion. And if it were a law, even if there are enough votes to pass it, there aren't enough votes to override a Presidential veto. Of more immediate concern is the House, which may cut funding for the war effort. That would be politically risky, though. Even if most people want us out of Iraq (which isn't proven), they don't want to cut off funding to our troops while they're still there.

So the bottom line is not what Congress wants, or what his advisors are saying, but rather what Bush wants. From everything I've seen, Bush still intends to win this war. Until that changes, I won't give up hope just yet.

Well, the Democrats have won both houses of Congress. I feel like I ought to say something, but I'm not sure what. Although I'm not a fan of the Democrats or their "plan" for the War in Iraq, there are a couple of positives. Others have mentioned these things as well, so I'll keep it brief:

1. The Republicans deserved to lose. It does not necessarily follow that the Democrats deserved to win, but Republicans had become too comfortably ensconced as the party in power, and they had forgotten the reforming ideals that put them in power in the first place.
2. The Democratic party has moved right. How far remains to be seen, but the Democratic candidates who won were definitely more conservative than the current party.
3. Now that the Democrats are in power, maybe they'll grow up. Seriously. Maybe it's a vain hope, and they'll be trying to impeach Bush by March, but they've spent the last four years opposing everything and embracing the leftmost, conspiracist fringes of the party. Now that they have actual responsibility, maybe they'll realize that our choices in this war aren't whether to fight it or not, but whether to win it or lose it.

Of course, it's at least equally likely that they'll do none of these things. That they'll spend their time holding hearing and repealing laws and challenging every decision Bush has made, ultimately stripping away all the commonsense decisions that have been made in this war along with those that reasonably can be opposed.

I'm hoping this time will be good for Republicans, that they'll get in touch with their roots. That in two years they'll return to power. However, that does not seem highly likely. Congress does not change over that often. It'll be at least a decade before another changeover. I just hope it's not another fifty years.

I find this sort of news encouraging (via Captain's Quarters):

For three years, the Bush administration has waged a campaign to choke off North Korea's access to the world's financial system, where U.S. officials say the nation launders money from criminal enterprises to fuel its trade in missile technology and its efforts to build a nuclear arsenal.

That effort has started to pay off.

U.S. pressure forced Macao this year to freeze North Korean assets in one of its banks, then foiled North Korea's panicky attempts to find friendly bankers in Vietnam, Mongolia, Singapore and Europe. And after North Korea's Oct. 9 nuclear test, China ordered some of its major banks to cease financial transactions with the country.

The cash crunch appears to have played a key role in North Korea's decision Tuesday to return to six-nation talks over its nuclear ambitions. North Korean officials said that as part of the talks, they wanted to raise the issue of lifting financial sanctions.

"They're not coming back because they want to give up nuclear weapons," said David L. Asher, the U.S. State Department's point man on North Korea until last year. "They are feeling the financial pressure and the cutoff from the international financial system, so they are trying to make nice."

The article goes on to explain that as long as Russia and China refuse to cooperate (more than they've done here), the effort will never be fully successful. Still, it's good to see that the US is involved in doing more than waving carrots in front of North Korea and hoping they'll cooperate. It's been obvious for years that North Korea's greatest weakness is it's economy--it has somehow managed to create one of the world's least successful command economies, for which there is no lack of competition. Its people are starving, it can't produce enough electricity to power even its capital city after dark, and its attempts at ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons have proven incompetent (thankfully). I'm beginning to think that the great fear, war on the Korean peninsula, is overrated, since if the rest of their society is anything to go by, their army is largely for show. But that shouldn't be necessary. If enough pressure is applied to their economy, North Korea will collapse, and it looks like the Bush administration is making every effort to do that behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, while China and Russia want to rein in North Korea, neither of them want it to collapse. First, because a collapsing North Korea will cause trouble on their borders, with a possible war, millions of refugees, and potentially nuclear weapons. Second, because a collapsed North Korea will look like a victory for the US, and greater esteem for the US is against their national interest. Third, because the ultimate fate of a collapsed North Korea is reunion with South Korea, which moves it outside of China's sphere of influence.

China sees itself as a burgeoning superpower, but it faces the difficulty that relatively few nations accept its leadership. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have strong economies, and benefit from a strong relation with the US. In fact, they depend on the US for protection, and therein lies our leverage with China. If North Korea does develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, then there's every reason to believe that we will arm our allies within range of those weapons. A nuclear armed South Korea and Japan are bad for China, a nuclear armed Taiwan is a nightmare. One thing China still dreams about is reuniting the tiny island with the mainland, by conquest if necessary, and nuclear weapons take conquest off the table. That is why they're applying as much pressure as they can to North Korea, trying to get it to back off its nuclear weapons development without breaking the country.

Remember to vote today. And if you want to annoy the media, vote Republican. I know I will.

Well, I spent some time the other day trying to figure out where I need to go to vote next Tuesday. While I was at it, I took a look at the election ballot. Ugh. I know I live in a Blue state, but is it too much to ask for the GOP, or well, somebody, to run a challenger to my Democratic Congressman? I wonder if I can write in a candidate. Maybe myself. For those Democrats not running unopposed, they have to beat the Green candidate. Overall, there are very few Republicans on the ballot, only one of which, Sandi Martinez, the candidate for State Senate, whom I know enough about to feel like she's a good candidate.

Well, at least I'll get the pleasure of voting against Ted Kennedy. That alone makes it worth going to the polls. There's also a non-binding question on the ballot on whether the elected State Senator should pressure the President to withdraw from Iraq. I'm not sure how much pressure a representative to the state legislature can apply, so it's mostly for show, but I hope it's soundly defeated anyway. Not likely, I know, but at least I'll vote against it.

And yet another State Supreme Court tells another State Legislature to rewrite the laws to allow gay marriage. I'm still waiting for the day when the Legislature impeaches the Court for overstepping their constitutional authority, but it doesn't look like that will happen.

North Korea detonating nukes, Iran trying to get them, terrorists looking for a chance to use them against us. Some people think that it's not a case of if, but when, an American city will be struck by a nuclear weapon. Most people don't worry about it, though. I wonder why.

I know why I'm not overly worried, as I explained in this post on asteroid strikes, but not everyone shares my faith. Is everyone just so confident in God (whatever version they believe in), or are we overly complacent?

This article by Jonah Goldberg seems depressingly correct:

The West is surely indebted to Protestantism. But the idea that liberal secularism was born from it steals a few bases. Protestantism lent itself to being a state religion even more than Catholicism did. And while Christianity has long recognized the distinction between secular and religious authority, the reality is that secularism rests on a foundation of blood, not theology. The Reformation inaugurated an era of relentless religious wars. French Catholics slaughtered Protestant French Huguenots. Calvinists and Lutherans beat the stuffing out of each other. The bloodshed continued until, as British historian Herbert Butterfield put it, religious tolerance became “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer.” Secular tolerance, in other words, defined the terms of cease-fire.

Now, obviously, as a Protestant evangelical Christian, I think the Reformation was a good thing. While the Pope made a good argument about the need for Classical thought in Christianity in his much maligned speech (and while sympathetic, I'm not completely convinced by that argument), I think the Church in Luther's time had strayed far from the right path and needed correction. After all, I believe that Christianity is at its core a true religion, and thus anything that makes its doctrine and practice more pure makes it more true. That said, purity is not something to be sought at any cost. While a worthwhile goal, it needs to be sought in humility, acknowledging that there is much that I do not know, and even when I know for a certainty, I should be teaching the truth in love. My goal is not to force anyone to believe anything, but to convince them, and to be willing to learn where I am mistaken.

As Jonah's Jewish, I don't expect him to agree that Christianity needs to be pure, so it's understandable that he's more interested in the practical results of the Reformation. Likewise, I'm less concerned with Islam's purity than the practical effects of what Muslim believes. So is it hypocritical for me to believe that Christianity should be more pure, while I'm all for Islam being less pure? Well, from my perspective, it makes perfect sense, as simply put, I believe Christianity is true and Islam is false.

Here the Pope and I agree, as is clear in this column by Michael Ledeen:

The combination of this crackpot toleration with a general contempt for religion made it difficult for us to comprehend the nature of the current war. Everyone from W. on down has been at great pains to assure us and themselves that we have no basic conflict with Islam, that our battle is with some lunatics who say falsely that they speak in the name of Islam. So we feel quite uncomfortable when the pope — quite deliberately — poses a question about Islam itself: Is it capable of responding to reason, or is it, as he put it, completely transcendent, beyond the reach of man, and hence unchallengeable by man under any circumstances?

It’s a big question, not easily reduced to newspeak like “did the pope anticipate the reaction?” Or “did the pope go too far?” That sort of banter is embarrassingly silly. Of course the pope anticipated the reaction, he’s one of the smartest and most learned men in the world, and he’s spent a lot of time studying Islam. He wanted to draw a line. He is not prepared to extend total, blind toleration to people who use violence in the name of faith, and he’s challenging the Muslims to answer the real questions. That quotation he chose — the one that asks, Is there anything positive that has emerged from the expansion of the domain of Islam? — wasn’t generated at random. He picked it quite wittingly. Of course he knows that, for several centuries, Islam conserved the wisdom of the West, the same “Greek” wisdom he invoked as the indispensable partner of Christian faith. He’s defying the Muslims to admit that, because he knows that the jihadis don’t want to hear about it, and that an open debate about it may undermine the sway of so many dogmatic mosques, schools, TV stations, and Internet sites.

Simply put, Christians are called to Evangelize. If I believe that Islam is wrong, then it is my duty to convince Muslims of this. As a Christian, I am not just opposed to radical Islam or fundamentalist Islam or Islamic fascism. I am opposed to Islam itself. Most Christians would just as soon shirk this responsibility. Calling on people to repent and convert doesn't come easily. It's never easy to evangelize, and even moreso with people who respond violently when you do so. That doesn't make it any less a Christian responsibility.

Having said that, here's what I don't believe it is my, or anyone else's responsibility, to do. I should not be trying to outlaw Islam, or to force people to convert, or ridiculing Muslims. I believe it's possible to respect Muslims, and even their beliefs, while opposing those beliefs. I'm not trying to force them to change their beliefs, but to convince them through reasoned arguments.

And this is not America's responsibility. It's not something our government or our military should be trying to do. They need to, and do, oppose the radical, violent ideology of Islamic fascism, trying to encourage more moderate versions of Islam. That is indeed what they should be doing. It is not up to them, but up to us, the Christian community, to oppose Islam itself, to say that it is false and force it to defend itself. I think it is highly unlikely that Islam will be destroyed in this confrontation, but there are several possible beneficial results:

1. It will win Muslim believers to Christianity. This is a real, and in a spiritual sense, the most important benefit.


2. It will force Muslim scholars to defend their faith, and encourage in them a more reasoned, and hopefully more moderate faith.


3. When forced to acknowledge other beliefs within their society, it will hopefully require Muslim countries to adopt a more tolerant attitude towards other religions, and finally acknowledge the freedom to conversion.

Are these benefits likely to happen? In the short term, no. If the reaction to the Pope's speech is any indicator, the immediate response will be close-mindedness and violence. That does not make it any less worthwhile. While most Muslim leaders probably don't agree, I believe that Islam has to move past this. If it doesn't, it will implode. If belief needs to be enforced by the sword, it will collapse the same way Communism did the moment the sword-arm shows any weakness. Applying pressure only accelerates this.

John Podhoretz thinks that Bush may be ready to use force against Iran:

George W. Bush just delivered what may be the most important speech of his presidency since he went before the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, and declared his intention to seek regime change in Iraq.

The time has come, the president all but said yesterday, to take the gloves off with Iran.

"The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," he said flatly. He prefaced those words by saying that efforts were being made to find a diplomatic solution to the problem. Nonetheless, Bush has now said in the strongest sentence he has yet spoken on the matter that Iran will not go nuclear. He is unconditional about it.

Captain Ed takes a different view of the whole situation:

The White House and senior Republican leadership in Congress have little enthusiasm for a war resolution at this time targeting Iran, the New York Sun reports this morning. After a suggestion by William Kristol that such a piece of legislation would put more pressure on Teheran to comply with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the Bush administration and Congress distanced themselves from any such talk...

At best, such a resolution would be a big bluff, providing authority for little more than air strikes that might damage Iran's nuclear program but would also likely turn their population against us. And the last thing we need in that region is to issue more empty threats.

The political situation in Iran is far different than it was in Iraq, and there is much greater hope that an internal movement could collapse the mullahcracy. Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council do not exercise the same kind of oppression that Saddam Hussein did on Iraqis. The Iranians would not stand for it, and the mullahs have to tread carefully to maintain their power, which is why they stage elections for the Assembly and the presidency, even though they retain veto power over all that either do. (They may have forgotten this, as my post below notes.)

If the US could help Iranian democracy activists gain momentum, especially starting with the trade unions and university professors, the Iranians themselves could overthrow the mullahcracy and replace it with a much more rational government. Iran's history is not one of radicalism, with the exception of the last thirty years, but of educated, Western-looking sophisticates. They may not replace the mullahs with a carbon-copy Western democracy, but any rational form of representative government will make a huge difference.

How do I feel about this? While, like Captain Ed, I long for an internal revolution that overthrows the mullahs, I just don't know whether that will happen quickly enough. I'm worried that a nuclear weapon will be in Hezbollah's or Hamas's or even al Qaeda's hands before that can happen, and airstrikes to set back Iran's nuclear program by a couple of years is starting to sound like a good idea. If Iran's population is truly looking for a liberal democracy, they won't change their minds because we knock out such a dire threat.

Mario Loyola makes the argument that Israel came out on top in the ceasefire with Hezbollah deal, even if mostly by accident. The general consensus of everyone except Olmert (the Israeli Prime Minister) is that Israel messed up the war, losing out on a golden opportunity to cripple Hezbollah by lashing out blindly. I guess I have to give more credit to all the complaints about Israel's "disproportionate response" than I did before, although it was less "disproportionate" than "poorly aimed." Of course, even a poorly aimed response can have some benefits, as Loyola notes:

Despite appearances, things are shaping up in some ways quite favorably for Israel — insofar as this is possible. Israel may not have much ground truth to show for its military efforts in south Lebanon, but it did make a very important point, or rather two: Namely, that it will destroy half of Lebanon in the blink of an eye before it will permit Lebanon to be used as a missile platform to terrorize Israelis, and that it will blow right through anybody that Hezbollah tries to use as a human shield.

In effect, Israel has transcended its image problem. Agree with Israel or disagree with it, everybody now knows that if Hezbollah uses you as a human shield, you are dead. This creates a huge disincentive to being used as human shields—at least for Europeans, who are generally happy with the abundant supply of virgins (etc.) right here on planet Earth and feel no need to go seeking them anyplace else.

A rather cold analysis, but a useful one. Our enemies' tactics are based on their high estimation of our humane behavior. They may accuse us of murdering women and children, but if they really believed that, they wouldn't be hiding behind them. Israel has made it clear that there is a limit to how far that strategy can take you. They know that they will be accused of killing innocents no matter how careful they are, so they are free to pursue their military objectives without regard for how it plays on TV. Although I don't commend that attitude (you don't avoid killing civilians just to avoid the press's condemnation), it is nevertheless satisfying to see Hezbollah's own strategy working against them. The modern West's paranoia of civilian casualties is often unhealthy anyway, making it impossible to wage war to the full extent and thus dragging out the fighting, and ultimately resulting in greater civilian casualties.

Mario has a bit more to say about how the new UN force is larger and more effective than the previous one, and he concludes with

The most immediate effect of a robust European-led presence may indeed be to chill Hezbollah activity in south Lebanon. The current ceasefire could turn out to be a lasting interregnum. But with our without the fighting, one thing is increasingly clear. In seeking deviously to outsmart the Israelis and the Americans, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan may have outsmarted themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Ann's article on the wiretapping decision is very good:

[T]he president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.
...
If the words of the written opinion reveal that the judge did not follow the discipline of the judicial process, what sense does it make to take the judge’s word about what the law means over the word of the president? If the judge’s own writing does not support a belief that the rule of law has substance and depth, that law is something apart from political will, the significance of saying the president has gone beyond the limits of the law evaporates.

I am not worried about presidential abuse of power. No matter how bad he gets, the President faces re-election every four years, cannot hold office more than two terms, does not have the power to make laws, and can be overruled by Congress and the courts. It's the courts I'm worried about. Who elects them? When do they leave office? Who overrules them? In theory, Congress can write new laws, but the courts seem to believe they have the power to overrule anything less than a Constitutional amendment. Our system of government, which is supposed to be by the people and for the people, is everyday slipping more into government by the lawyers and for the lawyers.

Well, if you haven't heard, Mel Gibson was arrested last week for drunk driving. When he was arrested, he said some nasty things about Jews. I'm disappointed in him, certainly. I'm wary about making too much of it, though. It is well known that his father is anti-Semitic, and it may well have shaped his thinking growing up. However, I don't believe that drink is the fount of truth either, so while his drunken raving certainly indicates anti-Semitic influences in his thoughts, I'm not qualified to say what's in his, or anyone else's, heart. I think Doc Rampage has a pretty good take on this.

Cynthia Lo talks a bit about the issue of proportionality in war, specifically as applied to the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict, over at Iron Chef. She quotes a lot of people without really giving her own opinion, but I think I'll go ahead and give my opinion on the matter.

The idea of proportionality has been misrepresented a lot recently. In just war, proportionality is not about doing no more damage to your enemy than they do to you. That is not a reasonable way to conduct war, as by its very nature it precludes victory. No, proportionality is about doing no more damage than necessary in order to achieve your objectives. The question, then, is whether the objective of the Israeli military is just, and whether the damage they've done is proportional to their objective. Proportionality in this sense is very technology dependent. In World War 2, you basically had to destroy a city if you wanted to take out a military factory. Precision bombing is a vast improvement over that.

So, we're faced with three questions: What is the Israeli military's objective? Is it just? And is the damage they are doing proportionate to their objective? The objective is, and I think most people are agreed on this, to cripple Hezbollah's capability to wage war against them, even destroying the organization if possible. Is this a just objective? Well, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It is not possible for Israel and Hezbollah to coexist, because Hezbollah's entire reason for being is to eliminate Israel. Some folks say that Hezbollah is now a legitimate political party, which provides social services and builds schools and hospitals. This is true only in the sense that Hezbollah is a political party dedicated to the destruction of Israel. I can't speak for the hospitals, but the schools are propaganda mills teaching a new generation of martyrs to hate Jews. And political parties, as a rule, are not also armed militias which control some territory so thoroughly that the legitimate elected government doesn't dare send police or troops there. So I think that there is a strong argument that the destruction, or at least disarmament (as called for in Security Council Resolution 1559), of Hezbollah is a just cause. Ideally, the Lebanese army would do it. It's their country, and Hezbollah is a threat to their authority as much as Israel's existence, but Lebanon is either unable or unwilling to do it. The leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, claims that he controls Lebanon's government, and some of what they're saying seems to conform with that.

So the final question is whether Israel's use of force is proportionate with their objective. I believe it is, but that is an argument that has to be decided by people who better understand the military situation. As I understand it, Israel has taken action to cut off Hezbollah from Syria and Iran, and then has bombed the location of known Hezbollah hideouts. They've tried to clear the civilian population away from the area, which is probably a mistake. First, it warns Hezbollah so it can leave the area. Second, the civilians are unable to leave since Hezbollah is keeping them in place by force. Civilian casualties on either side works to Hezbollah's benefit, and they will attempt to maximize them and inflate the numbers. There have been reports of firefights between civilians attempting to leave the area and Hezbollah fighters.

Ideally, Israel would so weaken Hezbollah that the Lebanese government could send its troops in and sweep away the remnants. It would be difficult for Lebanon to publicly cooperate with Israel, though, which is why I'm hoping that there is more going on behind the scenes than there appears to be.

Many conservatives are chomping at the bit, feeling that Bush has been too soft when he should have been more aggressive in going after North Korea and Iran. Captain Ed disagrees:

Most of this comes from a short attention span. This effort will take decades, not months, and Bush knows it. One cannot hope to transform all tyrannies into democracies overnight. It takes time to build up the momentum, and it will ebb and flow as world events unfold. The crisis in North Korea has been years in coming, and Bush started off with a lousy hand, as the Jimmy Carter-imposed Agreed Framework allowed Pyongyang to do as it pleased for eight years. Unless we want to start another ground war in Asia, we cannot simply bomb the Kim regime into non-existence. The Kim regime is committing slow suicide as it is, and the Bush policy of multilateral engagement is the correct one to contain Kim and to contain the damage from the ultimate collapse that will inevitably come.

On Iran, Bush allowed the Europeans to take the lead for a number of good reasons. Primarily, the White House wanted to focus on consolidating the Iraqi victory, and the mere presence of Americans on Iraq's Western border made it clear that we had a big stake in the outcome. It also made sense to have the EU-3 handle the negotiations, since neither Iran or the US wanted diplomatic relations with each other. Europe, which had convinced itself of the folly of American unilateralism, wanted the chance to strike a deal with Iran, and since they had more at risk with a nuclear Teheran, it made sense to allow them to do so. After all, we do not run the world.

Now we know that the EU failed, and the EU knows that it failed. We still have the big military in place in the region, and the Iranians know that we will not stand idly by while Iran threatens our position. If they had not realized it by now, they certainly understand it in our refusal to rein in Israel in Lebanon. We cannot simply start attacking Iran simply because their leader makes nutty statements about the Holocaust and has abrogated a treaty on non-proliferation. We need to build up as much of a consensus as possible to take action -- just as we did with Iraq -- and then strike if necessary.

I believe in a strong defense and pre-emption when necessary. I don't see the necessity at the moment, and in fact I see Israel's action as putting off that day for a while longer. If Israel crushes Iran's proxy and chases the Islamists out of Lebanon, Iran will find itself isolated even further -- and then they will want to cut a deal that makes sense.

Captain Ed makes some good points, but I really do not know whether he is right or not. There is too much I don't know about Iran and North Korea, and unfortunately, I'm not sure anyone knows. I hope we're taking the right approach, but I don't feel qualified to judge.

Mark Steyn has a book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. The book's premise is that anthropologists have whitewashed the violence in primitive societies, allowing the myth of civilization's evils and the primitive man as peaceful and in tune with nature to thrive in the popular mind, despite it's lack of a factual basis:

But the passage that really stopped me short was this:

"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."

That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction."

Anyone who's studied ancient history should have little trouble seeing the lie. War, slavery, and oppression are not inventions of Western culture. They've been practiced by just about every culture man has come up with.

Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."

Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? ... We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.

Genocide was considered the normal way of war in the ancient world. The rightness or wrongness of war was not considered, only whether you were strong enough to take what you want from the neighboring village, city, or nation. Aside from the high points of a few ancient civilizations (the Greeks, for example, often practiced limited warfare between professional armies for limited gain--and ultimately lost to the Romans, who did not practice limited war), it is only recently, in the last few hundred years, that we've come to believe wiping out the opposing nation is wrong, to believe that civilians are not legitimate targets in war, that it is not permitted to start a war simply to conquer another nation. Is it any wonder that large numbers of people have not been convinced yet? They'll take advantage of our distinction between combatant and civilain, but they won't follow it.

Mankind is fallen, given to sin and violence. Peace is the aberration, not war. It won't survive on its own.

By now, you've heard the news of the death of a 38-year-old woman due to a falling slab of concrete in one of the tunnels of Boston's Big Dig. I've driven in this tunnel quite a few times in the last couple of months. There but for the grace of God go I.

The Big Dig has been a boondoggle since before I moved to Boston a decade ago. The cost overruns, the leaking tunnels, the substandard concrete, the gigantic icicles forming on the bridge and crashing down on motorists--it's hard to believe you can get this level of incompetence without trying. This is the epitomy of a federal project gone mad (the Big Dig cost $14.6 billion, when it was supposed to cost $2.5 billion, much of it federal money). And yet we think a federal project in New Orleans, an area known for its political corruption, will fix its problems.

I think huge projects have a tendency to run away like this. That's why I'm cautious about proposing such things.

From Jonah Goldberg:

It seems an obvious point to me that flying space Marines would be a valuable contribution to the arsenal of democracy.

There's simply no way I can follow that.

It's an act of provocation any way you look at it. North Korea launched seven missiles yesterday:

All of the seven missiles fired by North Korea early Wednesday local time — six short-range variants of the Soviet-era Scud and one long-range rocket — fell into the Sea of Japan.

The long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, failed about 40 seconds after it was fired, U.S. officials said. Some analysts believe the Taepodong-2 is capable of hitting the western United States.

As might be expected, diplomats are talking about imposing sanctions, which of course are opposed by China and Russia, who may have contributed to North Korea's missile capablities in the first place. If that is the case, I vote for sanctions against China and Russia and permanent removal from the security council (and can we get rid of France as well?), but there's no mechanism to do that.

The question on everyone's mind is why the Taepodong-2 crashed into the sea. Was it defective? That would be good news, but not that good. Did the US shoot it down? That would be better, but it's unlikely. Was it only supposed to go a short way? That's not good.

Despite all this bluster, North Korea is desperate. Its economy is falling apart, its people are starving, its infrastructure is non-existent. It is reduced to stealing trains to keep its railroads running. At heart, North Korea is a thug which has nothing but the threat of violence to get what it wants. The smart thing to do would be to stop giving it what it wants. It couldn't survive long without international support, but the fear is that it will lash out in its death throes and kill millions, either with nuclear weapons (which it may or may not have) or with a massive ground assault on South Korea. It's doubtful it could win--it doesn't have the infrastructure to support a prolonged war. Even the Western will isn't so weak that it couldn't outlast them. However, even in losing, North Korea could kill thousands, perhaps even millions. The Western nations would rather just appease it until it collapses, while Russia and China see it as a useful tool against the US. But my guess is that propping up a dying regime is only delaying the inevitable, and meanwhile millions of North Koreans are suffering and, yes, dying, in Kim Jong Il's war on his own people. And every year Kim Jong Il extorts food and money from the West with his thuggery, more dictators are convinced they can do the same.

I certainly hope this is true:

Al Qaeda in Iraq has been virtually wiped out by the loss of an address book. The death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was not as important as the capture of his address book and other planning documents in the wake of the June 7th bombing. U.S. troops are trained to quickly search for names and addresses when they stage a raid, pass that data on to a special intelligence cell, which then quickly sorts out which of the addresses should be raided immediately, before the enemy there can be warned that their identity has been compromised. More information is obtained in those raids, and that generates more raids. So far, the June 7th strike has led to over 500 more raids. There have been so many raids, that there are not enough U.S. troops to handle it, and over 30 percent of the raids have been carried by Iraqi troops or police, with no U.S. involvement. Nearly a thousand terrorist suspects have been killed or captured. The amount of information captured has overwhelmed intelligence organizations in Iraq, and more translators and analysts are assisting, via satellite link, from the United States and other locations.
...
Zarqawi considered al Qaeda's situation in Iraq as "bleak." The most worrisome development was the growing number of trained Iraqi soldiers and police. These were able to easily spot the foreigners who made up so much of al Qaeda's strength. Moreover, more police and soldiers in an area meant some local civilians would feel safe enough to report al Qaeda activity. The result of all this is that there are far fewer foreign Arabs in Iraq fighting for al Qaeda. The terrorist organization has basically been taken over anti-government Sunni Arabs. That made the capture of Zarqawi even more valuable, as his address book contained a who's who of the anti-government Sunni Arab forces. This group has been hurt badly by last week's raids.

We won't really know how successful these raids have been for months, and we see whether we've really crippled their abilities to conduct attacks. Even so, it sounds like Zarqawi's death has proved to be more of a victory than I dared hope.

I've already covered this, but I received an e-mail today challenging me to explain why drugs were so expensive... I think. To be honest, I had trouble making sense of the e-mail, as there was something about it being Bush's fault and his company's insurance no longer covering the drugs his wife needs, amid the grammatical and stylistic errors. Maybe he was asking where he could get cheap drugs from Canada, which is at least different from the usual spam. Anyway, I wrote a long e-mail in response, and I thought it'd be worth sharing it here.

As he didn't say what post of mine he was referring to, I'm simply going to have to guess that it's this one. The matter of acquiring drugs from Canada is simple economics, and I thought I explained it clearly. I don't see why Bush has anything to do with it, as he can't change the laws of economics. But let me try explaining it again, this time with numbers.

Let's say that a company develops a new drug, called Curad. It costs $100 million to develop. These costs goes into years of research, failed drugs, testing, clinical trials, FDA bureaucracy, and lawsuits from the last drug they made, Curit, which nobody actually got sick off of, but some scientist somewhere said someone might, so the company had to pay $10 million dollars, of which everyone who ever used the drug, none of whom actually got sick from it, got $50, and the lawyers got $5 million. Anyway, Curad treats a disease called rad, which 100,000 people in the US have. In Canada, which has about a tenth of the US population, 10,000 people have it. In order to make back the money they spent, and have a slight profit, the company needs each person who needs the drug to spend $1,000 on it during the time for which the company has exclusive rights. The Canadian government, which controls the price of drugs for the country, refuses, and only lets them charge $100 per person. Not wanting to mess up their relationship with Canada, the company agrees. Overall, it makes $101 million. The 1% profit is immediately put into developing their next drug, Curall, which gives everyone eternal life.

Now imagine the Americans said, "Wait a minute! Why should the Canadians get their drugs for cheap? I'm going to buy my drugs from Canada." So now those 100,000 Americans are getting their drugs from Canada for $100, and the company only makes $11 million from sales. They lose $89 million, and they go out of business, so they never get a chance to develop Curall. Of course, the company can't allow that. If what they're sending to Canada is being sold back to America, they will either 1) Refuse to sell, or 2) Raise the prices for Canada, no matter what the government says. If it all evens out, everyone ends up paying $920. Of course, this is a slight boon to Americans, but a catastrophe to Canadians, so it's in their best interest not to sell to Americans, which is why there are rumblings from the Canadians about doing this already. Right now, sales to Americans through Canada is a tiny percentage, but if it becomes widespread Canadian prices become untenable.

Ultimately, the drug company's patent runs out (a patent has only a limited duration (17 years, I think), and I'm pretty sure it's usually a while from the time the patent is applied for and the drug is first marketeed), and it's available in generic brands for much less. In fact, generic brands are probably cheaper in the US than Canada.

Now, of course this is unfair if you need a drug and can't afford it. Insurance ameliorates this somewhat, but sometimes they don't cover the drug you need. On the other hand, the drug wouldn't even exist if the company didn't make the money it needs to invest in further drug development. Which is why my proposed solution is always to make the development of the drugs cheaper. Tort reform--limiting the legal risk in developing drugs--would help to reduce the cost of drugs overall. Streamlining the FDA approval process would also help. But if you try to put the pharmaceutical industry on a demand economy, the drugs we now can't afford wouldn't even exist. There's a reason that Canadians get their drugs from US companies.

Update: (6/15/2006) Corrected some math and grammatical errors.

I should also add that it's actually in the best interest of those Americans who cannot afford US prices that the practice not become widespread enough that the channel shuts down entirely. If whole states start buying drugs from Canada in bulk, or the practice becomes legalized and normalized, then no one will be able to get drugs at these prices. So if you need a drug that you can only afford through the Canadian market, it's in your best interest to do everything in your power to prevent others, especially those who can afford US prices, from doing the same.

Of course, you don't need me to tell you that. It's being played all over the Internet: Instapundit, The Corner, Dean Esmay, and Captain Ed are all over this. This is definitely good news for Iraq and the war on terror. Of course, some of al Qaeda considers it good news as well. Information about his location was leaked by his associates. Zarqawi was becoming a liability, instigating problems with Hezbollah and Iran (which is al Qaeda's main state supporter these days), and alienating Iraq's population with his killing of civilians and especially Shi'ites. It would have been better for al Qaeda if his death had looked like a suicide attack, but being killed by US forces is better than nothing. From our perspective, it would have been better to capture him, interrogate him, try him, and then execute him. Even so, killing him has a number of beneficial effects. It doesn't destroy, but it does harm the terrorist network in Iraq, doubly so as we got not just Zarqawi but a number of his top aides. It's also a psychological boost to both Iraq and the US, which has grown weary of this war with a steady (though small) stream of casualties and few clear victories. Zarqawi's death also provided a positive backdrop for the Iraqi Prime minister, al-Maliki, to announce the new appointments which complete his cabinet.

Not everyone is celebrating Zarqawi's death. Michael Berg, the father of beheaded civilian Nick Berg, is not happy at all:

I'm sorry when any human being dies...and I feel bad for that. His death will reignite yet another wave of revenge. It's an endless cycle as long as people use violence to fight violence...When Nick was killed I felt that I had nothing left to lose...I was not a risk-taking person, but I've done things that have endangered me. I have been shot at...Every time we kill an Iraqi...we are creating a large number of people who are going to want vengeance. When are we ever gonna learn that that doesn't work?

I can't say I agree with Michael Berg, as I believe Zarqawi's death does more to end the "cycle of violence" than his life, but his words got me thinking. As a Christian, I'm supposed to be praying for my enemies and blessing those who persecute me. Is it right for me to celebrate anyone's death, even someone as evil as Zarqawi? Much better for him, and for me, if he had come to repentance, to recognize the evil of his own deeds and reform. Consider Paul as an example of what a reformed sinner can accomplish. However, he was a murderer, daily assisting in the killing of men, women, and children, trying to incite a civil war which would have killed thousands, maybe millions, more. It is right and just that I celebrate that such evil has been stopped. That Zarqawi no longer has a chance to repent is a price lighter than the thousands of others whose chances he cut short.