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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (8842)	12/27/2001 10:26:53 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. -Elbert Hubbard, author, editor, printer (1856-1915) Something for all of us to keep in mind.

To: jttmab who wrote (8842)	12/27/2001 11:21:08 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 93284

Land mines! You've read what's been on my mind, part of the time that you were off line.

To: jttmab who wrote (8842)	12/27/2001 11:24:14 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

The Hidden Enemies The New York Times December 18, 2001 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF LI KHUJA, Afghanistan -- Abdul Taher is a slight 14-year-old farm boy facing a choice that would baffle any grown-up: Should he risk starvation or risk having his leg blown off by a land mine? His family lives in this village 30 miles north of Kabul, in an area that is heavily mined, so it would be crazy to walk through the family's farmland, even after such primitive Afghan-style mine-clearing methods as driving a flock of sheep through first. (This is a tough country for livestock as well as humans.) Yet the family has to eat, and the only way to get food is to work the land - even if every step is dangerous. This makes the problem of land mines central to any discussion of Afghanistan's future, for the mines are a critical impediment to the country's recovery. Long after Osama bin Laden is buried, after a new government is presiding over Afghanistan's reconstruction, land mines will continue to haunt this country. The Bush administration is now conducting an interagency review to determine its policy on land mines, and every signal is that it will pull back from President Bill Clinton's quasi-pledge to join the international ban on antipersonnel mines by 2006. Instead of belatedly joining the Ottawa Convention to ban mines, we seem determined to walk away from it. The outcome of the review on land mines will help determine how many children lose their legs and lives in the coming decades, how many countries find their economic recovery blocked by buried mines. This is an area where we have a strong national interest, as well as a humanitarian interest, in playing a leadership role to help evict land mines from the arsenal of wars, and yet Pentagon complacency and President Bush's allergy to treaties together make it very likely that we will be part of the problem rather than the solution. The laying of mines is the 21st- century equivalent of what the Romans did to Carthage: plow salt into the ground so that it could never again sustain a population. The number of mines in Afghanistan is usually wildly exaggerated, because estimates come from nongovernment organizations trying to raise money to clear them (figures of 10 million are sometimes thrown about, when a more careful extrapolation from areas that have been cleared suggests fewer than one million, perhaps only 300,000). But still, whatever the exaggerations, on average three Afghans a day are maimed or killed by mines. To clear a mine, a worker waves a metal detector over the grounduntil it buzzes, then uses a metal rod to probe - gently - from the side, and then a trowel to uncover it. If it is a mine, he uses a charge to blow it up. The job, which pays $105 a month, requires intense concentration. The Afghan who showed me how to clear mines recalled a colleague who had had a bitter argument with his wife one night and was still upset as he showed up for work the next morning. Distracted, he probed too aggressively - and blew himself up. Along roads and footpaths of Afghanistan, painted stones mark the safe zones - white on the inner, cleared side, and red on the outer, dangerous side. And yet one constantly sees Afghans walking into the minefields to gather fuel or till their fields. It is not that they are stupid or oblivious; it is that they feel they have no choice. New technologies and new kinds of wars have eclipsed the usefulness to us of land mines. They protect soldiers stationed for long periods in enemy territory, as Americans were in Vietnam and Korea, or as Russians were in Afghanistan, but they endanger our troops in modern wars like our deployments in Afghanistan or Somalia. Eight retired generals have written to President Bush saying that mines are not critical to our operations in Korea or elsewhere, and would slow a counter-invasion of North Korea in any war. The nub of the problem is that it will be impossible to restrain irresponsible users of land mines unless the entire international community, including the United States, is four- square against them. The mines in this village, for example, were mostly laid by the Northern Alliance, our new ally. If its leaders feel threatened, their impulse will be to lay new mines - and how can we tell them not to when we reserve the right to lay mines ourselves? This is an issue where the United States could and should get out front and lead the world, thus saving future generations of kids from the excruciating choices faced by Abdul Taher. nytimes.com

To: jttmab who wrote (8842)	12/29/2001 8:25:05 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

United States the Scrooge of the Western world Friday, December 28, 2001 By PAUL KRUGMAN SYNDICATED COLUMNIST "Bah, humbug!" cried the U.S. treasury secretary. OK, Paul O'Neill didn't actually say "Bah." But last week he contemptuously dismissed proposals for increased aid to poor nations. And his justification -- that he "would like to see evidence of what works before making new commitments" -- was pure humbug. For the truth is that we already know what works. Nobody expects foreign aid to perform miracles, to turn Mozambique into Sweden overnight. But more modest goals, such as saving millions of people a year from such diseases as malaria and tuberculosis, are quite reachable, for quite modest sums of money. That is the message of a commission report just released by the World Health Organization, which calls on advanced countries to provide resources for a plan to "scale up the access of the world's poor to essential health services." The program would provide very basic items that many poor nations simply cannot afford: antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, insecticide-treated nets to control malaria, and so on. The price tag would be about 0.1 percent of advanced countries' income. The payoff would be at least 8 million lives each year. This is not starry-eyed idealism. The report quotes Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard professor who headed the commission: "I can be 'realistic' and 'cynical' with the best of them -- giving all the reasons why things are too hard to change." Sachs knows that it will be hard to persuade advanced countries to come up with the money -- and that the United States, in particular, is likely to be highly unreceptive. But this is one of those cases in which leadership could make a tremendous difference. Right now, the United States is the Scrooge of the Western world -- the least generous rich nation on the planet. One of the tables in that WHO report shows the share of gross national product given in foreign aid by advanced countries; the United States ranks dead last, well behind far poorer countries such as Portugal and Greece. The sums proposed by the WHO would double our foreign aid budget, not because those sums are large, but because we start from so low a base -- about a dime a day for each U.S. citizen. Still, doubling our foreign aid budget sounds like an impossible dream. But is it? We may be a Scrooge nation, but we are not a nation of Scrooges. Not only are Americans often generous as individuals, they are -- without knowing it -- apparently willing to give substantially more foreign aid than the nation actually does. When asked how much of the federal budget should be devoted to foreign aid, Americans typically come up with a number around 10 percent -- about 20 times what we currently spend. Voters are, however, misinformed: They think that the share of foreign aid in federal spending should be cut to 10 percent. And they wonder why foreigners don't show more gratitude for all the money we give them. Americans are, in other words, living in the past: The Marshall Plan ended more than 50 years ago, but they haven't noticed. The point is that we like to think of ourselves as generous. This suggests that a U.S. administration that really wanted to follow the WHO report's recommendations would not find it hard to build political support. All it would have to do is use the bully pulpit to inform the public of the difference between America's generous self-image and the less attractive reality. Why bother? You might say that the United States has a selfish interest in helping the world's poor. The Sachs commission argues that there would be large collateral benefits from improved health care in the world's poorest nations. Disease, it argues, is a major barrier to economic growth, and economic growth in developing countries would make the world as a whole a richer and safer place. You might also say that reducing the disconnect between America's words and its deeds would give us a better claim to the moral leadership we think we deserve. But the key argument here is surely a moral one. A sum of money that Americans would hardly notice, a dime a day for the average citizen, would quite literally save the lives of millions. Can we really say to ourselves that this gift is not worth giving? seattlepi.nwsource.com Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times. Copyright 2001 The New York Times. E-mail this story Send comments to newmedia@seattle-pi.com ©1999-2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer Terms of Service/Privacy Policy