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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (55605)	10/29/2002 11:39:08 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

>>I gather you think it's style not content for Pipes to, rather than debate his opponents, call them unAmerican, ask students to spy on their courses, and expose them to the crazies. To call that censorship is kind.<< We never wound this down. I just despaired of your moral integrity, so I walked away, keeping my own counsel. Unfortunately for FADG you were the most moral and vocal person on the left, and now that you have caved, there's no one left with any shred of integrity to advance the left position at all. Stephen Rogers comes to mind, but he seems to be long gone. I doubt that this thread can be saved, but hope triumphs over experience, so maybe so. As for you, with all due respect, you have no courage. Maybe you are too old for courage.

To: JohnM who wrote (55605)	10/30/2002 12:09:23 AM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 281500

Perhaps this has already been posted here and I just missed it (I like the civil rights litigation angle, there's an element of poetry there that approaches Shakespeare): John Leo The absent professors newsandopinion.com \| It's not news that college professors are lopsidedly drawn from the political left. But American Enterprise magazine offers some numbers on how heavy the tilt has become. In eight academic departments surveyed at Cornell University, 166 professors were registered in the Democratic Party or another party of the left, with just six registered with Republicans or another party of the right. Similar imbalance showed up in departments at the 19 other universities surveyed. At the University of Colorado-Boulder, the numbers were 116 to 5. It was 151-17 at Stanford, 54-3 at Brown, 99-6 at the University of California-San Diego, and 59-7 at Berkeley, the flagship of the University of California system. At Williams College, a poll turned up only four registered Republicans among the more than 200 professors on campus. Why are the numbers so skewed? Some professors say the imbalance is natural because progressives tend to gather in do-good professions while conservatives gravitate toward traditional careers in business and finance. Besides, they say, voting patterns of teachers are irrelevant if classes are taught fairly. There's some truth in both arguments, but neither can account for what is happening on campus now. In the 1950s and early 1960s, faculties generally had a broad diversity of worldviews and philosophies and plenty of open debate. Professors were routinely hired by department chairmen who opposed their principles-because the candidates were sound scholars and students needed divergent views. Now debate has virtually disappeared, and there isn't much diversity of opinion. Campuses have become "ideological monopolies," as American Enterprise says. Graduate students who want to become academics know they can't rise within the system unless they display liberal views. Professors know they are unlikely to get hired or promoted unless they embrace the expected package of campus isms-radical feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, identity politics, gender politics, and deconstruction. Remaining conservatives and moderates can survive if they keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Dissent from campus orthodoxy is risky. A single expressed doubt about affirmative action or a kind word about school vouchers may be enough to derail a career. Campus indoctrination. Upwardly mobile professors also must endorse levels of indoctrination and coercion that were unheard of two generations ago. Freshman orientation and freshman writing classes are often straightforward exercises in political conditioning. So are the sensitivity training sessions and mandatory "prejudice reduction workshops" that lay down the party line and set limits on dissent. On some campuses, professors are expected to sign "loyalty oaths" promising to promote multiculturalism in their courses, even in math and science. Huge bureaucracies have arisen around affirmative action and other campus causes, making reform seem impossible. As a result, the modern campus has come to look like an ideological system learning to reproduce itself. What can be done about our wayward campuses? More monitoring by outside groups would be a start. The model is FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which has been remarkably effective in rolling back constraints on free speech and other repressive measures on many campuses. We also need a broader effort from the organizations that evaluate and rank universities, including U.S.News & World Report. These organizations avert their gaze from the ideological storm. It's easy to see why-ranking colleges by course content, academic freedom, and diversity of faculty would be costly and controversial. But the current system seems badly outdated-like a plan to rank used cars without looking under the hood. Writing in American Enterprise, New York lawyer Kenneth Lee suggests civil rights litigation to open up college faculties. The suits would argue that universities violate equal opportunity laws by engaging in employment discrimination against Republicans and Christian conservative professors. Not a good idea. After arguing for years that colleges should not establish race and gender quotas, how can the right suddenly endorse court-imposed quotas for conservative academics? Besides, the goal is not a set number of teachers for each viewpoint but a genuinely open policy of hiring by talent, not ideology. Litigation is likely to play some role in reforming the campuses, particularly at state schools, where taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for ideological excesses. One suit successfully challenged the funding of leftist campus causes with fees collected from all students. But social pressure will be the main tool. Journalists should begin noticing the one-sided hiring policies on campus. And politicians, civic leaders, and alumni have to start browbeating universities into making faculties more open and diverse. This won't be easy or quick, but it has to be done. URL: jewishworldreview.com

To: JohnM who wrote (55605)	11/11/2002 8:27:21 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

THE WAY TO WIN IN IRAQ IS TO STAY OUT By Richard Reeves Syndicated Columnist Sat Nov 9, 10:03 PM ET WASHINGTON -- President Bush (news - web sites), it seems to me, is in a win-win-win situation right now. He won big in last Tuesday's congressional elections. He won big at the United Nations (news - web sites), getting a unanimous Security Council vote on disarming Iraq. And if the arms inspections do not work out, he has won the power to do what he obviously has wanted to do all along, which is to bomb the hell out of Iraq until Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s head is delivered to the White House in a pizza box. The Republicans' excellent adventure on Tuesday makes all things possible for the man who won the presidency two years ago with fewer votes than his opponent. But now that past is truly prologue. This was the real recount, and he won it. Here in the war capital, every hotel ballroom and think tank conference room is filled with learned men and women analyzing how and why the Republicans did so well that they might soon be rounding up Democrats and sending them to Guantanamo for questioning. The waffling incompetence of overall Democratic strategy and tactics is part of the answer. The other part, I'm afraid, was stated with a bit too much drama by a conservative columnist, Martin Gross in The Washington Times. Declaring that all other interpretations were wrong, he wrote what he called "the dirty little secret": "The American people, by and large, do not trust the Democrats with the security of the United States. In franker language, they do not believe the typical Democratic politician in Congress is patriotic enough to maintain the nation, its defenses and its international security." He's wrong about patriotism -- unless you believe my country right or wrong -- but he may be right on about what happened on Tuesday. The election, I think, was turned by the horror bombing in Bali three weeks ago, which tended to validate the Republican line that anti-Western terrorists are everywhere and we should do whatever it takes to squash them one by one. Events are in the saddle. Before Sept. 11 of last year, most Americans were willing to bite their tongues and support the fortunate Mr. Bush on the American principle that we have only one president, one commander in chief, at a time. Then he became the new Winston Churchill, going into Afghanistan (news - web sites) to chase very bad guys -- and turned left (geographically) and wanted to hit Iraq, too. "Regime change," he said, going too far too fast. Leaders and diplomats of other countries, the United Nations, the press and some politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, slowed him down, and he shifted to "disarming." The more restrained rhetoric disarmed many of his critics, even if they suspected the administration was not actually rethinking the matter at all. Administration warmongers still see Saddam-the-monster as an excuse to re-create the Middle East in a rose-colored, made-in-America image, with stable oil supplies for us and our friends and a secure Israel. Many people around here, now that the talk and voting are over, expect that we will attack Iraq early in the new year. I hope not. I hope the president is aware that he might be able to win this without firing a shot in Iraq. The problem is that a lot of people around the White House want to go blazing into harm's way, if for no other reason than to show they're not wimps ... like Democrats. Alas, being stronger does not mean we can conquer at will. All we can do is win and occupy -- and have our own West Bank. One hopes we have learned from these last weeks of debate about Iraq. All we have to do is pay attention to what is happening now in Afghanistan. Last Monday night, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, talked a little bit too much after a dinner at the Brookings Institution and said, essentially, that our military cannot get control in Afghanistan. "I think in a sense," he said, "we've lost a little momentum there, to be frank." In other words, Afghanistan is still Afghanistan, and we are not going to be able to change that. And we can conquer Iraq, but that may not be winning. When we go home, in five years or 50, it will still be Iraq and the people there will decide its future. ____________________________________________________ RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com. story.news.yahoo.com

To: JohnM who wrote (55605)	11/14/2002 3:57:29 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush's war drums pay off at polls By Robert Kuttner Columnist The Boston Globe 11/13/2002 GEORGE W. BUSH has just had the best week of his presidency. Not only did the Republicans take back the Senate and pick up seats in the House. As a statesman Bush wins in two seemingly incompatible ways: He gets credit both for being tough with Saddam Hussein and for working through the United Nations. Not bad. Political moderates in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East who agreed that Saddam is an outlaw but who pressed Bush to use multilateralism and UN inspections are now almost as cornered as the Iraqi dictator. It's heads I win, tails you lose. If by some miracle Saddam genuinely cooperates with the UN, Bush emerges both tough and statesmanlike. If Saddam refuses or is proven a liar, the world community, however uneasily, will be compelled to support Bush's war. It would be giving Bush too much credit to suggest that this was his plan all along. Two months ago Vice President Cheney was sneering at UN inspectors and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his ultrahawks at the Pentagon were declaring that the United States would go it alone. It's actually to the immense credit of Bush's critics at home and in Europe as well as Secretary of State Colin Powell that Bush was compelled to work through UN and to accept an inspection ultimatum instead of an early war. But that goes politically unnoticed. Even though the compromise resolution is a victory for the French and other nations who insisted that inspections be tried first, Bush, in drastically giving ground, looks strong rather than weak. In a stroke he is bringing to heel Saddam, the UN, and the very critics who forced him to moderate his policy. Iraq, of course, has been a menace as a source of weapons of mass destruction from the day Bush took office. And Iraq has been in precisely the same ''material breach'' of the inspection deal that ended the Gulf War that has obtained since 1998 when the inspectors left, saying they had been prevented from doing their jobs. Bush discovered Iraq only when it was politically convenient. And even with UN blessing, an Iraq war could prove profoundly destabilizing in the Middle East. The abrupt, trumped-up Iraq crisis, however, cynically and brilliantly served three political purposes, two domestic and one international: First, it carried out a wag-the-dog strategy. Going into a close election, the Iraq crisis split Democrats, took the spotlight off other issues, and rallied voters to support their commander in chief. Second, the sudden emergence of the Iraq threat served to divert attention from Bush's less than stellar leadership on the more serious challenges of terrorist attack and civil defense (the press should stop using the Orwellian phrase ''homeland security,'' which sounds more like Goebbels than Jefferson). Third, the Iraq caper carries out the global policy of Bush's most right-wing advisers, such as Pentagon aides Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who hold that the United States should not just be a global leader but entirely in charge of remaking the world. Given all of this, what is the opposition to do? For starters, give Bush credit for recognizing that people like leadership. Bush received half a million fewer votes than Al Gore, but he acted as if he had a mandate. Rather than repair to the cautious center, Clinton-style, in the hope of ingratiating himself with Democrats, Bush played hardball from day one. Second, Bush is crystal clear about his goals, domestically and globally. When his views are not popular - privatize Social Security, put the drug industry in charge of drug benefits, give free rein to self-serving CEOs - he is clever at disguising them. But he absolutely knows what he believes. But the man is not 10 feet tall. His policies, foreign and domestic, are vulnerable both politically and substantively. Most of his domestic program, when understood, is not popular. His foreign policy is dangerous. But effective rebuttal will take leadership and political courage on the part of now-traumatized Democrats. In short, the Democrats need to take a page from Bush's book - not the substance but the political gumption. There are five or six Democrats auditioning for the right to run against George W. Bush in 2004. They might begin by offering a tough, sustained, systematic, and principled critique of what Bush is offering and a clear alternative. The way to challenge this president is not with intermittent, tactical, incremental, and poll-driven pot shots - Al Gore, take notice - but by having both convictions and the courage of them. This is the political lesson of Bush's moment of triumph. ____________________________________________________-- Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com