Things I Never Knew...

Friday, February 18, 2005

The Origins of the Sunni/Shia split in Islam

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Thursday, March 04, 2004

map of Haiti by way of the BBC Recent events in Haiti have made me wonder about US nation-building and what role democracy plays versus US national interests. In the last week elected Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned from power in the face of an ardent opposition movement and increasing international pressure. Aristide's departure leaves a lot of unanswered questions about Haiti's future.

Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected president in 1990. Prior to Aristide's election, Haiti was ruled by dictators. There was great promise for progress with Aristide's election but these were snuffed when he was ousted months later by a military coup. It wasn't until the US intervened militarily in 1994 that Aristide was reinstalled as president. He was ineligible to run in the elections in 1995 but ran and won the post again in 2000. His election though was tainted by murmurs of fraud and heavily contested by opposition groups. Along with the opposition, Aristide has faced a poor economy, social crises, and freezing of international aid. There have been several coup attempts made throughout his presidency.

The way that I read it is that Haiti is a very poor country that has historically been ruled by force of might. This has resulted in an economic disparity between a rich minority and a poor majority. I don't know how democratic elections came about in the late 80s to bring Aristide to power but the fact that he was ousted mere months after his election alludes that he either wasn't so broadly liked or that powerful opposition (in that case some military?) still held much sway in the country. It was only through external intervention that democracy was able to return. Yet there seems to recently have been a freeze on international aid to Haiti, some form of sanction for a reason unknown to me. Were they against Aristide's government? Did Aristide go bad and become a liability to the US? Why did we reinstall him in the first place?

Much reading must be done.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2004

I'm frankly surprised that the issue of gay marriages inspires so much fervor as to provoke talk of an amendment to the constitution. Time will tell how much of this talk is bluster but I expect this will be on people's lips for some time.

As to what it would take to amend the charter for our nation, Salon.com offers this article, "How the Constitution could be amended" to keep people appraised.

Essentially;

a proposal of an amendment to the constitution needs to be agreed upon by two-thirds majority of both houses of congress to go to the states for ratification
then the three-fourths of the states must ratifiy it to go into effect

I'm surprised by some of the statistics cited by the news item. I had no idea that the latest amendment (the 27th) was ratified as recently as 1992.

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Tuesday, February 24, 2004

An interesting article by Seth Ackerman in Mother Jones, A Legacy of Lies. Ackerman details how one of the more obsequeous rationales for believing that Iraq had WMDs -- defector Hussein Kamel's reports -- was actually doctored by two presidential administrations for the purposes of maintaining political policy. Ackerman cites numerous sources in making his case and paints a disturbing picture of how the government has essentially mislead the public in its (mis)use of Kamel's reports. With the Bush administration coming under fire for intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war, this example is an interesting anecdote illustrating that misinformation is not inherent in one administration's or one party's policy. It seems to be part and parcel of our government's foreign policy strategies. It makes me wary of any information that is fed through the news media and reinforces the need to understand the underlying forces at work in government.

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Friday, June 06, 2003

Because I'm curious about the Brits, a Guide to government in the U.K. Wherein I finally figure out what Prime Minister is...

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Hmm...from June 4, 2003, United Press International: GOP senator: Iraq probe 'premature'. Democrats in the senate were starting to speak up about starting a formal investigation into Iraq's WMD Intelligence but it appears that those calls are being rebuked by Republican committee leaders in favor of reviewing CIA intelligence first.

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I missed this tidbit, from June 1st, Bush Remarks Confirm Shift in Justifying War (washingtonpost.com). Wherein the Post reports that,

The president asserted that the discovery in Iraq of two trailers, with laboratory equipment but no pathogens aboard, was tantamount to a discovery of weapons.
"We found the weapons of mass destruction," Bush asserted in the Thursday interview, released Friday. "We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

Tom Tomorrow points to an Associated Press article of March 17, 2003 that says, "Iraq also handed over videotapes of mobile biological weapons laboratories to inspectors. Iraq says the videos show that the laboratories do not violate UN resolutions." as a rebuttal.

While one must be skeptical of Iraq's claim that their laboratories are not in violation of U.N. resolutions, one must also be skeptical of the president's logic that discovery of said laboratories in the absence of any accompanying biological materials is equates to discovering banned weapons. At best it proves that they had intentions of producing biological weapons but intention itself doesn't support the argument that Iraq was a clear and present danger.

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I was reading this article "Weapons of Mass Deception" on Salon.com and got to thinking about our political system of debate. In the opening paragraphs, the article describes Vice-President Cheney reassuring assembled legislators that the administration based the war in Iraq on credible evidence. Further into the article, it observes that Cheney was orating to "a room full of loyal Republican officials" which made me think this was a public relations move and not an open forum for debate about WMD evidence. But where would such a debate take place in our government?

I'm under the impression that in the British Parliamentary system, the Prime Minister must face parliamentary questioning every Wednesday. It can be contentious, it can be rude, but it serves to present a forum where government positions must be elucidated in public. This, at the very least, seems to engender some erudite politicians. On the other hand, the major public forum for issues in the U.S. seems to be in the media and that's proven to be not as rigorous a debate as we see in British politics. There are reports of the Democrats calling for inquiries into intelligence leading to the war but for some reason, it doesn't have the same potency as a public debate. One might argue this is a matter of giving the public what they want and apparently, the American public isn't interested in debating these sort of issues. My concern is whether our lawmakers are concerned about it and how that debate is being exercised in our government.

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Thursday, June 05, 2003

Myths are precisely what give people the faith to undertake projects which rational calculations or comon sense would reject.
--Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem

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Friday, May 30, 2003

It bothers me that this doesn't seem to bother more people, Whiskey Bar: What a Tangled Web We Weave... offers a timeline of Bush Administration comments regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

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