International Affairs: November 2006 Archives
In my previous posts about wiping out AIDS I've asked whether or not it's time to consider drastic measures to curb the disease, and now it sounds like other scientists are asking the same questions.
Within the next 25 years, AIDS is set to join heart disease and stroke as the top three causes of death worldwide, according to a study published online Monday.When global mortality projections were last calculated a decade ago, researchers had assumed the number of AIDS cases would be declining. Instead, it's on the rise. ...
"It will be increasingly hard to sustain treatment programs unless we can turn off the tap of new HIV infections," said Dr. Richard Hays, professor of epidemiology at London's School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was not linked to the study. "These AIDS numbers point to a need to do more in prevention."
Simply focusing on treatment or politically uncontroversial prevention methods will not suffice. "You can't put all your eggs in the abstinence basket," said Hays. "We need a menu of strategies for real people," he said, adding that condom distribution as well as new methods, such as a vaccine, are needed.
However, I think Hays is crazy if he really believes that promoting abstinence is "politically uncontroversial". In fact, advocating chastity and marital fidelity is nearly unthinkable for American politicians. Sure, a gesture is made to promote abstinence among teanagers, but even that suggestion is met with fierce hostility from all corners other than the Christian right. The idea that everyone should refrain from sex outside of marriage is anathema to modern American culture, no matter what percentage of us claims to be Christian.
And yet... it's hard to see any other way to stop the spread of AIDS unless a vaccine or cure is developed. Condoms have been pushed as the STD solution for decades, and yet the scourge of AIDS is still spreading like wildfire around the world.
The always brilliant Victor Davis Hanson sheds some light on liberal internationalism. I think his insight into the leftist mind also holds true regarding domestic affairs.
Or is it a deeper malaise that modern liberal internationalism is neither liberal nor international. Lacking any real belief that the United States, now or in its past, has been a continual force for good, the contemporary Left hardly wants the rest of the world to suffer the American malaise of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental degradation, and consumerism. That self-doubt is buttressed by the idea as well that confrontation is always bad, that evil does not really exist, but is a construct we create for misunderstanding, that the world’s ills are remedied by reason and dialogue.In essence, the progressive Leftist is often affluent, insulated from the savagery about him by his material largess, and empathizes with those who are antithetical to the very forces that made him free, secure, and prosperous—as a way to assuage the guilt, at very little cost, of his own blessedness.
Then the leftists dupe those who they (generally wrongly) believe they have victimized into joining together to make them victims in truth.
(HT: Instapundit.)
A sickly disturbing New York Times piece sadly illustrates the price of American weakness. Our supposed "allies" are in fact financing the terrorists in Iraq and around the world. Why do they have the balls for such a move? Because they know the United States will just bend over and take it.
The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.
As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.
So our "allies" buy smuggled oil, pay ransoms, and so forth, and their money is then turned around and used to kill Iraqis and Americans. Fantastic. France and Italy -- among others -- apparently need to relearn what it means to get on our bad side. Unfortunately for the world, it looks like America wants to be liked more than we want to be respected. So in the end we get neither... we just get killed.
Don't forget to cast your vote for your favorite Wonders.
In addition to the Statue of Liberty, pyramids, Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu, the finalists are the Acropolis; Turkey's Haghia Sophia; the Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral; the Colosseum; Germany's Neuschwanstein Castle; Stonehenge; Spain's Alhambra; the Great Wall; Japan's Kiyomizu Temple; the Sydney Opera House; Cambodia's Angkor; Timbuktu; Petra, Jordan; Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer; Easter Island; and Chichen Itza, Mexico.
I've personally seen a few of these: Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, Neuschwanstein Castle, and Stonehenge. Who can top that?
However, there are a couple modern marvels that I think should have made the list.
Apollo 11 planting a flag on the moon. Maybe too nationalistic, but moreso than the Kremlin or the Great Wall of China?
The Panama Canal. An amazing feat of engineering.
Considering that the original Seven Wonders of the World were chosen by consensus, online voting seems about right for the New Wonders.
I guess this story made so small a splash that some of my commenters are completely ignorant of it: the New York Times revealed two weeks ago that Saddam was less than a year away from having nuclear weapons.
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
Of course the NYT has framed this as a hit-piece against President Bush, but the fact of the matter is that these documents completely vindicate the pre-war claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. As Power Line says, Bush just can't win with the media, but don't let the paper's partisanship blind you to the bare facts of the matter.
The defining characteristic of partisan attacks on President Bush has been their unthinking and indiscriminate nature. For example, Bush is to blame for not halting the development of nukes by Iran and North Korea, but he's also to blame for toppling Saddam Hussein due in part to his concern that Saddam was interested in and capable of developing nukes. Critics point to Iran's rise as evidence that Bush misplaced his focus on Iraq, but they don't consider how Saddam would have reacted to Iranian nuclear progress.The New York Times now has carried unthinking Bush-bashing to a point beyond caricature. Today, as Tiger Hawk notes, it quotes with apparent approval "experts" who say that Saddam was as little as a year away from building an atom bomb. The Times does so in order to show that the Bush administration acted recklessly when it published captured Iraqi documents that describe that country's WMD programs, because those documents might be used by another country in furtherance of building WMD.
Did the Times just say that Saddam's Iraq was a year away from building a nuclear weapon? I guess so. Good thing Saddam's no longer in power.
So, just in case anyone missed it the second time through:
According to the New York Times, when we invaded Iraq Saddam Hussein was less than a year away from having nuclear weapons.
