Jay Reding.com

The Wall Street Journal draws an interesting parallel between the Duke rape case and the Scottsboro Boys case of 1931 (background on the latter can be found here).

Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman’s limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.

The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South.

The two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.

Thankfully, the wrongly accused Duke lacrosse players didn’t have to wait years to get some semblance of justice, but disgraced and disbarred DA Mike Nifong’s actions were still a slap in the face of American justice. Legal commentator/professional harpy Nancy Grace and the rest of the American media did no better than the racially-charged media of Jim Crow South over 70 years ago. What these cases demonstrate is that America still has two systems of justice — it’s just the players who have changed. Even though the Duke players came from privileged backgrounds, they were still guilty until proven otherwise. Trying to combat injustice with injustice is never a productive endeavor.

The reality is that the Duke community sold out any sense of justice in the name of crude racial animus — a racism that may be the opposite of what happened in 1931, but was no less unjust. America still has not learned the lessons of its racist past and still tends to see people as the color of their skins rather than the contents of their character. Until that changes, more travesties such as the Scottsboro Boys case and the Duke rape case will continue to happen.

Donald Horowitz of Duke University analyzes the future of a post-US Iraq and finds that it would lead to a massive humanitarian and political disaster:

With a territorial base, radical Islamist and Baathist forces would find ways to damage our interests here and abroad. Worse, our withdrawal would tacitly establish the principle, which we forcibly rejected in Afghanistan and more recently in Somalia, that we are prepared to live with a regime dedicated to our destruction even when we might be in a position to do otherwise.

Finally, a sundered Iraq would assuredly become a tempting target for external forces. Iran, already influential in the south, might aid the Madhi Army in the center. Arab Sunni regimes worried by the growth of Iranian power would likely move into parts of the vacuum we left behind. In these rivalries, played out in Iraq, there is considerable potential for wider war, with unpredictable consequences for regional stability and the fortunes of our various allies and antagonists.

A withdrawal from Iraq would likely be the biggest foreign policy blunder in United States history — and that’s even if one accepts that invading in the first place currently takes that prize. To do so would be to ensure that force inimical to the United States get a major victory and the Iraqi people end up in a situation that makes their current predicament seem like a walk in the park.

It’s certain that Iraq would break up, and it would not break up cleanly. There isn’t a convenient geographical dividing line between Sunni and Shi’ite in Iraq (or Kurd and Arab for that matter). Instead, places like Baghdad, Baquba, and Kirkuk would become battlegrounds in which the sort of violence we’re seeing now would pale in comparison. The best one could hope for would be a short war — more likely there would be massive ethnic cleansing throughout Iraq. If one thinks that problem is bad now, imagine what it would be if there was nothing to hold it back at all.

Iran would likely expand their influence with Iraqi Shi’ites, even if it took an inter-Shi’ite civil war to get there. Not all Iraqi Shi’ites are natural allies of the Iranians — in fact, few are. They don’t share the same language or culture, and the worst fighting of the Iran-Iraq War was between fellow Shi’ites on both sides. It is quite conceivable that Iranian forces would invade Southern Iraq and finish what they could not have done during the 1980s. The slaughter that they would bring in their wake would be one of the worst since the previous war.

Meanwhile, the Turks would not tolerate an independent Kurdistan. (They barely do now that Iraqi Kurdistan is mostly independent.) The chances of the Turks moving across the border on a mission to stop the PKK from launching attacks against Ankara would be quite high — and again, the death toll could be immense, especially if the Kurds decide to enact their revenge on the Turks with terrorism. Even though this situation is less severe than what is likely to happen in the rest of Iraq, it’s still troublesome indeed.

From the US perspective, the worst outcome would be in the Sunni heartland of Iraq. The Sunnis are slowly coming around to ally with the US because they know that al-Qaeda doesn’t care for them and we can protect them against the Shi’a. Absent that, they would be forced by necessity to rejoin with al-Qaeda in order to protect themselves. Places like al-Anbar would become the perfect home for al-Qaeda — meaning that we would likely end up back in Iraq regardless of our intentions to withdraw in order to refight the battles we had already won in al-Anbar. Every death that we’ve incurred in that long and difficult struggle would be for naught — and we’d only incur more trying to undo the damage our hasty and reckless exit would create.

That’s only the immediate set of consequences. Longer down the road there’s a good chance that the violence and instability in Iraq would spread across the region — a ripple effect that would disrupt the world’s oil markets and give al-Qaeda footholds across the region.

Even if one thinks that the current status quo is terrible, the consequences of withdrawal would be nothing short of catastrophic. It would lead to not less war, but more — and the United States would inevitably be drawn back into the region. Like it or not, our strategic interests are not going away, and we cannot afford to let the Middle East go to hell, as tempting as that may be. The Iraqi people would bear the brunt of the violence — the current horrors of Iraq give us a preview of what life would be like in an Iraq that’s been broken into pieces with all sides fighting for control of Iraq’s many mixed territories.

As Colin Powell said, we’re playing by the Pottery Barn rules, and since we “broke” Iraq, we cannot shirk our responsibility to fixing it. This war is crucial to the wider war against Islamic extremism, and the convenient fiction that we can leave Iraq (where al-Qaeda is) and fight in Afghanistan (where al-Qaeda is not, having slipped away to the Pakistani frontier) is just that — a fiction. Withdrawal is wrong, and it is an abrogation of everything this country believes in. If we want less war in the future, we have to work out the situation in Iraq — otherwise we will not face a more peaceful world, but one infinitely more violent that it was before we left.

E.J. Dionne wonders why the Democrats can’t get any political traction despite an incredibly weakened GOP:

It’s been clear for months that large majorities of Americans have given up on the Republicans. They’ve turned decisively against President Bush and, in principle, want him replaced in 2008 by a Democrat.

But there’s a major gap between the desired outcome and the will to bring it about. The electorate is more pro-Democratic in theory than in practice. And Democratic congressional leaders will have a hellish time changing that, given their narrow margins of control and President Bush’s possession of a veto pen.

Do not envy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid their supposed power. It would be easier to manage Bush’s former baseball team, the Texas Rangers (26 wins, 43 losses as of this morning). Expectations for the Rangers are a lot lower.

The Democrats’ problem is that they got elected because the Republicans, quite frankly, couldn’t get their shit together. The Republicans lost the independent vote, and that relatively small shift was enough to cause an electoral bloodbath. The problem is that the Democrats really aren’t doing any better.

Name one major Democratic policy proposal that’s actually passed. Other than the minimum wage (which had support from many Republicans), none of them have. The Democrats are doing no more than did their Republican predecessors, and that’s the approval numbers for Congress are just as bad as the President’s.

ABC News also notes that the lefward tilt of the Democrats is hurting them with independent voters. The Democrats have bought into the convenient fiction that their poor poll numbers are because they didn’t get their Iraq surrender plan passed. That’s like the GOP blaming their losses in 2006 on not doing enough to court evangelicals — it’s a way of dodging blame from policies that have utterly failed. Iraq isn’t the issue that’s keeping the Congress’ numbers down. It’s the fact that nothing is getting done. Even if the Democrats had gotten their surrender, their numbers wouldn’t be better because the problem isn’t Iraq, it’s a climate of poisonous political partisanship.

Both parties are in deep trouble. The President is an albatross around the neck of the Republicans, and the Democrats are being pushed further and further away from the political mainstream. Barring a meltdown, it still looks like Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate in 2008. While a meltdown is always a possibility, the Democrats are likely to pick one of the most divisive candidates in recent political history while the Republicans seem likely to reach out to a more centrist candidate. That’s why despite the Democrats winning the generic ballot, they still don’t have any candidates who can get close to that generic preference.

The reality is that neither party can get much traction because the system is broken. We need less pork, less influence trading, less partisanship and less government overall. The reason why there’s such a strong subculture behind candidates like Ron Paul is because they’re candidates who are pushing against the status quo — and even though they have no chances of winning, that sentiment is a lot broader than one might think.

American politics is in a shameful state, and unless this idiotic partisan divide ends, it will remain so for some time. The American people are rightly sick of the same cronyism and ineptitude coming from both sides, and unless one party can break the deadlock and appeal to the center, neither party is going to have much success in advancing any kind of agenda.

Ronald Asmus, a former advisor to Bill Clinton writes that the Democrats seem to have lost sight of their own foreign policy ideals:

Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy must be turning in their graves. Using U.S. power to promote freedom and democracy was central to their foreign policies and legacies. Even Jimmy Carter, a far less successful Democratic president, can be proud of making human rights a major U.S. foreign policy objective. And Bill Clinton’s interventions in the Balkans and drive to expand NATO were all about consolidating democracy in Europe’s eastern half. There was a time, not too long ago, when Democrats were proud of their track record on democracy promotion — and rightly so.

Is the party of Wilson abandoning Wilsonianism? Why have we gone mum on an issue that is so central to our own foreign policy heritage and past triumphs?

As usual, Asmus blames Bush — but this time rightly so. Because Bush has taken up the cause of democratic advancement, the Democrats don’t want anything to do with — despite the fact that it was supposedly one of the core values of the Democratic Party.

I’m more cynical than Asmus is — I believe that the Democrats have absolutely no principles anymore other than the naked exercise of power. They’d sell their mothers to take the White House in 2008 and expand their power in Congress — and given the meltdown of the Republican Party, they probably won’t have to. This hyperpoliticized climate is the reason why not only is democracy in Iraq in grave peril, but our own democracy is in serious trouble.

If all that remains is the will for temporal political power, we’re really no better than the Sunnis and the Shi’ites in Iraq — just with words rather than guns. How can we profess to value democracy when we’re entirely unwilling to defend it in Iraq? How can we honestly say we believe in a pluralistic society when we’re doing nothing to establish those values in the places where they are needed the most? The legacy of the Bush era will be the exposure of the fact that even when America is attacked, we’re too self-absorbed to manage but a few year’s efforts. The Democratic foreign policy has become nothing more than withdrawal for the sake of damaging a President (who is already politically irrelevant) regardless of the consequences. The true tragedy is that even if the Democrats get exactly what they want, the situation is only going to get worse. Only the most deluded of fools would think that absent the stabilizing force of the US and coalition military presence the situation would improve. Instead, Iraq truly would enter a period of bloody civil war that would quickly spread across its borders and consume the entire Middle East. We would have gone from an unstable “quagmire” to a regional war that would very likely end with a nuclear exchange.

Our mission in the post-September 11 world was to use the power of democracy to combat the authoritarianism that fuels terrorism. Now, that agenda lays in ruins. One can argue that Iraq was handled poorly — and certainly be right — but the way in which the promotion of democracy has been turned into part of some sinister “neocon” agenda shows that the United States has lost its values and lost its way. If we don’t believe in the promotion of democracy abroad, we abrogate our rights to have it here. Asmus is right in pointing out that the Democrats, once the party of Kennedy and Wilson, are no longer. Asmus points out that there is a better way:

Democracy promotion is often messy and hard. You need to work with authoritarian governments even as you try to encourage change in their societies; aid sent to democrats abroad can be wasted; elections don’t always produce the results we’d like. Still, the long-term benefits — as we see in Europe today — are worth it. The answer to Bush’s mistakes must be to develop a more realistic and credible democracy-promotion strategy, not to abandon the goal.

The Democrats have no stomach for anything messy or hard — they want to win, and if they can play to the new isolationism in American culture, that’s precisely what they will do. They can worry about foreign policy the day the first major American city falls to terrorist attack — a prospect which sadly had been growing fainter with time, but now once again becomes less of a probability than an inevitability.

The expression on Amanda Holden’s face about 2 minutes in is just priceless…

In the face of the ongoing devastation of Gaza, could some good come out of Hamas’ civil war? Martin Indyk seems to think that it might:

Whatever transpires, Gaza has become Hamas’s problem. It’s a safe bet that the real attitude of Abbas and Fatah is: Let Hamas try to rule Gaza, and good luck.

This turn of events would free Abbas to focus on the much more manageable West Bank, where he can depend on the Israel Defense Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the United States to help rebuild his security forces. As chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas is empowered to negotiate with Israel over the disposition of the West Bank. Once he controls the territory, he could make a peace deal with Israel that establishes a Palestinian state with provisional borders in the West Bank and the Arab suburbs of East Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza could compare their fate under Hamas’s rule with the fate of their West Bank cousins under Abbas — which might then force Hamas to come to terms with Israel, making it eventually possible to reunite Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity living in peace with the Jewish state. It’s hard to believe that such a benign outcome could emerge from the growing Palestinian civil war. But given current events, this course is likely to become Abbas’s best option.

If Abbas is smart, that’s exactly what he would do. Let Gaza become an open-air prison and let Hamas turn it into an Islamist hellhole. Meanwhile, Abbas can concentrate on getting a real solution for the West Bank that creates an independent Palestinian state and ends the policies of terrorism that have kept the Palestinian people mired in poverty and terrorism.

Abbas is already demonstrating that he’s willing to fight corruption and get the West Bank under control. The appointment of Finance Minister Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister is a good first step. Prime Minister Fayyad is a Western-educated economist with a reputation for fighting corruption. Abbas and Fayyad still have a long road ahead of them, but with Hamas creating their own terrorist fiefdom in Gaza, their attention will be drawn away from the West Bank.

This two-state solution may be the best outcome for the Palestinians. Fatah will be able to demonstrate that the Palestinians can have a responsible state, while Hamas will end up turning the Gaza strip into a no-man’s land. With Gaza sealed off, the Palestinians can see first-hand what terrorism brings — deprivation and destruction. Meanwhile, if Abbas can control terrorism coming from the West Bank, he has an opportunity to be the kind of leader that the Palestinians have not had in a long while.

Granted, as Madeline Albright once said about Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Fatah may be more diplomatic than Hamas, but both are sponsors of terrorism. Abbas must be willing to do the difficult and thankless task of rebuilding a society that has been turned into little more than a death cult with decades of indoctrination. To turn Palestine around, Abbas will have to make significant social and political changes to bring his people into the modern world. It is not sure if he can do it, but if he does not, the West Bank may well follow Gaza into hell — and it would demonstrate that the Palestinians have done more to oppress themselves than anything done to them during the occupation by Israel.

The Washington Post has an uncharacteristically dumb article that attempts the blame for the civil war in Gaza firmly on the desk of the President. For some, it’s not Hamas, Fatah, the Iranians efforts to aid terrorism, or the utter destruction of Palestinian society, it’s all about Bush. Even the one valid point that’s made is made through a transparently silly political lens. This article demonstrates the sort of petty political journalism that makes most American newspapers barely worth reading. The Post should know better.

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. “I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror,” the president declared.

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel’s departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.

First of all, the White House hardly championed the Sharon disengagement plan, except as a further step on its mythical “road map” towards Palestinian sovereignty. That decision was almost entirely that of Ariel Sharon, and it’s difficult to say that it was the wrong choice. Disengagement from Gaza was a necessity to maintain Israeli security, and the results of that disengagement don’t reflect on Israel or on the United States, but on the inability of Palestinian society to settle their disputes using political compromise.

The question of elections is a more questionable one. The biggest lesson that must be learned from Iraq and Palestine is that pushing elections when there is no responsible civil society is a recipe for chaos. The way to build a stable democratic country is through developing small institutions that can channel political activity — widescale elections only entrench sectarian lines unless there is a responsible political culture to support democratic activity. Yet at the same time, the Palestinian people made the choice to elect Hamas. A moderate party is not representative of the Palestinian people as a whole — they made this bed, and now they have to lie in it. It may take the Palestinians subjecting themselves to a bloody civil war before any progress can be made. Nothing Israel, the United States, or anyone else can do can magically undo the years of inculcated hatred that has been at every facet of Palestinian society. The choice to push for elections was inevitably to create a Hamas victory — but allowing Abbas’ undemocratic and corrupt Fatah (who are also sponsors of terrorism) to continue to reign was not a better choice for anyone. Blaming Bush for what is at its root a fault of Palestinian factionalism is simply foolish.

The situation in Palestine was a quagmire long before Bush took office. Clinton tried to make the same attempts to negotiate a settlement and that ended terribly as well. Blaming Bush for the Palestinian civil war is no more logical or sound than blaming Clinton for the Second Intifada in 2000. Both made naïve attempts at peace and both ended up watching as the Palestinians chose death rather than peace. If Bush can be blamed for anything, it’s following the longstanding and always fruitless American assumption that there is a “Palestinian society” rather than a death cult who has taken on the trappings of a society.

The only people who have the solution to this problem are the Palestinians themselves, and it seems that will only emerge once most of Palestinian society have killed each other off. The tragedy of Palestine isn’t what the West or Israel has done — it’s what the Palestinians have done to themselves. It is their brutality and their factionalism that is on display in Gaza right now, and trying to argue that Western policy is at the root of this is just enabling the sense of unjustified victimhood that lead the Palestinians down this terrible road to begin with.