Here are a few items that have appeared recently in the news that are worth thinking about.
"U.S. Study Paints Somber Portrait of Iraqi Discord," New York Times, April 9, 2006, International-1
Eric Schmitt and Edward Wong reported on an internal staff report by Iraq Embassy and military personnel that "provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq'sa political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces as 'serious' and one 'critical'. The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials." The report includes warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions in many areas, "even those generally described as nonviolent by American officials." It warns of the "growing power" of Iranian-backed Shiite parties and rival militias, noting that the U.S. helped put some of those groups in power. It concludes with a quote from an Iraqi police commander in Babil, who says that the police will not intervene between warring militias, if it should come to that, because "They would be too frightened to get into the middle." The commander adds that if American troops leave Babil, "the next day would be civil war." Dated January 31, 2006, the report was put together over a period of 6 weeks, before the bombing of a Shiite shrine that inaugurated an even more intense sectarian strife in Iraq.
The Administration, of course, has been on another of its public relations campaigns to talk optimistically about the Iraqi mess. Cheney, appearing recently on Face the Nation, suggested that the Administration's views more accurately reflect the real conditions in Iraq than the media's coverage of the sectarian violence. This is one more example of the Bush Administration's tendency to paint rosy pictures of their policies' effects--from tax to anti-civil liberties to Katrina aid to the safety of America's ports (see this Washington Post story) to the Iraq war--when in reality they have direct access to information that paints a substantially more somber picture of the same situations. The Administration tends to select out of its data that which best supports the argument it wants to make and keep secret or denigrate all other information. (Its arrangements with the national archives to reclassify unclassified materials is an example of its attempt to use secrecy and control of information to squelch discussion. See "Archives Kept a Secrecy Secret" in the April 12, 2006 Washington Post) That approach is dangerously misleading for the American public and hazardous for the development of reasonable and workable policies.
"Making Sure Universities Make the Grade," Chicago Tribune, April 9, 2006, Section 1, page 4
If it worries you to see the mess the incompetent handling of the Iraq invasion and occupation has created and the FEMA bungling of aid to Katrina victims in New Orleans and elsewhere, you may be about as undelighted as I am to hear that the U.S. Department of Education thinks that it can provide better information to colleges about what they should do to educate America's youth than they can provide for themselves. The story by Jodi Cohen looks at the 19-member commission appointed by Bush to suggest ways to revamp higher education. Quess what! In an administration that can't hold any Justice Department official or military officer of significant rank responsible for widespread abuse of prisoners throughout the military system, there is talk about holding Universities more accountable for the education they provide students. How? standardized tests, national databases, and a national organization to evaluate and sanction higher education institutions! (One has to wonder if the prime rationale is to provide more information Negroponte's project to track all personal information about each and every American citizen--it starts to look like the Minority Report Cruise film about punishing people before they commit crimes, which in fact we have done for thousands of people detained in our so-called "war" on terrorism and preemptive wars on Iraq and Afghanistan).
Generally, it isn't tests and sanctioning organizations with their check lists and "ranking" systems that higher education needs. We already have too much of that from the effect of the ridiculous U.S. News and World Reports ranking system, that has generated a flurry of predictable attention by administrators across the country to the particular numbers that count the most and the gaming of the numbers that any smart person can come up with. What we need is to put our money where our mouth is. We should make college accessible to every young person in the country with the gumption to go. We should fund college for youth with direct student loan programs that don't let financial institutions basically take a cut for doing nothing (because university administrators do all the administering of student loans "funded" by private institutions). We should double the nationally funded grants in the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, to provide more fundamental research to push the country into the next century with the advances we will need to survive the energy and pollution crunch caused by the mega-appetites of the United States and China. We should quit trying to privatize and corporatize university education, because that will result in biased applied research that doesn't spend enough time on the fundamentals. We should quit thinking that the ranking game has much to say about educational excellence. Any school can buy the best students and the most published faculty. The question is whether any school can educate the worst students and use the talents of the many not-quite-recognized-as-superstar faculty.
"Offshore Drilling Plan Widesn Rifts Over Energy Policy", New York Times, April 9, 2006, SEction 1 page 16.
Michael Janofsky writes about the Bush proposal to open another tract of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling (which, of course, will be supported by the archaic oil depletion allowance that lets wealthy oil companies like Exxon-Mobil write off huge chunks of their income without being subject to taxation---see the recent posting on this subject, titled "Environmentally Friendly Taxes?", at A Taxing Matter). The proposed tract is two million acres just 100 miles off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Some Republicans in the Senate want an even wider drilling zone, while many oppose any drilling at all in this sensitve area.
Note that this does not look like answering the challenge Bush gave himself in the State of the Union to remove our dependence on oil! Instead, it suggests that we will continue subsidizing and supporting oil exploration (exploitation) until the last drop is gone, hoping that we somehow come up with a substitute in the meantime. The environmental degradation--and even the problem of eliminating a resource that may prove to be essential as a base for future scientific developments--is hardly paid attention to. Gale Norton--former Interior Secretary who seemed to see her role as ensuring there remained no pristine wilderness area unscathed by big business--is attributed as suggesting that "drilling in the offshore zone would lead to further development in parts of the Outer Continental Shelf that have been offlimits since the 1980s under a federal moratorium that Congress has [until now, at least] renewed every year." Republican Congressperson Richard Pombo, chair of the natural resources committee in the House and a pro-business, pro-development idol of the oil and gas industry, will introduce a bill in June to allow states to control energy exploration within 125 miles of their shores--taking it away from the federal government and therefore making our oceans even more vulnerable to the power of Big Oil.
