President Bush’s announcement of a cooperative agreement with India on nuclear power generation technology should have come as no surprise. As early as 2001 the Bush Administration was looking at ways of expanding the American relationship with India. The 2004 India-U.S. Next Step initiative suggested a ‘presumption of approval’ for American dual use nuclear equipment exports to India, and that policy is essentially what the Bush Administration’s agreement with India attempts to accomplish.

However, the Administration’s initiative is not legal under current American law, and poses a significant danger of collapsing the core obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) – the central source of authority for global non-proliferation, and the very treaty under which the Administration currently seeks to refer Iran to the Security Council. In order for the Administration to open India to American exports of nuclear technology, the Congress will have to pass a concurrent resolution waiving several provisions of the Atomic Energy Act. (for details Download CRS Report).

There are significant reasons why Congress should not do so. The most salient being the damage it would do international reliance on core commitments of the NNPT, and the resulting encouragement of nuclear proliferation and regional escalation, especially in Asia.

Political science professors Poole and Rosenthal analyze the political behavior of Congress over time using Roll Call votes to determine the relative position of representatives on a basic liberal-moderate-conservative scale. The results of the their study confirm what many would intuit; that American politics is becoming increasingly polarized, and the views of elected officials have become more extreme.

The data sorts officials by a single score reflecting their voting patterns. The lower a score, the more liberal the official; the higher, the more conservative. This ranking separates the parties with perfect accuracy, except for a few outliers who persist in marginally hostile districts. For Arizona in the 109th Congress, the data shows that several of Arizona’s representative are among the most extremely conservative in the nation – I would contend far more conservative than the mainstream of even the Republican electorate. The Arizona Delegation is ranked here, with #1 being the most liberal member of the House, and #435 being the most conservative.

Another leader in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, Hon. John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, has apparently had his eyes forced open and is now seeing reality more clearly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more heartfelt description of a man’s conscience moving him from advocating for and participating in an atrocity, to having deep and fundamental doubts about the wisdom and utility of the whole enterprise.

John Howard is certainly no peacenik; he has been one of President Bush’s most reliable allies on Iraq. A crack of this size in the Coalition represents an unavoidable challenge to the continued legitimacy of American military prescence in Iraq. Democratic leaders and candidates should certainly seize upon this statement an its contents to push harder for complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

Of course, I and others like me, will disagree still with Howard that the invasion could ever have been a success if only executed with greater planning and intelligence. I think that the very idea of invading another country that was not an immediate military threat to us or our allies is not only a stragetic blunder of monstrous proportions, but monstrously immoral.

The poor fiction that our government honestly thought Iraq an immediate threat to international peace and American security is now revealed as a tissue of barely plausible lies, as was apparent to so many from the begining. Like any enterprise founded upon lies and mendacity, Bush’s Iraq policy had to collapse under its own weight with such a false foundation. The tragedy, and the horrible crime, of Iraq is the thousands of our fellow citizens and innocent Iraqis claimed and maimed by that collapse. Bush is a criminal fully culpable for all those honored dead, and all those still yet to die as his monster lumbers forward inexorably. He deserves the same fate as that criminal Ossama bin Laden, for he surely has as much innocent blood on his hands, if not more.

The world took another step closer to accepting the hard and terrible truth that Iraq has been a tragic mistake with Howard’s appologia. Tomorrow, perhaps it can start to step past such a passive definition, and begin to see it for what it truly is: one of the greatest war-crimes of our time.

12 March 2006

TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINISTER
THE HON JOHN HOWARD MP
ADDRESS TO THE DEAKIN SOCIETY, MELBOURNE
"REFLECTIONS ON THE SITUATION IN IRAQ"
 
 During our recent celebrations of the Coalition’s ten years in power, I have, as Prime Minister, been publicly reflecting on our Party’s many great achievements, as was appropriate to do. But on this occasion, among old friends and senior colleagues, I wish to share some unsettling thoughts about the situation in Iraq.

Meet Congresswoman Mom.

It’s not her chosen campaign slogan, but I think it sums up Francine Shacter’s iconoclastic campaign for Congress in Arizona’s 8th District pretty well. When asked, Francine chose as her (purely provisional) slogan, “I will listen to people and represent their views and bring back to them good ideas.” Not so snappy.

A divorced Jewish woman, 77 years old, who raised four kids by herself begining in 1961 (the result was nearly the Jewish trifecta – she got a lawyer and a doctor, but no Rabbi, just a scientist), Francine is a graduate with honors of the school of life (and of Goddard College in economics). She wants to use her life experiences to represent and work with and for the people of Arizona’s 8th District.

Francine proclaims herself proudly to be a Roosevelt Democrat; a highlight of her life was meeting Eleanor Roosevelt as a young woman. She clearly believes that government has a duty to make life better for people and is capable of doing so, given the right leadership. She is also bucking against the trend of incivility in the current political climate. She pleads for the Democratic nomination campaign to be more civil and less divisive.

At the same time, however, and perhaps contradictorily, she in unabashed about her criticism of Randy Graf, whom she would likely face in the general election if she wins the primary. She told me to quote her specifically when she said, “There is something gross about him” and that he “embodies values I abhor.” There seems little doubt that she’ll be very forthright in her critique of the opposition should she be nominated. If you are worried that the Democratic nominee will fail to draw clear contrasts with the opposition, that’s not a concern with Francine. At the same time, she makes it clear that she feels no personal animosity toward her political opponents. She says of Bush that she doesn’t hate him; she just wants him out.

Francine’s philosophy of leadership is cooperative and constructive, despite her blunt opinions. As a major qualification for the calling she now pursues, she emphasizes her career of public service, where she gained experience in working across interest communities to achieve policy objectives. Francine worked for 30 years in government on the Hill and in the executive branch as a manager and statistician. The result is an enthusiastically people-oriented person who also delights in policy minutiae and numbers. During my formal interview with her, I asked her to refrain from details and focus on the big picture. Suffice it to say that I’ve had to edit for length nonetheless.

Francine believes that Congress should be representative, not just in a formal sense, but also in reflecting the demographics of the populace. In this regard, Francine may be representative of views and persons not currently well represented in government. Francine was a pioneer of now common lifestyle, that of working single mother, and that experience gives her a perspective on labor and family issues, education, poverty, and government assistance that currently has little foothold in the corridors of power.

Francine holds out her life experiences and her “smart and incorruptible” character as her best qualifications for office. She points out that she sees holding office as Congresswoman as a privilege, a public trust, and a capstone of her career in public service, not as the stepping-stone to higher office that others in the race may seek. She opines that it does not reflect well on a candidate to abandon one’s recently elected office as soon as an opportunity for advancement presents itself.

On the subject of the logistics of her campaign, Francine is forthright about her unconventional approach. She does not currently employ any staff, relying entirely on volunteers. She describes her current fundraising situation as dismal. She intends to run a very lean campaign and thinks that if she could raise 50K, she should be able to mount a successful campaign. She wants to limit her exposure to big money donations on principle, and she says the campaign she most admires is that of a certain current candidate for Congress who has 400 volunteers working actively on her campaign.

While I do have opinions about the candidates I interview and their views, I am not interested (at this time!) in choosing a candidate to recommend to other voters. The transcript of the interview that follows is as close I could come to a verbatim transcript, except that it has been edited for brevity. My opinions or comments about specific answers are in square brackets and do not constitute part of the transcript.

I interviewed Francine on February 28, 2006 in Tucson: