I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the Sept. 11, 2001 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story.
Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to Sept. 11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of Sept. 11, but the fact is we lacked -- for the very best of reasons -- people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.
Imagination is on my mind a lot these days, because it seems to me that the only people with imagination in the world right now are the bad guys. As my friend, the Middle East analyst Stephen Cohen, says, "That is the characteristic of our time -- all the imagination is in the hands of the evildoers."
I am so hungry for a positive surprise. I am so hungry to hear a politician, a statesman, a business leader surprise me in a good way. It has been so long. It's been over 10 years since then Israeli prime ministerYitzhak Rabin thrust out his hand to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. Yes, yes, I know, Arafat turned out to be a fraud. But for a brief, shining moment, an old warrior, Rabin, stepped out of himself, his past, and all his scar tissue, and imagined something different. It's been a long time.
I have this routine. I get up every morning around 6am, fire up my computer, call up AOL's news page and then hold my breath to see what outrage has happened in the world overnight. A massive bombing in Iraq or Madrid? More murderous violence in Israel? A hotel going up in flames in Bali or a synagogue in Istanbul? More US soldiers killed in Iraq?
I so hunger to wake up and be surprised with some really good news -- by someone who totally steps out of himself or herself, imagines something different and thrusts out a hand.
I want to wake up and read that US President George W. Bush has decided to offer a real alternative to the stalled Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming. I want to wake up and read that 10,000 Palestinian mothers marched on Hamas headquarters to demand that their sons and daughters never again be recruited for suicide bombings. I want to wake up and read that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to his home in Riyadh to personally hand him the Abdullah peace plan and Sharon responded by freezing Israeli settlements as a good-will gesture.
I want to wake up and read that General Motors has decided it will no longer make gas-guzzling Hummers and Bush has decided to replace his limousine with an armor-plated Toyota Prius, a hybrid car that gets over 40 miles to the gallon.
I want to wake up and read that Vice President Dick Cheney has apologized to the UN and all our allies for being wrong about weapons of mass destruction. in Iraq, but then appealed to our allies to join with the US in an even more important project -- helping Iraqis build some kind of democratic framework. I want to wake up and read that Representative Tom DeLay called for a tax hike on the rich in order to save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation and to finance all our underfunded education programs.
I want to wake up and read that Justice Antonin Scalia has recused himself from ruling on the case involving Cheney's energy task force when it comes before the Supreme Court -- not because Scalia did anything illegal in duck hunting with Cheney, but because our Supreme Court is so sacred, so vital to what makes our society special -- its rule of law -- that he wouldn't want to do anything that might have even a whiff of impropriety.
I want to wake up and read that Bush has announced a Manhattan Project to develop renewable energies that will end America's addiction to crude oil by 2010. I want to wake up and read that Mel Gibson just announced that his next film will be called Moses and all the profits will be donated to the Holocaust Museum.
Most of all, I want to wake up and read that Senator John Kerry just asked Senator John McCain to be his vice president, because if Kerry wins he intends not to waste his four years avoiding America's hardest problems -- health care, deficits, energy, education -- but to tackle them, and that can only be done with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
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