Skip ahead to page content

federal_budget_and_spending.jpg

Investigate Haditha and continue the mission

June 6, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward

The Bush administration has proposed negotiations with Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on condition that Iran give up nuclear weapons research.

The government should investigate allegations of war crimes, but that should not distract from the mission in Iraq.

A little over a week ago, the press began reporting that US Marines may have killed as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians during a raid on the Iraqi town of Haditha last November. These allegations, which Heritage’s James Carafano calls “deeply troubling,” are very serious indeed. The killing of innocent civilians is a war crime and should not be tolerated.

Investigations into the incident are underway. “A senior defense official told the Associated Press last month that evidence points to unprovoked killings by the Marines involved,” the AP reports. “A separate probe is examining whether there has been a coverup of the incident by the U.S. military.”

The military, Carafano writes, must conduct “an investigation that is transparent, thorough, and respects rather than undermines the efforts of the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coastguardsmen who have served and will serve honorably in Iraq.”

To that end, Carafano also made three recommendations on how to proceed:

  • The government’s investigations into the matter should be transparent and “government and military officials should announce what findings they can as soon as possible.”
  • The military’s “operating procedures and training have to be scrutinized, and if shortfalls are found that materially contributed, they must be acknowledged. The military needs to be honest about its mistakes—and fix them.”
  • “The United States government must continue to demonstrate resolve that, despite this incident, it will finish the mission in Iraq.”

If the allegations are true, they will prove to be a black mark on the record of the Marine Corps. Regardless of the outcome of the investigations, we must not let the behavior of a few bad apples distract us from the core mission in Iraq: victory.

Amnesty doesn’t work

That amnesty encourages future lawbreaking is more than just a theory, James Carafano reports in a separate paper. It’s a fact.

“Spain offered four amnesties for illegal immigrants between 1985 and 2000. None of them slowed the flow of undocumented migrants,” Carafano explains. Their most recent attempt, in 2005, was followed by a surge in illegal immigration from Africa.

“Illegal border crossing has been matched with a skyrocketing number of cases of fraud from individuals trying to qualify for amnesty,” he continues. This has “overwhelmed immigration officials, who have been unable to cope with processing, screening, and adjudicating the flood of amnesty applications.”

While immigration reform seems stalled for now—the House and Senate have yet to name members to the conference committee where a compromise bill would be worked out—it is important that they keep in mind the very real consequences of the policies they are considering.

Telling the public about a bad idea

The Senate is set to consider a thoroughly terrible idea in the coming days: the establishment of a separate government for “native” Hawaiians. The unconstitutional proposal would allow those deemed to be “native” Hawaiian by virtue of their ancestry to be subject to their own laws.

Heritage has been a leader on this issue, helping bring this debate to the fore.

Just as bad as the proposal, though, is its premise: that native Hawaiians have been somehow “robbed” of their sovereignty by malicious Americans. This is a gross distortion of the facts, National Review’s Alston Ramsay explains. In fact, after the monarchy was overthrown in 1893, Hawaiians themselves pushed for annexation by the United States and then for statehood. In 1959, 99 percent of the population voted in the statehood plebiscite, with 94 percent backing the initiative.

Stay tuned to MyHeritage.org for the latest on this abomination.

Stifling the Internet

Congress is considering a proposal to impose onerous new restrictions and regulations on Internet providers. Called “net neutrality” by its supporters, this proposal would prevent companies from offering customers different levels of service at different prices, stymieing innovation and stifling investment in faster Internet connections for home users. To put it another way, this legislation would prohibit companies from offering better quality services at higher prices, limiting choice for consumers.

Advocates of this legislation worry that companies will abuse their ability to control Internet traffic to block certain services and websites and favor others. This worry is unfounded, as Heritage’s James Gattuso explains: “In today’s competitive broadband market, network abuse would quickly send consumers to another provider. Moreover, if a network owner somehow does abuse its power, existing competition law—with its decades of precedent—is more than sufficient to address the problem.”

Under this proposal, government would use its powers of regulation to help certain businesses, like Google and other big corporate backers of “net neutrality,” at the expense of consumers and other businesses. Government has a terrible record of picking winners and losers. Besides, much of the reason the Internet has succeeded so far is precisely because it has not been regulated. Net neutrality regulations, designed to solve a problem covered by other laws, will almost certainly cause a host of new complications.

In other news

Coming up at Heritage

To attend these or any other Heritage Foundation events, RSVP at Heritage’s events website. Or you can watch these events live online at Heritage.org. All times are Eastern.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.