Iraq panel is wrong on Israel
December 21, 2006 | By Nathaniel Ward
Heritage Middle East expert Jim Phillips takes a look at one of the Iraq Study Group’s more bizarre recommendations and finds it seriously wanting. “The simplistic connection the ISG report makes between building peace in Baghdad and building peace in Jerusalem,” he writes, “does not stand up to serious scrutiny.”
“The fighting in Iraq is caused by a brutal struggle for power, a proxy war fueled by Iran’s growing ambitions in the region and al-Qaeda’s ruthless campaign to establish a base of operations to export its totalitarian Islamic revolution,” Phillips explains. This fighting would likely continue, he argues, “regardless of events between Israelis and Palestinians.”
In any case, he continues, there’s no real prospect for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in the near future. For one thing, “the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority rejects not only peace negotiations with Israel but Israel’s right to exist.”
“If there is a link between the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq,” Phillips concludes, “it is the threat to a stable peace posed by terrorists supported by Syria and Iran.”
The failures of government-run health care
Health care is an issue of increasing concern for American voters. According to a recent Gallup poll, for example, fully 71 percent of Americans believe our health care system is in a state of crisis or suffers from major problems.
Liberals, of course, have their solution: government-run health care on the European model. But as Heritage health care expert Bob Moffit writes in California’s Press-Enterprise with Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, there are tremendous problems with this sort of one-size-fits-all, single-payer system.
Remodeling the UN
The United Nations has in many ways failed in its mission to reaffirm “fundamental human rights,” Heritage President Ed Feulner writes in The Chicago Sun-Times. “In recent years, the United Nations has often gone out of its way to avoid getting involved in the world's trouble spots. It ignored genocide in Darfur. Pulled out of Iraq in 2003. Done nothing to stem Iran's nuclear ambitions.”
He poses an important question: “Can an organization this compromised do much to improve things?”
Click here for Feulner’s answer.
In other news
- New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine today signed into law a bill granting the rights and responsibilities of marriage to same-sex couples. In yet another example of judicial overreach, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the legislature to adopt the legislation in a ruling earlier this year.
- Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court has said it will consider whether state laws upholding traditional marriage—enacted by the legislature in 1977 and the voters in 2000—are in violation of the state constitution’s prohibition on discrimination.
- President Bush said yesterday that he supports liberal plans to hike the minimum wage by 40 percent, though he said an increase should be linked with certain tax breaks. Minimum wage increases lead to unemployment among low-income workers, the very people the increases are supposed to help.
- The President also called for an increase in the size of the Army and Marines to meet the demands of the war on terror. “We’re not succeeding [in Iraq] nearly as fast as I had wanted,” he admitted.
- A British government report has recommended granting robots the same rights as humans. Computers with artificial intelligence “would want to have rights and they probably should,” one computer scientist told Financial Times. We should remember that rights are derived from nature and not from the demands of special interests, be they human or silicon-based.
- Eight congregations in Virginia separated from the Episcopal Church over the weekend, in a rejection of the national organization’s increasingly liberal theological views.
- “Pope Benedict XVI urged Christians on Wednesday to defend the spirit of Christmas against secular trends during his last general audience before the holiday,” the AP reports.
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.
- On Tuesday, January 9 at noon, author John Taylor explains how international finance has been used as a vital weapon in the war on terror.
- On Wednesday, January 10 at noon, author Mark Steyn will discuss his new book, America Alone, and the nation’s strategy in the war on terror.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
