POVERTY, RACISM AND THE BLACK FAMILY

Anyone who is interested in the causes and consequences of urban, especially African-American, poverty in America should read this piece by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal. It thoroughly examines the long-running argument over the conclusions of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his report on the Black family.

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.

I urge you to follow the link and read the whole thing.

WPRO IN PROVIDENCE

I will be doing some fill-in work at WPRO-AM in Providence, Rhode Island this week. I will be doing the Steve Kass Show from 9 AM to 11:45 AM tomorrow and Friday. WPRO-AM can be found at 630 on the AM dial.

NEWS AND VIEWS

General William Westmoreland is dead at 91. While he can be justifiably criticized for his tactics during the Vietnam War, in my estimation he is not the one responsible for the debacle. That can be laid squarely at the feet of Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose instincts told him quite clearly that we couldn't win the war without an all-out effort against North Vietnam but, for domestic political reasons, he was unwilling to go that route. Instead, with the advice and encouragement of Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara and General Maxwell Taylor, among others, he ordered hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, including Westmoreland, to fight a war without the possibility of victory. LBJ was the true villain of the piece, and I suspect by 1968 he knew it, which is why he withdrew from that election and died only a few years after he left office.

Nicholas Kristof continues to argue that "engagement" with North Korea is our only option. I would use the word "appeasement", or perhaps "bribery". His re-telling of the story of the U.S.S. Pueblo, and the story of how it was recently moved under the noses of U.S. and Japanese intelligence, does offer a compelling, and frustrating, backdrop for the validity of his argument. Our unwillingness to make the sacrifices necessary to fight a major war, in Korea or elsewhere, probably means his route is the best one.

This man would disagree.

Finally, here is a good news/bad news story from the Muslim world. I think it perfectly illustrates the nature of the problem, which is a civil war within Islam. This truly is about the 'hearts and minds' of Muslims. Which side the majority choose to embrace will determine the scope, length and intensity of our own war with Islamofascist terrorists.

MORE NEWS AND VIEWS

Michael Ledeen thinks the London terrorists may not have been suicide bombers after all.

Seymour Hersh says the U.S. government used clandestine tactics to intervene in the Iraqi election, although it doesn't seem to have done them any good.

Michael Barone says Joe Wilson is a liar.

The Times of London says Iraq may be headed to an all-out civil war after a weekend of slaughter.

Finally, and completely unrelated to anything listed above, I have a Page One article in today's Portsmouth Herald about the process of getting cell towers built in the face of community opposition.

WAR NEWS AND VIEWS

Jeff Jarvis has some links and analysis to several articles I have also noted over the weekend, including one by the Dutch writer Leon de Winter who writes about the tragedy of too much tolerance in the Netherlands.

Kenan Malik also blames wooly-headed multiculturalism for weakening Britain.

An Imam in Detroit weighs in. Based on what he has written in the article, I assume he is a Shiite. When will Sunni Imams condemn Al Qaeda?

Gerard Baker strikes an optimistic tone about the effect of the London attacks on the British public.

The news seems already to have profoundly altered the debate in Britain about the war on terror. Suddenly there is a new seriousness in much of the political discussion about the challenge the United Kingdom faces. For the last few years, since 9/11, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, Britain has been fighting a phony war, like the first eight months of World War II, one that some even doubted was a war at all.

The anti-American, antiwar crowd, of left and right, allied with the apologists for terror on the extreme left and in some sections of the Muslim community, had been insisting that the threat of terrorism was either all a fantasy of George W. Bush's and Tony Blair's evil minds or, if it did exist, an entirely justified response by angry Muslims to the "illegal" invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But last week the phony war ended. Opinion polls showed a sudden leap in support for Tony Blair, giving him his first net positive approval in more than two years. They showed large majorities in favor of keeping British troops in Iraq and, most strikingly, a jump in the number of Brits who believed their country should stay close to the United States in its foreign policy--now a clear majority--rather than striking out on its own or siding with the Europeans.

What the British people seem to grasp is that the real threat to their own lives now comes not from the British role in Afghanistan or Iraq or Israel's relations with the Palestinians, but from a global ideology, one held by fanatical Islamists in Kandahar, Falluja, Gaza, or Leeds, who will not be appeased by dialogue or changes in policy, who want nothing less than the overthrow of the basic values of British society.

One can only hope it is so.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN IRAQ AND AL QAEDA

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes continues to hammer away at the misguided public notion that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein's government and Bib Laden's Al Qaeda network.

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."
U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Interesting. What's more interesting: The alleged plot was to have taken place in August 1998, the same month that al Qaeda attacked two U.S. embassies in East Africa. And more interesting still: It was to have taken place in the same month that the Clinton administration publicly accused Iraq of supplying al Qaeda with chemical weapons expertise and material.
But none of this was interesting enough for any of the major television networks to cover it. Nor was it deemed sufficiently newsworthy to merit a mention in either the Washington Post or the New York Times.

The Associated Press, on the other hand, probably felt obliged to run a story, since the "Summary of Evidence" was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP itself. But after briefly describing the documents, the AP article downplayed its own scoop with a sentence almost as amusing as it is inane: "There is no indication the Iraqi's alleged terror-related activities were on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government, other than the brief mention of him traveling to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi intelligence." That sentence minimizing the importance of the findings was enough, apparently, to convince most newspaper editors around the country not to run the AP story.

It's possible, of course, that the evidence presented by military prosecutors is exaggerated, maybe even wrong. The evidence required to designate a detainee an "enemy combatant" is lower than the "reasonable doubt" standard of U.S. criminal prosecutions. So there is much we don't know.

Indeed, more than two years after the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was ousted, there is much we do not know about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. We do know, however, that there was one. We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.
We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

All of this is new--information obtained since the fall of the Hussein regime. And yet critics of the Iraq war and many in the media refuse to see it. Just two weeks ago, President Bush gave a prime-time speech on Iraq. Among his key points: Iraq is a central front in the global war on terror that began on September 11. Bush spoke in very general terms. He did not mention any of this new information on Iraqi support for terrorism to make his case. That didn't matter to many journalists and critics of the war.

CNN anchor Carol Costello claimed "there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al Qaeda." The charitable explanation is ignorance. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knows better. Before the war he pointed to Zarqawi's presence in Iraq as a "substantial connection between Iraq and al Qaeda." And yet he, too, now insists that Saddam Hussein's regime "had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, it had nothing to do with al Qaeda."

Such comments reveal far more about politics in America than they do about the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship.

Read the whole thing.

THE WAR CONTINUES

Yesterday's bombings in London have stirred up a hornet's nest of contemplation. What does it all mean?

The Boston Globe has this, and this. The New York times has this, and this.

Gerard Baker asks "Is this the best they can do?"

Christopher Hitchens has some thoughts about the anticipated nature of the attack.

Victor Davis Hanson has an outstanding analysis of the problem we face in fighting this war, while John Derbyshire thinks the Brits will pull a "Spain".

Finally, check out John Derbyshire's piece from September of 2003 about the what it might look like if the United States was really fighting a war against the Jihadists.

WBZ THIS WEEK

I will be on WBZ-Boston this week filling in for Steve Leveille. I will be hosting the Wednesday, 7/6 and Thursday 7/7 shows from Midnight to 5 AM. WBZ can be heard at 1030 on the AM dial.

AMERICA...THE RELUCTANT WARRIOR

Here is a terrific piece by Gerard Baker in the Times of London about American attitudes about war and the military. I am in complete agreement with him.

History suggests that for the American public to continue its support for a protracted struggle, three conditions must be met. They must be convinced that their cause is a noble one. No country in the world is as animated by ideals as Americans. But idealism alone will not suffice. Even Americans won’t in the end fight for abstract principles, or for somebody else’s freedom.

The second condition is that a war must be seen as being conducted against a threat, immediate or emergent, against Americans. Thirdly, Americans will back a lengthy war only if they believe their leaders have a clear strategy for winning. In the end it was not lack of faith in the cause in Vietnam that undermined support for the war among a majority of the US population. It was a steadily strengthening conviction that their leaders had given up believing the war could be won.

Iraq today still meets criteria one and two. It remains a noble cause, in keeping with the highest American ideals — liberation of a people from a hideous tyranny. And it is a fight in defence of America’s interests. Establishing a democratic base in the Middle East remains the key to overturning the ideologies of fundamentalist hate that are the root causes of terrorism.
It is fulfilling the third condition that may be hardest now. Americans wonder increasingly whether their political leadership has a clear idea of where the struggle in Iraq is headed. At times they wonder whether their leadership actually knows or understands what is going on. No one can set out a detailed path to victory against an insurgent enemy. But the Bush Administration needs to demonstrate a commitment to getting the job done. That means not only protestations of resolve, but actions to back it up; specifically more troops if needed. Otherwise the steady attrition of support will gather ominous momentum.

He is absolutely correct. Americans will continue to back this war as long as they believe we are fighting to win. Douglas MacArthur said "there is no substitute for victory". The sense that victory was not possible or that our leaders weren't going to do what was necessary to make it possible was the thing that soured Americans on the wars in Korea and Vietnam. (Only the proximity to the intense patriotism of WWII, and the paranoia about communism, prevented Korea from igniting the protests that later plagued the country during Vietnam). Even as poll numbers show a majority of Americans believe invading Iraq was a mistake, a majority still does not advocate withdrawal, despite opinion in elite circles. The question remains the same. Is the President willing to do whatever is necessary to win? Only time will tell.