Top 10 Reasons Not to Grow up in Iraq as a Child

Imagine growing up in Iraq which has been dubbed the world’s best-known conflict and its least well-known humanitarian crisis.

1. The continuing violence in Iraq displaces 25,000 children every month as their families are forced to seek shelter in other parts of Iraq or outside its borders.

2. Approximately 75,000 children were living in camps or temporary shelters by the end of this year.

3. This year alone, 1350 children were detained by military and police authorities for alleged security violations.

4. Iraq has anywhere from 3 to 4 million orphans, according to its Ministry for Planning and Development Corporation.

Since about 90% of those who die violent deaths are men, the number of unsupported widows and orphans in the country keeps rising. Out of the millions of orphans in Iraq, only 470 are supported by the government according to Nadira Habib, a member of the Committee on Family and Childhood Affairs in the Iraqi parliament.

5. It is estimated that 122,000 Iraqi children died in 2005 before reaching their 5^th birthday.

The under-five mortality rate (U5MR) is considered a critical indicator of the well-being of children. Expressed as a rate per 1000 live births, it is the probability of dying between birth and exactly five years of age. Iraq’s under-five mortality rate in 2005 was 125 compared to the United States’ U5MR of 7.

6. One out of three children in Iraq is malnourished and underweight.

Acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 years of age had been steadily declining for two years until the U.S. decided to invade Iraq. Twenty months after the invasion, the rate of acute malnutrition had almost doubled as it shot back up from 4% to 7.7% in late 2004.

7. In May 2007, UNICEF reported that 25 percent of Iraqi children between the ages of six months and five years suffer from acute or chronic malnutrition.

Did you know that the nutrition issue facing Iraqi children a generation ago was obesity? Malnutrition only appeared as a problem in the 1990s with U.S.-championed U.N. trade sanctions against Iraq.

8. An estimated 760,000 Iraqi children were out of primary school in 2006.

UNICEF reports say an additional 220,000 children of primary-school age may have had their education disrupted in the year 2007 alone.

9. Only 28 percent of Iraq’s 17-year olds sat their final exams this past summer.

Furthermore, only 40 percent of those that did sit their final exams in South and Central Iraq achieved a passing grade.

10. The figures quoted above can only attempt to capture the slightest part of the ordeal that Iraqi children face every day.

Any amount of words or numbers will fail to do justice to their suffering…to the parents, relatives, shelter, health, laughter, and peace that Iraqi children have lost as a result of this war.

Earmarks: Bad Policy yet Good Politics

President Bush’s press conference yesterday sparked a fierce debate about pork barrel spending which has been skyrocketing over the past decade. Many regard earmarks as corruptive and wasteful, arguing that they stymie progress, thwart innovation, and generally muck up the spending process. Others point out that earmark money is at least spent in the U.S., boosts the American economy, and employs American workers.

A lot of the discourse surrounding earmarks consists of bitter, partisan blame game. President Bush chastised Democratic leaders yesterday for failing to live up to their campaign promise to curb pork barrel spending. Democrats are calling the Bush administration's attempts at eleventh hour "fiscal conservatism" hypocritical given the trillions of dollars it has drained in the Iraq war.

Amidst all this finger-pointing, there is also the never-ending debate of whether earmarks are down 25 percent according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, 43 percent as the Democratic leadership claims, or 13 percent according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Rather than get entangled in the exact magnitude of pork barrel appropriations, we would all be better served by examining what is fueling these undeniably egregious Congressional pet projects.

We need to step back from the partisan bickering and acknowledge that pork barrel spending persists today regardless of the party in power because it simply is an “excellent reelection tool”. Tom Evslin does a great job here of explaining why “earmarks are a big reason why most Americans have a low regard for congress as a whole BUT continue to reelect incumbents at an overwhelming rate.”

Earmarks are a crucial way that lawmakers channel money back home and boost their chances of reelection. Some people defend these pork barrel appropriations as allowing states to micro-manage. However, the sheer number of these projects and questionable allocations – such as bike trails and Alaska’s now-infamous “bridge to nowhere” – has amply highlighted its downright wastefulness.

Before jumping on the bandwagon to criticize the other party for not doing enough to curb this wasteful spending, we must understand that earmark projects – and the bad policies they enact – are widespread because they are good politics. As long as our lawmakers have the opportunity to score themselves some reelection credits by inserting their pet projects into massive appropriations bills, pork barrel spending will not fall… regardless of our representatives’ benign intentions.

President Bush has the wonderfully convenient opportunity to get rid of many of the earmarks tacked onto the $516 billion omnibus spending bill because he doesn’t have to worry about reelection. If we are to see any lasting reform on pork barrel spending, however, the structural incentives that encourage, even necessitate earmarks must somehow be eliminated.

Clinton and the Battle of the Sexes

Does Senator Hillary Clinton’s fight for the White House reflect a nationwide Battle of the Sexes?

This article in the Washington Post today claims just that.

The author’s argument is two-fold.

Firstly, Lois Romano points to the unmistakable gender gap in voting preferences.

The New York Daily News national poll shows that in a head-to-head match-up with Hillary Clinton, she would have the support of 45 percent of women voters, compared to 30 percent for Giuliani. Given that more women head to the polls than men (In the 2004 presidential election, 67.3 million women voted compared with 58.5 million men) this voting gender gap may help Clinton outpace her rivals.

In Iowa, Clinton's support among male Democratic caucus-goers lags behind Barack Obama, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. While support for Clinton and Obama is fairly evenly split among women voters (36 and 32 percent respectively), a much larger gender gap emerges when considering men. Obama successfully claims the support of 33 percent of Iowan men surveyed compared to the measly 21 percent commanded by Clinton.

The gender gap in voting is perhaps most evident when considering which of the presidential candidates people want to prevent from becoming President. Senator Clinton was the overwhelmingly popular “anti-pick” with as many as 40 percent of American voters saying they would vote to keep her out of the White House. Clinton had a clear lead in this poll! The total for rival candidate Rudy Guiliani who came in at second place was only 17 percent, less than half of Clinton’s score.

The new Fox 5-The Washington Times-Rasmussen Reports survey shows that while Clinton performed poorly in many demographics, younger male voters dislike her the most. A whopping 53 percent of male voters younger than 40 said they would use their vote to keep Clinton from winning the presidency. The figure drops to just 39 percent amongst young women voters, indicating a stark gender gap.

Lois Romano’s claim in the Washington Post goes beyond this gendered difference in voting preferences though. He argues that men tend to dislike Hillary more and “the stated reasons for their aversion to Clinton seem more complicated and …far more visceral than substantive”.

They just don't like her, some say. They don't know what she stands for. They believe her word is no good, that she doesn't believe that she can be held accountable. They see her as intellectual snob who lets you know she's smarter. They say she sounds like everybody's ex-wife. They can't tell if she's the loyal, traditional wife who stayed with her husband for love after his humiliating extramarital affair -- or a canny politician who stayed because it was politically expedient.

The second argument Romano makes is that male skepticism about Clinton based on such flimsy attributes can plausibly be attributed to sexism.

It may very well be true that American men aren’t ready for a female president but I don’t think there is any evidence about that just yet. After all, the New York Daily News national poll of women revealed that forty percent of respondents said they think Clinton stayed with her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, after his affair with Monica Lewinsky for political advantage.

The most recent Iowa poll shows that Obama’s comparative advantage against Clinton lies in his “honesty and trustworthiness” on which score he leads the New York Senator 34-18 percent.

The results of these two polls indicate that men and women share the so-called ‘visceral’ reasons for disliking Clinton. While the gender gap of voting preferences is hard, cold fact, it can’t automatically and convincingly be attributed to the sexism of American men.

The Kyoto Protocol: Why the U.S. must ratify the climate change pact

As the U.S. continues to drag its feet on the Kyoto treaty, a fierce debate continues worldwide about the efficacy, fairness and even the very need of the climate change pact. As is the norm with any hotly contested issue, a lot of misinformation is being thrown around with regards to the Kyoto plan for tackling global warming.

An article in the American Thinker reports:

If we look at carbon dioxide emissions data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following:

• Emissions worldwide increased 18 percent.

• Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21 percent.

• Emissions from non-signers increased 10 percent.

• Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6 percent.

By providing statistics showing that countries that signed the Kyoto treaty went on to be worse emissions offenders than countries that didn’t, the author is trying to argue that countries that signed the Kyoto treaty aren’t putting their money where their mouth is.

But a more careful look at the same table (#1317) that American Thinker derived its startling statistics from suggests something else.

American Thinker was content with simply comparing country emissions levels in two randomly plucked years, 1997 and 2004. When I examined emissions levels for a group of years before 1997 with those for a few years after 1997, I got very different results.

Comparing the pre-Kyoto period of 1991-1997 to the post-Kyoto period of 1997-2004, I find that:

• Emissions worldwide increased 11.76 percent.

• Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 11.65 percent.

• Emissions from non-signers increased 12.01 percent.

• Emissions from the U.S. increased 9.55 percent.

From these figures, it becomes obvious that American Thinker’s sensational results were being driven merely by data from two randomly chosen, unrepresentative and idiosyncratic years.

Their report also overlooked the fact that 27 of the thirty-odd countries that have not ratified the Kyoto treaty are responsible for less than 0.1% of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions as measured in 1980 (same table). When measured as a percentage of today’s higher emissions levels, these countries’ contribution drops even further! When the non-signers group has this many countries which produce such little emissions, of course the rate of increase is going to be very low.

All countries that are serious polluters and therefore need to cut back on emissions have committed to doing so, except for the U.S. Some dissenters may point out that even using the figures above, the performance of signers versus non-signers isn’t anything to write home about.

It is true that there is no significant difference between the emissions growth in the countries that signed the Kyoto treaty and those that didn’t sign it. But that’s because while the emissions data is only available up until 2004, Kyoto went into force in most of the countries only in the year 2005 or later.

Obama and the Audacity of Naiveté

Political analysts and rival U.S. presidential candidates are fast realizing that bashing Obama's lack of experience may be the most viable line of attack against the Illinois Senator. Rumors that Obama is secretly Muslim have not done much and will likely take a backseat after his appearance at Church last Sunday. Furthermore, Hilary Clinton's recent slide in the polls painfully highlighted the inefficacy of slandering his kindergarten essays and candidly admitted teenage experiments.

Former President Bill Clinton tried yesterday to return the American public's focus to the fact of Obama's naiveté. He wondered out loud whether voters are "prepared to roll the dice" on the forty-six year old who joined the Senate in 2005, and started running a mere year after that.

Today, Paul Krugman also chimed in on his New York Times op-ed, criticizing what he calls the Senator's inexperienced "Big Table Fantasies".

Krugman criticizes Obama for wanting to engage with the insurance and drug lobbies in the health care reform process that he, like most of the other Democratic candidates, is promising.

"We want to reduce the power of drug companies and insurance companies and so forth, but the notion that they will have no say-so at all in anything is just not realistic," Obama said in the Democratic Debate at Des Moines, Iowa last week.

Krugman argues that Obama is being unrealistic because the drug and insurance companies - the cause of many of our health care problems - are unlikely to have a constructive role in health reform. He describes it as a simplistic, rational incentives story. The drug and insurance companies see their profits reduced by any serious health reform plan, and therefore will grind their teeth against any and all such proposed changes.

While Krugman is right about these companies being opposed to reforms, he misses the point that simply ignoring these companies doesn't make them go away. Stiff resistance from these industries is guaranteed. Given this implacable position, however, what is the best that any contender hoping to bring about serious health care reform can do? Working with the industries and including them in the process, no matter how highly contested it may be (and it definitely will be!) seems more practical.

Obama has said, "...it's time to let the drug and insurance industries know that while they'll get a seat at the table, they don't get to buy every chair." But how can we be sure the drug and insurance industries will be content with not buying every chair?

It seems that they were in at least one particular instance in Illinois in 2004.

Obama was instrumental in the successful legislation of the Health Care Justice Act which was narrowly passed by the Illinois Senate in May, 2004. One of his three amendments to the bill made changes favorable to the insurance industry, but in doing so brought them on board with a policy that they had vigorously been trying to sink from day one.

That industries oppose any policy that hurts their profits is obvious. Once substantial bipartisan support develops in the legislature for the policy, making it increasingly likely to become law, however, it is rational for the same industries to want to have an input in the policy-making process. Their strategy then shifts from one of 'dragging their feet' with regards to the proposed measure to trying to work with the disliked but inevitable policy measure in order to minimize their damages.

All relevant parties affected by a certain measure can and need to have a constructive role in its development. Given the undeniable power of lobbies in U.S. politics, I think Obama's strategy of giving the industries a seat on the big table is far from fantasy. It is a step toward acknowledging their influence on the policy-making framework, and therefore, molding it too.