Today has been a busy news day. Samuel Alito was confirmed, and will officially replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In case you were curious, the vote was 58-42, with four Democrats (Byrd, WI; Nelson, NE; Johnson, SD; Conrad, ND) and one Republican (Chaffee, RI) crossing the aisle (and Jeffords, the independent, voting with the Democrats). Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s widow and a prominent civil rights activist, died today. She was 78. The game of chicken that the United States and Europe are playing with Iran over nuclear weapons continues, with Iran once again threatening to restart their weapons programs if the Security Council gets involved. The Oscar nominations were announced (good day for Brokeback Mountain, Crash, and George Clooney; not so much for New World and King Kong). And, of course, tonight is President Bush’s sixth State of the Union address.
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Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections, it seems that Israel and the West are faced with a terrible dilemma: How can a foreign power support a government and yet oppose those who control that government? Keep in mind that the Palestinian Authority is a peculiar creation, because it was created by treaty and not by any kind of Constitutional Convention. There was no meeting of Palestinian leaders to write a constitution. There was not even a group that had conquered the Palestinian people and forced a constitution down their throats. Instead, Israel, Europe, and the United States needed a negotiating partner who could (somewhat legitimately) claim to speak for the Palestinian people as a whole. And thus the Palestinian Authority was born.
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Perhaps the oddest thing about the Iraq War is that no one is really sure, as far as I can tell, exactly why we are fighting it. Most wars that the United States fights have a pretty clear purpose and objective. Most of our 20th century wars (The first Persian Gulf War, the Korean War, and the two World Wars) were exactly the sort of wars that you would expect a world super-power to fight; that is, they were wars to protect the international status quo. All of them were fought with the specific objective to roll-back recent gains made by an aggressor nation, and to prevent that nation from attacking again in the future. Most of our 19th century wars (War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War) were intended to increase American power or territory, and are exactly the kinds of wars that you would expect an up-and-coming power to fight. The Vietnam War was fought to protect a friendly regime from communist over-throw (by domestic or foreign communists, depending on your point of view). And most of our other late-20th century invasions (Panama, Granada, etc.) were fought to overthrow unfriendly regimes. Like them or not, they are exactly the kinds of wars that we would expect a hegemon to fight. The current war, however, doesn’t really fit in any of those categories. Take a look at the predominant theories of the war, and perhaps you will see what I mean:
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One of the key tenets of the scientific method is reproducibility. Any experiment, in order to be scientifically valid, ought to be reproducible. In theory, the write-up of a scientific experiment ought to look something like a recipe: take a dash of salt, 3/4 of a cup of uranium, apply Einstein’s laws, and *poof* you get the result that I reported. After all, this is fundamentally the only way to actually tell if someone did something that they said that they did. And, ultimately, it is the only protection that science has against falsehoods; just look at the Cold Fusion story to see what I mean.
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