Our Views

Please move to Washington

The mayor of Washington is launching a plan to increase the population of the nation's capital by 100,000. Like other center cities, Washington has seen its population dwindle since the 1950s as first the white middle class and then the black middle class decamped for the suburbs and for the same reasons — better schools, less crime and more affordable housing. A series of incompetent and free-spending city governments didn't help matters.

If Williams does succeed in attracting new residents, the city will still never be the city it was. From a high of 802,000 in 1950, the city's population has stabilized at 571,000.

A thriving, livable national capital — much of it is already — is in everybody's interest, but the secret to drawing people back is first-rate city services, an art that has steadily eluded Washington's City Hall. While the mayor is considering an ambitious housing construction plan, his aides told The Washington Post that improving the schools and lowering the homicide rate were crucial to attracting new residents.

Sounds to us like a good place to start.

Ambiguity has its limitations

While assembling an assault force and threatening to invade, alone if need be, the president has also extracted strong new resolutions from the United Nations, assembled an international anti-Iraq coalition and succeeded in reintroducing weapons inspectors.

The administration received a mild setback this week when Hans Blix, the not very confidence-inspiring head of U.N. inspections, said his team would need "months" to complete its work. And he characterized a major progress report on the inspections due Jan. 27, as an interim report, an "update." A more complete report is due in March.

As yet, the inspectors have found no smoking gun, no conclusive evidence that Iraq is continuing its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs or that it has those weapons hidden away.

To give Blix his due, he is increasing the number of inspectors by 60 to 200, still far too few; adding eight helicopters plus high-altitude surveillance; and opening branch inspection offices in north and south Iraq. He has also agreed, with some reluctance, to take Iraqi weapons scientists and their families outside the country for interviews — with an implicit promise of asylum if they blow the whistle.

The White House is clearly unhappy with the pace of inspections and their lack of concrete results, but the official position is that the president is happy with the job the inspectors are doing and that the burden of compliance and disarmament is on Saddam Hussein, not them.

Now the White House has a new ambiguous formulation on Iraq: There is no timetable but time is running out. President Bush said Tuesday "time is running out."

He added, also somewhat ambiguously, "I'm sick and tired of games and deception; that's my view of timetables." And his spokesman Ari Fleischer repeatedly used the phrase "time is running out" without saying when that would be or what would happen when it did.

Fleischer said that while the president has no specific date for when inspections should come to an end, he "is looking forward to the Jan. 27th date. He believes it will be an important date."

All of this, plus the military buildup, is intended to increase the pressure on Iraq: for Saddam Hussein to cave and disarm or for his generals to depose him or for him to cut a deal to go into exile. Unconfirmed reports out of the Mideast say his emissaries have approached Egypt about asylum.

The policy of calculated ambiguity may be working, but the problem is that can't go on indefinitely. Time is indeed running out; no one seems sure just how fast.

Right gesture

But Riley made the right gesture after his defeat in going to see Barron and then holding a joint news conference.

There is no guarantee the two men will be able to work out all of their differences during the next four years. Some issues are bound to be too divisive for compromise.

However, the fact they were willing to talk to each other so soon after their battle indicates both men understand that today's political foe may be tomorrow's political ally. It's a level of political maturity that has not always been found on Goat Hill.

Your Views

We should send our convicts to Iraq

This may sound like a wild idea, but the discipline of military service is exactly what many convicted felons need. If we did this it would alleviate the overcrowded situation of our prisons and give convicts a way they could repay people for their crimes.

Stacking more and more prisoners behind walls, barbed wire and fences is not going to help. In prison, criminals learn how to be better criminals. If we shipped them off to protect America and fight terrorism they would learn the value of freedom and not be so eager to commit crimes upon their return.

It is futile to let so many people waste away their lives in prisons when we could put them in uniform, give them guns and send them to fight for America. I bet if this were done on a volunteer basis, thousands upon thousands of prisoners would volunteer. In return they could get their sentences reduced and/or receive pardons.

This would be a great incentive to prisoners to improve their lives. It would be an opportunity for criminals to give something back to society. I guarantee you if this were done it would have such a good result that we would not have to spend one red cent in additional taxpayer dollars to upgrade Alabama prisons, because they would soon be empty!

Let's stop pouring millions and millions of dollars into this or that state-sponsored prison system to satisfy moronic judicial rulings written by justices who have no imagination or creativity. Instead let's reform our criminal justice system, making soldiers and good citizens out of convicts.

Terry Lynch

P.O. Box 241035

6701 Winton Blount Blvd.

Montgomery

Laughable

The prospect of "the Bush team" carrying out Friedman's desires is laughable. We need look no further than right here at home, where Bush thumbs his nose at all but the wealthiest Americans. In policy after policy, from his breaking with global environmental agreements to his leniency with polluting power plants to his cynical claim to use the mantra of "double taxation" to reduce only dividend taxes that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy (since we all pay double taxes in many ways, as the Birmingham Post-Herald editorial position and columnist Paul Krugman have pointed out), Bush does virtually nothing to benefit our own people here. How can we expect him to want to use oil revenues obtained from a war with Iraq to benefit the people there?

Chris McDougal

100 Robert Jemison Drive, Apt. 305

Shame

When the President refuses to engage in dialogue with North Korea, he makes the great American land of the free and the home of free speech look bad.

He should be willing to talk with the devil himself if it would prevent nuclear war, but Bush chooses to communicate with this rogue state indirectly ... through Bill Richardson, the former secretary of energy and current governor of New Mexico. And not only that ... the president insisted the North Korean delegate come all the way to the state of New Mexico to meet with Richardson.

What does Bush hope to accomplish by pursuing such a haughty, hard-line policy? He must know that this country has always prided itself on being a free and open society, with an individual bill of rights that protects all its citizens. Yet, the president is too arrogant and prideful to meet the North Koreans himself.

President Bush surely is a poor salesman for the philosophy of Jesus Christ as delivered by Christ himself in his Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps Bush should reread Matthew five.

James M. Carroll

2201 Southern Shade Blvd.

Knoxville

President doth protest too much

Who benefits most from eliminating estate taxes, eliminating corporate taxes, eliminating taxes on dividends, reducing personal income taxes and using our military's blood to protect overseas assets of multinational corporations?

Is it the 1 percent of Americans who own more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and increasing, or the working class that bears the unemployed and homeless burden?

Bush's doo-doo economic programs are more appropriate for a Constitution that starts "We the corporations in order to form a more perfect corporate state."

Will "We the people" react to Bush's strategy before our dream of a "more perfect union" disappears forever? Not if only 41 percent of the eligible voters vote!

Joe Boyett

3807 Rouse Ridge Road

Montgomery

Left out

It was a chilling story indeed and if the allegations are true, then these are actions for which law enforcement authorities in any democracy — even one at war against terrorists — should be held accountable. What was perplexing, however, is that the Post-Herald, in this New York Times News Service account, only presented part of the story. A quick read of the same story in the New York Times Internet edition, showed some important disparities between the two versions.

The New York Times Internet version, unlike the version carried in the Post-Herald, included some additional information, which somehow didn't make it into our local paper's version.

In the internet version, the Times reporter noted: It is impossible to tell how many of the stories heard on the streets of Hebron are true.

The internet version of the story also included this: Ms. Pearl Liat, an Israeli border police spokesman, said the Israeli police did not engage in systemic brutality. Often, she said, the claims made by Palestinians fell apart once they were scrutinized.

Not everything Israel or any country does is always right. But what readers and viewers of the news media should expect — and require — is fair coverage; coverage that puts Israel's actions in context and provides full and appropriate background information. And it's especially important right now, so that the American people have a full and balanced picture of Israel's fight against terror.

Richard Friedman, executive vice president

Birmingham Jewish Federation

3966 Montclair Road

There's a reason

Armond "Si" Simmons

104 Wadsworth Lane

Pell City

Look Back

From Birmingham Post-Herald files:

Top of page