Vicious Cycle of Child Abuse, Neglect

Alvin Poussaint, an African American authority on child psychiatry, says blacks and other Americans need to pay more attention to a festering problem in child-rearing among poorer, often single, black parents. In "Spare the rod, save the child," columnist Clarence Page, who is himself black, gives the sorry details. The column appeared recently in The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.

The immediate problem, per Page, is that "African-American kids are being expelled from preschool at a much higher rate than other racial or ethnic groups ... African-American children are twice as likely to be expelled from preschool programs as white or Latino children, and five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children." Why? Poussaint says it's not racial profiling by school officials that's mostly to blame. Instead, "early anger" among three- and four-year-old black children leads to their misbehavior and expulsion.

That anger in turn often results, quite predictably, from parental abuse and neglect.

We're talking here in part about the 80 percent of black parents who believe that when their kids act up, they ought to "beat the devil out of them," Poussaint says. The psychiatrist goes on: "And research shows the more you beat them, the angrier they get. It is not good discipline."

Just as wrongheaded as outright corporal punishment is "black parents cursing, shaking or slapping their prekindergarten kids or demeaning them with statements like, 'You're no good, just like your father'." Or, the parent will simply neglect to discipline the child in a more appropriate way. Page then adds:

Single parents, usually moms, can easily be overwhelmed by the challenges involved in raising children, especially boys. In the worst cases they pass the consequences of their anger down from one generation to another.

Those consequences can later include social isolation, unruly school behavior and violence. Lacking appreciation at home, kids will often shop for it out on the street.

So childhood abuse/neglect not only breeds — via internalized anger that is always going to find some outlet — street crime, gang violence, drug use, educational failure, entrenched poverty, and other social pathologies. It also produces, eventually, parents who have their own bottled-up anger and who take it out on a new generation of kids: theirs. And the vicious cycle begins again.


This is an insight which oldstyleliberal finds most compelling. Anger breeds anger, via childhood abuse and neglect, with social ills in this country as its unfortunate side effect. We all need to pay attention to this syndrome; race is, after all, the third rail of American politics.

oldstyleliberal is accordingly mindful of the side effect of the side effect, as one might call it: non-black Americans develop a negative impression of black Americans, which turns into a stereotype, which turns into racial profiling and worse.

Thus we all need to be open to possible solutions to this problem. "What," asks Page, "can be done?" He answers that a Yale study "found that preschools that had psychologists and other support for their teachers had a lower expulsion rate. Back at home, communities may need to provide more resources, whether voluntary or through local social service agencies, to help parents cope. We need to help more parents learn about what works best in raising children — before the problems with their families become our problems."

Catamaran Politics

Catamaran: two hulls joined by a frame

The image to the right is a picture of (a military version of) a catamaran. It is from this Wikipedia article, which defines the catamaran as "a type of boat or ship consisting of two hulls joined by a frame."

oldstyleliberal defines "catamaran politics" as a habit of preferring, as it were, the frame to the hulls. Think of the hulls as the ideological right and left wings; it doesn't matter which hull represents which ideological wing. The object of catamaran politics is to keep the ship of state perfectly balanced over the two wings.

President Bill Clinton was a master of catamaran politics — which have also been called "triangulation" and "Third Way liberalism" — especially in his approach to reforming welfare. Political pundit Joe Klein writes of the topic in "Three Cheers for Triangulation: What Lieberman's primary defeat means," in a recent issue of Time magazine:

... [Clinton's] philosophy was both successful and profound. It proposed the achievement of liberal ends through market-oriented conservative means. Welfare reform, which combined a work requirement with significant financial incentives for the working poor, was the best example of how the philosophy might work. Unfortunately, Monica Lewinsky's thong show prevented further successes — and Al Gore and John Kerry foolishly sidled away from the Third Way, toward the [Democratic] party's electorally lethal special-interest groups.

Another name for what I'm calling catamaran politics, says Klein, is "bipartisan moderation — which has the additional advantage [over the extremism of either political wing] of being the highest form of patriotism and the only route to victory in a time of war."

Klein says the defeat of three-term Democratic senator Joe Lieberman in the recent Connecticut primary, at the hands of Ned Lamont, an anti-Iraq War candidate, set off a war of words between Lamont-supporting "blognuts" of the left and Bush administration "wingnuts" of the right. The latter were led by Vice President Dick Cheney, "the nation's wingnut in chief," who "actually said Lieberman's defeat would give aid and comfort to our terrorist 'adversaries and al-Qaeda types'."

The former, repesented by "Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org and therefore, perhaps, the nation's blognut in chief," gloated about Lieberman's loss as the "death of triangulation."

If Pariser is correct, it's bad news, writes Klein:

It was Bush's disastrous decision to go to war — and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources — that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush's feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. [Bush political strategist Karl] Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation's best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal's quasi-wingnut editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, "[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well."

Accordingly, "the essential felony of the Bush White House [is] that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support." Bush spurns catamaran politics at a time when Clintonian deftness is sorely needed.

So, too, does the far left wing of Clinton's own party. Alas and alack.

Tipping Point Against Iraq War?

Heretofore, it has admittedly been difficult for oldstyleliberal to answer the simple question, Should we get out of Iraq? Recent shifts in the attitudes of pundits he respects have brought him to a tipping point, however. He now thinks a "win" in Iraq to be too much to hope for.

"Snake Eyes," a brief article by Hendrik Hertzberg in the August 21, 2006, New Yorker pretty much says it all. Hertzberg compares a recent opinion piece by centrist and former war supporter Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times to the famous on-the-air renunciation of the Vietnam War by Walter Cronkite in 1968. (The Friedman piece may be read for free here.) Friedman writes:

It seemed to me over the last three years that, even with all the Bush team’s missteps, we had to give our Iraqi partners a chance to produce a transitional government, then write a constitution, then hold an election and then, finally, put together their first elected cabinet. But now they have done all of that — and the situation has only worsened ... we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.

Accordingly, says Friedman, "we need to try a last-ditch Bosnia-like peace conference that would bring together all of Iraq’s factions and neighbors ... For such a conference to come about, though, the U.S. would probably need to declare its intention to leave."

And, Hertzberg adds:

In a Washington Post column a day [earlier than Friedman's piece], the relentlessly centrist David S. Broder, citing his colleague Thomas E. Ricks’s new book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” admitted that “the hope for victory is gone” and deplored “the answer from Bush,” which he characterized this way: “Carry on. Do not waver. And do not question the logic of prolonging the agony.”

Broder's opinion piece, "Doubling Two Bad Bets?", chastised the Bush administration for its blind stubbornness in holding out for both the total destruction of Hezbollah by Israeli forces in Lebanon and the eventual U.S. quelling of the sectarian insurgents in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal agrees with Friedman and Broder. As Friedman says, "Since the Bush team never gave us a Plan A for Iraq, it at least owes us a Plan B."

Moral Questions in Israel's Struggle with Hezbollah

As might be intuited from a recent post, The Pan-Islamist Threat, oldstyleliberal tends to side with Israel when it is attacked from within or without by those who loudly say they oppose its very existence. Hezbollah, now attacking Israel from Lebanon, would seem to qualify in that regard. So it is with a great deal of reluctance that oldstyleliberal concludes that the way Israel is presently conducting its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon leaves way too much to be desired, in terms of moral propriety.

The reasoning oldstyleliberal employs to arrive at this sad conclusion is aptly and succinctly presented in this August 4 article by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. The title of the article summarizes its basic perspective: "Fog of War Is No Cover for Causing Civilian Deaths." Though "an honest reckoning of the conduct of Israeli forces in Lebanon is difficult" because "the awful bloodshed and intense emotions of war are not conducive to careful moral reasoning," Roth writes, he takes Israel to task nonetheless for several of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's potentially misleading claims in recent speeches.

First of all, Olmert's statement that "the Israeli military exercises great care to avoid harming Lebanese civilians" is called severely into question, in view of the fact that "Human Rights Watch investigators in Lebanon have recorded an appalling number of incidents in which civilians and civilian objects were hit with no apparent military justification." Roth lists the high civilian death tolls and massive amounts of destruction at Dweir, Marwahin, Beflay, Srifa, "nine square blocks of southern Beirut," and Qana as examples of Israel's insufficient care in safeguarding Lebanese civilians and their living conditions.

Does Hezbollah's "abusive" and "aggressive" intent to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth," or the fact that Hezbollah started these hostilities, justify Israel in sometimes harming civilians, as Olmert seems to claim when he suggests that Israel ought to be "given more latitude"? No, says Roth:

The obligations to respect international humanitarian law, including to refrain from deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and to take all feasible precautions against civilian casualties, persist regardless of the conduct of one's opponent.

Can Israel's less-than-fully-successful attempts to warn civilians to flee the areas that are about to be attacked excuse the subsequent unfortunate deaths of those who have stayed? No, says Roth,

... the failure to heed [a warning] does not create a free-fire zone. If it did, Palestinian militant groups might "warn" all settlers to leave Israeli settlements and then be justified in treating as legitimate targets those who remained.

Does Hezbollah bear the true blame for civilian deaths because it is using the Lebanese civilians as "human shields"? Roth says that Hezbollah has been guilty of violations of "international humanitarian law [that] does prohibit the deliberate use of civilians to shield fighters and military assets, and [that] requires all parties to do everything feasible to station their forces away from civilians." Yet the scale of the civilian carnage in Lebanon well exceeds any level commensurate with Hezbollah's "human shield" violations. When, as has been too often well-documented, Hezbollah troops are nowhere near Israel's chosen strike locations, the "human shield" argument doesn't work.

Nor, says Roth, do the putative misdeeds of the Lebanese government in allowing Hezbollah to continue to operate in south Lebanon prior to this war's outbreak justify the civilian carnage: "A government's misdeeds never justify attacks on its people."

What about the targeting by Israel of Lebanon's infrastructure — is it permissible? No, says Roth,

... international humanitarian law permits attacks on infrastructure only if it is making an effective military contribution, and the military benefits of its destruction outweigh the civilian costs. That case is difficult, if not impossible, to make for the extensive attacks on electrical facilities, bridges and roadways throughout the country.

oldstyleliberal is not sure he agrees here. It is his understanding that Lebanese bridges and roads are being devastated to keep Hebollah from rearming: restocking the rockets it is raining down daily on northern Israel, killing civilians there. Of course, it is an open question whether the strategy is actually succeeding. If it isn't, then the infrastructure attacks are indeed morally suspect.

On the whole, oldstyleliberal thinks Israel needs to clean up its act, if it wants to be seen as taking the moral high road – which it ought to do, to avoid paying for having pursued the opposite course of action somewhere down the road when its chickens come home to roost.

The Pan-Islamist Threat

"Actually, the Middle East Is Our Crisis Too," writes conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in this week's Time. In Gaza, he says, Hamas

... is fighting not to create a 23rd Arab state but, as its charter explains, to recover "an Islamic Waqf." Meaning? Territory claimed under the Islamic precept that "any land the Muslims have conquered by force ... during the times of [Islamic] conquests" more than a millennium ago belongs to Muslims forever because "the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations until the Day of Judgment."

From Lebanon, meanwhile,

Islamist Hizballah — client of Islamist Iran, ally of Islamist Hamas — provokes a war with Israel. Hizballah's motivation has nothing to do with Arab nationalism. Israel withdrew from every square meter of Lebanese territory six years ago. But legal obligation means nothing to Hizballah. Like Hamas and Iran, Hizballah views the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.

Hamas and (as I'll spell it) Hezbollah are, Krauthammer says, part of the movement called pan-Islamism, unlike the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the late Yasser Arafat, which was just a "secular, vaguely socialist and entirely nationalist movement." Even Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pan-Arabist, not pan-Islamic. "The successor Arab rulers [to the pan-Arabists of yore] no longer dream of a single Arab state," writes Krauthammer, "and have grudgingly come to accept a small Jewish state in part of Palestine. Hence the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan signed with Israel."

But pan-Islamism is unwilling to tolerate a Jewish state in its midst. The destruction of Israel, once but a geopolitical goal, has become a tenet of religious duty, in service to a "larger Islamist vision of a cataclysmic showdown with the infidel West as a harbinger of the return of the 12th Imam and the End of Days."

So, as Israel's staunchest ally, we're in for a "struggle against [pan-Islamism that] will be long and painful, and enduringly surreal."


We may be able to take some comfort from the fact that pan-Islamism has, in effect, two rival churches, with two Vaticans and two Popes vying for primacy — like Rome and Avignon in medieval times. The "Iran-Hizballah-Hamas axis" is one of these "churches" (even though Iran and Hezbollah are Shi'ite and Hamas is Sunni). The other "church" of pan-Islamism consists of al-Qaeda and its spawn, now trying to catch back up to the wave pulsed out recently in the Middle East by the activity of the first axis.

Krauthammer asserts:

For all their medieval trappings, these two sources of Islamic fervor now vying for possession of the newly transmuted Arab-Israeli dispute confirm the Bush Administration's view that, after a holiday from history in the 1990s, the global ideological struggles of the 20th century have been rejoined with a change only in the cast. In place of the ersatz Western religions of fascism and communism, radical Islam, bastard child of a real and great religion, has arisen. Led by two rival Vaticans, one in Tehran and the other cavebound on the Afghan-Pakistani border, it raises the banner of a militant religion that will not rest until, as al-Zawahiri pledged, Islam has retaken every piece of Waqf "from Spain to Iraq."

I'm not sure I concur that the Bush administration has the right attitude on all this. My understanding is that the administration is stuck ideologically in a world where states — nations, countries — remain the major players. By Krauthammer's own logic, this will never do.


oldstyleliberal likes the approach outlined in a companion article, "Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism," under the subhead, "By insisting it is, President Bush clouds the real issues, which are how much the U.S. should do for Israel and what it should do to Iran." Lisa Beyer, in her analysis, insists Bush is wrong to lump Hezbollah and Hamas under the umbrella epithet of "global terrorism." Doing so obscures the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas don't threaten us directly ... at least, not yet. We need to keep our powder dry, so to speak, and direct our ammunition only at those who threaten us face-to-face. Otherwise, U.S. power loses credibility abroad, as we stretch ourselves too thin.

Where Krauthammer sees a single pan-Islamist movement with two rival "Vaticans," Beyer maintains that such a view

... implies that Hizballah has the same mind-set and agenda as the global jihadis of al-Qaeda and its imitator groups, but they are not the same. Hizballah's military mission is principally to defend Lebanon from Israeli intrusion and secondarily to destroy the Jewish state. As an Islamist group under Iran's sway, Hizballah would like to see Islamic rule in Lebanon. The global jihadis think much bigger. They are Salafists, radicals who seek to revive the original and, to their minds, pure practice of Islam and establish a caliphate from Spain to Iraq, in all the lands where Islam has ever ruled. The Salafists are Sunni, and Hizballah is Shi'ite, which means their hatred for each other is apt to rival their hatred for the U.S. Al-Qaeda's late leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, used to say Shi'ites were worse than Americans and launched a brutal war on them in Iraq.

We can combine the Krauthammer and Beyer outlooks, which are really not as incompatible as they seem, by noting that the former attitude inspirits us for the long fight ahead while the latter cautions us not just to fight hard, but to fight smart. If there are fissures within pan-Islamism, a smart fight against it would seem to require that we do everything we can diplomatically, politically, economically, and socially to drive a wedge into it — using "soft" power, as the policy wonks say.

If there are moderate and hard-line wings in Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to play our cards so as to support the former at the expense of the latter — holding our noses all the while, perhaps. The moderates have, after all, shown signs in the past of being willing to accept our ally Israel's existence. Per the Beyer article:

"The strategy should be to identify the fissures in a terrorist group and widen those chasms to cause it to explode, to isolate the hard-liners and strengthen the moderates," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. and the author of the new book Inside Terrorism. "The risk of painting all terrorists with one brush is that you miss those signs, and so you miss those opportunities."

It would be downright stupid of us to drive together our various enemies, whether direct or by proxy, when there is now, practically speaking, faint daylight between them:

An additional downside to tossing all terrorists under one heading is that if you treat them the same, address them as one, you may encourage them to see themselves that way. "Bush has really been the great unifier of all the previously divided and often mutually hostile groups we're trying to defeat rather than assemble," says François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. "Waging war in Iraq to combat terrorism has transformed Iraq into a nexus of terrorism it hadn't been before. Justifying the operation in Lebanon by putting Hizballah on the same terrorism shelf as al-Qaeda is getting radical Sunnis to back radical Shi'ites in a way we'd have never imagined."

The current Bush they're-all-terrorists rhetoric hurts our cause by feeding Muslim "paranoia." We need, Beyer suggests, leadership with greater capacity for strategic nuance, since

... there is no one ideology among terrorists. And terrorism isn't even an ideology. It's a tactic. The President would be better off leveling with the American people. The U.S. has interests in the Middle East, such as protecting Israel. Some of them are subtle and require explaining, like resisting Iran's efforts to expand its influence. And many of them have nothing to do with global terrorism.

Well, "nothing to do with global terrorism" puts it a bit too strongly, oldstyleliberal feels. Many of them, it is true, don't threaten us directly. But they still feed into global crosscurrents that could capsize our ship. Krauthammer is right about that.