EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of some of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like.
‐ The White House has now completed a repudiation of its “stay the course” rhetoric — a repudiation that began, fitfully, months ago. Since no one — not even hawks — has much interest in staying the course if that means continuing to do exactly the same things we have been doing in Iraq, the administration’s rhetorical adjustment is shrewd. Bush also gave a frank press conference, acknowledging the disappointments and failures in Iraq and vowing to find new ways to address them. Since people had begun to suspect that his optimism on Iraq was detached from reality, this adjustment too was necessary. But, as ever, the most important events are on the ground. The Baghdad security plan has, predictably, failed. General Casey says he’s considering asking for more troops for Baghdad, and he should. Meanwhile, we are creating benchmarks for Iraqi political performance as a way of pressuring Prime Minister Maliki to make the difficult choice to confront the Shia militias that are helping drive Iraq into the abyss. It is often said that there isn’t a purely military solution to Iraq’s problems. But neither is there a purely political one. We need to try to do a better job on the security front so that the Iraqi government has the breathing room it needs to do the work that is necessary on the political front. This will take time, and we hope the White House has bought itself some with this repositioning.
‐ Democrats and their media allies proved once again that they have absolutely no shame when it comes to playing the race card. A Republican National Committee ad poked fun at Harold Ford Jr. with a sequence of faux “man on the street” interviews in which people explain why they plan to vote for Ford. One of them — a young blonde — giggles, “I met Harold at the Playboy party!” Within about two seconds of the ad’s airing, the entire liberal establishment denounced it as racist. Typical was Tim Russert on MSNBC, who asked RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, “The whole idea of having a blonde white woman winking at a black congressman, the notion of interracial sex, is not, in your mind, racist?” Russert’s question rather offensively assumes that Tennessee is full of racists who are bothered by interracial sex, but leave that aside. The point of the ad was to portray Ford as a gallivanting playboy whose lifestyle is at odds with the values of many voters. Saying so isn’t racist, it’s effective — which is the real reason Democrats and the media are so upset.
‐ What is going on in the languid federal investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people? Stephen Hatfill, a former government bio-defense scientist whose life was wrecked when the FBI labeled him — baselessly, it seems — a “person of interest” in the investigation, is now suing the government over its defamatory leaks. Last month, a federal judge ordered New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about Hatfill, to reveal his sources — and two of the leakers were described in the judge’s ruling as FBI agents. A constellation of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the 9/11 hijackers dabbled in anthrax was apparently put aside while the Bureau mulishly pursued its theory that a lone-wolf scientist perpetrated the attacks — a theory whose premise has been undermined by the forensic determination that the anthrax was not scientifically weaponized. And we learn now that the Bureau has just replaced the team that handled the case for five years. Essentially, the FBI is starting from scratch. Senate Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley has written Attorney General Gonzales, demanding some answers. He ought to get them — and so should the rest of us.
‐ Alberto Fernandez, the State Department’s director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, went on al Jazeera and, in his fluent Arabic, said that the United States — which has freed 26 million Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s sadistic tyranny — is guilty of “arrogance” and “stupidity” in Iraq. He has now apologized, lamely conceding that he “seriously misspoke.” (He has not yet explained what it was he meant to say when he made those execrable remarks; and he has made remarks in the past that similarly undermined U.S. policy.) How are we supposed to win the “war of ideas” when our ideas are so poorly represented?
‐ The genocide in Darfur has claimed 200,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people — and it is not over. Sudan refuses to let a United Nations force replace the ineffective African Union troops who have failed to stop the killing, and its intransigence meets with nothing but milquetoast diplomatic protest. Now Khartoum has expelled the U.N.’s envoy from Sudan. His offense was to report, on his personal blog, that the Sudanese army had suffered losses in fighting with rebels, and that the Sudanese government had responded by mobilizing janjaweed militias to do its bidding. If that is true, we can expect more indiscriminate slaughter. A Kosovo-style bombing campaign against Khartoum might make it rather more susceptible to the U.N.’s demands, but Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is betting that the West would rather ignore what is happening in Darfur until it is too late. Unfortunately, he is probably correct.
‐ The Department of Education has released new guidelines making it easier to establish single-sex public schools and classrooms. The change has been met with cries of “discrimination” — to which the obvious answer is that boys and girls are different, and evidence (along with common sense and experience) suggests that schools might better suit them if they were taught separately. The Department of Education’s rules require that a coeducational school always be available in addition to single-sex schools, but this is not enough for the partisans of diversity, who want their wishes to be imposed even — or especially — where not desired. Most likely they will try to recruit the courts to their side. Meanwhile, most people will probably welcome this expansion of educational choice.
See also our editorials on New Jersey & marriage, the media and the upcoming election , missile defense , and cloning in Missouri .