The Question of the Day - OpEd

With the passage of Labor Day, we have officially entered the silly season, otherwise known as the political home stretch. Regrettably our partisan passions are being appealed to just when we need to be thinking as one folk, one people. There is a reason that our tradition as to foreign policy has been non partisanship up until recent times, and our factionalism now is playing into the hands of our enemy.

One of our great Chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg noted it was essential to unite our official voice at the water’s edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world. On a very contentious issue, he once noted as to President Truman, “He is the only President we shall have, and this is the only Congress we shall have during the next two critical years; the quicker we reach a working relationship so that we can have a united policy, the safer our country will be”

Well, here is the problem. There don’t seem to be any Vandenbergs out there today, and our ship of state, the only bulwark we have against the raging seas that seek to overwhelm us is doing its best to not be swamped by the partisanship of the day. The loyal opposition is doing everything it can to shovel water into the boat rather than help bail. It is harmful, and it has to stop.

If I can restate the case of the opposition, it is that we got into Iraq by mistake, and they believe that the case for invading Iraq was purposely overstated, and therefore they were misled into their support. In their view, Iraq is not properly part of the “War Against Terror”, and we should…..? We should…what?

I am not really sure what it is they say we should do. And that is the problem. It gets very foggy at this point. Why would I decide to pass control of funding and oversight to them if I don’t know what they propose?

Whether Iraq should have become a shooting war may have been debatable three years ago, but that train has already left the station. It was, is and can only now be considered a crucial part of the war. Don’t kid yourself. We are at war, and it cannot be fought as if we are using our criminal justice system trying to corral a few law breakers. Miranda rights don’t apply here.

Whether or not, according to Senator Graham, “It is a mess”, we got into this war on a nonpartisan basis. The intelligence failures that led to our sincere but mistaken belief that Sadham had significant stores of WMD were based on information that on a worldwide basis was thought to be reliable and should be attributable to failures by both the current and last administrations, and both should be held equally responsible.

The Clinton administration literally had Osama Bin Laden in its gun sights, and the special ops team was denied permission to take him out. Further the most authoritative book on Operation Iraqi Freedom indicates we had only 4 sources of human intelligence in Iraq at the start of the war. Why is that? It is because The Clinton Administration drastically cut back on our sources of human intelligence. That the intelligence was flawed is clear, but according to the best sources available, even the Iraqi generals were not told until December of ’02 that they had no WMD.

The war began based on the best information available to prevent a proven user of WMD from continuing to pose a significant risk of harming us by his continued development of WMD and by his continued support of Wahabi jihadists. To play this blame game now does us discredit. It clouds our focus and weakens us. It is the United States that is fighting this war not one party or the other, and it is the welfare of the United States we should be thinking about. Are there better alternatives for us to pursue? I sure don’t know of any.

There are not better alternatives if we wish to preserve our way of life. Melting pot that we are, we still believe that each of us is entitled to pursue life, liberty and happiness. We also believe we have certain inalienable rights, and our neighbor has them too.

Many of us find it almost impossible to accept that there are enough people in the world who fundamentally disagree with that notion that it could in any way affect our lives. And even if they come to grudgingly accept that it is possible, they assume we can leave them alone, and we will be fine. “Gee”, they say, “the Middle East is playing out a 1000 year war, and it has never been of concern before. Why do we need to care, let alone substantially change our behavior now?”

We cannot disengage now without inviting a quiver of arrows in the back as we depart, nor can we leave without being responsible for the bloodbath that will follow. Let me say what Senator Graham said the other night at the College of Charleston. It is not a quote, but he pointed out that it is impossible to negotiate with someone who doesn’t believe you have a right to exist. That is the case for Israel and for us. Our enemies in the fascist jihadists want to kill us whether we are there or here; they will come after us and must be defeated. It is better to fight them there than have carnage in our streets here.

Whether the Administration has made significant errors or not, the loyal opposition has been devoid of rational suggestions to improve our prospects, and the task that has now in “tar baby” like fashion been thrust upon us cannot be accomplished quickly.

It is legitimate for Democrats to complain that the administration vastly underestimated the number of boots on the ground it would take to seal the borders and pacify the populace, that they never understood the problem to be posed by the fedeyeen, and they built an invasion plan based on using the defeated army to police the public and then told them to go home. But if the opposition is going to complain, it has a responsibility to say what it would do to make the situation better.

In truth while the Administration has relied too much on “contractors” and has never properly staffed the occupying force, we are making progress in meeting our delayed goals for having a viable national Iraqi Army and may be able to reduce our forces in 2007 as they stand-up. The meeting of the Iraqi Premier and his opposite number in Iran also poses the possibility that he can gain the cooperation that we cannot in taming the shia death squads. We are making progress in creating the basis for a free and independent state when we leave. What is not clear is whether any of the Arab states can withstand the Wahabi jihadists who insist that the world does it their way or is destroyed.

The jihadists also believe our democratic traditions make us weak. They will use our democratic traditions against us by manipulating what the public sees and reads and by doing all they can to inflame the Arab world.

They believe our rules of civil debate can be used to further divide us and make our society unable to defend itself and ultimately collapse. Senator Graham particularly noted as to Israel that he understood their difficulty. How would you like to be surrounded by states that want you destroyed just because you don’t believe as they do? He went on to note that unless something can be achieved as to the Iranian pursuit of atomic arms in the next several years, your children and mine and our next generation too will have a very difficult future.

I wish we could disengage, but in the “flat world” about which Thomas Friedman writes so eloquently, one Wahabi jihadist with a chemical/biological weapon or suitcase size atomic device can cause almost incalculable damage. While it might be therapeutic to rant at our own frailties, the forces that got us where we are far transcend them as a cause for the challenges we now face.

As we approach the next election, is it better to wring our hands, point and shout or ought we to hunker down, get over our differences and work together to defeat these evil forces that would destroy us? I know my answer to the question, and while polls disagree, I do not believe the American people are ready for two years of finger pointing, investigatory hearings, and calls for impeachment that would follow a change in control of Congress.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence 2005-2006, at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury September 27, 2006. Page 16.

Stem Cells - OpEd

Robert E. Freer, Jr.

Special Public Policy Correspondent

This is another in our quarterly series of articles on the scientific wonders of our age. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Craig Knowlton, one of our Baker Free Enterprise Fellows in the research for this article.

Last week, researchers at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced the development of a method to extract embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo. In doing so, they tried to address the concerns of opponents of stem cell research, who oppose the consequential destruction of embryos. Scientists hypothesize that stem cells may, at some point in the future, emerge as the basis for treating diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and heart disease. Despite the possibilities for tremendous medical advancements and ACT’s recent breakthrough, ethical objections still remain. Those who object have convinced the federal government to deny federal funding for any research that utilizes stem cells except for certain lines that existed prior to the imposition of the ban. Ethical research standards published by the department of Health and Human Services also speak to this restriction, and the real inhibition is found in the regulations of the Food and Drug Administration that require their notification of any new investigational drug research utilizing stem cells.

Stem cells differ from other kinds of cells in the body. One intriguing property is that they are unspecialized. This means that a stem cell does not have any tissue-specific structures that allow it to perform specialized functions: it cannot pump blood like a heart muscle cell, and it cannot carry molecules through the bloodstream like a red blood cell. However, unspecialized stem cells can morph into specialized cells like heart muscle cells, blood cells, or nerve cells. Scientists hope through their research to reliably direct this process, called differentiation, to create healthy specific cell types that could be used as effective transplant treatments that may not require continuing immunosuppressive treatment for a wide range of currently incurable conditions.

Traditionally, human embryonic stem cells are extracted from an embryo that has developed for four or five days into a hollow microscopic ball of 150 cells called a blastocyst. The extraction pulls the embryo apart and destroys it. Although the frozen embryos used have typically been leftovers from in-vitro fertilization procedures that would otherwise be discarded, this destruction of a possible life incites most criticism of stem cell research. Yet, researchers believe that stem cell lines can now be grown using blastomeres—less developed balls of eight to ten cells—which could be left intact. The head of Dartmouth College Ethics Institute, Dr. Ronald Green, believes that the new extraction method solves moral concerns and “appears to be a way out of the current political impasse in this country and elsewhere.”

The new method depends on in-vitro fertilization, the generation of embryos outside the womb from a couple’s egg and sperm. IVF clinics commonly extract a single cell from an early stage embryo in order to scan for genetic flaws, and while the procedure risks damaging the embryo, removing a cell does not appear to interfere with later fetal and childhood development. This extraction and testing already occurs, and ACT believes that these cells can be used to create medically viable stem cell lines.

Still, even the relative harmlessness of this new development may not dissuade critics. Some people still worry that a single cell extracted from an embryo harnesses the capability of becoming a human being despite there being no evidence to suggest that a single cell from blastomeres could develop into an individual. Another concern is the long-term development of a person from an embryo missing one eighth of its cells, and perhaps not enough individuals have grown using this IVF practice to make a comprehensive study.

Most opponents of stem cell research base their arguments from a pro-life standpoint. This outlook identifies human life in a clump of cells birthed in a test tube and perhaps in the presence of a single living stem cell. This stance is absolute and will not be swayed, yet stem cell research remains a necessary track which medicine must follow. The millions of people who could benefit from research and the relatively few stem cells presently available make this a certainty not a speculation. What I worry about is the rush to embrace this research elsewhere on the globe, where the resources will not be expended under our carefully nuanced regulations to balance the ethical concerns. If our nation does not lead stem cell medical innovation in a progressive yet principled manner, then other countries may control the emerging knowledge and reap the benefits without the necessary ethical oversights.

Our religious beliefs guide our actions, yet in life we are faced with dilemmas that force us to choose among unattractive choices where we recognize our human limitations. In the case of a natural disaster, for instance, medical personnel are often forced to “triage” their patients and the service they render into groups that their judgment tells them will live to receive delayed treatment, those who will most likely die whether treated or not, and those who will live only if they receive immediate treatment. These same medical personnel are daily selecting areas of most promising research and are facing the ethical issues of animal testing where it is often true that animals are sacrificed in the process.

We proceed because, distressful as it is, the experience gained can be shown to directly save countless lives, and as to the research, human lives aren’t sacrificed. In the case of stem cells, the unrealized promise of its exploitation holds out an even greater promise of greatly extending useful lives and saving countless others. These are human beings in which countless years of love and attention in many instances have been invested, and the ripple effect of their salvation holds almost incalculable benefits to society. Under that scenario, I choose the living. This is particularly so when I choose to permit the use of blastocysts, that others have already decided will never be allowed to develop into human beings and will ultimately be sacrificed

On the one hand, patients with traumatic spinal cord injuries, heart and organ disease, muscular dystrophy, and other neurological disorders will gain from the possibilities of stem cell research. On the other, some clumps of cells stay on the freezer shelf or disposed of without ceremony of any kind. To not support the use of stem cells research dooms thousands of individuals from the potential benefit of their only hope of salvation from their insidious diseases. Now that is immoral.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence 2005-2006, at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Chareston Mercury September 13, 2006. Page 16.