VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE

The following preamble introduces the discussion entitled "Voting for Life." The contributions to the discussion are archived from April 18 downward to April 1, so that they can be read chronologically by scrolling from top to bottom. Each contribution is marked with its original date of composition.

One of the drawbacks of the argumentative blogging world is perhaps the risk of closing oneself within an echo chamber of free-wheeling consensus that is punctured only on occasion by the sharp tone of a stray troll. Being new to blogging, I cannot generalize beyond the description of this "risk," but I wonder if the sustained, civil exchange of differences in opinion is a rare thing for bloggers to blog.

In a series of occasional posts to follow, I would like to present a (for the most part, civil) exchange between me and a long-time acquaintance, both of whom, for different reasons, are disaffected Democrats. Whereas I bemoan the increasing influence of corporate money on the Democratic party and on the campaign process generally, my acquaintance, Robert, is a devout Catholic who supports the Democrats on most issues but finds himself voting against them consistently because of their support for abortion/reproductive rights.

The exchange, which took place before the systematic torture and abuse of human rights by the U.S. military at the behest, irresponsible ignorance, or complicit indifference of its highest commanders was brought to wide-scale public attention through the publication of photos from the Abu Ghraib prison, concerns pressing questions of the quality of popular media in the United States, the War in Iraq, abortion, life, John Kerry's platform, George Bush's record in office, and justice.

In presenting this exchange, I hope others will join in by way of the comments box, or "constructive thoughts box" as I labeled it. I will identify the different posts that come from the exchange with the common title "Voting for life" and number the posts to distinguish them from posts dealing with other topics.

Voting for life. Initial inquiry.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written from March 27 to March 30.]#1

Fanni says: The other day, I took the trouble to write you a short note and included a few articles relating to a study of public attitudes. Did you receive it? If so, I would like to know your opinion of the topic.

I have read the 23-page study and found it to be enlightening. [Jim Naureckas has described the study as follows: "The survey, by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, found that misconceptions about the Iraq war were closely related to what news outlets an individual relied on for information. And for each misperception studied by the research group, viewers of Fox News were the most likely to be misinformed."] Of course, no one would be as foolish as to claim that this study proves that Fox and CBS, for instance, are the cause of public misinformation in the US, or of the exceptionally high incidence of support in the US for what the rest of the world largely views as an unjust and terrorism-propagating war. For, it could be the case that viewers inclined to seek solace in pro-war info-entertainment and pro-military-industrial-complex politics simply find that their views are confirmed by these corporate-state outlets.

Bill O'Reilly certainly finds solace in the war machine he supports. As Jim Naureckas reported,

"In an October 4 interview with CNBC's Tim Russert, Fox News star Bill O'Reilly made a puzzling boast about his network's Iraq coverage. He said, 'Well, I think Fox News Channel was lucky because we were less skeptical of the war, and the war went very well. So we won.'"

How about you? Clearly the Pope was resolutely against the war in Iraq and even admonished Mr. Bush Jr. face-to-face before Bush gave the commands for the outbreak of violence. How do you harmonize your respect for life with the fact that tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq have been killed by our government on the basis of hyped-up, false, misleading charges and, at best, demonizing, fascist politics that pretend that, for instance, France and Germany and the UN were actually arguing FOR the regime of Saddam Hussein (which is the worst abuse of argumentation in international politics that I have heard since the days when Hussein's own disinformation campaign was still in full swing)?

I'm just curious where you are on this issue. As well as on the issue of our corporate-state media, call it liberal or conservative, fair, balanced or what-have-you.

If it is true that you support life, then, I wonder, have you given any thought to the fact that 10.5 million children under the age of 5 died from easily preventable diseases last year, and that the institution—the World Health Organization—that has the potential to prevent these diseases has been severely under-funded by the Bush administration? Does this sort of fact mean nothing to you? Or does it concern you? Or does abortion appear like the only life-and-death issue that is worth any trouble to you? And if so, why is this so? Do you generally resist seeing your emphasis on life in its broadest context and focus exclusively on the destiny of fetuses? If so, why?

Of course, Bush has done some fine posturing with respect to the issue of AIDS. However, even here, his record concerning human life is horrific. In addition to the undeniable impression that Bush is more concerned with securing drug company profits than providing cheap drugs for sufferers of AIDS the world over, consider that President Bush promised $3 billion per year over five years for the AIDS initiative while the White House's 2004 budget request ended up asking Congress for only $1.9 billion annually. But even that sum was a mirage, as it was partly based on a reshuffling of related accounts. For example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, much of which is designated for Africa, received a $150 million cut from the previous year. Moreover, Congress mandated that even this money will not be spent unless the Europeans match the U.S. contribution. Immediate consequence: countless infant deaths that could have been prevented.

I expect you to respond by quoting the number of abortions worldwide and reminding me of how terrible they are. But I would only ask, would you ever be willing to take into consideration all the ways this "culture of life" president's policies lead to infant deaths worldwide? Or is that simply impossible for you to do? If so, why? And if you had convincing evidence that the president's policies were leading to more infant deaths than there are abortions in a given year, would you consider voting for someone who would seriously support preventive measures for infant health worldwide and generic drugs, even if that person did not seem socially conservative on the issue of abortion? If not, why not? Why is the fetus more important than the walking and talking infant? Or isn't it, to your mind? Is there no difference?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Robert says: I want to respond briefly to some of your questions. Whether we went to war on "hyped-up, false, misleading charges" is still really unknown. Those are the charges of Bush's political adversaries, but not yet proven.

As to the war with Iraq, I personally was ambivalent about doing it, primarily since it was the first time we had done a "preemptive strike."

Of course, I am not for killing innocent civilians, but there are such things as just wars, which the Pope felt Iraq was not. I believe one could argue that point, however, but the true facts to do that are still not totally known. (Hindsight is 20/20, and Iraq apparently did not have weapons of mass destruction which threatened us in an immediate way.)

The world is a complex place and one side is hardly ever 100% right and the other 100% wrong. Neither the French nor the Germans were completely free of ulterior motives in opposing the war, as I recall from various news stories. The French, I believe, had a large oil deal with Saddam that would be interrupted if another regime took over.

Regarding Bush's policies, I am not a Republican. I am a pro-life Democrat who votes for pro-life candidates. Many thing Bush and the Republicans do upset me, but without life, no one has any rights.

If the Republicans cut funds for foreign aid, I can (and do) give to charitable organizations that serve children and adults overseas. If the Republicans cut educational benefits at home, I can (and do) give to support education at home. But if pro-choice Democrats vow to continue the 31 year war against the unborn at home (as Kerry has done), currently with 3600 daily fatalities, and vow to extend it overseas through supporting abortion-promoting population control agencies (as Kerry has said he will do), and to continue the war on the unborn into the far future by appointing pro-abortion justices to the Supreme Court (as Kerry has vowed to do), I cannot bring anyone back to life, so I will vote for anti-abortion Bush.

We were all unborn human beings at one time. The unborn are real and they are here now. Their killing is direct and immediate. I cannot support someone who believes that the direct, immediate killing of innocent human beings, for any or no reason, should be a legal right.

Voting for life. What we know

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written from April 7 to April 8.]#2

Fanni: I will interject a few remarks.

Robert: "Whether we went to war on "hyped-up, false, misleading charges" is still really unknown. Those are the charges of Bush's political adversaries, but not yet proven."

Fanni: It is not still "really" unknown. If you would like me to forward you a long list of hyped-up, false, misleading charges relating to immanent threats, possession of weapons, etc., I will. You are not likely to have heard them aired on Fox News, which is broadcast in the TVs that hang in the White House. In fact, if you use Fox News as your primary source of news, for the sake of being able to conduct an informed discussion with you about the current administration, I suggest you that balance this "fair and balanced" news source with other, non-corporate, non-militaristic voices. Many of these misleading charges were part of the President's various State of the Union addresses. I am sure you took them in, in the moment of their delivery, before their false nature had been fully revealed. Others have been repeated recently by members of the administration. There is no "gray area" here behind which you can hide in an attempt to uphold as justified our belligerent president's motivations. Fox News will tell you otherwise; but, personally, I get my news from many different sources, and avoid war-cheerleading of the sort O'Reilly gives us, dressed up as "debate." I suggest you do the same. The death by U.S. fire power and cluster bombs of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq on the basis of false charges is not a venture that holds out the promise--not even a distant one--of respectability or justification.

Your "Oh, well the Germans and the French were not pure" line of argumentation, which I have seen Fox News return to time and again as a way to divert attention from the real debate, holds no merit whatsoever. The fact is, the French and the Germans were not resisting any and all calls to confront Hussein's criminal and enfeebled regime. You may have forgotten that, since the administration and Fox News have long forgotten it in their last-ditch effort to make it appear that anyone who disagreed with them actually wanted Saddam Hussein in power or supported him for self-interested reasons. The fact is, the Germans and French were calling for 3 and a half months more of inspections before a decision about conflict be made. Yours is a preposterous claim, furthermore, given the unchecked quest for wealth and profit that our war in Iraq has unleashed almost to the exclusive benefit of large U.S. corporations. Cheney's corporation, the one that still pays him in excess of 100,000 a year, has made a killing the likes of no corporate-war machine has done in the history of the world, and it has done so after having seriously curtailed over the last three years its lobbying of Washington. (Why lobby so ruthlessly, when your top guy is the vice president?)

Robert: "As to the war with Iraq, I personally was ambivalent about doing it, primarily since it was the first time we had done a 'preemptive strike.'"

Fanni: I am pleased to hear that your conscience is still showing signs of life on an issue other than that of abortion. Ambivalence is a good first step towards a reasonable view of the Bush administration. You should also be suspicious of the flagrantly absurd evocation of "preemption" as a means of describing military aggression in contexts where no serious threat to national security was substantiated.

Robert: "Of course, I am not for killing innocent civilians, but there are such things as just wars, which the Pope felt Iraq was not. I believe one could argue that point, however, but the true facts to do that are still not totally known. (Hindsight is 20/20, and Iraq apparently did not have weapons of mass destruction which threatened us in an immediate way.)"

Fanni: Voices the world over recognized this war as unjust from the get-go. Even members of Congress recognized that there was no clear evidence of an imminent threat. So, no one is arguing with the disingenuous "hindsight" logic that you refer to here. The only citizens of the world who supported it outside the U.S., as a majority voice, were those of Israel, and they obviously had their own motives for seeking aggression against their neighbors.

It is not my view that this war should have been opposed simply on the grounds that "war is unjust." That is a simplistic view of warfare that totally disregards the reasons for which a ridiculously powerful and oil-consuming nation like the U.S. goes to war with paper tigers of the sort that Iraq was one year and a half ago. To counter the logic of war that fueled this vicious, terrorism-propagating international outrage, one has only to do what so many people outside (and even inside) the US did: criticize it for its real motivations, which are at bottom corporate, and focused on the oil-rich region that is Iraq.

Robert: "The world is a complex place and one side is hardly ever 100% right and the other 100% wrong. Neither the French nor the Germans were completely free of ulterior motives in opposing the war, as I recall from various news stories."

Fanni: Various? Try reaching outside of your nationalistic corporate news, and you will get a broader understanding of the issue.

Robert: "The French, I believe, had a large oil deal with Saddam that would be interrupted if another regime took over."

Fanni: What about the large oil deal the US hoped to make by going to war (the plans for which, we now know, were sitting on Cheney's desk one week into his serving as vice president)? Is that not worth considering? The war profits hoped for by U.S. corporations with the dogged assistance of the current administration far diminish anything the French and Germans could have hoped for by forestalling the war for a few months.

Robert: "Regarding Bush's policies, I am not a Republican. I am a pro-life Democrat who votes for pro-life candidates. Many thing Bush and the Republicans do upset me, but without life, no one has any rights."

Fanni: This is the point I would most like to comment on. I think that, as long as Bush remains anti-abortion, you will find myriad ways to excuse his failings, his aggressions, his fascism, etc. So, it's not really worth our discussing at length whether, say, his last war was justified or not. For you, Bush can always be justified to some degree by the fact that he is anti-abortion. And you have reasons for thinking that this one justification is necessarily primary with respect to other, possibly lacking justifications.

Let me therefore shift the topic from the war in Iraq. I want to ask you about this "primary justification" or "ultimate right." It seems to me that it is the most important principle for you and has been so for all the years in which you have fought abortion. I have often wondered, since I have known you to support Bush, and since I have followed the devastation that Bush has brought to and promised for our environment over the past three years (including, at last count, 370 roll backs of environmental regulations, many long in place), just how bad an anti-abortion politician would have to be before you could no longer give the politician your support. Have you yourself ever posed this question, if only hypothetically? Because if, as you say, without life, there are no rights, then one could imagine a leader whose policies did truly horrendous, holocaust-like damage to humanity, but who would no less have your support, as long as the leader fought for all fetuses to be born and thereby fought to assure the basis of other rights, however damaged or neglected or violated all those rights were as a consequence of their leadership. One could even imagine a leader who called for the "letting die" of millions of children every year, as well as the increased poisoning of air and water by corporations that leads to measurable increases in asthma, for example, and who, instead of supporting measures for developing renewable sources of energy, siphoned off the national treasury in an annual multi-billion dollar corporate welfare program designed to fatten American fossil fuel barons. But you already do that in supporting Bush. So, while still respecting your principle of "this one right trumps all others," one could go a step further and imagine that George Bush called for the execution by fire power of all children who reach the age of 5 and do not commit themselves to killing for and drilling oil for their livelihood. A preposterous example, for sure. But what would you do in such a case? I assume you would withdraw your support for Bush. But if so, then there must be some sort of cut off, some sort of point at which your "inviolable principle" no longer trumps all others, right? If so, I wonder, where is that point?

Personally, I think you and I are both on the same side of this large issue of life, and the respect for it which we are called to cultivate. However, claiming that this principle, once reduced to a defense of the fetus, is primary with respect to all other issues of life is, I think, remarkably short-sighted. We live in an age in which thousands of species disappear from the planet every year. We live in a time where humanity has demonstrated irrefutably that its use of fossil fuels is rapidly leading to conditions that will try our race's ability to remain alive on the planet we inhabit. Therefore, claiming that the destiny of the fetus is the primary issue of life-and-death for humanity simply is not true. I don't mean by that that it is not important, and that it does not involve life-and-death issues in the same way that other issues do, but its primacy is no longer a thing assured, by dogma or scientific means. The disappearance of the human race means the disappearance of the ability of the human race to produce fetuses. Obviously.

Robert: "If the Republicans cut funds for foreign aid, I can (and do) give to charitable organizations that serve children and adults overseas. If the Republicans cut educational benefits at home, I can (and do) give to support education at home."

Fanni: Good luck in trying to counteract with your donations all the violence and degradation to the world environment, political and natural, that the Republican Party is bringing about. Remember, the Republican Party, while it may ring a few of your bells on certain conservative social issues, has as its main purpose of being extracting cheap labor out of the citizens of the world and maximizing profits for the few (which profiteers are disgracefully called "entrepreneurs" in the jargon of Carl Rove). If you haven't realized this yet, I would be stunned, and only chalk your blindness up to the passion of your anti-abortion struggles.

Robert: "But if pro-choice Democrats vow to continue the 31 year war against the unborn at home (as Kerry has done), currently with 3600 daily fatalities, and vow to extend it overseas through supporting abortion-promoting population control agencies (as Kerry has said he will do), and to continue the war on the unborn into the far future by appointing pro-abortion justices to the Supreme Court (as Kerry has vowed to do), I cannot bring anyone back to life, so I will vote for anti-abortion Bush."

Fanni: I will not flush at your war rhetoric. Rather, I will assume it wholly and remind you that there are many, many wars being fought everyday. And the war on the fetus is devastating, for sure, but it is not primary when you consider the destiny of the human race. All "pro-lifers," I would think, would have necessarily to be environmentalists of the highest order. This fact will only become increasingly true as, in the next century, nations go to war not only over the few remaining sources of oil, but over access to clean water and clean air.

Robert: "We were all unborn human beings at one time. The unborn are real and they are here now. Their killing is direct and immediate. I cannot support someone who believes that the direct, immediate killing of innocent human beings, for any or no reason, should be a legal right. Peace."

Fanni: I don't dispute the recourse to categories of "directness" and "immediacy." I am not one of a liberal camp that tries to diminish the significance of the violence wrought on the unborn. My view, rather, is that the violence done to all of us for the sake of short-sighted corporate greed, and most importantly to the bio-diversity and environment that we must treat as sacred -- whether we believe in a God or not -- is just as direct and immediate, and in fact concerns not only all of us as "one-time fetuses," but the destiny of all humanity, living and to come. No administration has done more violence to our environment than the Bush administration, and so I would wonder at what point you might draw a line, or at least weigh the balances, in your support of this administration or any administration that so violently pursues corporate profits and fossil fuels to the great peril of humankind.

Peace, indeed.

Voting for life. Confusing wars.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 4.]#3

Fanni writes: A little follow-up to your assertion that it is principally a charge of the pro-abortion camp -- you said: "the president's adversaries" -- that the justifications used to perpetuate war in Iraq were misleading and false. You can keep deluding yourself into confounding the hasty aggression in Iraq with stakes in the fight against abortion, but eventually the truth will out (and it already has, long ago, to all those who do not suffer from the sluggishness that results from uncritical over-exposure to Fox News).

Charges based on reports known by the administration to be fraudulent (as was the charge made in the State of the Union about substances obtained from Niger for making nuclear weapons), outdated and irrelevant reports (as was the material plagiarized from a student's essay in California), and discredited or disreputable and lying defectors from Iraq do not require pro-abortion adversaries to the president to be exposed to the public. Neither do contradictory statements and outright lies, of which this administration has offered up many (see Representative Waxman's report whose link I sent you for a generous sampling thereof).

I do not know what it's like to be a single-issue constituency such as yourself, but it must be a painful task to have to deny the validity of all these emerging facts simply not to feel that you may have lost a little ground on your One Issue. It's too bad, too, that your anti-abortion candidate for the presidency has pulled off one of the most grotesque attempts at justifying a war of aggression since Hitler sent Germans, disguised as Polish thugs, to kill German sentinels in Gdansk as a way of provoking fear and anger among the Germans at the Poles, just days before September 1, 1939. It must be painful, too, when you consider that experts on terrorism are asserting today that this war of aggression in Iraq has promoted, not combated, terrorism abroad. In a time of international terrorism that demands intelligent, investigative solutions and international cooperation of the highest degree, we are saddled with "I'm-a-war-president" Bush, and it's sad to think that this thug and all his incompetent conspirators, who have siphoned off the national treasury to the wealthiest of the land and compromised international peace and security on the basis of "the best intelligence" (which is to say, rubbish), are the best you can do in finding an anti-abortion proponent to fight your one big fight.

But I try to empathize with your plight. I know that it stems in large part from the fact that we have a winner-takes-all political system in the United States that penalizes people for not herding their votes together into two separate camps. As long as Kerry remains a "baby killer" intent on conducting, as you say, a "war on the unborn" and as long as Bush talks about something called "the culture of life," Bush can do just about anything in the world and he will still pocket your vote. This unconscionable bind you find yourself in is in fact understandable. In America, we have gotten used to voting for the less bad candidate. That is how our political system works. Moreover, it practically assures that our candidates will continue to get worse and worse in the future, since the party-appointed candidates know that all they have to do, to remain electable nationally and win it all, is appear one notch less undesirable than their one major adversary. But I wonder if it truly excuses the posture of single-issue voters such as you.

If you would like now to answer the questions I raised in my first e-mail on these topics, I still have no idea if there exists a point at which you would withdraw support for an anti-abortion candidate, however bad that politician is. And I am beginning, in fact, to doubt it. I am beginning to think that, if you had to choose between, on the one hand, a candidate who promised to lop the head off of 10 innocent five-year olds, or let 10 innocent five-year olds die from an easily preventable disease and, on the other, a candidate who would allow 10 fetuses to be torn rudely from their mothers in accordance with the mothers' wishes, you would without hesitation choose the former candidate, because something other than LIFE is at stake for you in your fight against abortion. But I am not sure. And I am not sure, either, what this "something other" that is bigger than life itself is for you that allows you to prioritize the destiny of fetuses in such a way. In short, my main question remains unanswered. So far, you have shown yourself to be good at parroting the Fox News view of the world (Bush, righteous; French and Germans, bad; Saddam, evil, imminent threat -- mushroom cloud, tortured and gassed his own people, etc. -- all those not with us are against us, etc.) and at demonizing John Kerry (who is someone I had not even mentioned). You haven't, however, answered my questions, as you said you have.

I know you're someone who has enjoyed consuming and disseminating images of war, both on the born and unborn, and so I thought you would appreciate these photos from Iraq. They probably did not make it to your Fox News TV screen in between images of Mr. Bush wearing a soldier's jacket, serving up Thanksgiving dinner to soldiers, or crawling out of a fighter plane. (It's always very quaint, isn't it, when a civilian dresses up in soldier's clothing? We certainly had never seen a president do it before.)

And I politely request that you not maintain, in the face of all evidence, that your vote for an anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, pro-war president can have only one meaning (i.e., "abortion is wrong"), and be free of violent consequences.

While weighing in your mind the righteousness and virtues of Mr. Bush, you might also find this report, coming from a Republican, to be worth taking into account:

Worse Than Watergate: Former Nixon Counsel John Dean Says Bush Should Be Impeached

Finally, it's a sad temptation I can't resist: sharing today's news from Bush's "mission accomplished" in Iraq. I'm sorry I don't have photos of the scores of innocent victims, torn to shreds by US firepower as they prayed in a mosque. Perhaps the photos will be made available in the foreign press. If so, and if I can locate them, I will be sure to pass them on. I am sure that there are enough images of murdered innocents in Iraq to counterbalance all the gruesome photos of aborted fetuses you show others. We can perhaps swap our favorite pics. And if Bush is reelected, we will have years of image sharing ahead of us, I'm sure.

It's nice that I can share this information with you, though, in this way, 'cause I am sure that, on Fox, if this report of yet another abuse of power and outrage to human rights on the part of the U.S. occupiers gets through at all, it will be wrapped up in deceitful rhetoric from our commander-in-chief, who will falsely claim that the Iraqis resisting foreign occupation hate freedom and liberty, and who will falsely confound this nationwide resistance to U.S. occupation with his supposed "war on terror." Lost in Bush's rhetoric, as I'm sure you can generously appreciate, is that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is very obviously fomenting resistance and violence across Iraq and the Middle East.

If you have begun to look for news outside the comforting and self-deceiving little world of support for American international vandalism and hooliganism called Fox News, maybe I don't need to keep sending you these updates? Just let me know.

U.S. Hits Fallujah Mosque; 40 Said Killed
By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer
FALLUJAH, Iraq - U.S. Marines in a fierce battle for this Sunni Muslim stronghold fired rockets that hit a mosque filled with people Wednesday, and witnesses said as many as 40 people were killed.
The fighting in Fallujah and neighboring Ramadi, where commanders confirmed 12 Marines were killed late Tuesday, was part of an intensified and spreading uprising involving both Sunni and Shiites stretching from Kirkuk in the north to near Basra in the south.
An Associated Press reporter in Fallujah saw cars ferrying the bodies from the mosque, which witnesses said had been hit by three missiles.

Robert writes: The innocent civilians in that mosque were firing on U.S. troops.

In studying the abortion question, I have learned to be wary of unsubstantiated statistics. Some groups just seem to make them up as they go along. For example, you stated, "Calling the death by US firepower and cluster bombs of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq ..." To the best of my knowledge, cluster bombs were not used in cities in the 2nd Iraq war. Smart bombs were. "Tens of thousands" is a gross exaggeration. If you can document otherwise, let me know.

A second possible example: You stated earlier that something like 10.5 million children died because Bush would not send them needed aid. Without documentation, this again sounds like a figure that someone pulled out of the air. Although even one child's death is a tragedy, Bush's "complicity" in these deaths is indirect and remote. He was not responsible for the circumstances or actions which caused their illnesses, and other wealthy nations share in the responsibility to help them out.

Voting for life. Suspecting Liberal Bias.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 7.]#4

Fanni writes: thanks for the substantive replies. I will address them when I get time to. The statistical points are minor, but I will address them to your satisfaction, I hope.

I look forward to your addressing the principle I was questioning you about. Till this point, I have no reason to believe that, were Hitler in power today and had he declared himself anti-abortion, he would not have your full support. If that is not so, I would like to know on what basis that would not be so. That's the sort of thing I'm wondering about: whether it is possible for you to take a critical view of an anti-abortion politician or issue or whether, on the contrary, according to the principle you announced in a recent e-mail, the "right to life" trumps all other rights and therefore cannot be viewed in a larger context of things such as corporate-driven warfare, fascist politics, the corporate-driven devastation of the environment, preventable diseases running wild due to corporate indifference, etc. At what point can you weigh the balances for and, most importantly, against a declared anti-abortion politician? Or can't you? Do you feel you have found the one issue in respect to which you can assure yourself a righteous vote in every case? Do you feel it is possible for there to be such an issue? Is abortion that one issue? Are there others that would do equally well for the same ends? Or does the issue of abortion stand alone in that respect?

In your message, you wrote: "The innocent civilians in that mosque were firing on U.S. troops."

Where did you find this summary explanation for the deaths in the mosque? I couldn't find it anywhere. In any case, it seems a little suspicious to cast the U.S. troops as victims in the midst of their offensive, cleansing action designed to root out what the administration thinks or tries to make us think are isolated, radical, insurgents. It also reminds me of the Gdansk anecdote I brought up yesterday. How many times have tyrants succeeded in convincing the masses that they were in fact the victims, the innocent ones? It's a very old strategy that we should be more critical of. The question with respect to this anecdote is not: Who shot first? It is: What is the U.S. doing in Iraq? Should the forces be there? Should they be confronting entire communities with violence? Bombing civilians?

If you think that I or some group is grossly exaggerating, consider that I did find this report on yesterday's activity in Iraq at www.democracynow.org:

"Over 150 Iraqis have been killed including 26 in Falluja where US warplanes bombed a residential Sunni area. 16 children and eight women were killed in that attack."

And I invite you to show this assertion to be false.

Disputes over sources aside, are you willing to assert that U.S. forces have not killed many innocent civilians recently and over the past year? That would be a tall order. It would be a weak way out to seek justification for this violence by saying, well, a few innocents will die inevitably. There was nothing inevitable about our manner of assaulting Iraq. There was no imminent threat; many, including the Germans and the French, made that assessment before our first bombs were dropped; and if you still believe there was an imminent threat, a "mushroom cloud" in the offing, you are living in a state of willful blindness and sucking up to the worst sort of propaganda ever invented by US leadership (because it has almost all been proven false, and was used to further what is arguably the most counter-productive aggression every undertaken by U.S. forces anywhere).

Robert: "In studying the abortion question, I have learned to be wary of unsubstantiated statistics."

Fanni writes: I will substantiate the numbers I used in previous e-mails (I have to go back and check the sources again). But, first, I want to ask: what is the point of this part of your message? Do you think that, if you manage to discredit certain numbers of dead that I have cited, you will have defeated the merits of my view of what is going on in Iraq, and by the same stroke justify your support for Bush's war? I highly doubt the strategy, if that is indeed the one you intend to employ here. The REASON I doubt it is because you have yet to make clear the basis on which an accurate death toll would be meaningful to you. If the actual toll were known conclusively to be 20-30,000 (the most liberal estimate I have found), and not 2,000 (the most conservative I have seen at any point in the conflict), would that change your view of the war to any degree? What if it were known conclusively -- a hypothetical, for sure, but please grant me it -- that 600,000 innocent civilians had been killed, would that cause your ambivalence to the war to grow, and would it cause you to consider withdrawing your support for Bush? If not, why not? If numbers matter to you (and I can't see yet why they would, given your previous arguments), is there a limit -- say, a rough number of innocent deaths caused by U.S. forces -- beyond which you would find that a vote for Bush would ring more loudly as a vote for violence than as a vote against it? This is the most important question I keep returning to.

Robert: "Some groups just seem to make them up as they go along. For example, you stated, ‘Calling the death by US firepower and cluster bombs of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq ...'"

Fanni writes: I will quote the source later. You can decide what the "group" is in this case, determine whether they are pro- or anti-abortion, and make your decision as to the figure's merit on those bases, if you like. But my point remains. Where is the limit to the amount of violence (military, ecological, etc.) you are willing to support, to keep the violence of abortion from being perpetuated? Have you ever conceived of one?

Robert: "To the best of my knowledge, cluster bombs were not used in cities in the 2nd Iraq war."

Fanni writes: You are wrong. Your knowledge on this point is fictional. Did it come from Fox News? I will find several sources that provide evidence that cluster bombs were used. It was a big point of dispute before the hostilities broke out, and Rumsfeld in particular refused not to use them. On this point, as on others, I would ask whether you get your information from Fox News principally. The point is relevant because there are good reasons for finding this state-friendly news engine to be suspect. I sent you a link to a recent report to that effect and you didn't say anything about it.

Robert: "Smart bombs were."

Fanni writes: That's a cute expression. "Smart bombs." Do you think it matters to the parents of a young boy whose skull has been knocked off whether it was removed by a smart bomb or a cluster bomb? I invite you to take the euphemistic jargon of the military less seriously. War is not a "smart" or "surgical" process. It is violent and imprecise by nature. No amount of dressing up by Fox News or the Pentagon will ever change this basic fact. Enemies are not more easily identified by improved technology, because non-hostile entities swiftly become hostile in changing conditions. And there can be much more to be said on this, but I simply reject your facile reception of this jargon. I am even disgusted by it. As a student of warfare, you should have learned to be more critical of bogus language designed to make war sound neat and economical from the point of view of more powerful forces and with the intent of sparing its supporters any pangs of conscience.

Robert: "'Tens of thousands' is a gross exaggeration. If you can document otherwise, let me know."

Fanni writes: I will let you know. In the meantime, since you don't yourself have conclusive evidence (which may not exist, likely for strategic reasons that benefit current U.S. foreign policy), it might be hasty of you, at the very least, to declare that "tens of thousands" is a gross exaggeration. More to the point, it is irrelevant to our discussion if tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have actually died because it would have no effect whatsoever on your assessment of the present administration and its foreign policy in particular. That is, unless you say otherwise.

Robert: "A second possible example: You stated earlier that something like 10.5 million children died because Bush would not send them needed aid. Without documentation, this again sounds like a figure that someone pulled out of the air."

Fanni writes: I will track down the source. But, again, even if it were pulled out of the air, it doesn't yet matter to our discussion, because you haven't yet said that, in the case where such a number of children had been left to die as a direct consequence of neglect by U.S. and other powers (I take your point there, that other nations are responsible, too), it would affect in any way your estimation of Bush. The contrary seems to be the case. What would you care if 10.5, or 600 million were known to have died in such a way? You could rationalize that number of deaths easily. By blaming the Germans and French, for instance, or making subtle distinctions between direct and indirect causes of death, or between "killing" and "letting die," and, on the basis of these subtleties, by washing your hands of all responsibility in your support of Bush and imagining that in supporting a thug you have embraced an angel.

Voting for life. U.S. Cluster bombs.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 7.]#5

Fanni writes: Hello, again. In reply to your assertion that cluster bombs were not used in Iraq, I went to USA Today, a source that can hardly be called "left wing" (by perhaps anybody other than Rush Limbaugh, for whom everyone else but himself and a few like-minded fascists are "liberals"-- where that means something to be reviled -- but I am not sure about Rush's "take" on the insipid USA Today, and that's not the point here). There, I found conclusive evidence that not only were cluster bombs used, but that many were used. Moreover, their strategic pertinence to the war had been seriously put to question before the war was commenced, and their inhumane consequences warned against.

In the face of this evidence (which was hardly hidden from public view), the point is this: why do you keep holding out a juvenile image of the present administration's supposedly righteous ways in Iraq? How much evidence do you need to tilt your ambivalence so that it becomes actual skepticism?

You say, "there were no cluster bombs." On what basis do you say this? Out of optimistic hope that your anti-abortion hero in the executive office is not a thug? And a member of an administration full of thugs? For how long can you hold out this hope? And for what stakes other than those relating to abortion?

Here a few decisive statements taken from the USA Today report:

"The world's most modern military, one determined to minimize civilian casualties, went to war with stockpiles of weapons known to endanger civilians and its own soldiers. The weapons claimed victims in the initial explosions and continued to kill afterward, as Iraqis and U.S. forces accidentally detonated bomblets lying around like small land mines."

"A four-month examination by USA TODAY of how cluster bombs were used in the Iraq war found dozens of deaths that were unintended but predictable. Although U.S. forces sought to limit what they call "collateral damage" in the Iraq campaign, they defied international criticism and used nearly 10,800 cluster weapons; their British allies used almost 2,200."

13,000 cluster bombs, including those of our British allies, is a far cry from none. You would agree, wouldn't you? You would agree that the 10,800 cluster bombs used by Rumsfeld's forces are a lot more than zero, and not very "smart," in any sense of this word, wouldn't you?

You might go to bed tonight dreaming of "smart bombs," righteous U.S. leadership in Iraq, and defeated isolated, radical, liberty-hating terrorists, and still hoping and praying that the international hooliganism of Bush can be portrayed in a pretty light so that no one in the U.S. can gain any ground in the fight to maintain or further practices of abortion, but I have done what I can to give you reason to increase your ambivalence with respect to U.S. aggression in Iraq in particular and to stop living in a Fox World of "smart bombs" and a "war on terror," and an "Operation Iraqi Freedom," etc.

I will address the other, statistics-based claims when I have time later.

p.s. To be precise, you made a distinction between the city and country use of cluster bombs (as if only civilians lived in cities and only soldiers lived and worked outside them! How "smart" that sounds! And, oh, if war were only that clean and tidy, then we could just remove evil from the face of the earth, couldn't we?). Even more pertinent to your false impression that cluster bombs were not used in cities, then, is the first sentence from the article to which I sent you a link already:

"BAGHDAD ・The little canisters dropped onto the city, white ribbons trailing behind. They clattered into streets, landed in lemon trees, rattled around on roofs, settled onto lawns."
And this, from further on in the article:
"U.S. forces fired hundreds of cluster weapons into urban areas. These strikes, from late March to early April, killed dozens and possibly hundreds of Iraqi civilians. Forty civilians were killed in one neighborhood in Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, say residents and Saad Khazal al-Faluji, a surgeon at Hillah General Hospital who tracked casualties."
"The attacks also left behind thousands of unexploded bomblets, known as duds, that continued to kill and injure Iraqi civilians weeks after the fighting stopped."

I include this p.s. because I don't want you to think that I misunderstood the nature of your flatly false impression. Your "knowledge" on this point was about as accurate as the "best intelligence" that served to rationalize the administration's war-making in Iraq. But you should have known better, because even a widely distributed newspaper like USA Today had presented an investigative report on cluster bombs. The question thus rears its head once more: where are you (not) getting your information from? And why?

Voting for life. Cluster bombing civilians.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 8.]#6

Fanni: To follow up on the first of three points on which you tried to discredit certain statements in my previous messages, below I provide further substantiation of my claims concerning cluster bombs (in addition to the USA Today report already sent). Substantiation of the other two claims will follow.

Evidence that the U.S. used cluster bombs in civilian areas in Iraq.

I promised multiple sources to substantiate the claim that the U.S. used cluster bombs in civilian areas in Iraq. There are numerous such reports available online. I have chosen two, plus a curious article from Fox News, released this time last year. I tried to find a Fox News "take" on cluster bombs, but could locate only this one article in which the idea that the U.S. had used such bombs in a way that would harm civilians is indirectly – and craftily – discredited, and in which the author states that, "The U.S. military has denied targeting civilians and said it takes extraordinary measures to avoid hurting noncombatants [my underscoring]." One wonders how extraordinary a measure it would have been for the U.S. Army not to use outdated, proven-to-be-harmful cluster bombs in Iraqi neighborhoods. Apparently, that would have been too extraordinary a measure for Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush Jr.

The first part of the Fox News article (copied as #3 below) tries to gain points for the "coalition forces" by dismissing some patently outrageous claims by a source of the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein that is idiotically identified with the metonymic term "Iraq." The second part craftily dodges the credible (and, today, wholly substantiated) accusation concerning the use of cluster bombs by: i) placing it in the above, propagandized context; ii) making uncritical use of militaristic mumbo-jumbo ("precision-guided weapons"); iii) presuming that civilian casualties only ever occur as a direct consequence of Iraqi aggressions or tactics; and iv) quoting U.S. military commanders who hedge as to what weapons were used, and where, and by whom.

So, then, here the two more sources that substantiate the reckless use of cluster bombs by U.S. forces in particular, plus a typical piece of propagandistic blather from Fox News. This sort of comparison allows me to appreciate how it is that you come away from your television set believing that the good ol' boys who fought fascism in Europe and Asia in the 40s are still up to their good deeds today, and swallowing whole the propagandistic images of "Bush, the righteous defender of the American people from imminent threats abroad," and "Bush, the good-faith liberator and democracy-fostering fighter for human rights" (or perhaps you swallow these images only nearly whole, since, with hindsight concerning the false nature of the main war rationalizations and understanding that the war was deemed "pre-emptive" in nature, you have admitted to "ambivalence"). This ambivalence should grow, I think, once you see that not only is the war aggressive in nature (which is arguably unlike anything the U.S. undertook at any time in the First or Second World Wars, despite atrocities and other abuses of international law perpetuated then), and based on false claims – a fact that you have partly admitted to when you spoke of hindsight being 20/20 – and that it is also being waged inhumanely, in a way that cannot be justified by the contextual needs of military strategy. This is why I take a moment to help dispel your false impressions concerning the "smart" use of what are very dumb cluster bombs.

I have put links to all three sources so that you can see where I got these things from and read the full citations and related stories/reports. For the time being, here is a sampling of the articles:

1) Off Target
report from Human Rights Watch
The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq

Hundreds of civilian deaths in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could have been prevented by abandoning two misguided military tactics. The use of cluster munitions in populated areas caused more civilian casualties than any other factor in the coalition's conduct of major military operations in March and April. U.S. and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions, containing nearly 2 million submunitions, that killed or wounded more than 1,000 civilians. International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, does not outlaw all civilian casualties in wartime. But armed forces are obliged to take all feasible precautions for avoiding civilian losses, and to refrain from attacks that are indiscriminate or where the expected civilian harm exceeds the military gain. The term "casualty" refers to both dead and wounded. This 147-page report also examines violations of international humanitarian law by Iraqi forces, including use of human shields, abuse of the Red Cross and Red Crescent emblems, use of antipersonnel landmines, and placement of military objects in mosques and hospitals. The Iraqi military's practice of wearing civilian clothes also eroded the distinction between combatants and civilians.

2) Published on Thursday, April 3, 2003 by The Asia Times (Hong Kong)
Cluster Bombs Liberate Iraqi Children
by Pepe Escobar

According to the Arab cameramen, two trucks full of bodies - mostly children, and women in flowered dresses - were parked outside the Hilla hospital. Dr Nazem el-Adali, trained in Scotland, said almost all the dead and wounded were victims of cluster bombs dropped in the Hilla region and in the neighboring village of Mazarak. Abbas initially said that there were 33 dead and 310 wounded. Then the ICRC went on site with a team of four, and they said that there were "dozens of dead and 450 wounded". Contacted by satphone on Thursday, Huguenin-Benjamin confirmed there were at least 460 wounded, being treated in an ill-equipped 280-bed hospital.

3) Fox News
Iraq Accuses U.S. of Targeting Civilians

BAGHDAD — Iraq's health minister Thursday said 36 Iraqi civilians were killed and 215 wounded in coalition air strikes on Baghdad a day earlier, and he accused the United States and Britain of deliberately targeting civilians to break the Iraqi people's will.

"They are targeting the human beings in Iraq to decrease their morale," Omeed Medhat Mubarak said. "They are not discriminating, differentiating." The U.S. military has denied targeting civilians and said it takes extraordinary measures to avoid hurting noncombatants. Fourteen people were reported killed in a northern Baghdad neighborhood on Wednesday in a blast that Iraqi officials blamed on cruise missiles. "So you see, the American and British mercenaries are targeting civilians regardless of their age," Mubarak said. "They targeted shops and small public-sector installations." Mubarak said the total number of civilian dead and injured since the U.S.-led war on Iraq began a week ago is more than 4,000, including 350 dead.
He accused U.S. and British forces of dropping cluster bombs on civilian targets.
"In Najaf, they destroyed a medical center," he said. "They bombed an ambulance and killed its driver." The U.S. military has acknowledged using precision-guided weapons to target Iraqi missiles and launchers "placed within a civilian residential area." But Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said he could not say whether the missiles that hit the neighborhood were Iraqi weapons or misguided U.S. missiles.

Voting for life. Iraqi death toll.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 8.]#7

Fanni: Today I present the substantiation of my claim concerning the number Iraqis killed by U.S. forces, which I claimed was "tens of thousands," and which claim you called a "gross exaggeration."

Number of Iraqis killed in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" [compiled on April 8, 2004 before I had assured myself of the legitimacy of a report by MEDACT that in November, 2003 estimated the number of Iraqi dead to exceed twenty thousand, and before a number of major offensives were undertaken by U.S. forces].

1) This is the most comprehensive and rigorous treatment of the question that I have found; a site that avoids inflating numbers and tries to err on the side of underestimating the number of killings.This estimation is line with that given by the White House, at www.whitehouse.gov:

The study concludes the following:

On March 20, 2003, US troops invaded Iraq. At least 17,094 people have been killed since then.

2) From Amnesty International. Killings of civilians

More than 10,000 Iraqi civilians are thought to have been killed since 20 March 2003 as a direct result of the military intervention in Iraq, either during the war or in violent incidents during the subsequent occupation. The number is an estimate -no one in authority in Iraq is willing or able to catalogue the killings. "We don't have the capacity to track all civilian casualties", admitted US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt in February 2004. A different attitude has been shown towards non-Iraqi civilians and soldiers who have been killed.

A year after the war began, Iraqi civilians are still being killed every day. The worst incidents receive some international coverage, but many killings simply go unreported. Often, the assailants are unknown. On 4 March 2004 an AFP journalist witnessed three Iraqi civilians being killed when a missile hit their car and exploded near a US military base in southwest Baghdad. Neither the journalist nor the Iraqi police could find out who fired the rocket, and the names of the victims were not published.

Killings by Coalition Forces
Scores of civilians have been killed apparently as a result of excessive use of force by US troops or have been shot dead in disputed circumstances. For example, US soldiers have shot and killed scores of Iraqi demonstrators in several incidents, including seven in Mosul on 15 April 2003, at least 15 in Falluja on 29 April and at least two outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad on 18 June. [See the full report for many other incidents of this kind.]

3) A recent report by medical charity MEDACT estimates that the total number of Iraqis killed as a direct result of the war is between 22,000 and 55,000 people. The report, entitled "Continuing Collateral Damage: the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq," also highlighted the long term health effects of the war, including a health crisis that is disproportionately affecting the young, women, and the poor.

4) Here is an estimation partly based on the Amnesty International report, and partly on the report by MEDACT.
A Year Later by John Pilger ; March 23, 2004

Sydney Hyde Park 20 March 2004: Let us be clear on the facts of what happened one year ago today. The United States, aided by Britain and Australia, attacked a sovereign country, unprovoked, and in breach of the most basic principles of international law. By the most conservative estimates, up to 55,000 people were killed, including at least, 10,000 civilians: men, woman and children, a figure confirmed this week by Amnesty International.
More than 1,000 children are killed or injured in Iraq every month by exploding cluster bombs, left by the Americans and the British. According to the Uranium Medical Research Centre, the main cities of Iraq are poisoned with radiation from uranium-tipped shells and missiles, fired by the Americans and the British.

As for the World of Fox News, I was unable to find anything. This is not one of the hot topics there, as you can readily imagine. But perhaps you have the Fox line on this one, too? What have they said? I would be interested to read "the Fox News report on Iraqi civilian deaths." On what basis did you form your own assessment? Since you are convinced that I have committed a "gross exaggeration," I would like to know if you feel the above studies must all be condemned out-of-hand as well. Does the government's own conservative estimate of 17,000 killed correspond to the expression I used, namely, "tens of thousands"? Not rigorously, I have to admit that much. But is it a "gross exaggeration"? I wouldn't call it that. And I would ask on what basis you have called it that. What motivates you to dismiss any claim that doesn't agree with your preconceptions about what is happening in Iraq, even in cases where you clearly have not bothered to inform yourself? Does the fight against abortion push you to this attitude? If so, is that a bad thing, do you think? Is it necessary?

In any case, with a general upheaval now afoot in Iraq against the American occupiers, the American forces turning Iraq into the American Palestine, and the human toll rising quickly, even the most conservative efforts will soon confirm the unexaggerated and wholly accurate nature of the claim. Certainly by the time you vote for Bush, tens of thousands will have perished in Iraq, and a majority of them will have been innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever, if the trends till this point remain in place.

But, again, I ask why you have chosen playing this game of trying to discredit statistical claims. Why does it matter? If 4,000,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed by order of a "preemptively" striking anti-abortion president, wouldn't that president still maintain your support? That's the question I have asked you in about ten different ways now and that you have not begun to answer. I mean, does the difference between 17,000 and 20,000 or even 30,000 mean anything to you? Without any apparent benefit to your own pro-Bush assessment of the violence in Iraq, you have tried to push me into a corner concerning the accuracy of this or that statistical claim, insinuated that I have been inaccurate in a fanciful, propagandistic way, and provided no substantiation whatsoever for your own efforts at discrediting what I have written. Of course, I leave it up to you to try to substantiate your efforts at discrediting my numbers.

If I have exposed the false nature of your impressions concerning the U.S. use of cluster bombs, it is because I stated early on my concern that your news sources are too limited and too propagandistic.

There was one more statement that you tried to discredit in a cavalier fashion (by offering no substantiation of your own). I will turn to that next.

Voting for life. 10.5 Million Easily Preventable Infant Deaths Yearly.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 9.]#8

Fanni: Let me quote the third part of your attempt at lumping me together with your pro-abortion foes on the basis of the claim that I, as they do, pull figures out of the air to satisfy ideological purposes, and which I promised I would return to, so as to substantiate my claims:

Robert: "A second possible example: You stated earlier that something like 10.5 million children died because Bush would not send them needed aid. Without documentation, this again sounds like a figure that someone pulled out of the air."

Fanni: Your strategy here has only been counter-productive for you. It has shown you to be engaged in the unsubstantiated assertion-making that you accused me of and has distracted us from the real issues I have been trying to get you to address. I have countered the first two parts of this tactic of yours and now will address the third. Here is the context in which are found the assertions that you have paraphrased simplistically above:

If it is true that you support life, then, I wonder, have you given any thought to the fact that 10.5 million children under the age of 5 died from easily preventable diseases last year, and that the institution - the World Health Organization - that has the potential to prevent these diseases has been severely under-funded by the Bush Administration? Does this sort of fact mean nothing to you? Or does it concern you? Or does abortion appear like the only life-and-death issue that is worth any trouble to you? And if so, why is this so? Do you generally resist seeing your emphasis on life in its broadest context, and focus exclusively on the destiny of fetuses? If so, why?

Of course, Bush has done some fine posturing with respect to the issue of AIDS. However, even here, his record concerning human life is horrific. In addition to the undeniable impression that Bush is more concerned with securing drug company profits than providing cheap drugs for sufferers of AIDS the world over, consider that President Bush promised $3 billion per year over five years for the AIDS initiative while the White House’s 2004 budget request ended up asking Congress for only $1.9 billion annually. But even that sum was a mirage, as it was partly based on a reshuffling of related accounts. For example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, much of which is designated for Africa, received a $150 million cut from the previous year. Moreover, Congress mandated that even this money will not be spent unless the Europeans match the U.S. contribution. Immediate consequence: countless infant deaths that could have been prevented.[source of the above information]

Before I address the source and substance of the number-related claim, let me note my perplexity at your having neglected the line of questioning to which it leads. The paragraph builds up to the following questions: Do you generally resist seeing your emphasis on life in its broadest context, and focus exclusively on the destiny of fetuses? If so, why? Did you feel that you could avoid these questions by discrediting the claim concerning the number of infant deaths cited before it? Or did you only mean to get to the essential questioning later? As I reread my italicized writing above, I think it is clear that, even if the number concerning 10.5 million deaths were a matter of pure ideological fiction concocted by some devilish liberal group in an attempt to demonize President Bush precisely because he is anti-abortion, the line of questioning would still stand and would still call for a reply. The possibility that a false or unsubstantiated number may have been employed in building the line of questioning does not render the questioning itself illegitimate and unworthy of a response. Perhaps, in asking, Does this sort of fact mean nothing to you? Or does it concern you?, I should have foreseen the possible temptation on your part to outmaneuver my line of questioning and so should have diffused this temptation from the get-go by writing, instead, Does this sort of factual claim – however debatable it may appear to you or anyone else – mean nothing to you? Or would it concern you, if you had reason to believe it might be accurate?

As far as I can tell, my line of questioning appears even more pertinent now in light of the fact that you have refused to respond to it other than by substituting for a response a cavalier attempt to try to discredit the factual nature of my figures. But perhaps you just haven't had time yet to respond to the essence of what I have been asking you, or have experienced the loss of a message that would have contained a reply? I suppose that is possible, but it doesn't explain why the quibbling over figures had to be put forth in your initial reply. Or perhaps you have found my main line of questioning to be perplexing and demanding of more effort and attention than did your hasty assertions concerning the supposedly false, ideological nature of certain factual claims that appear in the framing of my line of questioning?

I invite you to explain.

You also noted this, with respect to the same issue:

Robert: "Although even one child's death is a tragedy, Bush's 'complicity' in these deaths is indirect and remote. He was not responsible for the circumstances or actions which caused their illnesses, and other wealthy nations share in the responsibility to help them out."

Fanni: With respect to what you have written here, I find it to be a bad faith argument to assert that, because one who has the capacity to prevent diseases did not cause the diseases, or establish the conditions that initially led to the diseases, that person or institution cannot be held responsible for the failure to prevent the diseases. I argue the contrary. It is the preventable nature of the diseases and deaths that creates the responsibility, and not the fatal diseases themselves. (Certainly, you would agree with me on the issue of abortion that it is the preventable nature of abortions that makes abortion an issue of responsibility. And I doubt that you would say, in good faith, "Well, we don’t have to lift a finger in preventing abortions until the Europeans or other wealthy nations do the same.") Secondly, your point that other wealthy nations share this responsibility is valid, as I said in an earlier message but, as I indicated above, it is lamentable that the Republican-led Congress has exploited this valid point to justify inaction and that the President has done nothing to lead the way in addressing this responsibility. There is at least one candidate for the presidency who has made a large issue of this responsibility and who would certainly give a serious effort at leading the U.S. and other wealthy nations out of their corporate indifference to human suffering and to the preventable loss of human life the world over, but this is not the place to discuss Ralph Nader's platform for the presidency.

The figures relating to deaths in undeveloped nations are hard to establish not only because of the lack of infrastructure and of autonomous, investigative institutions within those nations, but because human lives as they exist outside of wealthy nations simply do not count for anything in the platforms of corporatized governments, just as the civilian lives in Iraq do not count for much in the corporate news engine called Fox News. (I sometimes try to imagine all those dashingly outfitted, bold, beautiful blonds and well-shaped figures of masculinity that Fox employs as its human face and voice, commenting compassionately on the unnecessary killing by U.S. forces of Iraqi civilians, and the scene appears so incongruous as to emit a cruel, hollow laugh from within me, despite all my efforts to master this cynical response.) So, you can always play a game of avoiding questioning and diminishing responsibilities by asserting that someone else's figures are not known to be entirely accurate or by trying to discredit the few institutions that do try to establish such figures by asserting that, on other issues – for you, this means, always, on abortion – that someone else, or that institution, has been on the wrong side. But even if you proceed in this manner, you will not have rendered my line of questioning irrelevant, illegitimate, or unworthy of a response because, precisely, as I have indicated amply before and do so here again, I am also interested in the hypothetical line that says: if you knew this many deaths to be at stake, and that, as President of the United States, Bush is directly or indirectly responsible for those that have occurred and those that are likely to occur, would this knowledge effect your support for Bush? Would it enter into your calculations concerning his merits as a leader in the "culture of life" debates? Or wouldn't it? And if not, why not? Why can't you address this line of questioning?

You do not need any factual report, or any number of credible reports by any number of credible institutions or individuals, to be able to address this line of questioning. And I am left wondering, today, why you have tried, deftly or not, to avoid it.

Lastly, you stated that, "although even one child's death is a tragedy, Bush's 'complicity' in these deaths is indirect and remote." I wonder, do you mean to imply thereby that a pro-abortion candidate such as Kerry is, by contrast, directly and immediately complicit in the deaths of the unborn? If so, on what basis have you made this distinction? Whereas Kerry is (implicitly, but unmistakably) deemed by you to be complicit directly and immediately, Bush is deemed "complicit" (in hedging scare quotes) only indirectly and remotely. As for me, nothing jumps out as being so dissimilar in these two cases. We are talking about politicians who have the power to effect legislation that, in turn, leads to such events as preventable abortions and deaths by preventable diseases. How, then, were you able to distribute your judgments so differently in the two cases? And how were you able to do it without having studied the question of preventable diseases worldwide and the neglect of the issue by both George Bush and the Congress of the United States?

Personally, I don't think the distinction between "direct" and "indirect" responsibility is satisfying. Your invoking it reminds me of Adolf Eichmann's trying to claim that he, and by implication other Nazi bureaucrats, were not guilty of their crimes because they were not directly involved in their application or their ordering. But it is still questionable of you to take my phrasing, which clearly puts Bush in an indirect (but I would still say, decisive) role, and flatten into a wacko assertion that makes Bush look like he is solely responsible for 10.5 million deaths of children with whom he bears a direct relationship – one as direct as the relationship between two correspondents, or acquaintances. I remind you both of (a) my statement and (b) your simplistic, distorting paraphrase thereof:

(a) If it is true that you support life, then, I wonder, have you given any thought to the fact that 10.5 million children under the age of 5 died from easily preventable diseases last year, and that the institution - the World Health Organization - that has the potential to prevent these diseases has been severely under-funded by the Bush Administration?

(b) "You stated earlier that something like 10.5 million children died because Bush would not send them needed aid."

This is not a fair manner of proceeding precisely because for you, and for reasons that you haven't explained, the distinction between direct and indirect, or immediate and remote, responsibility is both of prime importance and clearly at work in the cases of, for example, Bush's under-funding the campaigns against malaria and other preventable diseases and Kerry's lack of support for the anti-abortion campaign. The basis on which you make this distinction remains a mystery to me.

Finally, I reach the point concerning the claim of 10.5 million deaths annually. When I present these sources, keep in mind that whether one can link the Bush Administration's policies, directly or indirectly, either to only 10 deaths or to 700 million infant deaths would, strictly speaking, be irrelevant to the substance of our discussion because you have not yet said that, if a figure larger than, say, the most generous estimate of fetuses aborted annually were substantiated – this is a hypothetical – that, in such a case, you would shift your support away from the anti-abortion Bush and to a candidate who has the insight and will-power to address the problem of life loss and human suffering more generally, but who is not anti-abortion.

The only point of my having to substantiate this claim is that it prevents you from obscuring the line of questioning that is central to our dialogue. That avoidance tactic was apparently supposed to make you appear like you are rightfully suspicious of statistics and therefore able to discredit my arguments on that basis alone.

The tactic hasn't worked. It has provided a temporary diversion to our discussion, which obstacle I have, I hope, in this message, conclusively removed.

Here, finally, are sources for the claim I made concerning preventable infant deaths:

a) An article from the Boston Globe, from December 2003, in which are found the following sentences:

"In 1970, an estimated 17 million children under 5 died around the world; last year, that number was 10.5 million. In Oman, the success of improving health systems has been striking: in 1970, 242 out of 1,000 children died before age 5, but today its rate is just 15 deaths out of 1,000.
But in 14 African countries, child mortality rates are higher than they were in 1990.
Of those 10.5 million child deaths, 98 percent were in the developing world. The leading causes of child deaths remain complications at birth, lower respiratory tract infections, diarrheal diseases, and malaria, with malnutrition contributing to all of them. All such conditions and diseases are easily preventable, the report noted."

b) An article that assesses the World Health Organization report to which I alluded, and in which the following assertions are found, showing only slight variation from the above assessments:

"Some 10.5 million children in poor nations die every year before they turn five, 70 percent from infectious diseases. Leading child killers in 2002 included respiratory infections, which caused 1.9 million deaths. Diarrhea killed 1.6 million and malaria 1.1 million.
"Around 9.5 million of the deaths easily could be prevented, said WHO expert Dr. Robert Beaglehole. 'We can make a difference, right now,' with things like oral rehydration treatment for diarrhea and anti-mosquito bed nets to fight malaria, he said."

You will note, with respect to the second piece, the "immediate and direct" influence that Dr. Beaglehole says can be made in eradicating this suffering and death. This emphasis should impress you since the categories of immediacy and directness are precisely what animate your fight against abortion and because you have tried to diminish these categories with respect to Bush's responsibility in world health issues.

To conclude, you can continue, at this point, to try to cast doubt on my figures, or on the sources which I have used to substantiate them, but that would only expose a willing ideological blindness on your part because, whatever the nature of the facts or precise numbers of these claims (which nonetheless I feel I have convincingly substantiated), you will have refused once again to address my line of questioning and instead opted for nit-picking and resentful, baseless attempts at discrediting the assertions that support that line of questioning.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to your response.

Voting for life. Attack on Fallujah mosque.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 9.]#9

Fanni: While awaiting your reply to my previous questions, I admit that I am still confused about your military version of what happened in the mosque in Fallujah the other day. I was able to find no source that uncritically justified the killing by missile firing in the mosque in the manner you did, by depicting those in the mosque as aggressors who deserved such a death. I found this AP article at the Washington Times that reports there being two radically different viewpoints on the incident:

"In Fallujah, U.S. Marines battled for a second day to seize a mosque that officers say insurgents used as a fire base. Marines called in tanks and warplanes to pound the Sunni gunmen. By nightfall, the American force seized the Abdel-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque for the second night in a row. [....]
After a six-hour battle on Wednesday, Marines called in airstrikes before they took the mosque. Sunni rebels moved back in after the Marines left overnight.
The Islamic Clerics Committee, whose offices are next to the mosque, said 40 people, including whole families, were killed in Wednesday's bombing. It occurred at about the time worshippers would have gathered for afternoon prayers.
The Marines deny any civilians were killed, but U.S. military commanders said a large number of gunmen were killed in the day's battle."

From an independent news reporter in Iraq reporting for "Free Speech News," and www.democracynow.org, I found that the U.S. admitted to only one death in the event, whereas independent observers counted 40 bodies. Moreover, it was written by the Free Speech Radio News reporter that the mosque was filled with worshippers at the time of the missile strikes. Did you not even see such reports, or reports that presented more than a single, military viewpoint? Or did you swiftly presume, as you did with my claims, that any claims that potentially cast the U.S. military forces in a bad light must have been, or must always be, written by groups hostile to anti-abortion Bush who pull figures out of the air? And was it on that basis that you dismissed them?

What matters here is not that we "get to the bottom" of this particular incident. It is highly unlikely that, with our resources, we ever could. Nonetheless, I think it's worth noting the uncritical manner in which you asserted the military version of this incident. It seems odd that you summarily adopt the military's claims in a disputed incident that belongs to a war over which you are supposed to be "ambivalent." You seem to have lost all of your ambivalence and picked up your war drum to beat on it. Why did this happen? And on the basis of what pro-military news source did you form a summary judgment? Was it Fox News? I request that you answer this question and, in the future, when you offer military versions only of disputed incidents, please cite your source.

Voting for life. Robert's reply.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 12.]#10

Robert writes:

Thanks for the info on the 10.5 million.

Three thoughts.

First, isn't human nature interesting? You did exactly the same thing on the mosque issue that you said I did. That is, you referred to it initially without making any reference to combatants on the Iraqi side. When I tried to correct your omission by pointing out that US troops were indeed being fired upon, but did not mention innocent civilians, you accused me of beating on the war drum. Should I accuse you of being a one-sided peacenik?

Second, I could ask you the same question you appear to be asking me. How many unborn a day need to be killed before you disavow your loyalty to the man who has vowed to continue to work to expand abortion rights here and abroad?

Third, I believe I have answered your main question. I am doing the same thing you are doing, looking at an imperfect politician (I assume you don't agree with Kerry on every point, particularly the abortion rights point), looking at and assessing the evidence of his plusses and minuses, and coming up with more plusses. Hence, we each support our imperfect politicians. We just differ on how we add up the plusses and minuses.

I won't answer a hypothetical. I answer on my understanding of the existing plusses and minuses. Hence, I think I answered your question, unless you posed another one I missed.

Voting for life. War drum beating.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 13.]#11

Fanni writes: I will respond quickly to this message and send my reply to the rest later.

Robert wrote: "Thanks for the info on the 10.5 million."

Fanni writes: Sure.

Robert wrote: "Three thoughts. First, isn't human nature interesting? You did exactly the same thing on the mosque issue that you said I did. That is, you referred to it initially without making any reference to combatants on the Iraqi side. When I tried to correct your omission by pointing out that US troops were indeed being fired upon, but did not mention innocent civilians, you accused me of beating on the war drum. Should I accuse you of being a one-sided peacenik?"

Fanni writes: First, this is not a question of "human nature." Your point here would have merit if it related only to my very first message about the incident in Fallujua, which message I had already "corrected." I was responding to an initial report that I heard before the full story came out. No mention was made of anyone firing from within the mosque. After I wrote the message (in which I said that I could not find any military version of the incident), I did what any responsible citizen should do: I further checked multiple news sources and got a more complete, if complicated picture. Can you say that you did the same, or that you do so regularly? That's something I have doubted and asked you about and you keep refusing to address my questions on that account. In any case, I think we can agree, as I said earlier, that this fighting in and around the mosque in Fallujah is a disuputed incident. I adjusted my understanding of this incident without your help and I wasn't being a brainless peacenik. Am I to presume that you have set your war mask down on this one? It seems that you have considered it, but, if so, you may as well say so, as I already corrected my own understanding in a previous e-mail to include the military take on what happened. You're lagging behind on this one even as you try to win a point for belatedly expanding my version of the incident, and then try to force me into a permanent state of hypocrisy, chalked up to "human nature."

Robert wrote: "Second, I could ask you the same question you appear to be asking me. How many unborn a day need to be killed before you disavow your loyalty to the man who has vowed to continue to work to expand abortion rights here and abroad?"

Fanni writes: First of all, you appear to be playing tapes here. Who is this man that you say I am loyal to? Have I ever spoken of or demonstrated loyalty? Does this reference come from a debate had with someone else? I will respond to your question once you have identified the man. I do like the spirit of the question, though. It shows that you -- possibly -- are willing to see abortion in a large context of life-and-death issues. This is certainly not something I have resisted; on the contrary, my questioning has been calling for it repeatedly, and it is specifically this line of questioning that you have most resisted.

Robert wrote: "Third, I believe I have answered your main question. I am doing the same thing you are doing, looking at an imperfect politician (I assume you don't agree with Kerry on every point, particularly the abortion rights point), looking at and assessing the evidence of his plusses and minuses, and coming up with more plusses."

Fanni writes: I am not a supporter of Kerry and never was. Sorry, you're wrong on this point, and embarrassingly so, because all I have done in my discussions with you is to criticize Kerry. But do I think Kerry would be a better president than Bush? (I don't, like you, shy from a hypothetical). Well, as one commentator said, I would rather vote for a bowl of Jello than George Bush, so, yes. (At least the bowl of Jello would not knowingly tell lies during the State of Union.)

What are the "plusses" you see in Bush, other than his anti-abortion line? Please tell me the main reasons why Bush is a fine president, to your mind, or at least the best candidate among all those running, aside, obviously, from his anti-abortion line.

Robert wrote: "Hence, we each support our imperfect politicians. We just differ on how we add up the plusses and minuses."

Fanni writes: Let me hear all of your plusses for George Bush, please.

Robert wrote: "I won't answer a hypothetical. I answer on my understanding of the existing plusses and minuses. Hence, I think I answered your question, unless you posed another one I missed."

You missed many questions, including the most important ones, and I will indicate what those are in a coming message.

p.s. This is what you wrote to me, after I quoted an AP report that did not mention the presence of fighters within the mosque.

"The innocent civilians in that mosque were firing on U.S. troops."

And this is how, today, you characterize this one-sentence, flat, summary rendition of a disputed, complicated incident:

"When I tried to correct your omission by pointing out that US troops were indeed being fired upon, but did not mention innocent civilians, you accused me of beating on the war drum."

It is outrageous to call the above, simplistic and distorting sentence that I have underscored here a "correction of an omission." It is so because, even if it presents new information, it does not say that this information is only to be added, as supplemental material, to other, legitimate information. That is what corrections of omissions do. If you had wanted to present a corrective statement, or add supplemental information that was missing, you could have easily indicated that that was what you meant to do. On the contrary – this is where the sound of your war drum beating punches through – you leaped to the claim (which I have seen substantiated nowhere, in any press whatsoever) that it was the innocent civilians who were doing the firing. Now, it is patently absurd and propagandistic to claim that the innocent civilians were doing the firing; for, in such a case, obviously, they would no longer be innocent civilians, right? So, in ramming together both innocent civilians and militants, you obviously meant to deny that any innocent civilians were in the mosque at all. And I ask, how did you know this to be true? The point has been disputed, and remains so. What you gave me, then, was not a "correction of an omission" but the military line in its full, propagandistic (and, in your version, sardonic) form.

Point denied.

Voting for life. Corporate Influence.

[The brief introduction to this exchange is posted on April 19 as VOTING FOR LIFE: PREAMBLE. The following was written on April 16.]#12

Robert writes:Hitler was pro-abortion for ethnic groups he did not like and anti-abortion for ethnic groups he did like.

Like any large organization, corporations can do much good and/or much evil. I'll have to check with our reference librarian, but I would guess that a majority of Americans are part of large corporations, i.e., they benefit from profits in the form of dividends, both as individuals and in pension plans their companies have for them, and, as was reported in a column in the Beacon [Akron Beacon Journal] today, in lower prices which benefit all Americans. They help bring economy of size, and are responsible for increased productivity (although certainly not all they produce is good). Large corporations also support many charities such as the United Way. Of course, they can also exploit workers, the environment, and pay their executives ridiculously high salaries and benefits. Hence, they are a mixed good/evil. Abortion is an unmitigated evil which harms women healthwise, as 31 years of medical research regarding abortion on demand has demonstrated,and well as killing their children.

Of all the issues facing us as a nation, I prioritize, and find abortion to be the most significant, and vote accordingly.

Fanni writes:You finally returned to addressing your single-issue emphasis in politics, and I commend you for doing so. However, what you offer as an argument below is unpersuasive and suggests that you have not thought through a serious justification for it. I will now show you why I think this is so. You write the following

Robert: "Like any large organization, corporations can do much good and/or much evil. I'll have to check with our reference librarian, but I would guess that a majority of Americans are part of large corporations, i.e., they benefit from profits in the form of dividends, both as individuals and in pension plans their companies have for them, and, as was reported in a column in the Beacon [Journal] today, in lower prices which benefit all Americans. They help bring economy of size, and are responsible for increased productivity (although certainly not all they produce is good). Large corporations also support many charities such as the United Way. Of course, they can also exploit workers, the environment, and pay their executives ridiculously high salaries and benefits. Hence, they are a mixed good/evil."

Fanni writes: This is the first half of your argument, in which you establish that corporations are not an unmitigated evil. I agree with the basic premise of the above comments and would only dispute or mark my incomprehension of the claim that "(corporations) bring economy of size," since, as the examples Wal-Mart and many other corporations show, corporations do not bring economy of size; they bring, on the contrary, a quest for the dominance of world markets that is ultimately harmful to market competition (as well as, more immediately, to labor and in many cases environmental standards and to the families whose members are employed there). The only "economy of size" that corporations strive for is in government, which would otherwise be capable of regulating them effectively in the public interest and restraining their tendency to bloat. These off-topic points aside, there is no need to check with your reference librarian concerning the participation of Americans in corporations. I agree that corporations are omnipresent in our lives, and I think that this is true even of those to which we do not belong in some card-carrying way. No American escapes the power of corporations. American society is built upon participation in corporate waste and corporate-driven environmental destruction, most notably in its forcing citizens to rely on individually-operated, polluting vehicles. (As others have noted, "If every country had as many automobiles per capita as the U.S., the world would not be habitable." "The pollution would create a nuclear winter-like condition, blocking out the sun.") This omnipresence of corporations does not, however, mean that corporations and their corporate values become superior to civic, national, or family values. A corporation is an artificial entity dependent for its existence on the renewal of a state charter. This renewal system was intended to be regulatory in nature. All states have the right to suspend the charter if they deem that a given corporation is, for instance, involved in crime, damaging public health, or generally degrading the quality of life of the state's citizens, whether the citizens belong to that corporation in some official manner or not. In practice, however, this regulatory power has been reduced to rubber-stamping as states increasingly override civic values on a number of environmental, development, and labor issues in an attempt to attract corporate money and keep it from floating off to other states.

Enough for our discussion of corporations. That is not the topic we have chosen to focus on, and I agree with the spirit of your first premise. I have criticized the influence of corporations on our government and civic life without erecting them into an unmitigated evil and I accept that they have positive features such as employment.

In the message you are replying to here, I mentioned nefarious corporate influences as one possible example of something which you might see as a more significant threat to human life than abortion. That was the main point of bringing up the example of nefarious corporate influences.

Before addressing the second premise of your argument, I note that you avoided my line of questioning that posited corporate influences as one possible example of something more significant threat to human life than abortion and instead focused on the example that was used to concretize the principle of the questioning. Here is that line of questioning, recopied for your convenience. Unlike my generally critical view of corporations, which is far short of unequivocally equating corporations with "evil" and which, as I said, had in this context the value of an example only, the following line of questioning constitutes the main point of my remarks, and has not yet been responded to:

At what point can you weigh the balances for and, most importantly, against a declared anti-abortion politician? Or can't you? Do you feel you have found the one issue in respect of which you have found a way to assure yourself a righteous vote in every case? Do you feel it is possible for there to be such an issue? Is abortion that one issue? Are there others that would do equally well for the same ends? Or does it stand alone in that respect?