World of OpinionOn Israel-Palestinian conflict:
More horrible bombings in Israel, this time in Tel Aviv, with scores of civilians killed and wounded, many of them poor migrant workers. It was the worst since Nov. 21, when a bomb killed 11 Israelis on a Jerusalem bus. Between the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv bombings, 75 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, according to Palestinian figures, including 17 civilians, nine women and two children. Words are inadequate to express either the individual grief or collective failure represented by these acts. And they continue week after week, month after month, with no end in sight. …
Israel faces a terrible dilemma. With elections coming in three weeks, the Tel Aviv bombing is likely to reinforce the Sharon government, even though Sharon has shown he has no solution to Palestinian violence but more Israeli violence. Amram Mitzna, the new Labor Party leader running against Sharon, has announced a peace plan, but he likely will be weakened by the new bombings. …
History teaches that it takes strong U.S. leadership for Israelis and Palestinians to face their responsibilities. As long as the Bush administration hangs back, relegating this deadly quarrel to the back burner, there will be no progress. Britain and the European Union, recognizing the power vacuum, have tried to act as U.S. surrogates, but lack the influence. … The longer a solution is delayed, the harder it becomes.
On North Korea:
North Korea already has two nuclear weapons, says Secretary of State Colin Powell.
That and its long-standing ties with the colossus that is China are worth consideration by anyone trying to evaluate the Bush administration’s response to North Korea’s announced plans to restart a reactor capable of producing fuel for nuclear warheads.
The recent developments in North Korea do present a delicious irony when placed in contrast with Iraq. The former is a known threat, the latter a supposed or presumed one.
But that makes the decisions no less difficult. Any calculation involving military action must be based on likely consequences and costs. If the United States struck North Korea, the nation’s leaders might well retaliate against South Korea and Japan, perhaps even employing the nuclear weapons it possesses. And we apparently do not know what China would do. That’s all the more reason for the Bush administration to attempt to enlist Beijing as an ally in the effort to defuse the threat that North Korea presents.
On human cloning:
Eve, the clone made by a religious cult that believes space aliens cloned themselves to create life on Earth, is certainly a hoax.
That hasn’t stopped politicians allied with the religious right, and others afraid to stand up to them, from using the furor to push a ban on all human cloning. They will try to use the prospect of “baby farms” and armies of cloned humans to stampede Congress into action. But the campaign for a total ban on cloning erroneously equates two different types of cloning. It’s hard to imagine that the “misconception” is wholly unintentional.
So once again, for the record, reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning may both start out the same way, but end up in two very separate places. A cloned cell starts out with a human egg from which all the genetic material has been removed and replaced with cells taken from the human to be cloned. If the procedure works, the cells start to divide. In reproductive cloning, this egg is inserted in a woman’s womb and becomes a baby.
There are all kinds of reasons why this procedure is unethical and ought to be banned, at least for now. A major one is the possibility – likelihood – of problems developing in such a fetus or in the baby that is produced, as happened with Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal. But therapeutic cloning is different, and worth exploring: It could be used to aid in the treatment of degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes. In therapeutic cloning, the altered egg is allowed to divide into only a few cells, which then are used as stem cells. These cells have the potential to be coaxed into generating replacement cells for those destroyed by disease. Cloned cells would have the exact same DNA as the patient and so would be less likely to be rejected. …
So even though the buzz is all about Eve, Congress should resist this latest attempt to exploit bad science in the service of ideology.