Remember the Bush Doctrine
EDITORIAL Remember the Bush Doctrine U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan is happy with President Bush's apparent Middle East policy switch. So is European Union president Romano Prodi, French...
...Meanwhile, President Bush needs to stay focused on Iraq...
...How much do we want to modify the chemical and biological workings of brain and body...
...Researchers in both the United States and Japan claimed advances in artificial wombs...
...the production of : living human clones...
...If it fails, where will we draw the line...
...The president needs to ensure that Thursday's speech does not mark a significant turn away from the straight and admirable path of the Bush Doctrine...
...As the Washington Post's Lee Hockstader reports, Sharon "has never enjoyed more political harmony at home...
...In the wake of the Passover Massacre, Israel should be given the time it needs...
...So is European Union president Romano Prodi, French president Jacques Chirac, and the British foreign ministry...
...In my dreams I still walk and run...
...But now we have hope, thanks to a new kind of medical research, called somatic cell nuclear transfer—or SCNT...
...Israeli military commanders say they may well need more time to complete their mission of pulling down the terrorist network in the territories...
...Robert Kagan and William Kristol The Future Is Now, II In February 2001, after detailing a series of recent "advances" in biotechnology and genetics—genetically modified monkeys, the use of human fetal tissue in rodents, the granting of patents for "hybrid" man-animal embryos, and the harvesting of hearts, brains, and other organs from dead children in a British hospital—we editorialized, "The Future Is Now...
...On Thursday the Israeli government released two documents it had seized from Arafat's offices...
...The vote looks likely to be a close one, between two fundamentally different alternatives...
...Such sophistry—and the world it portends—must not be permitted to prevail...
...Other researchers reported the cloning of rabbits "ready in time for Easter...
...Consider this new radio advertisement by the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research: "My name is Kris Gulden...
...A company named Genetics Savings & Clone announced the cloning of a cat...
...And Secretary of State Powell won't be arriving in Israel until the end of next week, giving Israeli forces more time to round up terrorists and uncover their caches of arms and explosives...
...Now, in early 2002, we read of yet another wave of biotechnological advances...
...Much has happened in the fourteen months since: —In the spring of 2001, embryonic stem cells and cloning emerged as central issues in American politics...
...Do we want to transform human procreation into a form of technological manufacture...
...The biotechnology industry and patient advocacy groups have falsely sold this research as the key to imminent cures...
...Otherwise, the lesson will be clear: Terrorism pays...
...But, as it happens, the daily bombings paused once the tanks rolled...
...They have misleadingly described it in ways that obscure its connection to reproductive cloning (it is the first step down that path) and san- : itize its essence (the creation and destruction of nascent : human life for research purposes...
...Both authorized payments to Palestinian militants suspected of shooting and bombing attacks...
...Of course, it is medical researchers themselves who invented the term "therapeutic cloning...
...And, really, that's what American foreign policy is all about, isn't it...
...Bush did not call for an immediate halt in Israel's military operations...
...If the secretary of state goes to the region and conveys that message, to Arafat and to the Arab governments, his trip could be helpful...
...It is working...
...the use of pre-implantation genetic : screening and abortion to select "better" babies...
...Apparently the "advancement of medical research" justifies falsification of the facts...
...The list goes on and on, but the lesson is clear: The time really is now...
...Everything now depends on what the president and his administration say and do...
...We understand that the State Department, which recently declared one organization under Arafat's control—the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades—to be a terrorist entity, is now considering adding other Arafat-controlled organizations to the list...
...It could have been worse...
...In the Arab world, in Europe, in Washington and New York, and in some corners of the administration itself, there is the hope that Bush will become so immersed in peace-processing that he'll have neither the time, the energy, nor the inclination to tackle the more fundamental problem in the Middle East...
...Many of those who want him to become deeply and personally involved in the Middle East peace process also want him to do nothing about Saddam Hussein...
...If he goes to reiterate the Bush Doctrine and make clear to the Arab world that there will be no exceptions and that it's time to choose between civilization and terror, then his trip could be more than helpful...
...He's given Arafat—again—one more chance...
...Now, however, it looks like an administration tough enough to wage war in Afghanistan and target Iraq could not withstand a few days of heckling from the European Union and the New York Times...
...For the sake of medicine," West added, "we need to set our fears aside...
...Due to a spinal cord injury, I'm now in a wheel chair...
...Do we want to design our descendants...
...Whatever else President Bush means to do, he should not prevent Israel from completing its anti-terrorist operation...
...How would the president have liked it—how would the American people have liked it—had someone stepped in after two weeks of the war in Afghanistan and said, "Enough is enough...
...The moral and political questions raised by human biotechnology, we argued then, deserve a central place in American public debate...
...The Senate now has the opportunity to act to ban all human cloning...
...One of Bush's most admirable and most important qualities as president has been his Reaganesque indifference to such carping...
...The fact is that only after the Israeli government finishes dismantling the terror network in the territories will it be possible to talk seriously about making peace and achieving a lasting settlement with the Palestinian people...
...Until now, that's not how George W. Bush saw things...
...And renegade Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori claimed last week that one of the participants in his human cloning project is eight weeks pregnant with a human clone...
...It is very much in America's interest that Israel be given time to complete its current mission...
...The Europeans and the American foreign policy establishment howled for weeks after Bush gave his "Axis of Evil" speech, but Bush held his ground, soldiered on without a hint of self-doubt, and the critics more or less gave up...
...If he goes to negotiate between Sharon and Arafat— between a democracy and a terrorist—then the trip could be a worse disaster even than Vice President Cheney's failed mission last month...
...Alarmed by a few Arab protests, alarmed, it seems, by a carefully calibrated Egyptian downgrading of relations with Israel—Cairo didn't even expel the Israeli ambassador—Bush's advisers determined that they had to do something...
...As he put it: "We have arrived at that brave new world that seemed so distant in 1932, when Aldous Huxley wrote about human beings created in test tubes...
...In June, the House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 265-162, a ban on all human cloning...
...Some are simple and clarifying...
...By turning Bush into a Middle East mediator, they think they can shunt him off the road that leads to real security and peace—the road that runs through Baghdad...
...Israeli forces have also found something else: evidence that suicide bomber operations and other terrorist actions were paid for by Yasser Arafat...
...Advanced Cell Technology reported work on fetal stem cells—not embryonic, but fetal stem cells— taken from cows, raising the specter of such work in human beings...
...The Israeli anti-terrorist operation is not mad...
...How will we ever summon the will to avert the even darker nightmares that will surely follow...
...This really has to be the last one...
...It wasn't moral equivalence, but it wasn't exactly moral clarity either...
...It is not always simple to draw lines between genetic therapy and eugenic enhancement, between scientific experimentation and exploitation, between a better human world and a new, inhuman one...
...No one expects it to end all further suicide bomb attacks...
...One is the Brownback-Landrieu bill, : almost identical to legislation already passed by the House...
...Some lines are difficult to draw...
...We trust the president will see and avoid this trap...
...But, biologically, scientifically, I don't know of any reason why that would not happen...
...So the president, after days of resisting advice to criticize a fellow democracy fighting terrorism, gave his "enough is enough" speech...
...The moment has arrived for setting limits on—and reconsidering—the science that leads to what Francis Fukuyama calls "a posthuman future...
...I'm sure someone close to you—someone with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or diabetes does too...
...William Kristol...
...Both bore the signature of Yasser Arafat...
...the use of : human fetuses as fodder for experiments...
...The New York Times editorial page is very happy...
...And the supposed promise of this research is precisely that it would create an embryonic copy of human patients in order to provide stem cells that the body's immune system won't reject, or to supply the means to model particular diseases...
...When asked whether his technique would eventually be used to clone newborn human beings, Michael West, the company's president, replied: "I'm not an expert in ethics...
...In August, President Bush, after months of deliberation, delivered his decision about federal funding of embryonic stem cell research in a special televised address to the nation—the first of his presidency...
...In the next few weeks, the Senate will vote on one of the most important—whether to ban human cloning...
...The most shocking was the reported creation by Chinese scientists of cloned human embryos using human DNA and rabbit eggs...
...It would ban all human cloning, is supported by the president, and deserves to become law...
...And I wake up every morning hoping for a cure...
...If the administration feels the need to engage in faux peace-process shenanigans to get the Europeans and the New York Times off its back, fine...
...Some people call it therapeutic cloning, although it has nothing to do with copying human beings...
...Nor should anyone be under any illusion that peace talks can proceed while terrorist attacks continue, no matter how many times Colin Powell travels to the region...
...In November 2001, Advanced Cell Technology created what were believed to be the first cloned human embryos...
...Do we want to go down the road of using developing human life as a resource for experiments...
...Indeed, the current Israeli military action, derided in many circles here and abroad as the mad scheme of a vengeful Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, happens to be wildly popular among the vast majority of Israelis—in a recent poll over 70 percent expressed support for continued military action...
...This vote will set a precedent—one way or the other, for better or worse—for our effort to confront the moral challenges posed by our biogenetic powers...
...How long before Arafat himself receives the designation he deserves...
...I'm a former police officer and triathlete...
...But we trust the president isn't misled...
...The Kennedy-Feinstein and Harkin-Specter bills, : which will probably be combined into one alternative, would allow the creation of cloned human embryos for research and destruction...
...Meanwhile, Israeli forces have arrested or killed several dozen terrorists—remember, that is what Yasser Arafat was supposed to do under the so-called Tenet plan—and have found large amounts of weapons, ammunition, explosives, and bomb-making equipment...
...But our moral sentiments, when faced with the developments of the last few years, revolt at what may soon be possible: corporate ownership of genetically modified human embryos...
...And for good reason...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 30
