2004年01月の記事一覧 | 世界のWebを目指すブログ

Bush Appears to Back Down on Arms Claim Against Iraq

Bush Appears to Back Down on Arms Claim Against IraqBy David E. SangerThe New York Times Wednesday 28 January 2004 WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 ・President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world." Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Mr. Bush did not answer directly. "I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work, so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought," he said at an appearance with the visiting president of Poland. Mr. Bush praised Dr. Kay's work and came to the defense of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose reporting on Iraq's weapons programs Dr. Kay sharply criticized in interviews over the weekend. "These are unbelievably hard-working, dedicated people who are doing a great job for America," Mr. Bush said of the intelligence community. Yet at the White House and on Capitol Hill, many officials said it was obvious that the intelligence reports about Iraq had been deeply flawed. They said they doubted that Mr. Bush would have the luxury of waiting to confront the issue. Democrats demanded that an independent panel examine how the National Intelligence Estimate ・the 2002 document that Mr. Bush used as the basis of his comments that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies ・could have been so flawed. The White House expressed no interest in the formation of such a panel. "I think it is critical that we follow up and find out what went wrong," the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said on Tuesday, before meeting with Mr. Bush with a group of other Congressional leaders from both parties. At the meeting, Mr. Daschle noted that Congressional leaders had depended on sound intelligence in voting on the war. Officials knowledgeable about the exchange said Mr. Bush interrupted Mr. Daschle and argued that the Iraq war was a "worthy" effort and that the administration had not manipulated the evidence. The president also said he had not given up the search for the weapons. Dr. Kay resigned last week as head of the Iraq Survey Group. In an interview with Reuters last week, he said one reason he stepped down was that his team had been diverted to some degree to help battle the insurgency. In private, some administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Kay's conclusion that the intelligence was deeply flawed was becoming an unwelcome political problem that the White House would have to confront, either now or when the presidential campaign heats up. Two administration officials reported that a debate has erupted within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should soon call for some kind of reform of the intelligence-gathering process. But the officials said Mr. Bush's aides were searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming the Central Intelligence Agency or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who approved that National Intelligence Estimate. "We spent the summer with the White House and the agency spitting at each other," said one official, recalling the arguments over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's inaccurate accusation in the State of the Union address last year that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear material in Africa. "We can't afford another of those." Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that senior members of the administration continue to exaggerate evidence about unconventional weapons. "Just within the last few days, Vice President Cheney has said that it is clear that a couple of vehicles that were found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, exactly the opposite of what David Kay is reportedly saying," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said the "overwhelming question" surrounding the intelligence issue remained "was this a predetermined war or not?" In a recent interview, Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who won his party's New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, said he had been "repeatedly misled" about the evidence by a number of administration officials. He cited Mr. Cheney, but also noted that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ・who had been the most cautious in the administration about the evidence ・told him that the reason to vote to authorize military action was Mr. Hussein's weapons ability ・and that other reasons, including bringing democracy to Iraq, were secondary. But in public on Tuesday, Mr. Bush, while careful in his claims, made it clear that he had no regrets. "There is just no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," Mr. Bush told reporters as he met with the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. "There is just no doubt in my mind. And I say that based upon intelligence that I saw prior to the decision to go into Iraq, and I say that based upon what I know today." Yet Mr. Bush's own words on the subject have been a moving target. In the State of the Union address a week ago, he referred to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" that inspectors had found, drawing the wording from Dr. Kay's interim report last fall. He did not mention Dr. Kay's other conclusions: that those activities were largely in research and development, that most made little progress, and that they were intended to deceive Mr. Hussein into thinking that he was spending money fruitfully. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, argued Tuesday that Mr. Bush had never said that Iraq posed an "imminent" threat, but only a "grave and growing" one. That may be literally correct, but both Mr. Bush and his aides made it clear many times that they believed Mr. Hussein already had unconventional weapons. For example, on Oct. 7, 2002, during a speech in Cincinnati that laid out how America was threatened by Mr. Hussein, Mr. Bush said: "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today ・and we do ・does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?" Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002, said, "We do know that the Iraqi regime currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction." Such statements were important then because Mr. Bush had to convince the country and his allies that, especially in the post-Sept. 11 world, he could not wait to build a broader coalition against Mr. Hussein. Moreover, international law has been far more forgiving of "pre-emptive war" against a country about to begin a strike of its own than it is of "preventive war" against a country that may, some day, pose a challenge to another state. That is seen more as an act of raw power than of self-defense.

In Fighting Stereotypes, Students Lift Test Scores

January 20, 2004In Fighting Stereotypes, Students Lift Test ScoresBy MELISSA P. McNAMARAGirls and low-income minority students are more likely to improve their scores on standardized tests when they are taught ways to overcome the pressures associated with negative stereotypes, according to a new study of seventh graders.Despite decades of national attention, standardized test results continue to show gender and race gaps in achievement. Some educators say these disparities, including girls' lower math scores and the lower reading scores of minority and low-income students, are a result of anxiety-inducing stereotypes. A new study suggests that arming students with the means to overcome that anxiety may reduce those disparities.The study, which was published in The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology in December, was conducted by Dr. Catherine Good, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Columbia, Dr. Joshua Aronson, an associate professor of psychology at New York University and Dr. Michael Inzlicht, a postdoctoral fellow in N.Y.U.'s department of applied psychology."One of the biggest pictures our research tells is that performance is so much more psychological than anything else," Dr. Aronson said.In the study, college students acted as mentors for 138 seventh graders from Del Valle Independent School District near Austin, Tex., which serves a largely low-income population. The mentors encouraged the students to view intelligence as a faculty that can be developed or to attribute their academic difficulties to their new educational environment. At the end of the year, students took statewide standardized math and reading tests.To test which method worked best, the researchers randomly assigned the seventh graders to one of four groups. The mentors taught one group of students about how the brain processes information. Another group was taught that all students faced academic difficulty in the transition to junior high school but that most overcame these challenges.The mentors gave both messages to students in the third group. Then, the standardized test performance of these three groups was compared with the performance of a fourth group of students, who received information only about the dangers of drug use.The girls who were taught that intelligence developed over time scored significantly higher on the standardized math test than girls in the fourth group. Similarly, the minority and low-income students who were told that they could overcome challenges and achieve academic success scored significantly higher on the standardized reading test than students in the fourth group, the researchers found.The students who received both messages registered comparable gains. Students who were told about drug use experienced no gains.The findings suggest that if minority and low-income students receive positive messages about their ability to learn and succeed academically, they are less likely to conform to stereotypes they believe others have of them ? poor reading ability in the case of minority students and inferior math skills in the case of girls ? when taking standardized tests.The researchers note that standardized test scores may be poor predictors of future academic success. But they say that encouraging adolescents to attribute academic troubles to their situation rather than to their shortcomings can meaningfully increase student achievement.This is encouraging, the researchers say, because it demonstrates a successful way to stem the spiral of self-blame, anxiety and underperformance that many adolescents experience.Researchers say their findings could lead schools to adopt programs to remedy stereotype-based underperformance as students move into junior high school."The key is for students to think that change is possible," Dr. Aronson said. "Kids who believe intelligence is malleable are not demoralized and succeed."

Americans must think the unthinkable

Americans must think the unthinkableBy Paul KennedyJanuary 19, 2004A FEW months ago, former US president Bill Clinton returned to his alma mater, Yale University, to give a major address on US policies now and into the future. Quite properly, he did not launch any personal attacks upon George W.Bush nor produce nit-picking criticisms of the conduct of the war in Iraq. But he did offer a number of observations about the long-term future of the world and the US's place in it that have stayed in my mind, making me think long and hard.His most striking remarks concerned the US's eternal search for absolute security. This was not just about smashing al-Qa'ida or deterring North Korea, significant though they are. It was about the longer term, something that politicians in most countries rarely think about. In Clinton's words, the really big challenge for US leaders was to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour that we would like to live in when the US is no longer the military, political, economic superpower on this planet. Wow! I have never heard an American politician utter such an idea, and in many circles it would be regarded as heretical. How could an American think of a time when the US is not the leading nation? Of course the French, Russians, Chinese and Arabs like to dream of such a scenario, but surely not a US citizen, and especially not a former commander-in-chief? Clinton's notion stands in complete and profound contrast with the statement about the US's long-term grand strategy that was spelled out in the famous National Security Strategy document of September 2002. In that document the Bush administration asserted that the US armed forces should make every effort to prevent any other nation from surpassing, or equalling, the power of the US. This is, after all, the justification for a defence budget that is shooting clear over $US400 billion ($525 billion) each year and is larger than the combined spending of the next 12 biggest defence spenders. Thus, the very notion of accepting an end to this predominance, and especially of preparing to make it happen, seems weird. Has any leader or country in history ever thought along such lines before? Why should the US? There is, actually, a fairly close analogy to this in the foreign policy debates that took place between those two rival British statesmen, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, from the 1860s to the 1880s. Disraeli, a Conservative and arch-imperialist, stressed the need to keep the British Empire strong, to use gunboat diplomacy against recalcitrant regimes in the non-Western world, and to make strategic territorial acquisitions (as in West Africa, Malaya, Fiji and Afghanistan). By contrast, the Liberal leader Gladstone not only denounced imperial bombast and acquisitiveness, but also urged the values of international accommodation and treaties. He agreed (to use one of his favourite phrases) that large powers had large responsibilities, but felt that that was an additional reason why they must work together, cut their heavy arms spending and create a stable and prosperous world order based upon the rule of law. (It is no surprise that Woodrow Wilson had a portrait of Gladstone on his desk in the White House). Moreover, Gladstone was the only mid-Victorian statesman I know of who sensed that the US would one day overtake the British Empire, commercially and strategically, and had the character to face that fact. What, he wondered, should the ideal international system look like when Britain was no longer number one, perhaps 30 or 50 years down the line? It was not a silly question. The differing views of presidents Bush and Clinton regarding the US's long-term grand strategy can be viewed in the same light. Nobody of any sense is saying the US is facing its imperial sunset, even if its ground forces are stretched in Iraq and other trouble spots. Indeed, the US actually looks stronger, relative to any other nation or group of nations, than it did 20 years ago. But the real problem, as I see it, is that both schools of thought possess flaws. A simplistic strategy of staying number one at any cost and never considering an alternative future flies in the face of history. It is a privilege that has been accorded to no nation or empire, and it would be presumptuous to suppose that the US is different (which may be why some smart folks in the Pentagon have already commissioned a study on the decline of great powers, to try to learn how to stay on top a bit longer). In any case, and ironically, US commercial policies and private capital flows are already contributing to deep shifts in the worlds longer-term power balances, especially in the rise of Asia. Unless the staying-on-top school really wants to take pre-emptive action, it has no alternative to accepting that China and India will steadily catch up. Can one really arrest the ambitions of 3billion people when they have the same income-levels as Americans? That is absurd. But there are also perils in the let's-prepare-for-our-demise school. Withdrawing the legions, and adopting an isolationism such as former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan proposes, would lead to instabilities in many parts of the globe. When Gladstone spoke openly of pulling out of various places, or of sharing Britain's power, he only encouraged the Russians, Germans and French to press harder. When he slashed navy budgets, others increased theirs. In an anarchic world there are real limits to idealism and magnanimity if they are not tempered by an appreciation of the continuing strength of realpolitik. Yet at the end of the day there remains much value in the notion that the US should be thinking hard about the sort of international order it wants when newer world forces come into play and its present hegemonic position might be amended. Such thinking need not be negative (as in, how to stop India's power rising) but, rather, very positive: how to empower international bodies such as the UN to deal more effectively with conflicts; how to alter the composition of the Security Council to give it greater authority and respect; how to rid the world of the dire poverty and despair that fuels so much anger against the West; how to improve cultural understandings in the place of deep ethnic and religious prejudices; how to work better within (rather than outside) global institutions. Yes, some of this sounds dangerously Gladstonian or Wilsonian, and any and all of these policies should be measured by the real progress made and without abandoning the US's defences. But there is, frankly, no other way. Every so often the world's strategic landscape changes, and it will do so in the future. Without a panicked circling of the wagons, then, might it not behove us, every so often, to return to Clinton's question? Paul Kennedy is the Dilworth professor of history at Yale University and author or editor of 16 books, including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

【つなぎの言葉】　仮定法の秘密に迫りました

最近書店で久々によいなあ、という教材にめぐりあいました。ベレ出版からでている『アメリカの中学教科書で英語を学ぶ』という本です。http://books.rakuten.co.jp/RBOOKS/NS/CSfLastGenGoodsPage_001.jsp?GOODS_NO=1628472&fl=1 以前、米国の高校の教科書を用いて英語を学習する方法についてお知らせしましたが、ちょっと高校レベルでは大半の方にとって難解のようでした。（私が主催している勉強会の中だけの話ですが。）しかし、この本は米国中学校の教科書のダイジェストです。中学といってバカにすることなかれ、この本を勉強するとアメリカ人が一般常識としている知識が学べるのです。英会話の「引き出し」がかなり増やすことができるでしょう。ただ、難点をいえば、英文の中に直接日本語訳がはいっていたり、ちょっと日本語の解説がくどいこと。このレベルを超えた方は、本物の英文教科書をamazon.co.jpなどを通じて入手したほうがよいかと思います。さて、昨日の勉強会では「仮定法」を三段論法の中でいかに使うかということを学びました。また今まで漠然としていた「仮定法過去」が、会話の中でどう生きるのか、という点について、有益な表現方法をいくつかご紹介しました。次回のクラスでは、この発展系を展開したいと思います。（日記にもおいおい書いていきます。）

Evolution of Gene Related to Brain's Growth Is Detailed

January 14, 2004Evolution of Gene Related to Brain's Growth Is DetailedBy NICHOLAS WADE A gene that helps determine the size of the human brain has been under intense Darwinian pressure in the last few million years, changing its structure 15 times since humans and chimps separated from their common ancestor, biologists have found.The gene came to light two years ago, when a disrupted form of it was identified as the cause of microcephaly, a disease in which people are born with an abnormally small cerebral cortex.Dr. Bruce T. Lahn and fellow geneticists at the University of Chicago have decoded the DNA sequence of the gene in apes, monkeys and people and have identified the changes caused by the pressure exerted by natural selection. Most of the other changes in DNA units generally make no difference to the protein specified by the gene, and evolutionary forces are neutral to them. The gene, known as the ASPM gene, has been under steady selective pressure throughout the evolution of the great apes, a group that includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, Dr. Lahn and colleagues say in an article being published today in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. By contrast, the versions of the gene possessed by monkeys, dogs, cats and cows show no particular sign of being under selective pressure.The progressive change in the architecture of the ASPM protein over the last 18 million years is correlated with a steady increase in the size of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive function, during the ape and human lineage. Evolution has been particularly intense in the five million years since humans split from chimpanzees."There has been a sweep every 300,000 to 400,000 years, with the last sweep occurring between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago," Dr. Lahn said, referring to a genetic change so advantageous that it sweeps through a population, endowing everyone with the same improved version of a gene.But since the last sweep, the gene seems to have been kept stable by what geneticists call purifying selection, the removal of any change that makes a significant difference to the gene's protein product, according to an independent study by Dr. Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. Dr. Zhang's report was published last month in the journal Genetics. Early hominids like Australopithecus africanus, which lived some three million years ago, had a brain that weighed about 420 grams (15 ounces); modern human brains range from 1,350 to 1,450 grams, an increase that Dr. Zhang calls "one of the most rapid morphological changes in evolution." The brain of a typical patient with microcephaly is the same weight as that of an australopithecus, Dr. Zhang noted, as if disruption of the gene negated three million years of development.Disruption of the ASPM gene was identified as a cause of microcephaly two years ago by Dr. Geoffrey Woods, a British pediatrician, and Dr. Christopher Walsh, a neurogeneticist at the Harvard Medical School. Their finding instantly caught the interest of evolutionary geneticists.At least five other genes, yet to be identified, can cause microcephaly when disrupted by a mutation, so ASPM is not the only determinant of human brain size. But given what is now known about its evolutionary history, it does seem to be an important one. It acts during fetal development to prescribe the number of cells in the future cerebral cortex.Most human genes exist as families of similar members, formed when one gene gets accidentally duplicated one or several times. The ASPM gene is "almost unique," Dr. Walsh wrote by e-mail, because in all known animal genomes, it has resisted the usual duplication events and been maintained as a single copy. Single-copy genes can cause serious disease if disrupted by mutation. But their advantage, in terms of evolution, is that "you only have to edit them once to create a lasting change," Dr. Walsh said.Evidently, the ASPM gene has been heavily edited, but with an apparently fortunate result.