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Cato Daily Dispatch for July 8, 2003

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

Bush Still Undecided about Sending Troops to Liberia

"President Bush said on Tuesday he would work with the United Nations and African states to preserve a cease-fire in Liberia's civil war but had not yet decided whether to send U.S. peacekeeping forces," reports Reuters.

"The United States has sent a 20-member military assessment team to Liberia to evaluate the situation and many residents have been praying U.S. forces will be sent to save them from almost 14 years of violence."

In "Liberia Folly: No Role for U.S. Troops," Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, writes: "There is suffering going on in numerous places around the world. Indeed, the scale of human misery is far greater in such places as the Congo, Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea, and Sudan than it is in Liberia. From a moral standpoint, how can the Bush administration justify intervening in Liberia while declining to use force in those other cases? Yet if the United States intends to intervene everywhere bad things happen, our military will be busy in perpetuity. Humanitarian intervention is, therefore, an impractical, bankrupt policy."

Carpenter concludes: "It is unsound strategically to send our military personnel in harm's way when there is no vital security interest at stake. Even worse, it is immoral to risk their lives in such ventures. Being a superpower means that the United States has the luxury to say 'no' as well as 'yes' to suggestions that it engage in military interventions. Liberia is a case where U.S. leaders should have said 'no' early and often."

Federal Judge Looks for 'Hook' to Stop Medical Marijuana Raids

"A San Jose federal judge, expressing sympathy for the suffering of terminally ill patients, asked medical marijuana advocates Monday for a legal 'hook' to grant an injunction halting federal raids against a free Santa Cruz pot cooperative," reports San Francisco Chronicle.

"During arguments before U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, patient advocates said their case was unique among federal-state pot skirmishes. It is the first time local government officials have joined in a legal battle to stop federal drug agents from raiding a medical marijuana operation."

In the Cato Handbook for Congress, Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz and Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's Project on Criminal Justice, write: "The failures of drug prohibition are becoming obvious to more and more Americans. A particularly tragic consequence of the stepped-up war on drugs is the refusal to allow sick people to use marijuana as medicine."

They go on to say, "Whatever the actual value of medical marijuana, the relevant fact for federal policymakers is that in 1996 the voters of California and Arizona authorized physicians licensed in those states to recommend the use of medical marijuana to seriously ill and terminally ill patients residing in the states, without being subject to civil and criminal penalties."

Boaz and Lynch recommend that Congress pass a law to prohibit "federal interference with any state that chose to enact a medical marijuana policy."

"One of the benefits of a federal republic is that different policies may be tried in different states," say Boaz and Lynch. "One of the benefits of our Constitution is that it limits the power of the federal government to impose one policy on the several states."

Bush Makes Case to Reconstruct Head Start

"President Bush yesterday stepped up his efforts to recast Head Start, seeking to deflect criticism from Democrats and some educators that changes proposed by the administration would weaken the nation's main preschool program for poor youngsters and force young children to take standardized tests," reports The Washington Post.

"Bush reiterated his assertion that President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program would be more effective if it emphasized 'the basics for reading and math,' gave states 'management flexibility' over the curriculum and program rules and held Head Start centers accountable for how much their students learn."

In a 1992 Cato Policy Analysis, "Caveat Emptor: The Head Start Scam," John Hood of the John Locke Foundation, writes: "Head Start's popularity is due more to slick salesmanship and superficial thinking about child development than to proven success. The immediate benefits Head Start confers on poor children--by improving their nutrition, providing a safe and stimulating environment, and helping teach their parents basic parenting skills--could be made available to poor families more efficiently through a competitive, deregulated marketplace of private centers, nonprofit organizations, and church- and community-run programs. More important, early intervention by any outside institution is not a panacea for the long-term ravages of poverty. The money spent on Head Start, if converted into vouchers for poor children to attend the schools of their parent's choice, offers a much better prospect of ending the poverty cycle and its immense public costs than does increased government control of and intervention in the lives of American preschoolers."

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org