Cato Daily Dispatch for November 28, 2001
U.S. Halts Plan to Lift Iraq SanctionsSupreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action Case
Microsoft Seeks European Settlement
U.S. Halts Plan to Lift Iraq Sanctions
The United States agreed today to postpone its plans to negotiate an overhaul of U.N. sanctions against Iraq and permit Baghdad to continue exporting oil for the purchase of food for another six months, according to U.S. and U.N. diplomats, reported The Washington Post.
The decision spared the United States a diplomatic scuffle with Russia at a time when the two countries are cooperating in the war in Afghanistan. It came after Russia, a close ally of Iraq, pledged to conclude talks by June 1 on revising the Iraqi embargo.
It is the third time that the Bush administration has been forced to delay action on its proposal to jettison the U.N. "oil-for-food" sanctions program against Iraq and replace it with an embargo that would streamline the passage of civilian goods to Iraq but place tighter restrictions on imports of items that can be used for military purposes.
In "Two Cheers for Sanctions," and "A Chance to Rethink Sanctions," Trade Policy Analyst Aaron Lukas examines the failures of trade sanctions. He writes that "it's time for Congress to realize that disrupting private business transactions is not an effective foreign policy tool. Sanctions damage domestic interests at least as much as the target country and have little chance of inducing policy changes."
Earlier this year the Cato Institute hosted the policy forum "Ten Years after the Gulf War: The Lessons and Future of Washington's Iraq Policy," featuring former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Edward Peck and Middle East expert Laurie Mylroie. The future of sanctions and U.S. policy toward Iraq were debated.
Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action Case
The New York Times reports that the marquee affirmative action case of the Supreme Court's current term evaporated today when the justices dismissed a constitutional challenge to a federal highway contracting program and conceded that the case had been "improvidently granted."
The dismissal of Adarand Constructors v. Mineta, less than a month after argument, brought an ambiguous conclusion to a small Colorado subcontractor's long-running lawsuit over the federal government's affirmative action program for the highway construction industry. In an unsigned seven-page opinion, the justices said that Adarand had not established its suitability as a plaintiff to challenge the one aspect of the federal program that they said was still before the court.
But the debate over affirmative action in general, and the federal government's role in particular, is not likely to be absent for long from the court's calendar. In lower federal courts around the country, there are a number of similar lawsuits pending that could provide the justices with a case without the flaws the Supreme Court found today in Adarand's appeal.
In the Cato Journal article, "Affirmative Action Can't Be Mended," Walter E. Williams explains why "affirmative action, in the form of racial preferences, has worn out its political welcome." In "Setbacks Won't Stop Drive For True Civil Rights," Ward Connerly writes that "it is important for us to redefine our thinking with regard to that term, 'civil rights,' and to understand that indeed civil rights are individual rights for every citizen." The vision of American civil rights is the subject of the Cato book "The Affirmative Action Fraud: Can We Restore the American Civil Rights Vision?"
Microsoft Seeks European Settlement
Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it has waived its right to a hearing before European regulators, hoping to speed resolution of its antitrust woes in Europe as well as the United States, according to the Associated Press.
The procedural move does not mean an automatic start to settlement talks with the European Commission, the EU's executive arm. But it could hurry the process along by skipping over what might have been a contentious faceoff, originally set for Dec. 20-21.
"Rather than focus our energies on an oral hearing, we'd rather put our energies on continuing our discussions with the commission to resolve the issues of concern for them," said Microsoft spokeswoman Tiffany Steckler in Paris. "When they would like to move into discussions with us, we're ready and available."
European bureaucrats are taking a cue from the American Department of Justice. In "Microsoft Redux: Anatomy of a Baseless Lawsuit," Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies Robert Levy demonstrates why claims of monopoly or unfair competition are completely unjustified. In "The Theft of Microsoft," Executive Vice President David Boaz explains how "over the years Gates and his colleagues made a lot of people mad, especially their competitors. Some of those competitors delivered a 222-page white paper in 1996 to Joel Klein, head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, and urged him to do to Microsoft in court what they couldn't do in the marketplace."
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