Cato Daily Dispatch for November 8, 2002
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United Nations Delivers Unanimous Approval on Iraq ResolutionBush Renews Call for Passage of Homeland Security Bill
Cato Scholar: Virginia School Test Gains Leave Room for Improvement
United Nations Delivers Unanimous Approval on Iraq Resolution
The Associated Press reports that the United Nations has delivered unanimous approval of a tough new Iraq resolution, after eight weeks of negotiations.
"This resolution is designed to test Iraq's intentions," U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte said in remarks after the vote.
The broad support sends a strong message to Baghdad that the Security Council - divided for years over Iraq - expects full compliance with all UN resolutions.
Despite the multilateral aspect of the resolution, the Cato Institute's defense policy expert Ivan Eland expressed concern that the larger issue of whether military action is appropriate at all is being overlooked. "The United States has succeeded in getting a multilateral stamp of approval for what will still be largely a unilateral invasion of Iraq," Eland said in a statement released Friday. "To the delight of the multilateralist crowd, the U.S. negotiated the fig leaf of a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution that will go through the motions of reinserting international weapons inspectors before any U.S. military action is taken. But the Bush administration seems determined to launch a war and the resolution allows other Security Council members to acquiesce in a U.S. attack without formally endorsing it. But the issue should not be whether the U.S. should take a unilateral or multilateral approach to war, but whether it should embark on such a dangerous and unnecessary policy in the first place."
Bush Renews Call for Passage of Homeland Security Bill
President Bush, fresh on the heels of remarkably successful election returns for the GOP, called for immediate passage of a homeland security bill Thursday, according to the New York Post. Bush called the legislation "the single-most important item of unfinished business on Capitol Hill."
In a Cato Institute foreign policy briefing, Eric Taylor, a former Army officer, notes that instead of creating a new bureaucracy, "efforts for increased security should focus on timely intelligence sharing, threat recognition, and action. Without dramatic improvements in those areas, coordination and implementation of policy by the new offices and department will likely remain problematic."
According to Ivan Eland, Cato's director of defense policy studies, "even before the September attacks, the U.S. government had sufficient bureaucratic machinery to deal with terrorist attacks on the homeland without adding a new department." He added, "the real problem revealed by the terrorist attacks is too much bureaucracy - causing too many communication and coordination problems - not too little." In his commentary, "Bush Plan is Just 'Do Something'", Eland outlines the flaws that could render a new homeland security department ineffective.
Cato Scholar: Virginia School Test Gains Leave Room for Improvement
The Washington Times reports that, according to the Virginia state Department of Education, nearly two-thirds of public schools earned full accreditation based on mandatory state tests in the last school year, an increase from 40 percent a year ago.
The department said that 1,175, or 64 percent, of the state's 1,830 schools performed well enough on the 2001-2002 Standards of Learning exams to be fully accredited. That's up from 731 schools last year.
Mark Christie, president of the State Board of Education, said schools have made steady progress since 1997-1998, when only 2 percent were fully accredited after the first round of testing.
"What this proves is that when you base accreditation on student achievement, you get more student achievement," Christie said. "The reason students are doing better -- not just on SOLs, but on other tests as well -- is that they are learning more. That's why we're getting these gains."
However, David Salisbury, the Cato Institute's director of the Center for Educational Freedom, said that Virginians deserve more choices than the state currently offers. "The improvement demonstrated by many public schools in Virginia on the State Standards of Learning is laudable," he said, "but that doesn't mean that all parents are satisfied or that all children are getting a good education. Virginia still has few charter schools, does not offer parents choice among public schools and does not provide vouchers or tuition tax credits to parents who wish to choose a non-government school for their child." Salisbury noted that "under Virginia law, parents are currently prohibited from taking advantage of many of the options available. Therefore, parents in Virginia should continue to call for more school choice. Several good measures were defeated last year in the Virginia House and Senate. Hopefully, Virginia legislators will re-introduce these or similar measures next year."
In the Cato Policy Analysis, "Reclaiming Our Schools: Increasing Parental Control of Education Through the Universal Education Credit", Darcy Ann Olsen and Matthew Brouillette propose a universal education credit, which would give parents more control over their children's educations by empowering the parents to select and pay for their children's schools, reduce the financial penalty borne by parents seeking independent schools for their children and generate competition among schools, among other benefits.
Christopher Kilmer, editor, ckilmer@cato.org