Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.” “It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.”
One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards.
Source: Colleges and Universities – Institutional Review Boards – Ethics – New York Times
What about the possibility of pulling out of Iraq, letting Iran invade and lose resources fighting their own kind,
and then come in and mop up the dregs?
Wouldn’t work. Iran would support whichever side of the civil war they wanted to win, that side almost certainly would win, and the resultant Iran-positive government would form an official alliance that would put the world’s second-largest oil fields out of the control of the West entirely.
The last thing US businesses can afford is for Iran to influence any more oil production than it does. The US dollar is currently used in world-wide petroleum trading, and that — in turn — supports our currency. Iran wants to float the petroleum market on the Euro, which could result in a major US recession (translation: cost the Bushes and their friends billions) or worse.
However,, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to prevent that from happening — especially now that the Saudis are coming down on the side of Iraq.
That’s what happens when you try to run the world. Reality. It happened to the Romans, the Mongols, the British and other European empires of the 19th Century, and now it’s happening to US.