Obsidian Wings

Through the Iron Cage

by publius

I haven’t waded in too deeply into Gaza – largely because I’ve been holiday traveling. I did, though, happen to be reading Rashid Khalidi’s most excellent The Iron Cage, which provides some interesting longer-term perspective on the ongoing tragedy. Below, then, are just a few scattered thoughts on the book that are hopefully relevant to recent events. (Khalidi is the moderate and well-respected scholar that McCain shamelessly attacked in the closing days of the election).

To begin, what really becomes clear in reading The Iron Cage is how profoundly ignorant Americans (including me) are about the region and its history. And the ignorance exists on many different levels.

Just Say No to Just Say No

by Eric Martin

More evidence of the futility of the abstinence-only approach:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking." [...]

Rosenbaum attributed the difference to what youths learn about condoms in abstinence-focused programs.

"There's been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms," she said. "They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control."

According to the article, the Obama administration and Congress will have to make decisions soon on the roughly $176 million set aside annually for abstinence-focused sex education.  It would be better to spend that money on more effective methods of sex education than the denial approach.

Dear Web Advertising People ...

by hilzoy

Dear web advertising people,

You know those animated thingos you've recently started putting on pages I visit? The dancing Wii remote that absolutely nothing can turn off, and that consistently blocks content at any number of otherwise wonderful web sites (cough, TPM, cough cough)? The bunch of rockets that just shot themselves across a NYT article I was reading?

They're very annoying. They prevent me from reading what I want to read. Moreover, because they're so hyperactive, it's usually pretty hard to tell what they're an advertisement for. The Wii remote is pretty clear, but only because I already know what a Wii remote looks like. Who sent the rockets streaking across my NYT article? And why? I have no idea.

And that means that they're pretty bad advertising. The fact that they move around on top of my content does get my attention. But if I can't tell what they're supposed to make me buy, they cannot be working as ads, just as total annoyances.

They don't work for me. They don't work for you. Please make them go away. Thanks,

hilzoy

What Do You Mean 'We', White Man?

by hilzoy

Robert Samuelson has an infuriating op-ed in today's Washington Post. It's called "Humbled By Our Ignorance":

"It's the end of an era. We know that 2008, much like 1932 or 1980, marks a dividing line for the American economy and society. But what lies on the other side is hazy at best. The great lesson of the past year is how little we understand and can control the economy. This ignorance has bred today's insecurity, which in turn is now a governing reality of the crisis.

The entire column is devoted to explaining all these things that "we" were ignorant of. But who, specifically, are "we"? It's hard to say. Mostly, it seems to be the nameless subject of the passive voice:

"It was once believed that the crisis of "subprime" mortgages -- loans to weaker borrowers -- would be limited, because these loans represent only 12 percent of all home mortgages. (...)

It was once believed that American consumers could borrow and spend more, because higher home values and stock prices substituted for annual savings. [Ed.: Apparently, it was also believed that stocks and home prices always went up.](...)

It was once believed that the rest of the world would "decouple" from the United States.

And so on, and so forth. All these beliefs, and no believers in sight. All this bustle and commotion, and there's nobody around!

The closest Samuelson gets to identifying people who actually believed these things is at the beginning of his piece ("The great lesson of the past year is how little we understand and can control the economy"), and at the end ("Our ignorance is humbling.") Which is to say: it's "us".

And yet, strange to say, I did not believe these things. I'm almost sure I wrote about this in 2006, but I can't recall where, so this from March 2007 will have to do. In it I predict that the mortgage meltdown will knock the legs out from under consumer spending, create a serious credit crunch, and slam the many investors who own CDOs based on mortgages; and that the combination of these three things will be very, very bad, even without taking into account the possibility of systemic risk.

Apparently, I did better than Robert Samuelson. I'm not saying this because I think I deserve credit for that. I don't. That's the point. I'm not especially astute about the housing market, or an expert in economics. I do tend to be common-sensical and cautious about economics -- I do not, for instance, tend to believe such things as: that houses will go up in value indefinitely, or: that we can keep living way beyond our means forever. But that shouldn't exactly set me apart from anyone.

The only reason I saw this one coming was that I read people who know a lot more than I do: people like Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, Tanta at Calculated Risk, Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley, and Nouriel Roubini. They all challenged one or another of the myths Samuelson lists, and they did so years ago. Moreover, they had arguments to back up their claims, and I found these arguments much more persuasive than the arguments of the people who disagreed with them.

There were very smart people who did predict this. Their writings were not arcane or hard to find -- I mean, I found them, and this is not my area of expertise. Nor was their basic point that hard to grasp. If I could grasp it, then anyone remotely worthy of having an economics column in the Washington Post should have.

Whether or not Samuelson realizes it, I take the point of his op-ed to be that he is not competent in his alleged area of expertise, and moreover lacks one of the basic skills that a PhD in a discipline almost always provides: the ability to spot good arguments in that discipline made by other people, and to decide who is worth listening to and who is not. In his shoes, I would ask myself what, in the absence of competence or the ability to learn from the writings of others, could possibly justify my continuing to take up valuable space in the Post. It's certainly not obvious to me.

The Old Flim Flam Flummox

by Eric Martin

Last Monday, a move by the Iraqi government emphasized, yet again, that the SOFA broached by the Bush administration and the Maliki government does not represent a "stinging defeat" for Iran (Condi didn't get the memo either).  On that day, the Iraqi government announced its intention to oust the MEK from its soil (the MEK are a Saddam-backed anti-Iranian terrorist group).  Prior to establishment of the terms of sovereignty enshrined in the SOFA, the Iraqi government lacked this authority, but now the SOFA has given Iraq the ability to act.  And, no, Iran is not rueing the day.  Hillary Mann Leverett on the significance of this move, and the leverage lost in the process:

Monday's news that the Iraqi government is moving quickly to prepare the expulsion or deportation of the MEK - the Saddam-era Iraqi-based Iranian terrorist group -- from Iraq is an important story that needs to be understood in the context of the post-9/11 U.S.-Iranian dialogue over Afghanistan and al Qaida, a dialogue in which I directly participated.

During US talks with Iran in 2002-2003 when it became clear the US was going to invade Iraq, the Iranians made clear that they would turn over suspected al Qaida figures in Iran to the U.S. in exchange for the U.S. allowing MEK leaders based in Iraq to be turned over to Tehran.

In 2003, the Bush Administration inexplicably rejected this offer and then had the gall, as the occupying military power in Iraq, to give the MEK "protected status" under the Geneva convention, which essentially prevented the Iraqi government from turning the MEK operatives over to Iran. The Bush Administration's reasoning was that they wanted to have the MEK on hand to use as necessary to be a thorn in the side of the Iranian government - and, perhaps even a paramilitary force supporting a U.S. strategy to achieve regime change in the Islamic Republic.

Since the US and Iraqi governments have concluded the SOFA, the US government can no longer protect the MEK. And, it is clear that the Maliki government is moving to assert its own sovereignty by laying the ground work for the MEK's deportation to Iran. Now, Iran may get hold of the MEK forces without having to give up a single thing.

On the talk shows this weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claimed that the conclusion of the SOFA shows that the US is winning over Iran in the battle for influence in Iraq.

The story I've just recounted strongly suggests that, as usual, Rice is out of touch with on the ground realities.

You know, you might get better results from your bargaining chips if you actually attempt to bargain when in possession of said chips.  Just a thought.  Meanwhile, Matt Duss hammers home the greater significance of our dalliance with, and protection of, the MEK:

While it’s now understood that, despite the Bush administration’s claims, Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have any significant relationship with Al Qaeda, Saddam did have relationships with other terrorist organizations, one of which was the MEK. In addition to receiving financial, logistical and material support from from Saddam to carry out attacks inside Iran, “MEK forces also assisted the Iraq regime in the repression of Kurds and other minorities in northern Iraq.”

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sec. Donald Rumsfeld declared the MEK “protected persons” under the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which is to say that a designated terrorist group known to have carried out attacks that killed Americans enjoyed greater legal protections than your average Iraqi picked up after curfew. The decision to protect the MEK — possibly for the purpose of carrying out future attacks against Iran — also revealed one of the underlying premises of the U.S. war on terror — the idea that we would make “no distinction” between terrorists and those who harbor them — to be just empty rhetoric.

But then, this type of semantic and rhetorical fraud is neither accidental nor particularly rare for the Bush administration:

During the presidency of George W. Bush, everything possible has been done to obfuscate and conflate the true meanings of the terms terrorism and insurgency.  Preferring the former, largely because of its emotional post-9/11 impact on the American psyche, Bush spokespeople and the president himself consistently have used the terms insurrection and terrorism interchangeably, indiscriminately, and inaccurately.

This has not simply been a case of intellectual carelessness.  It has been a conscious effort to label any group that threatened any status quo of which they approved as a “terrorist organization,” without any thought to the origins of or reasons for the struggle being waged.  Thus, in a moment of warm and fuzzy presidential friendship with Vladimir Putin, with American concurrence, the Chechen rebels officially became terrorists rather than insurrectionists trying to break free from centuries of Russian oppression.  As terrorists, they were far less acceptable outside Russia.

Further, and in the Bush administration's limited and qualified defense, this is an old racket that was used to great effect during the Cold War.  The Bush team, while not the inventors, are just the latest perpetrators: Now with "9/11 Changed Everything" Razzle-Dazzle! 

You're an Idea Man Not a Yes Man

by Eric Martin

I make a habit of turning to Daniel Levy for his balanced and well-informed take on all matters related to Israel-Palestine.  He is, quite simply, one of the brightest minds in the foreign policy intelligentsia and he brings a refreshingly thoughtful analysis to a fraught topic that is hardly conducive to such discourse.  So I lean heavily on Levy and the points he makes regarding Israel's recent attacks on Gaza.  Levy on some of the more salient causes of the violence:

(1) Never forget the basics - the core issue is still an unresolved conflict about ending an occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state - everything has to start from here to be serious (this is true also for Hamas who continue to heavily hint that they will accept the 1967 borders).

(2) The immediate backdrop begins with the Israeli disengagement from Gaza of summer 2005, ostensibly a good move, except one that left more issues open than it resolved. It was a unilateral initiative, so there was no coordinating the 'what happens next' with the Palestinians. Gaza was closed off to the world, the West Bank remained under occupation and what had the potential to be a constructive move towards peace became a source of new tensions - something many of us pointed out at the time (supporting withdrawal from Gaza, opposing how it was done).

(3) U.S., Israeli and international policy towards Hamas has greatly exacerbated the situation. Hamas participated in and won democratic elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 2006. Rather than test the Hamas capacity to govern responsibly and nurture Hamas further into the political arena and away from armed struggle, the U.S.-led international response was to hermetically seal-off Hamas, besiege Gaza, work to undemocratically overthrow the Hamas government and thereby allow Hamas to credibly claim that a hypocritical standard was being applied to the American democracy agenda.

American, Israeli and Quartet policy towards Hamas has been a litany of largely unforced errors and missed opportunities. Hamas poses a serious policy challenge and direct early U.S. or Israeli engagement let alone financial support was certainly not the way forward, but in testing Hamas, a division of labor within the Quartet would have made sense (European and U.N. engagement, for instance, should have been encouraged, not the opposite).

Every wrong turn was taken - Hamas were seen through the GWOT prism not as a liberation struggle, when the Saudi's delivered a Palestinian National Unity Government in March 2007 the U.S. worked to unravel it, Palestinian reconciliation is still vetoed which encourages the least credible trends within Fatah, and unbelievably Egypt is given an exclusive mediation role with Hamas (Egypt naturally sees the Hamas issue first through its own domestic prism of concern at the growth of the Muslim Brothers, progress is often held hostage to ongoing Hamas-Egypt squabbles).

(4) Failure to build on the ceasefire. Israel is of course duty bound to defend and protect its citizens, so as the intensity of rocket fire in 2007-8 increased, Israel stepped up its actions against Gaza. But there was never much Israeli military or government enthusiasm for a full-scale conflict or ground invasion and eventually a practical working solution was found when both sides agreed to a six-month ceasefire on June 19th 2008. Neither side loved it. Both drew just enough benefit to keep going. That equation though was always delicately balanced.

For the communities of southern Israel which bore the brunt of the rocket attacks, notably Sderot, the ceasefire led to a dramatic improvement in daily life, and there were no Israeli fatalities during the entire period (only today, following the IDF strikes did a rocket hit the town of Netivot and kill one Israeli). Israel was though concerned about a Hamas arms build up and the entrenching of Hamas rule (which its policies have actually encouraged). For Gaza the calm meant less of an ongoing military threat but supplies of basic necessities into Gaza were kept to a minimum - just above starvation and humanitarian crisis levels - an ongoing provocation to Hamas and collective punishment for Gazans. The ceasefire needed to be solidified, nurtured, taken to the next level. None of this was done - the Quartet was busy with the deeply flawed Annapolis effort.

(5) A disaster was waiting to happen, and no-one was doing much about it. There was of course a date for the end of the ceasefire - December 19th. As that date approached both sides sought to improve their relative positions, to test some new rules of the game. Israel conducted a military operation on November 4th (yes, you had other things on your mind that day), apparently to destroy a tunnel from which an attack on Israel could be launched, Hamas responded with rocket-fire on southern Israeli towns.

That initiated a period of intense Israeli-Hamas dialogue, albeit an untraditional one, largely conducted via mutual military jabs, occasional public messaging and back-channels. Again though the main reliance was on Egypt - by now in an intense struggle of its own with Hamas. When Hamas pushed the envelop with over 60 rockets on a single day (December 24th), albeit causing no serious injuries and mostly landing in open fields (probably by design), Israel decided that it was time for an escalation. That happened today - on a massive scale - with an unprecedented death toll.

Levy has some useful suggestions as well.  First and foremost, we must engage the situation and the actors, and not make the same mistakes in terms of green-lighting further Israeli escalation as we did with Israel's 2006 Lebanon incursion:

Useful lessons can be drawn from some very recent, and ugly, Middle East history - though it seems that to its dying day the Bush Administration is refusing to learn (today the White House called on Israel only to avoid civilian casualties as it attacks Hamas - not to cease the strikes, Secretary Rice was more measured).

In the summer of 2006 an escalation between Israel and Hezbollah led to a Lebanon war whose echoes still reverberate around the region. There were well over one thousand civilian casualties (1,035 Lebanese according to AP, 43 Israelis), thousands more injured, and other fatalities including the Israeli government which never recovered its poise, what little American credibility remained in the region (Secretary Rice was literally forced to return to Foggy Bottom as allied Arab capitals were too embarrassed to receive her) and much Lebanese infrastructure. That time it took 33 days for diplomacy to move and for a U.N. Security Council Resolution (1701) to deliver an end to fighting. The U.S. actively blocked diplomacy, Rice famously called this conflict "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" - it was no such thing, and the Middle East itself did not know whether to laugh or cry (the latter prevailed).

Just as in 2006, Israel needs the international community to be its exit strategy - and there is no time to waste. Even what appears as a short-term Israeli success is likely to prove self-defeating over a longer time horizon and that effect will intensify as the fighting continues. Over time, immense pressure will also grow on the PA in Ramallah, on Jordan, Egypt and others to act and their governments will be increasingly uneasy.

Neglect is not an option:

But there is a bigger picture - and it is staring at the incoming Obama administration. Today's events should be 'exhibit A' in why the next U.S. Government cannot leave the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to fester or try to 'manage' it - as long as it remains unresolved, it has a nasty habit of forcing itself onto the agenda.

That can happen on terms dictated to the U.S. by the region (bad) or the U.S. can seek to set its own terms (far preferable). The new administration needs to embark upon a course of forceful regional diplomacy that breaks fundamentally from past efforts. A consensus of sorts is emerging in the U.S. foreign policy establishment that this conflict needs to be resolved - evidenced in the findings of a recent Brookings/Council of Foreign Relations Report or the powerful statements coming from elder statesmen like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, themselves building on the findings of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group.

Speaking of the Brookings/CFR Report, Levy had some thoughts on the content of that piece a few weeks back that are also worth checking out.  Levy was writing in the wake of the anti-Palestinian pogrom committed by settlers in the West Bank.  First, a recap since it received little to no coverage in US media:

Public Service Announcement

by publius

Just a quick note to point some changes to the sidebar on the left. First, we've created a Twitterfeed. If you use Twitter, just start following "ObWi" and you'll get a tweet when a new post is up. Second, we now have a functional search bar for this site.

I'm also pleased to report that I've gained approximately 22.5 pounds in the last week, largely due to fudge and cookies.

An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Israeli aircraft pounded Gaza for a second day on Sunday, increasing the death toll to nearly 300, as Israeli troops and tanks massed along the border and the government said it had called up reserves for a possible ground operation.

The continued strikes, which Israel said were in retaliation for sustained rocket fire from Gaza into its territory, unleashed a furious reaction across the Arab world, raising fears of greater instability in the region. (...)

In Gaza on Sunday, officials said medical services, stretched to the breaking point after 18 months of Israeli sanctions, were on the verge of collapse as they struggled to care for the more than 600 people wounded in two days. (...)

Israel made a strong push to justify the attacks, saying it was forced into military action to defend its citizens. At the same time, heated statements from the supreme religious leader of Iran and the leader of Hezbollah expressed strong support for Hamas."

From an earlier article:

"There was a shocking quality to Saturday's attacks, which began in broad daylight as police cadets were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market, and children were emerging from school.

The center of Gaza City was a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutilated bodies were laid out on the pavement and in the lobby of Shifa Hospital so that family members could identify them. The dead included civilians, including several construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms.

By afternoon, shops were shuttered, funerals began and mourning tents were visible on nearly every major street of this densely populated city."

One of the many things that makes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict so utterly dispiriting is that it's impossible to think of anything good coming of any of this. Worse than that, it's hard to imagine that even the people involved think anything good will come of it.

What, exactly, do the Palestinians lobbing rockets into Sderot think they will accomplish? That the Israelis will look about them and say: Holy Moly, I had no idea this place was so dangerous!, and leave? Do the Israelis think: even though we've bombed the Palestinians a whole lot, and it's never done much good before, maybe this time it will be different! Maybe Hamas will say: heavens, this is a pretty serious round of attacks; maybe we should just sue for peace -- ? Or what?

I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides. And its actual results are numbingly predictable:

Hamas lacks the technology to aim its rockets. They're taking potshots. In response, the Israeli government launched air strikes that have now killed more than 280 Palestinians, injured hundreds beyond that, and further radicalized thousands in the Occupied Territories and millions in the region. The response will not come today, of course. It will come in months, or even in years, when an angry orphan detonates a belt filled with shrapnel, killing himself and 25 Israelis. At which point the Israelis will launch air strikes killing another 70 Palestinians, radicalizing thousands more, leading to more bombings, and so the cycle continues.

Cernig is right:

"Indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks on civilians and indiscriminate but deliberately targeted airstrikes on civilian infrastructure are both wrong. Collective punishment is collective punishment and is morally wrong no matter the relative intensity by which both sides pursue it or what has gone before in the way of provocation. Wrong (Strength 2) + Wrong (Strength 5) cannot ever = Right (Strength 7). All you can say is that one is less wrong but still ultimately morally reprehensible."

As is Spencer:

"Do you believe for a moment that leveling Gaza will stop the rockets? Well, then you've lost your right to call the peaceniks naive. You want the cycle broken? Then you can start by breaking your own."

As was Gandhi, who gave me the title for my post.

WaMu

by hilzoy

A story about WaMu from the NYT:

"WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers' incomes and assets, according to former employees. The bank set up what insiders described as a system of dubious legality that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients.

WaMu gave mortgage brokers handsome commissions for selling the riskiest loans, which carried higher fees, bolstering profits and ultimately the compensation of the bank's executives. WaMu pressured appraisers to provide inflated property values that made loans appear less risky, enabling Wall Street to bundle them more easily for sale to investors.

"It was the Wild West," said Steven M. Knobel, a founder of an appraisal company, Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson, that did business with WaMu until 2007. "If you were alive, they would give you a loan. Actually, I think if you were dead, they would still give you a loan."

Here's a charming anecdote:

On another occasion, Ms. Zaback asked a loan officer for verification of an applicant's assets. The officer sent a letter from a bank showing a balance of about $150,000 in the borrower’s account, she recalled. But when Ms. Zaback called the bank to confirm, she was told the balance was only $5,000.

The loan officer yelled at her, Ms. Zaback recalled. "She said, 'We don’t call the bank to verify.'" Ms. Zaback said she told Mr. Parsons that she no longer wanted to work with that loan officer, but he replied: "Too bad."

Apparently, WaMu's CEO got $88 million in compensation between 2001 and 2007. The most charitable description of what he did for all that money is: he provided a textbook example of the principal/agent problem -- the kind of problem you get when someone (say, a CEO) who is supposed to be working for someone else (say, shareholders) decides to throw their interests overboard and rob them blind, and the structure within which he's working is not set up well enough to prevent him from doing so. The less charitable description is: he looted the company.

The most ludicrous part of the NYT story involves a guy who set up a program whereby real estate agents got $10,000 fees for selling option ARMs to people who didn't speak English. These fees were eventually banned because WaMu thought they might be found to be illegal. But the NYT quotes the guy who designed the program as saying: "I don’t think the bank would have let us do the program if it was bad."

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Factcheck: Mexican Laws Against Incest

by hilzoy

Yesterday, the Washington Post had an op-ed on rape which contains the following claim:

"In Mexico, for example, the rape of a teenage girl by her father is defined as voluntary until it is proved otherwise. Under most state criminal codes in Mexico, incest is considered a crime against the family, not against the physical integrity of the victim, and the underage victim is initially considered as much a criminal as the adult perpetrator."

This is appalling, if true. But is it true? It's hard for me to say: my Spanish might charitably be described as rusty, my Mexican legal research skills are nonexistent, and while I suspect that some worthy organization has a good database of international rape statutes, I haven't been able to find it. Still, I've written down what I've found. If I'm wrong, I hope someone will correct me. And if some one knows a good survey of the relevant laws, I'd be interested to read it.

The Mexican federal criminal code is here (pdf, sexual crimes are Articles 259-277). Unless I'm mistaken, the relevant section contains no presumption of consent:

"Articulo 272.- Se impondrá la pena de uno a seis años de prisión a los ascendientes que tengan relaciones sexuales con sus descendientes.

La pena aplicable a estos últimos será de seis meses a tres años de prisión.

And Article 266bis seems to say that the normal penalties for rape will be raised by half when various conditions obtain, including the rape of a child by his or her father.

As far as Mexican state law is concerned, I've checked the Federal District's (pdf, see Articles 174-182), Durango's (pdf, see articles 323 and 392-8) and Quintana Roo's (see Sec. 1, Title 4 and Sec. 2, Title 1) penal codes. (States chosen more or less at random from those that have their codes online.) In the Federal District, incest is defined as a crime against liberty, sexual security, and normal psychosexual development, not as a crime against the family. In Durango and Quintana Roo, it is considered under two headings: incest, which is a crime against the integrity of the family, and rape, which is a crime against liberty and personal security (Durango) or sexual liberty and its normal development (Quintana Roo). It is not true in any of these jurisdictions that having sex with one's children is defined solely as a crime against the family.

In all three states, incest is defined to include sex with one's parents; therefore, when someone above the age of consent has sex with her father, absent evidence of violence or coercion, she is considered to have committed incest, as is her father. If there is evidence that she did not consent, she is presumably not criminally responsible; if she did consent, however, that does not let her father off the hook for incest, as far as I can see.

Consent would, however, show that she was not raped. In all three states, sex with someone under the age of consent is defined as rape, and in all three states, as in the Federal Code, the penalty for rape is raised by half in the case of parents molesting children, but not for children who rape their parents. In all three states, however, consent by a person who is old enough to give it is a defense against a charge of rape, as one would expect.

The problem is the age of consent, which is twelve to fourteen in most of Mexico. That's why "in Mexico, for example, the rape of a teenage girl by her father is defined as voluntary until it is proved otherwise": because all sex by kids over twelve or fourteen is presumed to be voluntary. When I read the Post's op-ed, I took it to mean that Mexican law presumes that fathers have a right to have sex with their teenage children. In fact, it does not: incest is illegal even if both parties are over eighty, and rape is wrong at any age, though of course it can only be rape if the victim did not consent. What Mexican law does presume is that children of twelve or fourteen are competent to consent to sex. That is wrong, but it's wrong in a different way.

I checked this out because, as I said, I thought that if Mexican law did, indeed, say that teenagers raped by their parents are presumed to have consented, that would be appalling; but that if it did not say this, it would be worth correcting. Just as people ought not to be accused of certain things without good reason, so (it seems to me) entire countries should not be accused of having grotesque legal systems. (Obviously, though, enforcement is another matter entirely, and one that I have not been able to check.)