Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 13)

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Da sind sich wohl alle Kommentatoren einig. Die USA muß auf die Europäer zugehen.

Sharing the load in Iraq
By Borut Grgic and Alan L. Isenberg, 8/21/2003

AS TERROR struck Baghdad on Tuesday, taking 17 lives (including that of Sergio Vieira de Mello, who had been mentioned as a future UN secretary general), the world was again forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that Iraq is far from being a secure environment where a nascent democracy can grow. Al Qaeda`s presence is on the rise; Saudi guerrillas and terrorists enter through Syria and wreak havoc on American soldiers. The number of casualties since the president declared combat operations over now exceeds the number of American soldiers killed in the fight.

There is no longer any doubt: America`s role in Iraq is dangerously overextended. But there is a way to maximize security and stability while mitigating America`s overwhelming exposure and responsibilities: a second UN Security Council Resolution bridging American, French, and German differences, and aligning their commitment in Iraq. The Europeans will have to be let in on some of the decision-making concerning Iraq`s reconstruction. The extent of this involvement should be determined by a hard-headed analysis of the persisting security challenges and needs in Iraq and not by petty grandeur tagged along from the prewar days.

For the benefit of all, it`s time to shake hands and make up. The current stubbornness in Washington and Paris (somewhat less so in Berlin) to move beyond the hard feelings is doing no one any good. Rather, to restore confidence and retain balance in the broader global security structure, the burden shouldered by the Americans must be shared. Most obviously, the Americans are not as experienced at peacekeeping as the Europeans, and the current state of Iraq is evidence that the coalition authority needs all the help it can get.

It`s not just about Iraq, though. The United States has almost 200,000 combat forces committed within the Iraq-Kuwait-Afghanistan triangle. This is not only compromising its military leverage but may even restrict its ability to engage ing across the international security spectrum. Europe should be worried more about this overstretch than it is: It is in Europe`s interest for the United States to continue projecting security proactively and globally, particularly given Europe`s military shortcomings. Notwithstanding what the Brussels mandarins may think, European common foreign and security policy remains largely imprisoned by competing agendas, most notably the clash between Gaullism and Atlanticism.

Moreover, if America`s overstretched presence in Iraq is supplemented by removing troops from other hotbed areas (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently mentioned a potential downsizing of US troops in the Balkans), the United States will be cutting off its nose to spite its face. Allowing other regions to become more unstable when there is a multilateral solution that could avoid this problem altogether would be unnecessary and strategically myopic.

At the same time, it is folly to think it is in the interest of the United States to continue weathering the brunt of Iraqi reconstruction alone in the hope of maximizing its spoils. Pressures, both financial and emotional, far outstrip possible future returns. Iraqi reconstruction is now pegged at almost $4 billion a month. If the United States does not agree to share some of the burden of reconstruction, whatever spoils are gained will pale in comparison to the losses caused by deepening the federal budget deficit.

Moreover, the suffering morale of US soldiers, who are daily subjected to guerrilla warfare, could be significantly improved if they did not feel as though they were languishing in Iraq`s deserts alone for an undetermined period of time. A more multilateral presence would boost both the efficacy and spirit of the reconstruction and peacekeeping. Then there is the question of resolve. If US blood continues to spill on Iraqi streets, growing domestic pressure (recall Vietnam) could push the White House into panic mode and induce a premature withdrawal. This scenario would badly hurt Middle East stability.

Finally, the diminished credibility that would arise from any failure in the reconstruction effort would profoundly detract from America`s foreign policy ambitions.

A second Security Council resolution on Iraq, which would bring France, Germany, and the United States back onto the same page, would also make it easier for many other European states to come to America`s aid and contribute more resources -- military and financial -- for stabilizing Iraq. It is also a prerequisite for recruiting other nations with skilled peacekeepers, most notably India.

However, the Americans will not negotiate if going to the Security Council will be paraded in Europe -- particularly in Paris and Berlin -- as a moral victory over US brashness. All sides, for the benefit of future Iraqi stability and legitimacy and for the maintenance of future American and European foreign policy aims, must move aggressively toward a desperately needed internationalization of Iraq`s reconstruction.

Borut Grgic is adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia and a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington. Alan L. Isenberg is contributing editor of the world affairs journal Orbis and an affiliated scholar at Stanford University`s Institute for International Studies.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

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Die elegantesten Lügner der Welt
von Eduardo Galeano
TomDispatch.com / ZNet 14.08.2003


Fünfundvierzig Jahre verbrachte der Iraker Ahmad Chalabi im Exil. Um seinen Kummer zu erleichtern, gründete er die Petra Bank in Jordanien. Als die Bank Pleite ging, wechselte Chalabi in ein anderes Land über. Bei seinem Weggang ließ er 500 Millionen Dollar verschwinden und raubte so Tausende Aktienbesitzer aus.

1992 verurteilte ihn ein jordanisches Gericht in Abwesenheit zu einer 20jährigen Gefängnisstrafe und Zwangsarbeit. Im gleichen Jahr wurde der Irakische Nationalkongress in London gebildet und Chalabi zum Führer der demokratischen Opposition gegen die korrupte Tyrannei Saddam Husseins bestimmt.

Der allgegenwärtige Chor zorniger Gegner konspirierte in den folgenden Jahren gegen ihn und beschuldigte ihn, einen Teil der Spenden vom CIA zu erhalten. Eine der geistesabwesenden Taten auf der Liste der Anklagen gegen ihn war, dass er 4 Millionen Dollar in die eigene Tasche gesteckt habe.

Nichts von all dem hielt Chalabi davon ab, zum Lieblingsberater der Streitkräfte zu werden, die vor kurzem in den Irak einfielen. Seine Kollaboration versetzte die Invasoren in die Lage, während der von ihnen ausgeführten Morde und danach, mit bewundernswertester Geradheit zu lügen. Und Präsident Bush bestätigte, er habe eine gute Wahl getroffen. Dieser neue Verbündete besaß die gleichen Gewohnheiten wie seine Freunde bei Enron.

Seit 1958 hat Chalabi den Irak nicht betreten. Endlich hat er den Weg zurück gefunden und ist jetzt das Lieblingsmaskottchen der Besatzungstruppen.

***

In Afghanistan ist Hamid Karzai, der vorgibt, Präsident zu sein, das Lieblingsmaskottchen der Besatzungstruppen.

Vor dem Irak wurde Afghanistan zum Ort für das Bombardement in die Geographie des Bösen des neuen Jahrhunderts auserkoren. Dank des donnernden Sieges der Invasoren gibt es jetzt dort Freiheit. Freiheit für die Drogenhändler.

Nach Informationen verschiedener Sonderorganisationen der Europäischen Union und der Vereinten Nationen ist Afghanistan weltweit zum Hauptlieferanten von Opium, Heroin und Morphium geworden.

Schätzungen dieser Organisationen zeigen, dass im ersten Jahr nach der Befreiung die Drogenproduktion um das 18fache, von 185 auf 3400 Tonnen, im Wert von 1,2 Milliarden Dollar, gestiegen ist. Sogar Tony Blair musste im vergangenen Januar eingestehen, dass 90 Prozent des in England konsumierten Heroins aus Afghanistan kam.

Die Regierung von Hamid Karzai, die ausschließlich die Stadt Kabul kontrolliert, ist eng mit Washington liiert. Von den sechzehn Ministern der Regierung besitzen zehn einen US-Pass. Und Karzai selbst, der früher als Berater des US-Ölkonzerns Unocal tätig war, lebt von US-Soldaten umgeben, die ihm Befehle erteilen und ihn bewachen, wo immer er auch hingeht, selbst wenn er schläft.

Die Invasoren sollten ursprünglich nur zwei Monate bleiben, aber sie sind immer noch da. Dies ist der Grund: Die unbestechlichen Krieger des Anti-Drogenkrieges haben in Afghanistan ein Geschäft eröffnet, um die Freiheit des Anbaus, des Handels und die des Grenzübertritts zu garantieren.

Es wird kaum noch über den Wiederaufbau dieses zerstörten Landes gesprochen. Ahmed Karzai, der Bruder des virtuellen Präsidenten und prominentes Mitglied der Regierung beklagte sich kürzlich: "Was haben sie für uns getan? Nichts. Die Leute sind erschöpft und ich weiß nicht, was ich ihnen sagen soll."

***

Der Internationale Währungsfond (IWF) und die Weltbank schießen keine Raketen ab. Sie haben andere Waffen, um Länder zu bombardieren und zu erobern sowie deren Ruinen zu besetzen.

Nachdem die beiden Organisationen Argentinien ausgenommen hatten, schickten sie Anfang des Jahres ein Spezialteam in das Land, um sich einen Überblick über die Konten zu verschaffen. Eines der Mitglieder dieser Finanzpolizei, Jorge Barca Campodonico, war angeklagt, Steuern hinterzogen zu haben.

Er ist Experte auf diesem Gebiet. In seinem Heimatland Peru besteht ein Haftbefehl wegen verschiedener Anschuldigungen. Sobald er in Buenos Aires gelandet war, nahm ihn Interpol in Gewahrsam. Aber der IWF schritt ein und gab ein Vermögen für Anwälte aus, um eine Auslieferung seines Funktionärs zu verhindern.

***

Der Vorstand des Weltfußballverbands FIFA hat für den Fußballsport ähnliche Funktionen wie der IWF: er wacht über die Transparenz der lukrativsten aller Sportarten.

Ricardo Teixeira führt seine edle Mission in Brasilien aus. Dies hatte sein Schwiegervater Joao Havelange beschlossen, als er König der FIFA war. Brasilien, dieses zauberhafte Land, produziert außergewöhnliche Spieler, Trainer, die es zum Millionär bringen und ruinierte Mannschaften.

Ende 2001, nachdem zwei Untersuchungsausschüsse drei Jahre getagt und 2400 Seiten Ergebnisse zusammengetragen hatten, verlangte der brasilianische Senat ein Gerichtsverfahren gegen Teixeira und 17 andere Manager. "Der Brasilianische Fußballverband ist wahrlich eine Verbrecherbude, die Unordnung, Anarchie, Inkompetenz und Unehrlichkeit offenbart", erklärte der brasilianische Senator Alvaro Diaz, Vorsitzender eines der Untersuchungsausschüsse.

Danach drohte Joseph Blatter, der den FIFA-Thron von Havelange geerbt hat, damit, Brasilien aus der WM 2002 herauszunehmen, "falls sie weiterhin ihre Nase in die Angelegenheit stecken".

Die Untersuchung im brasilianischen Parlament kam zu dem Ergebnis, dass Teixeira angeblich Gelder veruntreut, Darlehen umgeleitet, Geld gewaschen, Steuern hinterzogen, Dokumente gefälscht und zwanzig verschiedene kriminelle Delikte begangen habe und es ihm damit gelungen sei, den brasilianischen Fußball, den erfolgreichsten der Welt, in die roten Zahlen zu treiben.

Teixeira bleibt weiterhin Chef des brasilianischen Fußballs. Außerdem hat er jetzt eine wichtige Position in den oberen Rängen der FIFA: er ist als Mitglied der sechsköpfigen Revisionskommission verantwortlich für Gerechtigkeit und Fairness im Weltfußball.

***

Der Weltcup, bei dem jedes Jahr verschiedene Teilnehmer in der französischen Stadt Moncrabeau miteinander wettstreiten, hat nichts mit Fußball zu tun. Es ist ein Wettbewerb der elegantesten Lügner der Welt. Die Teilnehmer schwören dabei, dass sie Lügen erzählen, ausschließlich Lügen und vollständige Lügen.

Dieser Artikel, der die Qualifikationen einiger möglicher Kandidaten präsentiert, erwähnt nicht Italiens Silvio Berlusconi oder Agentiniens Carlos Menem. Sie nehmen jedoch nicht an dem Wettbewerb teil. Sie sind einfach unschlagbar. Keiner von den beiden hat es bisher gewagt, die Wahrheit, die ganze Wahrheit oder einen winziges Körnchen Wahrheit zu sagen.

Um nicht außerhalb der Grenzen des Rechts zu streunen, einer unangenehmen Tätigkeit, kaufte es sich Menem einfach: Er kaufte sich das Recht mit dem Geld, dass er verdiente, als er das Land ausverkaufte. Genau wie Berlusconi verabschiedete er ein Gesetz nur für sich. Er verwarf das alte Gesetz und ersetzte es durch ein neues auf Bestellung italienischer Schneider.

Berlusconi ist immer noch an der Macht. Das argentische Volk hat andererseits Menem arbeitslos gelassen.

Aber früher oder später wird er im Dienste der Menschlichkeit, als Verantwortlicher irgendeiner internationalen Organisation, die beauftragt ist, Korruption, Waffen und Drogenhandel zu bekämpfen, wieder auf der politischen Bühne erscheinen. Seine Zeugnisse sind makellos. Diese Themen beherrscht er gut.

Copyright (C) 2003, Eduardo Galeano

[Dieser Artikel erschien zuerst in der Augustausgabe 2003 von The Progressive. Er erschien mit Genehmigung von The Progressive auf Tomdispatch.com, einem Weblog des Nation Institute, das regelmäßig alternative Quellen, Nachrichten und Kommentare von Tom Engelhardt, dem langjährigen Verlagsredakteur und Autor des kürzlichen erschienen Buches The End of Publishing (U Mass. Press), veröffentlicht.]

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Investigation reveals why America is hated
By Billy I Ahmed
Aug 20, 2003, 03:27

According to investigations carried out at the end of 2002 by the PEW Research Centre, dislike of the USA has risen in the last year in Latin American countries as well as in Middle Eastern nations. Around 81% of Pakistanis expressed aversion to US foreign policy. In Argentina loathing of America reaches 73% and just 6% of the Egyptian public has a favourable view of the United States.

The report in general states that the spread of U.S. ideas and customs is disliked by majorities in almost every country included in this survey. This sentiment is even prevalent in friendly nations, such as Canada (54%) and Britain (50%), and even more so in countries where America is broadly disliked. The PEW global attitudes survey interviewed more than 38,000 people in 44 nations between July and October 2002. A sampling of the questions was as follows.

Is the spread of American ideas good or bad? Britain, 50% say bad, 67% in Germany, 68% in Russia, 71% in France, Turkey at 78%, Pakistan at 81% and Egypt at 84%.

Does the US "consider others: not much/not at all?" 52 % in Britain agree, 73% in Canada, 73% in South Korea, 74% in Japan, 76% in France.

Is American policy towards Iraq really about oil? A cynical 44% of Brits agree; 54% of Germans; 75% of French. Would you let the US use your bases to attack Iraq? Eighty-three per cent of Turks say no. It is a measure of arrogance in itself that America would attempt to gauge the world`s opinion towards itself. The reply was deafening. Not that American policy or values will change as a result.

Two reasons therefore are apparent for the hatred of America across much of the world; its colonialist foreign policy and for the Islamic world in particular the American values.

The reasons for the Islamic world`s incompatibility with the values of America, which are the values shared by the West, and which are in fact the values of capitalism, were accurately summed up by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (Dec 2002);

"The essential cause for conflict, ……is the incompatibility of values between Islamic society and the modern West. The power and material dynamism of the West seem inseparable from a value system that demands that Muslims give up their moral identity."

The British conservative writer Roger Scruton asked in a recent book why we should blame Islam for trying to reject "western technology, western institutions, western conceptions of religious freedom" when all of these "involve a rejection of the idea on which Islam is founded - the idea of God`s immutable will, revealed once and for all to his prophet, in the form of an unbreachable and unchanging code of law."

Why indeed? The West takes for granted that the existing religious assumptions of Islamic society have to be overturned, not only because they don`t suit the West but because the West believes that they are unsuitable for the Muslims themselves.

There is constant Western pressure on Islamic governments to conform to Western conceptions of human rights and promote free and critical religious and political thought. In short, they are to become us.

We in the West are inclined to think that everybody must eventually become like us….To the orthodox Muslim that means apostasy, immorality and God`s condemnation.

For people in other societies, Westernization frequently means destruction, social and moral crisis, with individuals cast adrift in a destructured and literally demoralized world." The resentment of American colonialist foreign policy echoes across the Islamic world in all sections of society. The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 14) published a survey of opinions of wealthy and privileged Muslims in the Gulf region (bankers, professionals, businessmen with close links to the U.S.). They expressed much the same views: resentment of the U.S. policies of supporting Israeli crimes and blocking the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement for many years while devastating Iraqi civilian society.

The fact that the US is hated for its colonialist foreign policy is even acknowledged by many Americans themselves.
Robert Bowman, bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, Florida wrote, "We are the target of terrorists because, in much of the world, our government stands for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things."

"The US virtually exterminated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal." was Professor Noam Chomsky`s reply in a Belgrade interview to the question of why America was hated.

Expanding further Justin Podur, journalist for Znet remarked "There is a long list of reasons why `they` (Arabs, Muslims, West, South, and Central Asians) might have hated `us` (North America, Europe) before September 11, 2001. These include but aren`t limited to the sanctions in Iraq, the bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, and unconditional support for the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine. But since October 7 (when the US began bombing Afghanistan), `we` have added quite a lot to the list.

As to why Arabs and Muslims should particularly loathe America, Stephen Zunes - Professor of politics at the University of San Francisco offers the following reasons:
U.S. support for Israeli occupation forces has created enormous resentment throughout the Middle East. There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from the U.S. policy toward Iraq.

The United States has been inconsistent in its enforcement of international law and UN Security Council resolutions. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has used its veto power to protect its ally Israel from censure more than all other members of the Security Council have used their veto power on all other issues combined.

The United States has supported autocratic regimes in the Middle East.

Increasing support for autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt and Morocco. Jordan for example, received large-scale U.S. support in the 1970s and 1980s despite widespread repression and authoritarian rule.
The U.S. promotion of a neo-liberal economic model in the Middle East has not benefited most people of the region.
Like much of the Third World, the United States has been pushing a neo-liberal economic model of development in the Middle East through such international financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. These have included cutbacks in social services, encouragement of foreign investment, lower tariffs, higher taxes, the elimination of subsidies for farmers and basic foodstuffs as well as ending protection for domestic industry.

While in some cases, this has led to an increase in the overall Gross National Product, it has dramatically increased inequality, with only a minority of the population benefiting. Given the strong social justice ethic in Islam, this growing disparity between the rich and the poor has been particularly offensive to Muslims, whose exposure to Western economic influence has been primarily through witnessing some of the crassest materialism and consumerism from U.S. imports enjoyed by the local elites.
The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East. With regards to this foreign military presence William Pfaff observes; "The violence of the shock is intensified when the foreigner establishes military bases and tries to shape an Islamic country`s policies. This has been Pentagon policy during the past decade, with regional commanders for all of the world`s major geographical zones and expansion of the U.S. worldwide base system.

The New York Times a few days ago wrote about the rising importance of ultraconservative or radical Islam in Saudi Arabia, and acknowledged that its growing influence has been directly connected to the presence of American troops in that country since 1990.

The United States now has extended its base in Kuwait to nearly a third of that state`s territory. There are new bases in the other Gulf monarchies.

The Afghanistan intervention has left American bases in that country, and in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The war against terror has expanded American troop presence in Georgia and the Muslim southern Philippines. A long military occupation of Iraq is envisioned by Washington.
Every base conveys the contamination of "infidel" modernization, as well as the oppressive suggestion of foreign military occupation.

Washington remorselessly expands its military presence in the Islamic world in order to fight the anti-American terrorism that its presence causes. No one in the government seems to see a contradiction in this."

America`s loathing in the world is self inflicted. A product of its values and foreign policy that emanate from its conviction in the ideology of capitalism. Thus whilst it follows capitalism it will continue on its present path regardless of the increasing world resentment. Only a change in its belief system or a clash with an opposing civilisation can alter this course.


© Copyright 2003 by The New Nation

http://nation.ittefaq.com/artman/publish/article_4178.shtml

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Steve Chapman: `Bush succeeds by failing in foreign affairs`
Posted on Thursday, August 21 @ 09:58:32 EDT
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By Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune

President Bush may have trouble with voters on his handling of the economy, the deficit and other domestic matters, but when it comes to foreign policy, he`s been riding high. The latest Gallup Poll found he gets his best ratings in international affairs, with 54 percent of Americans approving of his policies. Given recent events, that`s the equivalent of New Yorkers throwing a party for the people who caused the blackout.

His record on foreign policy, after all, is not exactly studded with triumphs. The Middle East is awash in blood from Baghdad to Jerusalem. Almost everywhere the United States is engaged, things are going from bad to worse. With each passing day, the administration looks more and more like the helpless victim of its own hubris.

That attitude was instrumental in bringing about the invasion of Iraq, which the president assumed was merely a military challenge, and an easy one at that. No one in the administration was prepared for the possibility that occupying the place might take a lot longer, and be a bit harder, than smashing its army.



The bombing of the UN office in Baghdad this week was the most spectacular of an endless series of attacks. The administration barely pretends it can restore order anytime soon. As one senior official told The Washington Post after the bombing, "It was the routine of it that struck me more than anything. It`s unfortunately what we`re dealing with and will be for a long time."

The growing disorder and resistance were not an unforeseeable accident. They`re the direct result of the administration`s insistence on using the bare minimum force to topple Saddam Hussein. Nation-building--successful nation-building, anyway--demands lots of boots on the ground, and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld declined to provide them. By that decision, he gave free rein to diehard Baathists, Islamic zealots, embittered nationalists and even Al Qaeda operatives.

Grimness prevails elsewhere in the region. The administration only recently decided to try to bring an end to the violence in Israel, after years of staying away from the whole matter. But the glimmer of hope that appeared after the Israelis and Palestinians accepted the U.S. "road map" was virtually extinguished this week by the suicide bomb that blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing 20 people and wounding another 100.

The White House thought deposing Hussein would scare Palestinian militants into moderation, and that presidential involvement would force both sides to compromise. By throwing its weight behind Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, it hoped to help him assert control over terrorist groups and win concessions from Israel. Instead, Bush has rediscovered that the peace process is always hostage to extremists who can`t be controlled.

North Korea is another crisis that won`t go away, in spite of the administration`s feigned nonchalance. The Pyongyang regime has agreed to take part in six-nation talks, rather than the direct negotiations with the U.S. that it had demanded, but there is no sign it will give up its nuclear weapons program without major concessions from Washington.

After months of refusing to reward blackmail, the administration is now considering doing exactly that. But the North Koreans may ultimately decide they`d rather have a nuclear deterrent, to keep the Americans from trying a regime change. And there is probably nothing Bush can do to stop them.

Pyongyang`s logic makes sense to the government of Iran. It apparently is moving to acquire its own nuclear arsenal. Bush has few good options for preventing the mullahs from getting the bomb, but his policy of aggressive pre-emption has encouraged proliferation rather than discouraged it. Iran is just one more place where things have gotten worse during this administration.

Where have things gotten better? We removed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, eliminating a safe harbor for anti-American terrorists. (Leave aside for the moment that Bush did nothing about that particular threat until after Sept. 11.) Winning the war was a vital achievement, but by letting Osama bin Laden slip through our grasp, we missed a chance to decapitate Al Qaeda.

Afghanistan, now that you mention it, has been sliding into anarchy. The Taliban is making a comeback, warlords are wielding power, and opium production has skyrocketed. This week, the Bush administration was forced to embark on an overhaul of its approach there, sending more money and taking a bigger role in the government of President Hamid Karzai. Otherwise, the country may once again become a nest of vipers, to our detriment.

Bush has been good at winning wars. Too bad victory doesn`t solve everything.

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/
chi-0308210037aug21,1,3783708.column

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Why The US Needs To Blame al-Qa`ida

By Robert Fisk
08/21/03: It was always the same story. If it wasn`t the enemy you were fighting, it was the enemy you knew you`d have to fight in the future.

So when the killers of Baghdad on Tuesday slaughtered 20 UN staff, with the UN`s local proconsul, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Americans embarked on one of their familiar flights into fancy. If it wasn`t Saddam`s "diehard remnants" who were tormenting them, it must be al-Qa`ida`s "remnants" who are destroying America`s best efforts to produce democracy in Iraq (though not Afghanistan); "foreign Arab" fighters were creeping over the border from Iran or Syria.

This was the line from the "Coalition Provisional Authority" yesterday: don`t, for God`s sake, produce proof of home-grown opposition, or the whole "liberation" of Iraq might look rather dodgy. Blame it on al-Qa`ida, on "Ansar al-Islam", on "terrorists" coming from Saudi Arabia or Syria or Afghanistan. But, during the war against the American invasion of Iraq, weren`t there two suicide bombings in Nasariyah, one by a man, the second by two women? Weren`t they Iraqis? And isn`t it possible an Iraqi Sunni resistance movement - for let us be frank and accept that the Shia have not yet joined the resistance war, though they will - destroyed the UN headquarters on Tuesday? Only yesterday did it emerge that the bomber was probably a suicider.

Months ago, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary who in a previous incarnation pleaded with Saddam (circa 1983) to reopen the US embassy in Baghdad, arrived in the Iraqi capital to address his troops, he warned of "terrorist" organisations at large in Iraq. Some of us wondered what he was talking about. Hadn`t the US just defeated Iraq?

But then we realised he was spinning a narrative for journalists to grasp if the "Saddam remnants" line wore out. There would be other evildoers to blame, other antagonists in the "war on terror" to single out.

Sure enough, the "outside" guerrillas have now been brought centre-stage, whether or not they exist, to explain why US rule in Iraq is coming undone. The US can crush Saddam. It can kill his sons. But still it cannot control Iraq.

This, in a sense, is the last heirloom that Saddam has handed to President George Bush: you can occupy this country, he is saying, but you can`t rule it. Saddam created enough pseudo-Wahabist groups to let off steam during his reign. Talk about Islam, they were told, but not about politics. But the moment the regime collapsed, these organisations, which had always been hostile to Saddam, were left to their own devices, and immediately opposed US rule in Iraq. They, not al-Qa`ida, or anyone else, are running this butchery of a war against America and its friends in Iraq.

When the resistance to the Americans began in Lebanon in 1982-83, it started with stone-throwing after six months. Yet the assaults on the Americans in Baghdad are coming at a speed six times as fast. Six months ago, it would have been impossible to imagine such a scenario. Certainly, al-Qa`ida could not have organised its legions so quickly. So even Osama bin Laden may have something to learn from this debacle.

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The Price of Freedom in Iraq and Power in Washington
by Ceara Donnelley and William D. Hartung, August 2003

A Privatized Occupation

Numbers dominate the recent headlines and sound bytes from Baghdad and the Pentagon.

147,000: the number of U.S. ground troops on Iraqi soil.
237: the number of U.S. service men and women killed since the beginning of ground operations.
99: the number of these deaths since May 1, the day Bush declared combat victory for the coalition.
9: the number of months since members of the 3rd Infantry Division have seen their families.
3: the number of times their homecoming has been delayed.
$3.9 billion: the number of U.S. dollars, estimated by Donald Rumsfeld, it costs per month to support U.S. efforts in Iraq.
$400 billion: the projected military budget recently approved by Congress for FY 2004.
The list goes on.

What many reports lack, despite all of these statistics, are the real details. When it comes to who is doing what in Iraq, the facts are less clear. Your average CNN-watching American may be able to report the latest on soldiers killed or Iraqis successfully "found, killed or captured," but you’d be hard pressed to find an average American who could tell you how the scene is really unfolding. How many Americans know who supplied the war, who is in charge of reconstruction, how much they are being paid for it, and how they were hired?

The answer is not quite so simple as a predictable response—"the military." Few know the real details: how the projects and personnel planning post-war Iraq come from private American corporations making world-class lemonade out of the sour situation in the Persian Gulf.

From providing the weapons and tanks that took us to Baghdad, to the personnel rebuilding dams and bridges or operating ports, to the pencils and lesson plans revamping the education system for young Iraqis, private American corporations are spearheading U.S. campaigns in Iraq and reaping the financial rewards of warfare.

Private corporations have played an unprecedented role in the Second Gulf War, and from the looks of just one more number—$680 million, the projected contract with Bechtel Group Inc. for its reconstructive work in Iraq—they will continue to do so.

Some of jobs undertaken by the Bechtels and the Halliburtons- such as rebuilding water and electrical systems for instance are necessary and important. Yet as a nation and a democracy we must ponder seriously whether such private corporations, with firm connections to our leadership, are necessarily the ones who should be handed these jobs. The privatization of the United States military is not a new controversy. P.W. Singer’s new book Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003) offers insights into the questions that should be asked about the unprecedented levels of privatization of military planning, training, construction, and services that were pursued during the Clinton/Gore administration and have been accelerated under the Bush/Cheney administration. If the experience thus far in Iraq is any indication, we clearly have a long way to go before we establish the appropriate balance between profits and patriotism in the use of private corporations to implement our national security strategy.

From a taxpayers’ perspective, the most important question is how many billions of dollars has our government paid private corporations to ensure a final victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom—whatever "victory" ultimately comes to mean?

What follows is a breakdown of the major corporations involved in Iraq from the incipient days of U.S. military action to the forthcoming years of rebuilding.

RUN-UP TO WAR: WHO PUT THE SHOCK IN "SHOCK AND AWE"

Long before the Bush Administration could sufficiently sell its case to the United Nations, Congress, and the American people, it was planning for war against Saddam and his Republican Guard. For companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin this meant a big boom in business in exchange for the big booms their weapons and bombs showered on Iraq months later. Though the ties that bind these companies to the Bush administration are not quite as controversial as those linking rebuilding and private military companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel, it is still clear, by tracing overlapping personnel, that far from being a relic of the Cold War, the military-industrial complex is alive and well and thriving in George W. Bush’s Washington.

Lockheed Martin

The Pentagon’s No. 1 contractor has certainly benefited from military action in Iraq. The company reports 80% of its business is with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. federal government agencies. It is also the largest provider of information technology (IT) services, systems integration, and training to the U.S. government. Such business has grown substantially during the Bush tenure, especially in fiscal year 2002, as plans for war were formulated, expenditures in weapons and dollars calculated.

The company was awarded $17 billion in defense contracts in 2002, up from $14.7 billion in 2001. (2)
First quarter sales for 2003 were $7.1 billion, an 18% increase from the corresponding quarter in 2002.
In March of 2003, as the first bombs rained on Baghdad, the U.S. Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a $106.6 million contract for Paveway II GBU-12 and –16 Laser Guided Bomb (LGB) kits, as part of a $281 million contract characterized by "indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity" – a fancy term for an open-ended, cost-plus contract. The majority of the kits, also known as "smart bombs" (when fitted on warheads) were ordered to restock diminishing U.S. Navy inventories.
Also in March, the company received a $4 billion multi-year contract with the U.S. Air Force and the Marine Corps for the acquisition of C-130J Super Hercules Aircraft, to deliver the additional planes (the two departments combined already own 41) from 2003 to 2008.
Former Lockheed Martin Vice-President Bruce Jackson was a finance chair for the Bush for President campaign; Vice-Presidential spouse Lynne Cheney is a former board member of Lockheed Martin, and used to receive $120,000 per year from the company for attending a handful of semi-annual board meetings. (3)
Chris Williams, lobbyist for Johnston & Associates, is one of nine members of the Defense Policy Board to have ties to defense companies. His firms represent Lockheed Martin, Boeing, TRW and Northrop Grumman. (4)
Boeing

Boeing is the Pentagon’s No. 2 contractor as a supplier of war materials ranging from information technology to planes to the bombs that drop from them. The B-52, the aircraft made famous during the Korean War, remained the "workhorse" in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It has been upgraded to modern technological heights by "smart bombs" and precision-guided weapons like those produced by Lockheed Martin, as well as those devised by Boeing itself. In fact, Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) are the majority of the military’s smart bomb arsenal, because they are cheap and effective: a $22,000 kit makes almost any bomb a precision munition.

In 2002, Boeing received $16.6 billion in Pentagon contracts—up from $13 billion in 2001, $12 billion in 2000.
While the Air Force originally ordered 87,000 JDAM kits, it expanded that order to more than 230,000 sometime before the March invasion. The going price was $378 million. (5)
The company recently won a $9.7 billion contract from the DoD to build 60 additional C-17 transport planes, praised as the only aircraft capable of lifting the Army’s heavy tanks, in addition to Apache helicopters, Humvees, and Bradley fighting vehicles. In a deployment that began in January 2003, the C-17s were operating constantly delivering equipment to staging spots in the Persian Gulf.
Other recent contracts include $60.3 million for additional production of 120 Standoff Land Attack Missiles Expanded Response (SLAM-ER), $3.3 billion for the sale of 40 F-15K aircraft and weapons support for the Republic of Korea.
Richard Perle, former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board (now he is a mere member) is a managing partner at venture-capital company Trireme Partners, L.P., which invests in homeland security and defense companies. Half of the $45 million in capital thus far comes from Boeing. (6)
58% of the $1.5 million in Soft Money and PAC contributions Boeing made during the 2000 campaign went to the Republican candidates. When Bush was declared victor, Boeing gave $100,000 for the Inauguration.
Raytheon

The fourth largest defense contractor in the United States, Raytheon boasts involvement in over 4,000 weapons programs.

The defense electronics company is best known for the publicity garnered during the 1991 Gulf conflict by its Patriot Air Defense missile that intercepted Iraqi Scud missiles. Since 1991 the Pentagon has spent $3 billion improving the accuracy of the weapon, which studies subsequent to Desert Storm revealed to be far less than perfect.

Raytheon also manufactures the Tomahawk land attack missile, another familiar name in times of combat. Raytheon ’s website morbidly celebrates its popularity: "Over 300 Tomahawks were used in Operation Desert Storm alone. Since Desert Storm in 1991, more than 1,000 Tomahawks have been fired." Estimates of the weapon’s use the second time around predicted that 800 would be fired in just the first hours of war. In addition to these two well-known weapons of war, Raytheon produces a wide range of popular missile systems, radar and surveillance systems, and bombs. As a major arms exporter to countries including Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and South Korea, the company is likely to doubly benefit from the militarization of world politics as nations clamor to bolster defense systems.

Each Tomahawk missile costs between $600,000 and $ 1 million.
Raytheon’s fourth quarter operating report of January 2003 reported a doubling in profits.
CEO Daniel Burnham is content with the course set by Bush and company, applauding the fact that "the market is higher today than we thought a year ago," and boasting that "We are perfectly aligned with the defense department’s priorities."
The Navy recently contracted a $1.2 billion deal to develop future ships like the DDX destroyer, for which Raytheon integrates electronics.
The Air Force raised its request from $12.2 million to $80 million worth of 901 Javelin anti-tank missiles, co-produced by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
Since 1996, Raytheon has donated more than $3.3 million in soft money and PAC donations, which places it fourth in donations among major defense contractors in the 2002 midterm electoral campaigns.
Despite a traditional relationship with Massachusetts Democrats, Raytheon’s contributions have increasingly leaned towards the Republican party culminating in a 58%/42% split, R/D, in the 2002 midterm Congressional elections. (7)
Alliant Techsystems

Lesser known than defense giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, Alliant nonetheless may be the defense company that profits most consistently from the war in Iraq and for the wars for "regime change" that may be yet to come under the Bush administration’s first-strike military doctrine. Alliant Tech supplies all of the Army’s small arms munitions, used in rifles and machine guns, and approximately half of the medium-caliber rounds fired by tanks and antitank chain guns in attach helicopters. War strategies may change, favoring tanks over aircraft or vice versa, but soldiers will always need ammo and they will always need more ammo in times of combat. Alliant’s recent 16% increase in sales reflects that bottom line.

Alliant’s sales rose from $1.8 to $2.1 billion in FY 2002, a 16% increase.
Last year the Army awarded Alliant a $92 million dollar contract for 265 million rounds of small-caliber ammunition, notably including cartridges for M-16 rifles.
In February, Alliant received another $113 million in contracts to make ammunition for the Abrams battle tank. (8)
CLEANING UP THE MESS:
CONTRACTING THE REBUILDING OF IRAQ

P.W. Singer calls it the "service side" of war. Private military companies are on the rise as the purported defenders of freedom. During "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the United States deployed one private military worker for every ten soldiers—a tenfold increase since the 1991 Gulf War.

Between 1994 and 2002 the Pentagon entered into more than 3,000 contracts with private military companies of varying notoriety. (9) Worldwide, private military contractors are a $100 billion annual business. And with the war on terrorism being described as the "endless war," there will be more money to be made in the years ahead.

Many Americans now know the link between private military contractor Halliburton and Vice President Cheney, yet the morally ambiguous relationships between military-industrial giants and the Washington elite do not end there. Mainstream news reports have also focused on the role played by Bechtel, another corporation that enjoys close ties with the Republican administration and is reaping billions as it rebuilds Iraq.

Along with these familiar examples, we should add Dyncorp, MPRI, Vinnell, Logicon, AirScan: these names should become familiar because their employees are being paid to do the dirty work alongside U.S. soldiers in Iraq. One wonders whose salaries are higher.

Halliburton

Halliburton first made headlines in this war, when it won the very first rebuilding contract without bidding and before U.S. tanks even made it to Baghdad. In the shadow of Enron and seemingly ubiquitous corporate scandal, the relationship between Halliburton and its former CEO, Vice President Dick Cheney, raised a red flag.

In March 2003, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) was awarded the main contract to control oil fires and stabilize oil fields under U.S. command; no limit was placed on the duration or dollars involved in this venture.

Halliburton is not all about oil; its profit from the war on Iraq runs deeper than the oil wells. Cheney’s former company provides a wide range of services and is correspondingly contracted to perform them in private bidding sessions that exclude most competitors.

Since September 11, the Bush administration has doled out over $2.2 billion in defense-related contracts to Cheney’s former company. (10)
Halliburton’s contract to secure and protect oil fields in Iraq, secretly awarded by the Army without any competitive bidding, could be worth up to $1 billion. (11)
From September 2002 to April 2003, Halliburton received over $443 million in defense related contracts to provide services ranging from logistical support to building enemy prisoner of war camps and refueling military tanks.
From 1999 to 2002, Halliburton donated $708,770 in soft money and PAC contributions, 95% of that total going to Republicans.
A recent Newsweek article reports that "while Defense secretary in the first Bush administration, Cheney awarded KBR the Army`s first private contract to manage troop tent cities. During the Clinton years Halliburton lost that contract after KBR came under fire for allegedly overcharging the government. But after Cheney was elected, KBR was again awarded that Army contract and has rung up $1.15 billion so far on the 10-year deal." (12)
Due to a decision he made upon leaving Halliburton, Cheney still receives annual deferred compensation of roughly $180,000 from his former company.
Bechtel

Though contracts for rebuilding Iraq were awarded as soon as war was underway, if not sooner, as late as mid-April the big question was who would win the grand prize, the jackpot in the current round in bidding: a wide ranging $600 million reconstruction contract awarded by USAID to cover the cost of rebuilding critical infrastructure: airports, roads, water and power systems, schools and hospitals.

After a secretive bidding process, Bechtel Group of San Francisco was announced as the winner, sparking a flurry of attention from the media and those who know of Bechtel’s intricate ties to the Bush Administration. As one New York Times article aptly put it: "Awarding the first major contract for reconstruction in Iraq to a politically connected American company under restricted business procedures sends a deplorable message to a skeptical world… the award of a contract worth up to $680 million to the Bechtel Group of San Francisco in a competition limited to a handful of American companies can only add to the impression that the United States seeks to profit from the war it waged." (13)

Bechtel was widely regarded as a highly capable contender for the $600 million plus contract, yet its ties to Washington are so intricately and firmly woven that it’s nearly impossible not to imagine what kind of pressure was on the contracting decision.

As Secretary of State for Reagan (and former president of Bechtel), in 1983 George Schultz sent Donald Rumsfeld on a Middle East peace envoy to the city of Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld was instructed to ask for the leader’s support in Bechtel’s bid on construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq to the port of Aqaba. Twenty years later, Rumsfeld and his cohorts were in the position to once again launch Bechtel into a position of power in the Middle East, and they did so. (14)
Jack Sheehan, a senior Vice President at Bechtel, is a member of the Defense Policy Board. (15)
USAID administrator Andrew Natsios, the overseer of bidding contracts in Iraq, also has close ties to Bechtel; he headed Boston’s massive "Big Dig" construction process, a disastrous $14 billion boondoggle the accounted for some of the biggest cost overruns in the history of American municipal public works. Bechtel is one the main contractors on the "Big Dig" project. (16)
Just two months before war, President Bush appointed multi-billionaire Riley Bechtel (the 104th richest man in the world thanks to his family’s company) to his Export Council to advise the government on how to create markets for American companies overseas. (17)
From 1999 to 2001, Bechtel contributed $1.3 million to political campaigns; 58% went to Republican candidates. (18)
DynCorp

The celebratory images from the fall of Baghdad—giant Saddam statues falling, spontaneous exultation—were quickly replaced with grim reality of the consequences of destroying order in hopes of implementing a better one. Looting ran rampant: much needed medical equipment and supplies disappeared, precious and invaluable artifacts were stolen from museums. The U.S. military, already stretched thin and committed to the continuing task of stabilizing the region, stood by helplessly.

It was clear something had to be done. Enter Dyncorp: a multi-billion dollar military contractor providing personnel that fits the description offered by one Pentagon official to the New York Times: "something a little more corporate and more efficient with cleaner lines of authority and responsibility [than United Nations peace-keeping troops]." (19) Corpwatch.org reporter Prattap Chatterjee has accurately characterized this service as rent-a-cop; Dyncorp’ s website is still advertising lucrative positions to fill the Iraqi police force it has promised to build under contract to the U.S. government. Former servicemen, police officers, and prison guards line up.

The State Department awarded DynCorp a multi-million dollar contract in April to advise the Iraqi government on setting up effective law enforcement, judicial, and correctional facilities. The company estimates it will send 1,000 American law enforcement experts to Iraq to meet the task. DynCorp projects a return of up to $50 million for the first year of the contract. (20)
DynCorp contributed 74% of a total $276, 975 to the Republican party from 1999 to 2002. (21)
Dyncorp has a long history of alleged human rights violations and fraud. The most well known example appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Two Dyncorp employees ran an underage sex slave ring in Bosnia while they were there under U.S. contract. The employees who exposed this crime were fired; the ones responsible were merely transferred.
More Contracts: Privatization Beyond Defense

The U.S. government has not only hired companies to dramatically supplant the duties of the occupying military. American taxpayers are also paying for the specialized rebuilding of other essentials in Iraq. To appreciate fully the cost of the war and its aftermath, these contracts are listed below with brief summaries of tasks for which they were awarded. (22)

$4.8 million to Stevedoring Services of America was awarded by USAID for "assessment and management" of the Umm Qasr port on southeastern Iraq.
$10 million to Abt Associates Inc. to reform the Iraqi Ministry of Health and to deliver health services and supplies in the interim.
$2.5 million to Skylink Air and Logistic Support (USA) Inc. to help reopen and manage Iraq’s airports.
$7 million to International Resources Group was awarded for a 90-day period for the management of relief and rebuilding efforts.
$7.9 million to Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to promote Iraqi civic participation in the reconstruction process. RTI will provide technical assistance and training systems in the effort to improve internal administrative skills and understanding of municipal government and services.
$2 million over one year to Creative Associates International Inc. to address "immediate educational needs" of Iraq’s primary and secondary schools. Contract provides for school supplies, training teachers, and developing testing methods to track student performance.
Iraqi Oil: Funding Reconstruction

The U.S. has just recently lined up long-term oil deals with 12 companies around the world in a hastened effort to gain revenue to pay for reconstruction. According to its senior American advisor, Philip Carroll, a former executive of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization, plans to supply an average of 725,000 to 750,000 barrels of oil a day to U.S. firms like ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhilipps, Marathon and Valero Energy; as well as European giants like Shell, BP, Total, Repsol YPF; the Chinese firm Sinochem; Switzerland-based oil dealer Vitol and Japan`s Mitsubishi. (23) The choices of oil contractors seem to be entirely political, with Carroll’s former company on the list, along with National Se curity Advisor Condoleeza Rice’s former firm, Chevron. The contract with BP is may be a partial payback for the United Kingdom’s commitment of combat troops to the U.S.-led war against Hussein’s regime; and the Japanese deal has been discussed as "bait" to lure the Japanese government into supplying personnel for security and policing functions in occupied Iraq. And, of course, while Washington’s man from Royal Dutch Shell exercises veto power over the decisions of the new Iraqi oil ministry, the money for rebuilding Iraq’s devastated oil producing infrastructure goes to Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, on a cost-plus basis.

CONCLUSION: TIME FOR ACCOUNTABILITY

As costs mount for the U.S.-led rebuilding and occupation of Iraq, the profits of companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Bechtel, Halliburton, and Dyncorps are likely to rise substantially as a result of contracts steered their way by the Bush administration. Just last Friday, the New York Times reported yet another example of favoritism that benefited Halliburton (Neela Bannerjee, "Bechtel Ends Move for Work in Iraq, Seeing a Done Deal," August 8, 2003).

After responding to pressure from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and rival companies to re-bid the longer-term portion of Halliburton`s multi-year, multi-billion dollar contract for rebuilding and operating Iraq`s oil infrastructure, it now appears that the bidding process is a sham, like so much else about the Bush administration`s privatized rebuilding effort in Iraq. After going through the process of recruiting bidders for the contract and holding an all day meeting in Dallas in mid-July with companies interested in competing with Halliburton for the Iraqi oil industry rebuilding contract, the Army Corps of Engineers quietly revised the specs for the new contract so that the vast majority of the $1 billion in work that was supposed to be up for competition was in essence handed back to Halliburton. The work schedules for the alleged $1 billion bid were fixed so that the majority of the work (or at least the majority of the contract dollars) would be issued during calendar year 2003. Given that the bidding process for the second phase of rebuilding Iraq`s oil sector won`t yield a winner until October 15, 2003, at the earliest, this essentially meant the Halliburton would get the majority of phase two work by default. This led Bechtel, a major potential competitor for the phase two work, to withdraw from the bidding, arguing that so much of the work had essentially been handed to Halliburton in a back-door deal with the Army Corps that was not revealed during the initial rounds of bidding, that the notion of a true "competition" for the Army Corps` second phase contract was basically a sham.

It is clear that there needs to be more accountability – both to the people of Iraq and the American taxpayers – about how the privatized rebuilding process in Iraq is going to proceed. Contracts should be opened to true competitive bidding, involving not only U.S. firms but competent companies from allied nations. The decisions about which tasks are appropriate for private corporations, as opposed to U.S. government entities or non-profit, non-governmental organizations, should be made openly and transparently, with appropriate Congressional oversight and public input. Rebuilding contracts should be short-term, limited profit arrangements that do not pre-empt the ability of a future democratic government in Iraq to choose its own contractors and structure its own industries as the Iraqi people – not Washington bureaucrats or politically-wired companies like Bechtel and Halliburton – see fit. Companies which are profiting from the rebuilding of Iraq should take a pledge not to make contributions towards the 2004 presidential and Congressional campaigns, to avoid the unseemly appearance of payback, as if firms that have been rewarded by the Bush administration with contracts in Iraq are funneling a percentage of their profits back to Republican candidates. Ideally, if President Bush wants to set an appropriate moral tone, he should agree not to accept contributions for his re-election campaign from any company involved in the rebuilding of Iraq.

At the height of World War II, Senator Harry Truman of Missouri made a name for himself by uncovering profiteering and fraud by companies involved in providing supplied for the war effort. Given the high political and economic stakes in Iraq, a comparable investigation is in order now. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been asking all of the right questions in his role as the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Government Reform, but he needs to be joined by prominent colleagues of both parties, and in the Senate as well as the House, in digging up answers about the cost, effectiveness, and propriety of rebuilding Iraq via the secretive, privatized process that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have been pushing thus far. (24)

Notes:

Ceara Donnelley was a research intern at the World Policy Institute during the summer of 2003. William D. Hartung directs the Institute`s arms project.
"War in Iraq: We foot the billing, Corporations make a killing," www.citizensworks.org
Ibid.
"Advisors of Influence: Nine Members of the Defense Policy Board Have Ties to Defense Contractors," report by the Center for Public Integrity, www.publici.org
Ibid.
For more details on Boeing`s role in Iraq and its connections to Washington see ATRC`s April 4, 2003 update.
For additional information on Raytheon see ATRC`s March 24, 2003 update.
"Quiet, but Central, Role for Ammunition Maker," by Amy Cortese, New York Times, March 23, 2003.
"Have Guns, Will Travel," by P.W. Singer, New York Times, July 21, 2003.
"The World According to Halliburton," by Michael Scherer, www.motherjones.org
"Fanning the Flames: Cheney`s Halliburton ties," by Keith Naughton and Michael Hirsch, Newsweek, April 7, 2003.
Ibid.
"And the Winner is Bechtel," New York Times, April 19, 2003.
"Bechtel`s Friends in High Places," by Pratap Chatterjee, special to Corpwatch, April 24, 2003, www.corpwatch.org.
"Advisors of Influence," www.publici.org.
Chatterjee, April 24, 2003.
Ibid.
"Rebuilding Iraq -- The Contractors," www.opensecrets.org.
"DynCorp Rent-a-Cops May Head to Post-Saddam Iraq," by Pratap Chatterjee, special to Corpwatch, April 9, 2003, www.corpwatch.org.
"Rebuilding Iraq -- The Contractors," www.opensecrets.org.
Ibid.
All statistics provided by the USAID fact sheet on reconstruction contracts for Iraq: www.usaid.gov/press/factsheets/2003/fs030620.html.
"Iraq Lines Up Long-Term Oil Deals," by Chip Cummins, Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2003, company identification provided by Agence France Presse, July 31, 2003.
To see Waxman`s excellent series of letters to the Army Corp of Engineers and other key Bush administration policy makers, go to the web site of the House Committee on Government Reform, www.house.gov/reform, and find the site for minority
ARMS TRADE RESOURCE CENTER http://www.worldpolicy.org

[Joerver]

Bush Job Performance Continues to Slip; Re-elect Numbers Worsen; 43%-43% Bush vs. any Democratic Contender; Slight Bump in Overall Opinion, New Zogby Poll Reveals



President George W. Bush’s job performance rating has slipped to 52% positive, 48% negative, according to a poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. From a post-September 11th peak of 82%, his rating has slipped steadily with the exception of a slight increase following the official end of the war in Iraq.
Bush Job Performance
Event Positive % Negative %

August 16-19, 2003 Current 52 48

July 16-17, 2003 Current 53 46

June 10, 2003 Post Iraqi War 58 41

March 16, 2003 Pre Iraqi War 54 45

September 25, 2002 One year Post 9/11 64 36

September 23, 2001 Post 9/11 82 17

August 27, 2001 Pre 9/11 50 49

April 26, 2001 100 Days in Office 52 44

January 16, 2001 Pre Inauguration 42 36

The ‘down’ trend is also seen in the percent of likely voters who say it’s time for someone new in the White House (48%), compared to 45% who said the President deserves to be re-elected.

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=721

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

We`re losing the war in Afghanistan, too
21.08.2003 [06:40]


A human rights worker reports from the other front in the U.S. war on terror, where warlords rule supreme, music is once again banned, journalists hide from gunmen, and even the streets of Kabul are filled with fear.

Aug. 21, 2003 | KABUL, Afghanistan -- If the Winter Olympics are ever held in Kabul, the bucolic district of Paghman, just to the city`s west, will be an important site for events. Tucked into the mountains just above the city, with its scenic vistas and orchards, Paghman is the perfect base site for downhill skiing, bobsledding or luge. With the snowcapped peaks above it and the picturesque city below, it couldn`t be a better backdrop for televised winter sports.

Yet the Olympics aren`t coming anytime soon; Kabul isn`t ready quite yet. Much of the city is still in ruins, destroyed during the civil fighting here 10 years ago, and the civilian population today is still plagued by attacks from rogue troops and police, the mujahedin veterans who, with the backing and support of the United States, swept back into the city when the Taliban collapsed. Extortion, corruption and poverty are everywhere.

Paghman is a particularly bad area. I interviewed several families there last month and earlier this year, and like the people in U.S.-occupied Iraq, they described lives of constant physical threat and deprivation. Many families reported regular robberies by army and police troops there -- soldiers under the command of Paghman`s local leader -- as well as rapes, kidnapping and ransom schemes by local military commanders.

Even the city of Kabul, often touted as the one secure area in the country, also has problems, and the thieving gunmen that plague its streets, most people say, all come from Paghman. (Paghman is a district within Kabul province, which itself extends well beyond the city limits.)

I asked one victim in west Kabul city, who was robbed by a gang of troops, how he knew the men were from Paghman. He laughed. "I followed their footprints," he said, explaining that on the night he was robbed, it had rained in Kabul, and the troops had left clear prints in the mud. The next day, he said, he found some Kabul policemen and they pursued the lead.

"We followed the footprints up toward Paghman. We got to a little fort, used by the army there," he said. But then, the Kabul policemen got scared and turned back, telling the man that they could not challenge such strong military people.

Many of the footprints from crimes committed in the Kabul area lead directly to Paghman`s de facto ruler, Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf -- an archconservative Islamic fundamentalist with links to extremist Saudi groups, whose main sub-commanders are running extortion and kidnapping cartels right out of central Paghman. While Washington exults in the overthrow of the medieval Taliban regime, warlords like Sayyaf continue to enforce strict Islamic social codes including restrictions on women`s education and dress.

Sayyaf, a major mujahedin leader from the past who allied himself with the U.S. in fighting the Taliban, is one of the most powerful men in the new Afghanistan. Sayyaf`s influence extends beyond Paghman. He was an important force in creating a post-Taliban government, and he is a leading force in the country`s current efforts to adopt a new constitution. Afghanistan`s future, long-term or short-term, cannot be planned or predicted at this point without taking him into consideration.

Most people outside of Afghanistan have the mistaken perception that the country leads a divided existence, with urban stability on the one side and rural chaos on the other. There is the city of Kabul -- the conventional wisdom goes -- an oasis of security in which there are embassies, an international military force, a relatively stable government, even a new Thai restaurant. Outside the city limits, though, there are the lawless rural areas in which former mujahedin warlords run wild and remnants of the Taliban maraud in the mountains. In recent days, the Taliban has escalated its attacks on the shaky, U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, killing nine police officers in eastern Afghanistan on Monday after taking four others hostage, launching a murderous attack on a district governor`s house, and ambushing Afghans who work for a British charity. In all, some 80 people have been killed in the last week, making it one of the deadliest since the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in December 2001.

If Kabul could control the rest of the country, the hope goes, things would get better. Yet this isn`t an entirely accurate picture. In reality, the lawlessness of renegade warlords and strongmen like Sayyaf, whose troops operate in west Kabul, extends right into the city itself. The capital city`s perceived political stability is in many ways an illusion. Many of the most destabilizing figures in Afghan politics are not in the hinterlands, but right in Kabul. Numerous government officials in Kabul -- many of them former commanders who received support from the United States during the 1980s and again in their fight against the Taliban -- are now engaged in underhanded dealings, corruption, and human rights abuses against civilians. Several leaders, including members of the Cabinet, have been involved in attacks and death threats directed at potential rivals and critical journalists, as well as in abusing their governmental posts to increase political support. Kabul is filled with rogues and troublemakers. Sayyaf is just one of the most menacing.

Sayyaf is, basically, the political kingpin of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan. He is the man who put the "Islamic" into "The Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan," the country`s current name (he spearheaded the effort to change the name at last year`s "loya jirga," or grand council, charged with picking Afghanistan`s current government). An adherent of the Wahhabi doctrine of Islam, the ultra-conservative branch of Islam practiced widely in Saudi Arabia, Sayyaf was responsible for bringing many Arab fighters to Afghanistan during the 1980s to train and fight against the Soviet Union`s occupying army. He also opposed the United States` involvement in the first Gulf War, and maintained ties through the 1990s with several anti-Western Islamic groups, including one of the more powerful fundamentalist groups in Pakistan, Jamiat-e Islami.

Sayyaf has tried to put his fundamentalism into practice through his commanders and troops. Once, last year, after arriving late to a meeting with some international legal experts, he apologized by stating that he had been instructing "his commanders" in Sharia, or Islamic law. And obviously the troops have taken his teachings to heart. Sayyaf`s men in Paghman have broken up weddings at which music is being played, and beaten up villagers for listening to music on cassette players. Paghman villagers told me a few months ago of how the governor of Paghman, a protégé of Sayyaf`s, beat up some old men at a wedding in late 2002, insulting each of them in turn for listening to music:

"He made them stand in a line, and he walked down the line, looking at each in the face. He would look at them, like he was deciding, and then he would start slapping them in the face. And as he slapped them, he would say things like, `Be ashamed of your acts! Look at your beard! At your age, how old you are! You should be ashamed!` It had been the first time there was music in Paghman in a long time. There was no music when the Taliban was in power."

Sayyaf`s power extends to the highest levels of the Afghan government. He appointed most of Afghanistan`s current judiciary -- mostly clerics in rural areas -- as well as many of the country`s provincial governors, especially near Kabul. The governor of Kabul province, Taj Mohammad, is one of Sayyaf`s men, and many police and intelligence officials in Kabul are primarily loyal to him. President Karzai himself is often forced to bow to Sayyaf`s demands.

This summer, Sayyaf offered a raw display of his power to two newspaper editors, Sayeed Mir Hussein Mahdavi and Ali Reza Payam Sistany, who dared to challenge his dominance in Kabul. Mahdavi and Sistany, until recently, ran a new Kabul periodical called Aftab, or the Sun, which offered a refreshingly critical perspective on the country`s political order. In early June, they wrote a series of articles harshly attacking Afghan clerical leaders, including Sayyaf and the former president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani (also a powerful man), both of whom are considered to be Islamic scholars.

In one of the articles, astringently titled "Holy Fascism," Mahdavi raised questions about these leaders` use of Islam to dominate Afghanistan`s political processes. The article was largely sarcastic, especially with regard to Sayyaf. It contained several rhetorical questions about Sayyaf and Rabbani`s wealth, inquiring how, for instance, after paying their Zakat, the religious tithe that Muslims are required to pay, "they can afford to purchase so many Four Wheel Drives [SUVs], houses, and employ a great number of servants," and asking why, if they were such pious Muslims, they had been involved in current and past criminal activities including, "shooting of artillery, bombing, on innocent undefended civilians." Both Rabbani and Sayyaf have "bloody hands," the article said, because of their involvement in civil fighting in the early 1990s. The article referred to the time when the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan collapsed in 1992 and infighting broke out among rival mujahedin parties vying for control, during which the armies of both men were involved in shelling of civilian areas in Kabul.

Sayyaf was reportedly apoplectic when he heard about the article. The response was swift. Clerics loyal to Sayyaf, including Afghanistan`s chief justice, Fazl Ahmad Shinwari, managed to convince President Karzai to allow the men to be arrested, on the grounds that Mahdavi`s articles were blasphemous. To prove this, they pointed to the remainder of the article, in which Mahdavi suggested that the general history of Islam in Afghanistan had been almost entirely accompanied by violence and repression, and asked tough questions about why ordinary Muslims were bound by clerics` interpretations of Islamic law -- a sort of Luther-like challenge to Islamic fundamentalism.

On June 17, Mahdavi and Sistany were arrested and charged with blasphemy, typically a capital crime under Islamic law. Karzai ordered the two men released a week later, after he came under pressure from international officials and groups like Human Rights Watch, but the two then went into hiding and their newspaper was closed. Having received death threats before their arrest, the two editors understandably feared for their safety. Mahdavi tried to get protection from the United Nations, while Sistany, who is an Iranian national, sought help from the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR.

Despite their desperate situation, both Mahdavi and Sistany still had a sense of ironic humor when I saw them in July, joking about how much more danger Karzai himself was in, for letting them go. Meeting me at a Kabul hotel, they expressed fears about their security, but managed to joke about their predicament and the United Nations` inability to help them:

"The U.N. pressured the police to help us," Sistany told me, laughing. "But the police only sent a few men, who were four inches shorter than me and 20 kilos lighter." Sistany himself is a small, thin man. "Since I figured these thin men wouldn`t really help me, I sent them back to be with their families."

Later, Sistany got a new apartment in Kabul, with help from the U.N., but he was still too scared to go outside. "I can`t even go shopping for food," he said.

Sayyaf hasn`t commented on this case publicly, which is typical of him. Part of Sayyaf`s strength stems from the fact that he often keeps a low profile. (As do I. As a human rights researcher, I often have to lie low in Kabul, which is why I never ask to meet Sayyaf during my trips there.) He doesn`t impose himself personally in most political affairs, and when he does meet with foreigners, he knows exactly how to charm them.

An Afghan news producer described Sayyaf`s wiliness to me earlier this year: "Sayyaf has two faces, one for the Western people, and one for the fundamentalists. When the Western people go to see him, he speaks their language: progress, reconstruction, human rights and democracy. When the fundamentalists go to see him, he speaks their language: Sharia, the glory of the mujahedin, Islam. Everybody hears what they want to hear."

The same producer also suggested that part of Sayyaf`s power derived from the large sums of money he receives from foreign sources, including Saudi religious groups -- a charge reiterated by other critics.

"He has uncountable money," he said, lowering his voice to a whisper. "He easily has handed out money to NGOs [non-governmental organizations] that are doing little projects. He gave $200,000 to a close friend of mine, for some little project. He is the most very clever leader. We have no one as politically strong as Sayyaf."

Yet that`s not entirely true. There are other leaders in Afghanistan whose power rivals Sayyaf`s, and thus surpasses Karzai`s, both inside Kabul and in rural areas.

Afghanistan`s defense minister, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, is one of the country`s leading strongmen. Fahim, the primary ally of the U.S. in fighting the Taliban, currently commands a private militia of tens of thousands, barracked northeast of Kabul, independent of the official army. He also controls most of Afghanistan`s official military -- largely composed of other militias left over from the Northern Alliance -- as well as the 5,000 troops in the newly trained Afghan army. Fahim`s political base, the political organization Shura-e Nazar, is derived from the support base of the late mujahedin leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, the powerful anti-Taliban commander who was assassinated in northeast Afghanistan on Sept. 9, 2001. Fahim`s Shura-e Nazar was the primary recipient of the massive amount of cash and weapons that was funneled to the anti-Taliban resistance by the CIA in the weeks and months after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Today, Fahim continues to receive assistance from the Russian government, although this has been repeatedly denied by both Fahim and the Russian Ministry of Defense.) Officially, of course, President Karzai is the leader of the national government, but in reality, Fahim and Shura-e Nazar control most Kabul-based government offices.

One reason Fahim is so strong is that he is allied with Sayyaf, whose political networks among the country`s Pashtun population are vital to Fahim, who is ethnically Tajik. Inversely, one of the reasons Sayyaf is so strong is that he is allied with Fahim (and Shura-e Nazar). Sayyaf, despite having no governmental post, can call on the assistance of many of Kabul`s main commanders under Fahim.

Afghanistan is full of mutually reinforcing relationships like this one, on smaller local levels. These types of alliances are what the politics of Afghanistan are made of. As many Afghans point out, Karzai isn`t really the leader of Afghanistan; he`s simply a figurehead over a set of rival parties vying for control. In reality, the Afghan state is just a complicated anarchy in which various local players, with varying amounts of power, exert power over one another in different ways.

There are no functional political processes in the country, just naked power dynamics. And this is to be expected: Afghanistan`s provincial governors, village mayors and police chiefs are really only local military strongmen -- usually former mujahedin -- who are ostensibly allied with Karzai but ultimately loyal to no one. Many are self-sufficient, independent sovereigns over the areas under their control, and act and think as soldiers. The political dynamic resembles a battlefield, a state of war, even with Afghanistan at peace.

Most Afghans refer to their country`s local leaders as jangsalar, Dari for "warlords," or tufangdar, "gunmen," which is, essentially what they are. Kabul journalists use the term "warlordism" to describe the country`s core problem (which allows them not to name names). And yet warlordism also has a cause, which journalists are glad to point out if you ask them.

"The Americans," said one newspaper editor to me, in July. "The Americans put the warlords into power."

"Something is rotten in the Islamic State of Afghanistan," an old Afghan is saying to me one night after dinnertime. He is a Kabuli, a local humanitarian worker, and he seems to like making literary jokes. We have just dined together on fried chicken and rice in his small apartment. He is explaining why he is pessimistic about Afghanistan`s future.

"The leaders are criminals," he says, referring to Afghanistan`s warlords. It is a cool spring night earlier this year, and the old man is sitting on his couch across from me, lecturing me about the past. All of Afghanistan`s current military and police leaders, he says, have blood on their hands from past war crimes. Specifically, he refers to the civil fighting in Kabul from 1992 to 1995, detailing how various commanders, including Fahim and Sayyaf, were involved. They killed, he says, and now they rule.

"Like Hamlet`s uncle," he says. "But," he continues, "they have no remorse."

As usual at night in Kabul, it is very dark in the apartment. There is no electricity, and the old man`s face is lit up by the ghastly white glare of a propane lamp. In fact, he looks like he could play the ghost of Hamlet`s father. He is an intellectual; he was once a professor. The dramatic lecture works well for him.

The Soviets were terrible, he admits. The regime they imposed in Afghanistan in the 1980s was relentless and cruel, and the country was a police state. But when the mujahedin took over Kabul, he says, life became "the law of the jungle." People were made into beasts.

As the evening goes on, he brings out photographs of his youth, when he was studying abroad, before the war. He shows me pictures of him, seated with some other Afghans in Italy. He also shows me pictures from an art book filled with Picasso sculptures of nude women, one of which he calls "my mistress." It is late and he is a little drunk: At some point in the evening, a bottle of grain alcohol has appeared, to be mixed with the warm Coca-Cola on the table -- a rare event in dry Afghanistan. He sighs.

"The guys in charge now, they destroyed everything," the old man says, referring to the civil war in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. "All the beauty in this country, and in this city, Kabul. They destroyed the natural and the art-i-fice," he draws out the word, "I mean the flowers and the trees, and the architecture. It was beautiful here, then, very, very beautiful ..."

His eyes are wet. The gaslight hisses. In the distance, there is typical Kabul night noise: It sounds like thousands of dogs are barking at each other. The old man is looking down at the Picasso sculptures, shaking his head.

Sadly, I have seen this sort of thing before: grown men reduced to tears, even when sober, describing Afghanistan before the communist revolution in 1978. When the Taliban was in power in 2001, and there was a severe drought in Afghanistan, I saw tearful Kabulis pointing to the withered grass and ruined buildings, lamenting the country`s fate. In Kandahar, in early 2002, I saw pomegranate farmers cry while talking about how their farms and gardens looked, before the Soviets came.

The dirges are a standard theme for many older Afghans when they discuss current Afghanistan. Before the war, older Afghans say, every garden in Kabul had a bevy of fruit trees: apricots, peaches, apples and pears. In the summer, the tree-lined streets were shady and the evening breeze was cool and fresh. In the winter, the distant mountains were tipped with snow, and you could sit by a stove with freshly sugared walnuts and tea, watching the children play in the snow.

A lot of foreigners who travel to Kabul don`t seem to appreciate Afghanistan`s pacific past -- the fact that the country was at peace for most of the 20th century. Many journalists, when writing about their time in Afghanistan, describe the destroyed military planes and tanks lying around Kabul`s airport, the warlords, and the ruined houses that stretch for miles in south and west Kabul, as though Afghanistan has been a war zone since the beginning of time. There is not much discussion of how Afghanistan turned out as it did, of what life was like before the destruction, and -- the most sensitive subject -- who destroyed the country in the first place.

Of course, the question of who destroyed Afghanistan is a sensitive one, because some of the people who are implicated -- like Sayyaf and Fahim -- are currently in power.

It`s also a complex question, because the country was destroyed by many people, with many different motives, over a lengthy period of time. Blame tends to need a focus, but in Afghanistan, truly, blame can be thrown in all directions. One person can argue that the Soviets are the prime culprits: After all, they invaded the country in the first place. But another can point out that Kabul city was destroyed not by the Soviets, but by mujahedin parties fighting with one another after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. A third might join here: "That all happened because the Americans gave them weapons, which in turn was the result of the Soviet invasion." And why did the Soviets invade anyway? Isn`t it true that the country was ripe for a rebellion, since Afghanistan`s feudal and paternalistic society (which the mujahedin fought to protect) was so socially unjust? Why not bring the British Empire into the equation, the Russian Tsars, Alexander the Great, and so on?

The debate can go on forever, and it probably will. But the one historic fact that seems most relevant now is that Afghanistan today is ruled, to a great extent, by some of the same mujahedin leaders who were responsible for reducing it to rubble. Many Afghans have not forgotten what happened in the early 1990s in Kabul, so they look at current leaders, like Fahim and Sayyaf, and they worry.

American officials, for their part, do not realize how important these ghosts from the past are, as they have allowed these same leaders to dominate Afghanistan`s political landscape.

I have spoken to many U.S. officials and military officers about these issues, in both Kabul and Washington, and have briefed staff in the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council, describing this common Afghan perception about Kabul`s current leaders. I have even testified before Congress about this issue. There are signs that opinions are starting to shift in official Washington, but for the most part the Bush administration still clings to its line on Afghanistan. When confronted with complaints about warlord-dominated Afghanistan, administration officials resort to a stock "things are better than they once were" lecture: "Look, you have to appreciate the fact that the Taliban is gone. The Taliban was terrible. The Taliban beat women on the streets, and cut off people hands for petty crimes. Under the Taliban, girls couldn`t go to school and men had to grow ling beards. Today, girls are back in school and civil society is flourishing, newspapers and businesses are opening, and there is peace. Of course, there are still security problems, and remnants of the Taliban are creating problems, especially in the south and east. But for the most part, our understanding is that things are improving, and Afghanistan is on the road to recovery."

Most officials now know better, but you`ll never hear them express their doubts in public. On Women`s Equality Day last year, President Bush issued a glowing report on Afghanistan and his administration has adhered to this theme ever since: "In Afghanistan, the Taliban used violence and fear to deny Afghan women access to education, health care, mobility, and the right to vote. Our coalition has liberated Afghanistan and restored fundamental human rights and freedoms to Afghan women, and all the people of Afghanistan. Young girls in Afghanistan are able to attend schools for the first time."

Many Afghans, especially women, have found this sort of unfounded cheerfulness, and the comparisons to the Taliban era, annoying. (The fact is that the majority of school age girls in Afghanistan are not back in school.) One Afghan woman, an activist, put it succinctly to me in a meeting in July: "When you compare life to the Taliban, just about every situation seems like a paradise. Afghan women want their rights to be judged in the same ways women`s rights are judged in other countries. Not by the Taliban standard, but by the human rights standard."

Across the country, Afghan activists and political opponents are tired of being told that their country is on the mend when they know it is not, and they are frustrated with the dominance of Sayyaf, Fahim and their kind. But they are even angrier about the explicit threats they receive whenever they actually challenge the warlord dominance in public.

One political organizer I ran into in July, who runs a small periodical in Kabul, told me a story that seemed to sum up the country`s warlord problem. Earlier this year, the organizer fell afoul of Sayyaf after he published an editorial in his paper that alleged the warlord might have been involved in the killing of civilians during fighting in west Kabul in 1992 and 1993. The organizer told me that the day after he published the article, he received several threatening calls from Sayyaf himself, while he was traveling to Paghman to attend a wedding there.

"When Sayyaf understood I was in Paghman, he tried to find me. He called me on my mobile phone while I was eating lunch. He asked me to come and see him.

"I said, `Sir, at the moment I am eating, and I cannot see you,` But he insisted that I come to him." But the organizer, fearing that he would be arrested, stayed where he was.

"Half an hour later he called again and he said to me that I should to come to see him. I again refused. He got angry and said, `You have written nonsense, trash; you have degraded me and insulted me. What you have written is an indignity for me. You have insulted and degraded the mujahedin, and you are traitors to the achievements of the jihad.`

"I said, `Sir, what have I done wrong? I just reflected what you say you had done in the jihad. You should not have done those deeds which you repent now.`

"`Juan Mak,` he said. It means `Damn you, God kill you.` Then he said, `You do not know what you have done. I am a jihadi leader. It is an insult to me.`

"I said, `Sir, please, this issue cannot be solved on the telephone. We can see each other and talk about this later.`

"He said, `I want you to come immediately.`"

The organizer started to fear that Sayyaf might find him in Paghman.

"Well, I left immediately with my family for Kabul. When I got back, I received another call from him. He wanted me again to come to him, but I said, `Sir, forgive me, I am in Kabul.`"

Later, the same organizer was visited and threatened by members of the army and Afghan intelligence service, the Amniat-e Melli.

He has kept a low profile since, and hasn`t gone back to Paghman.

About the writer
John Sifton is an Afghanistan researcher with Human Rights Watch. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the International Herald Tribune. Since 2001, he has made eight trips to Afghanistan.

John Sifton/Salon.com

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 12:04 p.m. EDT August 21, 2003

The Pentagon says the former high-ranking Iraqi official known as "Chemical Ali" is in U.S. custody. Saddam Hussein`s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid once ran Iraq`s armed forces. He was given his knickname by opponents for his role in 1988 chemical weapons attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq.
U.S. officials had thought Ali Hassan al-Majid had been killed in an April airstrike on a house in southern Iraq. A body believed to be his was found at the site, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "We believe that the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come to an end." But later interrogations of Iraqi prisoners indicated that he might still be alive.
U.S. forces have captured a suspected senior member of Saddam Hussein`s Fedayeen militia. A military official say he was carrying a shopping list for explosives materials. Rashid Mohammed was also holding a list of ten Iraqi names that U.S. forces believe was an assassination list when soldiers stopped his car on a highway northeast of Baghdad.
Secretary of State Colin Powell says U.S. and U.N. officials are working on a draft resolution "that might call on member states to do more" in Iraq. Powell spoke after meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
A senior U.S. official says Secretary of State Powell is discussing ways to enhance security for aid workers and other civilians who are part of reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
A United Nations spokesman says three more bodies were pulled Thursday from the rubble of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. The discovery raised the death toll from the devastating truck bomb attack to 23.
The U.N. has announced that it`s pulling about a third of its staff out of Iraq.
The deadly attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad could disrupt humanitarian work as fears grow that aid workers have become targets in a guerrilla war against the U.S.-led occupation. Relief organizations, however, pledged to keep up their fight to help Iraqis.
Democrats and Republicans are complaining that the administration failed to anticipate the amount and sophistication of attacks in Iraq that have killed 131 U.S. soldiers since President Bush declared an end to major combat there on May first. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says he thinks "we may have misled the American people by telling them basically that it was over."
Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he was surprised to hear reports that the United Nations turned down an offer of security from U.S.-led coalition forces. He said security is the responsibility of the United States as the occupying power and if it was needed, the U.N. shouldn`t even have been asked.
U.S. forces in Iraq acted on a tip on where Saddam Hussein might be, but they didn`t find the former president. An informant had told soldiers Wednesday that Saddam was hiding in a farmhouse in a town about 45 miles northeast of Baghdad. Soldiers raided the house and took five men into custody.
The Bush administration plans no major changes in personnel in Iraq, despite this week`s terror bombing in Baghdad. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says the U.S. will keep sending civilians to Iraq. He says the U.S. remains committed to helping Iraq`s transition to a democratic government.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


Summary
++++US++++UK++++Total++++Days

++++271++++48++++319++++++154
Latest Fatality Date: 8/20/2003

Coalition War Dead
At least 322 Coalition forces have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
279 from the US and 43 from the UK.

08/21/03 iafrica.com
SPANISH NAVAL CAPTAIN DIES WEDNESDAY OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN UN COMPOUND BOMBING
08/21/03 CENTCOM
ONE US SOLDIER KILLED, TWO WOUNDED IN IED ATTACK IN BAGHDAD
08/21/03 CENTCOM
SERVICE MEMBER DIES AS A RESULT OF AFGHAN HOSTILE FIRE INCIDENT
08/20/03 Reuters
Four US soldiers wounded in Iraq bomb attack
08/20/03 CENTCOM
One 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed and another injured when they received small arms fire and struck another vehicle.
08/20/03 CENTCOM
One U.S. citizen working as a contracted interpreter was killed and two U.S. soldiers were wounded in a small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attack in Tikrit on Aug. 20.
08/19/03 Associated Press
Huge Car Bomb Blast Hits UN HQ

[Joerver]

Kelly`s chilling words: `I`ll be found dead in the woods`
Diplomat reveals inspector`s pre-war doubts

Ewen MacAskill, Nicholas Watt and Vikram Dodd
Friday August 22, 2003
The Guardian

The weapons specialist, Dr David Kelly, said six months ago that he would "probably be found dead in the woods" if the American and British invasion of Iraq went ahead, Lord Hutton`s inquiry was told yesterday.

His chilling prediction of his own death during a conversation with the British diplomat David Broucher in Geneva in February, throws new light on his state of mind about the row over Britain`s role in the Iraq war.

In a startling string of revelations yesterday, Lord Hutton`s inquiry was told that Dr Kelly:

· confirmed there had been a "robust" debate between Downing Street and the intelligence services about the September dossier on weapons of mass destruction

· expressed scepticism about British claims that Iraq`s weapons capability could be deployed quickly

· had been in direct contact with senior Iraqi scientists and officials he knew, promising them the war could be avoided

· feared he had "betrayed" these contacts and that the invasion had left him in a "morally ambiguous" position.

The latest twists came as Lord Hutton announced that Tony Blair would give evidence on Thursday and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, on Wednesday. Both will be pressed about the September dossier and about the way the government helped put Dr Kelly`s name into the public domain.

The disclosure of Dr Kelly`s unease about the Iraq war even before the invasion on March 20 undermines assumptions that his apparent suicide was tied to recent events, principally the pressure he came under last month over his conversations with the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan.

Dr Kelly`s body was found in woods near his home last month.

Towards the end of Lord Hutton`s inquiry yesterday, Mr Broucher, British ambassador to the disarmament conference in Geneva, made a surprise appearance.

He said he had sent an email to Patrick Lamb, his boss at the Foreign Office, on August 5, recalling a chance conversation with Dr Kelly at disarmament talks in February, in which he set out his concerns.

Elaborating on the email yesterday, Mr Broucher said that Dr Kelly had told him the government had pressured the intelligence community to make the September dossier as "robust as possible, that every judgment [in the dossier] had been robustly fought over".

Contrary to a claim in the dossier that biological and chemical weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes, Dr Kelly said he thought the weapons and the material to be placed inside them "would be kept separately from the munitions and that this meant that the weapons could not be used quickly".

It emerged this week that the MoD knew that Dr Kelly`s views on Iraq could make uncomfortable reading for the government, and the conver sation with Mr Broucher bears out why the MoD - in particular, Mr Hoon - was so keen to prevent any disclosures.

A government memo published yesterday showed that Mr Hoon tried to stop Dr Kelly talking about weapons of mass destruction when he appeared before the Commons foreign affairs select committee.

Mr Broucher said that Dr Kelly thought that the UN weapons inspectors could gain a good idea of the state of the Iraqi arsenal because the Iraqis had learned during the British colonial days to keep full written records. That assessment runs counter to the US, which insisted inspectors were wasting their efforts.

A crucial point in the conversation with Mr Broucher was Dr Kelly`s revelation about continued links with Iraqis after working in Iraq in the 90s as a UN weapons inspector. He had retained contacts with Iraqi scientists and officials, and told Mr Broucher he had tried to persuade them to comply with the inspectors in order to avoid invasion.

In his email, Mr Broucher said Dr Kelly`s concern was that "if an invasion now went ahead, that would make him a liar and he would have betrayed his contacts, some of whom might be killed as a direct result of his actions".

Mr Broucher added: "I asked what would happen then, and he replied, in a throwaway line, that he would `probably be found dead in the woods`."

His interpretation of this was Dr Kelly feared a personal attack by the Iraqis: "I did not think much of this at the time, taking it to be a hint that the Iraqis might try to take revenge against him, something that did not seem at all fanciful then. I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines."

Barney Leith, secretary of the National Spiritual assembly of Britain, who knew Dr Kelly and will testify before the Hutton inquiry about the impact of the Baha`i faith had on him, said he could not know whether the scientist might have taken his own life because of guilt. But he added: "The teachings of the Baha`i faith strongly emphasise the importance of ... keeping one`s word."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Nuclear reaction
Wind farms supply clean, green energy but opponents are whipping up local protests to block expansion

Polly Toynbee
Friday August 22, 2003
The Guardian

With good timing, as sweltering Europe ponders an overheating world, the first of 30 turbines was this week erected at Britain`s first major offshore wind farm. North Hoyle is four miles out to sea off the north Wales coast, inaudible and virtually invisible. Britain has the best wind potential in Europe and the government`s new energy policy at last promises no more nuclear power and a lot more wind and other renewables.

But don`t imagine the nuclear industry just rolled over and died. The fight is on. Despite the staggering cost of bailing out British Energy with £610m now and £3bn to come in taxpayer liabilities, the nuclear industry is doing all it can to halt the progress of wind power.

When Patricia Hewitt announced the end of the nuclear era and the beginning of a better energy policy, there was a clear caveat. Her promise is for 10% renewable energy by 2010 and an aim to reach 20% by 2020. But the caveat is that wind power has to prove itself sufficiently cost-effective and reliable within the first five years when the nuclear option will be reviewed in the light of wind`s success or failure.

Three major offshore wind regions were announced, producing the same electricity as six new nuclear power stations. Can they be got up and running quickly and easily, to prove that wind is indeed the answer?

The one great obstacle that could cause fatal delay and disruption is local objections. The history of wind farms has been that 16 out 18 planning applications for land wind farms in Wales failed between 1993 and 1998, due to local objections.

A harmless-sounding group called Country Guardian has been backing many of the small, but effective, local action groups opposing planning requests for wind farms. It describes itself as the national campaign to oppose wind turbines. Its cleverly casuistic website casts scathing doubt on global warming and rubbishes every aspect of wind power`s viability.

Country Guardian`s vice-president is Sir Bernard Ingham, former Thatcher press spokesman, former consultant to British Nuclear Fuels and current secretary of Supporters of Nuclear Energy (Sone). He has boasted that he personally is responsible for stopping 66% of wind farm planning applications. Now the battle is on at the next proposed wind farm location - Porthcawl in Swansea Bay, where Country Guardian backs the local opposition, SOSPorthcawl.

The proposed wind farm, three miles out to sea, would produce enough energy to power Swansea. The group has produced grossly distorted pictures of how the wind farm might look, alarming the town and generating 3,000 letters of objection. It claims tourism will be damaged, that the waves for surfers will be affected, the noise deafening and the sight an eyesore - none of which is true. (Only distant masts on the horizon will be visible: as for noise, the blaring of Britney Spears from the fairground is rather more damaging than far-away silent windmills). SOSPorthcawl supports wind in principle, but just not on its coast.

The Nimbys will be challenged over this bank holiday weekend when Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth turn out in force in Porthcawl to mobilise local people to speak up for wind power and to persuade local businesses that offshore wind farms have proved a tourist attraction, not a deterrent, elsewhere. Would they rather a nuclear power station? Or would they rather wait until Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melt completely, raising sea levels by some six metres, wiping out Porthcawl altogether? How people view turbines on their far horizon may depend partly on how well they appreciate the good being done.

It is crucial for the future of offshore wind farms that planning permission passes quickly and smoothly here. It goes first to a public inquiry and then to the Welsh assembly environment and planning committee but the local politician (a Lib Dem AM), is backing SOSPorthcawl despite party policy that strongly supports wind power. That`s always the bind - localism against the national interest. If the Welsh assembly turns it down and this pattern is repeated elsewhere, it will dampen government enthusiasm for wind power.

In North Hoyle, whose first turbine rose up this week, there was strong local support for the wind farm, as Greenpeace moved in early. There all power generated will flow into Juice, a purely green electricity supply, provided by npower, in partnership with Greenpeace. There are other green power suppliers, but only Juice is directly linked to offshore wind. North Hoyle will supply enough for 50,000 homes, so once it has 50,000 subscribers, Juice will start another offshore site and so on.

So anyone who wants wind power to win out over nuclear power can help make it happen by switching to Juice. (Call 0800 316 2610 or go to www.SwitchtoJuice.com) for instant connection. It does the changeover from your present supplier and it costs the same. It is not more expensive.) The market for green power is still shockingly small - with just 56,000 green subscribers to various schemes. With Juice, every new subscriber will add to the demand for green energy.

Unusually Greenpeace has endorsed a commercial enterprise - answering critics who accuse it of perpetual, knee-jerk negativity. It is counterintuitive to find green campaigners lobbying in favour of a large development (they are not being paid or taking any profits). They and Friends of the Earth are also fighting against the conservative-minded Council for the Protection of Rural England, who oppose wind farms as an eyesore.

For now, the main opponent is pro-nuclear Country Guardian, whose anti-windfarm website (www.countryguardian.net) wins the breathtaking hypocrisy award: "It is unacceptable that our last great landscapes should be heavily industrialised in a futile political gesture.

Wilderness is a non-renewable resource crucial to the sanity of a pressurised and overcrowded world. It must not be sacrificed for a derisory and largely illusory contribution to clean energy supply when there are far more effective and cost effective strategies." Readers may consider last week`s spectacle of over-heated French nuclear power stations discharging nuclear hot water straight into rivers for fear of meltdown in the heat rather more environmentally alarming than windmills three miles out at sea.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are often accused of raising panics about new technologies. It`s easy to stir people up against big government, big corporations, big energy. But now they find themselves in a knock-down, drag-out fight with just the kind of local action groups that used to be their mainstay. They have had to make hard choices between minor damage to countryside views and saving the planet. This weekend, they will be appealing to Porthcawl citizens to make the same choice. Anyone else who supports wind power should sign up for Juice right now.

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Sharon is now a danger to US troops and hopes in Iraq
Lack of progress in the Holy Land will feed the growth of terrorism

Martin Woollacott
Friday August 22, 2003
The Guardian

The crisis of American power that has been building since the Twin Towers attacks is close to a point of no return. The bombs which brought havoc to Baghdad and Jerusalem this week and the likely collapse of the ceasefire in the Holy Land illustrate how unsteady is the American hand in the Middle East. Great enterprises demand great qualities. While the US has certainly not yet failed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Holy Land, and has some achievements, ultimate success depends on it showing a new determination and clarity.

The Americans have been slow - slow to act and slow witted; slow to discard the assumption that Iraq and Afghanistan could easily be restored to normality after their regimes were destroyed; slow to set aside ideological preconceptions; and slow to grasp, if they have grasped at all, the deviousness of their Israeli ally.

That slowness has allowed Islamic extremists to move into Iraq, in what force it is not yet known, but it would be prudent to assume it is substantial. That slowness has allowed Afghanistan to slip into a political limbo, half a real state and half a collection of dubious chieftaincies, in which, again, extremists can not only survive but pose a real threat to the country`s future. That slowness has given the Sharon government in Israel room to manipulate the "road map", a plan for peace which took an unconscionably long time to emerge. The fact that the bombs came on the same day, and shortly after serious Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, was fortuitous. But it is a reminder of how closely events in these three places are linked, much more closely than when the US used to make play with "arcs of crisis" running from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan.

This time the crisis is as American as it is regional. It would not have unfolded in this way had the US not intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq, and resumed its attempts to manage the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and if its interventions had not then faltered.

There is a natural tendency to assume that everything would be better if the US would give the UN, its allies and the international community generally more say in all three situations. Should not the Baghdad tragedy, especially, shock the US and the UN into a more equal partnership in Iraq? But America and the UN, as well as other actors like the European Union, cannot shed their differences so easily. Already the interpretations of this week`s attacks are showing a familiar divergence. For Bush, the bombs show that allies who have so far been unwilling to offer much help must now stand up and be counted in a war against those who would destroy civilisation.

For most leaders elsewhere in the world, the bombs demonstrate that America is in trouble, in part because of mistakes it insisted on making in spite of much advice, and that it is still not ready to change its attitude or policy. That does not mean that they think that America will not ultimately prevail. But their impulse may be, as nations, and insofar as they influence the UN , to limit their own exposure to the difficulties of Iraq.

The real danger is that such an impulse will be paralleled by a similar American readiness to contemplate retreat. Certainly the political pressures on the Bush administration are growing. That would be the worst of both worlds, an America striving to cut its losses by "internationalising" and an international community unwilling to assume fully the burden.

Important as Iraq is, the most urgent aspect of this American crisis is in Israel and Palestine. Unless the US faces up to the fact that Ariel Sharon and his defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, have been working to undermine the remarkable accord between Palestinian factions which has recently brought a period of relative peace to the Holy Land, a complete breakdown is entirely possible. The Sharon government sees the road map as an instrument for the disarmament and political extinction of all radical groups and parties among the Palestinians. The peace process as it worked out on the Palestinian side instead brought a deal likely to preserve those groups on the basis that they suspended armed action. The Americans seemed to half recognise that, and, although no such deal had been envisaged by the road map, it was, in fact, a realistic basis on which to proceed.

The Israeli government, on the other hand, was enraged that its plan to bring about the political and military demise of the radicals was being derailed. It clearly determined to provoke Hamas and Islamic Jihad by assassinating their leaders, even though the two had called off their attacks. As surely as the suicide bomber himself, Sharon and Mofaz were responsible for the deaths and injuries in the Jerusalem bus attack this week, and now by their incursions and and yet another assassination they may well have destroyed the Palestinian ceasefire.

Bush and Powell should act with speed and vigour. Deploring the loss of life, blaming both sides and endorsing the Israeli right to respond to attacks will not do. They need to pin the responsibility where it belongs, on the Sharon government, and prevent a new round of attacks. Unpalatable though such pressure on Israel may be to this administration, it is vital to exert it if America`s larger purposes are to be served. Progress toward a settlement in the Holy Land is not a panacea which will end terrorism. But lack of progress, or, worse, the abandonment of the effort to achieve it, would undoubtedly feed the growth of terrorism, and that now includes a threat to America, and anybody associated with America, in Iraq. Even if those who bombed the UN were Saddamists rather than Islamists, the two may have a common cause. Sharon, in other words, endangers American troops and American purposes, in the largest and boldest of its undertakings abroad.

Pity the poor Iraqis. They did not deserve to be delivered from Saddam only to find themselves on the frontline of a war between America and Arab extremists, especially the Islamist terrorists who were the one malign force from which seclusion under dictatorship had preserved them. One bomb does not yet indicate that fate, but the possibility undoubtedly looms.

The Americans now need Iraqi help as much as Iraqis ever needed American help, because the most effective policing has always been self-policing. Indeed, the Americans need help from all quarters but, above all, they need to help themselves.

The Bush administration embarked on these interventions with the expectation that their own political interests, preferences and prejudices could be paramount in all the choices they would have to make. That is an illusion which they must shed, above all in dealing with the conflict in the Holy Land.

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Free the Dixie Three
When the Guardian reported the Dixie Chicks` attack on George Bush at a London gig in March, all hell broke loose in their homeland. They were branded `Saddam`s Angels` and their records were burned. So do the country trio have any regrets? And how is their current US tour going? Nigel Williamson joins them on the road

Nigel Williamson
Friday August 22, 2003
The Guardian

The Dixie Chicks backlash hits us almost as soon as we touch down on American soil. Standing in line at Cincinnati airport, an immigration officer asks the purpose of our visit. When we tell him we`re here to interview the Texan trio, he refrains from spitting on federal property. But you can hear the sound of phlegm gathering in the back of his throat. "They should string those girls up," he snarls.

Before we know it, we`ve been hauled off to have our bags searched and we miss our connecting flight to Memphis, where the Chicks are playing the following night. Welcome to America. When we belatedly arrive in Tennessee, several hours later, our taxi driver is similarly unimpressed with the 25m-selling one-time saviours of American country music. "Those girls need to learn to keep their mouths shut," he says.

Ever since Natalie Maines, the Dixie Chicks` lead singer, told a London audience they were "ashamed that the president of the United States of America is from Texas", the group has found itself in the eye of a storm that has threatened to destroy their careers. The comment, made last March during a concert at the Shepherd`s Bush Empire, three days before America and Britain went to war in Iraq, was applauded by the audience.

The American ambassador to Britain didn`t appear overly offended and, after the show, asked to have his photograph taken with the trio. But when a review of the concert in the Guardian, the only newspaper whose critic reported the comment, was picked up by a country-music website in Nashville, all hell broke lose. Before you could say shock and awe, Clear Channel, which owns 1,200 radio stations in America and helped to fund Bush`s election campaign, had banned Dixie Chicks records from the airwaves "out of respect for our troops and our listeners". Cumulus Media, the second largest radio conglomerate, with 270 stations, also banned them, while right-wing press commentators had a field day denouncing them as traitors and dubbing the group "the Dixie Sluts" and "Saddam`s Angels".

Six weeks earlier they had sung the national anthem at the Superbowl. Now, public CD-burning parties were being held all over the south and mid-west in scenes unprecedented since the Beatles` records suffered the same fate almost 40 years earlier, after John Lennon had suggested the group was bigger than Jesus. In one town in Louisiana, a steamroller crushed piles of offending Dixie Chicks records. Sales of their current album, Home, plummeted from 124,000 in the week the story broke to 33,000, an inevitable result of their banishment from the airwaves. Their number one country single, Travellin` Soldier, also went into freefall down the charts.

And there were more sinister aspects to the backlash. Death threats against Maines led to the need for 24-hour armed protection. Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, her fellow Chicks, stood by her in admirable solidarity and said that any one of them could easily have made the comment. So Robison`s Texas ranch was trashed.

The obnoxiously gung-ho country singer Toby Keith (who, in the wake of 9/11, scored a country number one with an offensive record called Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), which threatened "we`ll put a boot in your ass, it`s the American way", launched his own anti-Chicks crusade. His shows now feature a backdrop depicting Maines and Saddam Hussein as lovers. Another image has her face superimposed on the body of a toad.

In conservative country-music circles, Keith`s crude attacks have gone uncriticised. But Maines faced a fresh backlash when she responded by turning up to a country music awards ceremony wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan: "f.u.t.k."

Less than two weeks before Maines fateful comment, tickets went on sale for the Dixie Chicks` summer American tour. A staggering $49m was taken on day one, beating the previous record held by the Rolling Stones. Like every date on the tour, when we caught consecutive shows in Memphis and Atlanta, they were sold out, despite some fans having returned their tickets in protest.

At several venues, demonstrations have been staged. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a few days earlier, a local radio station handed out anti-Chicks T-shirts. More ludicrously, the American Red Cross turned down the group`s offer of a $1m donation from the tour proceeds because Bush is one of its patrons.

In Memphis, the audience is divided. The merchandising counter is selling Free Natalie T-shirts and doing a brisk trade. The road crew also sport them, after the phrase was coined by a DJ in Austin, Texas (where they live), who had bravely come out in support. But some fans are highly critical. "Natalie made those statements later on after we bought the tickets, otherwise we wouldn`t be here," complained Rod Good, 44, from Alexandria, Ohio. Connie and Steve Vaughan, both 53, from Atoka, Tennessee, turned up in matching American flag shirts. "We want her to know we support the troops," they said.

Yet the show - which is prefaced by Elvis Costello`s version of (What`s So Funny `Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding - is well received, even when a song called Truth No 2 is accompanied by a video featuring Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Malcolm X and footage of civil-rights protests. The film also shows archive footage of Nazi book burning before it ends with shots of the destruction of Dixie Chicks records and the on-screen messages: "SEEK THE TRUTH" and "TOLERANCE". Throughout the show, Maines sports a "Dare To Be Free" T-shirt, and it is lost on no one that we`re in the city where King was assassinated.

The following night we see the show again in Atlanta, Georgia, where neither of the city`s two country radio stations has played a Dixie Chicks song since March. But when there are a handful of cat-calls from the audience, Maines responds feistily. "If you`re booing that`s OK, because we love freedom of expression," she tells them. "But just remember. We`ve got your 65 dollars."

Backstage before the show, the Chicks had been in similarly defiant mood. In their initial shock at the backlash, Maines issued a qualified apology to Bush in which she said that whoever holds the office of president "should be treated with respect". Since then, her resolve has hardened. As Trotsky once observed, the proletariat is radicalised by experience of the struggle. And while many have abused and reviled the Chicks, to others they have become a cause célèbre.

Bruce Spingsteen was one of the first to post a message of support on his website. Dolly Parton has also told her fans they should carry on buying Dixie Chicks records. More significantly, political support has grown since early July, when the group`s English-born manager, Simon Renshaw, testified before a congressional committee looking into the future of the radio industry.

He revealed that his office had received death threats, and offered evidence that right-wing organisations had orchestrated the campaign. He complained that the group`s rights under the first amendment had been abused, and that "artistic freedom, cultural enlightenment and political discourse" had been undermined.

Many agreed. One committee member, Barbara Boxer, a Democratic senator from California, likened the corporate radio ban to Nazi Germany and the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s and called it "a chilling message to people that they ought to shut up". Reclined over a chair in a room marked "CHICKS LIVING ROOM" and with armed security posted outside the door, Maines is astonishingly upbeat about her ordeal. "There was a point where I felt sick," she admits. "But now I feel proud and empowered. I`m glad it happened."

Two days after the row erupted, Maines asked her fellow group members if they were mad at her. "I said `No, it really could have been any of us`," Maguire says. "We were about to go to war, and before we went on that night we talked about how silly we felt having to go out and entertain when our hearts were so heavy with what was about to happen." Maines concedes that they are entertainers, not politicians. "But that night it felt just too strange not to say anything. It would have been trite not to acknowledge it. To say something that was true and real but in a jokey manner was my way of dealing with it. And I`d rather it was a political reason that brought us down off the top of the charts than a musical one." "It`s changed us all for the better," Robison adds.

Their solidarity is self-evidently genuine. They are so in tune on the issue that they frequently finish each other`s sentences, and they screech "Oh my God!" in unison when told of our experience in the immigration line. "You`re just lucky you weren`t French," says Maines.

Their anger at Bush is now expressed in far stronger and more coherent terms than the original off-the-cuff comment. "We were told the official White House quote on our ordeal," Maines recalls. "I thought it was going to be something empowering about the first amendment and our rights as American citizens. I don`t know why I thought such an educated thing could have come out of there. Instead it was, `Their fans have spoken.`"

"Which makes your mind go back to the death threats and the trashing of Emily`s ranch and the corporate banning," says Maguire. "So is the President condoning those things?" Robison demands.

"He was asked about the end of the war in Iraq, and he said, `Freedom is a beautiful thing and these people now have a right to speak and we`ve given them that`," recalls Maines. "It was everything he should have said when he was asked about us."

One of the group`s first public responses to the radio ban was to pose nude on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with slogans such as "TRAITORS" and "SADDAM`S ANGELS" superimposed on their bodies.

"It deserved a strong response from us and we felt it had to be in your face," Maguire says. "The magazine wanted us standing in front of the American flag in our jeans and smiling for the cover. And we thought no. We had to hit them over the head with it and expose the absurdity of the things we were being called. It`s made me realise our country has not progressed as far as I thought we had. If this can happen to three white girls playing country music... "

Robison picks up the thread: "They`ve set this tone that they`re not to be questioned and if you do then you are unpatriotic. That`s somehow gotten into the American psyche and that`s scary. If you can`t question your government then you are just mindless followers."

· The Dixie Chicks play the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (020-7589 8212), on September 14 and 15.


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US goes cap in hand to UN for reinforcements
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
22 August 2003


America is poised to table a new resolution before the UN in an increasingly desperate attempt to persuade more countries to provide troops for Iraq.

Amid signs of a rift reopening among the Security Council`s permanent members, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said officials were working on the language for a new resolution that would encourage countries to provide troops, money and other assistance to the Allies. But he made clear that the US was not prepared to hand authority for any international force to the UN.

"We have said all along that we want the UN to play a vital role. The issue of ceding authority is not an issue we have had to discuss today," he said during a joint press conference at the UN headquarters in New York with Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general. "You have to have control of a large military organisation. That`s what US leadership brings to the coalition."

Mr Powell said that 30 countries, including Britain, were already providing more than 20,000 troops with a further four ready to commit forces. Another 14 countries were considering the matter, he said.

Britain has been pressing for a greater UN role in Iraq, though officials at the UN said they were not expecting the US to cede authority. Rather, they talk of the new resolution (a draft of which could be circulated as soon as today) providing "cover" for those countries, which may be reluctant to provide troops for domestic reasons. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, will discuss the issue with Mr Annan today in the hope of being able to draw Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt, into the peace-keeping effort.

But France, which has a veto in the council, is warning that it will only provide troops if the Allies hand over political and military control to the UN. Other countries, including India, Pakistan and Turkey, have also ruled out contributing troops to anything other than a UN force.

Without American agreement to cede some control to the world body, diplomats said the possibility of a robust international force appeared unlikely to attract new support. In the aftermath of Tuesday`s bomb attack on the UN offices in Baghdad, which killed at least 23 people, some countries that had offered troops are having second thoughts. Japan has postponed deployment of the 1,000 troops it was going to send and Shigeru Ishiba, the head of the Japan`s defence department, said: "A dispatch may not be feasible this year. It doesn`t seem out of the question that [Japanese troops] could be targeted for attack." Thailand, which was to send 400 soldiers, is also reviewing its position and Thaksin Shinawatra, the Prime Minister, said he had asked senior officers to evaluate the safety of Iraq.

One US official said: "We are going to be looking to see if there are ways to entice them to contribute. We are aware that people are apprehensive."

Mr Annan, who held a video-linked question-and-answer session with UN employees around the world yesterday, led the organisation in a minute`s silence for those who were killed when the suicide bomb was exploded.

"There were divisions before the war, but we all realise that it is urgent to help bring peace to Iraq," he said. "And an Iraq that is destabilised, an Iraq that is in chaos, is not in the interests of the region or the world. And we do have a responsibility to ensure that."

At the UN yesterday, Mr Straw said: "No one should be in any doubt now that ... terrorism is not just against the United States or against the United Kingdom or against Israel. This is a war against the world, and attacking the United Nations was an attack on the international community, on the world, and it`s an attack on the people of Iraq."
22 August 2003 08:29



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August 22, 2003
Inquiry of U.N. Bombing Focuses on Possible Ties to Iraqi Guards
By DEXTER FILKINS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 21 — American investigators looking into the suicide bombing of the United Nations compound on Tuesday are focusing on the possibility that the attackers were assisted by Iraqi security guards who worked there, a senior American official here said today.

The official said all of the guards at the compound were agents of the Iraqi secret services, to whom they reported on United Nations activities before the war. The United Nations continued to employ them after the war was over, the official said.

The official said that when investigators began questioning the guards, two of them asserted that they were entitled to "diplomatic immunity" and refused to cooperate. Diplomats working in foreign countries are often entitled to immunity from prosecution by local authorities, but the official said the two guards could make no such claim.

Investigators are continuing to question the guards, the official said.

"We believe the U.N.`s security was seriously compromised," the official said, adding that "we have serious concerns about the placement of the vehicle" and the timing of the attack. The bomb exploded directly under the third-floor office of the United Nations coordinator for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, while he was meeting with a prominent American human rights advocate, Arthur C. Helton. Both men were killed, along with several top aides to Mr. Vieira de Mello.

In New York, a United Nations official reacted skeptically to the assertions. "All of us are trying to get to the bottom of this," said Fred Eckhard, spokesman for the secretary general, Kofi Annan. "In fact, the secretary general is sending his security coordinator to Baghdad this evening to investigate the bombing. But the task is not made easier by the conspiracy theories circulating. We`ll have to separate as best we can fact from speculation."

No one connected to the United Nations office in Baghdad, which was demolished in the bombing, could be reached for comment. The United Nations had a large presence in Iraq before the war, running the oil-for-food program and housing teams of weapons inspectors.

The American official said investigators were trying to determine which, if any, of the guards failed to report to work the day of the attack. Even before the war, the government of Saddam Hussein was widely known to assign intelligence agents to guard and guide foreigners visiting or living in the country.

Suspicions have focused on the guards rather than other local United Nations personnel because their links to Mr. Hussein`s security service were close. Under the former government, they had to report to the security service once a week on the activities of United Nations personnel, western officials said.

Even so, United Nations administrators retained the guards after Mr. Hussein`s government was removed. American officials said earlier this week that the administrators had also turned down an American offer to provide greater security around the building.

The American official also questioned the wisdom of United Nations officials who ordered the construction of a cement wall around the compound. In some places, he pointed out, the wall was just 12 feet from the building.

Tensions have repeatedly flared between the United States and the United Nations over Iraq. The United Nations has been confined to a marginal role in Iraq since the war, and had sought to project a sympathetic and approachable image to the Iraqi people, partly by shunning the heavy protection surrounding American troops and installations here.

In the attack on Tuesday, the deadliest ever against the organization, a suicide bomber drove a flatbed truck loaded with 1,500 pounds of explosives up to the wall of the compound and set it off. Rescue workers pulled three more bodies out of the rubble today, bringing the total dead to 23.

At the scene of the bombing, a green military backhoe lifted great chunks of the rubble and dropped them into dump trucks to spread it out on the ground for later examination. The work paused momentarily to allow two dogs from a Turkish cadaver team to search the wreckage for missing bodies or body parts. None were found.

Throughout the day, United Nations staffers came to gape at the wreckage of what had been their offices and to try to salvage the hard drives of their computers. Looking at the remnants of the office of Mr. Vieira de Mello, one woman gasped: "How could they have left this place so unprotected?"

The possibility that Iraqi security guards had cooperated in the bombing increased suspicions that Mr. Vieira de Mello was a target of the attack, the American official said. The truck pulled up to the wall just below his office while he was inside meeting with other American officials.

"We are very concerned about the possibility" that Mr. De Mello was chosen as a target, the official said.

The official said that the revelation that former agents of Mr. Hussein were still working at the compound had also added to their suspicions that it was loyalists to the deposed president who carried out the attack.

Investigators said yesterday that they were intrigued by the discovery that the explosive device used in the attack consisted of an array of munitions, including mortar shells, hand grenades and a Soviet-made 500-pound bomb.

Iraqi munitions, looted from storehouses and dumped by army veterans, were widely available in the days after the war. Many munitions storage sites, like so many other government facilities here, were looted in the chaos that followed the removal of Mr. Hussein`s government. So many weapons and munitions flooded the streets that they could be purchased at prices well-below cost.

The American official said the investigators had determined that the Russian-made truck was not registered with the Iraqi government, meaning that it may have entered the country after the war. The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, said today in New York that the truck had entered the country from Syria.

The American official said that investigators had recovered the vehicle identification number for the truck and were trying to trace it back to its owner.

Also today, a previously unknown Iraqi group called the Armed Vanguards of the Second Muhammad Army had claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement sent to an Arabic television channel, Al Arabiya.

"The statement promised to make war on all foreigners," the station said.

"It warned Arab countries against sending armed forces to Iraq and called for continuing what it called acts of jihad against all those who help the Americans, even if they are Arab or Muslim."

There was no way to verify the authenticity of the statement. But in the days since the bombings, some Iraqi officials have raised the possibility that loyalists of Mr. Hussein are now collaborating with radical Islamic groups to attack Western targets. Mr. Hussein is believed to have access to dozens of safe houses in Baghdad and areas north and west of the capital.

A senior Iraqi official said this week that recent intelligence suggested that Mr. Hussein`s loyalists had made their money and hideouts available to Islamic militant groups like Ansar al-Islam, which American officials believe has been plotting attacks against Western targets in Baghdad.



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August 22, 2003
POLITICAL MEMO
Bush Tries to Put Focus on Domestic Policy, but Events Conspire Against Him
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON


REDMOND, Ore., Aug. 21 — With two big forest fires darkening the skies near here, President Bush could hardly have had a more compelling setting today to promote his approach to reduce the risk of devastating blazes. He even took a bumpy helicopter ride for a close-up look, providing another of the made-for-television images that the White House uses skillfully.

But with the ruins from terrorist attacks smoldering halfway across the globe, Mr. Bush`s efforts to burnish his environmental credentials, court moderate voters and focus the nation on domestic matters struggled for traction. The attention of the news media and much of the world remained riveted by the Mideast violence and the growing terrorist threat in Iraq. Today served mostly as a reminder of how much Mr. Bush`s standing is hostage to his foreign policy and events abroad.

Since Mr. Bush landed on the carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1 under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," the White House has tried to refocus its message to domestic concerns, starting with the economy but extending to other issues vital to the strategy of claiming the political center.

Starting a day after flying to the Lincoln, he stepped up promotion of his domestic agenda on points like tax cuts, health care, energy and limits on lawsuit awards. Today in Oregon, a state he lost by fewer than 7,000 votes, Mr. Bush was distracted from his plan to expand logging as a way to thin forests and reduce fire risk. On Friday in neighboring Washington, he is to make a case for how his policies on hydroelectric dams and river management have led to a salmon resurgence.

If only the world will listen. With television images and newspaper headlines focused on the violence overseas and what it says about leadership on antiterrorism, "there is always the potential for taking away the White House`s strategy and message of focusing on the economy, health care, the environment and swing voters," said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington.

To some degree, the focus on an unstable threat-filled world works to Mr. Bush`s advantage. His position as commander in chief of an open-ended war on terrorism is the foundation of his standing and a difficult credential for his would-be Democratic challengers to overcome.

Polls show that voters are far more concerned about the economy than terrorism and that they give Mr. Bush far lower marks on the economy and domestic issues generally than on foreign policy. Moreover, Mr. Bush`s foreign policy ratings are also falling as Washington encounters problems in Iraq.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, 52 percent of respondents disapproved of Mr. Bush`s handling of the economy, with 40 percent approving. A poll this month by the Pew Research Center found that the number of people saying the military effort in Iraq was going very well had fallen, to 19 percent from 61 percent in April. The same poll found that 57 percent of respondents said Mr. Bush should primarily focus on the economy versus 27 percent who said he should focus on terrorism. At the beginning of the year, 43 percent said he should focus on terrorism and 38 percent said he should focus on the economy.

Mr. Bush`s overall approval ratings, while still strong, have also fallen, from more than 70 percent in many polls in the war to below 60 percent in many polls.

"The question is how long can his ratings hold up while the Iraq situation seems to go from bad to worse, and can he get traction on his domestic agenda when people are distracted constantly by Iraq and the Middle East," said Andrew Kohut, executive director of the Pew Research Center.

The focus on events abroad "does emphasize his strong point, but his strong point is getting weaker," Mr. Kohut said.

Mr. Bush did his part to stay on message today. In two speeches, he did not mention the announcement by Palestinian terrorists that they were declaring an end to their cease-fire with Israel. Nor did he mention the bombing on Tuesday in Baghdad, and he took no questions from reporters.

Even when he managed to command attention on the domestic front, Mr. Bush faced challenges. As his motorcade whisked him to a $1 million fund-raiser in Portland, he passed unusually large numbers of protesters, despite approaching by what seemed to be a back route. Environmental groups issued statements condemning his forest policy as a sop to the timber industry.

In both appearances, Mr. Bush acknowledged the uncomfortable reality for him that Oregon`s unemployment rate, at 7.8 percent, was far above the national rate of 6.2 percent.

He received a warm reception here from a crowd of several hundred people who sat in a brisk breeze that fanned the fires on the horizon and applauded when he said the nation should leave behind what he called the "propaganda of what it means to protect forests."



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August 22, 2003
Injustice in Guantánamo

As the prisoners in Guantánamo approach their second anniversary in captivity, the Bush administration is finally talking about bringing them to trial. The delay in holding trials, and releasing the innocent, is unacceptable. So are the rules the administration has outlined for conducting their trials. The Defense Department should heed the calls of respected voices in the legal community, including that of the American Bar Association, and develop fairer procedures.

The detainees held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion of involvement in terrorism have been in custody so long it may seem that they have been found guilty of something. But the detainees, most of them captured in the Afghanistan war, have not had trials, and it is not clear when they will. Relatives and human rights groups say many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or were picked up based on bad intelligence.

The administration has indicated that it intends to start putting the detainees before military tribunals soon. The procedures that have been adopted for these proceedings are unfair. The trials themselves may be held in secret, and lawyers can be prevented from speaking publicly about the proceedings. Secret trials make it impossible for the outside world to determine whether justice is being done.

The military tribunal rules also contain restrictions on lawyers that will make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to mount effective defenses. The government reserves the right to deny detainees and their civilian lawyers access to the evidence being used at trial. The rules authorize the Defense Department to monitor communications between civilian lawyers and clients, and require lawyers to reveal information that they learn from their clients relating to future criminal acts. The American Bar Association, at its annual meeting this month, urged Congress and the executive branch to revise these rules substantially. Finally, the appeals process laid out in the military tribunal rules falls far short of what fairness requires.

The Bush administration has already denied each of the Guantánamo detainees one basic right guaranteed in the civilian justice system: a speedy trial. Now it appears determined to deny many more. Before these prosecutions go any further, the administration should overhaul its procedures until it has a system capable of exonerating the innocent, and of showing a skeptical world that those who are convicted are in fact guilty.



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August 22, 2003
Conan the Deceiver
By PAUL KRUGMAN


The key moment in Arnold Schwarzenegger`s Wednesday press conference came when the bodybuilder who would be governor brushed aside questions with the declaration, "The public doesn`t care about figures." This was "fuzzy math" on steroids — Mr. Schwarzenegger was, in effect, asserting that his celebrity gives him the right to fake his way through the election. Will he be allowed to get away with it?

Reporters were trying to press Mr. Schwarzenegger for the specifics so obviously missing from his budget plans. But while he hasn`t said much about what he proposes to do, the candidate has nonetheless already managed to say a number of things that his advisers must know are true lies.

Even Mr. Schwarzenegger`s description of the state economy is pure fantasy. He claims that the state is bleeding jobs because of its "hostile environment" toward business, and that California residents groan under an oppressive tax burden: "From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they`re taxed."

One look at the numbers tells you that his story is fiction. Since the mid-1990`s California has added jobs considerably faster than the nation as a whole. And while the state has been hit hard by the technology slump, it has done no worse than other parts of the country. A recent study found that California`s tech sector had actually weathered the slump better than its counterpart in Texas. Meanwhile, California isn`t a high-tax state: through the 1990`s, state and local taxes as a share of personal income more or less matched the national average, and with the recent plunge in revenue they`re now probably below average.

What is true is that California`s taxes are highly inequitable: thanks to Proposition 13, some people pay ridiculously low property taxes. Warren Buffett, supposedly acting as Mr. Schwarzenegger`s economic adviser, offered the perfect example: he pays $14,401 in property taxes on his $500,000 home in Omaha, but only $2,264 on his $4 million home in Orange County. But the candidate quickly made it clear that Mr. Buffett should stick to the script and not mention inconvenient facts.

When Mr. Schwarzenegger threw his biceps into the ring, he seemed to think that, like George W. Bush, he could adopt a what-me-worry approach to budget deficits. "The first thing that you have to do is not worry about should we cut the programs or raise the taxes and all those things," he told Fox News. Then someone must have explained to him that a governor, unlike a president, can`t just decide that red ink isn`t a problem. In fact, one reason Gray Davis is so unpopular is that, unlike the challengers, he has actually had to take painful steps to close the budget gap. Although news reports continue, inexplicably, to talk about a $38 billion deficit, the projected gap for next year is only $8 billion.

So Mr. Schwarzenegger now says that he will balance the budget, while bravely declaring that he is against any unpleasant measures this might involve. He wants to roll back the increase in the vehicle license fee, which was crucial to the state`s recent fiscal progress, and he says he won`t propose any offsetting tax increases. And while these promises mean that he must come up with large spending cuts, he refuses to say what he will cut. His excuse is that his advisers couldn`t make "heads or tails" of the California budget.

Please. The details are complicated, but the broad picture isn`t. Education dominates the budget, accounting for more than half of general fund spending. Medical care dominates the rest. The last remaining big chunk is corrections.

Yet the candidate says he won`t touch education. Sharp cuts in medical spending would be not only cruel but foolish, since in many cases they would mean losing federal matching funds. And prison spending is largely determined by the state`s "three strikes" law. In short, he`s not leveling with voters: there`s no way to balance the budget while honoring all his promises.

But the candidate says that specifics don`t matter, that the public just wants someone "tough enough." Does he really think that voters will confuse him with the characters he plays?

So here`s the question: Can a celebrity candidate muscle his way into public office without ever being held accountable for his statements?



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General Cites Rising Peril of Terror in Iraq


By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A01


The top U.S. military commander for the Persian Gulf region said yesterday that terrorism is becoming the "number one security threat" in Iraq, with foreign fighters entering the country through Syria and a revived group called Ansar al-Islam now firmly established in Baghdad.

The remarks by Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, added to a growing chorus by senior Bush administration officials who have begun to depict postwar Iraq as a magnet for terrorists bent on attacking the United States. "I think Iraq is at the center of the global war on terrorism," Abizaid said at a Pentagon news conference.

But while sketching the outlines of a surging terrorist campaign in Iraq, Abizaid provided little specific evidence to support his assertions of heightened activity by mounting numbers of foreign militants.

Tuesday`s deadly assault on the United Nations` headquarters in Baghdad and the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy earlier this month have marked the arrival of large-scale terrorist tactics in the Iraqi capital. U.S. suspicions have centered on loyalists of Saddam Hussein`s government as the perpetrators of the U.N. attack, but foreign terrorists have not been ruled out, and Abizaid cited signs of growing links between the loyalists and non-Iraqi terrorists entering Iraq.

"I wouldn`t say they have become allies per se, but I believe that there are some indications of cooperation in specific areas," Abizaid said. "Of course, ideologically they are not at all compatible. But, on the other hand, you sometimes cooperate against what you consider a common enemy."

Before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March, senior Bush administration officials sought to bolster their case for war by suggesting that connections existed between Hussein`s government and the al Qaeda terrorist network. The CIA found no substantive links and warned instead that a war could actually end up driving Hussein`s supporters and terrorist groups together -- a prediction that Abizaid`s remarks yesterday suggested may be coming true.

"Clearly, it is emerging as the number one security threat," Abizaid said of the escalation of terrorist attacks in Iraq. "And we are applying a lot of time, energy and resources to identify it, understand it and deal with it."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who appeared with Abizaid, sought to portray the attacks as part of a long series of such bombings around the world. "There is hardly a month that goes by where there`s not some relatively significant terrorist act that occurs somewhere," he said.

But Abizaid, making his first public remarks since Tuesday`s bombing in Baghdad, offered a blunter, more ominous assessment of what he characterized as a grave new menace to the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq.

"They are clearly a problem for us because of the sophistication of their attacks and because of what I would call their tactics to go after Iraqis," he said of the terrorists. "Clearly, they`re going after Iraqis that are cooperating with us. They`re going after soft targets of the international community. They`re still seeking to inflict casualties upon the United States."

He said the terrorist activity is being fueled by extremists operating in an area between Baghdad and the towns of Ramadi and Tikrit.

Abizaid also cited an increase in operations by Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist group that Bush administration officials say has links with al Qaeda and had operated a poison laboratory at a base in northeastern Iraq. Although the base was bombed during the war, reportedly scattering the group`s adherents to Iran, U.S. intelligence has since warned that the group is reconstituting in Iraq with about 150 fighters.

"We think they`ve migrated from the north down into Baghdad, and we think that they`re established there. It`s not good for us when they get established in an urban area, as you can well appreciate," Abizaid said.

Abizaid also spoke of other foreign fighters infiltrating from outside Iraq. He singled out Syria as a channel, although other regional specialists have said militants also appear to be entering Iraq from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

At the same time, Abizaid said it is not clear that the foreign fighters are being sponsored by Syria or any other nation. "I don`t believe that I would say that they are state-supported, but they are supported by misguided people who think that sending money to them is okay," he said.

Interjected Rumsfeld: "They clearly are not being stopped by the countries from which they`re coming."

A U.S. intelligence official said yesterday that it remains unclear how many foreign fighters are crossing into Iraq, what their intentions and affiliations may be, and how organized they are. Some analysts are wondering, the official said, whether the foreigners may simply be "riffraff being attracted to chaos," rather than a coordinated resistance. Other officials have said the militants include Syrians, Saudis, Jordanians, Lebanese, Algerians and Yemenis, among others.

At the United Nations yesterday, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said intelligence reports show that the truck used in the bombing of the U.N. headquarters came from Syria, although he added that he had no evidence linking Syria directly to the attack, which killed at least 23 people and injured more than 100. Syria`s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Fayssal Mekdad, called the statement "an absolutely crazy allegation."

A previously unknown group calling itself the Armed Vanguards of the Second Muhammad Army claimed responsibility for the U.N. bombing yesterday. It sent a two-page typewritten statement to the Associated Press and an Arab broadcast station, Al-Arabiya. The statement pledged "to continue fighting every foreigner [in Iraq] and to carry out similar operations." It also threatened U.S. forces -- and Arabs and Muslims who aid them -- and warned Arab countries against sending troops to Iraq to serve in an international peacekeeping force.

Several self-proclaimed fighting forces have appeared in the Arab media in recent months, proclaiming responsibility for attacks in Iraq. While the validity of these and yesterday`s claims could not be verified, they pointed to the fierce, smoldering emotions feeding the attacks.

Abizaid said defeating the terrorists should not require increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Instead, he argued for intensifying efforts to develop new Iraqi security forces and to expand the ranks of peacekeeping forces from other countries. His prescription echoed the strategy outlined earlier in the week by administration officials.




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Security May Not Be Safe Issue for Bush in `04


By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A01


The wave of violent death this week in Iraq, Israel, Gaza and Afghanistan brought to the fore a reality that President Bush has been reluctant to discuss: Peace is not at hand.

A confident Bush stood in the Rose Garden less than a month ago, saying, "Conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful," boasting of "dismantling the al Qaeda operation" and pronouncing "pretty good progress" toward Middle East peace and a Palestinian state within two years.

Those sunny characterizations may yet prove true, but Bush allies and foes alike are coming to the conclusion that the progress may not be noticeable by the time Bush faces the voters again in 15 months. For a president who has staked his reputation on making "a tough decision to make the world more peaceful," this could be a big problem.

Both Republican and Democratic strategists have begun adjusting their plans for what they once viewed as unthinkable: that Bush`s handling of national security in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, could become a vulnerability rather than an asset in his reelection race.

One presidential adviser said the suicide attacks hours apart in Iraq and Israel, which undermined the two anchors of Bush`s ambitious effort to transform the Middle East, made Tuesday "by far the worst political day for Bush since 9/11."

In one of the new Democratic charges, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the images from Iraq are making it ever plainer to the public that Bush`s plan for a more peaceful world "has clearly not occurred." On the contrary, he said, "the world is more apprehensive about our leadership."

Bush will have a chance to refine his portrayal of the stakes in postwar Iraq when he addresses a friendly audience of veterans, the American Legion`s national convention, Tuesday in Missouri, a crucial state in the presidential race. Some foreign policy experts, even conservatives who support Bush`s policy, say he should begin to prepare the country for a long haul. "We should not try to convince people that things are getting better," said former Reagan official Kenneth Adelman, who is close to several Bush officials. "Rather, we should convince people that ours is the age of terrorism."

To be sure, there is plenty of time for events in Iraq and elsewhere in the region to improve, as yesterday`s announcement of the capture of Ali Hassan Majeed, Iraq`s "Chemical Ali," confirmed. If former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is killed or captured and the illicit weapons uncovered, it is possible that resistance would fold quickly and U.S. troops could return home.

Even without that, GOP pollsters say, there is no cause for alarm. A poll taken in late July by Public Opinion Strategies found that the number of people calling the war and its aftermath a success had fallen from 85 percent in April but was at a still-strong 63 percent. "Americans are quintessential optimists," said Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll.

Still, after this week`s violence, several Republican officials said they are rethinking calculations that Bush`s vulnerability is the economy. "A couple of months ago, everyone believed national security was the president`s trump card," said one Republican with ties to the White House. "Now, we could be in a position where the economy is growing very nicely, well in advance of the election, and the vulnerability could be on the national security side."

Independent experts see more political trouble than advantage for Bush in Iraq. "There is a substantial potential for the occupation of Iraq to become a deep political problem for Bush," according to Ohio State University`s John Mueller, an authority on public opinion and war. If things go well, people will lose interest, but if things go badly, "people are increasingly likely to see the war as a mistake, and starting and continuing wars that people come to consider mistaken does not enhance a president`s reelectability."

The matter is politically important to Bush because he has made the peaceful transformation of the Middle East the main justification for war in Iraq. With the failure to find forbidden weapons in Iraq, Bush and his aides have said the invasion of Iraq will allow it to become the linchpin of a stable and democratic Middle East. In one version of this argument, Bush said last week that in deciding to go to war in Iraq, he made "a tough decision to make the world more peaceful." As a result, continued violence in Iraq and the Middle East would deprive the administration of another key justification for the war.

Bush seemed to acknowledge the political importance when he gave himself a deadline for showing results. "We`ve got a year and a while during my first term to make the world a more peaceful place, and we`ll do it," he said earlier this month.

Though Bush has consistently cautioned Americans that the war on terrorism will be long, he has been upbeat about progress. In his May 1 speech proclaiming "victory" in the battle of Iraq, he also said "we destroyed the Taliban" in Afghanistan, and predicted that in the war on terrorism, "we do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide."

Top Bush aides have begun to talk about a long and expensive U.S. presence in the Middle East, a generational commitment akin to the half-century presence in Europe during the Cold War. "Today America and our friends and allies must commit ourselves to a long-term transformation in another part of the world: the Middle East," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote this month in The Washington Post.

Foreign policy expert Richard Perle, who has close ties to the administration, recommended that Bush caution Americans about the lengthy commitment. "It may be a very long time before we`ve so substantially eliminated the source of terror that we can pronounce that we are safe," he said.

Bush, however, has not emphasized that point -- which, opponents say, means Americans may believe that he played down the commitment. "Iraq is going to be a long slog," said Democratic pollster Jeremy Rosner. "He hasn`t prepared the nation for the reconstruction of Iraq."

Democrats, while still approaching the subject gingerly, are increasingly willing to take on Bush for his choices overseas. Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) said from the campaign trail in Las Vegas that at event after event, voters who are supportive of the military ask him when troops will be coming home from Iraq. "The president seems oblivious to the fact that we`re over there almost alone," Gephardt said. "We`re not getting less violence, we`re not getting the country put back together, people are getting killed, and the forces are stretched thin."

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), former political adviser to President Bill Clinton, said, "Presidents get the benefit of the doubt in any war. But they don`t get blind loyalty when Americans think they were given a false sense of security or led into a situation that made them more vulnerable."

Republican officials, while acknowledging this has been a terrible week, say this week`s attacks prove Bush`s point that he is taking on a global struggle. His advisers say they are not worried that Bush`s popularity will be tied to his handling of international relations. Of course, a failed foreign policy would undo Bush as surely as it did President Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, one adviser said. But Bush is a long way from that -- and his allies still believe that Democrats challenge his foreign policy performance at their peril.

"Democrats could find themselves more willing to attack on national security concerns than the economy if we have several months of strong growth and declining unemployment," said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member from Minnesota. "But that will mean they are fighting the campaign on an issue that has long been Republican turf."



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Pipes to Be Named to Think Tank
Controversial Mideast Scholar Will Be Recess Appointment

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A04


President Bush will sidestep congressional opposition by making a recess appointment today of a controversial Middle East scholar, Daniel Pipes, to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an administration official said.

Although the position is largely honorary, Muslim organizations and some Jewish groups have campaigned vigorously since April against Pipes`s nomination to the federally funded foreign policy think tank, which has 70 staff and 15 board members.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights group, said Pipes is "known for his hostility to Muslims," and called the appointment "a backdoor move" that is "an affront to all those who seek peace."

A Harvard-trained author and lecturer, Pipes, 53, heads the Middle East Forum, an independent think tank in Philadelphia. He also founded Campus Watch, a group dedicated to combating what it sees as pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias on university campuses.

He has declined to comment on the appointment but disputes the charge of bigotry, saying he distinguishes between "militant" and "moderate" strains in Islam.

At a July 23 meeting on the nomination, Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee questioned what signal Pipes`s appointment would send. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said Pipes`s record did not "reflect a commitment to bridging differences and preventing conflict," and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said the controversy could "overshadow" the institute`s work.

By making the appointment while Congress is in recess, Bush avoids a confirmation vote. But instead of serving the usual four years, Pipes will serve the remaining 18 months of an unexpired term.



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Aid Groups Reduce Operations in Iraq
U.N., Red Cross, Others to Withdraw Staff as a Result of Truck Bombing

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A14


BAGHDAD, Aug. 21 -- Independent humanitarian operations in Iraq began to erode today as the United Nations announced a reduction of about a third of its Baghdad headquarters staff, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that an unspecified number of foreign workers would be withdrawn and other organizations considered changes in personnel or security arrangements.

Two days after a truck bomb exploded at U.N. headquarters here, taking the lives of at least 23 workers and visitors, the organization`s coordinator of humanitarian programs, Ramiro Lopez da Silva, said that the administrative staff would shrink from about 300 to 200. Those who leave Baghdad will take up duties related to Iraq in Jordan and Cyprus, he told reporters.

Other headquarters staff members will resume work at an unspecified location on Saturday, da Silva said. The Canal Hotel, which served as the main U.N. office here, was badly damaged by the truck bomb, and U.S. soldiers continued to search for one missing person among the slabs of concrete, broken ceilings and shattered glass.

U.N. officials said they would beef up security at their new location but would not request large numbers of U.S. or allied forces. U.N. officials say they don`t want their facilities to look like an armed camp.

"We always remain a soft target, and we are conscious of that," da Silva told reporters. "We cannot create a division between us and the people we serve. The presence of coalition forces does intimidate some of the people we need to work with."

A spokeswoman for the Red Cross, Nada Doumani, said her organization had decided to withdraw some expatriates. The Red Cross had taken steps to limit travel of employees among Iraqi cities after a worker was killed in an ambush last month. Administrative staff members have dispersed to other Iraqi cities to avoid having to travel, she said.

"It is all related to the local security situation, and actually to the security problem in the Middle East," Doumani said. The number of Baghdad Red Cross workers to be withdrawn was still being worked out, she added.

Typically, if the United Nations and Red Cross reduce services or personnel in dangerous countries, other aid organizations follow. In Baghdad, foreign relief groups were keeping a low profile. The only reports of a shutdown involved the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Each withdrew its small staff from Iraq Wednesday.

Aid agencies perform numerous functions that indirectly ease the pressure on the U.S. administration in Iraq to provide basic services. The U.N. World Food Program feeds millions of Iraqis, and a variety of organizations provide health care, sanitation and clean water. The U.N. Development Program is working to fix Iraq`s tattered electrical power network.

Staff reductions seemed to be a common topic among aid agencies. The Italian Red Cross field hospital said it would reduce its workforce of 70 by about a third. The Italians broke Red Cross custom in April by placing armed police on the grounds of their hospital. Today, they were shoring up the perimeter with sand and cement blocks. "We decided that we needed to strengthen our passive defense," said Fabio Strinati, a hospital official.

At the offices of CARE, a group that provides health and nutritional aid to children and is undertaking other rebuilding efforts, an official would say only: "We are staying. We just don`t want to wave a banner about it."

In the United States, Pat Carey, a CARE vice president, suggested that cutbacks could hurt the group`s mission. "We`re continuing our operations in Iraq, and we intend to carry on with the programs that we currently have," he said. "But we do want to step back and think through the security implications."

An official of a medical relief agency in Baghdad, who asked not to be identified, said: "The aid community is reluctant to speak much about leaving or cutting back. No one wants to start a stampede."

A claim of responsibility for the explosion emerged today in a letter faxed to the Al-Arabiya satellite television network in Dubai. There was no way to confirm that the heretofore unknown group, the Armed Vanguards of the Second Army of Mohammed, actually carried out the attack -- or even exists -- but the letter said the attack was meant to shed "Crusader blood."

The death toll of U.S. soldiers continued to rise. Wednesday night, a soldier from the 1st Armored Division was killed by a roadside blast, in a tactic that has become increasingly common. Sixty-three U.S. troops have been killed by hostile action since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

Ahmed Ibrahim, the Iraqi deputy interior minister, appealed to Iraqis to inform the appropriate people of suspicious activities. "Iraqis protect themselves when they inform," he said.



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Behind the Failure


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A21


Can we now please admit that the Bush administration`s policies in Iraq are a terrible failure?

The terrorist truck bomb that blew up the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad this week also blew up the pretensions of an arrogant strategy that assumed the United States could do nation-building on the cheap. It was an approach that assumed we needed little support from traditional allies, only a limited number of troops and relatively modest expenditures to rebuild a shattered country.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the administration`s indifference to the truth or falsity of the various claims it made before the war is the fact that it seemed to believe its own propaganda. President Bush and Vice President Cheney really thought that if they wished it, it would come -- "it" in this case being not only a quick victory in the war but also a rapid rallying of Iraqis to the American standard afterward.

Last March on "Meet the Press," moderator Tim Russert asked Cheney: "If your analysis is not correct and we`re not treated as liberators but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, bloody battle with significant American casualties?"

Cheney replied: "Well, I don`t think it`s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

The vice president said he knew this because he and the president had met with "various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."

Please look at those sentences again. Note that for its reading of the situation inside Iraq, the administration relied on people who spent their lives outside Iraq. The administration believed the outsiders because the outsiders said what the administration wanted to hear -- and perhaps because the administration had no clue as to how people inside Iraq might react.

It`s astonishing that Bush and his advisers never seemed to take seriously the obvious possibility: that many, perhaps most, Iraqis -- especially the Shiite Muslim majority so oppressed by Saddam Hussein -- could be perfectly happy to have the United States get rid of their dictator and then want U.S. troops to leave immediately.

And will anyone in the administration ever be held accountable for putting down Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army`s chief of staff before the war? Shinseki told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early March that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required to occupy a postwar Iraq.

Two days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz described Shinseki`s estimate as "way off the mark." Cheney was also dismissive. In his "Meet the Press" appearance, he insisted that "to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don`t think is accurate. I think that`s an overstatement."

It`s now clear that the courageous 139,000 American troops in Iraq are insufficient to guarantee security -- including their own. Shinseki was right. Wolfowitz and Cheney were wrong. Will Wolfowitz and Cheney ever apologize to Shinseki?

And consider our president`s statement on July 2 in response to a question about attackers targeting our troops. "Bring `em on," our president declared. "We`ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." Mr. President, they`re bringing it on.

What`s required? It`s obvious we need more troops in Iraq. Since the administration played down the cost of the occupation before hostilities started, that may be hard to sell to the American people now. As we don`t want to bear the whole burden of this enterprise ourselves, we desperately need much more help from allies. We`ll soon learn how much crow the administration is willing to eat to make that happen.

And we need to spend a lot more money to put Iraqis to work, to fix Iraq`s oil facilities and to repair its electric power system. Will the administration and its neoconservative allies ever admit that their big government policies abroad are inconsistent with their tax cuts for the rich at home?

Now that we have invaded Iraq, we cannot afford to let the place go to pieces. The administration can hold fast to its arrogance. Or it can acknowledge its mistakes and chart a new course.

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A Victorian View of Iraq


By George F. Will

Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A21


At the beginning of her military campaign to reverse Argentina`s 1982 seizure of the Falklands, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, "Failure? The possibilities do not exist." She was paraphrasing Queen Victoria: "We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist." Victoria said that in 1899, during "Black Week" in the Boer War, when things were going badly.

The United States has just endured 12 particularly difficult days in Iraq -- the bombings of the Jordanian Embassy, the oil and water pipelines and the United Nations offices. This has been "terrorism plus," terrorism with this difference: Most terrorism is random violence. This is tactical, carefully targeted to serve a cunning strategy.

It is not just a "Mogadishu strategy" intended to induce "occupation fatigue" in America by sporadic attrition of U.S. military personnel, leading to precipitous withdrawal. The purpose of attacking "soft" targets is much easier to achieve. It is to prevent America from making material conditions better.

It was considered marvelous that there was no disorder in New York when the power recently went off for 29 hours. In Iraq, water and electricity have been unreliable for months. Until conditions become much better, Iraq will be a newly created example of a danger newly perceived since 9/11 -- a "failed state." Hence it will be a vacuum into which political evil rushes.

Days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Thatcher, who by serendipity was in Colorado with the first President Bush, exhorted him not to "go wobbly." There was no danger of that, and no danger that this President Bush will do so. Rather, the danger is that he might think that being the reverse of wobbly -- obdurate -- is a sufficient response to the Iraq challenge.

Perhaps the administration should recognize that something other than its intelligence reports concerning weapons of mass destruction was wrong. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, was wrong in congressional testimony before the war. Although he said "we have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," he insisted that Gen. Eric Shinseki, a veteran of peacekeeping in the Balkans, was "wildly off the mark" in estimating that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in occupied Iraq.

Currently, 139,000 U.S. troops and about 22,000 from other nations do not seem sufficient. And there may not be enough U.S. troops to do the job. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, writing in the Washington Times, says that to keep 370,000 deployed in more than 100 countries, "we have called to active duty an unprecedented 136,000 members of the Reserve and National Guard." Today`s tempo of operations threatens the services` retention and recruitment.

To those who say that further internationalization of the occupation of Iraq would lessen U.S. "control," the response is: Control -- such as it is -- should not be the grandiose U.S. objective. Neutralization of Iraq as a source of terror will be sufficient.

Grandiosity is an American inclination because there is an engineering gene in this nation`s DNA. Like engineers, Americans assume that the existence of something designated a problem entails the existence of a solution -- a fix waiting to be discovered and implemented. The problem of the vast arid land west of Missouri? Put railroads across it, then irrigate it. The Golden Gate? Throw a bridge across it.

But some conditions -- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Ulster are two -- have been shown to be less problems to be tidily and decisively solved than messes to be slowly and partially ameliorated. The failure to distinguish between solvable problems and durable messes is a facet of a larger political failing.

Much political folly and almost all political calamities (e.g., the French and Russian revolutions, Mao`s Cultural Revolution, the murder of perhaps a quarter of Cambodians by Khmer Rouge "re-educators") have flowed from the belief that things -- societies, human nature -- are more malleable than they are.

Some very good people thought like this when expecting that Saddam Hussein`s defeat would trigger a benign domino effect, emboldening Arab moderates and prompting nasty regimes to mend their ways. But inertia rules, as usual.

Regarding the reconstruction of Iraq (when did the Reconstruction of the American South end? The 1870s? The 1970s?), the United States must resolve, as Victoria and Thatcher did, that the possibilities of defeat are unthinkable. This is necessary not because a happy Iraq, or a welcome cascade of political dominos, is or ever was likely in the near term. It is necessary because U.S. national security, meaning the war on terrorism and rogue regimes, must move on.

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washingtonpost.com
Time to Unite


By David Ignatius

Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A21


Sometimes tragedy forces people to see things in a changed light. Perhaps Tuesday`s truck bombing at United Nations headquarters in Baghdad will have that galvanizing effect -- on the Bush administration, on its critics in countries such as France and Germany and most of all on the Iraqi people.

Amid the rubble that buried the brave U.N. emissary, Sergio Vieira de Mello, one can discern three lessons that, taken together, could produce an Iraq policy that might eventually succeed in stabilizing the country. But it will require all the players to put aside grudges and, as the slang expression goes, "get over it."

The most obvious lesson of Tuesday`s bombing is that the terrorism and instability enveloping Iraq threaten the international community as a whole -- not just American soldiers but U.N. humanitarian workers, too. If truck bombers succeed in driving the United Nations from Iraq, the international organization will be weakened -- as will all the countries that see it as a cornerstone of international order and legitimacy. U.N. members should understand that whatever misgivings they had about the war, their interests are now at risk. They can be indignant at America for creating a mess, but they still have a powerful stake in helping Washington sort it out. The recent tone of schadenfreude from Europe as America`s troubles have mounted -- the "we-told-you-so" commentaries in the French and German press -- are unworthy and self-defeating.

A grieving U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan put the matter succinctly Wednesday: "The pacification and stabilization of Iraq is so important that all of us who have the capacity to help should help."

The second lesson is that the Bush administration`s Iraq policy is in trouble and needs some changes. Above all, it needs a broader and more active coalition of international support and the legitimacy that would provide.

To gain that internationalization, the administration will have to make concessions that, until Tuesday, it had rejected. The details will be tricky, but Washington will have to get over its anger toward Europe and ask forthrightly for help. That sort of humility hasn`t been George W. Bush`s long suit, but it`s essential now. Pique isn`t a foreign policy.

Fortunately, the Bush administration seems finally to understand that it needs more help in Iraq. With support from the White House and the Pentagon, the State Department is exploring a new U.N. resolution that might encourage nations such as India, Pakistan and Turkey to send troops. The right formula will give the United Nations more authority for rebuilding Iraq, while keeping security in the hands of the U.S.-led military coalition that fought the war. The United States may need to send more troops -- but they should have company.

The third lesson is that the Iraqi people need to step up and take more responsibility for security. By allowing a terrorist resistance to take hold, they are blowing their chance at becoming a prosperous, free nation that could lead the Arab world. Understandably, the Iraqis are disappointed that America has botched things in the initial months of occupation. But the only people who can truly safeguard Iraq`s infrastructure -- its pipelines, water supply, power stations -- are Iraqis themselves.

At the end of the day, it`s their country. The United States has spent blood and treasure to give the Iraqi people an opportunity to escape the torture chamber in which they have lived for a generation. But America can`t force them to be free. In this sense, the Iraqis already play the decisive role. They can vote in the streets, by their actions.

U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer was right to press the members of the Iraqi Governing Council Wednesday to assert more authority. "You can`t blame us for anything. We don`t have any responsibility," responded a leader of the council, former foreign minister Adnan Pachachi. Okay, fair enough. Bremer needs to give the Iraqis more of the power they have been clamoring for, and demand that they exercise it wisely.

The people who sent that truck bomb to the Canal Hotel Tuesday made a blunder. They hoped to isolate America further from its allies and the Iraqi people and force the occupiers to leave. But unless the international community is as feckless as the terrorists hoped, the Baghdad bombing should pull people together and make possible a new start in Iraq.

This time the international community should work to get it right. The world is much sadder than a few months ago, and hopefully a bit wiser, too.

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The Cartoon Graveyard

Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
92 mal frische Cartoon Ware. Beachtet den Warnhinweis.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030821__092toons.htm

[stockmarketbull]

@Joerver,ich möcht auch was dazu beitragen



Bin ich jetzt engagiert

[Joerver]

Nachdem das Netzteil meines PC den Geist aufgegeben hat, Stockmarketbull sein erfülltes Sexualleben dargestellt hat und die NeoCons auf Nebenschauplätzen versuchen von dem absoluten amerikanischen Versagen im Nahen Osten abzulenken, werde ich mich wieder der Presseschau über die Bushclique widmen.

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Bush`s pollution charter
Republican supporting energy firms set to escape controls on emissions

Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America`s air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.

Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation.

The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations.

The regulations are being challenged by 13 states including New York. If adopted, they would represent a multi-million dollar victory for energy corporations, most of whom are significant Republican contributors, and who were consulted in the drafting of the administration`s energy plan by vice-president Dick Cheney in 2001.

The US accounts for a quarter of the world`s carbon emissions, 10% more than all of western Europe combined. Environmentalists fear that, by relaxing its controls even further, America could undermine attempts to persuade other countries to stick to the targets laid out by Kyoto.

Under the current rules set in 1977, industrial sites built before the Clean Air Act are exempt from its controls until they are upgraded in any way, beyond "routine maintenance", that increases emissions. At that point companies have to install filters and other controls or face penalties.

Under the draft rules, seen by the Guardian, corporations can do far more than "routine maintenance" - investing in old plant up to 20% of its total value at a time - without having to spend money on anti-pollution equipment. The figure of 20% is highly controversial, and in some places in the document has been replaced by an "X". Elsewhere the figure has been left, apparently as an oversight.

The rules do not impose a time limit for the investment, allowing a firm to make successive upgrades to an old power station, oil refinery or factory - replacing it piece by piece, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars - as long as each upgrade costs less than a fifth of the plant`s total value.

"The companies could completely rebuild their plants by gaming a gimmick that is designed to be gamed," said John Walke, of the Natural Resources Defence Council, a pressure group which leaked the draft."This is a massive giveaway," Mr Walke said. "The Bush administration, using an arbitrary, Enron-like accounting gimmick, is authorising massive pollution increases to benefit Bush campaign contributors at the expense of public health."

An agency spokesman said yesterday that the draft was being worked on and he could not comment on its contents.

Frank Maisano, spokesman for an industry group, the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said he was not familiar with the new rules. However, he said: "If it were to be set at 20%, that would be reasonable for a routine maintenance provision. The reality is you need to maintain your plants efficiently and reliably. The only thing the environmentalists here are interested in is getting rid of the coal plants," Mr Maisano said.

The change comes in the wake of victories for US justice department lawyers in cases against six big polluters in the electric power industry, forcing them to reduce emissions by more than half a million tons a year. However, analysts said that, under the new rules, the six would have won. The trade group representing the companies, Edison Electric Institute, contributed nearly $600,000 to the Republican party from 1999 to 2002, and had at least 14 contacts with the Cheney energy task force in 2001.

Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York, one state challenging the policy as being damaging to the health of residents, said he would mount a legal challenge as soon as the regulations were signed.

guardian.co.uk/usa 11



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Bush appoints anti-Muslim to peace role
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

A Middle East expert who has written dismissively of diplomacy and holds views to the right of the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was yesterday named to the board of the US Institute of Peace.

The largely honorary appointment of Daniel Pipes, a gift of President George Bush, has outraged Democratic senators, American Muslims and Arabs, liberal Jews and a large portion of the academic community, who say his opinions are not conducive to peace.

The manner of Mr Pipe`s appointment is likely to deepen the sting. Mr Bush exploited the summer recess to avoid a congressional vote on his selection. But as a recess appointment, Mr Pipes will serve less than 18 months rather than the normal four years.

Mr Pipes would not comment until his appointment was formally announced but he has been no stranger to controversy, especially since the September 11 attacks.

As a frequent commentator, he has warned that America`s Muslims are the enemy within and called for unrestricted racial profiling and monitoring of Muslims in the military.

From his own thinktank in Philadelphia, he has also clashed with fellow scholars, who say his Campus Watch website has initiated a witch-hunt against those he views as critics of Israel or lacking in patriotic zeal.

Within the community of Middle East scholars, he is regarded as extreme. He opposes the "road map" for the Middle East, as he opposed the Oslo peace accords, and objected to efforts to reform the Palestinian Authority.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Special investigation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Inside story of the hunt for Bin Laden
The al-Qaida leader is said to be hiding in northern Pakistan guarded by a 120-mile ring of tribesmen whose job it is to warn of the approach of any troops. Rory McCarthy reports

Rory McCarthy
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

Early in March, intelligence agents searching the western deserts of Pakistan thought they had finally tracked down the world`s most wanted man. A convoy was spotted racing along one of the remote smugglers` routes which winds down from southern Afghanistan, through the sand dunes of Pakistani Baluchistan and into Iran. American intelligence agents had a tip that Osama bin Laden was in the group.

They seemed to have reason to be optimistic. Five days earlier Pakistani officers had scored the biggest success so far in the hunt for Bin Laden and his al-Qaida deputies. In a midnight raid they had arrested a ragged-looking Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the Pakistani Kuwaiti who was regarded as the third most senior figure in Bin Laden`s network, a man described by the jubilant authorities in Islamabad as a "kingpin of al-Qaida."

Mohammad had been pinpointed when he made a satellite telephone call, which US military electronic eavesdropping tracked to Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan. A computer and lists of phone numbers were recovered after his arrest, amounting to what the Pakistani interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, called an "arsenal" of information.

That new information encouraged investigators to focus their attention on the sparsely populated deserts of Baluchistan. Within a few days they had spotted the convoy.

A major operation was mounted by Pakistani soldiers and US troops. There were reports of heavy gun battles around the Afghan border town of Spin Majid, with up to nine of the men in the convoy killed.

Baluchistan`s interior minister appeared on television to announce that two of Bin Laden`s sons had been captured. Then one Pakistani journalist broke the sensational news that Bin Laden himself had been caught.

Within hours, it became clear that he had not. In fact, several sources now say the intelligence tip was faulty: Bin Laden was never even in the convoy.

Those with knowledge of the operation have told the Guardian that two of the Saudi-born millionaire`s sons had been led by Afghan warlords in the previous days down the same route, a well-trodden drug smugglers` path, and across into Iran. By the time the operation took place, there were still convoys of drug smugglers on the trail but the sons were gone.

"In the end it was just another flop," said Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has met Bin Laden three times and studied al-Qaida in detail.

"The intelligence agencies have totally failed with al-Qaida. They are such highly motivated people in al-Qaida that it is very difficult to break into the rank and file of the organisation."

That is one of the reasons why, almost two years after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden has yet to be found.

But a Guardian inquiry has revealed that there are others. Experts who have been following the attempts of the Pakistanis and the US to find the al-Qaida leader have suggested that:

· The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, struck a deal with the US not to seize Bin Laden after the Afghan war for fear of inciting trouble in his own country;

· The al-Qaida leader is being protected by a three elaborate security rings which stretch 120 miles in diameter; and

· The Pakistani special forces looking for him are no closer than they were a year ago.

For the Americans, the March operation was yet another bitter lesson in the difficulty of tracking down Bin Laden. With the US election nearing and mounting concerns about Washington`s second great military project - Iraq - George Bush more than ever needs the incalculable political boost that Bin Laden`s capture would bring.

The Saudi`s last known hiding place was in the caves of Tora Bora in the Spin Ghar mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It was December 2001 and the Taliban regime was collapsing across Afghanistan under the weight of America`s bombing campaign.

Hundreds of al-Qaida fighters were holed up in the caves, where Bin Laden was heard making a radio address exhorting his men to fight. He also made a 33-minute video recording. Looking gaunt and tired, he described the September 11 attacks as "blessed strikes".

"We say that the end of the United States is imminent," he said. It was the last the world saw of him.

Bin Laden fled the mountains and spent the next six or seven months trying to re-establish his network, according to Mansoor Ijaz, a financier who has spent years tracking his movements and operations. In the small world of international terrorism analysts, Mr Ijaz, an American of Pakistani origin, knows al-Qaida better than most. He has close contacts in Pakistan`s intelligence agencies and has worked, behind the scenes, as negotiator over Bin Laden in the past. In 1997 he was involved in negotiating attempts by Sudan to provide crucial information on the Saudi exile and worked on an attempt to have him extradited from Afghanistan through the United Arab Emirates in 2000.

In the same year he persuaded General Musharraf and his ISI intelligence agency to accept a rare ceasefire among Kashmiri militant groups.

Since 1991 he has been chairman of a New York-based hedge fund, Crescent Investment Management, which focuses on national security technologies and for which James Woolsey, a former chief of the CIA, is vice-chairman of the advisory board.

Mr Ijaz argues that the flight from Tora Bora badly disrupted al-Qaida`s access to electronic communications: satellite phones, radios and email. "Initial communications were stopped and it took them a while to transplant and regroup," he said in an interview. "It was in a place where it was impossible for them to get communications across to anybody."

He suggests Bin Laden is hiding in the "northern tribal areas", part of the long belt of seven deeply conservative tribal agencies which stretches down the length of the mountain ranges that mark Pakistan`s 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan.

Mr Ijaz, who has recently visited Pakistan, believes Bin Laden is protected by an elaborate security cordon of three concentric circles, in which he is guarded first by a ring around 120 miles in diameter of tribesmen, whose duty is to reportany approach by Pakistani troops or US special forces.

Inside them is a tighter ring, around 12 miles in diameter, made up of tribal elders who would warn if the outer ring were breached. At the centre of the circles is Bin Laden himself, protected by one or two of his closest relatives and advisers. Bin Laden has agreed with the elders that he will use no electronic communications and will move only at night and between specified places within a limited radius.

At first Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a bespectacled Egyptian doctor who is regarded as the potent intellectual force behind the al-Qaida net work, passed messages by word of mouth, what Mr Ijaz calls a "human chain-link fence". But the message system was inefficient; too many specific details were being missed.

"By the time they got from the first man to the 10th man, the messages had in fact become so distorted no one knew what they were talking about," he said.

And so Bin Laden began to use handwritten notes, more specific but potentially more of a risk. On March 16 Pakistani intelligence officers acting on information from US military eavesdroppers arrested Yassir al-Jazeeri in Karachi.

Al-Jazeeri, a Moroccan, was believed to be one of Bin Laden`s closest bodyguards. In his pocket he carried a handwritten note from Bin Laden. It was perhaps the closest investigators had come to finding the trail of the al-Qaida chief.

For their part Pakistani officials say their intelligence on Bin Laden is still remarkably limited.

Many of the reports they receive of his movements, they insist, are simply wrong. "We have been getting reports of his presence across the border inside Afghanistan and along the border area also," Mr Hayat said in an interview.

"Not all reports have been credible at times. If others were credible we would certainly have been able to get near to him but certainly that has not been the position so far." Nevertheless Bin Laden, he said, remained a "fiercely hunted man."

The terrain of the tribal regions makes it almost impossible to find a single man intent on hiding, according to Mr Hayat. Local communities rule themselves, bound by deeply rooted codes of honour and respect which are enforced with vast armouries of weapons, ranging from assault rifles to heavy artillery.

Few would dispute Mr Hayat`s complaints about the terrain. The tribal agencies have developed an infamy for their protection of wanted men. Even today Pakistani officers describe the immense difficulties they face operating in the tribal lands, an area without police and which the army never entered before September 11. Several hundred soldiers are required every time one house is searched. A handful of men are needed for the search, dozens more to protect them from the neighbours.

Some argue that the Pakistani authorities saw the difficulties from the start and, although they publicly stressed their commitment to the hunt for Bin Laden, in private they had a different strategy.

Mr Ijaz believes an agreement was reached between Gen Musharraf and the American authorities shortly after Bin Laden`s flight from Tora Bora.

The Pakistanis feared that to capture or kill Bin Laden so soon after a deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan would incite civil unrest in Pakistan and would trigger a spate of revenge al-Qaida attacks on western targets across the world.

"There was a judgment made that it would be more destabilising in the longer term," he said. "There would still be the ability to get him at a later date when it was more appropriate."

The Americans, according to Mr Ijaz, accepted the argument, not least because of the shift in focus to the impending war in Iraq. So the months that followed were centred on taking down not Bin Laden, but the "retaliation infrastructure" of al-Qaida.

It meant that Gen Musharraf frequently put out remarkably conflicting accounts of the status of Bin Laden, while the US administration barely mentioned his name.

In January last year Gen Musharraf said he believed Bin Laden was probably dead. A year later he said he was alive and moving either in Afghanistan or perhaps in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Yet western diplomats say they believe the Pakistani authorities are committed to the hunt for Bin Laden, although they admit that frequently the official accounts of the timing and location of successful arrests do not square with reality.

Since Tora Bora, there has been a series of high-profile arrests. "I think there is no doubt they are very much against al-Qaida," said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general and security analyst. "I think the Americans find their reliance on the Pakistanis now is increasing."

In March last year police in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad raided a house on a tip from the CIA eavesdroppers and arrested Abu Zubaydah, one of Bin Laden`s top associates and a man responsible for running two al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

On the anniversary of September 11, a raid in Karachi produced Ramzi al-Shibh, a Yemeni who was suspected of passing money and information between the teams of the September 11 hijackers and al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan.

He was also an aide to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who was eventually picked up in Rawalpindi this March in the most significant arrest to date. Dozens of less high-profile men, responsible for providing shelter to al-Qaida figures or printing off fake passports, have been arrested.

"We were able to nab some of the very high-profile al-Qaida activists," Mr Hayat said. "We launched very successful operations all over inside Pakistan, arresting and neutralising those people who were involved in facilitating those people, who were the planners, the architects, the financiers."

For the future, the single greatest task facing the Pakistanis and the Americans will be to tame the powerful elders who run Pakistan`s tribal areas and who appear to have given Bin Laden sanctuary. The danger is that the longer he remains uncaught, the bolder and stronger the surviving al-Qaida elements will feel.

"With so much of the retaliation infrastructure gone or unsustainable, Bin Laden`s martyrdom does not pose nearly the threat it did a year ago," Mr Ijaz said.

Yet failing to catch the Saudi now could embolden the surviving al-Qaida forces. It was like "watching a radiation-hardened cancerous tumour regenerate and proliferate even more dangerously", he said.

"That`s why Pakistan must now end the charade and get Bin Laden."


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It`s official - Saddam was not an imminent threat
Hutton`s remit was narrow - yet he has exposed the truth about the Iraq war

Clare Short
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

After eight days of the Hutton inquiry and enormous quantities of media coverage, it is worth pausing to try to take stock. Many of us have said that, deliberately or otherwise, Alastair Campbell`s decision to go to war with the BBC had the potential to distract attention from the most important questions arising from the Iraq crisis - whether the nation was deceived on the road to war, and where responsibility lies for the continuing chaos and loss of life in Iraq.

Lord Hutton has been charged with inquiring into the narrower question of the circumstances that led to the death of Dr David Kelly and will report on this very important question. But his inquiry is revealing important information that casts light on the bigger question of how we got to war.

There is an unfortunate tendency among some commentators to seek to narrow the issue to a blame game between the BBC and 10 Downing Street. This has led to comment to the effect that Dr Kelly was the unfortunate victim of a battle between two mighty institutions, accompanied by a campaign of vilification against Andrew Gilligan and the Today programme. It is important to remain constantly aware of the vested interests at play: the Murdoch empire and other rightwing media operations would like to weaken and break the BBC so that British broadcasting might be reduced to the sort of commercially dominated, biased news reporting that controls the US airwaves. It is extremely unfortunate that a Labour government has been willing to drive forward this campaign against the BBC.

We must not allow the barrage of biased comment to mislead us into a fudged conclusion that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. And we must focus both on the pressures that were placed on Dr Kelly and the wider question of how we got to war in Iraq.

The inquiry has already established beyond doubt that, despite government briefing that Dr Kelly was a medium-level official of little significance, he was in fact one of the world`s leading experts on WMD in Iraq. It is also clear that Dr Kelly chose to brief three BBC journalists - and presumably others - to the effect that the 45-minute warning of the possible use of WMD was an exaggeration. He said to the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts, as well as to Gilligan that Campbell and the Downing Street press operation were responsible for exerting pressure to hype up the danger. The inquiry is exploring the reality of that claim. But it is already clear that Dr Kelly made it, to Gilligan and Watts.

The BBC would have been grossly irresponsible if it had failed to bring such a report - from such an eminent source - to public attention. It is a delicious irony that Alastair Campbell castigates the BBC for relying on one very eminent source for this report ... and yet the 45-minute claim itself came from only one source.

As a result of the Hutton inquiry, we now know that two defence intelligence officials wrote to their boss to put on record their disquiet at the exaggeration in the dossier. Moreover, one official asked his boss for advice as to whether he should approach the foreign affairs select committee after the foreign secretary had said that he was not aware of any unhappiness among intelligence officials about the claims made in the dossier.

We know through emails revealed by Hutton that Tony Blair`s chief of staff made clear that the dossier was likely to convince those who were prepared to be convinced, but that the document "does nothing to demonstrate he [Saddam Hussein] has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the west. We will need to be clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are making is that he has continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of UN resolutions. The international community has to enforce those resolutions if the UN is to be taken seriously."

I agree completely with Jonathan Powell`s conclusion. But it follows from this that there was no need to truncate Dr Blix`s inspection process and to divide the security council in order to get to war by a preordained date.

If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq`s WMD programmes - just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein - just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.

Or if Blix had failed, we would have been in the position President Chirac described on March 10, when the issue would have come back to the security council. And in Chirac`s view, this would have meant UN authorisation of military action.

The tragedy of all this is that if we had followed Jonathan Powell`s conclusion, and the UK had used its friendship with the US to keep the world united on a UN route, then, even if it had come to war, a united international community under a UN mandate would almost certainly have made a better job of supporting Iraq`s reconstruction. In this scenario the armed forces would have concentrated on keeping order; the UN humanitarian system would have fixed the water and electricity systems; Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Kofi Annan`s special representative, would have helped the Iraqis to install an interim government and begin a process of constitutional change, as the UN has done in Afghanistan; and the World Bank and IMF would have advised the Iraqi interim authority on transparent economic reform, rather than a process of handover to US companies.

Following the terrible bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, there is a danger that those who favour chaos in Iraq will make further gains, at great cost to the people of Iraq and coalition forces. The answer remains a stronger UN mandate and internationalisation of the reconstruction effort. The worry is that the US will not have the humility to ask for help, and the chaos and suffering will continue.

In the meantime, Lord Hutton will draw his conclusions about the tragic death of Dr Kelly. My own tentative conclusion is that Downing Street thought they could use him in their battle with the BBC, and that the power of the state was misused in a battle to protect the political interests of the government.

· Clare Short resigned as international development secretary in May

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Three British soldiers killed in Basra
By Sherna Noah and James Lyons, PA News
23 August 2003


Three British servicemen were killed and one seriously injured in an attack today in Iraq`s southern city of Basra.

Eyewitness accounts said a bomb was thrown at a British military vehicle as it was driven down one of the city`s main streets.

This morning`s attack came as, nearly 300 miles away, British diplomats left their Baghdad embassy following a "credible threat" of attack.

The deaths take to ten the toll of Britons killed since President George Bush declared major fighting over on 1May.

They come less than two weeks after the last combat killing of a British soldier, who died near Basra when the ambulance he was travelling in was blown up by a roadside bomb.

According to reports from the scene today, the troops were followed by the attackers in a pick-up truck as they drove out of their Army headquarters.

Eyewitnesses said they were shot at and returned fire before the bomb was thrown at them.

A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman said: "A serious incident took place in central Basra at approximately 8.30am local time. Three British servicemen have been killed, and one seriously injured.

"The casualty has been taken to hospital for treatment and the incident has been contained.

"This is a difficult time for all concerned and our priority now is to inform the families of those concerned," he said.

BBC Arabic Service journalist Issam Alainachi, who arrived on the scene shortly after the attack, told BBC News 24 that checkpoints had been set up on Basra`s streets.

He said: "People have told me that the British vehicle left the British Army headquarters in the centre of Basra.

"An Iraqi pick-up followed it and some of the people inside who were carrying guns started shooting at the British Army car. "There was firing between both of them.

"Then one of the people in the Iraqi car threw a bomb on the British Army car which killed the three British servicemen and injured the fourth."

Before the last death on August 14, when Captain David Martyn Jones, 29, of the 1st Queen`s Lancashire Regiment, was killed, no British soldier had been killed in combat since June 24.

British forces seized the southern city of Basra shortly after the outbreak of war in Iraq.

The city has been relatively peaceful since Saddam Hussein`s regime fell on 9 April, but a large swathe of the country north and west of Baghdad, the so-called "Sunni Triangle", has been the site of a bloody guerrilla war that has taken the lives of 65 US soldiers since May 1.

The attack comes as Britain and the US are seeking to increase the number of countries contributing troops to Iraq, and follows violent riots earlier this month in the city over fuel and power shortages.

Before then it had been one of the quietest cities in the country and calm had been restored in recent days.

The British diplomatic team, led by head of mission Chris Segar, evacuated their Baghdad embassy on Wednesday, the day after Tuesday`s truck bombing of the UN headquarters in the Iraqi capital which killed 23 people including top UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The group, which includes security guards and contract workers, are now staying at the coalition provisional authority (CPA) HQ in the city, the Foreign Office confirmed.

23 August 2003 12:49

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Es wird immer sachwerer werden die einzelnen Konflikte
von einander zu trennen, bis es alles eins ist.
August 23, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
The Illusions of Progress
By JAMES BENNET


JERUSALEM, Aug. 22 — "Great and hopeful change is coming to the Middle East," President Bush declared on June 4, as he stood with the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, and Mr. Sharon`s Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas. Appearing at a summit meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, they presented a picture of shared determination to achieve lasting peace.

Since then, the image the Palestinians have sought to project has been of a unilateral halt to violence. For the Israelis, it has been of earnest concessions, including troops withdrawn and prisoners released.

The White House hoped that reality would bend to match these images, as the adversaries gained some confidence in each other and came to enjoy the benefits of a new atmosphere of calm.

But the images, already blurred, were erased this week, as a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 20 people, including six children, aboard a city bus and Israeli forces raced back to their old positions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Just one crucial image remained from the peace process, that of a new Palestinian leadership, and it was fading fast.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged the underlying reality on Thursday when he urged Yasir Arafat, the pre-eminent Palestinian leader and a pariah to Washington, to help the government of Prime Minister Abbas. Palestinian ministers acknowledged the reality when some spoke today of possibly dissolving that government. "I don`t think we can handle all of these burdens and complexities that come with this new wave of violence," said Ziad Abu Amr, the minister of culture. "Nobody is helping this government."

The Bush administration now confronts a grim reality: that nothing fundamental has yet changed here, despite the war in Iraq and the new peace plan known as the road map; that there are still two peoples with clashing visions of an equitable split of this land and contempt for each other`s leaders, if not each other.

"All sides have made important commitments, and the United States will strive to see these commitments fulfilled," Mr. Bush said that day in Aqaba.

After that, the two prime ministers met, and for a time sustained a public image of good will. But commitments were not kept. Palestinians did not begin to dismantle violent groups, as called for in the peace plan and most desired by Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were using their unilateral cease-fire to re-arm, Palestinian officials acknowledged.

Israel returned security control to the Palestinians only of very limited areas, ones that it had been prepared to give back under a different peace initiative a year ago. It made sure its concessions were instantly reversible, as demonstrated today by the ease with which it recreated two major road blocks in the Gaza Strip, turning it into three strips.

Israel did not, as called for in the peace plan, freeze settlement growth or dismantle the 60 settlement outposts it had built in the West Bank since March 2001. Many of the prisoners it freed were due to be released shortly, and, as Israeli officials noted, they could always be re-arrested.

People here are used to the grand imagery of summit meetings and the inspiring goals of peace plans, and they are also used to disappointment. Because the obligations of the peace plan were pursued with mincing steps, each side feared it was being lured into repeating past mistakes.

Israelis — not just the leaders, but the citizens — feared that they were again letting the Palestinians get away with keeping Hamas in their arsenal, when the Palestinians were supposed to be forswearing violence. Palestinians feared that they were again letting the Israelis get away with expanding settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, when the Israelis were supposed to be preparing to give up territory.

In December 2001, Israel declared Mr. Arafat "irrelevant." Six months later, the Bush administration cut all ties to him. He remained in his Ramallah compound, seemingly sidelined, as Mr. Bush embraced Mr. Abbas as the new Palestinian leader.

But as the peace plan unraveled this week, Mr. Powell said, "I call on Chairman Arafat to work with Prime Minister Abbas." Both sides saw that statement as an acknowledgment of the reality of Mr. Arafat`s influence, though they inferred very different meanings from it.

Israeli officials interpreted Mr. Powell`s statement as a threat to Mr. Arafat, saying that he was warning him that the Bush administration would eventually permit Israel to deport him if he did not cooperate fully with Mr. Abbas. "This is the warning before the ultimatum," a senior Israeli official said.

Palestinian officials interpreted Mr. Powell`s statement as a recognition that Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, was a subordinate to Mr. Arafat, not a competing center of power. "They convinced themselves in a very funny way, like children, that now we have a new Palestinian leadership," Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian minister of labor, said of the Americans and Israelis. "It`s not a new leadership. Abu Mazen is No. 2, and he has been No. 2 as long as I can remember."

Mr. Abbas — who also served as a lead negotiator for the Oslo peace process — shares the same stated goals as Mr. Arafat, including a Palestinian state in the entire West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in Jerusalem. But Mr. Abbas, unlike Mr. Arafat, opposes the armed Palestinian uprising.

Israel accuses Mr. Arafat of preventing Mr. Abbas from confronting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, saying that Mr. Arafat`s true goal is Israel`s destruction.

Mr. Khatib, who was in meetings this week as the Palestinian leadership debated what to do, said that Mr. Arafat was not interested in such a confrontation now because, like most Palestinians, he believes the Palestinians will gain nothing in return.

"The question is, what is it for?" Mr. Khatib said. "Is Sharon really willing to move forward in ending the occupation? No one is really convinced that there is a chance, that there is a partner on the other side that is worth paying any price for."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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Die Gerichte funktionieren noch, entgegen aller Bemühungen von Bush.

August 23, 2003
In Courtroom, Laughter at Fox and a Victory for Al Franken
By SUSAN SAULNY


A federal judge in Manhattan told Fox News yesterday that it had to learn how to take a joke. Then he rejected the network`s request for an injunction to block the satirist Al Franken from using the words "fair and balanced" on the cover of his book, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

Calling the motion "wholly without merit, both factually and legally," the judge, Denny Chin of United States District Court, said that a person would have to be "completely dense" not to realize the cover was a joke, and that trademark protection for the phrase "Fair and Balanced" was unrealistic because the words are so commonly used.

Lawyers for Mr. Franken and his publisher, Penguin Group (USA), called the ruling a victory for the First Amendment. Mr. Franken was not in court.

"I never really had any doubt," he said in a telephone interview, calling the ruling "a victory for satirists everywhere, even the bad ones. In addition to thanking my own lawyers, I`d like to thank Fox`s lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I`ve ever seen in my life."

The Fox court papers had referred to Mr. Franken, a former "Saturday Night Live" writer and performer and an unabashed liberal, as a "parasite" who appeared shrill, unstable and "increasingly unfunny."

The network could appeal the decision. "We are considering our options," said Paul Schur, a Fox spokesman. "We don`t care if it`s Al Franken, Al Lewis or Weird Al Yankovic. We`re here to protect our trademark and our talent."

If anything, the lawsuit only benefited Mr. Franken. His book had been scheduled for release in September, but the publicity caused the publisher to print an extra 50,000 copies, for a total of 435,000, and to roll the book out on Thursday.

After the ruling yesterday, it moved to the No. 1 spot on the best-seller list at amazon. com.

The network filed for the injunction on Aug. 11. Fox News Network trademarked the phrase "Fair and Balanced" in 1998 to describe its news coverage, and network lawyers claimed that Mr. Franken`s use of the phrase in his book would "blur and tarnish" it.

Fox also objected to the use of a picture of Bill O`Reilly, one of its prominent news personalities, on the cover, claiming that it could be mistaken as an endorsement of the book.

But these arguments were met by laughter in the crowded courtroom, as Fox tried to defend its signature slogan. Part of the network`s burden was to prove that Mr. Franken`s use of the phrase "fair and balanced" would lead to consumer confusion.

One round of laughter was prompted when Judge Chin asked, "Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word `lies` over Mr. O`Reilly`s face would believe Mr. O`Reilly is endorsing this book?"

The giggling continued as Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer for Fox, replied, "To me, it`s quite ambiguous as to what the message is here."

She continued, "It does not say `parody` or `satire.` "

Ms. Hanswirth said Fox`s "signature slogan" was also blurred, because people who were not associated with the network, which owns the Fox News Channel, also appear on the cover with Mr. O`Reilly.

Judge Chin said, "The president and the vice president are also on the cover. Is someone going to consider that they are affiliated with Fox?"

The courtroom broke into laughter again.

Ms. Hanswirth replied, "It`s more blurring, your honor."

After more discussion about what was and what was not satire, and about the definition of "parody," Judge Chin decided that Mr. Franken`s work was of "artistic value."

"Parody is a form of artistic expression protected by the First Amendment," he said. "The keystone to parody is imitation. In using the mark, Mr. Franken is clearly mocking Fox."

He said Mr. Franken`s work was "fair criticism."

Judge Chin said the case was an easy one, and chided Fox for bringing its complaint to court. The judge said, "Of course, it is ironic that a media company that should be fighting for the First Amendment is trying to undermine it."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 23, 2003
U.N. Chief Says New Force in Iraq Can Be Led by U.S.
By FELICITY BARRINGER


UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 22 — Secretary General Kofi Annan suggested today that the Security Council could set up a new multinational force in Iraq that would be led by the United States as the largest troop contributor — a common practice in joint military operations.

In addition, Mr. Annan said continuing security concerns in Iraq were a part of a larger challenge of persuading Iraqis that the foreigners in their midst were acting in their interest and intended to turn back the reins of power quickly.

In remarks to reporters, he said the Security Council might "decide to transform the operation into a U.N.-mandated multinational force." But, he added, "it would also imply not just burden-sharing, but also sharing decisions and responsibility with the others."

"If that doesn`t happen," he added, "I think it`s going to be very difficult to get a second resolution that will satisfy everybody."

A spokesman for Mr. Annan later said a unified command would not exclude having the leaders of other troop contingents work as part of the same headquarters unit.

It was not immediately clear if Mr. Annan`s suggestion would provide common ground between the United States — with its insistence on complete control of political, economic and particularly military operations — and Council members like France, Germany and Russia. They remain disinclined to lend their approval to a military effort undertaken despite their fierce opposition.

But it was clear from Mr. Annan`s public remarks today and a brief interview that he is certain that a new United Nations mandate is required to give the organization a clearly defined role and to allow Iraqis to have confidence that control over Iraq`s future is reverting to them.

"We are focusing a lot on the force, the multinational force, and security," he said. "I think it`s because of what happened. But that is only part of the answer. The other part of the answer is to move quickly to create an environment where the average Iraqi will support the operation and see that what is happening is in their interest."

He added, "That`s why I keep saying, let`s come up with a timetable to let them know that the occupation is really time-bound."

Paying homage to the skills of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations coordinator on Iraq who was killed in Tuesday`s bombing, he said Mr. Vieira de Mello`s ability to win the trust of diverse segments of Iraqi society could not be replicated. "We have played a vital role," Mr. Annan said. "But we did because of that personality. Because of Sergio being who he is. The next time around, the mandates have to be very clear and well-defined. I cannot rely on personalities. I had only one Sergio."

The secretary general, who flew to Brazil tonight to attend the memorial service for Mr. Vieira de Mello, has been increasingly vocal in emphasizing the need for a common approach among the former Security Council opponents. He told reporters today that "a chaotic Iraq is not in anyone`s interest," and "therefore we have a collective responsibility to try and deal with the situation as it exists in Iraq today."

But the bitterness, particularly on the part of France, was back in evidence on Thursday in the remarks of a French envoy to the Council.

In interviews published and broadcast today, Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, did not reject the idea of supporting a new resolution calling for international help in Iraq.

Mr. de Villepin did, however, talk of moving Iraq from a "logic of occupation" to a "political logic of the restoration of sovereignty." He called for elections for a constituent assembly, to be supervised by a new special representative of the secretary general and to take place as early as the end of the year.

It was unclear how nations like India, Pakistan and Turkey, which have balked at providing troops in the absence of a mandate, would respond to the secretary general`s notion of essentially embracing the existing occupying force as part of a United Nations-mandated multinational force.

In a related development, Mexico has angered the United States by calling for a vote Monday on its moribund resolution on the security of United Nations employees overseas, diplomats here said today.

Council diplomats said today that the resolution, which was proposed in May, was put aside after the United States threatened to veto it because of its invocation of the powers of the International Criminal Court. The Bush administration opposes the court, a standing war crimes tribunal, arguing that it might be used to harass American soldiers and government officials.

But vetoing a resolution to enhance the security of United Nations staff, less than a week after 23 people died in the Baghdad bombing, would be too embarrassing, the diplomats added. Even an abstention would be hard to explain. So the United States would be left with a choice of agreeing to language it has repeatedly rejected or finding some way to get Mexico to modify the draft.

But, diplomats said, almost all the rest of the Council members have indicated support for the measure. Bulgaria, a close ally of the United States during the Iraq debates, expects to be a co-sponsor, the Bulgarian envoy, Stefan Tafrov, said today. Even Pakistan, which also has reservations about the court, has indicated its support.

A State Department official said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell would call the Mexican foreign minister, Luis Ernesto Derbez, to push for modification of the draft resolution. "We want to make sure our concerns regarding the International Criminal Court were addressed before we could support such a resolution," the official said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 23, 2003
Fouling the Air

n defiance of Congress, the courts and the requirements of public health, the administration is on the verge of effectively repealing a key section of the Clean Air Act. According to a report yesterday in The Times, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to issue a final rule next week that would allow thousands of industrial sites, including hundreds of old coal-fired power plants, to make major upgrades without installing new pollution controls, as currently required by law. Eliot Spitzer, New York`s attorney general, has rightly vowed to sue the moment the rule becomes final. We are eager to hear Gov. Michael Leavitt of Utah, President Bush`s nominee to run the E.P.A., try to defend this decision when he comes up for confirmation in September — especially in light of his own clean-air director`s vigorous opposition to the change.

At issue is a provision called "new source review," part of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977. It requires companies to install modern pollution controls in new plants, and in old plants when they make significant modifications leading to increased emissions. The rule was aimed mainly at older coal-fired power plants, which were temporarily exempted from the act`s requirements in the expectation that they would install pollution controls later. New-source review has been in the administration`s sights ever since Vice President Dick Cheney all but ordered its abolition in his 2001 energy report. Industry and the administration have argued that the rule is impossibly cumbersome and that other Clean Air Act provisions can achieve the same results. These arguments are only partly true and largely beside the point, which is that until something better comes along, new-source review is an indispensable tool for cleaning the air.

What really bothers industry is that the rule requires significant capital outlays. Many companies have therefore tried to evade it, leading to lawsuits by, among others, Mr. Spitzer. Confronted with industry`s howls, the administration decided simply to scuttle the rule. This is hardly the first time that the White House has ordered the rollback of a law that discomfits its friends. But this is a particularly egregious example, and one that could do the environment great harm.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Clean Air Rules To Be Relaxed
EPA Will Ease Power Plants` Requirements

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 23, 2003; Page A01


The Bush administration has decided to allow thousands of the nation`s dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries to upgrade their facilities without installing costly anti-pollution equipment, as they now must do.

Acting Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Marianne L. Horinko said yesterday that she will sign the new regulation next week, and that the measure will take effect this fall. The decision marks an important, cost-saving victory for the utility industry, which has vigorously lobbied the administration for the past 21/2 years to relax the Clean Air Act enforcement program.

That program, known as New Source Review, generated dozens of state and federal lawsuits against 51 aging power plants during the Clinton administration, and forced some of them to agree to install hundreds of millions of dollars of pollution-control equipment.

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that FirstEnergy`s Ohio Edison Co. violated the law by upgrading seven coal-fired power plants without installing pollution equipment -- the first time a judge has ruled against a utility in those cases.

Industry advocates have complained that the current enforcement system is confusing, and has discouraged investment and expansion at a time of increased demand for expanded and reliable sources of power. Industry and EPA officials said yesterday the new rule would encourage plant improvements, provide greater regulatory certainty and reduce dangerous emissions.

"I think it will provide more fairness and predictability for facilities," Horinko said in an interview. "We`re hoping to provide a bright line of clarity on the national level that you can`t get from the scattershot approach" of the existing enforcement program.

But environmentalists, state officials and congressional Democrats who have long fought the rule change -- which was first reported yesterday in the New York Times -- warned that it would undermine the only effective tool to combat industrial polluters. They said it would allow antiquated industrial plants that should have been shut down years ago to go on polluting -- or even increase pollution -- without fear of prosecution.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a presidential candidate, charged that President Bush is giving major polluters a "get out of jail free" card, and that the new rule had "literally pulled the rug out from under every governor`s efforts to curb air pollution."

Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), another presidential challenger, called on Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt, Bush`s nominee to succeed Christine Todd Whitman as EPA administrator, to stand up against the new rule. "If Governor Leavitt cares about our air, about kids with asthma, and about seniors with lung problems, he will tell George Bush to scrap this rule before it goes into effect," Edwards said.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a leader in the effort to prosecute utility polluters, has said he would file a court challenge to the new rule as soon as it is published, probably shortly after Labor Day.

Under the rule change, industry could potentially save billions of dollars in pollution-control equipment costs while continuing to emit hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants.

The Clean Air Act requires new plants and utilities to install the best available pollution-control technology. However, plants and refineries built before 1970 are exempt from having to install modern "scrubbers" unless they undertake extensive and costly improvements that boost power production and pollution. Industry officials have long complained that the distinction between "routine maintenance" and more substantial improvements is too vague.

Under the new rule, older plants could avoid installing pollution controls when they replace equipment -- even if the upgrade increases pollution -- provided the cost does not exceed 20 percent of the cost of replacing a plant`s essential production equipment, and the new parts are the "functional equivalent" of the worn-out equipment.

For example, if a coal-fired power plant replaces a boiler at a cost that is less than 20 percent of the combined replacement cost of the boiler, turbine, generator and other equipment, the company would not have to install devices to control the additional pollution. However, the regulation would not relieve plants of continuing to meet air pollution targets set in 1990 for reducing levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and fine particles that pose public health problems.

A draft of the final rule was obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council and made available to The Washington Post. EPA officials cautioned that they are still putting final touches on the rule and would not confirm the 20 percent replacement threshold.

NRDC officials noted that if the new rule had been in effect during the Clinton administration, the Justice Department never could have brought charges against Ohio Edison and other major utilities.

"The Bush administration, using an arbitrary Enron-like accounting gimmick, is authorizing massive pollution increases to benefit Bush campaign contributors at the expense of public health," said John Walke, director of NRDC`s Clean Air Project.

Industry officials said they had not seen the details of the rule but predicted that the measure, as reported, could be a boon to energy producers that will promote new upgrades and investment.

"It`s extremely important and a good sign if there`s going to be a percentage allowance," said Scott Segal, executive director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a utility advocacy group.

Quin Shea, a senior official of the Edison Electric Institute, the main lobbying arm of the utility industry, said, "This on a whole is a favorable development for electrical reliability and routine maintenance."

"I can assure you there are a lot of companies that held back on what we consider routine maintenance out of fear of triggering New Source Review actions," he added.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
`Don`t Let Them Pull the U.N. Out of Iraq`
Envoy`s Final Words Related by Army Sergeant Who Tried to Free Him

By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 23, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Aug. 22 -- As soon as he could pick himself up off the floor of his room and remove the shard of glass embedded in his right leg, Army 1st Sgt. William von Zehle rushed toward the sound of the explosion.

The 52-year-old retired fire chief from Wilton, Conn., surveyed the rubble and carnage. As he pondered what to do, a man in a blue U.N. baseball cap approached. "We have two people trapped! Sergio and Gil are trapped!" the man said.

The names meant nothing to von Zehle, he recalled today. But he went to look.

Sergio was alive, conscious and in excruciating pain. For the next three hours, von Zehle worked to set him free. He had no rope, no bucket, no flashlight, none of the equipment that could be found on any firetruck in Wilton.

All the while, the two men talked. Von Zehle did not realize he was listening to the last words of the U.N. special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The following day, when he learned who the man was, von Zehle jotted down his words from memory.

In an interview today, three days after the truck bombing that killed Vieira de Mello and 22 others at Baghdad`s U.N. headquarters, von Zehle would not say what the two men talked about. He said it was "personal."

But at a ceremony at Baghdad`s airport, where the diplomat`s body was placed on an airplane to be returned to his native Brazil, one of Vieira de Mello`s colleagues gave voice to one of the utterances that von Zehle had recorded.

"Don`t let them pull the U.N. out of Iraq. Don`t let them fail this mission," Benon V. Sevan, the head of Iraq`s U.N.-administered oil-for-food program, quoted Vieira de Mello as saying to von Zehle.

Around 4:30 on Tuesday afternoon, von Zehle was in his room at the Civilian Military Operations Center, a squat building about 100 yards from the U.N. offices at the Canal Hotel. Serving with the Army`s 411th Civil Affairs Battalion and working with nongovernmental organizations in Iraq, von Zehle was about to leave for a meeting.

No one was allowed out of the building without protective gear, von Zehle said. So he put on his flak vest and his beige, cloth-covered helmet.

Then he felt the blast.

The next thing he knew, he was "lying across the room," The windows were blown out. Von Zehle stood up. He found a chunk of glass stuck in his right leg and cuts on his right arm. Otherwise, he was all right.

At first von Zehle, who had worked with Special Forces and taught classes on counterterrorism, said he thought a car bomb had hit the military operations building. He stepped outside and saw the U.N. building on fire.

Vieira de Mello was in a meeting when the bomb detonated directly below his third-floor office. He crashed through two floors and came to rest on the ground level, his legs pinned by rubble. He was trapped in a small, dark space.

Von Zehle headed for the U.N. headquarters. There were body parts everywhere, dead and wounded. "Quite a chaotic situation," he said.

When the man in the U.N. cap came for help, von Zehle followed him to the space where he said two people were trapped. He peered in and looked to the right. He could see Vieira de Mello, but he couldn`t reach him.

The main stairwell was intact. Von Zehle climbed up and walked to the corner of the third floor where the bomb hit. He was looking for the sliver of light that he knew would be cast by the gap he had peered through at ground level. He found it.

Head first, he moved into a hole in the wreckage and worked his way downward, climbing over three dead bodies on the way. He clenched a penlight in his teeth to light the way, but it slipped out and tumbled down.

He made it to the ground floor and spotted Vieira de Mello. "I asked his name," von Zehle said. It wasn`t a name von Zehle recognized, but the man acted as if he were in charge. "Is everybody all right? How is everybody?" the man asked.

Von Zehle started to work. He called for anything that could substitute for the equipment he was used to using. Someone passed a woman`s purse down from the third floor. Von Zehle filled it with rubble. Pieces of drapery served as a rope to haul it up, again and again.

Von Zehle and a paramedic from the New York City Fire Department worked to free Sergio and the man named Gil. The paramedic gave Sergio a morphine shot for the pain.

"Can you move your toes? Can you feel your fingers? What day of the week is it?" von Zehle asked Sergio. The diplomat asked about his family and friends. He wanted to know how bad things were.

About three hours after the blast, Sergio stopped talking. He was dead. About 15 minutes later, Gil was freed. He had cuts on his face and both legs were seriously injured, but he was free.

"I honestly thought we`d get them both out," von Zehle said. "If this had happened in almost any other place, we would have been able to get him out."

It was close to 8 p.m. Von Zehle was bone tired and went to bed. He awoke the next morning, heard the news and realized who Sergio was. He remembered everything they talked about and wrote it down.

In Wilton, where von Zehle served as fire chief before retiring in 2001, the town`s chief executive, Paul Hannah, described him as "the sort of guy who would get himself involved. . . . When he went to a fire, he was always in the front."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Three boys between ages 13 and 15 have been kept separate from adult detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
washingtonpost.com
3 Likely To Be Freed From Guantanamo
Rights Groups Urge Children`s Release Under International Law

By Tania Branigan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 23, 2003; Page A18


Three children whose detention at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison has outraged international human rights groups are likely to be freed soon, military officials indicated yesterday.

The boys, who are believed to be Afghan and between the ages of 13 and 15, were among hundreds of males captured in the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan. Their presence at the U.S. Navy prison was revealed in April, but they may have been in military custody for many months before that, according to human rights activists and military officials.

"We would obviously have preferred that a determination was made earlier, but I`m pleased by the news that they will finally be released," said Olara Otunnu, U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict. He had urged the United States to free the juveniles as soon as possible.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, spokeswoman for the joint military task force that runs the prison, said that officials there will recommend the release of the three boys, but she could not say when they will be freed. The final decision on whether to release, charge or continue to hold detainees is made by the Pentagon.

"The process may take a while, so there`s no foretelling when that may happen," Hart said.

The task force`s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, has told reporters for the Baltimore Sun and the British Broadcasting Corp. that the boys were brought to Guantanamo Bay because they were considered a threat and they had "high value" intelligence that U.S. authorities wanted.

The boys have been kept separately from about 650 adult detainees in the prison, in a low-security jail dubbed Camp Iguana. They have been allowed to watch videos and play games, and receive schooling, counseling and visits from social workers. But like the adults, they have been denied lawyers and visitors and have been interrogated.

"They were kidnapped and forced into terrorism," Hart said. "They`re young, and we did a lot of care in ensuring their education continued and that they got adequate exercise and psychiatric care.

"At the same time, we remembered that they were detainees and had information they could contribute to help us in the war on terrorism," she said.

Otunnu said that, under international law, children should not be detained as enemy combatants, even if they were with fighting groups.

"We regard them essentially as victims. They should be held separately [from adults], put in contact with their families and at the earliest possible opportunity given the opportunity for rehabilitation instead of punishment," he said.

Added Jo Becker, children`s rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch: "Detention at Guantanamo is not rehabilitation. It needs to take place in a community setting, and for most of these kids that means Afghanistan."

Becker said that the United States should now free 16- and 17-year-olds held at the camp, who are defined as children under international law. They include Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who is alleged to have killed a U.S. Special Forces medic in a house-to-house battle.

The U.S. government has listed six detainees as the first potential defendants in military trials known as "commissions," but has suspended proceedings against three of those men pending discussions with their governments in Britain and Australia.



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washingtonpost.com
Mr. Ashcroft`s Foot Soldiers




Saturday, August 23, 2003; Page A22


ATTORNEY GENERAL John D. Ashcroft knows how to mount a political campaign. Not only is the former senator barnstorming the country to defend the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, but the department has directed all 93 U.S. attorneys across the country to launch a similar effort in their regions. As reported by The Post`s Dan Eggen, a memo from the office that supervises federal prosecutors` offices details the "actions required" of each U.S. attorney: contacting members of Congress, holding community meetings and reporting back to the Justice Department on their efforts. All this is part of what the memorandum describes as "a 16-state, 18-city Patriot Act tour" -- an effort spurred in large part by a House vote last month against a key provision of the law. The memo helpfully includes the names and phone numbers of House members -- including an asterisk next to the names of those who voted for the amendment, which would cut off funding for so-called "sneak and peek" warrants that permit delayed notice to those whose homes or offices are searched.

The U.S. attorneys are political appointees, and there`s nothing wrong with having them explain a complicated -- and controversial -- new law to members of Congress who are getting questions about the Patriot Act from a jittery public. As we said in this space the other day, we think much of the rhetoric regarding the searches is overblown; after all, courts have authorized them in the past, judicial approval is required, the government has to demonstrate the need for secrecy and the subjects of such searches are eventually informed. Nor does the department seem to be making wholesale use of its new powers; it informed Congress recently that it has used the new provision 47 times since the Patriot Act was enacted. And although it`s rather unusual, there have been other occasions in which U.S. attorneys have been asked to educate lawmakers -- for example, when Congress considered subjecting federal prosecutors to state ethics rules.

Still, there`s something a little unsettling about this mass deployment. Perhaps it`s the wholesale and seemingly involuntary nature of the enterprise: The U.S. attorneys aren`t requested to contact lawmakers or hold public meetings but instructed to do so, and given a handy form on which to report on their sessions with members. (Department spokesman Barbara Comstock says the effort is not mandatory and was an effort to help U.S. attorneys who "feel besieged" with complaints about the Patriot Act.) Perhaps it`s the sense that the prosecutors, while political and a part of a Republican administration, also ought to be at some remove from partisan politics. After all, Republicans had a field day when Attorney General Janet Reno, as one of her first acts in office, dismissed all the incumbent, GOP-appointed U.S. attorneys. Then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) took to the Senate floor to denounce the "March Massacre" -- and laid out the Watergate comparison, in case anyone had missed it.

Perhaps it`s that the administration hasn`t been nearly so accommodating about the importance of educating lawmakers and the public when it involves folks on the other side. For example, during the recent debate over reauthorizing Head Start, the administration took pains to warn Head Start centers to comply with the provisions in federal law that prohibit them from engaging in grass-roots lobbying. Justice says the current campaign fully complies with the Anti-Lobbying Act, which generally bars government employees from lobbying for or against legislation. But this campaign, which comes complete with its own Web site, www.lifeandliberty.gov, uncomfortably blurs the line between law and politics.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
Heute 85 frische Cartoons

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030822__085toons.htm

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 11:02 p.m. EDT August 22, 2003

President Bush says "foreign elements" are infiltrating Iraq -- and may be aiding the recent rash of attacks there. He says Iraq is "turning out to be a continuing battle in the war on terrorism". But he vows: "We`re going to stay the course." He`s blaming both Saddam Hussein`s loyalists and what he called "al-Qaida-type fighters."
President Bush says the administration`s stepping up efforts to recruit peace-keepers from other nations. He says he`s confident more foreign troops will be joining the effort.
The Pentagon says two U.S. soldiers reported captured by an unknown Iraqi group were actually never missing. Lebanese T-V showed two American I-D cards with a statement from the group. The Pentagon says one soldier lost his I-D in Iraq but is in Texas now. The other soldier is also safe.
The flag-draped coffin of the U.N.`s top diplomat in Iraq has been loaded onto a Brazilian air force jet for a final trip out of Baghdad. Bagpipers played "Amazing Grace" while pallbearers hoisted the body of Sergio Vieira de Mello (SUR`-jee-oh vee-EHR`-uh duh MEHL`-oh). He was killed in the suicide truck bombing this week at U.N. headquarters in Iraq.
The American creating Iraq`s police force says Tuesday`s devastating U.N. bombing may have been an inside job. Bernard Kerik (KEHR`-ihk) says officials are questioning Iraqis who worked inside and outside the U.N. headquarters. Many guards had worked for Iraq`s secret service before the war. Investigators are checking to see if any guards failed to report for duty on the day of the bombing.
A senior Army general says supplying the force in Iraq has become a problem. General Paul Kern, chief of the Army Materiel Command, says Bradley infantry fighting vehicles have sustained so much wear and tear in Iraq that the Army is months short of replacements for their steel tracks. He says the Army has also had trouble supplying enough tires for Humvee utility vehicles and generators for electrical power.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (KOH`-fee AN`-nan) says the United Nations is unlikely to order more troops to Iraq unless the U.S. agrees to let the world body help make decisions. Annan says the Security Council might consider a "U.N.-mandated multinational force," but that would require more than "just burden-sharing."
U.N. chief Kofi Annan has notified Security Council members that he has appointed the U.N. humanitarian chief in Iraq, Ramiro Lopes da Silva of Portugal, as acting head of the U.N. mission. He replaces Sergio Vieira de Mello (SUR`-jee-oh vee-EHR`-uh duh MEHL`-oh) who died in the Baghdad U.N. complex bombing.
Turkey`s foreign minister says his nation could send peacekeepers to Iraq, but he stressed the soldiers would help with rebuilding efforts and "definitely will not be occupiers."
Two more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Officials say one soldier was killed in action Thursday near the Iraqi town of al Hilla, 34 miles south of Baghdad. Another soldier died in a fire at a shooting range. No word on what caused it.
Six U.S. soldiers were wounded Friday when their truck ran over a roadside bomb about 125 miles north of Baghdad. The victims were evacuated in a helicopter to an Army field hospital north of Tikrit, where one was in critical condition awaiting surgery. The others were in stable condition.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Summary

++++US++++UK++++Total++++Days

++++273++++51++++324+++++156
Latest Fatality Date: 8/23/2003

08/23/03 AP via The New York Times
Three British soldiers were killed and one was seriously wounded Saturday morning in the southern city of Basra, the British military reported.
08/22/03 CENTCOM
A 1st Armored Division soldier died, and six others were wounded in a small arms range fire. The fire broke out at a range in Baghdad’s Karadah district at 4:30 p.m. on August 21
08/22/03 CENTCOM
U.S. service member on duty with the I Marine Expeditionary Force died after being shot on Aug 21 in Al Hillah by an unidentified gunman.
08/21/03 iafrica.com
SPANISH NAVAL CAPTAIN DIES WEDNESDAY OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN UN COMPOUND BOMBING
08/21/03 CENTCOM
ONE US SOLDIER KILLED, TWO WOUNDED IN IED ATTACK IN BAGHDAD
08/21/03 CENTCOM
SERVICE MEMBER DIES AS A RESULT OF AFGHAN HOSTILE FIRE INCIDENT
08/20/03 Reuters
Four US soldiers wounded in Iraq bomb attack
08/20/03 CENTCOM
One 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed and another injured when they received small arms fire and struck another vehicle.
08/20/03 CENTCOM
One U.S. citizen working as a contracted interpreter was killed and two U.S. soldiers were wounded in a small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attack in Tikrit on Aug. 20.

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War foes were right
By DON WILLIAMS, [e-mail]
August 22, 2003

The French were right. The liberals were right. The peaceniks were right. True conservatives were right.

Veterans opposed to the war - I hear from more of them than you might imagine - were also right. They said this war was based on lies, and it was. They said this war, like most wars, would lead to more chaos and killing, and it has.

Now some in the Bush administration are telling the world that the car bombing of United Nations headquarters in Iraq is evidence that our policy is right.

How illogical can you be? Insurgents blow up oil pipelines and water mains; American soldiers get killed or maimed almost daily. Demonstrations are ongoing. And the biggest blow from the Iraqi resistance so far - destruction of U.N. headquarters in Iraq - is presented by the Bush team as evidence that our policy is correct because - because - because this proves terrorists are really, really bad.

Duh. We all know terrorists are really, really bad. That`s why it`s best not to give them more chaos in which to thrive. That`s why it`s best not to stir up new nests unnecessarily as we did by invading Iraq.

The Soviets couldn`t win in Afghanistan, and I`ll be surprised if, in five years or seven, American-style democracy has taken hold in Iraq. Like Afghanistan under the Russians, Iraq has become the rallying point for a growing jihad.

It all makes for mesmerizing news, and I`ve spent lots of time tuned to the daily media looking for evidence to support my gut feeling that this war, like most wars, was based on lies and misconceptions from the start. You don`t have to look very hard these days. It`s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Every public argument for making war on Iraq has broken down. Let`s start with the biggest:

Weapons of mass destruction: None has been found. I`m sure that, at some point, evidence will mysteriously appear to show Iraq had a weapons program, but we already knew that, and to prove they had a program is a far cry from finding the tons of anthrax and chemical bombs, the armed missiles and mobile labs, the remote drones and nuclear components the Bush team scared us with almost daily in its drive to war.

Speaking of nukes, Bush`s allegations were based almost solely on documents he apparently knew were forged. What could be more damning? Bottom line, if WMDs existed, they`re now in the hands of terrorists or unfriendly governments or they`re up for grabs in the Iraqi desert some place. Either way, it`s a bad result.

The link to al-Qaida: The myth that Iraq had significant ties to al-Qaida was based on a hospital visit to Iraq by one man and another meeting in a third country that likely never took place. No evidence has surfaced for an Iraqi-al-Qaida link. Ironically, Bush`s misguided war now has forged just such a link. Osama bin Laden recently called on all Muslims to oppose our occupation of Iraq, and they appear to be responding.
Iraq would welcome us as liberators: It happened only in a few places, and some of those appeared stage-managed. Now Iraqis are criticizing and demonstrating and shooting Americans. We`ve become occupiers. In the process we`ve killed, maimed, destroyed the Iraqi infrastructure and caused the loss of priceless cultural artifacts from the dawn of civilization. Some of our actions can be justified, but being justified and being wise are different things.
We`d be out in 60 days, leaving behind a democracy that would take root, then blossom across the Middle East: Well, if majority rule flowers in Iraq, Shiites will run the place, as they do in Iran. That`s who the majority is.
Saddam Hussein is an evil man who must be destroyed. As this is written, he`s still at large. All thinking people hope he`s brought in, preferably alive, so he can shed more light on those who helped him in his rise to power, including some now serving Bush.
Now, as I say, the car-bombing of U.N. headquarters in Iraq is being used as proof we`re in the right. Two points: One, like several thousand others, those U.N. workers would be alive today except for the will to empire by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and a few others who are pulling the strings.
Two. If, in Country X, the power is out, the water`s out, the oil pipeline is burning, unemployment tops 60 percent, murder and rape are daily occurrences, the treasury is looted, the museums are looted, official history is a tool for propaganda, and U.N. headquarters are bombed, then the ruler of Country X should be held accountable, right?

Well, Iraq is Country X. Bush is its ruler.

Don Williams is the founding editor of New Millennium Writings. You may write to him at PO Box 2463, Knoxville, TN., 37901, e-mail him at [e-mail] or phone him at 428-0389.

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American soldiers and rescue workers searched for casualties on Aug. 19, in the rubble of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.
August 22, 2003
DISPATCHES
In the Cross Hairs
By MICHAEL R. GORDON


There were several warning signs that the United Nations could soon be in the cross hairs of the forces battling the American-led coalition in Iraq. In early hours of August 10, a small band of unknown assailants in a white and orange taxi zoomed past a United Nations compound in the northern Iraq city of Mosul and shot at the Iraqi security guards. A short time later a rocket-propelled grenade flew over a second U.N. site in the city. A patrol from the Second Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division searched the building across the street from that U.N. facility but found no sign of the attackers.

I learned about these incidents during a recent visit with the American forces in Mosul. In a country in which ambushes, drive-by shootings and explosions from improvised mines are a daily occurrence these attacks attracted little attention - especially since no injuries were reported.

But coupled with the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad earlier this month they formed a ominous pattern, in my view. In a guerrilla campaign in which a car bomb is another instrument of war, a military ambulance has been attacked, surface-to-air missiles have been fired at aircraft flying in and out of the Baghdad airport and Iraqis who have been cooperating with American forces have been killed, nothing is off-limits.

The United Nations Baghdad compound was the ultimate soft target. It was highly symbolic and that alone made it vulnerable. Also, its officials eschewed tight military security.

The attack which ripped apart the U.N. building sent a very unsettling message at a very delicate moment. It occurred as the Bush administration was trying to persuade more nations to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq, and as American military commanders were trying to encourage non-governmental organizations to share the nation-building burden by undertaking more projects in Iraq.

Consider the new multinational division that is now assembling in southwestern Iraq to replace the United States Marines, who are scheduled to leave in early September. The division is led by the Poles and will also have brigades that are commanded by the Ukrainians and the Spanish. There are an assortment of other nations contributing troops to take the place of the Marines including Bulgaria, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Thailand.

The attack on the United Nations compound and the experience of the new foreign troops may well determine whether additional nations yield to the Bush administration’s entreaties to send forces to Iraq. The hope has been that foreign forces that had no role in the invasion would be less of a target for the insurgents than the United States military and that the aread they would occupy would remain relatively peaceful. But now that hopeful scenario is in doubt because of the bombing of the U.N. compound.

A recent attack at Al Hillah, near Camp Babylon, where the Marine headquarters is located does not help either. Al Hillah will soon be under the jurisdiction of the Polish-led division. The last time a marine was killed by enemy action in Iraq was April 12, according to a Marine Corps spokesman. But on Thursday a gunman approached an American service member who was in a sport utility vehicle in the city, shot him and ran away. (The United States Central Command has not said whether the person, who died as a result of the attack, was a Marine or the member of another service that was attached to the Marine command)

Since the bombing of the United Nations headquarters on Tuesday there has been the usual finger-pointing. U.N. officials have been quick to emphasize that the American-led coalition has the ultimate responsibility for security in Baghdad. American officials have asserted that the United Nations did not want the overbearing force protection that often comes with the United States military.

Investigators will eventually determine how the United Nations headquarters became dangerously exposed. For starters, they can examine the design of an outer wall that ran too close to the U.N.’s office to keep car bombs out of range. In contrast, the former palace housing the Coalition Provisional Authority run by L. Paul Bremer III has turned into a virtual fortress. Visitors are frisked and their vehicles are inspected before they can get within sight of the Republican Palace headquarters, a forbidding exercise in force protection that the United Nations seemed to think would interfere with its activities in Iraq.

My own sense is that this was probably a collective failure. The United Nations was not sufficiently attuned to the potential dangers it faced because it wrongly assumed that its record of humanitarian assistance in Iraq and arms-length relationship with the American occupiers would make it less of a target. Also, the over-stretched American force was relieved not to have yet another site to defend that its commanders concentrated on other threats.

But this was a loss for each. The Bush administration, which failed to win an explicit Security Council endorsement of its military intervention, was eager for U.N. special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello to come to Iraq, albeit in a minor supporting role. His death and that of others in the attack was a big setback for American policy and its claims to have made headway in stabilizing Iraq.

The Bush administration and the United Nations have each suffered a serious blow. Neither can afford to turn away from Iraq without a serious loss of credibility. How well they can work together in Iraq is an open question.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 22, 2003

The Marquis of Mendacity
A George Will Follies Review
By JOHN CHUCKMAN

I used to read George Will occasionally just to see how strange words bent to political purpose could become. No political commentator in America is better able to use large words to say something at times indescribably odd. I don`t ask you to take this from me on faith. I offer examples, although none is recent since my tolerance for this sort of stuff has worn thin.

By outward appearance, George is the eternal American schoolboy. I imagine George`s conception of himself and the career he would follow may have been fixed when, as a reticent, dour twelve-year old with cowlick and glasses, he achieved an early social success blurting out a big word he had read, startling his teacher and breaking up his class. He has been repeating the same trick for decades to the applause of intense, pimply-faced boys in starched white shirts with dog-eared copies of Ayn Rand tucked under their arms.

America`s plutocrat-Junkers do have courtiers serving them just as the great princes of antiquity had. However, the pop-culture tastes of these modern great eminences do not employ the likes of Walter Raleigh or Francis Bacon. Instead we have Rush Limbaugh as one of the court jesters, still doing frat-boy jokes about physical differences between men and women forty years after college, and we have George as one of the sages, who appears from all the sage-like figures of history and literature to have selected Polonius as his model for style.

A few years ago, George nearly choked over plans to move a statue of some women to the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. He was upset about an expense, as he gracefully put it, to "improve the representation of X chromosomes." The statue is of suffragists. George couldn`t resist passing along a demeaning nickname, "The Ladies in the Bathtub," he picked up somewhere, perhaps at one of Trent Lott`s good-ol`-boy get-togethers down on his plantation.

George tried to make the nickname an issue of artistic merit. Artistic merit? The sculpture of the Capitol Rotunda is as uninspired a collection of stolid, state-commissioned hulks as ever graced a giant marble room. Aesthetics have never played a role.

George said he`d "stipulate" the women were great Americans--an interesting choice of words, "stipulate," the arid language of lawyers allowing one to proceed in court or settle a contract without further discussion of some (usually minor) point. He then observed "the supply of alleged greatness long ago exceeded the supply of space for statues in the Rotunda."

Well, clearly, choices do have to be made. And could it be news to anyone, apart from survivalists, huddled in abandoned missile silos, savoring George by candlelight as they bolt down freeze-dried snacks, that politics play a role in every choice in Washington? My God, members of the U.S. Congress, overwhelmingly male, actually have the flag that flies over the Capitol changed about every thirty seconds to provide a steady supply of authentic relics for interested, influential constituents, almost the way tens of thousands of true splinters of the Cross were fashioned as princely gifts in the Middle Ages. American presidents sign laws with fists full of pens, one for each loop of the signature and as gift for each key supporter. Politics just doesn`t get more ridiculous anywhere.

What`s annoying about a statue to the movement that gave (slightly more than) half the nation`s people the right to vote? The importance of what it symbolizes equals any democratic advance in the nation`s history. Why should a symbol for this achievement be the target of scorn?

The Rotunda collection already had highly ambiguous symbols that never upset George. Garfield was an undistinguished Civil War general and an undistinguished politician, ennobled only by a frustrated office-seeker assassinating him. Grant, despite his importance in the Civil War, was one of the most dangerously incompetent presidents before Bush. Jackson was a violent backwoods madman and unrepentant slave-holder, colorful and interesting at a safe distance, but America would have been a far better place without most of his presidential accomplishments. Hamilton, a truly great figure in American history, was nevertheless a man who had absolutely no faith in democracy.

It would be unfair to draw conclusions about George`s prejudice only from his opposition to the statue, but in writing about it, he managed, over and over, to use words of scorn and derision.

How do you explain a squib that the possible removal of a reproduction of Magna Carta in favor of the statue "might displease a woman" (Queen Elizabeth II, whose gift it was)? Wouldn`t you say it might displease the British people whose representative the Queen is? What explains his calling the statue one "less to past heroines than to present fixations"? Why his belittling description of the campaign for the statue as "entitlement mentality"?

George attacks one national symbol but is especially protective of others. He is especially protective of the reputation of the Sage of Monticello, patron saint to America`s militia and survivalist crowd. Thomas Jefferson, much to the surprise of people who know him only as a giant, worthy head on Mount Rushmore, provided the prototype for two centuries of American shadow-fascism: use fine words about freedom in your correspondence while living off the sweat of a couple of hundred slaves; a man who never hesitated to stretch presidential authority to its very limits, always seeking to extend American empire. Jefferson was a secretive, suspicious, and vindictive man. He was not a friend to the spirit of Enlightenment.

Conor Cruise O`Brien, Irish scholar, published a biographical study called "The Long Affair," in 1996, about Thomas Jefferson and his peculiar admiration for the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. Well, the Sage for Archer Daniels Midland went into a word-strewn fit over the book.

Perhaps, the single thing about the book that most upset George was O`Brien`s comparison of a statement of Jefferson`s to something Pol Pot might have said. Jefferson wrote in 1793, at the height of the Terror, "...but rather than it [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is." George wrote off Jefferson`s brutal statement as "epistolary extravagance," and attacked O`Brien for using slim evidence for an extreme conclusion about an American "hero."

George went so far as favorably to compare the work of Ken Burns with that of O`Brien, calling Burns "an irrigator of our capacity for political admiration," as compared to one who "panders" to "leave our national memory parched." Whew! See what I mean about words?

I mean no disparagement of Ken Burns, but he produces the television equivalent of coffee-table books. O`Brien is a scholar, the author of many serious books. The very comparison, even without the odd language, tells us something about George.

But language, too, is important. The irony is that George`s own words, "irrigator of our capacity for political admiration," sound frighteningly like what we`d expect to hear from the Ministry of Culture in some ghastly place (dare I write it?) such as Pol Pot`s Cambodia.

But George should have known better. This letter of Jefferson`s is utterly characteristic of views he expressed many different ways. Jefferson quite blithely wrote that America`s Constitution would not be adequate to defend what he called liberty, that there would have to be a new revolution every 15 or 20 years, and that the tree of liberty needed to be nourished regularly with a fresh supply of patriot blood.

Jefferson`s well-known sentimental view of the merits of sturdy yeomen farmers as citizens of a republic and his intense dislike for industry and urbanization bear an uncanny resemblance to Pol Pot`s beliefs. Throwing people out of cities to become honorable peasants back on the land, even those who never saw a farm, was precisely how Pol Pot managed to kill at least a million people in Cambodia.

Jefferson is not now revered for his understanding of the economics of his day. He truly had none, a fact which enabled the brilliant Alexander Hamilton to best him at every turn. However this is not a mistake Jefferson`s intellectual heirs make, since money and power no longer come from plantations and slaves. They understand money and pursue the principles of economics narrowly often to the exclusion of other important goals in society. Jefferson is only of value to them because of the powerfully-expressed words he left behind belittling the importance of government, the only possible counterbalancing force to the excesses that always arise from great economic growth.

What is it about many of those on the right relishing the deaths of others in the name of ideology? You see, much like the "chickenhawks" now running Washington, sending others off to die, Jefferson never lifted a musket during the Revolution. While serving as governor of Virginia, he set a pathetic example of supporting the war`s desperate material needs. He also gave us a comic-opera episode of dropping everything and running feverishly away from approaching British troops in Virginia (there was an official inquiry over the episode). Jefferson turned down his first diplomatic appointment to Europe by the new government out of fear of being captured by British warships, a fear that influenced neither Benjamin Franklin nor John Adams.

But real heroes aren`t always, or even usually, soldiers. Jefferson, despite a long and successful career and a legacy of fine words (expressing thoughts largely cribbed from European writers), cannot be credited with any significant personal sacrifice over matters of principle during his life. He wouldn`t give up luxury despite his words about slavery. He never risked a serious clash with the Virginia Establishment over slave laws during his rise in state politics. And in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he lamely and at length blamed the king of England for the slave trade, yet, when he wrote the words, it was actually in his interest to slow the trade and protect the value of his existing human holdings.

Unlike Mr. Lincoln later, who had none of his advantages of education and good social contacts, Jefferson did not do well as a lawyer. He never earned enough to pay his own way, his thirst for luxury far outstripping even the capacity of his many high government positions and large number of slaves to generate wealth. Again, unlike Mr. Lincoln, Jefferson was not especially conscientious about owing people money, and he frequently continued buying luxuries like silver buckles and fine carriages while he still owed substantial sums.

Jefferson spent most of his productive years in government service, yet he never stopped railing against the evils of government. There`s more than a passing resemblance here to the empty slogans of government-service lifers like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich who enjoy their government pensions and benefits even as they still complain about government. Jefferson`s most famous quote praises the least possible government, yet, as President, he brought a virtual reign of terror to New England with his attempts to enforce an embargo against England (the "Anglomen" as this very prejudiced man typically called the English).

Jefferson, besides having some truly ridiculous beliefs, like those about the evils of central banks or the health efficacy of soaking your feet in ice water every morning, definitely had a very dark side. Any of his political opponents would readily have testified to this. Jefferson was the American Machiavelli.

It was this side of him that put Philip Freneau on the federal payroll in order to subsidize the man`s libelous newspaper attacks on Washington`s government--this while Jefferson served in that very government. At another point, Jefferson hired James Callender to dig up and write filth about political opponents, an effort which backfired when Callender turned on Jefferson for not fulfilling promises. Callender famously dug out and publicized the story about Sally Hemings, Jefferson`s slave-mistress, his late wife`s illegitimate half-sister (slavery made for some amazing family relationships), a story we now know almost certainly to be true (by the way, dates point to Sally`s beginning to serve Jefferson in this capacity at 13 or 14 years old). It was this dark side of Jefferson that resulted in a ruthless, years-long vendetta against Aaron Burr for the sin of appearing to challenge Jefferson`s election to the presidency.

George charged O`Brien with wronging Jefferson on his racial views by quoting from Jefferson`s youth and ignoring a different statement years later. But history really doesn`t support George. Jefferson was challenged by others over the years on this issue, and, rather than argue a point on which he knew he was vulnerable, he tended to keep quiet, but there is no good evidence he ever changed his views, despite bits of writing, twinges of his own conscience undoubtedly, that sound sympathetic about how blacks might have arrived at their then piteous state.

Jefferson expressed himself in embarrassingly clear terms about his belief in black inferiority. And it is important to note that in doing so, he violated one of his basic principles of remaining skeptical and not accepting what was not proved, so this, clearly, was something he believed deeply. There is also reliable evidence that on one occasion he was observed by a visitor beating a slave, quite contradicting Jefferson`s public-relations pretensions to saintly paternalism.

When Napoleon sent an army attempting to subdue the slaves who had revolted and formed a republic on what is now Haiti, President Jefferson gave his full consent and support to the bloody (and unsuccessful) effort.

Hero? I have no idea how George defines the word, but by any meaningful standard, Jefferson utterly fails.

In another flight of fancy some years ago, George equated honest efforts to limit campaign contributions to attacks on the First Amendment, about as silly an idea as claiming the Second (well-ordered-militia) Amendment defends the right of every household to own tanks and missile-launchers.

America restricts many forms of commercial expression deemed destructive or dangerous. Liquor advertising on television, certain forms of cigarette advertising, pornography, and racist propaganda are among these. Are these attacks on the First Amendment? Well, if they are, concerns for the Amendment are trumped by concerns for protecting children from noxious substances.

I`m not sure I can think of a more noxious thing than the complete twisting and distorting of democracy by money in Washington. Restrictions on things like liquor advertising testify that people recognize the suggestive, manipulative nature of advertising, yet America`s national elections have pretty well been reduced to meaningless advertising free-for-alls between two vast pools of money.

No one objects to informative discussions of liquor, cigarettes, or racism on television, yet any thoughtful person knows that advertising for the same products or ideas is something else altogether. Do the most fundamental issues of a nation deserve the debased treatment they receive in election advertising campaigns? The Lincoln-Douglas Debates cost little but supplied voters with real information, something that cannot be said for any money-drenched campaign of the 20th Century.

When a particular aspect of free speech, as the right to give and spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, undermines democracy itself, it is not just one Amendment at stake, it is the whole evolution and meaning of the American Constitutional system.

Further, large amounts of campaign money, in economic terms, represent barriers to entry against newcomers, outside the two money-laden, quasi-monopoly parties. Try marketing a new product against a firm with the market position of a Microsoft or a Coke without tens of millions to spend, no matter how good your product, and you`ll see what I mean by barriers to entry. This is something many find instinctively repellent and unfair in their most ordinary, everyday shopping and business dealings. How much more so where it directly affects the entry of candidates and new ideas into government?

Apart from the sheer ugliness of watching members of Congress grovel for money, we have many examples of money`s pernicious influence on elections. The CIA has spent God knows how many millions of dollars influencing elections in other countries, yet observe America`s great touchiness a few years back over even a hint that China may have played the same trick. This only shows how well Americans understand what money does to politics, yet whenever someone tries to do something to improve a rotten situation, George and other courtiers switch on their word processors and start felling trees.

My last citation from George concerns his regret over the coarseness and lack of civility in America, what George called "Dennis Rodman`s America," or in another place, "a coarse and slatternly society" jeopardizing "all respect...."

Unfortunately, George`s historical errors gave him a false basis for measuring moral decline. He wrote that the youthful George Washington was required to read "110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior." The fact is the highly ambitious Washington chose the small book and forced himself to copy out the rules in longhand so that he might become more acceptable for advancement in British colonial society.

Young Washington was heavily influenced by associating with families from the cream of British colonial society, people not at all characteristic of average colonial Americans. Most of America then was a rude, rough place. Newspapers regularly libeled and abused with a ferocity we can scarcely imagine today. Drunkenness and brawling were common. Fights often included such grotesque practices as gouging out eyes. And, of course, the filthy brutality of slavery was normal, on exhibit in many streets.

It is simply wrong to say that American behavior has gone downhill from a golden age. Europeans in the 19th century noted with horror the way Americans spit tobacco juice everywhere--even on the floors and carpets of the most elegant hotels. Visitors to the White House used to clomp around in muddy boots, pawing and even walking on furnishings, cutting souvenir swatches from the drapes and carpets and grabbing anything small enough to stuff under a coat--often leaving the place a shambles after a large public gathering.

At times there have been rules or practices that might now be cited as exemplifying a lost age of gentility, but citing these in isolation misrepresents the general tone of the past. While George cited the clean language used in movies under the Production Code in the 1940s, he neglected to mention that, while Hollywood worried about sexual innuendo in scripts, in any American city a policeman might freely and openly address a black citizen as "niggah." And while Hollywood fussed over suggestive words in "Casablanca," it was still possible in some parts of the country to lynch a black man and suffer no penalty.

But George is more concerned about sexual coarseness than violence. This happens to be a characteristic America`s Puritans. It has also been characteristic of tyrant-temperaments. Hitler did not permit off-color or suggestive stories told in his presence. Lincoln, on the other hand loved a good off-color joke.

Now, again consider George`s words about "a coarse and slatternly society" jeopardizing "all respect...." Slattern? Just what century does he think it is?

In fact, it is easily observed that people who use foul language are expressing anger and frustration, and there are lots of angry people in America: the pressures of the society do that to you. Trying to get at the cause of the anger would raise a discussion of civility to something worthwhile, but George seemed simply to want to "tut tut!" a bit like some marquis in the late 18th Century worrying about the niceties just before the deluge.

http://www.counterpunch.org/chuckman08222003.html

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Action Figures For Imbeciles
It`s the G.W. Bush "aviator" doll, just in time to degrade every notion of heroism, ever
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, August 22, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fgate%2Farc…



Country`s in shambles and economy`s gutted and schools are shot and Iraq`s a violent bloody mess and joblessness is rampant and it`s a proud time indeed to be an American, and hence you might be asking yourself, what, pray what, can I give the hardcore lockstep pseudo-Christian homophobic Republican on my gift list?

What can you give the one who just loves bogus wars and BushCo`s lies and thinks SUVs are way bitchin` and believes every bile-filled opinion crammed down their throats via Fox News and Hannity/Coulter/Limbaugh et al., hates them damnable gays and libs and environmentalists and has one hand over his heart while the other gropes the cat?

If you shouted out "a pile of Schwarzenegger DVDs!" or "Lifetime NRA/KKK membership!" or "The Complete Catholic Church Total Absolution/Multimillion Dollar Settlement/Home Enema Kit!" you`re only about half right.

Because now we have a new doll, this neat little prefab landfill thing, the George W. Bush "Elite Force Aviator" action figure, to stand proudly alongside your "We Will Rock You" Animated Soldier and your civilian-maulin` "Forward Command Post" toy set from JCPenney! That`s right! Collect the whole set!

It is so damn cute. It is so damn cute you almost have to shudder with nausea and ennui and soul-cringing pain and then rush right out and buy a bottle of wine and a Pyrex sex toy and a ticket to Burning Man, just to cleanse.

It`s true. It`s real. The Bush action figure is a genuine serious item and not, as you would fully expect, a joke, not a parody, not necessarily meant to be a gag gift you would give to your favorite rabid pro-military war aficionado to make them cheer and stroke the flag and sigh wistfully for a time when men were men and Uzis were legal.

There he is, all faux manly and squinty and artificially buffed up, his gull-wing ears toned down and the thin-lipped brow-furrowed monkey confusion so common to his scrunched little face apparently erased by expert doll craftsmen and/or a drunken 50-cents-an-hour sweatshop employee somewhere in China.

There he is, all fierce and makeshift macho and ready to be flown a handful of miles offshore to land on a carefully positioned photo-op aircraft carrier and make an entirely staged entirely bogus internationally embarrassing speech announcing the end of the Iraq war, hee hee suckers whoops sorry about all the dead U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, every day, ever since.

And sure you can try to say "George W. Bush action figure" without choking on your vodka/Valium martini, but it is worth noting that it is, apparently, and tragically, not common knowledge that Shrub avoided almost all military service through his daddy`s connections, skipped right by the Vietnam draft by enlisting in the National Guard and then went AWOL from that service for well over a year, and that military service is to a Bush WASP-mafia member what oral sex is to a Hilton sister: that is, degrading dirty scum work full of icky germs and heavy lifting and scary phallic exploding thingies best left to the middle classes and the plebes.

Oh my God but we love fake heroism. Oh my God but we are so easily duped by the macho and the puffed up and the synthetic and the heavily shellacked.

Here is Arnie. The big dumb Terminator. Kindergarten cop last action hero Conan the barbarian. A man with zero political experience and negligible actual acting experience and the intellectual and verbal acumen of something you find on the bottom of your shoe at a Shania Twain concert.

And here is California (or is it just the gullible media?), suddenly all agog and atwitter over the possibility that we will beat out Minnesota on disastrous thick-necked aging quasi-celeb governors who turn their respective state into an international laughingstock, a fiscal and socioeconomic disaster, more of a joke than it already is. (P.S.: Go, Arianna.)

Have we really forgotten what a hero is? Have we have been so desperately numbed into thinking it`s some overpampered spoon-fed monosyllabic C-grade Texas daddy`s boy who thinks the world is full of "evildoers" and "sinners" and "furriners" and a desperately lonely Condi Rice?

Have we been so endlessly hammered with the celluloid lie that a hero is some sort of scarred grunting lug nut with a machine gun and a bandanna and big veiny muscles and copious fake sweat who blows away the corrupt sheriff or the evil rogue robot in bloody ultraviolent glory and gives us a big thumbs-up at the end before he self-destructs to save the world?

Maybe we want to believe the miserable U.S. soldiers in Iraq are heroes, are serving some sort higher and more noble good, are protecting us from some sort of impending looming evil that was never really there in the first place, when deep down we all have that sinking feeling they`re really just disposable henchmen for BushCo`s endlessly gluttonous petrochemical and political stratagems.

Maybe we`ve forgotten that a hero is, of course, someone who goes deep into the underworld and has terrifically spiritual and self-revealing adventures full of danger and mystery and hot moist goddesses who offer him magic and mysteriously juicy fruit.

All coupled with the ever-present threat of death and/or immortality, endless failures and setbacks and strange gifts, and yet he re-emerges above ground stronger, more aware, attuned, enlightened and potent. Does anyone really believe that`s appropriate to Shrub? To Arnie? Are you now gagging? Exactly.

The Web site claims demand for the Bush "flyboy" action figure is incredibly high. Undoubtedly due in part to how the link to the hilarious little product has been making the rounds on the Net, as tens of thousands of nauseated people send it to one another, as a joke, as a punch line, saying oh my God have you seen this? What the hell is the world coming to? What the hell is wrong with us? Who, pray who, is buying this ridiculous thing? And who, pray who, actually believes Bush is a hero?

Who will save the children from karmically poisonous toys? Who will save California from awful thick-necked actors who don`t know a fiscal policy from a dumbbell? What sort of hero will rise up and resist this degrading onslaught, fight back the demons of ignorance and misinformation and BushCo lies and "I`ll be back" moronism? Who, in short, will be the hero to conquer all this bogus heroism?

The answer is easy. The answer is right there, in front of you, in you. Don your intellectual armor, grab your divine sword, get ready to go deep, lose a dogmatic limb, gain astounding insights, win the accolades of the universe, endure the sneers of the uptight and the deluded and the asexual and the flag waving and the ultraconservative and the Ashcroftian and the terminally pissed off.

Because the hero you most need? It`s you. Simple, really.
Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

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August 21, 2003
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2003/34/we_529_04a…
Haunted by Iraq

Quote of the day from our revisionist-historian-in-chief: "In an interview with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service given on Thursday and released by the White House yesterday, Bush interrupted the questioner when asked about his announcement on May 1 of, as the journalist put it, `the end of combat operations.`
"`Actually, major military operations,` Bush replied. `Because we still have combat operations going on.` Bush added: `It`s a different kind of combat mission, but, nevertheless, it`s combat, just ask the kids that are over there killing and being shot at.`"


-- From a piece by Dana Milbank and Bradley Graham of The Washington Post, where someone with a sense of humor or is it irony, headlined the piece "Bush Revises Views On `Combat` in Iraq."

As of this week, that`s one of the understatements of the decade. The forgotten war in Afghanistan has ratcheted up a notch, the hotel in which the UN mission to Iraq was housed just collapsed under what may have been a suicide truck bombing with the death of up to twenty people including UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, and of course another suicide bombing in Jerusalem has just brought the peace process in Israel, such as it was (and it wasn`t much), to a screeching halt. Welcome to the war on terror.
I thought I might start today with an email I received recently from a "unilateral" photojournalist (that is, one not "embedded" with American troops) who spent several months in Iraq and Kuwait both during and after the recent war. He wanted me to know that Vietnam Vet James Larocca, whose Newsday op-ed, "Have We Forgotten Anger in the Eyes" was quoted in a previous dispatch, "has it right." The photojournalist says:

"I saw these tactics first hand and having a great deal of experience in law-enforcement coverage first hand, I stood in disbelief as we blundered and bullied away the hearts and minds of the common Iraqi people. The culture gap is being widened to an abyss, as wide as the eyes of the children dragged out of bed in the night. Iraqis who once viewed our soldiers as liberators now see us as no different than Saddam`s enforcers, holding `suspects` at gunpoint with bags over their heads for all to see. In one published case U.S. soldiers took the family of a sought-after Iraqi officer hostage, leaving a note behind stating if he wanted to see them again, he should surrender.
I will always be haunted by the faces of war, but I will also be haunted by the faces of the `Iraqi peace.` I know that not all Iraqis see us this way and I still hold out hope that things will turn around. But I do not see anything changing our tactics at all.

I must also say that I support our soldiers, as I got to know many of them. They as a whole are stuck doing the dirty work as the service demands. I can tell you that many of them are wondering out loud what we have done, and whether it`s right. I could go on and on about the lack of planning and common sense associated with the occupation of Iraq (or the war itself)."

Tactics:
For those following the news from Iraq, even without today`s bombing of the UN mission, the chaos seems to be spreading. More American dead and wounded daily; a British soldier killed and two wounded by a bomb in Basra; the first Danish soldier killed; the fifth journalist killed by American troops, a Palestinian Reuters cameraman shot by soldiers who claimed they mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher (more likely they mistook him for an Iraqi and are, by now, thoroughly edgy and trigger happy); oil pipelines are in flames; a major water pipeline evidently bombed -- new forms of sabotage spreading weekly -- electricity still failing; phones not yet working; unemployment in the 60% - 70% range; crimes like kidnapping and carjacking seemingly soaring; the police chief of Mosul shot; the main prison the Americans are using in Baghdad mortared by unknown parties, with many prisoners dead and wounded; new self-proclaimed resistance groups with names like the Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement releasing tapes to Al-Jazeera and other Arab TV outfits almost daily ("This resistance is not a reaction to the American provocations against the Iraqi people or to the shortage of services ... but to kick out the occupiers as a matter of principle."); frustrated Shiites venting in Baghdad`s slums; and, as The Washington Post`s Anthony Shadid reports, the first signs of cooperation among Sunni and Shia clerics opposed to the occupation, something which has sent shudders of alarm through American officialdom. And of course, there are still those Iraqis shot at checkpoints or humiliated in the streets or at home, arrested and neither released nor charged. There are still those ubiquitous bags over Iraqi heads.

As Justin Huggler, the Independent`s man in Baghdad puts it in a summary article on recent developments:

"The American-led occupation is going badly wrong before our eyes. Already US soldiers are dying daily in attacks and there is anarchy on the streets. As of yesterday, the Americans appeared to be facing an all-out assault on another front - on their efforts to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq.
This is the occupation that was supposed to pay for itself. All the Americans had to do was to get Iraq`s vast oil reserves flowing out of the country and that would finance the occupation. The sabotage of the [northern oil] pipeline, which will take 10 days to repair, means at least $70m (£43m) in lost revenue.

The cost of the occupation, being almost exclusively borne by US taxpayers, is out of control. The Pentagon conservatively estimates it is costing $5bn a month. Other analysts have put it at $600bn over 10 years - bigger than the current record US federal deficit."

And as the photojournalist who wrote me makes all too clear, American tactics in Iraq only incite more of the same. A recent piece by Zvi Bar`el, a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ha`aretz reporting from Turkey and quoting a Turkish official catches something of what`s evidently going on. In a listing of offensive American acts, he writes in part:
"the head of an important Iraqi tribe was detained at a U.S. roadblock, and a woman soldier conducted a body search in front of his fellow tribesmen. The response: a public outcry from the elders of all the tribes whose cooperation the Americans covet.
`Soldiers walk around the streets aiming their rifles at pedestrians. Sometimes women are searched by male soldiers who make vulgar jokes. There is total ignorance about Iraqi culture among the soldiers,` said the Turkish government official. `In many cases, the soldiers don`t even know where they are, what city they`re next to, what distinguishes Shi`ites from Sunnis, how women are to be treated, or what they`re supposed to look for.`

[...]

Saddam Hussein`s responsibility for the tragedy of Iraq is eroding rapidly. Saddam is being replaced by the American soldier, who is viewed by a large segment of the population as being to blame for the evolving chaos."

In this we can see another aspect of the Vietnam experience rerun in quite different circumstances. The soldiers on the ground simply play out the ignorance of those above them. After all, this was an occupation that moved in largely without either Iraqis or Iraqi translators in tow and, though this has been somewhat remedied since, it`s indicative of why we are where we are today. Talk about a cycle of catastrophe: American tactics drive Iraqis into the arms of the resistance and the tactics of the resistance - ambushes, car bombs, suicide attacks - cause the Americans to separate themselves ever more from Iraqis and become ever more short on the trigger and quick on the uptake. It`s a formula for just what`s happening.
We`re Number One: Incarceration

Let`s also remember that we bring our baggage with us. That was the Vietnam story. That undoubtedly will be the story of the occupation of Iraq, which, as it turns out, is brought to you by the country that`s just garnered the number one position in the global incarceration sweepstakes with the highest imprisoning rates on the planet. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

"More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time there, according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That`s 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world....
If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it`s 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17....

`These new numbers are shocking enough, but what we don`t see are the ripple effects of what they mean: For the generation of black children today, there`s almost an inevitable aspect of going to prison,` says Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington. `We have the wealthiest society in human history, and we maintain the highest level of imprisonment. It`s striking what that says about our approach to social problems and inequality.`

Of course, even when we use his former prisons, the comparison to Saddam and his practices can`t but be flattering. But let`s forget about Saddam for a minute. Other comparisons could be made and they would be far less flattering. While I`ve seen a number of reports recently on our incarceration policies in Iraq (think as well of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba, and the military brig which holds Jose Padilla in the US), I`ve included below the single most chilling one I`ve run across -- by Jonathan Steele of the Guardian. It deserves to be read in full, but it`s subhead sums up the cavalier, almost forgetful nature of the American approach to justice in Iraq and explains how in the very processes of everyday occupation, American military and civilian officials have been turning potential friends into sullen, angry enemies or actual resistors: "Hundreds of Iraqis civilians are being held in makeshift jails run by US troops -- many without being charged or even questioned. And in these prisons are children whose parents have no way of locating them." Think not of the liberation of Iraq, or even of its occupation, but of its incarceration.

Signs of the Times, Occupation-Style:

First it happened to Hamid Karzai, the American-protected head of the Afghan "national" government, widely known as "the mayor of Kabul" for his government`s lack of political control beyond the gates of that city; now it`s happening to the Iraqi Governing Council, reports the Los Angeles Times:

"[T]he U.S.-led occupation authority moved Tuesday to hire scores of security guards for the new Iraqi Governing Council...... For its own protection, the council has been all but invisible since it was appointed last month -- a victory in itself for the anti-American forces.
The council works cloistered in a building set back more than half a mile from the road. Visitors can enter only if they are met by a council member and after they have been checked by U.S. soldiers. Once inside the complex, they must drive past a second American checkpoint, stop their cars and wait while a soldier removes a set of road spikes.

[...]

The request for 120 bodyguards to protect 25 people suggests either around-the-clock coverage or multiple guards for certain members. [The training of these guards by imported [`bodyguard trainers`], according to the authority`s Web site, will cover reaction to `attack, terrorism threat assessment, hostage situations, general security to include residence, office, vehicle and travel escort... anti-ambush drills... explosive awareness...`"

So the soon-to-be-guarded-round-the-clock official Iraqi governing body is also "all but invisible." In the Washington Post Vivienne Walt makes a similar point in reporting on Ali Hassan, a jobless former accountant from the Ministry of Justice who has just sold his television and refrigerator to raise a little money for his four children. He has joined unemployed demonstrators chanting, "I`m happy Saddam is gone -- but I need a job." She writes:
"And to whom did he and the other demonstrators turn? Chanting their demands for work, they marched toward Saddam Hussein`s old Republican Palace, headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- the almost all-American body, headed by L. Paul Bremer III, that runs Iraq. When I asked one of the organizers why they didn`t go to their own leaders in the Iraqi Governing Council, he looked blank. `We don`t know where they are,` he said.

That`s no surprise. One month after the council`s 25 members were handpicked by Bremer`s office, its members work in a largely empty office building, surrounded by American military cordons and coils of barbed wire. They carry American-issued MCI cell phones, with an American area code (914).

Almost all have spent the past few decades in exile...to many of the people who stayed here through 23 years of Hussein`s stranglehold, they might as well have landed from another planet. They are generally inaccessible, with no control over their own budget..."

As Walt says, what we seem to be creating in Iraq is not (here`s a surprise) a democracy of liberated Iraqis which might be a model for the Middle East -- and so goes the last leg in the now collapsed triad of official explanations for war, weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, having long departed the scene -- but a "resentful dependence."
Even the tiny group of "royalists," supporters of Iraq`s unpopular, long-gone monarchy, who returned with Saddam`s fall, are beginning to sound resentful, as Reuters writes of former exile Sharif Ali, who heads the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, which wants a democratic Iraq under a royal figurehead:

"U.S. troops must step back and let Iraqis run their own affairs or risk being equated in Arab minds with the Israeli forces in Palestinian territory, a leading member of Iraq`s former royal house said... `What I fear most is that the picture will be similar to that of the Israeli forces in the Palestinian lands,` said the 47-year-old London banker who returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein to promote the restoration of the monarchy.
`The reasons under which these forces entered Iraq have expired,` he said. But he added: `I hope that my remarks are not understood that I want them to leave, because what is hoped for is that they help us rebuild the country and other things... We are an occupied people. It is our right to discuss the best ways and decisions to deal with this situation.`"

The Making of a Resistance:
Perhaps the most striking thing about the two major car bombings of the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters is that no one has yet taken credit for the attacks. The resistance remains faceless, portrayed by American occupation officials, Donald Rumsfeld et. al. alternately as Baathist "bitter-enders" and infiltrating foreign terrorists. That there is a resistance in limited areas of the country and that it is increasingly coordinated in some fashion is beyond question. But who exactly are these guerrilla fighters?

Paul McGeough of the Australian Sydney Morning Herald interviewed a number of Iraqis who claim to be part of the resistance and in a long, fascinating piece offers a picture that, grim though it is, bears little relation to the one the Americans are repeating daily. He met, for instance, with resisters from a group calling itself the Army of the Right. Here`s a little of what he recounts:

"The Pentagon, the US military and American analysts are reluctant to acknowledge popular support for the Iraqi resistance. But the chaos has tribal sheiks, Baghdad businessmen and many ordinary Iraqis speaking in such harsh anti-American terms that it is hard not to conclude there is a growing body of Palestinian or Belfast-style empathy with the resistance.
If the accounts of the resistance given to the Herald... are accurate, US intelligence is way behind understanding that what is emerging in Iraq is a centrally controlled movement, driven as much by nationalism as the mosque, a movement that has left Saddam and the Baath Party behind and already is getting foreign funds for its bid to drive out the US army....

Toying with his beard, [a guerrilla] describes a Sunni resistance that is a disciplined, religiously focused force. Asked where authority rests, he says: `It`s with the sheiks in the mosques. Baath Party people and former members of the military are not allowed to be our leaders. Baathists are losers; they didn`t succeed when they worked for the party.`

[...]

Another self-proclaimed guerrilla] declares: `The Americans say they are still looking for weapons of mass destruction. But they have found them. We are their WMD!`"

That last comment reminds us that in this single webbed world of ours the news from everywhere is available to everyone. I have no doubt that the Iraqi guerrillas, whoever they may be, know the latest polling figures on our President as well. McGeough concludes that "the US has not begun to grasp the depth of Iraqi resentment and continues to feed the anger."
For one man`s story of resistance and an ill-planned ambush on an American convoy, check out the Christian Science Monitor`s Cameron Barr:

"The group is nameless, [the guerrilla says] says, and so decentralized that he is not certain who is behind it. He says he doesn`t think foreigners are involved, but he admits he might not know it if they were.... The man in the tracksuit is disappointed by the experience. He says he was not well trained. He has risked his life in the attack, and he has failed. He remains part of the underground group, but its leaders have not asked him to take part in another mission."
No such accounts can be corroborated as yet, but these seemed plausible to me.
A Movement to Bring the Troops Home:

In the meantime, the most recent Scripps Howard opinion poll indicates, once again, slowly sinking support for the war and for the President, even during these quiet weeks when Congress is in recess and the drumbeat of reports about the administration`s lies and evasions has faded temporarily. The Scripps Howard news service reports:

"Public confidence in America`s military involvement in Iraq has eroded recently with 42 percent of U.S. adults now describing themselves as `not certain` that committing troops to war was the right thing to do.... Bush`s approval rating also has dropped, with 52 percent saying they approve of what he has done as president, a 12-percentage point decline in less than three months and the lowest number yet recorded by the polls since he took office in January 2001. The general feeling that America is headed "in the right direction" has taken a hit recently as well."
At the same time, a "Bring them home now" campaign has been started by a group, Military Families Speak Out, which claims 600 members, and by Veterans for Peace. You can even read about it in the military paper, Stars & Stripes or you can check out San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ruth Rosen`s piece on the subject. This, I assure you, is a remarkable development less than half a year into our latest war.
Where Is Osama Anyway?

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, there`s been an explosion of violence, a level of fighting unseen since the American war there was "won."

"Until recently," according to today`s wire service reports, "guerrilla attacks in Afghanistan were hit-and-run assaults launched by small bands of gunmen. But fierce battles over the weekend brought an unprecedented show of force: Hundreds of fighters stormed into two towns and overran police stations. The expanded attacks put more pressure than ever on a fragile U.S.-backed government struggling to rebuild a country following the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001."

And just as this is happening, the Boston Globe reports that we`re actually switching intelligence personnel from the "hunt" for Osama to the "hunt" for Saddam (remember that "tightening noose") -- just as critical Democrats have suggested all along:

"As the hunt for Saddam Hussein grows more urgent and the guerrilla war in Iraq shows little sign of abating, the Bush administration is continuing to shift highly specialized intelligence officers from the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to the Iraq crisis, according to intelligence officials who have been involved in the redeployments.
The recent moves -- involving both analysts in Washington and specially trained field operatives -- follow the transfer of hundreds of elite commandos from Afghanistan duty to service in Iraq, Pentagon officials said."

In his latest column, the ever acidic Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun considers why the Canadian troops going to Afghanistan are not peacekeepers ("Just as the Soviet Union compelled its Warsaw Pact alliance during the 1980s to send troops to Angola, so the U.S. has forced its reluctant allies into Afghanistan."), and manages to point out as well that in Afghanistan we are, as we have been in Central and Southeast Asia since our secret war in Laos in the 1960s, "in bed" with drug lords. If you want to know more about this, check out Al McCoy`s book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
The bigger our "footprint" gets in that "arc of instability," the more unstable the region looks. These are, I suppose, the modest glitches that trail along after the urge to occupy the world. A small piece of belated advice to this administration, though: Think of that old children`s horror story, "The Monkey`s Paw," and be careful what you wish for.

--Tom Engelhardt

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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2003 The Foundation for National Progress

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Der tollste Ayatollah

Thomas Pany 22.08.2003
Machtkämpfe innerhalb der Sadristen im Irak - USA werden als einäugiges Lügenmonster stilisiert

Die kulturelle Kluft zwischen den anglo-amerikanischen Besatzern und der irakischen Bevölkerung vertiefe sich zum Abgrund, diagnostiziert ein beachtenswerter Artikel des amerikanischen Magazins Mother Jones. Nachdem die Bedrohung durch irakische Massenvernichtungswaffen und die Verbindungen des alten Regimes zur al-Qaida als Kriegsgründe mittlerweile vollkommen entwertet seien, fällt jetzt auch die dritte Säule der Argumentation: die Befreiung. Schon längst werde dieses Wort der Stimmung im Lande nicht mehr gerecht, stattdessen spreche man besser von "Ressentiment geladener Abhängigkeit (resentful dependence)".

Noch geht man offiziell davon aus, dass der erbitterte Guerillakrieg gegen die Besatzer vor allem von sunnitischen "Widerstandsnestern" aus geführt wird. Über die genaue Zusammensetzung der Guerilla, ob sie, wie fortwährend propagiert, nur dem alten Baathistischen Kern zugerechnet werden kann oder ob diese Annahme nicht einem politisch-strategischen Wunschdenken der Amerikaner entspricht, darüber wird in der gegenwärtigen Berichterstattung viel spekuliert (auch dazu bietet der MotherJones-Bericht erhellende Einblicke).

Bemerkenswert ist, dass sich die Amerikaner - trotz der üblichen "Watch Out!"-Rhethorik von Wolfowitz Richtung Teheran - gegenüber den Unruhen im schiitischen Lager bislang ziemlich gelassen geben. Obwohl, wie ein jordanischer Politiker vor einigen Tagen äußerte, der ganze Irak in Brand gesteckt würde, sollten sich die Schiiten dem sunnitischen Widerstand anschließen.

Inmitten der vielen Meldungen über die wachsende Frustration platzte nun letzte Woche die Neuigkeit, dass ein bekannter Sunni-Muslim, ein Kleriker namens Achmed Kubeisi, den Schiitenführer Muktada as-Sadr (siehe Der Punk unter den irakischen Schiitenführern) mit geschätzten 50 Millionen Dollar unterstütze: ein "seltenes Beispiel für die Kooperation über dem sektiererischen Graben im Irak hinweg" (Washington Post), das der amerikanischen Führungsriege "kalte Schauer über den Rücken jagte" (Mother Jones).

Wenn die Informationen des Washington Post-Berichts stimmen und der sunnitische Kleriker obendrein seine Anhänger zu den berüchtigten Freitagspredigten von Muktada as-Sadr schickt, dann hat die US-Administration tatsächlich gute Gründe, alarmiert zu sein.

Unter den Schiitenführern vertritt as-Sadr bislang den unerbittlichsten, glühendsten Widerstand gegen die amerikanische Besatzung - "Wer für die USA ist, ist kein Muslim". Bislang... Jetzt tritt ihm aus eigenem Haus, dem der Sadristen, die sich u.a. auf Muktadas hochverehrten Vater, Sadiq as-Sadr berufen, ein Rivale entgegen, der es an zugkräftiger anti-amerikanischer Rhethorik mit ihm aufnehmen kann: der selbsternannte Ayatollah Scheich Muhamed al-Jaqubi.

Am 15.August sollen unzählige Sympathisanten vor der ar-Rahman Moschee in Bagdads Oberklassenviertel al-Mansur Muktada as-Sadrs engstem Vertrauten im hohen schiitischen Klerus, al-Hairi, scharf verurteilt und "Ja für al-Jaqubi" skandiert haben. Für die Asian Times ein Indiz dafür, dass hier ein Zwist, eine Fitna, die von Muslimen normalerweise unter allen Umständen vermieden wird, im Gange ist.


Es geht um einen Richtungsstreit innerhalb des schiitischen Klerus im Irak. Während die konservative Fraktion der Hawsa (oder Hausa), eine Art "vatikanischer Oberrat" der Schiiten in Nadschaf, unter der Führung des greisen Ayatollahs Ali Sistani der althergebrachten Tradition der Zurückhaltung in politischen Angelegenheiten huldige, sehen sich die Sadristen in einer anderen, aktivistischeren Tradition: der "Hawsa natika", der revolutionären Linie der Hawsa. Trotz vieler anderer historischer Vorläufer, beruft man sich hier vorzüglich auf den Widerstand von Muhamed Sadiq as-Sadr, den dieser dem Regime von Saddam Hussein entgegensetzte (und mit dem Martyrertod bezahlte).

Al-Jaqubi soll der Lieblingsschüler des Vaters von Muqtatda as-Sadrs gewesen sein. Jetzt ist er Hauptrivale des Sohnes im Versuch, die Kontrolle über die irakischen Schiiten zu erlangen, so die Asian Times.

Die Organisation, die al-Jaqubi zu diesem Zweck gegründet hat, die Fudala ("Die Großzügigen"), versteht sich - wenig überraschend- als die einzig wahre Hawsa. Zu ihren Hauptaufgaben gehört, auch das keine Überraschung, die Verteidigung der Muslime gegen die westliche Kultur.

Argumentative Unterstützung sollen sich die Anhänger, über deren Anzahl noch keine Schätzungen vorliegen, aus den gelehrten Werken des Ayatollahs beschaffen, in denen die Freimaurer für den schon lange währenden Kulturkampf zwischen dem Westen und dem Islam als Drahtzieher verantwortlich gemacht werden. Die USA fungieren als der große Anti-Muslim, ein einäugiges Lügenmonster, so etwas wie der Antichrist, halbblind eben und mit überwältigender finanzieller und technologischer Macht ausgestattet. Mit seinem einäugigen Blick, der alleine auf Geld und nichts anderes ausgerichtet ist, bereitet der "Awar al-daschal" allen Muslimen die Hölle. Helfen kann hier nur die Aussicht auf das Paradies, das jedem Muslim, der durch diese Hölle gegangen ist, bevorsteht, die Erlösung durch das Wiedererscheinen des Mahdis, des verschwundenen Imams, (übrigens in Zusammenarbeit mit Jesus Christus!) und selbstverständlich der Kampf gegen dieses Monster.


Konkret sollen diese Ansprüche durch Fudala-Zentren im gesamten Irak, eigene Zeitungen, engagierte Sozialarbeit in der armen schiitischen Bevölkerungsschicht, religiöse Erziehung und vor allem über eine bedeutende Mitwirkung an der Ausarbeitung der irakischen Verfassung realisiert werden. Militante Ambitionen, wie sie etwa der rivalisierende Bruder, Muktada, mit seiner "Al-Mahdi-Armee" an den Tag legt, hegt man zumindest öffentlich nicht. Die Frontlinien sehe man woanders, der Kampf gegen den Westen habe viele Gesichter, sagte der Sprecher der Fudala, Abu Abdullah, bei einer Pressekonferenz zur Gründung der Organisation.

Es gibt einen kulturellen und pädagogischen Krieg, weil uns die westlichen kulturellen und pädagogischen Institutionen zerstören wollen. Und es gibt einen wirtschaftlichen Krieg, weil der Westen in den Besitz der Reichtümer der islamischen Länder gelangen will. Die Fudala wird viele Orte haben, um ihre Ideen zu verbreiten. Denn: jede Moschee im Irak wird ein "Office" für uns sein, weil es der naturgemäße Ort für religiöse Leute ist, die sich treffen wollen.

Al-Jaqubi, der sich auf der Pressekonferenz über spezifischere Ziele ausschwieg, fügte dem hinzu:


Es ist nicht nötig, dass diese Hawsa den Irak direkt kontrolliert. Wenn die Hawsa natika jede Stadt unabhängig kontrolliert, dann ist die Summe des "Managements" aller Städte gleichbedeutend mit einer Regierung.

http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/irak/15487/1.html

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-hurr…
THE WORLD



Uncle Sam Wants You, Iraqis Told
U.S. military police begin training recruits for the new Civil Defense Corps. They will help keep the peace and gather intelligence.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer

August 23, 2003

BALAD, Iraq — The United States is urging Iraqis to take more responsibility for their own security, and Kasim Adnon — 23, jobless and under threat of death from a local mullah — is at the vanguard of that push.

Adnon is in the first class of recruits for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a group that ultimately will number 20,000 and whose job will be to patrol cities and the countryside, keep the peace, gather intelligence and impose the order that Iraq is still lacking nearly four months after President Bush declared major combat operations over.

"There is someone murdered every day in my town. There are many areas that are unsafe, and I want to help stabilize it. I need a job also," said Adnon, who is from Taramiyah, a town not far from here in an area northwest of Baghdad where anti-U.S. sentiment runs high.

In the wake of bombings at the Jordanian Embassy and U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, plus sabotage of pipelines and continuing attacks on coalition forces, U.S. officials say Iraqis such as Adnon must be trained and put into uniform quickly in order to gain and maintain the peace in this country.

The Pentagon hopes that in addition to conducting routine patrols, these Iraqis can help improve the volume and quality of local intelligence, which many observers say are abysmal.

U.S.-led trainers at bases across Iraq are trying to muster no fewer than three types of security forces as well as local police units.

The largest is the new Iraqi army, which is expected to have 12,000 members in a year and 40,000 by 2005. At least an equal number of Iraqi border and infrastructure guards are also being trained in addition to the Civil Defense Corps. And coalition forces are giving lessons to 35,000 police officers.

Adnon completed his first week of training Thursday at the Balad airfield, where soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division gave him and 26 other recruits basic lessons in first aid, firearms and the rules of engagement.

The recruits, whose average age is 30, made visible daily progress and impressed their trainers with their enthusiasm, said Lt. Michael D. Corley, who supervises the class.

"They`ll also take our place at checkpoints and on some of the security missions we do," Corley said.

Iraqis say they are eager to take on the responsibility.

"U.S. soldiers don`t understand Iraqis," said Alla Khalife, 29, another enlistee from Taramiyah who was a sergeant in the old Iraqi army. "It is better if I deal with Iraqis."

As for the police training, many of the instructors are U.S. military police officers. One such unit is the 156th "Law and Order" Army Reserve attached to the 101st Airborne Division, which is training the city police force of Dehok, in northern Iraq.

"There are some cultural differences we are adjusting to — like handling domestic disturbances — which are tricky. Police here don`t have the arrest powers we do in the States," said instructor Maj. Scott Fuller, who is a police officer in Huntington, W.Va., in civilian life.

Ultimately, the training will reduce the burden on coalition units, including the 4th Infantry`s 68th Armored Regiment, which is training Adnon`s unit in Balad. But for now, it is an added responsibility, and the unit, under Capt. Mark Bailey, had plenty to do before the first class arrived last Saturday.

Bailey`s company runs two armored patrols per day, often up and down Highway 1, this country`s main north-south road. His company also guards a corner of the sprawling airfield compound in Balad and helps staff the Quick Reaction Force, a kind of armored SWAT team on 24-hour call to respond to hostile fire in the area.

All that is in addition to teaching the recruits. The training facilities are often impromptu, such as the abandoned munitions bunker at the airfield complex used to train Adnon and his class. The training cycle is also compressed, lasting just three weeks, or less than half the basic training time U.S. Army recruits receive.

But officials here say they can`t afford to wait. The success of the occupation authority`s efforts in Iraq hangs in the balance.

Adnon, who will earn $70 a month as a civil guard, enlisted in the corps despite threats from occupation opponents. He is undeterred, he said, by a mullah of the strict Wahhabi sect who at recent Friday prayers said the death of any Taramiyah men who joined the force "would be good for our religion."

"He says we are spies," Adnon said. "Even though I am here, I am afraid. I could go out from this compound and be dead. But I believe in this job and I will walk my way, not where others tell me."

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer John Hendren in Washington contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-auss…
THE WORLD

Australia Lied About Iraq, Inquiry Is Told
From Reuters

August 23, 2003

CANBERRA, Australia — The government lied about the threat of Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction to justify involvement in the U.S.-led war, a former senior intelligence analyst told an official inquiry Friday.

Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March to protest Australia`s case for war, said Prime Minister John Howard, a close U.S. ally, created a mythical Iraq by dropping ambiguous references in intelligence reports.

"The government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story The exaggeration was so great it was pure dishonesty," Wilkie, formerly of the Office of National Assessments, told the inquiry into Australian intelligence on Iraq.

The ONA is equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency.

"Key intelligence assessment qualifications like `probably,` `could` and `uncorroborated evidence suggests` were frequently dropped. Much more useful words like `massive` and `mammoth` were included," he said.

Controversy has been swirling in the United States, Britain and Australia over accusations that those governments manipulated intelligence on Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction to justify war. No evidence has yet been found of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Wilkie`s comments to the inquiry are some of his strongest yet against Howard`s administration. Since his resignation, he has made numerous attacks on Howard.



"I don`t know on what he bases those claims. If he has got evidence of that, let him produce it, otherwise stop slandering decent people," Howard told reporters in Adelaide.

"I deny his allegations ONA has indicated that he had virtually no access to the relevant intelligence," Howard said.

The Australian parliamentary hearing parallels an inquiry into the information the British government used to make its case for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein.

Howard has said he made the right decision in sending 2,000 troops to the Persian Gulf despite initial public qualms. He said intelligence could not have provided absolute proof of the Iraqi threat.

Wilkie said he believes Iraq had a disjointed weapons of mass destruction program, but he said the United Nations should have been given more time to search the country.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Published on Friday, August 22, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Now It’s Your Turn
Intelligence Veterans Challenge Colleagues to Speak Out



MEMORANDUM FOR: Colleagues in Intelligence

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Now It’s Your Turn

Sixty-four summers ago, when Hitler fabricated Polish provocations in his attempt to justify Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was not a peep out of senior German officials. Happily, in today’s Germany the imperative of truth telling no longer takes a back seat to ingrained docility and knee-jerk deference to the perceived dictates of “homeland security.” The most telling recent sign of this comes in today’s edition of Die Zeit, Germany’s highly respected weekly. The story, by Jochen Bittner holds lessons for us all.

Die Zeit’s report leaves in tatters the “evidence” cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration spokesmen as the strongest proof that Iraq was using mobile trailers as laboratories to produce material for biological weapons.

German Intelligence on Powell’s “Solid” Sources

Bittner notes that, like their American counterparts, German intelligence officials had to hold their noses as Powell on February 5 at the UN played fast and loose with intelligence he insisted came from “solid sources.” Powell’s specific claims concerning the mobile laboratories, it turns out, depended heavily—perhaps entirely—on a source of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s equivalent to the CIA. But the BND, it turns out, considered the source in no way “solid.” A “senior German security official” told Die Zeit that, in passing the report to US officials, the Germans made a point of noting “various problems with the source.” In more diplomatic language, Die Zeit’s informant indicated that the BND’s “evaluation of the source was not altogether positive.”

German officials remain in some confusion regarding the “four different sources” cited by Powell in presenting his case regarding the “biological laboratories.” Berlin has not been told who the other three sources are. In this context, a German intelligence officer mentioned that there is always the danger of false confirmation, suggesting it is possible that the various reports can be traced back to the same original source, theirs—that is, the one with which the Germans had “various problems.”

Even if there are in fact multiple sources, the Germans wonder what reason there is to believe that the others are more “solid” than their own. Powell indicated that some of the sources he cited were Iraqi émigrés. While the BND would not give Die Zeit an official comment, Bittner notes pointedly that German intelligence “proceeds on the assumption that émigrés do not always tell the truth and that the picture they draw can be colored by political motives.”

Plausible?

Despite all that, in an apparent bid to avoid taking the heat for appearing the constant naysayer on an issue of such neuralgic import in Washington, German intelligence officials say that, the dubious sourcing notwithstanding, they considered the information on the mobile biological laboratories “plausible.”

In recent weeks, any “plausibility” has all but evaporated. Many biological warfare specialists in the US and elsewhere were skeptical from the start. Now Defense Intelligence Agency specialists have joined their counterparts at the State Department and elsewhere in concluding that the two trailer/laboratories discovered in Iraq in early May are hydrogen-producing facilities for weather balloons to calibrate Iraqi artillery, as the Iraqis have said.

Perhaps it was this DIA report that emboldened the BND official to go public about the misgivings the BND had about the source.

Insult to Intelligence

What do intelligence analysts do when their professional ethic—to tell the truth without fear or favor—is prostituted for political expedience? Usually, they hold their peace, as we’ve already noted was the case in Germany in 1939 before the invasion of Poland. The good news is that some intelligence officials are now able to recognize a higher duty—particularly when the issue involves war and peace. Clearly, some BND officials are fed up with the abuse of intelligence they have witnessed—and especially the trifling with the intelligence that they have shared with the US from their own sources. At least one such official appears to have seen it as a patriotic duty to expose what appears to be a deliberate distortion.

This is a hopeful sign. There are indications that British intelligence officials, too, are beginning to see more distinctly their obligation to speak truth to power, especially in light of the treatment their government accorded Ministry of Defense biologist Dr. David Kelly, who became despondent to the point of suicide.

Even more commendable was the courageous move by senior Australian intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie when it became clear to him that the government he was serving had decided to take part in launching an unprovoked war based on “intelligence” information he knew to be specious. Wilkie resigned and promptly spoke his piece—not only to his fellow citizens but, after the war, at Parliament in London and Congress in Washington. Andrew Wilkie was not naïve enough to believe he could stop the war when he resigned in early March. What was clear to him, however, was that he had a moral duty to expose the deliberate deception in which his government, in cooperation with the US and UK, had become engaged. And he knew instinctively that, in so doing, he could with much clearer conscience look at himself in the mirror each morning.

What About Us?

Do you not find it ironic that State Department foreign service officers, whom we intelligence professionals have (quite unfairly) tended to write off as highly articulate but unthinking apologists for whatever administration happens to be in power, are the only ones so far to resign on principle over the war on Iraq? Three of them have—all three with very moving explanations that their consciences would no longer allow them to promote “intelligence” and policies tinged with deceit.

What about you? It is clear that you have been battered, buffeted, besmirched. And you are painfully aware that you can expect no help at this point from Director George Tenet. Recall the painful morning when you watched him at the UN sitting squarely behind Powell, as if to say the Intelligence Community endorses the deceitful tapestry he wove. No need to remind you that his speech boasted not only the bogus biological trailers but also assertions of a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, despite the fact that your intense, year-and-a-half analytical effort had turned up no credible evidence to support that claim. To make matters worse, Tenet is himself under fire for acquiescing in a key National Intelligence Estimate on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq that included several paragraphs based on a known forgery. That is the same estimate from which the infamous 16 words were drawn for the president’s state-of-the-union address on January 28.

And not only that. In a dramatic departure from customary practice, Tenet has let the moneychangers into the temple—welcoming the most senior policymakers into the inner sanctum where all-source analysis is performed at CIA headquarters, wining and dining Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Assistant Condoleezza Rice, and even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (now representing the Pentagon) on their various visits to make sure you didn’t miss anything! You have every right to expect to be protected from that kind of indignity. Small wonder that Gingrich, in a recent unguarded moment on TV, conceded that Tenet “is so grateful to President Bush that he will do anything for him.” CIA directors have no business being so integral a “part of the team.”

Powell, who points proudly to his four day-and-night cram course at the CIA in the days immediately prior to his February 5 UN speech, seems oblivious to the fact that personal visitations of that frequency and duration—and for that purpose—are unprecedented in the history of the CIA. Equally unprecedented are Cheney’s “multiple visits.” When George H. W. Bush was vice president, not once did he go out to CIA headquarters for a working visit. We brought our analysis to him. As you are well aware, once the subjects uppermost in policymakers’ minds are clear to analysts, the analysis itself must be conducted in an unfettered, sequestered way—and certainly without the direct involvement of officials with policy axes to grind. Until now, that is the way it has been done; the analysis and estimates were brought downtown to the policymakers—not the other way around.

What Happens When You Remain Silent?

There is no more telling example than Vietnam. CIA analysts were prohibited from reporting accurately on the non-incident in the Tonkin Gulf on August 4, 1964 until the White House had time to use the “furious fire-fight” to win the Tonkin Gulf resolution from Congress—and eleven more years of war for the rest of us.

And we kept quiet.

In November 1967 as the war gathered steam, CIA management gave President Lyndon Johnson a very important National Intelligence Estimate known to be fraudulent. Painstaking research by a CIA analyst, the late Sam Adams, had revealed that the Vietnamese Communists under arms numbered 500,000. But Gen. William Westmoreland in Saigon, eager to project an image of progress in the US “war of attrition,” had imposed a very low artificial ceiling on estimates of enemy strength.

Analysts were aghast when management caved in and signed an NIE enshrining Westmoreland’s count of between 188,000 and 208,000. The Tet offensive just two months later exploded that myth—at great human cost. And the war dragged on for seven more years.

Then, as now, morale among analysts plummeted. A senior CIA official made the mistake of jocularly asking Adams if he thought the Agency had “gone beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty.” Sam, who had not only a keen sense of integrity but first-hand experience of what our troops were experiencing in the jungles of Vietnam, had to be restrained. He would be equally outraged at the casualties being taken now by US forces fighting another unnecessary war, this time in the desert. Kipling’s verse applies equally well to jungle or desert:

If they question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.

Adams himself became, in a very real sense, a casualty of Vietnam. He died of a heart attack at 55, with remorse he was unable to shake. You see, he decided to “go through channels,” pursuing redress by seeking help from imbedded CIA and the Defense Department Inspectors General. Thus, he allowed himself to be diddled for so many years that by the time he went public the war was mostly over—and the damage done.

Sam had lived painfully with the thought that, had he gone public when the CIA’s leaders caved in to the military in 1967, the entire left half of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial would not have had to be built. There would have been 25-30,000 fewer names for the granite to accommodate.

So too with Daniel Ellsberg, who made the courageous decision to give the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam to the New York Times and Washington Post for publication in 1971. Dan has been asked whether he has any regrets. Yes, one big one, he says. If he had made the papers available in 1964 or 65, this tragically unnecessary war might have been stopped in its tracks. Why did he not? Dan’s response is quite telling; he says the thought never occurred to him at the time.

Let the thought occur to you, now.

But Isn’t It Too Late?

No. While it is too late to prevent the misadventure in Iraq, the war is hardly over, and analogous “evidence” is being assembled against Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Yes, US forces will have their hands full for a long time in Iraq, but this hardly rules out further adventures based on “intelligence” as spurious as that used to argue the case for attacking Iraq.

The best deterrent is the truth. Telling the truth about the abuse of intelligence on Iraq could conceivably give pause to those about to do a reprise. It is, in any case, essential that the American people acquire a more accurate understanding of the use and abuse of intelligence. Only then can there be any hope that they can experience enough healing from the trauma of 9/11 to be able to make informed judgments regarding the policies pursued by this administration—thus far with the timid acquiescence of their elected representatives.

History is littered with the guilty consciences of those who chose to remain silent. It is time to speak out.

/s/

Gene Betit, Arlington, VA
Pat Lang, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Ray McGovern, Arlington, VA


Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity


Ray McGovern ([e-mail]), a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President`s Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.

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Eine Flash Animation von Mark Fiore (San Francisco Chronicel) Congratulations on your Liberation


http://www.markfiore.com/animation/liberation.html


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The DIY terror threat
The United States confronts a menace of its own making in Iraq and the only way out appears to be via the United Nations, writes Marian Wilkinson.


August 23, 2003

General John Abizaid arrived at the Pentagon two days after the horrific bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Abizaid pronounced that Iraq was now "at the centre of the global war of terrorism".

The senior commander for all US forces in the region, Abizaid warned that terrorism was the "No.1 security threat" in Iraq and his forces were scrambling to come to grips with it. Terrorist cells were becoming firmly established in Baghdad, he said, having successfully moved from isolated strongholds in the north and west of the country.

Asked if these cells were Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign jihadists from Syria and Saudi Arabia or the al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam, Abizaid agreed all were active. "It`s not good for us when they get established in an urban area, as you can well appreciate," he said.

Jessica Stern, a Harvard University terrorist expert, put it more bluntly: "[The] bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one."

Less than three months ago, President George Bush, in a Top Gun performance, landed in a US Navy fighter jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln returning from the Iraq war, thanked the crew for their successful mission and declared major combat operations in Iraq over.

The same day, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, told a cheering audience in Washington: "A Iraqi government that is of the people, by the people and for the people will serve as a dramatic and an inspiring example to other nations in the Middle East."

A short time later, Bush released his much-heralded road map for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Today Iraq is rapidly becoming an inspiring example for terrorists throughout the Arab world who want to kill Americans and challenge the US occupation of an Arab Muslim country. A previously unknown group calling itself the "Armed Vanguards of a Second Muhammad Army" this week issued a statement to Al Arabiya satellite television claiming responsibility for the deadly attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed at least 23 people, including the respected head of mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Within hours of the Baghdad blast, Bush`s Middle East road map was also under threat when a suicide bomber blew up a Jerusalem bus packed with men, women and children, killing 20. The attack, claimed by Hamas, marked the end of the fragile ceasefire, beginning another cycle of violence as the Israeli army retaliated by assassinating one of the founders of Hamas.

FOR nearly two years since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bush has won the overwhelming support from the majority of Americans for his handling of national security. Backed by this support, he launched the pre-emptive war in Iraq in the face of opposition from the UN Security Council and the Arab world.

Now, both at home and abroad, the Bush Doctrine is under fire, fuelled by the growing security crisis in postwar Iraq. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are calling for hearings on the security crisis in Iraq and the failure of the White House to build more international support to help steer Iraq towards self-government.

Two leading members of the US Senate Foreign Relations committee wrote to Bush this week urging him to broaden the role of the UN in an attempt to get a "genuine international effort" in postwar Iraq, including more troops and police from other countries.

"We`re in a catch-22 moment," said Rick Barton, from the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who recently helped write an independent report for the Pentagon on postwar Iraq. "We`re really at that very delicate point where the more security presence we have, the less secure things are."

His report warned the Pentagon it had until September to turn around the security crisis in Iraq. "We`ve really got to engage the Iraqis and hope they will expand their ownership. And it`s not really just the Iraqi police or reconstituted Iraqi military; it`s got to be the Iraqi body politic," he told the Herald.

Barton eerily echoes de Mello`s last report to UN Security Council. "[Iraqis] want to see themselves back at the helm of their country," de Mello warned four weeks before his brutal death, "They also want to see the arrival of security and of the rule and law."

After the bitter divisions in the Security Council over the war in Iraq, the White House insisted that the UN role should be severely limited, giving it no power in the political transition. This made de Mello`s job "a difficult balancing act", as he put it.

Postwar Iraq is effectively run by the small US-led Coalition Provisional Authority headed Paul Bremer and dominated by Americans, Britons and a few Australians. The military occupation force also remains dominated by US and British troops with limited support from a host of small US allies.

Both de Mello and the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, made strenuous efforts to work with the coalition and supported the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council appointed by Bremer, even though it is dominated by US-backed exiles. The targeting of the UN and the killing of de Mello are reopening the question of how much the UN can support the US strategy in Iraq.

THE back-to-back bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have shaken the aura of confident certainty that surrounded Bush. The cracks in Washington are having a ripple effect.

In New York, simmering tensions at the UN over Iraq and the Middle East erupted. In an extraordinary outburst, the Israeli ambassador to the UN attacked Syria, which is this month`s acting president of the UN Security Council. He accused Syria of sponsoring terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and possibly complicity in the Baghdad bombing.

"Syria [is] the country from which most probably the truck that blew up the UN compound in Baghdad came," the clearly furious ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told UN reporters in New York. "Syria - the perpetrator, the harbourer and the headquarters of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and countless other terror organisations - is with one hand drafting a presidential statement condemning the bombing in Iraq and with the other hand drafting instructions to terrorist organisations to carry out horrible bombings and suicide mission such as the one that was carried in Jerusalem."

At UN headquarters in New York, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, tried to assure both the UN and the US public that Bush would not shift policy either on Iraq or the Middle East road map.

"The end of the road map is a cliff that both sides will fall off," he said, "so we have to understand the consequences of the end of the road map."

But at the same time, the Israelis were launching a retaliatory attack on Hamas. "Unfortunately at the moment the only road we see is a road in Jerusalem with the bodies of little babies and children," said Gillerman.

Inside the Security Council, the US strategy in Iraq was also under fire from Russia, Germany and France. Bush had sent Powell to New York looking for a new UN resolution that would encourage its allies to send more troops to Iraq. But the French ambassador, Michel Duclos, said bluntly it was time for the US to rethink its occupation and hand over to the UN. The US would not get more international troops in Iraq without giving up some political power.

"Iraq, unfortunately, has become a theatre of operations for terrorists," said Duclos. "To emerge from this trap laid for us by the terrorists, we must give back to the Iraqis their responsibility and their sovereignty." Only the UN, he said pointedly, had the legitimacy, the impartiality and the expertise to do this.

Until now, Bush has stood firmly against the Security Council and his congressional opponents on Iraq. Immediately after the Baghdad bombing he insisted that "Iraq is on an irreversible course towards self-government and peace and America and our friends in the United Nations will stand with the Iraqi people as they reclaim their nation and their future".

For Bush, handing over power in Iraq to the UN would be a stunning backdown. It would also give control over his most important foreign-policy crisis to a body he does not trust.

But as next year`s presidential election gets closer, Bush is acutely aware that if Iraq remains a terrorist battleground, not only will its future be at stake, so will his own.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061529338223.html

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U.N. staff resume work in Baghdad
NBC, MSNBC and news services
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U.N. staff resumed work in Baghdad on Saturday in tents and shipping containers set up beside the wreckage of their bombed headquarters. In the wake of the deadly attack, U.S. and British diplomats lobbied to get more countries to contribute troops to U.S.-led forces in Iraq, but the U.N. Security Council remained bitterly divided over the U.S. decision to launch a war without U.N. approval.

DOZENS OF U.N. workers who survived Tuesday`s truck bomb attack which killed at least 24 people, including three Americans, were joined by colleagues flown into Iraq to help to re-establish the mission.
"We`ve come back to help restart operations to the best of our ability," said Kevin Kennedy of the United Nations` Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who arrived from New York on Friday. "It`s hard to believe the level of destruction. It has to be seen to be believed."

Different U.N. agencies were assigned spaces in rows of white tents, pre-fabricated offices and containers to set up computers and files retrieved from the devastated building.

Air-conditioners were hooked up in some tents, others were left to the mercy of the blazing heat.

A few meters away, using bulldozers and heavy lifting equipment, U.S. soldiers continued to sift through the rubble of the blast which killed the head of the U.N. mission in Iraq,Sergio Vieira de Mello.

At a ceremony on Friday before Vieira de Mello`s body was flown out of Baghdad, a colleague said one of his dying wishes was that the United Nations should continue to operate in Iraq.

All expatriate staff working in Baghdad were given the option to leave the country, but about half have stayed.

BUSH CONDEMNS BOMBING
President Bush condemned the bombing in Baghdad, along with a suicide attack this week in Jerusalem, on Saturday as part of militant campaigns to impose a "totalitarian vision."

"These two bombings reveal, once again, the nature of the terrorists, and why they must be defeated," Bush said in his weekly radio address, which was prerecorded.

"Terrorists commit atrocities because they want the civilized world to flinch and retreat so they can impose their totalitarian vision," Bush said.

He said the two bombings were attacks in a war against "every free nation and all our citizens." He vowed to keep fighting and prevail.

Despite the Baghdad attack, Bush said that most of Iraq was moving steadily toward reconstruction and self-governance.

"This progress makes the remaining terrorists even more desperate and willing to lash out against symbols of order and hope, like coalition forces and U.N. personnel," Bush said. "The world will not be intimidated. A violent few will not determine the future of Iraq."

In southern Iraq, meantime,attacks on coalition forcescontinued. Three British soldiers were killed on Saturday after their vehicle came under fire from another car, veered off the road and crashed.

U.S. PURSUES INTERNATIONAL FORCES
On Friday, France`s foreign minister dismissed the U.S. effort to get more countries to contribute troops to Iraq, saying an international force should instead be sent with a U.N. mandate. Secretary of State Colin Powell and his British counterpart, Jack Straw, were due to meet in the Hamptons on Long Island in New York, where Powell is vacationing. Straw met Friday with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at theUnited Nations.

Before the meetings, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin urged the coalition powers to switch from "a logic of occupation to a logic of sovereignty" in Iraq.

"We can`t make do with adjusting or enlarging the current plan," he told the French newspaper Le Monde. "The right thing would be to bring into play a true international force under the mandate of the United Nations. Sovereignty is a matter of urgency."

Powell made it clear Thursday that broadening the international involvement in Iraq would not mean that the United States would cede any control. France and others insist that they cannot send troops under such terms.

Asked whether he would accept increased U.N. authority in exchange for more foreign troops, Bush said during a visit to Washington state only that talks were under way on a new resolution and that he wanted a "vital role" for the United Nations, a longstanding U.S. position.

The push for a new Security Council resolution to draw more troops, police or financial assistance met resistance from Russia and Germany, as well. The three countries said the United Nations should be given a larger role in Iraq`s future and asked for a timetable to end the occupation.

Annan agreed that the United States and its allies would have trouble passing a second resolution if they did not cede some control. An alternative proposal was circulating under which the United Nations would send its own security forces to protect U.N. facilities and personnel, but not peacekeepers under U.S. command, he said.

"It is not excluded that the Security Council may decide to transform the operation into a U.N.-mandated multinational force [or] operation on the ground with other governments coming in," Annan told reporters.

"It would also imply not just burden sharing but also sharing decision and responsibility with the others," he said. "If that doesn`t happen, I think it is going to be very difficult to get a second resolution that will satisfy everyone."

BLAST IN BAGHDAD
Since the war to oust President Saddam Hussein, U.S. troops have come under constant guerrilla attack. The massive bomb at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad that wounded at least 100 added to the security woes of the U.S.-British occupation force.

In his drive for a new U.N. resolution, Powell called on member states to do more to help Iraq. U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said later that Washington wanted the resolution to encourage countries to provide troops, money and help with police training.

U.S. and British officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity that they were floating informal ideas among Security Council members. The officials said they expected serious discussions to begin sometime next week.

One official said they were so far hearing possible "workable ideas" from nations for "a greater degree of shared responsibility" in Iraq.

U.S. TROOP REQUESTS
Turkey`s top political and military leaders met Friday to consider a U.S. request to deploy thousands of Turkish soldiers in Iraq, a move that could make the predominantly Muslim country the third-largest foreign country in Iraq after the United States and Britain.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told the newspaper Milliyet that Turkey could send peacekeepers to Iraq, but he stressed that soldiers would go to help rebuild the country and "definitely will not be occupiers."

New Delhi gave no indication of whether India would consider sending forces. "Along with the international community, we are also watching with interest. We will see what happens," said Navtej Sarna, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.

Powell reaffirmed the U.S. determination to succeed in Iraq and insisted that U.S. leadership provided "competent control" of the coalition force. He stressed that the U.S.-led force in Iraq was already multinational, with 30 nations providing 22,000 troops -- 11,000 of them from Britain.

"But perhaps additional language and a new resolution might encourage others," he said.

Straw echoed the need for a single command, saying: "If you want to be an effective military operation ... then the command has to be through the United States."

INSIDE JOB AT BAGHDAD HQ?
Iraqi employees and guards at the compound were being questioned by American authorities on the suspicion that the suicide truck bombing could have been an inside job. Many of the security guards at the hotel had been in place before the war and were linked to Saddam`s security service.

Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who is working to re-establish an Iraqi police force, said the placement of the truck bomb and the timing of Tuesday`s attack had raised suspicions.

The truck was as close as it could have been to the office of Vieira de Mello and the bomb went off as a high-level official meeting was in progress in the office.

"Would the security guards have access to that information? Would the people who work in that building for any other reason have access to it?" Kerik told The Associated Press on Friday.

In a tearful and brief ceremony on Friday the coffin bearing Vieira de Mello`s body and draped in the U.N. flag was carried aboard a Brazilian air force plane at Baghdad International Airport. Bagpipers played "Amazing Grace," and L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, wept as he consoled a sobbing U.N. employee.

The plane stopped over in Geneva, where Vieira de Mello`s wife and two children boarded the aircraft before heading for his native Brazil, airport officials in Switzerland said.

Annan named Ramiro Lopes da Silva, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, to replace Vieira de Mello on an interim basis, diplomats said. Officials said Annan would fly to Brazil for Vieira de Mello`s memorial service.

A previously unknown group calling itself the Armed Vanguards of a Second Muhammed Army claimed responsibility for the attack Thursday, pledging "to continue fighting every foreigner and to carry out similar operations" in a statement sent to the Dubai-based satellite channel Al-Arabiya.

Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Thursday that he was aware of a group with a similar name, but he did not elaborate. He warned that terrorism "is emerging as the number one security threat" in Iraq.

The al-Qaida-linked group Ansar al-Islam, based in northern Iraq since before the war, has "definitely established" cells in Baghdad, and foreign fighters have been entering the country from Syria, Abizaid said at a news conference in Washington.


NBC`s Tammy Kupperman at the State Department,

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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When is Enough Enough?
By Jennifer Barrett, Newsweek Web Exclusive


Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the U.S. mission in Iraq, saying the United States should reduce its spending and scale back its efforts there, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll.

SIXTY-NINE PERCENT of Americans polled say they are very concerned (40 percent) or somewhat concerned (29 percent) that the United States will be bogged down for many years in Iraq without making much progress in achieving its goals. Just 18 percent say they`re confident that a stable, democratic form of government can take shape in Iraq over the long term; 37 percent are somewhat confident. Just 13 percent say U.S. efforts to establish security and rebuild Iraq have gone very well since May 1, when combat officially ended; 39 percent say somewhat well.
Nearly half of respondents, 47 percent, say they are very concerned that the cost of maintaining troops in Iraq will lead to a large budget deficit and seriously hurt the U.S. economy. And 60 percent of those polled say the estimated $1 billion per week that the United States is spending is too much and the country should scale back its efforts. One-third supports the current spending levels for now, but just 15 percent of those polled say they would support maintaining the current spending levels for three years or more.

Against this backdrop, President George W. Bush`s approval ratings continue to decline. His current approval rating of 53 percent is down 18 percent from April. And for the first time since the question was initially asked last fall, more registered voters say they would not like to see him re-elected to another term as president (49 percent) than re-elected. Forty-four percent would favor giving Bush a second term; in April, 52 percent backed Bush for a second term and 38 percent did not.

Despite the costs and the continued attacks against both U.S. and United Nations personnel, most Americans support maintaining current military levels in Iraq--for now anyway. Fifty-six percent approve of keeping large numbers of U.S. military personnel in Iraq for two years or less; 28 percent would support a stay of one to two years, while another 28 percent would support a stay of up to one year. Eighteen percent support keeping large numbers of troops in Iraq for three to five years, three percent for six to 10 years, and 11 percent for more than 10 years (just five percent want to bring troops home now).

Sixty-one percent still believe that the United States was right to take military action against Iraq in March; 33 percent do not. But respondents are split on how effective the U.S. war with Iraq has been in fighting Al Qaeda and terrorism in general. Forty-five percent say the war has reduced the terror network`s power by removing an oil-rich regime that supported terrorism while 38 percent say the war has actually increased Al Qaeda`s power by inspiring a new generation of terrorists to take up arms against the United States and its allies.

The failure to capture Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, and the slow progress in Iraq have also affected Americans` views on the Bush administration`s efforts to fight terrorists at home and abroad--but not drastically. A slim majority (54 percent) still approve of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, though Bush had a 74 percent approval rating in his handling of Iraq in mid-April

Fifty-seven percent say Bush is doing a better job than Democrats in finding and defeating terrorists abroad, while 21 percent say Democratic party leaders in Congress are dealing better with terrorists. At the beginning of last year, nearly three-quarters of those surveyed thought Bush was doing a better job than the Democrats on fighting terrorism overseas--just 9 percent gave higher marks to Democrats. Fifty-seven percent say Bush is best at handling the fight against terror at home, down from 74 percent in January 2002. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) now think the Democrats do a better job at handling homeland security, versus 11 percent in January 2002.

The biggest shift in opinion, however, comes in Bush`s handling of non-terror issues. A plurality of voters now think the Democratic leaders in Congress have a better approach to dealing with the economy, tax cuts, healthcare, education, social security, the environment and energy policy. In January 2002, more thought Bush had the best approach to handling all the issues above, except the environment.

Forty-five percent of respondents now think the Democratic party leaders are doing a better job of finding ways to stimulate the economy (36 percent say Bush is)--a huge shift from January 2002, when 55 percent thought Bush was better on the economy and just 29 percent thought Congressional Democrats were. Over the past year-and-a-half, Americans have also shifted their views of Bush`s tax cuts--45 percent prefer his cuts to those supported by Democratic leaders now, but that`s down 12 percent from January 2002.

Nearly half of those polled (47 percent) say Democratic leaders have the best approach to health care (31 percent say Bush does), a flip from January 2002, when 45 percent preferred Bush`s approach and 36 percent liked the Democrats`. Bush has lost the most support for his handling of education issues. Just 39 percent prefer his approach now--down 16 percent from January 2002. Forty-three percent say the Democrats are now doing the better job in their approach to education issues.

Similarly, more Americans (45 percent) say Democrats have the better approach to handling Social Security issues. About one-third (32 percent) say Bush has the best approach to Social Security, down 12 points from January 2002. On the environment, 53 percent prefer the Democrats` approach, while 29 percent support Bush`s handling of environmental issues versus 43 percent and 38 percent respectively in January 2002. Finally, 42 percent of Americans prefer the Democrats` approach to energy policy, while 33 percent say Bush is doing a better job on the issue (versus 33 percent and 46 percent respectively in January 2002).

Bush has the lead over Democrats in his handling of foreign policy in general, with 48 percent of Americans preferring his approach to foreign-policy issues (37 percent prefer the Democrats` approach).

The NEWSWEEK poll is conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, which interviewed by telephone 1,011 adults aged 18 and older on Aug. 21 to Aug. 22. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.



© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:21 a.m. EDT August 23, 2003

Three British soldiers are the latest coalition troops to die in Iraq. Witnesses say the soldiers were riding in a sport utility vehicle when they came under small arms fire from an unknown number of men in a pickup truck. The British military is investigating.
As of Saturday, 273 U.S. soldiers have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, according to the military. The British government has reported 48 deaths. Denmark`s military has reported one death.
Some U.N. staffers have returned to work in tents set up at the battered Canal Hotel compound in Baghdad. Investigators and soldiers are still searching the debris for human remains and clues in the deadly suicide truck bombing Tuesday that killed at least 23 people, including the top U.N. envoy.
The U.S. administrator for Iraq says the Iraqi Governing Council has voiced frustration about the U.S.-led coalition`s inability to restore electricity to prewar levels, and the Americans have set a deadline for doing that. Paul Bremer says the Americans plan to get electricity fully restored by the end of September.
President Bush says "foreign elements" are infiltrating Iraq -- and may be aiding the recent rash of attacks there. He says Iraq is "turning out to be a continuing battle in the war on terrorism." But he vows: "We`re going to stay the course." He`s blaming both Saddam Hussein`s loyalists and what he called "al-Qaida-type fighters."
President Bush says the administration`s stepping up efforts to recruit peace-keepers from other nations. He says he`s confident more foreign troops will be joining the effort.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (KOH`-fee AN`-nan) says the United Nations is unlikely to order more troops to Iraq unless the U.S. agrees to let the world body help make decisions. Annan says the Security Council might consider a "U.N.-mandated multinational force," but that would require more than "just burden-sharing."
The Pentagon says two U.S. soldiers reported captured by an unknown Iraqi group were actually never missing. Lebanese T-V showed two American I-D cards with a statement from the group. The Pentagon says one soldier lost his I-D in Iraq but is in Texas now. The other soldier is also safe.
The flag-draped coffin of the U.N.`s top diplomat in Iraq has been loaded onto a Brazilian air force jet for a final trip out of Baghdad. Bagpipers played "Amazing Grace" while pallbearers hoisted the body of Sergio Vieira de Mello (SUR`-jee-oh vee-EHR`-uh duh MEHL`-oh). He was killed in the suicide truck bombing this week at U.N. headquarters in Iraq.
The American creating Iraq`s police force says Tuesday`s devastating U.N. bombing may have been an inside job. Bernard Kerik (KEHR`-ihk) says officials are questioning Iraqis who worked inside and outside the U.N. headquarters. Many guards had worked for Iraq`s secret service before the war. Investigators are checking to see if any guards failed to report for duty on the day of the bombing.
A senior Army general says supplying the force in Iraq has become a problem. General Paul Kern, chief of the Army Materiel Command, says Bradley infantry fighting vehicles have sustained so much wear and tear in Iraq that the Army is months short of replacements for their steel tracks. He says the Army has also had trouble supplying enough tires for Humvee utility vehicles and generators for electrical power.
U.N. chief Kofi Annan has notified Security Council members that he has appointed the U.N. humanitarian chief in Iraq, Ramiro Lopes da Silva of Portugal, as acting head of the U.N. mission. He replaces Sergio Vieira de Mello (SUR`-jee-oh vee-EHR`-uh duh MEHL`-oh) who died in the Baghdad U.N. complex bombing.
Turkey`s foreign minister says his nation could send peacekeepers to Iraq, but he stressed the soldiers would help with rebuilding efforts and "definitely will not be occupiers."
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Diehards who kill for a revolution
The UN bombing in Baghdad and yesterday`s shooting of three British soldiers in Basra bear the hallmarks of an attempt by Saddam loyalists to inspire a revolt. Can the coalition forces keep the backing of ordinary Iraqis while the attacks go on?

Jason Burke in London, Jamie Wilson and Patrick Graham in Baghdad
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer

There was no warning. The two vehicles, a standard Land Rover and a slate-grey four-wheel drive, had driven out of the British Army headquarters a few minutes earlier. Basra, at 8.30am yesterday, was quiet. The ferocious heat was keeping most of the city`s two million inhabitants indoors, despite the lack of power and water.

As the armed soldiers left the compound, a pick-up truck pulled out behind their small convoy. It followed the vehicles for a short distance then closed up. The men inside opened fire with Kalashnikovs. There followed, according to eyewitnesses, a short chase as all three vehicles engaged in a high-speed firefight. Then the British 4WD careered off the road and smashed into a wall. The pick-up drove off, leaving three British soldiers dead and another seriously injured.

The attack capped one of the worst weeks for the coalition in Iraq. On Tuesday a massive bomb destroyed much of Baghdad`s Canal Hotel, headquarters of the United Nations in Iraq. It killed 24 people, including the UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello. On Thursday, gunmen shot dead a US Marine in Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, bringing the total of Americans killed by hostile action to 64 since 1 May when George Bush declared the war in Iraq over.

Leaders in Britain and the US said they would stand firm. But doubts continued to grow over their strategy. Was the blast a sign that Iraq was, as a nation, rising up against the coalition forces? Is the situation spiralling out of control? Have the US and Britain won a war, only to lose a peace? Can the coalition strategy succeed?

The attacks in Basra and in Baghdad are under investigation. The bomb had consisted of up to 1,500lb of former Iraqi army shells, grenades and other ammunition packed around a core of high explosive. It had been driven, in an old Russian-built truck, to the newly erected security wall around the hotel and detonated directly below de Mello`s office.

De Mello, a suave Brazilian diplomat, wearing the slacks and open neck short-sleeved shirt that was his preferred dress in the oppressive summer heat, was in the middle of a meeting when, at 4.30pm, the explosion ripped through the building. He was discussing his favourite subject - human rights - with two other experts, Arthur C. Helton, 54, an American immigration lawyer, and Gil Loescher, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

The office, with its blue UN flag in the corner and black wooden desk, littered with papers and briefing notes de Mello`s secretary laid out for him to read, took the full force of the blast. Moments after the shockwave hit the corner of the building, it collapsed.

De Mello and Loescher, who were probably sitting next to each other on a sofa where the diplomat preferred to do business, crashed through two floors and landed on the ground level, trapped under piles of rubble but alive.

Sgt. William von Zehle, a 52-year-old retired fire chief from Wilton, Connecticut, who was working at a nearby military compound, was one of the first on the scene. Climbing down into a hole where two men were trapped, von Zehle began trying to free them. He had no idea who de Mello was, just that he was alive, conscious and in great pain. The two men talked as von Zehle worked to free de Mello`s legs. He gave the UN envoy a morphine injection but three hours after the explosion he stopped talking. He was dead.

Loescher was freed 15 minutes later. Terribly injured, he has been taken to a hospital in Germany where he is gravely ill. Helton did not survive the blast.

There are few clues as to who was behind the attack and it will take the FBI investigators some time to reach conclusions. There are various suspects: diehard loyalists to Saddam Hussein`s Baath party regime, Iraqis rising up against the Americans, or radical Islamic militants, possibly even connected to Osama bin Laden`s al-Qaeda.

British, American and Middle Eastern intelligence sources have told The Observer that elements from each group might be involved. The style of the attack - involving a big bomb in a vehicle directed against a spectacular target - suggests Islamic militants acting in the style of al-Qaeda. Bill Kerik, the Baghdad police chief, said that traces of flesh found in the wrecked cab of the truck indicated it may have been a suicide attack, reinforcing the suspicion of radical Islamic involvement.

There were two suicide attacks in the south of Iraq during the conflict earlier this year but such tactics were favoured more by the radical Islamic group Ansar ul Islam that was operating in northern Iraq until it was scattered in March by US special forces acting alongside local Kurdish fighters. There have been indications that militants from the group, many of whom have links to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups once based in Afghanistan, have been regrouping, particularly around the Iranian city of Yerevan.

Many fled into Iran after the attack on their bases and have since re-entered Iraq, according to US military sources in Kirkuk. Another suspect is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant, who many believe was behind the bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad three weeks ago.

It is also possible that a hitherto unheard-of militant Muslim group, possibly composed of Iraqis although more likely to have been formed out of the hundreds of Islamic fanatics who have been making their way to Iraq with the express purpose of attacking Americans, was behind the attack.

Yet, though the method of the attacks suggests Islamic militants, the targeting of the UN suggests the involvement of Baathist diehards. The strategy of Saddam`s henchmen has been to render Iraq ungovernable. Attacking the soft target of the UN, responsible for massive feeding programmes and other humanitarian activities in the country, would, everyone knew, cause massive chaos. With the UN blamed by many Iraqis for over a decade of punishing sanctions, it would also be popular.

In the short term, the tactic has been successful. One UN spokeswoman said at least half of its staff had left Iraq by this weekend. The Polish government has restricted its troops in Iraq to what are considered `safe` areas. The World Bank has pulled its teams out.

Many intelligence officers suspect Baathist diehards directed the bombing but used willing militants as cannon fodder. `The Baathists have been paying destitute Iraqis, some from the former army, to do their dirty work. If they can get someone to do it for nothing, they will. A pragmatic alliance with Islamic militants is very possible,` one intelligence officer said.

The highway heading north out of Baghdad leads past the Oil Ministry and the green half domes that commemorate the dead in the Iran-Iraq war and out into the poor Shia Muslim enclave of Sadr City. On a Friday afternoon, the street is a teeming throng of men, prayer mats tucked under their arms, returning home from the mosque.

Most of the men in Sadr - formerly Saddam - City, welcomed the invading forces. But many are also followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery young cleric who is seeking to become the leader of the Shia opposition, and who has denounced the US-appointed governing council as a puppet body.

Two weeks ago, attempts by a US Blackhawk helicopter crew to take down an Islamic flag provoked a riot in the slums, during which a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the Americans. In the ensuing firefight an Iraqi was killed and several others injured. Now a sign on a statue at the gateway to the enclave reads: `American troops not welcome.`

In Sadr city the grievances are social and economic but expressed in religious and political terms.

`When they came here the Americans promised us everything but they have delivered us nothing,` said Abu Yasser, 35, a former conscript in Saddam`s army. `We have jumped from one fire to another - the fire of Saddam to the fire of America.`

There are other dissenting voices. `We hated Saddam, but at least we had the power and the water, and at least we felt safe on the streets. Now everybody is afraid,` said Mussa Hamid, 41, a labourer. `Getting rid of Saddam was unbelievable, but now we have Bush and his lies instead. People here realise now they have not come here to help the Iraqi people. If they had, we would have electricity by now. They have just come for the oil.`

But, though the resentment is genuine, sentiments are complex.

Should the Americans leave Iraq? `No, No, No,` Hamid said. `If they go now things will not be better. Everything will be falling apart.`

For many, the key question is time. `I will not fight them yet, but I know people that want to,` said Hamed Hassan, another labourer, `They have done nothing for us. Before, when the Americans got shot we were sad, but now we don`t care.`

The problem for the occupying forces is that they cannot provide security and the basic utilities - and thus keep the support of many Iraqis - because of the continuing attacks. But to stop the attacks they need the support of the Iraqi people and basic security.

Those behind the campaign being waged in the country know this. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-dominated body that runs Iraq from a heavily fortified base in the centre of Baghdad, insists the violence against coalition forces is not orchestrated. But the events of the last week, from the attacks on oil and water pipelines to the bombing of the UN, suggests that all those waging the war are thinking the same thing: destroy the infrastructure and the means to deliver basic supplies and the population will eventually rise up out of sheer frustration.

So what happens next? The consensus appears to be that more troops and civilian specialists are needed to kickstart a recovery and break the cycle of violence. But no one can agree who should supply them and who should control them. The Americans want more nations to send larger contingents of troops to Iraq but appear unwilling to relinquish any military or political control in the country.

Many states, including France, have said they are willing to send troops but only as part of a UN-led force and only if, in return, they receive a stake in the political and economic administration of the country. The Pakistanis and the Turks, whose Muslim forces would add welcome credibility, are also placing conditions on any dispatch of troops. So are the Indians.

Large-scale international involvement would almost certainly require a new UN resolution. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw flew to America last week to talk to Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, about the various options.

The Bush administration has given no sign that it is prepared to give up any of its authority in Iraq. This may or not be a bargaining position. Whatever the case, all sides know there needs to be a decision taken soon - or the bloodshed will continue.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Farewell America
After six years, The Observer`s award-winning US correspondent Ed Vulliamy takes his leave from a wounded and belligerent nation with which, reluctantly, he has now fallen out of love

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer

Once smitten, it should be impossible to fall out of love with America. Who could fall out of love with that New York adrenaline rush, or the clutter of the 7 Train as it grinds on stilts of iron from Manhattan out to Queens through the scents and sounds of 160 first languages? Who could fall out of love with the mighty desert when a lilac dawn fades out the constellations in its vast sky? Who could fall out of love with the muscular industry of America`s real capital, Chicago, `city of big shoulders`, as the poet Carl Sandburg described it? It was insurgent Chicago that first captured my heart for America as a visiting teenager in 1970.

Now it`s time to leave the United States as a supposed adult, having been a resident and correspondent for exactly as long as Tony Blair has been Prime Minister - I was appointed that May morning in 1997 that brought Britain`s Conservative night to an end. Blair`s love for America seems to have deepened since; but love is both the strongest and most brittle of sentiments, and mine has depreciated. I still love that adrenaline rush, the desert light, those big shoulders; but something else has happened to America during my six years to invoke that bitter love song by a great American, BB King, `The Thrill is Gone`: `And now that it`s all over / All I can do is wish you well...`

I arrived in an America regarded by the world as `cool`. One can never be sure whether a President defines the country or vice versa, but this was Bill Clinton`s America.

I`m not quite sure what `cool` means in any context beyond a vague positive, but the Clinton administration turned even Washington into a vaguely `cool` place; one could spend a relaxed evening listening to the Allman Brothers Band with someone who had all day been advising the President of the United States over takeout pizza (George Stephanopoulos, who, admittedly, left the administration, disillusioned).

Meanwhile out in the world, intervention by the US was either welcomed by the persecuted of Haiti and Kosovo or else craved by (but culpably denied) those in Bosnia and Rwanda - as a force of deliverance, not of empire. Clinton`s declared quest did not always aim to embrace only the Americans. Terrorists then were spawned by the homegrown Right; proud to murder hundreds of their own countrymen, women and children with the Oklahoma bomb of April 1995, a bloodbath I covered during a brief American sojourn exploring the armed `patriot` network in which Timothy McVeigh - by no means a lone wolf - operated. Strange now to recall that stench of charred masonry, the floodlit wreckage, the rescue workers spluttering dust, the tearful, wandering bereaved displaying pictures of their `missing`... (scenes that would return to a different America, from a different quarter, six years later).

There was a deafening, bewildered silence that prairie night in the Iguana diner on the edge of Oklahoma, broken only by such musings as that of a man asking: `What is it people have got against us, that they want to come killing our kids?` The honest answer: a despised `federal government` headed by a man the Right - even beyond McVeigh`s militias - regarded as a usurper in the White House.

During my first full year here there was a lynching in east Texas: James Byrd, a black man, was chained to the back of a truck by three whites and dragged to his death, severed into 75 pieces. The subliminal connections were obvious: Mississippi Burning; the smell of evil that hung in the muggy air as thick as the sweet scent of pine trees, as I ended those days with a drive, a little dazed, listening to Emmylou Harris`s `Waltz Across Texas Tonight`. But Jasper, Texas, was not a cliché. When the hooded Ku Klux Klan paraded through town a few weeks later, most of the crowd which faced them down was white. When the murder trials began, sure enough: slat blinds broke diagonal shafts of sunlight, and the fan whirred around - straight from the movie - but 11 whites on the jury elected the single African-American as foreman and sentenced a white racist, Billy King, to death for killing a black man. This in east Texas, the most racially vicious slice of the Deep South; something was afoot even in that corner of Bill Clinton`s America; not a result but maybe a beginning.

Then, of course, there was the man himself. Bill Clinton loved it: I remember him in Arkansas, working a rope line to the bitter end, greeting stragglers long after the band had packed up and gone. And Monica was not the only girl who went weak at the knees. She just happened to be the one who took his fancy - and even that said something about him. It is surreal to consider the weeks I laboured over the political implications of uses for a cigar, and that an American President was subjected to a television grilling about `anal-oral contact`. The right-wing opposition called him a liar; Hillary Clinton blamed a `vast right-wing conspiracy`. They were both right.

There are perennial American themes that even Good Time Bill could not paper over. Those which cut a riptide beneath the most memorable places in my working America were: poverty and race. They define the nation`s poorest county: Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Badland of the Lakota Sioux, where I marched for land rights under a banner of Crazy Horse. Here, around the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, sighs the wounded pride of a people caught in a deep well of poverty, battling alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment at 65 per cent. And yet that pride burns again: the young - rebuking their parents` generation - are returning to tribal history and ancient lore, horsemanship and their language of old. Poverty and race define the Mississippi Delta, where the blues began, beneath the crossroads in Clarksdale between highways 61 and 49 where the greatest of bluesmen, Robert Johnson, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his wizardry on the guitar.

Forty per cent in this land that politics forgot live below the poverty line, drawn at $16,000 per annum. Even here, where a late sun strokes the billowing cotton, there is a healthy market in crack cocaine. Pastor Benny Brown of Jonestown, near Clarksdale, remarks: `I don`t really call this a rural area; more a "reservation"; a black poverty reservation.` `Sometimes I wonder,` pondered old Ruby Walker, sitting on her porch surrounded by cats, soon after her daughter had been killed in a shoot-out, `if they ever did really do away with slavery here.`

Poverty and race also define the country I call `Amexica` that runs along either side of the Mexican border, belonging to both countries and neither. The conurbation comprising El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, is a microcosm of new America; during my time here, Hispanics overtook blacks as the biggest ethnic minority. Juárez is a strong if blemished place, a harsh but pulsating city which is and is not part of the United States; its luminous colours are unmistakably Mexico but most of its workforce labours in US-owned sweatshop factories.

In ancient Mexican lore there lies behind the sun that shines a black sun which leaves this world to shed light upon another. The Aztecs believed the black sun was carried by the god of the underworld, and was the maleficent absolute of death. And behind the sunlight of the `Amexican` desert there is some maculate black light which gives nothing back; un-shining behind the music, the bustle and hot peppers tumbling from every open storefront. For in Juárez, the most depraved crime in the Americas continues, unpunished: the mass abduction, abuse, mutilation and murder of some 345 young women to date, invariably employees of the new American factories that pay rock bottom wages but do nothing to protect them. Here was a parable - in a single narrative - of the scourges in our American-led global economy. If there was a programme called `Desert Island Articles`, and I was permitted to write only one during my years in America, it would be that.

Strangely, it was an event with little bearing on indigenous Anglo-Saxon America that brought out the inimitable best, the essence, of New York: the 2002 World Cup, when hard-working immigrant America, of whatever generation or skin colour, took over.

Every national team played at home in some cranny of the city - in home-language bars and cafes to festoon with flags and weep or whoop. American citizens wearing rival shirts - Nigerian, Ecuadorian, Russian, whatever - would pass each other on the street with a dichotomous glance and smile of recognition that said, simultaneously: `Hail, fellow` and `Fuck off`.

The time difference was punishing; games televised at 2.30am, 5.30am and 7.30am. Immigrant New York, myself included, gave up sleep for a month. Up to Harlem by night: the Cafe Africa in `Little Senegal` around 116th Street, to watch the Lions at 2.30. After their team qualified for the quarter-final, the Senegalese danced and ran across the tops of parked cars through a ghetto dawn. Straight on, though, to Third Avenue for England or Ireland, to Queens for Turkey or Poland, and thence to grab a perch at the packed Caffè l`Angolo in SoHo for the Azzuri against Mexico, here a local derby. `Ecco la vera America` - behold the real America - said a correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Milan, and he wasn`t far wrong.

Most of America, however, shared the approach of the White House, and its reply to Mexico`s President Vicente Fox after he invited President Bush to a mutually convenient location on the border to watch their respective countries play each other, as a gesture of friendship. Fox was informed by an aide that `the President will be asleep at that hour` (2.30 am). I, however, was wide awake at the Cafe Margarita with Marco the existentialist Mexican hairdresser, who afterwards had to take three days off from working on the heads of the rich and beautiful, such was the pain of defeat at the hands of los gringos. By contrast, I was obliged to change immediately into a suit and - fuelled by tequila - board a plane to Boston and address a conference on war crimes. I was unable to find anyone in the departure lounge or at the conference who knew about their country`s lusty performance.

The gyre has turned three times in America since the Monica scandal engulfed Clinton`s presidency. First, after November 2000, with that long wrestle between George Bush and Al Gore; counts, recounts and hanging chads. As even a Democrat pollster remarked at the time, the moment James Baker III arrived to handle Bush`s side, the result was a foregone conclusion. Baker - lawyer to the Texas oil industry for decades and former Secretary of State to President Bush senior - was one of The Firm.

It is incumbent upon journalists, I think, to distrust conspiracy theories. But the problem with the conspiracy theory of the machine that lifted George `Dubya` Bush to high office is that it never lets you down; you wait for the trip wire, but walk on. This is hardly the place to recount my inspections of that mechanism but I did spend many weeks listening in Texas and days at the Securities and Exchange Commission sifting through box files, to become acquainted with its workings.

I wanted, just for instance, to find out which company bought Dresser Industries, once the world`s biggest oil services company, of which Prescott Bush (Dubya`s grandfather) was director and for which George Bush senior opened up the West Texas oil basin. It was Halliburton, recent beneficiary of a contract in Iraq, where Vice President Dick Cheney made his fortune after being Bush senior`s Defence Secretary. And on it goes. President Bush broke all records in the history of campaign finance to get `elected`. One of his biggest donors was `Kenny Boy` Lay, CEO of the Enron Corporation, operator of one of the biggest company frauds ever. And among Enron`s lav ishly paid consultants was, inevitably, Ralph Reed, former head of the right-wing Christian Coalition, recommended to the board by Karl Rove, the Svengali figure who managed all Bush`s campaigns in Texas, and is now the most powerful man in the White House.

The entwinement of politics around the corporate boardroom had been rehearsed during Bush`s governorship of Texas - once a nation, and most Texans would love it to be so again. But the Union prohibits that. So: if Texas cannot be a nation, make the nation into Texas.

For nearly a decade a group of people exiled from power during the Clinton years had been making plans. Their names are now more or less well known: Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Douglas Feith. In a series of papers they devised a blueprint for unchallenged and unchallengeable American power, military and political, across the globe, with the Middle East and Iraq as fulcrum. All that was needed to realise that dream - said a document produced by one of their many think-tanks, the Project for the New American Century - was `a new Pearl Harbour`.

The second turning of the gyre came, literally, out of the blue. Like a good reporter, I missed the first of al-Qaeda`s hijacked planes slamming into the World Trade Centre. But we grabbed coffee and ran down Sixth Avenue, against the fearful flow of people in time to catch the North Tower collapse into its own dust. I may owe my life to the policeman who blocked our way as I demanded to be let through his cordon, brandishing my press card, just as the South Tower tumbled in front of us.

No one could forget the vortex of shock, grief, dignity and insanity that followed. My block became a carpet of candles and flowers and New York was wrapped in the American flag and the stench of incinerating flesh. One could be forgiven for not realising immediately that this was America`s moment of opportunity in the world. As Le Monde`s headline put it: `Now, We Are All Americans`; never before had America so many friends across the planet - or so we thought. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice used that same word, `opportunity`. But opportunity for what? The White House and Le Monde did not, it turned out, share the same notion of what `We Are All Americans` meant. The other day the same paper carried another headline about America: `Seul contre tous` - alone against everyone. Well, almost everyone.

This is no time to recount the drive to war in Iraq, the third turning of that gyre, except to say that all the authors of the `Project for the New American Century` are now senior members of, or close advisers to, the Bush administration. And to add that as early as last October a former senior analyst at the CIA, Mel Goodman - in close touch with his erstwhile colleagues - was telling me how the agency`s assessment of Saddam Hussein`s weaponry was `cranked up` by political cadres within the administration.

I did not go to America to be a columnist or one of those people Michael Frayn derides in a hilarious essay asking `What is a Man of Opinion?` There are American voices which describe my own reflections more capably than I can, be it in words, pictures or music; some of which I here invoke - as valued friends, but, more importantly, as voices that cannot be easily ignored.

I had the honour and pleasure of befriending Susan Sontag - one of the world`s greatest writers - in New York. `People project a lot of different things on to America,` she says, `but it is the consistencies that are most striking. Look, Arnold Schwarzenegger may become the next governor of California; does that mean the way of life in California will change? Of course not. But places get their tone and colour from individuals. It would be a new era in the myth of California, just as the transition from Clinton to Bush was a new era in the myth of America.

`I think what we are seeing now, represented by the policies of the Bush administration, is an old American tradition, an imperialist tradition that has existed since the middle of the nineteenth century. But we are in for a busy ride. Reality has a way of landing in your lap and punching you in the nose. "Empire Lite" may not work; and are the Americans really ready for heavy Empire?`

I had the honour and pleasure of befriending David Turnley - one of the world`s greatest documentary photographers - in New York. `There was this crucial period,` he says, `after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when America was no longer centre stage; it moved to the sidelines and developed this sense of detached superiority. The era in which I grew up - in which to be a good American was to question everything America did - came to an end.

`And so we are left with an America which sees the world as a football game: you win or lose. It has lost all sense of nuance. And even though Americans do not like foul play in football - a clip in the back from behind - we are encouraging it in the world. We have become a nation with no idea what it means to grow up in a refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza, and no idea why people such as al-Qaeda - with whom I have no agreement at all, I hasten to add - dislike us so much.`

In New York I had the honour and pleasure of befriending John Cale, who, with the Velvet Underground and his prodigious output since then has proved himself one of the world`s greatest rock musicians. Cale, like me, comes from Britain (Wales); but unlike me will never return. However he says: `My love affair with the US, which began with music, took a dive when I heard that Clear Channel Communications [a vast network of local radio stations owned by a close friend of President Bush] had forced the Dixie Chicks to withdraw their statement of criticism of the Bush regime. And with the latest power outage, the level of trust in the regime (never great?) has also nosedived. Who knew that, of the three power grids constituting the US system, one was solely for Texas!

`The generosity of this once great country (of which I am now a product) is being obscured by a political fervour derived from something akin to the parody of the Communist manifesto that was around in the Sixties - "What`s yours is mine, and what`s mine`s my own." I see a "dauphin" in the White House while powerful figures range in the background, making resource theft a way of life... Meantime, I will stew in the poisonous atmosphere Karl Rove slides under my door each morning. I`ll write a song or two, turn up the volume and bury my dead.`

America was always a dichotomous, Janus nation - born of a revolution by democratic visionaries such as Tom Paine but built on genocide and enslavement. Enriched by immigration but made greedy by power and wealth. It was always a question of which America was in the ascendancy at a given time. I think that during Clinton`s presidency there were elements of that democratic America to the fore. Or at least there were by contrast to a country now redefining its role as an international citizen, a country where democratic rights, enshrined in the Constitution, are eroded largely by consent.

I am not leaving the country in which I arrived. The cafeteria in Congress changes `French Fries to `Freedom Fries`. Students are urged to monitor and report academics who oppose the occupation of Iraq. An Egyptian-American friend had a visit from the police after his seven-year-old son refused to sign a letter from his school to troops serving in Baghdad.

One`s love for and faith in America, therefore, would always be tested by counterpoint between opposites - as is that of the rest of the world. The longest queues for visas are invariably in those same countries where the American flag is burned most frequently, often where the liberties that America does afford are in short supply. But it is not uncontroversial to posit that George Bush`s America is not regarded as `cool`; that it`s not just me - that the world`s American thrill has gone too.

There are many, invariably woolly, ways to measure how America is perceived in the world: one was the relative absence of anti-Americanism on the planet`s streets until the invasion of Iraq. More instructive probably are the fortunes of quintessentially American commercial brands on the global market. Just this month, a survey by the RoperASW consultancy found that for the first time ever overseas sales by Nike, Microsoft and McDonald`s have fallen by 14, 18 and 21 per cent respectively).

My faith - if not the love affair - was resurrected just in time, during my last week, by an American muse specialising in the uplift of one`s personal and political condition. This resurgence took place not in the US but half a mile from where I was born in the form of a hurricane that blew through the Shepherd`s Bush Empire during the London heatwave: Hurricane Patti - aka Patti Smith. It was a ninth birthday outing for my eldest daughter, Elsa. The storm had blown for over two hours as Patti surged into her anthem and invocation, `The People Have the Power`, and then a recitation of America`s Declaration of Independence, that noble affirmation of democratic principle, casting off the yoke of Empire: `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights... When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a government...`

Then the text started to do something curious; Thomas Jefferson`s indictment shifted from King George III to a living namesake: `The history of the President of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations...`

Afterwards, backstage, the poet of rock and roll gave Elsa the black ribbon that had tied back her hair during the tour. Thank you then, Patti Smith, for my daughter`s birthday presents: the ribbon and, more importantly, a glimpse of the America with which I fell in love. And for giving that America - still there, still restive - the voice it deserves.


Back in New York there`s a bar called Nevada Smith`s, where life revolves around football. To walk in is to enter a warp not only of place but also of time: because of the five-hour lag between US Eastern and British time, Nevada`s is full on Saturday and Sunday mornings with people dressed in whatever colours, pints in hand, glued to the screens, singing songs we know and love from rainy afternoons in England, just as the rest of New York is thinking about breakfast.

The result is that those better-heeled New Yorkers walking silly little dogs or setting out for Eggs Benedict and a tedious directory of `today`s specials`, are confronted by such scenes as that after last season`s Worthington Cup final: a flowing river of unusually dejected Mancunians and jubilant Scousers along Third Avenue, one over the eight, bellowing heartily. So that a nation which is only just getting to grips with the global David Beckham phenomenon is faced with an early-morning rendition of: `Beckham, oh Beckham; get yer hair cut, yer missus is a slut..`

Oh well. Becks has decided to leave England now; but me... hmm... must be time to go home.


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Bombers could cost Bush the White House
With every atrocity, assurances of peace and progress ring more hollow as war and terror become part of the politics of re-election

Edward Helmore in New York
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer

The Bush administration is showing concern that the spiralling chaos of events in Iraq and Israel may damage the President`s re-election bid.

Although senior Republican strategists decline to discuss the prospect openly, some are whispering that the centrepiece of the Bush administration - handling of national security, and the war in Iraq in particular - could now become a vulnerability rather than an asset. One senior administration official conceded that the suicide attacks in Iraq and Israel last Tuesday made `by far the worst political day for Bush since 9/11`.

In less than a month since Bush proclaimed that `conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful` and pronounced that `pretty good progress` was being made toward Middle East peace and a Palestinian state within two years, the illusion of progress has been shattered.

With the road map to peace in Israel deeply troubled, Iraqi resistance to foreign occupation growing stronger, and the US returning both to the UN to ask for help in Iraq and calling on Yasser Arafat to rein in Hamas, Bush is being advised to revise his political message that conditions are improving with realism that there is unlikely to be a `peace dividend` by the time of the election in 15 months.

`We should not try to convince people that things are getting better,` said former Reagan official Kenneth Adelman. `Rather, we should convince people that ours is the age of terrorism.`

With the US economy improving, the apparent unravelling of Bush`s plan to bring about the peaceful transformation of the Middle East by invading Iraq is now the President`s weakest link.

`A couple of months ago, everyone believed national security was the President`s trump card,` said one Republican adviser last week. `Now, we could be in a position where the economy is growing and the vulnerability could be on the national security side.`

But continued chaos in the Middle East will further deprive the administration of its key justification that war in Iraq would ultimately make the world a more peaceful place.

Recent polls show that the Government`s credibility on Iraq has dropped in the past two months, with more Americans saying that they are sceptical about the intelligence used to justify the war. At the same time, 50 per cent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had clear ties to al-Qaeda. On Friday, Bush re-emphasised the connection, saying that he believes a `foreign element` of `al-Qaeda-type fighters` are moving into the country.

To offset the potential for political damage, Bush aides have begun preparing Americans for the long haul. Comparing the task to the Cold War, Condoleezza Rice recently wrote that the US and its allies will need to commit to `a long-term transformation` of the Middle East. In a speech on Tuesday in Missouri - a key state in the presidential election - Bush is expected to echo that line.

The dawning realisation that Bush`s foreign policy may have created precisely the opposite effect to the one intended has given opponents new vigour. Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, warned last week that Bush`s plan for a more peaceful world `has clearly not occurred`.

On the contrary, `the world is more apprehensive about our leadership`, Democratic presidential contender Richard Gephardt said. `The President seems oblivious to the fact that we`re over there almost alone. We`re not getting less violence, we`re not getting the country put back together, people are getting killed, and the forces are stretched thin.`

But Republican pollsters say that, although the percentage of the public that call the war and its aftermath a success has dropped from 85 to 63 per cent in three months, there is still no cause for undue political concern.

`There is a substantial potential for the occupation of Iraq to become a deep political problem for Bush,` John Mueller, an analyst on public opinion and war, told the New York Times.

`If things go well, people will lose interest, but if things go badly people are increasingly likely to see the war as a mistake. Starting and continuing wars that people consider mistaken does not enhance a President`s re-electability.`


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Alone, the US will fail
First the UN bomb, then the murder of three British soldiers: peace in Iraq will be elusive until reconstruction is truly international, says Will Hutton

Will Hutton
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer

The bombing of the United Nations building in Baghdad last week that left at least 23 dead, including the leading UN official Sérgio Vieira de Mello, put the Hutton inquiry into perspective. The drama of Iraq moved centre stage. What happened was an outrage, an assault on humanitarianism, international legitimacy and disinterested multilateralism.

Even if the UN has been compromised by the role forced on it by the United States, it remains Iraq`s last best hope. Those who attacked it revealed their fundamental value system to be breathtakingly at odds with those of common humanity. Their action is a commentary on the pre-Enlightenment barbarity of Islamic terrorism which menaces not just the Middle East but the entire West.

Yet there can be no retreat from Iraq now, whatever your original position on the war, as the French government - the leading critic of going to war - formally recognises. But if the rebuilding of Iraq is to be successful we must be realistic about the scale and duration of the engagement that will be required. As the latest atrocity claims three British lives in Basra, we also need to transform the framework and mindset of waging war to one of how to conduct the peace.

The priorities must be legitimacy, legitimacy and legitimacy; and there is no legitimacy in trying to reconstruct Iraq with the same pre-emptive unilateralism which characterised the launch of the war. The reconstruction must be internationalised as quickly as possible. But internationalisation is a two-way process. The US must give up its pretensions; the rest of the world has to be realistic about the scale of the challenge.

The mismatch between post-war reality and the Pentagon`s pre-war reconstruction planning is huge, revealing how ideologically blinkered America`s conservative leadership has been. Iraq`s reconstruction, believed George Bush, would be analogous to that of post-war Germany and Japan, and could proceed similarly but on more ultra-free market lines.

Iraq`s interim government would be assumed by a US military viceroy with an Iraqi advisory council to input local advice. The US would run all internal affairs; the United Nations, as May`s Resolution 1483 made crystal clear, would be confined to `promoting`, `encouraging` and `facilitating` those international efforts that would support the US viceroy in his aims. The US would have complete control.

Security was to be undertaken by the functioning police force which the Americans expected to inherit along with friendly elements of the armed forces; within months the US could expect drastically to reduce troop commitment. If additional help was needed, private security firms could be enlisted.

It was envisaged, for example, that a mere 6,000 private security guards could look after Iraq`s 300 kilometres of exposed desert oil pipeline. Production of oil was expected to more than treble to 3 million barrels a day by Christmas driven by a flood of inward investment from the great oil multinationals, and the revenue would be earmarked to finance the vital reconstruction of Iraq`s utility infrastructure. This would be led by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the ultimate in anti-state minimalism.

Its 600 officials would not do anything themselves, because it is an article of American conservative faith that state initiative in any form is pathetically inefficient; rather they would commission American companies (leavened with the odd British company as a concession to its participation) to spearhead reconstruction. Its budget could be small; Iraqi oil revenues would quickly kick in to provide the necessary supplementary finance.

Five months later nothing remains of this fantasy put together by the Pentagon, free-market think-tanks and Iraqi exiles. Iraq, it is obvious, is not in the same situation as post-war Germany or Japan. Rather, the entire apparatus of a capitalist democracy has to be painfully created from scratch - an exercise in state building from outside on a scale that has never been attempted before.

The Americanisation of political authority has helped justify the charge that the Americans are invaders rather than liberators; casting the UN as a supporter of American aims fatally discredited it and made it a target for Islamic extremists. Oil production, even before the latest sabotage on the pipeline network, was running at a third of the level needed; the Americans now openly acknowledge there is not a chance of production building up as projected.

As a result the CPA is going to have to find much more cash. Paul Bremer, the US administrator, now estimates reconstruction costs to be as high as $100 billion over the next three years. Just repairing the electrical grid and the water system will cost $13bn and $16bn respectively. This compares with the CPA`s original budget for electricity work this year - a mere $229 million.

On top of this there are the ongoing defence and security costs, already more than $50bn and running at $3.9bn a month. Put just the official projections together and the cost exceeds a cool $80bn a year; many private estimates believe it will be half as much again.

As for security, the pre-war assumptions were even more awry. If the US were to match, pro rata, the troop commitments to Bosnia and Kosovo (in which no US soldier died) it would need between 300,000 and 450,000 soldiers on the ground, estimates James Dobbins, variously the US envoy to Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia.

Given the escalating acts of sabotage, the requirement is at the upper end of the range. Since the US claimed it had the security position under control some weeks ago, deaths of American soldiers have continued at exactly the same rate. We need realism now, not propaganda. For, until there is genuine security, there is not a cat-in-hell`s chance of securing vital investment, resisting sabotage and making real progress in restoring electricity and water supply. And while these remain inadequate, Iraqi public opinion remains inflamed.

For some months now, the neo-conservatives have been on the defensive, their judgment having proved so obviously wanting. Bremer has upgraded the original advisory council to a governing council, attempting to give it more legitimacy by formally stepping up Iraqi input - even if 16 of the 25 council members are returning exiles.

Now he is admitting what the real financial costs will be, and even Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who before the war dismissed claims that the US would need hundreds of thousands of troops as `wildly off the mark`, has admitted he was wrong, just as he was to assume a functioning police force.

The neo-conservatives are beginning to eat humble pie. With their position weakening, last week`s atrocity provided an opening for the onset of rationality. Secretary of State Colin Powell is seizing the opportunity to launch a UN resolution that would enlist more international support, but the key states that would provide it - France, Germany, Turkey, India and Pakistan - are insisting that there should be a proper bargain. Support should be in exchange for wholesale internationalisation.

They are right. And the Blair government, guilty of tamely accepting the American terms for post-war reconstruction, has a chance to redeem itself. It must side unambiguously with the Europeans and fight for a proper approach to Iraqi reconstruction.

A new UN Resolution should entail a decisive move towards the internationalisation of Iraqi reconstruction and the legitimisation of political authority. There must be direct elections to the Governing Council immediately: the US has obstructed these so far on the grounds that the electoral rolls are inadequate but, in truth, because it fears it would lose control of the hand-picked council. On top of that, the US must propose a timetable for the council to become Iraq`s de facto Provisional Government with executive authority and full powers over the discredited CPA.

In return, the UN must plan for a peace-keeping operation with troops on the scale Dobbins argues for (more than 400,000). The European Union must commit to deliver at least a quarter of the total. Realism over security must be followed by realism over the scale and cost of reconstruction. This is a 10-year engagement that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, not all of which can come from Iraqi oil revenues.

This would be a deal of Marshall Plan proportions, but is essential if Iraq is to win through. The forces ranged against success are growing; the Armed Vanguard of the Second Mohamed Army which claims responsibility for the attack on the UN said it does not hesitate to spill `crusader blood`. These men make no distinction between liberal and conservative, hawk and dove, UN official or American soldier; we are all `crusaders`. We have to get Iraq right. It can no longer be left to the ideological stupidities of the Pentagon and American conservatives.


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Phillip Knightley: Doomsday for James Bond
The Intelligence Services - Should intelligence shape policy or vice versa? Rumsfeld decided it should, no matter how the spies squealed
24 August 2003


James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the Government, revealed by the Hutton inquiry, are - for better or worse - here to stay.

Intelligence bureaucracies such as Britain`s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the US`s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have traditionally seen their role as identifying monsters. Their officers go out into the world, keep their eyes and ears open and return with warnings for their masters of threats to the wellbeing of the nation they serve.

The one thing they do not offer is certainty. SIS lecturers at the service`s training school near Portsmouth draw the attention of recruits to a line from Sun Tzu`s The Art of War: "Unless someone has the wisdom of a sage, he cannot use spies; unless he is benevolent and righteous, he cannot employ spies; unless he is subtle and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence reports. It is subtle, subtle, subtle."

But the one quality the Western intelligence community has lacked since the arrival of the George W Bush administration is exactly that: subtlety. Since 11 September, Bush and the leading members of his administration have spoken of little other than certainty. Victory against terrorism is certain; the coalition`s moral right to attack Iraq was certain; that weapons of mass destruction will be found is certain; that the US will triumph over all its enemies is certain.

This soothing rhetoric is understandable; it counters the fear and uncertainty that Americans have felt since the al-Qa`ida attack on the World Trade Centre. But in attempting to impose certainty on US intelligence-gathering, the administration risks crippling the CIA. And since the CIA is the lead intelligence service in the Western alliance and what happens in Langley sooner or later spreads here, British intelligence is now also at risk.

This is how it came about. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and other neo-conservatives in the Bush administration saw no reason why the CIA should not be subjected to the same radical examination as has convulsed all other US government departments. The examination had two main aims. First, it would answer the fundamental question: should intelligence shape policy or vice versa? Second, it would look for a whole new methodology for evaluating the danger posed by the monster out there.

Rumsfeld and his supporters tackled the latter problem first. Traditionally, the CIA had two different sorts of officers: collectors and analysts. They often crossed over but Rumsfeld felt that the relationship was too close and that the analysing of intelligence material should be done not by intelligence professionals but by outsiders, preferably politicians.

Rumsfeld argued for a more intuitive (feminine, if you like) approach to intelligence analysis. He wanted a subjective judgement, "a connecting of the dots", which involved "imagining what you would do if you were in the other guy`s shoes". This led him to his byword about the threat from the monster, one repeated at every opportunity: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." In other words, just because there is no intelligence that the monster is out there does not prove that he is not.

Old-time intelligence officers were horrified at this approach and protested that, without the professional objectivity that CIA analysts brought to the job, politics would take over, the intelligence product would be "bent" to suit the plans of politicians, and that this would be courting disaster.

A group of retired officers even formed a lobby, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) which accused the administration of manipulating CIA intelligence about Iraq to fit President Bush`s political agenda - shades of the accusations here about the Blair government and British intelligence and the controversial dossiers.

Like the CIA, the SIS saw itself as running a service industry whose clients were the Government, the Foreign Office, various ministries, and the Armed Services. It did not deal with these clients directly but through the Joint Intelligence Committee, which consisted of intelligence professionals and high-ranking civil servants.

Before the events of earlier this year that have led to the Hutton inquiry, any idea that intelligence provided by the SIS would be used by the JIC to produce a dossier for public consumption would have been unthinkable. Former chiefs of the SIS would have been apoplectic.

And there we have the answer to Rumsfeld`s question: should intelli-gence shape policy or vice versa? Rumsfeld decided that policy should shape intelligence, that the work of the US`s intelligence community should be directed to furthering administration policy, no matter how loudly the spies squealed.

The same thing is happening in Britain. The Blair government has decided that the intelligence service is just another Whitehall department, there to further government policy. It is as if it is saying to the SIS: "We`ll decide who the monster is. Then you can give us the material to help make our case to the punters."

If traditional spymasters do not like this, too bad. The Government will find new ones who will do what they are told.

Phillip Knightley is the author of `The Second Oldest Profession` (Pimlico), a history of spies and spying
24 August 2003 10:46


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Marines took part in an exercise last week in Liberia. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is expected to ask for a review of peacekeeping roles.
August 24, 2003
Rumsfeld Seeking to Bolster Force Without New G.I.`s
By THOM SHANKER


ASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seeking to increase the nation`s combat power without hiring more troops, is poised to order a sweeping review of Pentagon policies, officials say. It will include everything from wartime mobilization and peacekeeping commitments, to reservist training and incentives for extended duty.

A senior Defense Department official said Mr. Rumsfeld would order the Pentagon`s senior leadership, both civilian and military, to rethink ways to reduce stress on the armed forces, fulfill recruitment and retention goals and operate the Pentagon more efficiently.

In essence, Mr. Rumsfeld will ask the service secretaries and chiefs and his under secretaries to address how the Pentagon can more efficiently use its troops at a time when the armed forces are spread thin by global deployments.

Should Mr. Rumsfeld eventually be forced to expand the military, whether by unexpected missions, future threats or a Congressional mandate, the effort should reduce the size of the reinforcements required, officials said.

The review will be seen in some circles as answering powerful members of Congress who have demanded more active-duty troops for the military. Lengthy deployments to Iraq drew scattered complaints from families of soldiers, and some reservists criticized their extended call-ups.

Some concepts being proposed as ways to enhance combat power challenge core military planning. One questions the long-term practice of earmarking forces in the United States for specific regional war zones, as opposed to ordering the military at large to stand ready to be sent wherever required. Another asks whether advances in intelligence-gathering and analysis allow the nation to anticipate threats with greater accuracy. Such "strategic warning" could direct more efficient plans for assigning troops.

Other proposals are based in pragmatism. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress he wanted to transfer to civilians or contract workers an estimated 300,000 administrative jobs now performed by people in uniform.

While some on Capitol Hill reject that total as high, one senior Pentagon official said that if even one-sixth of those jobs were converted, then the equivalent of more than two Army divisions could enter the fighting force without any increase in the number of paid military personnel.

In the same vein, Navy planners are complimented for designing ships that use new technologies to cut crew size by perhaps 50 percent.

Another approach is asking allies to help shoulder the burden. Officials say 3,000 Germans now stand guard at United States bases in Germany, replacing Americans sent to Iraq. Before Mr. Rumsfeld asked Germany to provide those patrols, thousands of reservists were almost mobilized for the mission.

Mr. Rumsfeld`s latest thinking on these questions is encapsulated in a working paper, titled "End Strength," which runs about a dozen pages and has already gone through four versions after discussions with his most senior circle of civilian and military advisers, said officials who have seen the document. End strength is the military term for total force levels.

"He said, `Let`s bring back answers so we can start to gather the information, start to make the analysis of where we are with regard to stress on the force, what we`re going to do about that,` " said one senior Pentagon official. "What does the force `end strength` look like in terms of what we need for tomorrow? This has got to be an intellectual pursuit as opposed to an emotional argument. That`s the secretary`s intent."

A heated debate over end strength is expected after Congress returns from its recess in September, as powerful voices on Capitol Hill have taken to op-ed pages to announce their coming fight for more troops.

"We need more troops or fewer missions," Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas Republican who leads the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on military construction, wrote in The Washington Times this week. "Do we have enough Army and Marine active-duty members for the post-Sept. 11 era of national security? My view is: We do not."

Senior Pentagon officials cite war games run by the Joint Staff indicating that the military — at present — has sufficient active and reserve forces to do the job. While Mr. Rumsfeld has said he would go to President Bush and Congress for additional troops if required, he also says that it would be an expensive mistake to enlarge the military without detailed analysis proving the case.

The debate is about balancing risks. On one side is the risk that there will not be enough soldiers to carry out diverse missions or that troops will not re-enlist after exhausting assignments that degrade their quality of family life and do not leave enough time for training.

That risk must be weighed, though, against the fact that money spent on personnel will not be available for new technology and modernizing the current arsenal.

Mr. Rumsfeld`s senior aides say that his view does not represent an antipathy to a larger military in general or to ground forces in particular. They say he is aware that increased troop levels carry a number of additional costs beyond pay and benefits: the more troops on the roster, the more it costs to house them, guard them and equip them — and pay them retirement benefits in decades to come.

Some of the arguments made by Mr. Rumsfeld, based on evidence from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, provide only a broad measure for required troop numbers.

For example, early lessons from those two wars are cited as proving that the military does not necessarily require "overwhelming force" — in numbers — to defeat an adversary if it brings "overmatching power." That power includes not only the number of fighters, but also precision weapons, accurate intelligence, speed of maneuver and joint missions that combine the combat punch of all the armed services.

Even so, the quick victory over Saddam Hussein has not silenced those who say more troops are required to stabilize Iraq and win the peace.

The strain on the National Guard and Reserve is of considerable concern, and officials will analyze how to increase the months actually served on duty. At present, with the promise of a 30-day notice of mobilization, — which in some cases was reduced to less than a week — several months of training and a month of demobilization, some reservists spend only six months on operations out of a yearlong call-up.

For active-duty troops, the Pentagon will review incentives for extended deployments.

Mr. Rumsfeld will ask for analysis on a proposed "Peace Operations Initiative" to create an international force for such operations, relieving the United States of pressures on its troops for missions like that under way in Liberia. The American role would emphasize logistics, transportation and intelligence. In the meantime, the Pentagon will assess how to pare down its commitments in Sinai, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Senior officials in recent days convened a number of invitation-only discussions with retired three- and four-star officers and civilian analysts to describe Mr. Rumsfeld`s ideas for reducing stress on the military.

"Rumsfeld`s goal is reshaping the entire institution," said Michael O`Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who joined one of the closed-door discussions at the Pentagon. "He is rethinking everything, not just reconceptualizing warfare."

The Pentagon`s archives are filled with annual reviews, quadrennial reviews and top-to-bottom reviews ordered by previous defense secretaries — but which only marginally restructured the department and the armed services. Mr. O`Hanlon warned that Mr. Rumsfeld`s efforts might founder, too, although he noted that Mr. Rumsfeld certainly found himself in a powerful position.

With two military victories in two years, Mr. Rumsfeld "doesn`t want to wait for a second term of the Bush administration," Mr. O`Hanlon said. "He is trying pushing this through, personally, now."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Marine Capt. Patrick J. Nash brought food to a retirement home in Diwaniya, where Americans are welcomed
August 24, 2003
Chaos and Calm Are 2 Realities for U.S. in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS


IWANIYA, Iraq, Aug. 19 — As the area around Baghdad endured a week of repeated violence, a happier scene unfolded in this city, a two-hour drive to the south.

American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.

"We like the Americans very much here," said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. "We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better."

Such is the dual reality that is coming to define the American enterprise in Iraq, a country increasingly divided between those willing to put up with the American occupation and those determined to fight it. While the areas stretching west and north from Baghdad roil and burn, much of the rest of the country remains, most of the time, remarkably calm. [On Saturday, three British soldiers were killed in the south, in Basra.]

Rather than fight the Americans, most Iraqis appear to be readily accepting the benefits of a wide-ranging reconstruction.

The two faces of the occupation give American policy makers something to take solace in and something to worry over. Four months into the occupation, the rebellion against American forces, though fierce, is still largely limited to the Arab Sunni Muslim population and its foreign supporters and confined to a relatively limited geographic area.

In much of the rest of the country, in places like Diwaniya and Mosul and Amara, American and British soldiers are finding a population that has, at least for now, made a fragile and tentative peace with the occupation. Violence still breaks out but increasingly in broad regions it no longer seems the norm.

In the north, the Kurds, long the beneficiaries of American protection, count themselves as America`s most enthusiastic supporters. In the south, the country`s Shiite majority, while restive and suspicious, has largely chosen to go along for now.

"I don`t accept the definition of a country in chaos," L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, said this month. "Most of this country is at peace."

But the violence in and around the capital, and the growing incidence of terrorism, seen in the suicide-bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, pose a grave threat to the American rebuilding plan. Both undercut the establishment of democratic rule, and make the Americans less confident about handing over political power to the Iraqis.

With the capital under threat of attacks, the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body ultimately expected to assume the reins of power, has increasingly conducted its business behind the marble walls of the presidential palace — away from danger, but away from the people.

The atmosphere in Diwaniya is far different. The 2,300 marines based here move freely about the city, tossing candy to the children, waving back to the parents. Not a single marine in Diwaniya has been lost to hostile fire since their arrival in April. There is not even a curfew.

"This is not Baghdad," said Lt. Col. Patrick Malay, who commands a force of about 950 marines in Diwaniya. "The Iraqis love us here."

By any standard, Diwaniya is fraught with problems, many left over from the war. Deprived of electricity and bottled oxygen, the ward for premature babies at the children`s and maternity hospital here has all but collapsed, and doctors say that babies are dying at a higher rate than before. The shortage of electricity has led to the closing of the local textile mill and tire factory, which employed hundreds.

Recent outbreaks of rioting here have shown that Diwaniya residents are impatient with the pace of progress and suspicious of the occupiers. Two recent demonstrations, one involving a failure to pay Iraqi laborers working on an American project, and the other a protest against the local governor, turned momentarily violent. The demonstrations, each involving a couple of hundred people, were dispersed.

"Are they going to pay us or not?" asked Asad Joda, who said he had worked for two weeks without being paid. "Every day I come here, and they tell me, come back tomorrow, come back tomorrow."

But for a city emerging from three decades of neglect and dictatorship, Diwaniya in many ways seems remarkably stable. For instance, there is none of the virulent anti-American graffiti that marks walls and alleyways across Baghdad.

So far, most of the anger shown here has not been directed at Americans. With hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring into the area, the city and its surrounding areas are rapidly being restored and in some cases improved.

Since April, groups of marines have been fanning out across Qadisiya Province to oversee an array of projects intended to revive the local economy, its government and education systems, while putting Iraqis back to work.

In interviews, Marine commanders rattled off a list of local projects: 86 schools renovated; the police station, courthouse and jail reopened. Some 2,500 police officers, many of them graduates of a one-week human rights course, patrol the streets. Hundreds of local men earn $15 a week clearing weeds from local irrigation canals.

The marines are even able to go beyond immediate postwar needs and move toward strengthening the civil society. They are supervising construction of a women`s shelter here, and they make regular deliveries to a local nursing home. They have even set up a Rotary Club.

"We are in lock-sync with the Iraqis," Colonel Malay said. "We want what they want."

It is difficult to judge the lasting impact of the reconstruction projects. The new coat of paint on the Dar Al Salam primary school makes the place look brand new. While the electricity flows erratically, some residents said they were getting more now than before the war.

Anecdotally, the efforts of the marines sometimes appear to be succeeding exactly as the policy makers in Washington intended.

"Every morning, I come to work with a passion to serve my country," said Aladeen Muhammad Abdul Hamza, who took a job in the new Iraqi police force. Mr. Hamza, a former officer in the Iraqi Army, is being paid $60 a month.

One day last week, Mr. Hamza scurried about the grounds outside the old textile mill, where hundreds of Iraqis employed in the weed-clearing had come to get paid. He did his best to keep order. "I know all about human rights," he said.

Even when things do not go especially well in Diwaniya, there seems to be a reservoir of good will. Much of it apparently stems from the historical predations suffered by the Shiite people at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Many in Diwaniya lost relatives and friends to agents of Mr. Hussein, and they have not forgotten.

Hassan Naji, a records clerk at the Diwaniya children`s hospital, is critical of recent changes but only up to a point. Like many at the hospital, he is convinced that newborns are dying needlessly because the hospital lacks the electricity to run its sterile ward for premature babies. Before the war, an emergency line kept the electricity flowing.

Mr. Naji could produce few records on the recent infant deaths, attributing the inability to the new freedom brought by the Americans.

"Democracy has ruined this hospital," he said, sifting through uncollated notes and jottings. "In the past, people really worked at their jobs, if only because they were terrified of their supervisors. We kept the most accurate records. We had weekly meetings on the worst cases.

"Now, with all this freedom, no one cares anymore," he said. "We don`t keep records anymore."

For all of that, Mr. Naji said, he would not pine for the days of Saddam Hussein. "Never," he said. "The Americans did a great thing when they got rid of that tyrant. Things could even get worse here and I would still feel that way."

"Believe me," Mr. Naji added, "most of the people in Diwaniya would feel that way."

The Americans could only wish that their welcome in Diwaniya was reproduced in towns like Tikrit, Ramadi and Falluja, part of the central and western core of Iraq, an area from which Mr. Hussein drew his ruling class. The destruction of his government brought an abrupt end to the privileges many enjoyed.

When American troops arrived in Ramadi in April, Sheik Fauzi Ftekhan Aburisha was the man they had to work with. Chosen by Ramadi`s tribal leaders as their representative, Sheik Fauzi struck a deal that allowed American forces to enter the city. He assured other tribal leaders that the Americans would leave them alone. He assured the Americans that they would not be attacked.

"I really put myself out for the Americans," he said in an interview. "I guaranteed them — gave them my word — no one would take up arms against them."

That did not last. American soldiers were killed, and Americans began hunting some of the people to whom the sheik had promised safety.

These days, he said, many of the town`s residents are so enraged that they have sworn to battle the Americans forever. The sheik, who counts himself a supporter of the Americans, is caught in the middle.

Whatever restraint the people had, they have lost, he said. "They will keep fighting."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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August 24, 2003
Inquiry Shows How Blair`s Inner Circle Made Case for Iraq War
By WARREN HOGE


LONDON, Aug. 23 — It was the biggest challenge the vaunted information managers of Prime Minister Tony Blair`s government had faced in their six years in power — how to gain support from the British public for an unpopular war.

During two critical weeks last September they held closed door meetings, exchanged e-mail messages and battled among themselves to produce a dossier of intelligence information that would alert people to the threat they believed was posed by Iraq`s unconventional weapons.

Throughout the months leading to the war in Iraq, the Bush administration relied heavily on British intelligence and the Blair government to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein.

Then last month they were forced to come together for another round of frantic maneuvering. A BBC report in late May called the integrity of that dossier into question and led to the death, apparently by suicide, of the source of the report, the weapons expert Dr. David Kelly.

This kind of activity normally takes place under deep cover in Whitehall, the complex of palatial Victorian and Georgian government buildings in downtown London where secrecy is the traditional norm and modern freedom of information practices have never taken hold.

But for the last two weeks, the inner workings of what has come to be known derisively as the "spin" machine of Mr. Blair and his powerful communications director, Alastair Campbell, have been laid bare during daily sessions of a judicial inquiry in a packed chamber in the Royal Courts of Justice.

Diary entries, draft document language, minutes of closed-door meetings, telephone conversations, private comments, gossip from a Ministry of Defense cocktail party, thoughtless asides, belittling remarks about colleagues and e-mail message texts have all emerged in testimony, with some of them boldly flashed onto an overhead screen.

"This type of language, if you put it out of context on the screen, is not the words perhaps I would normally use," Tom Kelly, an official spokesman for Mr. Blair, said when he was confronted with a display of his depiction of the struggle between the government and the BBC as a "game of chicken," to see who would flinch first. Mr. Kelly`s normal context is the safe one of anonymity, because under the rules of Downing Street briefings, the names of spokesmen can not be printed.

The hearings, conducted by Lord Hutton, a former chief justice of Northern Ireland, are focused on the death of Dr. Kelly and whether public pressures played a role in driving him to take his own life. Assessing what the hearings have established in that regard during the past two weeks, an editorial in Friday`s Evening Standard said, "The overall picture remains that Dr. Kelly was used as a football in what became a grudge match between Downing Street and the BBC."

But the exercise has gone beyond Dr. Kelly and turned into an examination of the government`s dependence on manipulating and controlling information. That skill that was once credited with helping the Blair inner circle maintain political discipline over a party that has a history of losing its way once in power. But these days, the practice is cited as the reason why Mr. Blair has lost so much credibility with the public.

The trail of evidence has reached Mr. Blair himself. His chief of staff and close aide, Jonathan Powell, disclosed that he had warned on Sept. 17 that it would be wrong for Mr. Blair to claim that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" to the world. When Mr. Blair presented the case to Parliament a week later, however, he said that Iraq`s program of weapons of mass destruction was "up and running," and the dossier spoke of a "current and serious threat." The prime minister is scheduled to testify this Thursday.

Mr. Campbell, in his testimony, appeared to have been successful in turning aside the inflammatory charge at the center of the disputed BBC report — that he personally intervened to "sex up" the dossier by inserting, over the objection of security chiefs, the claim that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons that could be launched in 45 minutes.

But he was portrayed as intensely involved in shaping the final document, even succeeding in having the phrase "may be" replaced with the word "are" in the crucial sentence about the Iraqis being able to deploy such weapons so rapidly.

Mr. Campbell was revealed this week to have written a diary entry about the effect of the BBC report on Mr. Blair and himself. It read, "Grim for me and grim for TB, and there is huge stuff about trust."

In a poll published in The Guardian on Tuesday, only 6 percent of Britons polled said they trusted Mr. Blair`s administration to tell the truth more than they trusted the BBC.

Much as in the Watergate hearings in the United States three decades ago, behind the scenes mandarins and faceless time-servers have suddenly become front and center in the public consciousness. Newspapers, usually starved for political news during August, have devoted pages each day to the story, with extensive transcripts.

One witness, Sir Kevin Tebbit, a career civil servant from the Ministry of Defense with such pinstriped bureaucratic rectitude that he is called "Kevin Paperclip" by the satirical magazine Private Eye, was asked this week by Lord Hutton`s counsel whether he knew about "the open government code."

His sure and silken responses came to a halt. "I`m not terribly familiar with that," he said. There was laughter around the room.

The hearings are not televised, but broadcasters have gotten around that restriction by staging on-the-air dramatizations, with actors resembling the real participants recreating the day`s testimony.

While the hearings have yet to establish how much government manipulation of intelligence information, if any, went on last September, they have exposed in-fighting and 11th-hour disagreements between various agencies and among Mr. Blair`s closest aides.

Internal e-mail messages from members of his staff that have been entered into the record showed more Downing Street input in the dossier in the days before it was published than Mr. Campbell has acknowledged. Aides freely complained that much of the evidence of the arms threat assembled by the intelligence agencies was circumstantial, that the argument was not compelling and that the document failed to establish intent as well as capability.

One of Mr. Campbell`s advisers, Philip Basset, warned: "Very long way to go I think. Think we`re in a lot of trouble with this as it stands now." Another, Daniel Pruce, said the dossier should make clear that Iraq had "enough chemical warfare agents to kill x thousand or contaminate an area the size of Wales."

Lord Hutton`s conclusion on how Dr. Kelly was handled and whether his treatment contributed to his suicide will only become known after the hearings end late next month.

But testimony thus far shows that after he came forward June 30 to identify himself to his Defense Ministry bosses as the possible source of the BBC report, the weapons expert became a pawn in a struggle between the government and the BBC.

Testimony showed that Mr. Campbell`s spin operation went back into overdrive, with his aides pondering the most artful way to leak Dr. Kelly`s name so his doubts about the BBC charges that Mr. Campbell had "sexed up" the dossier would become known.

In his testimony, Mr. Campbell distanced Downing Street from the eventual decision by the Ministry of Defense to identify Dr. Kelly or force him to testify in Parliament, but Sir Kevin Tebbit, the defense official, countered that his agency had no other choice given the intense pressure coming from Downing Street. Dr. Kelly`s body was found on a country road near his Oxfordshire home two days after he appeared before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee.



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August 24, 2003

A Six-Month Revival Plan for Iraq

The terrorists who destroyed the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad last week not only blew up the most important symbol of international involvement in rebuilding Iraq. They also fueled growing doubts among the American people about the Bush administration`s contention that Iraq is already on the way to recovery. In truth, Iraq is staggering ahead, at best, and the administration has yet to show that it has a realistic plan to produce tangible progress over the next six months.

It will take more than White House vows to stay the course. What is needed is a detailed plan for restoring Iraq`s security and economic viability, backed by the resources that are required to achieve it. This has to be accompanied by credible steps toward self-government, carried out in close coordination with the U.N. The patience and good will of most Iraqis have not yet been exhausted, but they won`t last forever.

The starting point must be greatly improved security for the Iraqi people, the international-aid workers and the United States occupation forces. More American troops would help, in particular intelligence specialists, special forces, civic action units, engineers and military police. Soldiers from other countries, including Muslim countries, are also needed. Currently, more than 90 percent of international troops inside Iraq come from either the United States or Britain.

Equally important is a larger police presence to control violent street crime. Iraqis who see their possessions pillaged, their sons threatened with armed robbery and their daughters fearful of rape will not look kindly on the American occupation. International police forces need to be recruited, ideally from Arab countries like Jordan and Morocco, while more Iraqi police are being trained. At least 5,000 international police officers will have to be urgently recruited.

Economic revival must begin with reliable supplies of water and electricity, without which neither normal life nor business activity can proceed. It will take $16 billion over the next four years to ensure safe and sustained water supplies. Another $13 billion will be required over a comparable period to rebuild Iraq`s patchwork electric-power network. Hospitals and health care are near collapse and will take billions to revive. Six out of 10 Iraqi workers are without jobs, and six million live in chronic poverty.

According to the best estimates, rebuilding Iraq is likely to cost some $20 billion a year for the next five years. It will be some time before the Iraqi oil industry is back to full strength. And other large donors have been reluctant to contribute until agreement has been reached on a strengthened U.N. role. So most of that money will have to come from the United States. That`s a lot to ask from American taxpayers, but far less than the cost of stationing large numbers of American combat troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Broader international support will not materialize until Washington changes its Lone Ranger approach. Last week`s decision to seek a new U.N. resolution is encouraging. But unless Washington is willing to accept a much larger U.N. role in developing independent Iraqi political institutions, other countries will continue to hold back. It is appropriate for America and Britain to remain in command of international military and police forces.

Without a stronger U.N. political presence, however, the Governing Council recently appointed by Washington risks being perceived as America`s puppet. America has not yet lost the peace in Iraq, but it could in the next six months if the Iraqi people do not see concrete benefits from the American occupation.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Friedman ist ein absoluter Verteidiger der Irak Invasion und ein persölicher Freund Bushs.

August 24, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Fighting `The Big One`
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


n the wake of the bombing of the U.N. office in Baghdad, some "terrorism experts" (By the way, how do you get to be a terrorism expert? Can you get a B.A. in terrorism or do you just have to appear on Fox News?) have argued that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is a failure because all it`s doing is attracting terrorists to Iraq and generating more hatred toward America.

I have no doubt that the U.S. presence in Iraq is attracting all sorts of terrorists and Islamists to oppose the U.S. I also have no doubt that politicians and intellectuals in the nearby Arab states are rooting against America in Iraq because they want Arabs and the world to believe that the corrupt autocracies that have so long dominated Arab life, and failed to deliver for their people, are the best anyone can hope for.

But I totally disagree that this is a sign that everything is going wrong in Iraq. The truth is exactly the opposite.

We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One. They don`t believe their own propaganda. They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq — a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

You`d think from listening to America`s European and Arab critics that we`d upset some bucolic native culture and natural harmony in Iraq, as if the Baath Party were some colorful local tribe out of National Geographic. Alas, our opponents in Iraq, and their fellow travelers, know otherwise. They know they represent various forms of clan and gang rule, and various forms of religious and secular totalitarianism — from Talibanism to Baathism. And they know that they need external enemies to thrive and justify imposing their demented visions.

In short, America`s opponents know just what`s at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America`s ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere.

One of the most interesting conversations I had in Baghdad was with Muhammed A. al-Da`mi, a literature professor at Baghdad University and author of "Arabian Mirrors and Western Soothsayers." He has spent a lifetime studying the interactions between East and West.

"Cultures can`t be closed on themselves for long without paying a price," he explained. "But ours has been a vestigial and closed culture for many years now. The West needed us in the past and now we need it. This is the circle of history. Essentially [what you are seeing here] is a cultural collision. . . . I am optimistic insofar as I believe that my country — and I am a pan-Arab nationalist — is going to benefit from this encounter with the more advanced society, and we are going pay at the same time. . . . Your experience in Iraq is going to create two reactions: one is hypersensitivity, led by the Islamists, and the other is welcoming, led by the secularists. [But you have to understand] that what you are doing is a penetration of one culture into another. If you succeed here, Iraq could change the habits and customs of the people in the whole area."

So, the terrorists get it. Iraqi liberals get it. The Bush team talks as if it gets it, but it doesn`t act like it. The Bush team tells us, rightly, that this nation-building project is the equivalent of Germany in 1945, and yet, so far, it has approached the postwar in Iraq as if it`s Grenada in 1982.

We may fail, but not because we have attracted terrorists who understand what`s at stake in Iraq. We may fail because of the utter incompetence with which the Pentagon leadership has handled the postwar. (We don`t even have enough translators there, let alone M.P.`s, and the media network we`ve set up there to talk to Iraqis is so bad we`d be better off buying ads on Al Jazeera.) We may fail because the Bush team thinks it can fight The Big One in the Middle East — while cutting taxes at home, shrinking the U.S. Army, changing the tax code to encourage Americans to buy gas-guzzling cars that make us more dependent on Mideast oil and by gratuitously alienating allies.

We may fail because to win The Big One, we need an American public, and allies, ready to pay any price and bear any burden, but we have a president unable or unwilling to summon either.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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August 24, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Gotta Lotta Stigmata
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

John Kerry is going to announce his candidacy for the presidency next week (who knew?) standing in front of an aircraft carrier.

That`s a relief. If he had used the usual town square or high school gym backdrop, what would we have thought about his manliness?

Dropping his heroic military service into almost every speech has not been enough, nor has mounting his Harley in a bomber jacket whenever a TV camera`s near.

Three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star in Vietnam should trump one lackadaisical Texas National Guard record, but we live in an age when "reality" is defined by ratings. So the issue is illusion: can Senator Kerry match President Bush`s ability to appropriate an aircraft carrier as a political prop?

Mr. Kerry, a Boston Democrat, had thought about announcing in front of a warship, wrote The Boston Globe`s Glen Johnson, but felt the need for something bigger, to stage a more chesty confrontation with Mr. Bush.

Even though his "Mission Accomplished" backdrop turned out to be woefully premature, W.`s "Top Gun" moment is immortalized with an action figure in a flight suit and the leg-hugging harness that made Republican women`s hearts go boom-boom.

In presidential races, voters look for the fatherly protector. In the 90`s, contenders showed softer sides, crying, wearing earth tones, confessing to family therapy.

But 9/11 and the wars that followed have made pols reluctant to reveal feminine sides. Howard Dean struts and attacks like a bantam, and wonky Bob Graham paid half a mil to plaster his name on a Nascar truck.

Out-he-manning the cowboy-in-chief, Arnold Schwarzenegger strides into the arena in a cloud of cordite, cigar smoke, Hummer fumes and heavier bicep reps.

Spike TV, the first men`s channel, offers "Baywatch," a Pamela Anderson cartoon called "Stripperella," "The A-Team," "American Gladiators," "Car and Driver" and "Trucks!"

Conservatives want to co-opt all this free-floating testosterone and copyright the bravery shown on 9/11. They disparage liberals as people who scorn "traditional" male traits and sanction gay romance.

The cover of the American Enterprise Institute`s magazine bellows: "Real Men: They`re Back."

A round-table discussion by conservative women produced the usual slavering over W. in his flight suit and Rummy in his gray suit.

"In George W. Bush, people see a contained, channeled virility," said Erica Walter, identified as "an at-home mom and Catholic writer." "They see a man who does what he says, whose every speech and act is not calculated."

Yeah. Nothing calculated about a president`s delaying the troops from getting home and renting stadium lights so he can play dress up and make a movie-star landing on an aircraft carrier gussied up by his image wizards, at a cost of a mil.

Kate O`Beirne of The National Review gushes: "When I heard that he grew up jumping rope with the girls in his neighborhood, I knew everything I needed to know about Bill Clinton. . . . Bill Clinton couldn`t credibly wear jogging shorts, and look at George Bush in that flight suit."

On the men`s round-table, David Gutmann, a professor emeritus of psychology at Northwestern, notes that Mr. Bush "bears important masculine stigmata: he is a Texan, he is not afraid of war, and he sticks to his guns in the face of a worldwide storm of criticism."

Stigmata, schtigmata. Shouldn`t real men be able to control their puppets? The Bush team could not even get Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraq Governing Council to condemn the U.N. bombing or feign putting an Iraqi face on the occupation. The puppets refused because they didn`t want to be seen as puppets.

Shouldn`t real men be able to admit they made a mistake and need help? Rummy & Co. bullied the U.N. and treated the allies like doormats before the war, thinking they could do everything themselves, thanks to the phony optimistic intelligence fed to them by the puppet Chalabi. No wonder they`re meeting with a cold response as they slink back.

Shouldn`t real men be reducing the number of Middle East terrorists rather than increasing them faster than dragon`s teeth?

Could the real men please find some real men?



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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U.S. Recruiting Hussein`s Spies
Occupation Forces Hope Covert Campaign Will Help Identify Resistance

By Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Aug. 23 -- U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The extraordinary move to recruit agents of former president Saddam Hussein`s security services underscores a growing recognition among U.S. officials that American military forces -- already stretched thin -- cannot alone prevent attacks like the devastating truck bombing of the U.N. headquarters this past week, the officials said.

Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, one senior U.S. official said, despite sometimes adamant objections by members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits. While U.S. officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating with a force that embodied the ruthlessness of Hussein`s rule, they assert that an urgent need for better and more precise intelligence has forced unusual compromises.

"The only way you can combat terrorism is through intelligence," the senior official said. "It`s the only way you`re going to stop these people from doing what they`re doing." He added: "Without Iraqi input, that`s not going to work."

Officials are reluctant to disclose how many former agents have been recruited since the effort began. But Iraqi officials say they number anywhere from dozens to a few hundred, and U.S. officials acknowledge that the recruitment is extensive.

"We`re reaching out very widely," said one official with the U.S.-led administration, who like most spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitivity over questions of intelligence and sources.

Added a Western diplomat: "There is an obvious evolution in American thinking. First the police are reconstituted, then the army. It is logical that intelligence officials from the regime would also be recruited."

Officials say the first line of intelligence-gathering remains the Iraqi police, who number 6,500 in Baghdad and 33,000 nationwide. But that force is hampered in intelligence work by a lack of credibility with a disenchanted public, and its numbers remain far below what U.S. officials say they need to bring order to an unruly capital. Across Iraq, walk-in informers have provided tips on weapons caches and locations of suspected guerrillas, but many Iraqis dismiss those reports as haphazard and sometimes motivated by a desire for personal gain.

The emphasis in recruitment appears to be on the intelligence service known as the Mukhabarat, one of four branches in Hussein`s former security service, although it is not the only target for the U.S. effort. The Mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear in ordinary Iraqis, was the foreign intelligence service, the most sophisticated of the four. Within that service, officials have reached out to agents who once were assigned to Syria and Iran, Iraqi officials and former intelligence agents say.

For years, U.S. relations with both Syria and Iran have remained tense and, if anything, have deteriorated since American forces overthrew Hussein`s government on April 9. Once-vigilantly patrolled borders stretching hundreds of miles are remarkably porous, and L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, has openly accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to enter Iraq. A senior American official said those fighters inside Iraq, mainly from Saudi Arabia and Syria, number between 100 and 200.

The emphasis on intelligence mirrors a decision earlier this month by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. ground forces, to minimize large military sweeps to the north and west of Baghdad. Launched in June and July, the sweeps rounded up hundreds of Iraqis, but angered residents who complained of mistreatment, arbitrary arrests and humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers.

Sanchez and others have suggested that the anger caused by those raids could bolster the support for guerrillas, who are thought to number in the thousands, mainly in the Sunni Muslim-dominated regions that provided Hussein much of his support.

The guerrilla tactics have grown in sophistication over the four months of the occupation. But U.S. officials said the guerrillas remain decentralized, with no sign yet of national coordination. In the view of Bremer, a former counterterrorism specialist, and other U.S. officials, their amorphous nature makes them harder to stamp out, and makes more pressing the need for intelligence to pinpoint raids and create the possibility of infiltrating the groups.

"The expectation is that we`re going to have to fight it out," one senior official said.

The official said it might require 500,000 U.S. troops, perhaps far more, to secure every potential target in the country -- an unlikely prospect, given that many U.S. allies are balking at the prospect of sending more soldiers, especially without a U.N. mandate. The United States has 132,000 troops in the country, and there are 17,000 other soldiers, the majority of them British.

"The key is to try to stay ahead of this game and prevent it from happening," the senior official said.

At a news conference today, Bremer repeatedly stressed the need for better intelligence, saying that U.S. authorities were "constantly working to refine and upgrade our intelligence capabilities."

The goal, he said, was "to find and, if necessary, kill as many of them as possible before they find and kill us."

Hussein`s security forces were a suffocating presence in Iraq and still cast a long shadow.

Of the four security branches, the Mukhabarat was the best-treated and often supplied agents for the other branches. The largest was internal security, known as Amn al-Amm, which focused on domestic intelligence. The third was special security, which protected government officials. These three answered to the presidency. Only military intelligence was nominally independent of Hussein`s inner circle and operated within the Defense Ministry. The Baath Party, with membership in the millions, provided a check of sorts, with its almost endless network of informers in every town and village.

Within the Mukhabarat, former intelligence officers say, the branches dedicated to Iran, Israel and, during the 1990s, the United Nations were the most important. One officer, a 23-year veteran who spied on the United Nations, said about 100 agents worked on Iran, between 75 and 100 on the United Nations and 50 each on Israel and Syria, in addition to their networks and contacts.

Earlier this summer, Bremer dissolved those services, along with the information and defense ministries. But Wafiq Samarrai, a former military intelligence chief who went into exile in 1995 and retains contacts, said U.S. officials were seeking to reconstitute them in some form. "They are trying to rebuild it very quietly," he said.

One officer, who was not contacted by the Americans, said he believed that about 300 people were being recruited. Adil Abdul Mahdi, the director of the political bureau for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the groups taking part in the Governing Council, said his organization has a list of almost 20 names of recruited officers from the dreaded Fifth Section, an organ inside military intelligence that focused on Iran. He said his group believed that at least one of those agents was sent to the United States for training last month. An official with the U.S.-led administration said he was not aware of agents having been sent to the United States.

While not disclosing how they check the operatives, U.S. officials said they believed some agents remained "fairly untainted" by Hussein`s government. But they said they recognized the potential pitfalls in relying on an instrument loathed by most Iraqis and renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment.

"We have to be very careful in how we vet them, in how we go through their backgrounds," the senior American official said. "We don`t want to put a cancer right in the middle of this."

Another official called the recruitment part of an ongoing struggle between principle and what he called the practical needs of the occupation. "Pragmatically, those are people who are potentially very useful because they have access to information, so you have to compromise on that," he said. "What we need to do is make sure they are indeed aware of the error of their ways."

While many Iraqi officials say they are aware of the recruitment, some have spoken against the use of former operatives, and others have warned against reconstituting an intelligence service before an independent Iraqi government takes charge. Former exiles who cooperated with the Americans were trailed by Iraqi intelligence for years, and among them the issue is particularly sensitive. "We`ve always criticized the procedure of recruiting from the old regime`s officers. We think it is a mistake," Mahdi said. "We`ve told them you have some bad people in your security apparatus."

The objections come in the context of a struggle between Bremer and the Governing Council over the degree of Iraqi control over the security services. Bremer said today that despite Iraqi objections, security will remain in the hands of U.S. forces. But many Iraqis, both former operatives and U.S.-allied officials, are dismissive of the U.S. ability to run intelligence inside the country. They say U.S. officials lack the means to recruit effective networks and are overwhelmed with information of dubious quality.

"There`s a difference between how we perceive things and how they react," said one council member. "There`s no quick response to intelligence. The Americans have huge quantities of it, most of it nonsense. They have no means of distinguishing."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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British Aim to Defuse Tensions With Iraqis
Some Problems Persist as Troops in the South Try to Avoid Mistrust Plaguing Towns Run by U.S.

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page A16


BASRA, Iraq -- The mourners milled and murmured angrily in a parking lot, preparing to march. A makeshift coffin was mounted on a truck, and a huge tribal banner was hoisted aloft, to be rattled in a traditional sign of defiance. A Koranic chant rose as the crowd of men, beating their chests in a slow rhythm, began moving toward the British military headquarters.

The protest last weekend had all the makings of an ugly incident, fueled by the same explosive combination of harsh summer heat, utility shortages, joblessness and resentment against foreign occupation that unleashed two days of rioting and clashes with British troops in this dilapidated Persian Gulf port city on Aug. 9 and 10, leaving two Iraqis and a Nepalese security guard dead.

But this time, the dynamics on both sides were different -- far more typical of the low-key, culturally respectful dealings that have marked four months of British military occupation in southern Iraq, the Shiite Muslim heartland that was systematically repressed by former president Saddam Hussein`s government.

In contrast, considerable mistrust and tension have plagued U.S. military relations with Iraqis in more hostile communities in the north, including some Sunni Muslim areas that supported Hussein and have been the targets of U.S. raids, as well as some impoverished Shiite districts whose religious leaders have been agitating against foreign occupation.

A total of 12,000 British troops are stationed in Iraq, a much smaller contingent than the U.S. force of about 140,000. Since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat had ended in Iraq, 64 American troops have been killed in hostile action, while only 10 British forces have died at enemy hands..

Yesterday in Basra, three British soldiers were killed and one was wounded when gunmen in a car fired at their vehicle, causing it to crash into a wall. Officials said it was not clear whether the attackers deliberately targeted the troops, whose vehicle did not have highly visible markings, or whether they were simply carjackers.

At dusk in Basra last Sunday, as several hundred demonstrators approached the heavily guarded British base, a half dozen combat soldiers waited impassively at the gates, rifles ready but pointed downward. Fifty yards away, the march halted and several delegates continued forward until they were face to face with the silent British troops.

One was the uncle of Azhar Fawzi, 25, who had been shot dead by British forces several days before. The Iraqis said his death was a dreadful mistake during a wedding procession through the Basra streets that was punctuated by traditional celebratory gunfire. The uncle began speaking in a formal, dignified voice, then broke down in a fit of weeping.

"Did my boy do anything wrong? Did he shoot you?" demanded Mohsin Hashim, 43, his voice rising in anguish. "I tried to explain about the marriage celebration, but they shot him like animals. His father was executed by Saddam. We opened our doors to the British because they got rid of Saddam, but now they have killed my boy, and for what?"

The British soldiers listened politely. The post commander murmured repeatedly how sorry he was, quietly asking that the marchers move to one side of the road so military traffic could pass. After a few moments, a British political adviser appeared, opened the gate, and invited the distraught Iraqis inside the base for tea.

"We`ve had a lot of experience in situations like this. We have all served in Northern Ireland, and some of us have also been in Afghanistan," the commander explained, keeping one eye on the waiting marchers. "We can see their intentions are peaceful, and we want to make sure nothing goes wrong."

As Iraq`s second-largest city and the surrounding region bake in 120-degree heat, with electricity working only intermittently, fuel supplies curtailed by shortages and smuggling, prices rising and thousands of men out of work, all the problems that culminated in the recent spate of violence are still very much in evidence.

There are widespread complaints of hardship. Children break out in heat rashes. Fishing boats that normally ply the Persian Gulf have been idle for weeks along the Shatt al Arab canal that bisects Basra. Ice blocks that once sold for about 35 cents now cost $2.50 or more at dripping roadside stands. Families must obtain water from filthy public taps, sucking the first few drops through plastic hoses.

"We start our day exhausted, because when the power goes off we can only get a few hours of sleep," said Adel Ebadi, 47, a teacher whose family lives in a small apartment. "We can`t keep any meat or fish in the refrigerator, and the children get sick from spoiled food. My wife has to go down to get water every morning because there is no pressure to pump it upstairs."

But despite the recent explosion of pent-up frustrations, and the continued finger-pointing at foreign authorities for failing to restore basic services and control economic sabotage, Basra residents seem anxious to avoid another eruption of unrest and to preserve what, with minor exceptions, has been an incident-free coexistence with British forces.

British authorities, for their part, moved quickly after the riots to partly restore power by using some of their own reserves, while noting that the underlying problems -- a badly damaged oil industry and power infrastructure, sabotage of pipelines and persistent smuggling of fuel into Kuwait for more profitable prices -- require considerable time and intensive efforts to solve.

"It seems they are trying now," acknowledged Hassan Jabbar, 50, who sells thick blocks of ice from his truck at a traffic intersection. "The electricity is a little better than it was. But the British need to provide better protection against smuggling, because all the trouble stems from these shortages."

In recent days, British troops have begun escorting every tanker truck convoy carrying fuel from the Basra refinery to Baghdad, which is about 250 miles northwest. They also inspect every local boat that heads out of the Shatt al Arab into the gulf. But for many people who depend on fuel to earn a living, one man`s crime is another`s survival.

For weeks, dozens of trawlers have been tied up to a quay along a public park. Because of shortages, boat owners have been allotted a monthly quota of diesel that is half the customary amount, making most fishing expeditions into the gulf not worth the effort. The only alternative, several owners suggested, is to hide extra fuel below decks -- and risk being caught by the British.

"We need three tons of fuel for 10 days in the gulf. With half that, we may run out before we find a school of fish. So mostly we just sit here and sing," said Capt. Bayub Abdullah, 40, whose 90-ton vessel was bobbing at the quay with its nets rolled up on deck. "I`ve been at sea since I was 10, and I miss it."

The only alternative, Abdullah said obliquely, is "very expensive and risky." He did not elaborate, except to repeat a story circulating widely in Basra about a man who was recently caught by the British. He was carrying two barrels of oil to a ship on his horse cart and had to pay the large sum of $200 to secure his release. "We have limited dreams, and we only want enough fuel to do our jobs," the captain added. "But we`re scared if we buy even two or three barrels, we may be arrested."

Some community leaders here said that while most Basra residents are willing to tolerate the current hardships and have maintained a generally favorable impression of the British, several political and religious groups have been manipulating public sentiment against the foreign occupation in order to gain influence in the post-Hussein power scramble.

"Some of the unrest has been spontaneous, but there are also organized groups who have been trying to spark it," said Qasim Alwan, an artist and founder of Basra`s newly formed Free Democratic Gathering. "We have been trying to calm the situation, and the British seem to be trying to avoid clashing with powerful parties, but there are still people with negative motives and personal interests who are trying to lead the fire to their hearth."

At the demonstration last weekend, which was organized by a Shiite political group, leaders said they had no desire to clash with British forces. But they warned that if the British do not make a concrete response soon to their demands for formal atonement in the wedding death, their methods might quickly change.

"For now we are acting in a peaceful manner, but what they did was unreasonable and aggressive," said Adel Hamoud, 36, a leader of the group, as the marchers assembled in the parking lot. "By killing this boy, the British have injured the dignity of all Iraqis. If they do not agree to respect our people, we will have a much more serious response."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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11 Killed In Ethnic Violence In N. Iraq
U.S. Troops Intervene In Riots, Slaying Six

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page A16


TUZ KHURMATU, Iraq, Aug. 23 -- An ethnic feud over a religious shrine in this dusty town north of Baghdad escalated into riots in which eight people were killed here Friday and three others slain today in Kirkuk, 50 miles north.

U.S. troops trying to quell the violence between Kurds and ethnic Turkmens killed three of the people in Tuz Khurmatu and three in Kirkuk, the U.S. military said. By dusk, Tuz, as the Iraqis call the town, was calm, although Apache attack helicopters made a series of air patrols at sunset. In Kirkuk this evening, however, a couple of explosions of unknown origin rocked the city.

Mounting attacks on U.S. troops have overshadowed simmering ethnic tensions among Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs in the north. But the eruption of communal violence and the speed with which the problems spread beyond Tuz Khurmatu was a stark reminder that the issue has not disappeared. Formerly displaced Kurds and resident Arabs continue to tussle over property in and around Kirkuk. Turkmens, a small minority in Iraq, accuse Kurds of trying to terrorize them out of their homes in Kirkuk and surrounding areas. Kurds claim that the Turkmens form a fifth column for Turkey, which opposes Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in the north.

Meanwhile today in southern Iraq, until recently a relatively quiet region, three British soldiers were killed in an ambush in Basra, the second-biggest city in Iraq. An attacker fired on their two-vehicle convoy, and one of the vehicles lost control and crashed. Shiite Muslims, the largest religious group in Iraq, dominate Basra and are vying for control in postwar Iraq after being excluded from power during President Saddam Hussein`s rule.

"I`ve never hidden the fact that we`ve had security problems," L. Paul Bremer, the American civilian administrator in Iraq, said today. He called the past week a "grim one" and said suspicion for Tuesday`s suicide truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters fell on loyalists to Hussein, foreign militants or a combination of both. The bombing killed 23 people.

In northern Iraq, the violence started Thursday when a group of Turkmen Shiites decided to march to the shrine of Imam Ali Zein Abeddine, one of their most revered holy men. The domed shrine had been destroyed during the Hussein era. Townspeople rebuilt it after the Iraqi leader was deposed, and Thursday was its inauguration.

On the way out of town, however, the Turkmens encountered hostile Kurds, who are Sunni Muslims, and exchanged insults with them. One of the few things that Tuz Khurmatu residents agree on is that religion played a secondary role in the dispute: The primary source of the tension between Kurds and Turkmens is a political struggle over the administration of Tuz Khurmatu.

Overnight, someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the shrine`s dome, caving it in. Friday morning, enraged Turkmens marched through town. Gunfire broke out, and U.S. armored vehicles and helicopters attached to the 173 Airborne Brigade fought off the rioters, U.S. officials said. Three people were killed in the exchanges.

Today in Kirkuk, Turkmens marched on the heavily fortified mayor`s office. Shooting broke out, and the Turkmens burned a police station as well as a Kurdish flag. U.S. troops guarding city hall intervened.

In Baghdad, Turkmens also protested, but no violence was reported.

Tuz Khurmatu police chief Abbas Mohammed Amin, a Kurd, said Hussein supporters and "Islamic extremists" were behind the violence. "Anyway, everyone has a gun here," he said, "so once problems began, people were sure to die."

Members of his police force retreated when the protesters began firing at them. "It was like breaking up a fight between husband and wife. They turned on us," said Amin, whose force is majority Kurd.

Hashem Nori Hassan, a member of the Turkmen Front political party, charged that the Kurds shot first and police let them get out of control. "We don`t feel in Tuz that we are properly represented. The Americans appointed a Kurdish mayor. The police chief is Kurd. Property from the regime has been given to the Kurds. Yet, we are the majority. The name of the town is in Turkmen language!" he said. He was nursing a slightly wounded right thigh in his living room.

At the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Yusef Younis Johar, the local leader of the party, blamed the violence on Ansar al-Islam, a group with links to the al Qaeda terrorist network. "It wasn`t us," he said. "The Turkmens started the shooting and the terrorists blew up the shrine."

Capt. David Swenson of the 1st Armored Division, who is in charge of Tuz Khurmatu, spent part of today trying to persuade local leaders, imams and clan chieftains to avoid revenge attacks. "I want the families of the victims to visit each other and make peace," he said.

The Kurds and Turkmens of Tuz Khurmatu have been squabbling over the town`s place on a future map of Iraq, Swenson added. The Kurds want it joined to an expanded autonomous zone they hope to get under a new constitution. The Turkmens want to keep Tuz Khurmatu attached to a district containing Arab, Sunni Muslim towns to the east.

The violence in Kirkuk also began with a march, this one by local Turkmens, in solidarity with their ethnic kin in Tuz Khurmatu. At one point, shots rang out as the marchers passed the precinct police office. The Turkmens say the Kurds fired first; the Kurds claim it was the Turkmens.

When the marchers reached city hall, they burned the Kurdish flag, and more shots were fired. U.S. troops moved to disperse the crowd. "The helicopters appeared and everybody fled," said Alfan Asse, a Turkmen witness. "We`re afraid of the Kurds. I work in the bazaar, and every once in a while, someone shouts, `The Kurds are coming, the Kurds are coming.` Everyone closes their shop. Peace in this town is only on the surface."

Sgt. Todd Oliver, a U.S. military spokesman, said the Americans returned fire from the mob. He said outside agitators ignited the shooting, but declined to say who they were. As in Tuz Khurmatu, U.S. military officials met with leaders to try to dampen fiery emotions.

Outside city hall, someone had scrawled graffiti that read, "Avenge Tuz." Inside, the U.S.-installed mayor, Abdul Rahman Mustafa, insisted that today`s bloodletting was an anomaly.

"We are proud of our tranquility," he said of Kirkuk. "We`re investigating. We think it`s outsiders. Someone who wants to make trouble here. But Kirkuk is really peaceful." He left his office through an anteroom filled with 18 bodyguards, all carrying AK-47 rifles. They boarded a convoy of armored cars for the ride home.

Correspondent Anthony Shadid and staff writer Theola Labbé in Baghdad contributed to this report.



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Dueling Timelines in Iraq




Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page B06


IF A TERRIBLE WEEK in the Middle East shook any of the complacency out of the Bush administration, there was little public evidence. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell traveled to United Nations headquarters to express condolences for the U.N. staffers killed in Tuesday`s bombing in Baghdad and to seek more foreign contributions of troops to aid U.S. forces in Iraq. But he came without any stated willingness to do what would be needed to attract such contributions, that is, to share political authority over Iraq with the United Nations. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld continued to maintain that U.S. troop strength in Iraq is adequate. There was no talk of an accelerated effort of any kind to improve daily life for Iraqis.

The administration seems convinced that time is on its side in Iraq. It acknowledges grave problems but counsels patience. As "regime remnants" are captured or killed, officials say, Iraq will become safer and Iraqis will feel freer to work with U.S. authorities. Maybe that is right. Last week U.S. forces captured two of the highest-ranking and most odious figures from Saddam Hussein`s regime, which suggests an encouraging level of intelligence cooperation with Iraqis. Even anti-U.S. newspapers in Iraq publish, if grudgingly, results of opinion surveys showing that most Iraqis are glad Saddam Hussein is gone and do not yet want U.S. forces to depart. In many parts of the country, local Iraqi councils are beginning to govern and Iraqi police are assuming authority.

But it seems at least equally plausible that time is working against the coalition. Many Iraqis already are surprised and disappointed by the meager results of the first months of U.S. rule. Meanwhile, Gen. John P. Abizaid said last week that terrorism "is emerging as the number one security threat." While U.S. soldiers continue to come under daily attack, targets also include Iraqis who cooperate with the United States, private contractors and, as the U.N. bombing showed, anyone else who is trying to improve conditions in Iraq. That attack set back reconstruction efforts in many ways, and the continuing threat of violence will slow progress toward rebuilding the nation`s infrastructure. That in turn means many Iraqis will remain without electricity or water or, too often, employment -- which may encourage opposition to the occupation and thus further set back efforts to make Iraq more secure.

There`s no magic solution for the challenges the United States faces in Iraq, but a key first step would be to face them honestly. Even before the war, we and many others urged the administration to level with Congress and the American people about the likely costs of postwar occupation. It failed to do so, perhaps, it now seems, because the administration itself harbored an unrealistic view. Has that changed? Last week, asked about the challenges of attracting more troops from countries that resent sole U.S. authority, Mr. Powell said, "I don`t think there is a problem."

But there is a problem. There aren`t enough troops, there aren`t enough police and there aren`t enough contributions from countries with competent militaries. In Karbala, a city in southern Iraq where occupation has been fairly successful, 1,000 Marines are about to withdraw in favor of 455 Bulgarian troops. But the Bulgarians have no intention of assuming the civil administration functions the Marines have been carrying out, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, and a civilian team that was supposed to deploy there hasn`t even been named. Given the stakes, and the potential for new problems, this kind of ragged, improvised, resource-poor effort is inexcusable and incomprehensible.

"Opposition to the foreign occupation is becoming stronger and more violent," the International Crisis Group says in a report to be released tomorrow. The ICG, a private organization that conducts useful research in trouble spots around the world, recommends a new division of labor that would put the United Nations in charge of political transition while leaving the U.S.-led coalition in charge of security and the Iraqi Governing Council doing as much day-to-day administration as it can. Whether that precise formula is the right one can be debated. There shouldn`t be any debate about the need for more intense effort and more openness to allied cooperation. The longer the administration delays, the greater the chances of failure.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Wrong Time to `Stay the Course`


By Michael McFaul

Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page B07


Last week was a tragic setback for those committed to promoting regime change in the greater Middle East. Terrorists slaughtered dozens of innocents in Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan. In the wake of the carnage, expressing hope for democracy in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan sounds naïve. Even the prospect of stable, effective government in these places seems remote.

Reflexively, Bush administration officials and their supporters reacted to these horrors by reaffirming the need to "stay the course." If offered only two choices -- stay the course or turn back -- then Bush and his team are most certainly right. Quitting Iraq, Afghanistan or the road map would produce greater chaos in these places and eventually new security threats to the United States.

But why must this debate be confined to two choices? Now more than ever the search for third ways demands more attention and resources. The current polarized, simplistic debate is getting in the way of creative thinking and effective policymaking. The Bush administration, especially as the presidential election draws nearer, is playing defense precisely when innovation is needed.

The call for "staying the course" is even more indefensible when one tries to find it. What course are we staying on in Iraq or Afghanistan? The president has boldly outlined the objective or endpoint of our policy: democratic regime change in the greater Middle East. But the president has never articulated or written down the strategy for getting there. Without a plan in hand, the Bush administration instead is compelled to move reactively from crisis to crisis, making up "the course" as it goes along.

Compare the debates and tools developed by those working on economic reform to those developed by social scientists and government officials working on political reform. When the moment came for promoting economic transformation in the former Communist world in 1989 and 1991, Western economists developed theories for how change could occur, proposed specific policies for creating capitalism and suggested very concrete tools to be used by outsiders for facilitating market reform. The evidence of sound theory and well-articulated arguments was the emergence of alternative hypotheses that could be tested in the real world. There were well-defined objectives, clearly defined strategies for achieving these goals, and critics of both.

A parallel body of knowledge regarding regime change or political reform or state building does not exist. Nor is a compelling blueprint for bringing about democratic regime change sitting on the shelf of a policy planning staffer, a Stanford professor or a former government official/think tanker. It is time for us all to confess that our understanding of regime change and the role that outside actors can play in fostering it is frightfully underdeveloped and poorly accumulated. Government officials and outside analysts roll out their favorite analogies -- postwar Germany today, East Timor tomorrow. Practitioners who have worked in countries undergoing regime change have a wealth of on-the-ground experiences. But this mishmash of metaphors and anecdotes has not added up to a model for how to change regimes effectively.

The list of immediate amendments to the course in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is obvious -- more American troops, faster deployments of newly trained Iraqi forces, more money for the reconstruction effort and a new United Nations resolution to help bring in soldiers from other countries. But these reactive corrections do not substitute for fundamental rethinking of our grand strategy.

The Bush administration must become proactive in filling this void of ideas. Most immediately, it must speak honestly about the need to refine the present course and engage those who reject retreat but who also have alternative ideas for improving the present course. Intellectually exhausted and politically challenged, Bush and his closest advisers have circled the wagons to defend the status quo. They cannot remain insulated and in the bunkers for two more years. Democrats in turn must do their part to engage in and not simply politicize this debate. Too many innocent people are dying every day to put the search for new ideas on hold until November 2004.

To help articulate and execute a refined course, President Bush should create a Department of Democratic Regime Change headed by a Cabinet-level official -- the offensive equivalent of the defense-oriented Department of Homeland Security. The State Department`s mission is diplomacy between states, not the creation of new states. The Pentagon`s mission should remain regime destruction; its formidable capacities for regime construction should be moved into a new agency, which would also appropriate resources from the Agency for International Development (particularly the Office of Transitional Initiatives), the State Department, Treasury, Commerce, Justice and Energy. This new department must include an office for grand strategy on democratic regime change and be endowed with prestige, talented people, and above all else resources. Our capacity to help build new states must be as great as our capacity to destroy them. (It is telling that the top position at AID is called "administrator," hardly the equivalent of a secretary of defense.) Radical? Yes. Unprecedented? No. It is exactly what leaders with vision undertook after World War II as a way for dealing with the new threat of communism. Their creations included the CIA, the National Security Council, Radio Free Europe and a bipartisan commitment to the grand strategy of containment as the guiding doctrine of American foreign policy. By comparison, it is striking how little institutional change has occurred or how little bipartisan agreement has emerged to address our new security needs.

The same can be said of institutional innovation at the international level. In the wake of World War II, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO, the precursor to the European Union and many other new bodies all got their start. Since Sept. 11, 2001, not one new major international organization has been formed. Instead of citing the real flaws in existing international institutions as an excuse for unilateralism, the Bush administration should take the lead in creating new organizations for promoting democratic regime change. For instance, what about creating an Organization for International Trusteeships? Founding countries would offer assistance in governing failed or new states (Palestine, Liberia, maybe even Iraq) in return for leverage over "sovereign" decisions in these places -- a kind of IMF with guns and a focus on state building rather than economic reform. As a representative organ of all states, with a commitment to neutrality and a focus on diplomacy between states, the United Nations cannot effectively undertake such missions.

In the private sector, organizations form and dissolve all the time to respond to changing market conditions. Government institutions must do the same.

Reorganization or shifting resources does not substitute for new ideas but may help to generate them. Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option.

The writer is Hoover fellow and professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.



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THE TIMES POLL



Bustamante Has Big Lead on Schwarzenegger
But nearly half say their choice for a successor to Davis, if he is ousted, may change. Predicting who will turn out for the election is difficult.
By Mark Z. Barabak
Times Staff Writer

August 24, 2003

Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante holds a wide lead over Arnold Schwarzenegger in the race to succeed Gov. Gray Davis, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll, which finds the Republican vote splintered among several GOP contenders.

As the sole major Democrat running to replace Davis — should the incumbent be ousted Oct. 7 — Bustamante enjoys the support of 35% of likely voters, the poll found.

Schwarzenegger received the support of 22%, followed by three fellow Republicans: state Sen. Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks with 12%, businessman Peter V. Ueberroth with 7% and Bill Simon Jr. — the GOP`s 2002 gubernatorial nominee — with 6%.

Simon abruptly quit the race Saturday, after the poll was completed. He said that "there are too many Republicans" running and expressed concern that his candidacy would undercut GOP efforts to oust Davis and replace the Democrat with one of their own.

Simon`s earlier failure to beat Davis apparently took a toll on his repeat run; nearly one in five likely voters said they would be less likely to support Simon because of last year`s loss.

Three other gubernatorial contenders who have won prominent mention lag far behind the major-party hopefuls, according to the poll. Arianna Huffington, who is running a nonpartisan campaign, received the support of just 3% of likely voters, and the Green Party`s Peter Camejo drew 1%, tying him with Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

Under the idiosyncratic rules that govern the recall vote, all 135 candidates from assorted parties or no party are listed on the same ballot. The candidate who gets the most votes will become governor — if Davis is kicked out, which will be the first issue on the ballot.

The poll, completed Thursday night, found that 50% of likely voters favored recalling Davis and 45% were opposed, with 5% undecided.

But the contest remains unsettled, and polling is a particular challenge in this environment, given the special nature of the election and the way the campaign has been collapsed into a relatively brief, two-month time frame. California has never before witnessed a gubernatorial recall election. Voter turnout will be critical to the outcome, yet it is difficult to predict who will cast ballots. The figures in the Times poll assume a disproportionately high Republican turnout.

The poll suggested a great deal of fluidity: Although views on the recall effort itself were quite fixed, 46% of likely voters said they could change their minds about whom to support between now and Oct. 7.

Democrats were more certain of their candidate choices, with six in 10 saying they had definitely made up their minds, compared with 46% of the likely Republican voters.

Despite the smorgasbord of gubernatorial hopefuls, likely voters do not appear terribly enamored of their options. Of the leading contenders to replace Davis, only Bustamante and Ueberroth are seen in a largely positive light, though just half of likely voters indicated that they knew enough about Ueberroth to make a decision. Others were even less known or, in the case of Flynt, Huffington and Simon, seen in mostly negative terms.

Schwarzenegger has a mixed image among likely voters, with 46% saying they have a favorable impression of him and 44% an unfavorable one.

Much of his campaign strategy is based on his cross-over appeal to non-Republican voters, given his comparatively moderate positions on issues such as gun control, abortion and gay rights. But less than two weeks into his first run for elected office, Schwarzenegger has already become a politically polarizing figure.

Roughly seven in 10 likely Democratic voters have an unfavorable impression of the action-movie star, while the same number of likely Republican voters expressed a favorable view.

The actor won the support of 39% of likely Republican voters, 20% of independents and 7% of Democrats polled. McClintock received 21% of the Republican respondents` backing, Simon got 12% and Ueberroth 10%.

Overall, 50% of likely voters see Schwarzenegger as a political moderate. Twenty-seven percent view him as a conservative and 11% as a liberal; the remainder were not certain or declined to say.

The Times Poll, directed by Susan Pinkus, interviewed 1,351 registered voters between Aug. 16 and Aug. 21. Among them were 801 voters deemed likely to cast ballots in the recall election. The margin of sampling error for likely voters is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The survey suggested that, for all the novelty of the campaign and the unconventional backgrounds of many of those running, no candidate has yet captured the imagination of California voters.

Bustamante, serving his second term as lieutenant governor, is vying to become the first Latino elected California`s governor in modern times. He is pursuing a dual strategy, urging a "no" vote on the recall question but asking voters to support him in the event that Davis is thrown out of office.

Asked if Bustamante`s candidacy made them more likely to go to the polls Oct. 7, an overwhelmingly majority of likely voters — including Democrats — said it did not. Even his fellow Latinos were not dramatically more inspired: 75% said Bustamante`s running made them no more likely to take part in the recall vote.

Overall, the lieutenant governor was chosen by 65% of the Democratic respondents, one in five independent voters and 8% of Republicans.

Fifty-one percent of likely Latino voters surveyed backed Bustamante, 13% chose McClintock and 12% favored Schwarzenegger.

Among union members, a crucial part of the Democratic Party base, Bustamante was receiving 39% support, with Schwarzenegger at 18% and McClintock at 15%.

For all the star power the actor brings to the race, Schwarzenegger — like Bustamante — has not made voters notably more inclined to take part in the election. About seven in 10 likely voters surveyed said the movie star`s run made no difference in their intentions to vote, a finding that was constant across party lines, regardless of political philosophy.

The poll suggested that Schwarzenegger, who launched the first paid advertising of the recall campaign Wednesday, still has a selling job to do with many voters who doubt his credibility as a potential governor.

While a little more than half — 56% — of likely voters said they believed that the first-time candidate knew "some" or "a lot" about the issues facing California, more than a third — 36% — said he didn`t know much at all about such issues.

One such skeptic was Linda Lackey, a 55-year-old insurance agent in Downey.

"He may care about certain things, he may care about children and stuff, but he really has no background in this type of thing," she said in a follow-up interview. "And he`s very quiet about what he actually thinks and what he plans on doing. He doesn`t put his ideas out well."

Lackey, a Republican, said she was leaning toward the more conservative McClintock. "He`s in government already and seems knowledgeable," she said.

Schwarzenegger has made his political-newcomer status a central part of his campaign, vowing to "clean house" in Sacramento if elected.

But that promise is met with widespread skepticism: Nearly six in 10 likely voters predicted "politics as usual" if Schwarzenegger became governor, while just about a third said they expected that he could rein in the power of "special interest groups."

Former Gov. Pete Wilson is a key advisor to Schwarzenegger, having urged him into the recall election and serving as his campaign co-chairman. Many of Wilson`s former aides are involved in the actor`s effort, including Wilson`s ex-chief of staff, advertising consultant and press secretary.

Two weeks ago, Wilson created a stir by revealing Schwarzenegger`s support for Proposition 187, the anti-illegal-immigration initiative pushed by Wilson and passed by voters in 1994. Analysts were split over the potential effect. Some suggested the disclosure would help Schwarzenegger by shoring up his Republican support; others said it would hurt him among Latino voters.

Both assessments appear correct.

Overall, just about half of likely voters said a candidate`s position on Proposition 187 would make no difference in how they voted. But 34% of Republicans said it would make them more likely to support a candidate.

Forty-two percent of Latinos said it would make them less likely. Of that 42%, the overwhelmingly majority opposed efforts to kick Davis out of office.

Jill Darling Richardson, associate director of the Times Poll, and Claudia Vaughn, the poll`s data management supervisor, contributed to this report.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD


Iraqis Celebrate `Martyrs` of the Resistance Movement
One family receives hundreds of neighbors paying visits to express congratulations.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer

August 24, 2003

SAMARRA, Iraq — When Azadeen Abdullah Ani was buried, thousands poured out to celebrate a new martyr.

Azadeen died trying to kill American soldiers. Part of a festering and, by all accounts, widening guerrilla resistance to U.S. occupation, Ani, 44, one evening last month stood on a ramshackle market street not far from his brothers` house, pointed a grenade launcher at a convoy of U.S. military vehicles and opened fire. The Americans gunned him down immediately.

At the funeral, men fired guns into the air and shouted "Allahu akbar!" — "God is great!" — as they converged on the New Samarra Cemetery. Hours earlier, Ani`s brothers had retrieved his bloodied body from the hospital morgue and put up the black posters announcing his death.

They received hundreds of neighbors paying visits to express not condolences, the brothers stressed, but congratulations.

"Everyone said they were proud of him," eldest brother Nejem said Saturday, seated cross-legged on the cushioned floor of his home.

Occupation authorities have sought to portray the fight here as part of the United States` "global war on terrorism." And although U.S. intelligence indicates that a number of foreign Islamic radicals have infiltrated Iraq through its porous borders, many of the daily attacks can easily be attributed to a fully home-grown insurgency.

Some insurgents, such as Ani, are loyalists who had served Saddam Hussein`s brutal regime. Many others are Iraqis who opposed Hussein but now oppose with equal hatred the occupation of their country by nearly 150,000 U.S.-led troops.

Whichever the case, those who die in the fight are being hailed in their native towns and villages as martyrs. They don`t receive quite the adulation accorded Palestinians who die battling Israeli occupation. Lingering fear keeps the celebration muted by comparison; in Hussein`s day, not only would an Iraqi who opposed authority be killed but his entire family also would be made to suffer.

Ani`s house is not decorated with graffiti saluting the fallen hero, and his brothers profess ignorance at the details of his activities. Still, he is admired and, said residents in this conservative, hard-line city, an inspiration.

"We didn`t cry, we didn`t weep, because we believe it was God`s will," Nejem said. "He died resisting. He died defending his country and honor."

Samarra, founded in the 9th century along the banks of the Tigris River, lies about 70 miles northwest of Baghdad and roughly three-quarters of the way to Tikrit, Hussein`s hometown.

This section of central Iraq remains a bedrock of support for the deposed dictator and is dominated by Sunni Muslims who benefited under the former regime.

Painted on the sand-colored walls in the city are slogans declaring: "Long Live Saddam" and "No, no to America; Yes to jihad." Some of the graffiti in the center of town adorn walls facing a compound that U.S. soldiers on Saturday were busily fortifying. A military backhoe was shoveling dirt into berms used to block off the nearest city street.

Last week, an Iraqi working as an interpreter for the U.S. Army was shot dead as he arrived home. A note was left on his body vowing death to all such "collaborators."

So the elevation of Ani to heroic status is perhaps not surprising. Yet the resentment against U.S. troops is so great that armed resistance has become attractive to those who might once have been allies to the American cause.

"The shahid [martyr] is precious: You have to resist. It`s a national task," said Mustafa Samarrai, a neighbor who is the nephew of Abdul Khaliq Samarrai, a politician whom Hussein accused of plotting a coup and executed.

Samarrai, the Ani brothers and others described what they see as a series of humiliations by troops: searches, raids on homes, handcuffings and, they say, public beatings by soldiers often made all the worse because the soldier is female.

Gen. John Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command, said in a news conference last week that "terrorism" was becoming "the No. 1 security threat" in Iraq, especially for U.S. troops who may come under attack numerous times a day.

He said there were indications that former members of Hussein`s Baath Party were beginning to cooperate with elements of Ansar al Islam, a radical group that U.S. forces crushed during the war but that has made a comeback, and other Islamic "foreign fighters."

"I think that the terrorists` cells are definitely established, primarily in Baghdad, operating through some of the western areas, and that the threat from the terrorists is increasing," Abizaid said. "It is not good for us when they get established in an urban area."

Ani, an oval-faced man with a short beard, was the father of six children, the eldest 16 years old. He was a Baath Party militant and a security agent. With the fall of Hussein, he had taken to driving a taxi and was becoming more religious, friends and family said.

His brothers say Ani worked secretly and did not share many details of his clandestine operations. It is not clear whether he belonged to a larger militia or a small cell.

People in Samarra said they were confident more Iraqis would follow Ani`s lead.

"Even those supporting the Americans now, the day will come when they too are anti-American," Samarrai said.

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THE WORLD



1966 Hydrogen-Bomb Mishap in Spain Detailed
Four nuclear weapons fell on a populated area after planes collided. Incident is explored in photo exhibition.
By Daniel Woolls
Associated Press Writer

August 24, 2003



PALOMARES, Spain — In a sunny corner of the world where nothing much ever happened, a fruit wholesaler named Martin Moreno climbed atop a leaking American H-bomb and tried to pry loose a souvenir.

Oblivious to the danger from radiation, he poked a screwdriver into a crack, working in vain to secure his prize.

"I`ve never regretted that nor have I been afraid," Moreno, an engaging, healthy-looking man of 68, said in recounting that morning in the winter of 1966.

His bird`s-eye view of those 1.5 megatons of destructive power — Hiroshima 75 times over — didn`t last long.

American troops and Spanish police soon swarmed around the 10-foot-long bomb and carted it off. It was one of four hydrogen bombs that had plummeted from a B-52 that had collided with a refueling plane.

Nuclear bombs had been involved in previous plane crashes, but this was the first — and only — known case of such weapons being lost in a populated area.

Most people in Palomares, a sleepy farming hamlet on Spain`s southeast tip, never saw the bombs, one of which ended up in the Mediterranean. Nor did they get a peek inside the tent city thrown up to house the 800 Americans who searched for the bombs and cleaned up the radioactive mess.

But now the camp and much of Spain`s worst nuclear scare are on display for the first time in this country at a photo exhibition based on 16-mm film footage from the National Archives in Washington.

In 1966, Spain lived under the thumb of Gen. Francisco Franco, and about the only image most Spaniards remember from the disaster is a chirpy newsreel in which Information Minister Manuel Fraga and U.S. Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke took a swim at a Palomares beach to show that it was safe to go back in the water.

In the exhibition, however, photos show charred wreckage of the crashed B-52 and tanker, soldiers hauling thousands of barrels of contaminated soil onto ships bound for a nuclear cemetery, doctors sticking swabs up noses to check for radiation exposure, and frogmen and mini-subs looking for the bomb that fell into the sea and eluded recovery for 75 days.

The exhibition, "Operation Broken Arrow: Nuclear Accident in Palomares," opened in May in the provincial capital, Almeria, and will make a tour of Spain.

It is the work of Spanish film producer Antonio Sanchez Picon and photographer Jose Herrera. They culled 60 frames from 36 reels of movie film — 700,000 frames altogether — at the National Archives. Herrera has researched the Palomares incident for nearly 20 years.

The Cold War was in full swing in 1966, and U.S. policy was to keep nuclear-armed warplanes in the air constantly near the Soviet border. Under an accord with Franco, U.S. B-52s had permission to fly over Spain and rendezvous in Spanish airspace with KC-135 tankers.

On the morning of Jan. 17, 1966, a routine refueling operation turned disastrous. It is believed that the B-52 flew too fast as it approached the tanker from below. The planes collided, killing seven of 11 crew members and raining 100 tons of flaming wreckage over 15 square miles.

And the four H-bombs tumbled from the B-52.

While one bomb splashed into the sea, the other three hit the ground. None exploded — layers of safeguards made that virtually impossible — but seven pounds of plutonium 239 were released when two bomb detonators did go off. The three bombs on the ground were found in the first 24 hours.

The villagers of Palomares — population 600 then, 1,400 today — went days without knowing that they were at ground zero of an unprecedented nuclear accident.

"H-bomb, butane gas canister, what difference would it have made?" said Mayor Juan Jose Perez. "This is a rural area. What did people know about bombs?"

But some caught on when doctors speaking a strange language came around asking for urine samples and waving gadgets that ticked.

Crops were dug up and burned — a mistake, it turns out, that only served to disperse radioactive particles. Contaminated soil was scooped up with tractors.

The mayor says Palomares today has the same cancer rate as the rest of Spain, although the government still tests people at random, and late last year it warned against construction where the two semi-detonated bombs fell.

At the time of the crash, the danger of contamination was largely overshadowed by the frantic search for the bomb lurking on the seabed, an operation using 34 ships, 2,200 sailors, 130 frogmen and four mini-subs.

A Spanish fisherman had come forward quickly to say he`d seen something fall that looked like a bomb, but experts ignored him. Instead, they focused on four possible trajectories calculated by a supercomputer, but for weeks found only airplane pieces.

Media worldwide expressed stupefaction. Newsweek ribbed the Pentagon: "Where, oh where has our H-bomb gone? Oh where, oh where can it be?"

The fisherman, Francisco Simo, was summoned back. He sent searchers in the right direction, having memorized the impact spot using visual triangulation, a mariner`s trick used since the time of the Phoenicians. A two-man sub, the Alvin, finally found it in 2,162 feet of water.

But the nightmare was not over. The sub surfaced to recharge its batteries and went back down for the bomb, but it was gone. The crew discovered that it had tumbled 400 feet down an undersea slope.

Several attempts to grab the bomb with mechanical arms failed. It rolled farther down the hill and when Alvin finally secured it, the weapon lay near a 5,000-foot-deep abyss.

"If they hadn`t got it then, they might never have," Perez said.

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THE ECONOMY
a d v e r t i s e m e n t




Bubble Won`t Reinflate
By Robert Pollin
Robert Pollin is professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst and the author of "Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fr

August 24, 2003

AMHERST, Mass. — Three years ago this month, the greatest stock market run-up in U.S. history came to an abrupt end. Since then, it has become abundantly clear that economic growth in the Clinton era was dependent on wildly inflated stock prices. It seems equally apparent that President Bush would love to reinflate that bubble. But despite efforts like the dividend-tax cuts that passed in May, he will almost certainly fail.

The bull market made life easy for politicians. When President Clinton left office in January 2001, the federal government had run surpluses for three straight years. Bush will have run three straight years of growing deficits by 2004.

Clinton needed the stock market boom because eliminating fiscal deficits brought cutbacks in government spending. But people working in the United States still needed customers to buy their products. The declines in government spending under Clinton therefore had to be matched by increases in spending elsewhere.

This is how the stock market bubble became the bedrock of Clintonomics. Spending by households and corporations grew rapidly during the 1990s, but this was tied closely to the bubble. By 2000, households were spending a remarkable 99 cents of every dollar of disposable income, leaving only one cent on the dollar for savings. But almost all of this increased spending came from the richest 20% of households. They spent $1.04 for every dollar of income, and covered the difference by borrowing on their burgeoning paper wealth.

Corporations also borrowed heavily against their rising stock prices to finance what turned out to be excessive investment in machines and equipment. As of June, U.S. industrial firms were still saddled with excess capacity, making use of only 74% of their available production equipment. This is down from an average of 82% between 1967 and 1992.

Clinton handed over to Bush a precarious financial pyramid, even after allowing for his federal government surpluses. But this isn`t to say that Bush is now blameless for the country`s economic difficulties. His determination to deliver tax cuts for the rich — and in particular his most recent victory in lowering taxes on dividends, from a maximum of 38.6% to a flat 15% — is likely to lead the country into some of the same kinds of financial traps that emerged under Clintonomics.

Nothing Bush can do is likely to push stock prices back up to anything close to the bubble-era stratosphere. This becomes clear from considering the historical pattern of the earnings-to-stock-price relationship in the U.S. market. The average firm in the Standard & Poor`s 500 index today earns about 3.6% relative to the price of its shares. This contrasts with the 109-year period between 1880 and 1989, during which the average S&P firm earned nearly 7% relative to the price investors paid to buy shares. From this perspective, the price of the average S&P stock still needs to fall almost another 50% relative to earnings, even three years after the bubble burst.

True, the Bush dividend-tax cut changes things somewhat, since the average wealthy shareholder now gets to keep 85 cents rather than 65 cents of every dollar a firm pays out in dividends. This means that a dollar of dividends is now worth up to 30% more than it was before the Bush tax cut. But this 30% gain in the after-tax value of dividends at best only partially counteracts the current market overvaluation of nearly 50%.

Many market analysts claimed during the bubble years that historic stock-price-to-earnings relationships no longer applied. Let`s assume for the moment that they were right and that Bush`s tax cuts could generate a renewed stock market boom. Even then, because Bush has taken no steps to avoid the excesses of debt and industrial capacity that built during the Clinton years, the likelihood is that a renewed stock market boom would not produce stable and sustainable growth.

It`s impossible, of course, to know the future. But what we`re likely to see emerge from the current policies is a sputtering recovery followed by an even more vulnerable financial system than the one we faced when the Clinton bubble burst three years ago.



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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

When an Identity Crisis Goes Global
By Paula R. Newberg
Paula R. Newberg is an international consultant who works with countries in conflict and transition.

August 24, 2003

WASHINGTON — When the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was hit by a truck bomb Tuesday, killing the United Nations` top diplomat in the country, it was not just Iraq`s reconstruction and the U.S. occupation that were put at greater risk. The terrorist attack also raised questions about who and what the United Nations stands for, and why anyone would blame it for U.S. foreign policy.

In no period since the U.N.`s creation has the international body`s endurance and diplomatic agility been more strained than in the last two years. Fresh from turmoil in Rwanda, East Timor and the Balkans, the U.N. stands alongside the beleaguered peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq and now faces new responsibilities in Liberia. But as its role keeps changing, its own security is increasingly jeopardized.

Take Afghanistan. In the weeks following the U.S.-led coalition`s fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.N. facilitated an agreement that led, almost miraculously, to the first peaceful installation of a government in Kabul in decades. But it wasn`t granted a formal trusteeship of Afghanistan, which might have separated reconstruction from divisive politics. The war`s victors wanted to govern, and the U.N. wanted them to have the right to do so. So it entered into a curious partnership with a weak and poor interim Afghan government, U.S.-led coalition forces and the Bush administration.

Neither the Afghan government nor the United Nations can override the coalition`s military and security prerogatives, which often involve trampling people`s rights. The interests of Afghanistan and the U.S. are not wholly at odds, but their priorities differ. For Washington and now for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which will direct security operations, a stable Afghanistan is a victory against terrorism; for Afghans, a stable country is the primary goal. In all this, the U.N. is loyal cheerleader, occasional standard-setter and cautious umpire. But when rights are violated, violence increases, and the United Nations can`t do anything about it. As a result, many Afghans see the U.S. and the U.N. through the same weary eyes, without distinguishing between them.

Iraq, sadly, vindicates this view. Most U.N. members sat out the Iraq war. Even before the worst fighting ended, some insisted that the world body help rebuild Iraq as a matter of principle and to ensure stability in the region. The U.N. has thus begun to work in and around Iraq`s gutted political environment. Even as violence erupts around it, the U.N. seeks footholds to assist Iraq`s recovery and offers nuance to ideas of development, democracy and the rule of law.

The U.S. was initially reluctant to include the U.N. in Iraq. But in the aftermath of the Baghdad bombing, the U.S. is tarnishing the organization as it now embraces it. In calling the attack on the U.N. headquarters "an attack on the United States," former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke erased the critical distinction between Washington and an international community that has repeatedly criticized American actions. And when L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. top administrator in Iraq, called the incident an attempt to "sabotage nation-building," he bolstered those who believe that Iraq was already a nation before the U.S. arrived and now needs to be returned to its people.

When the question of intervention in Iraq resurfaced two years ago, many observers argued that the U.N. should stay out if it couldn`t set the terms of its involvement. Others now think that the U.N. can smooth the rough edges of U.S. force by finding ways for Iraqis to help run their own reconstruction. Many cynically suspect that the U.N. will be stuck with Iraq when U.S. patience runs out.

All these views may be true. All share the suspicion that common cause between the U.S. and the U.N. creates common enemies — and the Baghdad bombing may have proved them right. Once again, the U.N. is working with a superpower whose policies contradict the views of many of its members. Once again, U.S. prerogatives seem to have come perilously close to overtaking the U.N.`s human rights mandate. And once again, skeptics in Iraq and elsewhere, whether peacefully or violently inclined, see little difference between those who wage war and those who profess peace.

These perceptions cast a shadow over the U.N.`s new trusteeship role in Liberia as that country emerges from an avaricious dictatorship. It`s not because trusteeship is bad but because it risks being incomplete. The U.S. has decided that Liberia, less important to its security than Iraq, is too troublesome to ignore — so the U.N. is now in charge of fixing it. This may satisfy African states whose soldiers will keep the peace, but if the U.S. has left Liberia to the U.N., it`s reasonable to fear that both the U.N. and Liberia will soon be left wanting.

This week, the U.S. will again ask the U.N. to share its burdens in Iraq. Fearful of further instability, anxious member states may increase their assistance. They`re likely to want to enlarge the U.N.`s role as well. If the U.S. imprudently refuses to cede control, and pushes the U.N. to the periphery once again, everyone will lose — and the lesson of last week`s tragedy will have been lost.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
Heute 70 frische Toons

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030823__070toons.htm

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The Cemetery at Basra: Broken Remnants of Britain`s Imperial Past

By ROBERT FISK in Basra.

08/23/03: The soldiers of Britain`s forgotten armies of Iraq lie beneath the dirt and garbage of Basra`s official war cemetery, almost 3,000 of them, their gravestones scattered and smashed, the memorial book long looted from the entrance, even the names of the dead stripped from the screen wall.

Only by prowling through the dust and litter can you find a clue to some of the great ironies of recent Mesopotamian history. Here lies Sapper GW Curry of the Royal Engineers, for example, who was 31 when he died on 5 May 1943. His gravestone is broken, lying on its side. Not far away is the stone erected in memory of Aircraftman 1st Class KG Levett of the RAF, who died on 31 October 1942. Still visible at the bottom is the inscription: "We shall meet again in a happier place. Mum."

A few metres further is the memorial to Leading Seaman FC Smith who died aboard HMS President III in March 1943, a break in the stone running through the last lines of Binyon`s "Poem for the Fallen": "At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them."

The ruined Indian army cemetery opposite contains an unknown number of bodies whose numbers and names were--to the shame of the British Empire for which they died--never recorded. But if the great British and Indian cemeteries at Basra are a disgrace, their fate was probably inevitable. They came under sustained shellfire during the eight-year war that followed Saddam Hussein`s insane 1980 invasion of Iran, and looters stripped the place of brass and stones in the aftermath of the Shia Muslim revolt against Saddam in 1991. The Iraqi son of the old caretaker told me that his father was, for many years, too frightened to enter the graveyard.

Yet here lie the bones--both literal and historical--of imperial adventures that have much in common with our most recent invasion of Iraq. The British cemetery contains 2,551 burials, 74 of them unidentified, of soldiers who stormed ashore in Basra in 1914 at the start of a British-Indian campaign that eventually captured all of Iraq from the Ottoman Turks.

Somewhere amid the bracken, for example, lie the remains of Major George Wheeler VC of the 7th Hariana Lancers, killed as "this gallant Officer"-- so his official citation says -- single-handedly charged the Turkish standards at Shaiba on 13 April 1915. After Rashid Ali had declared an alliance with Nazi Germany in Baghdad in April 1941, the British stormed Basra again--just as they did in March--and lost hundreds more men as they drove Iraqi troops from the port city in 1941.

According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, whose director-general visited Iraq two months ago, there are ambitions plans to restore the Basra cemetery, to re-erect new headstones and place the names of the 1914-18 war dead back on the wall.

In fact, the commission was preparing the rehabilitation of the North Gate British cemetery in Baghdad--with the permission of Saddam`s government, of course--when the latest invasion began. The Basra restoration will take up to five years and cost, according to the commission`s spokesman Peter Francis, "millions". Always supposing, of course, that "stability"--that quality so hard to find in Iraq--is restored.

Copyright: The Independent. UK.

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We Have A Long And Dishonourable Tradition Of Smearing The Dead
Let us remember Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, Mazen Dana, Twefiq Ghazawi, Bahij Mentni, Rachel Corrie and Dr David Kelly

Robert Fisk
24 August 2003: Across the marble floor of the Shrine of the Imam Hussein in Kerbala scampers Suheil with his plastic bag of metal. He points first to a red stain on the flagstones. "This was a red smoke grenade that the Americans fired," he tells me. "And that was another grenade mark." The Shia worshippers are kneeling amid these burn marks, eyes glistening at the gold façade of the mosque which marks the very place, behind silver bars kissed by the faithful, where - in an epic battle far more decisive in human history than any conflict fought by the United States - Imam al-Hussein was cut down in AD680. There is a clink as, one by one, Suheil drops his souvenirs on to the marble.

US forces denied that any ordnance fell upon the shrine when they opened fire close to the Huseiniya mosque last month. Of course they denied it. Denial has become a disease in Iraq - as it has through most of the Middle East. The Americans deny that they kill innocent civilians in Iraq - but kill them all the same. The Israelis deny they kill innocent civilians in the occupied territories - indeed, they even deny the occupation - but kill them all the same. So folk like Suheil are valuable. They expose lies. The evidence, in this case, are his little souvenirs. On one of the grenades in his plastic bag are written the words "Cartridge 44mm Red Smoke Ground Marker M713 PB-79G041-001". Another is designated as a "White Star Cluster M 585", yet another carries the code "40mm M195 KX090 (figure erased) 010-086". They are strange things to read in a religious building whose scholars normally concentrate on the minutiae of Koranic sura rather than the globalised linguistics of the arms trade.

But one of the Kerbala shrine`s guards, Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, was killed by the Americans when they arrived to assist Iraqi police in a confrontation with armed thieves near the shrine. Two more Shias were shot dead by the Americans during a protest demonstration the next day.

Suheil insist that the US troops wanted to enter the mosque - an unlikely scenario since they are under orders to stay away from its vicinity - but four bullets did smash into an outer wall. "We are peaceful people - so why do we need this?" Suheil asks me plaintively. "Remember how we suffered under Saddam?" And here he points upwards to another sacrilegious assault on the shrine, this time amid the gold of one of the two principal minarets - a shrapnel gash from a shell fired by Saddam`s legions during the great Shia revolt of 1991, the rebellion we encouraged and then betrayed after the last Gulf War.

So you`d think, wouldn`t you, that the shootings at Kerbala were an established fact. But no. The US still insists it never fired into the shrine of the Imam Hussein and "has no information" on the dead. Just as it had "no information" about the massacre of at least six Iraqi civilians by its soldiers during a house raid in the Mansour district of Baghdad a month ago. Just as it has no information on the number of Iraqi civilian casualties during and after the illegal Anglo-American invasion, estimated at up to 5,223 by one reputable organisation and up to 2,700 in and around Baghdad alone according to the Los Angeles Times.

And I`ve no doubt there would have been "no information" about the man shot dead by US troops outside Abu Ghraib prison last week had he not inconveniently turned out to be a prize-winning Reuters cameraman. Thus Mazen Dana`s death became a "terrible tragedy" - this from the same American authorities whose Secretary of State Colin Powell thought that the tank fire which killed another Reuters cameraman and a Spanish journalist in April was "appropriate". Of course, the Americans didn`t hesitate to peddle the old lie about how Dana`s camera looked like a rocket-propelled grenade - the same cock-and-bull story the Israelis produced back in 1985 when they killed a two-man CBS crew, Tewfiq Ghazawi and Bahij Metni, in southern Lebanon.

But there`s a far more hateful bit of denial and hypocrisy being played out now in the US over two young and beautiful women. The first, Private Jessica Lynch, is feted as an American heroine after being injured during the American invasion of Iraq and then "rescued" from her Iraqi hospital bed by US Special Forces. Now it just happens that Private Lynch - far from firing at her Iraqi attackers until the last bullet, as the Pentagon would have had us believe - was injured in a road accident between two military trucks during an ambush and that Iraqi doctors had been giving her special care when Lynch`s "rescuers" burst into her unguarded hospital. But the second young American is a real heroine, a girl called Rachel Corrie who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was about to demolish a Palestinian home and who was killed - wearing a clearly marked jacket and shouting through a loudspeaker - when the Israeli driver crushed her beneath his bulldozer and then drove backwards over her body again. All this was filmed. As a Jewish writer, Naomi Klein, bravely pointed out in The Guardian, "Unlike Lynch, Corrie did not go to Gaza to engage in combat; she went to try to thwart it." Yet not a single American government official has praised Rachel Corrie`s courage or condemned her killing by the Israeli driver. President Bush has been gutlessly silent. For their part, the Israeli government tried to smear the activist group to which Rachel Corrie belonged by claiming that two Britons later involved in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv had attended a memorial service to her - as if the organisers could have known of the wicked deed the two men had not yet committed.

But there`s nothing new in smearing the dead, is there? Back in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, I remember well how the British Army`s press office at Lisburn in Co Antrim would respond to the mysterious death of British ex-soldiers or Englishmen who were inconveniently killed by British soldiers. The dead were always described as - and here, reader, draw in your breath - "Walter Mitty characters". I used to get sick of reading this smear in Belfast Telegraph headlines. Anonymous army officers would pass it along to the press. The guy was a Walter Mitty, a fantasist whose claims could not be believed. This was said of at least three dead men in Northern Ireland.

And I have a suspicion, of course, that this is where Tony Blair`s adviser Tom Kelly first heard of Walter Mitty and the ease with which authority could libel the dead. Born and bred in Northern Ireland, he must have read the same lies in the Belfast papers as I did, uttered by the same anonymous army "press spokesmen" with as little knowledge of Thurber as Mr Kelly himself when they spoke to journalists over the phone. So from that dark war in Northern Ireland, I think, came the outrageous smear against Dr David Kelly, uttered by his namesake to a correspondent on The Independent.

So let us remember a few names this morning: Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, Mazen Dana, Tewfiq Ghazawi, Bahij Metni, Rachel Corrie and Dr David Kelly.

All they have in common is their mortality. And our ability to deny their deaths or lie about why we killed them or smear them when they can no longer speak for themselves. Walter Mitty indeed!

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Der amerikanische Macho-Mann und die kastrierten Euroweenies

Herbert Hasenbein 24.08.2003
Eine politische Analyse aus Kanada empfiehlt den Europäern, die Muskeln zu zeigen und die Visionen der amerikanischen Neokonservativen zu untergraben

Das renommierte kanadische Cato Institute publiziert die Analyse "Mending the U.S-European Rift over Middle East" vom Politologen Leon T. Hadar just zur Zeit, in der Colin Powell, der US Außenminister, beim UN Generalsekretär Kofi A. Annan vorstellig wird und eine Art internationale Hilfe für den Irak anfordert.

Leon T. Hadar tritt der Meinung der US-Hardliner (vgl. Die Machtergreifung der Neocons in Washington) entgegen, wonach die Kontroverse über den Irakkrieg als politisch-kulturelle Auseinandersetzung zwischen Amerikanern und Europäern begriffen wird, und mit den "Neuen Europäern" (Großbritannien, Spanien, Italien und einige osteuropäische Länder) gelöst werden kann.

Robert Kagan, Leiter des US Leadership Project am Carnegie Endowment for International Peace war Initiator oder goss zumindest Öl in diese Argumentation, indem er schrieb: "Die Amerikaner sind vom Mars, die Europäer von der Venus: sie stimmen kaum noch überein und verstehen sich immer weniger." Und so schließt Robert Kagan, man solle endlich aufhören vorzugeben, dass Europäer und Amerikaner die Welt unter denselben Augen sehen, "or even that they occupy the same world." Von dem vielschillernden Begriff "occupy" ist es nicht weit zum historischen Vergleich amerikanischer Intellektueller, die sich und Washington mit Rom gleichsetzen und die Europäer in das byzantinische Konstantinopel verbannen.

Dort fröhnen die Euroweenies dem "posthistorischen Paradies" in einer beschränkten Welt mit übernationalen Gesetzen, Verhandlungen und Kooperationen. Ganz anders die Amerikaner. Sie folgen Hobbes und dem Universum der politischen Interessen und Konflikte. Dem Universum, in dem internationales Recht verachtet wird und nur der stärkste, sprich der mit der stärksten Militärmacht, überlebt. Europa ist, so "The Economist" ein "alter Kontinent, ein wundervoller Platz für Reisen, aber schwerlich der Amboss für die Zukunft."

Leon T. Hadar macht die Zeitungen The Weekly Standard, National Review Online und das Wall Street Journal als Sprachrohre zur Verbreitung dieser Ansichten aus. Aus Europäern sind Karikaturen geworden: "the Euros", "the Euroids", "the peens" oder "Euroweenies". Hinzu kommt Sexismus: "The European is female, impotent, or castrated, who just can`t get it up", beobachtet Timothy Garton Ash von der Hoover Institution in den Texten, und auch dies, dass es amerikanische "EU-nuch"-Hasser gibt.

Die Antwort der Europäer ist vor allem in Frankreich von der Idee des Kampfes zwischen den Kulturen und vor der amerikanischen Gefahr geprägt. Der Brite Harold Pinter spricht von den Vereinigten Staaten als "Moloch, der außer Kontrolle geraten ist."

Was Leon T. Hadar in der Überschrift "The American Macho Man and the Castrated Euroweenies" zusammenfaßt, ist aus seiner Sicht keineswegs ein kultureller Konflikt. Auch die Hoffnung auf die "Neuen Europäer" bleibt ein amerikanisches Missverständnis. Italien und Spanien stehen nicht weniger oder mehr als Deutschland und Frankreich der ökonomischen Liberalisierung gegenüber. Polen und Ungarn orientieren sich in ihrem Verständnis von Kapitalismus an den Vorstellung des Sozialstaates und nicht am amerikanischen Macho. Was den Irakkrieg und den israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt angeht, dokumentieren viele Befragungen eine gemeinsame europäische Haltung, sogar in Großbritannien, wo die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung den Irakkrieg ablehnt. Auch militärisch sind die "Neuen" keine Vorzeigeobjekte: Italien wendet 1,5, Spanien 1,4 Prozent des Bruttosozialproduktes für die Militärmaschinerie auf, Deutschland auch nur 1,5 Prozent, während Frankreich 2,6 Prozent investiert (Großbritannien 2,4 Prozent).

Tatsächlich geht es um Einflusssphären und ökonomische Interessen. "Neokonservative Intellektuelle haben den Krieg gegen den Terrorismus zu einem Kreuzzug umgeformt, um aus dem Mittleren Osten ein amerikanisches demokratisches Empire zu formen", schreibt Leon T. Hadar.

Er hält es für kurzsichtig, dass sich die europäischen Mächte Frankreich und Deutschland nicht engagieren. Wer in Europa befürchte, die US-Politik im Mittleren Osten werde weitere Instabilität erzeugen und den Kampf gegen den Terrorismus nicht befrieden, sondern - wie vorausgesagt - anheizen, vergisst, dass "unter diesen Umständen Europa durch seine geographische Nähe, die engen wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen und die demographischen Verbindungen das erste Opfer der amerikanischen Politik wird". Auch könne es nicht im dauerhaften Interesse der Vereinigten Staaten liegen, den Mittleren Osten zu dominieren und die Europäer auszugrenzen.


Leon T. Hadar verweist auf den internationalen Finanzmarkt. "Die USA", so der Historiker Niall Ferguson, "benötigt ausländische Investoren, um die globale Führungsrolle und die militärische Vormachtsstellung zu erhalten". Womit die EU, vornehmlich Frankreich und Deutschland, die Chance haben, ihre "soft power" in "hard power" umzuwandeln. Finanzexperten beobachten seit dem Irakkrieg, dass Gelder aus Saudi Arabien in die EU fließen. Das Kapital wird aus den USA abgezogen, aus Furcht, es könnte dort eingefroren werden. Noch profitieren die Vereinigten Staaten vom Petrodollar und der Tatsache, dass Notenbanken aus Schutz gegen Spekulationen enorme Summen an US Dollar halten. Diese Philosophie ist nicht zementiert, sondern ließe sich zugunsten des Euro ändern.

Auch in militärischer Hinsicht könnten die bisher "leichtgewichtigen Europäer" eine dominierende Rolle spielen. Leon T. Hadar verweist auf die Ablösung der UN-Streitkräfte durch NATO-Verbände im früheren Jugoslawien und empfiehlt eine militärische Friedensmission der EU zwischen Israelis und Palästinensern. Ferner sollten im Irak die US Truppen abgezogen und von europäischen Friedenstruppen abgelöst werden.


Solche Vorstellungen widersprechen zwar den Neocons, die dem US-Militär oder israelischen Streitkräften die Aufgabe von Ordnungskräften im Mittleren Osten zuweisen. Diese seit Bill Clinton vertretene Außenpolitik kann nach dem Einmarsch der Amerikaner im Irak aus Kostengründen nicht ewig durchgehalten werden und ist letztlich zum Scheitern verurteilt. Leon T. Hadar sieht den historischen Vergleich eher zum Wiener Kongress, der zu Lösungen führte, die zuvor undenkbar schienen.

Er appelliert daran, das European Mediterranean Partnership ( EMP) zu aktivieren: 1995 hatten sich in Barcelona 12 Mittelmeeranrainerstaaten verpflichtet, bis 2010 eine Freihandelszone zu schaffen. Dazu gehören Palästina und Israel. Zwei Länder, Zypern und Malta, werden im kommenden Jahr Mitglieder der EU. Die EU stellte 5 Milliarden US Dollar bereit, um die Liberalisierung zu fördern.

Auch traf die EU bereits 1989 Arrangements mit den sechs Staaten des Gulf Cooperation Council. Folglich sitzen nirgendwo sonst Araber und Israelis an einem Tisch. Ferner: im Jahr 2001 exportierten die mediteranen Länder die Hälfte ihrer Produkte in die EU, und zugleich machte der Import von EU Produkten 63 Prozent aller Waren aus. Selbst für Israel ist der Haupthandelspartner die EU und nicht, wie viele vermuten, die USA.

"Mit Hilfe einer Strategie des konstruktiven Engagments im Mittleren Osten könnte die EU versuchen, sowohl diplomatisch wie ökonomisch das zu erreichen, was George W. Bush militärisch durchsetzen will." Dieses Engagement darf sich nicht nur auf den Irak beschränken. Gefragt ist eine Perspektive für den gesamten Mittleren Osten. Das "maligne" Europa hat das Zeug dazu, den Neuen Mittleren Osten zu kreieren und mitzugestalten.

http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/irak/15485/1.html

Das Original:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa485.pdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa485.pdf

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http://www.atimes.com

Middle East

THE ROVING EYE
The plot thickens
By Pepe Escobar

HANOI - Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon erstwhile protege, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), member of the American-appointed Iraqi interim government in Iraq and a convicted criminal in Jordan, went on record in Baghdad saying that he had received intelligence on Thursday, August 14, that "a large-scale act would take place ... against a soft target, such as Iraqi political parties or other parties, including the UN". He even learned that the attack would be a truck bombing - by means of a suicide bomber or a remote-controlled detonator. Chalabi also made clear that according to this intelligence, "neither the Coalition Provisional Authority nor coalition troops" would be attacked.

Chalabi is usually not recognized as a reliable source. But if this startling piece of information is true, it means two things: 1) The Americans in Iraq knew about an attack, and did nothing to try to prevent it. 2) The UN itself didn`t know anything about it, according to Fred Eckhard, spokesman for secretary general Kofi Annan: "To my knowledge, that information was not relayed to the United Nations."

The frightening possibility that Chalabi knew it, the Americans knew it, the UN didn`t and the Americans did nothing to improve security at the UN headquarters will only benefit one player: the Pentagon, according to which Iraq is now the central battle in the "war against terrorism". And right on cue, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and US Central Command chief General John Abizaid, in a joint briefing, declared Iraq now to be a sort of terrorist Woodstock.

Whatever goes terribly wrong in Iraq is not enough to force the Pentagon to change its script. It still refuses to acknowledge the indigenous broad-based Iraqi resistance against the occupation, which, as Asia Times Online has reported, spreads out from Sunni mosques and is guided by patriotism. The Pentagon keeps repeating what it wants to hear - and it all comes from none other than Chalabi, according to whom there was an important meeting between the notorious "remnants of Saddam`s regime" and "international terrorists" before the UN bombing.

The Pentagon may have a point when one considers that a substantial part of Iraqi public opinion is convinced that true patriotic Iraqis could not have perpetrated the attack. Some Islamic factions of the Iraqi resistance - like the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance Movement - have in fact condemned the UN bombing as a "criminal act", although up to now other factions, like the White Flags, the Muslim Youth and the Army of Mohammed, have not said anything. But it`s crucial to note that the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance Movement has denied the involvement of all Iraqi resistance factions, not only in the UN bombing but in the attacks against the Jordanian embassy and the oil pipelines: it says these attacks discredit the true Iraqi resistance.

Even if the Iraqi resistance was not responsible for these attacks, this does not mean that there is no heavy indigenous opposition to the occupation - as the Pentagon script demands. It`s much easier to blame everything on al-Qaeda, the Ansar al-Islam or a fuzzy terrorist Woodstock with players coming from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Afghanistan.

Ansar al-Islam - led by Mullah Krekar, at the moment exiled in Norway - may have been a very convenient tool manipulated by the Pentagon. For three years, the organization was based in the village of Bijara, in northeasten Iraq, almost an enclave in Iranian territory. Last March, its hideout was bombed into oblivion by the Americans. The Pentagon version at the time was that Ansar was virtually extinct. But now Ansar`s leadership has mysteriously managed to resurface - and in heavily-patrolled Baghdad, of all places. According to Kurdish sources, a key element of the leadership is Abu Wayl, a former colonel in Saddam`s security services reconverted into operational chief of Ansar`s "Arab battalion".

The Americans have already blamed Ansar al-Islam for the attack on the Jordanian embassy. Jordan, for its part, blames Abu Mussad al-Zarkaoui, a Jordanian national, as one of Ansar`s top operatives. Of myriad groups operating in Kurdistan, there have been no Ansar-related arrests so far. On the other hand, the Americans have arrested Ali Bapir, the leader of Jamiya Islamiya, and Mullah Ali Abdul Aziz, the charismatic leader of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan - the main Kurdish Islamic force, which even has two ministers in the local government dominated by Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK, also a member of the interim government).

Nobody knows where Mullah Abdul Aziz is being held. The Americans are accusing both Jamiya Islamiya and the Kurdistan Islamic Movement of having links with Ansar. The complicating factor is that all these groups come from the same source: the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, created in 1988 and fragmented in three factions in 1990. Ansar al-Islam decided to launch a jihad against the kaffirs (infidels) of the PUK. The other two remained legal. But they also consider themselves jihadi groups: the difference is they don`t think a jihad against the PUK - as well as a jihad against the Americans - is justified at this stage.

A crucial fact is that both Islamist groups enjoy huge popular support in Kurdistan: many Kurds are in fact fed up with Jalal Talabani`s barely-disguised dictatorship. But as the Americans have branded these groups as "terrorists", the only one to benefit is Talabani, an American ally. And why are these Kurds fed up? We come back to the same point: because in a real democratic set up in Iraq, it is Islamist parties that inevitably touch popular sentiment, with their central message that Muslims cannot accept to be pawns of a foreign and non-Muslim occupation force.

The Pentagon line of "remnants of Saddam`s regime", now composed with "international terrorists", is supposed to explain the actions of all those anti-American "evil doers" on the loose in Iraq. It`s much more complex than that. During the Saddam era all sort of crypto-Wahhabi groups were more or less tolerated - as long as they did not meddle in politics. Obviously, these groups were all of them anti-Saddam. Post-Saddam Iraq finally offered them the perfect cause: resistance against foreign occupation. This has absolutely nothing to do with al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Islam. Al-Qaeda - which was never tolerated inside Iraq - or the enclaved Ansar al-Islam could never have organized such a disciplined resistance in two or three months.

As the Iraqi resistance is so multi-faceted, there`s every possibility that the UN bombing was perpetrated by elements of this Wahhabi network, already in existence in the Saddam era. And as unfortunate as it may seem, the UN for them is a pretty legitimate target. Human rights groups have extensively documented how UN Resolutions 661 and 687 may have been responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990s, due to entirely preventable diseases. For many strands of the Iraqi resistance, the UN is just a tool of the occupying power.

On top of it, the Baghdad office of the World Bank was also in the UN building . Many Iraqi patriots in fact welcomed the fact that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) "suspended" their activities in Iraq after the bombing. Educated Iraqis are very much aware of the dreaded IMF-imposed "structural adjustments" and the ghastly record of the World Bank in terms of alleviating poverty in the developing world. The rationale of the Iraqi resistance is that there are no holds barred to prevent an occupation designed to steal Iraq`s fabulous oil resources and also plunder its already devastated economy.

So not only soldiers are legitimate targets. Corporate employees of Kellogg Brown and Co (a subsidiary of Halliburton) or any other corporation likely to make a killing out of Iraq`s resources are legitimate targets. UN employees are legitimate targets. The IMF and the World Bank are legitimate targets. The Pentagon`s response is predictable. It will send more troops. Not regular troops, but most of its 29,000 specialists in repression of urban guerrilla and terrorist groups with military training. They may kill thousands more Iraqis, but they won`t kill a national liberation movement, operated by people who lived for years in a militarized society awash with weapons. And the message of this national liberation movement to those who concocted and want to profit from the invasion of their country is stark: welcome to hell.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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Sunday, August 24, 2003

It`s time to fire Rumsfeld

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

The United States has more serious problems in Iraq than President Bush could have imagined when he declared major combat at an end. Before he faces more surprises, the nation`s first MBA president should take management action.

Relieve Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

The president needs a Defense Department in which professional views about what military force levels hold sway, change can occur without perpetual turmoil and military planning avoids undermining diplomacy. None of that is likely under the domineering Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld is brilliant, dedicated and hard-working. It`s said he gets results and has won two wars, right? It certainly didn`t look that way last week when Americans watched scenes from the bombed U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Continuing U.S. casualties, sabotage and insecurity plague Iraq.

In Afghanistan, we now have more troops than ever and the Taliban have been on the offensive, leading to 90 deaths in a seven-day period. So much for driving them into caves. Afghanistan needs additional resources to become a stable nation.

Every day, Iraq`s troubles make it more certain that Rumsfeld was wrong in his assessment of troop needs. His rapid action plan brought quick victories. But just as Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, security requires several hundred thousand military.

News accounts raise questions about whether Rumsfeld is simply a demanding boss or one who may inadvertently limit what he hears from aides.

When pressed on troop-level questions months ago, Rumsfeld repeatedly ducked behind the planning of his generals. He now says that his generals haven`t requested additional troops. Such talk has enough suggestion of buck-passing to be a management concern.

If Rumsfeld brings some genius to hiring decisions, it hasn`t been apparent. He`s surrounded himself with neo-conservatives bent on war, including Paul Wolfowitz, who wanted Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the Sept. 11 massacres, and such Defense Policy Board members as Richard Perle and Newt Gingrich.

Somehow, Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter was picked to head the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, where he suggested creating a massive personal data program and a terrorism futures trading market.

Rumsfeld also has proven to be an impediment to diplomacy. Numerous accounts show how Secretary of State Colin Powell has been undercut within the administration.

During the Iraqi war preparations, Rumsfeld insulted allies with such phrases as "the old Europe." In Germany, he followed up with public praise for Romania and Albania`s help in Afghanistan, but none for Germany`s leading role. Powell needs to be in charge of diplomacy, untroubled by an out-of-control defense secretary.

Rumsfeld is the bright, abrasive boss whose usefulness expires quickly. If the president has any thought of a more international approach to security threats, he must remove Rumsfeld from his leadership team.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/136272_rummyw2ed.html

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"I`m also not very analytical. You know I don`t spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things." —George W. Bush, aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

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Former UN chief: bomb was payback for collusion with US




Exclusive: By Neil Mackay



THE reason the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad were bombed is because the UN has been taken over by the US and turned into a “dark joke” and a “malignant force”, according to one of the UN’s most internationally respected former leaders.
Denis Halliday, the former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq, attacked the UN as an aggressive arm of US foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the truckbomb attack on the UN mission in Baghdad which killed at least 23 people – many of whom were Halliday’s former friends and colleagues.

“The West sees the UN as a benign organisation, but the sad reality in much of the world is that the UN is not seen as benign,” said Halliday, who was nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. “The UN Security Council has been taken over and corrupted by the US and UK, particularly with regard to Iraq, Palestine and Israel.

“In Iraq, the UN imposed sustained sanctions that probably killed up to one million people. Children were dying of malnutrition and water-borne diseases. The US and UK bombed the infrastructure in 1991, destroying power, water and sewage systems against the Geneva Convention. It was a great crime against Iraq.

“Thirteen years of sanctions made it impossible for Iraq to repair the damage. That is why we have such tremendous resentment and anger against the UN in Iraq. There is a sense that the UN humiliated the Iraqi people and society. I would use the term genocide to define the use of sanctions against Iraq. Several million Iraqis are suffering cancers because of the use of depleted uranium shells. That’s an atrocity. Can you imagine the bitterness from all of this?

He warned that “further colla boration” between the UN and the US and Britain “would be a disaster for the United Nations as it would be sucked into supporting the illegal occupation of Iraq”.

“The UN has been drawn into being an arm of the US – a division of the state department. Kofi Annan was appointed and supported by the US and that has corrupted the independence of the UN. The UN must move quickly to reform itself and improve the security council – it must make clear that the UN and the US are not one and the same.”

Halliday said the US should withdraw from Iraqi within six months and allow free elections to be held. The UN could then start the work of helping the Iraqis rebuild their nation. “Bush has blown $75 billion on this war, so he should spend $75 billion on reconstruction – and the money shouldn’t just go to Halli burton [an oil firm now operating in Iraqi which was once run by vice- president Dick Cheney] and the boys either. Once the US goes from Iraq, the terrorist will go as well.

“Bush and Blair have misled their countries into war. By invading Iraq and placing the US inside the Islamic world, America is inviting terrorists to come on the attack.”

Halliday, who resigned from the UN in 1998, knows his comments will upset London, Washington and Kofi Annan, but he claims many senior UN figures feel the same anger.

24 August 2003

http://www.sundayherald.com/36222

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August 24, 2003
U.S. mired in a mess of its own making
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
SCHONRIED, Switzerland -- Misled and misread. That pretty well sums up America`s growing disaster in Iraq.

First, President George W. Bush, VP Dick Cheney and a coterie of neo-conservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle misled Americans into an unprovoked, unnecessary war by claiming Iraq was about to attack the U.S. with nuclear and biowarfare weapons. This was a grotesque lie that anyone with knowledge of strategic weapons knew was arrant nonsense, but few had the courage or honesty to refute.

Next, the White House gravely misread the strategic situation by swallowing neo-con assurances the "liberation" of Iraq would be a cakewalk and oil bonanza. Last week, Iraqis responded to Bush`s foolish challenge, "Bring `em on," by blowing up UN headquarters in Baghdad and inflicting serious sabotage on Iraq`s oil infrastructure.

These attacks show the U.S. has got itself into a truly awesome mess in Iraq. Far from easily plundering Iraq`s oil wealth, U.S. occupation troops - almost half the U.S. Army`s combat forces - are now under siege, at a cost of $1 billion US weekly.

Bush has literally stuck his head in a hornet`s nest in Iraq and is now getting royally stung. He, his scandalously inept national security advisers, and the media`s so-called "Iraqi experts" failed to comprehend that a U.S. occupation would be a frightful, expensive, bloody mess - a disaster that was totally predictable.

Worse, the U.S. occupation is clearly creating the kind of violence and car bomb terrorism that Bush used as an excuse to invade Iraq. Call this a terrorism perpetual motion machine. Iraqis who resist U.S. occupation are branded "terrorists" and lumped into Bush`s crusade against Islamic militancy.

Blame the neighbours

When the U.S. finds itself unable to crush Iraqi resistance, it will blame neighbouring Iran and Syria for "fueling terrorism," and may attack them. Tehran and Damascus thus have every reason to stir the pot in Iraq to tie down American forces and make it less likely the U.S. will next invade them, as neo-cons are urging.

Just a score of Syrian or Iranian-supplied snipers, for example, could inflict punishing losses on the U.S. garrison in Iraq. A few truck bombs causing heavy U.S. casualties might well convince hitherto trusting Americans that Bush`s Iraq adventure is a bloody fiasco.

This writer, who covered the Afghan struggle against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, sees many of the same elements developing in Iraq: tribal and ethnic divisions, a foreign-supported puppet regime with a useless army, an intractable guerrilla war and a great power with overreaching imperial ambition.

Worse for the U.S., Iraq may be emerging - like Afghanistan - as a new, pan-national cause for the Muslim world. Thousands of jihadi volunteers are reportedly slipping into Iraq to battle U.S. troops. They range from youthful idealists to battle-hardened jihadis from other wars and a handful of suicide bombers. Just as the Afghan jihad electrified the Muslim world and helped assuage its feelings of weakness and inferiority, for a new generation Iraq may come to be a passionate struggle against another foreign invader.

President Bush has conveniently provided anti-American militants and fanatics across the Mideast with an ideal target: the U.S. army in Iraq.

Ironically, the American neo-conservatives who played a primary role in engineering this war have stuck the U.S. in much the same morass that their hero and ally, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, found himself in after he engineered the invasion of Lebanon.

Each passing day makes Bush`s ill-fated invasion of Iraq increasingly resemble Lebanon`s ugly civil war in the 1980s. Sharon, then Israel`s defence minister, ordered his army to invade war-torn Lebanon in 1982 under the pretext of fighting terrorism. In fact, Sharon`s real goal, which he hid from Israel`s prime minister and cabinet, was to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization, turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate and make himself prime minister.

A calamity

The result was a calamity for Israel, as its intelligence agency, Mossad, had warned. Like recent CIA warnings over Iraq, Mossad was ignored. At first, Israeli troops were welcomed by many Lebanese, but, they soon ended up in a bloody guerrilla war. Israel`s Lebanese Christian allies, many neo-fascists, turned out to be as inept, conniving and treacherous as America`s Iraqi yes-men.

Israel was eventually car-bombed and blasted out of Lebanon by Hezbollah guerrillas who, like today`s Iraqi resistance forces, were branded "terrorists." The war cost Israel heavy casualties and billions of dollars. Syria emerged as the real winner, and overlord of Lebanon. Israel suffered its first-ever military defeat. Sharon was convicted of indirect responsibility for the massacres of thousands of Palestinian civilians at the Shatilla and Sabra refugee camps.

The U.S. finds itself in a disturbing analogue of the long Lebanese civil war, with confused American troops, like Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, not knowing why they are there or who is the enemy and venting their frustration on civilians. Protracted guerrilla warfare eventually turns even the best-disciplined troops into brutes, and corrupts entire armies.

The very neo-cons who fathered this disaster are now calling for more American troops to be sent to Iraq.

http://www.canoe.com/Columnists/margolis_aug24.html

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http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres243426639aug…

The Air Is Thick With Lies
Jimmy Breslin





August 24, 2003

I was a few hundred yards up on Liberty Street when the Two Tower of the World Trade Center blew. I put my nose inside my shirt and ran through smoke that turned day into night. In the smoke were computers, asbestos, pulverized glass, human bodies, lead. I got on another street and One Tower blew up. Again, the air was black with a pulverized 110-story building.

I did not feel well for two months. I never said anything because I was too embarrassed. A couple of thousand had died. So many others were scorched and broken and maimed. I had no right to open my mouth, I thought. Besides, from the first day, the government`s Environmental Protection Agency had announced that air was remarkably clean. Work on. Breathe on. You`re fine.

They lied. They lied because the administration did not want people not going to work. They lied the first week and they lied the week after that and they have lied every day of the past two years to the people of this city.

Christine Whitman was the EPA head until recently. I wasn`t disturbed that her education was a jump horse school, but I thought she was better than standing up and doing what she was told by George Bush`s White House, telling lies to a public who had to breathe this air. Turns out she isn`t much of a human being.

The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time.

Now what are we supposed to do? By now I feel better physically because I have adjusted to feeling lousy. I`m not going near a doctor. Once I read what was in that air, and in it for all those days I spent around there, I didn`t want to know anything more. Don`t scare me. My friend Dan Collins, whose office is on Broadway, only yards up from the site, said he has not taken a good breath for two years. "They tell me it`s good and I know it`s bad," he said.

This lying with the lives of the people of the nation is not solely the habit of Bush and his crew, although it is more widespread and being done in so many cases by so many of their people that it looks like a generation of liars.

This war with Iraq started with the full government standing right up and looking you in the eye and openly lying about why we had to invade Iraq immediately. Bush said the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. Why, they were starting to make nuclear bombs. He had a statement about this in his State of the Union speech. When it was shown to be a lie, Bush had people like Condoleezza Rice say, Why are you so worried about 26 words in a speech? That the 26 words were about nuclear weapons seemed beyond her. Out in the streets, you can scare people with only three words: "Stick `em up."

I sit here in New York and I don`t believe one single solitary word of what the government says. Can you believe anything Bush says? Only if you`re a rank sucker. Then you put that Rumsfeld on and he grimaces and tells you the first thing he thinks of, and here is Powell, who I thought would be our first black national candidate and he`s as bad as the rest of them.

What I would like to do is sit here and type in anger only about Bush and his vile people. The trouble is in my memory there is a corrupted past of people I favored.

There was the day in 1962 when John F. Kennedy was in Cleveland on some sort of appearance and a courier from Washington brought him photos taken of Russian missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy canceled the stop and flew back to Washington. His press people announced that he had a severe cold. This was reported to the country.

Kennedy was rushing back to begin secret meetings about the chances of whether the country was going to go into a nuclear war with Russia over the missiles.

Talk worked. We`re here. But only one person complained about the false report of Kennedy`s cold. That was David Wise and he worked on a newspaper I was on. He said that it was a dangerous precedent to lie to the nation for any reason.

At the time, I thought it a minor complaint about an enormous occurrence. I didn`t have the wisdom to understand that once government gets away with lying, it becomes virtually impossible to dislodge the habit from any of them. I don`t know what other lies Kennedy told, but it couldn`t have been his last and he had our lives in his hands.

It was only in August of 1964 when Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who presented himself as being a person of unparalleled brilliance, told Lyndon Johnson that a North Vietnamese PT boat had attacked the American destroyers Turner Joy and the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Haiphong, east of Hanoi. On a night of confusion, McNamara persuaded Johnson that it was an actual attack. Johnson acted. He put the country into a war right there.

The attack on the destroyers never happened. McNamara lied. And the lie grew, and anybody who took the time to build evidence of this was attacked. "This is a just war," Johnson said.

The war blew up 58,000 of our young.

And now we have this administration welding their lies together on two matters: the air you breathe and the war they insist is good for us. We`ve just dealt with 40 years of lying and death. It is getting worse. "We`re winning in Iraq," your poor president says.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres243426639aug…

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A U.S. soldier walks past a car overturned and set fire by angry Turkmen, near a police station during clashes between ethnic Iraqi Turkmen and Kurdish peshmergas, in Kirkuk, Aug. 23, 2003. Iraqi police patrolled the streets of Kirkuk Sunday after ethnic violence in northern Iraq left several dead, stoking further tension in a country already grappling with lawlessness and a guerrilla insurgency.
Iraqi Shi`ite Group Bombed; Ethnic Tension Flares
Sun August 24, 2003 12:24 PM ET
By Rosalind Russell and Michael Georgy
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A bomb blast killed three bodyguards in the office of one of Iraq`s main Shi`ite Muslim groups Sunday, a spokesman for the group said, as ethnic violence flared between Kurds and Turkmen in the north.
The blast in the holy Shi`ite city of Najaf and the ethnic clashes around Kirkuk stoked tensions in a country already grappling with lawlessness and a guerrilla insurgency.
In Baghdad, one of the main bridges over the Tigris river was closed after explosives were found planted there, Iraqi police said. The bridge is one of the main routes to the headquarters of the U.S.-led administration.
The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is one of the main Shi`ite parties in Iraq and is represented on the U.S.-backed Governing Council, said it was the target of the bomb attack in Najaf.
Its spokesman said Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, uncle of SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, suffered very light wounds to the neck, and 10 other people were wounded in the blast near the sacred Imam Ali mosque.
"There was a strange man in the building outside his office. When someone went to see who it was, a bomb went off. Three security guards were killed," he told Reuters.
Tensions have risen between rival Shi`ite groups in Najaf since the U.S.-led war ousted Saddam Hussein in April. Power struggles in the city play a key role in determining the political future of Iraq, which is majority Shi`ite.
SCIRI has been criticized by some Iraqi Shi`ites for cooperating with the United States and accepting a seat on the Governing Council. Moqtada al Sadr, a rival Shi`ite leader, has condemned the U.S. occupation and refused to join the council.
ETHNIC TENSIONS
In northern Iraq, fighting between Kurds and Turkmen has claimed at least 12 lives since Friday, local officials said.
The violence began Friday in Tuz Khurmatu, south of Kirkuk. The mayor of Tuz Khurmatu said nine people were killed after Turkmen accused Kurds of defiling a Shi`ite shrine.
Saturday, officials said, three people were killed in clashes in Kirkuk, an ethnically divided city at the heart of Iraq`s richest oil reserves.
Abdel Rahman Mustafa, a Kurd whose appointment as governor of Kirkuk is resented by many Turkish-speaking Turkmen in the city, said he would investigate accusations that Kurdish police had opened fire unprovoked on protesters.
"Things are under control after some losses, which we regret," he told Reuters at the municipal government building.
Both Kurds and Turkmen recount persecution in Kirkuk during the rule of Saddam Hussein, when many were expelled from the city and replaced with Arabs from other parts of the country in a bid to change Kirkuk`s ethnic make-up.
The Turkmen, whose presence in Iraq dates back to Ottoman rule, say they now face oppression by the Kurds, and accuse the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of inciting ethnic violence.
Turkish newspapers blamed Kurdish `peshmerga` fighters belonging to the PUK for the unrest. Turkey, which wants to suppress Kurdish separatism within its own borders, has expressed concern about growing Kurdish influence in Iraq.
The PUK denied any role in the violence and blamed "foreign elements" and "elements of the former regime."
GUERRILLA ATTACKS
In southern Iraq, three British soldiers were killed in the city of Basra Saturday. The British military said two vehicles were ambushed by gunmen shooting from a pickup truck.
Ten British soldiers have been killed in action since Washington declared major combat over on May 1. In the same period, 64 U.S. soldiers have been killed in guerrilla attacks, mostly in Saddam`s main strongholds in central Iraq.
Washington blames Saddam loyalists and foreign fundamentalists for the attacks, and says they are also the main suspects for last week`s devastating truck bomb attack on the United Nations in Baghdad.
Charles Heatly, a spokesman for the U.S.-led administration, said Sunday one militant group that may have been involved was Ansar al-Islam, which was based in Kurdish northern Iraq before the war.
"We know there are terrorist organizations seeking to operate and operating in Iraq. We have credible and repeated information about Ansar al-Islam, which is affiliated to the al Qaeda network," he told a news conference.
The group`s Iraqi Kurdish founder, Mullah Krekar, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in an interview that the group was not to blame for the truck bombing, which killed 24.
"It wasn`t Ansar al-Islam... The Pentagon and CIA have got it wrong," he was quoted as saying in Norway, where he has had refugee status since 1991.
"I think it was rather an operation born inside the country and carried out by Saddam`s faithful." (Additional reporting by Joseph Logan in Kirkuk and Andrew Cawthorne in Tikrit)
Preliminary FBI estimates showed 16,110 people were murdered in America in 2002, up 0.8 percent from the year before, the Department of Justice said. Final numbers will be available later this year.

Summary
++++US++++UK++++Other++++Total++++Avg
++++275++++50+++++2+++++++327+++++2.08
Latest Fatality Date: 8/23/2003
Estimated Wounded: 1204
08/24/03 CENTCOM
US SOLDIER DROWNS IN EUPHRATES RIVER ON AUG. 23RD
08/24/03 CENTCOM
A 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment soldier died on August 23 from a non-hostile gunshot wound
08/24/03 CNN
U.S. military vehicle reportedly been hit by an explosion on the Amriyah Bridge, west of Baghdad. Eyewitnesses reported injuries...
08/23/03 AP via The New York Times
Three British soldiers killed, one seriously wounded, Saturday morning in Basra, the British military reports.
08/22/03 CENTCOM
1st Armored Division soldier dead, six others wounded, in fire at small arms range in Baghdad at 4:30 p.m. on August 21
08/22/03 CENTCOM
US service member on duty with 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died after being shot on Aug 21 in Al Hillah by unidentified gunman.
08/21/03 iafrica.com
SPANISH NAVAL CAPTAIN DIES WEDNESDAY OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN UN COMPOUND BOMBING
08/21/03 CENTCOM
ONE US SOLDIER KILLED, TWO WOUNDED IN IED ATTACK IN BAGHDAD
08/21/03 CENTCOM
SERVICE MEMBER DIES AS A RESULT OF AFGHAN HOSTILE FIRE INCIDENT

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Comment
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God help America
US law insists on the separation of church and state. So why does religion now govern?

Gary Younge
Monday August 25, 2003
The Guardian

Montgomery, Alabama, is no stranger to stand-offs. The gold star embedded into the marble at the front of the state capitol marks the spot where Jefferson Davis stamped his foot and declared an independent Confederacy and where former governor George Wallace promised "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". From that very point you can make out the bus stop where Rosa Parks took her seat and the church where Martin Luther King made his stand, launching the bus boycott that sparked a decade of civil rights protest.

Stand on the star today and you can witness the city`s latest confrontation as the Alabama supreme court house plays host to prayer circles and television trucks in a showdown between the state`s most senior judge and the country`s highest court.

This particular dispute is cast in stone. Two-and-a-half tonnes of granite, displaying the 10 commandments, which was placed in the rotunda of the courthouse two years ago by Alabama`s chief justice, Roy Moore. The US supreme court told him to remove the monument, which violates the separation of church and state. Moore refused, saying that Christianity forms the bedrock of the American constitution and his conscience.

Since the deadline passed at midnight on Wednesday, Christian activists have descended on the town from all over the country, keeping a 24-hour watch to make sure the monument is not moved and establishing phone trees to rally the faithful if it is. Many have T-shirts with slogans every bit as intolerant as the south`s reputation. "Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder," says one. (It is difficult to imagine how many more people you could offend on one piece of summerwear.)

They appear as dotty as they do devout and determined. "What you`re watching is that the socialist, communist elements are attempting to push out God from the public domain," Gene Chapman, a minister from Dallas, told the Montgomery Advertiser. Those subversive elements include the national rightwing Christian coalition and the seven southern, Republican judges.

On Thursday afternoon, Moore vowed his undying opposition to the removal of the commandments; by Friday he had been suspended and his lawyers announced he was prepared to relent. Yesterday, the monument was still there and the crowds of believers kept coming, determined to martyr themselves before a lost cause.

It would be easy to deride the defenders of the monument or to dismiss the whole charade as the latest illustration of the scale of degradation in America`s political culture. However, Britons would do well to remove the mote in their own eye before resorting to ridicule. The only reason America can have these disputes is that it has a constitution that separates church and state (which we don`t).

For, while the spectacle is certainly ridiculous, its symbolism is significant. The US is at one and the same time one of the most fiercely secular and aggressively religious countries in the western world. The nation`s two most sacred texts are the constitution and the Bible. And when those who interpret them disagree, the consequent confusion resonates way beyond Montgomery.

This is a country where 11 states, including Alabama, refuse to give government money to students who major in theology because it would violate the constitution, and where nativity plays are not allowed in primary schools. It is also a country where, a Harris poll showed, 94% of adults believe in God, 86% believe in miracles, 89% believe in heaven, and 73% believe in the devil and hell.

These two competing tendencies produce some striking contradictions. The supreme court and both houses of Congress all invoke God`s blessing before they start work. But children are not allowed to say the words "under God" when they pledge allegiance to the flag at the start of school.

So while there is a constitutional, albeit contested, barrier between church and state, there is almost no distinction between church and politics. Indeed, when it comes to elections, religion is the primary galvanising force and the church the central mobilising vehicle.

This is one of the few truths that transcends both race and class. White evangelicals and black Protestants are the two groups most likely to say that their religion shapes their votes at least occasionally, according to a survey by the non-partisan Pew research centre. Since these two constituencies form the cornerstone of both major parties, it would be impossible for either to win an election without them and inconceivable that they could do so without the support of the church.

But the influence of religion goes beyond domestic politics or social issues such as abortion and gay rights to crucial areas of foreign policy. Another Pew poll revealed that 48% of Americans think the US has had special protection from God for most of its history. Moreover, 44% believe that God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people, while 36% think that "the state of Israel is a fulfilment of the biblical prophecy about the second coming of Jesus".

At this point America`s internal contradictions become an issue on the world stage: the nation that poses as the guardian of global secularity is itself dominated by strong fundamentalist instincts. There are two problems with this. The first is that, as became clear in Montgomery last week, there is no arguing with faith. Fundamentalists deal with absolutes. Their eternal certainties make them formidable campaigners and awful negotiators - it is difficult to cut a bargain with divine truth.

The second is that America`s religiosity is not something it shares with even its few western allies, let alone the many countries that oppose its current path. Yet another poll shows that among countries where people believe religion to be very important, America`s views are closer to Pakistan`s and Nigeria`s than to France`s or Germany`s.

These differences go all the way to the top and explain much of the reason why the tone, style, language and content of America`s foreign policy has been so out of kilter with the rest of the developed world, particularly since September 11. For these fundamentalist tendencies in US diplomacy have rarely been stronger in the White House than they are today. Since George Bush gave up Jack Daniels for Jesus Christ, he has counted Jesus as his favourite philosopher. The first thing he reads in the morning is not a briefing paper but a book of evangelical mini- sermons. When it came to casting the morality play for the war on terror he went straight to the Bible and came out with evil. "He reached right into the psalms for that word," said his former speech writer, David Frum.

Bush speaks in the name of the founding fathers but believes he is doing the work of the holy father. He cannot do both and condemn fundamentalism. But if he feels he must try, he might start with the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not kill."

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The foot soldiers are rebelling
Getting into Iraq proved easy. Getting out is already a nightmare

Peter Preston
Monday August 25, 2003
The Guardian

There is one grim, twisty rule about the politics of death in action. It isn`t the bodybags coming home that make the difference, sap the resolve and drain the popularity. It is the suitcases packed and stacked on the front porch for those who may replace the fallen. The real pressure points are in the waiting and the anticipation.

That`s why, whatever else is said this week after Basra and more British deaths, no political player - not even an MoD emailer - will start talking about troops out of Iraq. Long years of a regular army doing its duty in Northern Ireland have anaesthetised us to the drip-drip-drip of casualties.

We give our boys in their flag-covered coffins a suitably ceremonial farewell, but we do not question their sacrifice. They did their duty, didn`t they? Why sully their memory by asking whether that tour of duty was strictly necessary? David Kelly rates a full inquiry, but three dead military policemen on a dusty road barely rate a second`s reflection. Just sound the Last Post and move on.

Another death out in Iraq and then another don`t counsel withdrawal. On the contrary, it seems, they merely mean more of the same: more soldiers, more flak jackets, more jut-jawed resolution.

Pause, though, and watch how the rhythms inside our so-called coalition of the willing begin to beat out dissonant tunes. Tony Blair, it is confidently asserted, has more trouble over weapons of mass destruction than George Bush because American public opinion, happy with a job swiftly done, isn`t too fussed about bodged-up intelligence assessments. It`s over, let it go. Score one for a president supposedly cruising towards re-election. Mire one for a prime minister where detail counts.

But Bush, too, has his own special handicaps. Blair can be up to his rictoid grin in Hutton sludge and still enjoy a clear five-point lead over the Tories. George is down (from 82% approval two years ago) to a 52-48 edge over an unnamed generic Democrat (and is now actually losing 48-45 on the Zogby poll`s regular question of whether he or "a newcomer" should be next into the White House).

Why this accelerating sinking feeling? The US economy, after all, is showing signs of life. It`s high summer. People ought to be feeling good. And we know foreign affairs don`t shift votes, don`t we?

No: we don`t. Take another fascinating poll. A Scripps Howard/Ohio University sampling of the mood in the south. Here`s the region that, quite disproportionately, recruits its sons and daughters to go to war. A region of tradition and conservatism and military pride. A region that salutes when the commander-in-chief comes into the room. A region that backed Operation Iraqi Freedom to the hilt.

And now? Now 42% of southerners question whether the war was worth it. Now Bush approval is down from 69% to 57% in a couple of months. Now 72% of the south`s black population - America`s foot soldiers in the search for Saddam - have turned against the involvement, a switch of nearly 20% since May.

These aren`t small or insignificant movements. On the contrary, they`re big and they fit together. As Nikos Zahariadis, professor of political science at the University of Alabama, says: "It seems paradoxical, but many people from the south weren`t supporting Bush, they were supporting the troops... and now they`re wondering exactly when their husbands and sons and daughters are coming home."

That`s the thing about strong regional identities and communities. Those troops still in Baghdad, still taking casualties, thought they`d be home long ago. But they`re stuck. And those other units in waiting across the south see the call coming for them, too. The entanglement is specific and dangerous and apparently interminable. Did Bush or Rumsfeld spell that out last March? Of course not. Even this month, Bush was still setting himself short, sweet deadlines. "We`ve got a year and a while during my first term to make the world a more peaceful place, and we`ll do it."

But the world is not, remotely, a more peaceful place. The Middle East road map lies in a pile of rubble - just like the UN headquarters in Baghdad. OK, so the "war against terror" was always going to be long. How long is long? How much more of this empty reassurance is any electorate supposed to take without choking? These have been an awful seven days for empty reassurances.

Is it too late to change course? Perhaps not. "Defeating al-Qaida would not end the problem of proliferation," writes Madeleine Albright in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, "because al-Qaida is deadly even without nuclear, chemical and biological arms. But, meanwhile, the nuclear programmes of North Korea and Iran are driven by nationalism, not terrorism, and must be dealt with primarily on that basis. September 11, the administration`s eureka moment, caused it to lump together terrorists and rogue regimes and to come up with a prescription for fighting them - namely, pre-emption - that frightens and divides the world at precisely the moment US security depends on bringing people together."

So wiser counsels may finally prevail. So the flaunting of US power, the facile bullying of Iran and Syria, the belief that the Pentagon can run the world may be over. But is it already too late?

Why should we assume, for instance, that a UN-led force in Iraq will not be sabotaged and attacked? That wasn`t last week`s obvious lesson. Why should we assume that a broader Nato coalition - as in Kosovo - will fit the bill? Al-Qaida lives in Riyadh, not Pristina. Getting in was easy. Getting out is already a nightmare, the nightmare for George Bush. And Tony Blair`s deepest worry after Hutton, curiously, may be what happens to the faithful dog when he no longer hears his master`s voice, singing the Song of the South.

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US `using Saddam`s spies to combat terrorism`
America admits improved intelligence, rather than more coalition troops, is the key to stopping daily attacks by militants in Iraq

Julian Borger in Washington
Monday August 25, 2003
The Guardian

The United States has covertly begun the wholesale recruitment of Saddam Hussein`s most feared former spies in an attempt to combat a rising tide of attacks by Saddam loyalists and Islamists from across the Arab world, it was reported yesterday.

The recruitment has focused on members of the Mukhabarat, the ousted regime`s foreign intelligence service, and has been "extensive", involving up to a few hundred agents, according to the Washington Post quoting unnamed US officials.

The head of the US-led coalition provisional authority (CPA), Paul Bremer, said yesterday that he could not confirm the details of the report, but stressed that improved intelligence would be a more effective way of dealing with the daily attacks and bombings by the insurgents than bringing in US military reinforcements.

He said he believed that up to 90% of the attacks on coalition forces were still being carried out by Saddam loyalists, but confirmed President George Bush`s claim last week that non-Iraqi Islamic fighters were coming in across the borders.

"We`ve seen an increase, certainly, in the terrorists here since liberation. We`ve seen a re-infiltration of the Ansar al-Islam, which is a group with al-Qaida connections," Mr Bremer said.

"We`ve seen some evidence of al-Qaida personnel here. And we`ve certainly seen foreign fighters who sort of fit the al-Qaida profile - people travelling on documents from Syria, Yemen, Sudan, in some cases Saudi Arabia."

He said last week`s bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad could have been carried out by a loyalist group such the Fedayeen Saddam, or by an international terrorist organisation, or a combination of the two.

Time magazine suggested yesterday that the insurgents were neither al-Qaida nor Baathists, "but are instead a broad group of mostly Sunni Iraqi nationalists taking guidance from militant Sunni clerics.

"Some are drawn into cell structures under the command of former security and intelligence officers; others operate through tribal and clan networks," the magazine reported.

The recruitment of Mukhabarat agents, reflects a broader policy u-turn by the US administration in Baghdad, which after the war attempted to do without the muscle of the Saddam regime.

Mr Bremer has been widely criticised for the May 23 decision to disband the Iraqi army. Officers, such as Mohamed al-Faour, said the decision turned Iraqi soldiers from potentially willing allies to sullen enemies.

"Disbanding the army was a big mistake," Mr Faour, a former special forces major, said yesterday. "They have created a terrorist nest in Iraq with all the ingredients - a chaotic country with no laws and no borders. And they have the bait - the American and English soldiers.

"You have now new terrorist groups with new names, and with a mutual interest with ex-Baathists."

That criticism is echoed by the International Crisis Group (ICG), an international thinktank, in a report due to be published today, titled Governing Iraq.

"The CPA`s decision to disband the army and the ministry of the interior is said to have greatly strengthened this group, as it drove many alienated people to join the clandestine resistance," the report argues.

Mr Bremer has defended the decision on the grounds that the army had already collapsed anyway, but American officials have said the move was forced on him by administration hawks, influenced by the views of the Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmed Chalabi.

Mr Bremer yesterday angrily rejected Mr Chalabi`s claims that he was not doing enough to round up senior Baathist officials.

Today`s ICG report will recommend a division of power in Iraq, giving Mr Bremer`s CPA the primary role in "military security, civil law and order, and restoring basic infrastructure".

Under the proposals, the UN would take the lead in the political transition to a new Iraqi government, supervising the transitional Iraq governing council, and organising elections - work currently done by the CPA - while the council, a collection of non-Baathist Iraqi leaders chosen by the coalition, would carry out the day-to-day tasks of civilian government.


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Growing opposition to Bush re-election
Julian Borger in Washington
Monday August 25, 2003
The Guardian

For the first time, more Americans say they would oppose President George Bush`s re-election in 2004 than support a second term, according to a poll published yesterday that showed mounting pessimism over the US military presence in Iraq.

As attacks on coalition forces continue to inflict casualties, a Newsweek poll found that the human and economic costs of occupation were eroding the president`s support at an accelerating rate.

Sixty-nine per cent of those asked were concerned that the US would be bogged down for many years in Iraq with little to show for it in improved security for Americans; 49% said they were very concerned.

At the same time Mr Bush`s approval rating dropped to 53%, down 18% since April, and his lowest rating since before the September 11 attacks turned him from the victor of a disputed election presiding over a worsening economy into a wartime leader.

But the most jarring statistic for the White House looked forward to the 2004 election. Some 49% of Americans questioned in yesterday`s poll said they did not want him re-elected, against only 44% prepared to give him a second term. The corresponding figures in April were 52% backing re-election with 38% opposed.

The change over four months represents a serious haemorrhage in support, reflecting a combination of long-term but spreading disenchantment with the president`s economic stewardship and new doubts over where he is taking the country in his open-ended "war on terror".

In April, 74% of the country supported his handling of the situation in Iraq. Yesterday that figure was 54%. Americans are split between those who believe the administration`s line that the invasion has undermined terrorist groups such as al-Qaida (45%) and those who think the opposite - that it has inspired a new generation of Islamist radicals to take up arms against America and its allies.

Despite the increasing doubts over how US troops can be extricated, a significant majority of Americans, 61%, still believe the invasion of Iraq was justified, and a slightly smaller majority would support the maintenance of a significant occupation force for up to two years.

The impact of the Iraq occupation on Mr Bush`s standing has encouraged Democrats who, voters said yesterday, had the best approach to stimulating the economy and handling domestic issues such as health and education, a reversal since the beginning of the year.

Nine presidential contenders have joined the Democratic primary contest, with a 10th likely soon - General Wesley Clark, a former Nato commander.


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BBC launches public attack on Murdoch `imperialism`
By Vincent Graff, Media and Culture Editor
25 August 2003


The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a "capital imperialist" who wants to destabilise the corporation because he "is against everything the BBC stands for".

Lorraine Heggessey said Mr Murdoch`s continued attacks on the BBC stemmed from a dislike of the public sector. But he did not understand that the British people "have a National Health Service, a public education system" and trust organisations that are there for the benefit of society and not driven by profit.

Her controversial comments, in an interview with The Independent, are believed to be the first time a senior BBC executive has publicly attacked the motives of the media tycoon. They follow an intensification of anti-BBC rhetoric from Mr Murdoch`s side.

The BBC has been alarmed by the increasingly close relationship between the Government and Mr Murdoch`s British newspapers, at a time when the BBC`s relationship with New Labour is strained as never before. The frostiness of the relationship has raised speculation that the Government will consider abolishing the licence fee in its forthcoming review of the BBC`s charter.

Ms Heggessey`s remarks will cheer supporters of the corporation who fear the BBC has kept quiet for too long in the face of attack from Mr Murdoch and his most senior employees.

Her comments come in the wake of a speech to the country`s senior broadcasting executives by Tony Ball, chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, in which Mr Murdoch`s News Corporation is the major shareholder.

Mr Ball told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that the BBC ought to be forced to sell its most successful programmes, such as EastEnders, Casualty and Have I Got News For You to its commercial rivals, who would screen all future episodes instead. The money raised by such sales should then be ploughed into experimental programming, he said.

Executives at the BBC and elsewhere see the plan as a Murdoch-inspired attempt to cripple the corporation by depriving it of its most popular shows - and the large audiences that go with them.

Mr Ball told a questioner at the festival that it "would not be such a disaster" if the BBC were eventually to become a marginal broadcaster.

But Ms Heggessey retorted: "It wouldn`t be such a disaster for Sky because he hopes that the less successful we become, the more people will subscribe to Sky. It would be a disaster for the BBC."

Supporters of the BBC say Mr Ball`s proposal, intended to influence the Government`s hand as it considers the renewal of the BBC`s charter, follows relentlessly negative reports in Mr Murdoch`s British newspapers about the BBC`s conduct in the David Kelly affair. The Times and The Sun, in particular, have come under attack for what is perceived as anti-BBC bias.

"I would suspect that everybody who works for Rupert Murdoch knows what he expects of them and they know that if they don`t deliver they will be booted out," said Ms Heggessey. Newspaper readers "know when they are being peddled a line," she added.

In his speech, Mr Ball proposed two further restrictions to be placed on the BBC, which he argued would prevent the corporation it from straying too far into territory he regards as the sole domain of commercial broadcasters such as his own.

The BBC should be banned from buying any foreign-made material, he said. This would prevent the BBC from pushing up the price of American sitcoms, Hollywood movies and Australian soap operas, the staples of many commercial channels. "I really cannot see why public money is being diverted to those poor struggling Hollywood studios," he said.

Ms Heggessey said BBC1 did not run any overseas-originated programmes during peak time but "the audience expects us to run movies and we do".
25 August 2003 09:52

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Iraqi Shia leader hurt in bomb blast
By Justin Huggler in Mosul
25 August 2003


One of the most senior Shia clerics in Iraq was injured and three of his bodyguards were killed yesterday in a bomb attack on his house in the Shia holy city of Najaf.

The attack on Ayatollah Mohammed Sayyed al-Hakim could ignite dangerous tensions over the control of Iraq`s Shia Muslims. Ten other people were injured when the gas cylinder bomb exploded outside Ayatollah Hakim`s house in Najaf after noon prayers.

"There was a strange man in the building outside [Ayatollah Hakim`s] office. When someone went to see who it was, a bomb went off [killing] three security guards," said a spokesman for the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is led by Ayatollah Hakim`s nephew ­ but is not supported by the cleric.

If Ayatollah Hakim`s injuries are more serious than initial reports suggested, violence between rival groups of Shias in Najaf may ensue. Iraqi newspapers reported last week that the ayatollah had received death threats, and was among three Shia leaders threatened with death by a rival Shia cleric shortly after Saddam Hussein was toppled on 9 April.

Differences of opinion over growing calls for Shia resistance to the occupation may lie behind the bombing.

On 10 April, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a Shia cleric, was hacked to death at a mosque by a mob which also killed several others.

Ayatollah Hakim has allied himself with Iraq`s highest religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Some radical Shia factions are unhappy with Ayatollah Sistani`s refusal to be politically involved in opposing the US occupation, and his call for Iraq`s Shias to stay calm.

"Obviously, terrorist groups belonging to the former regime are behind this incident," said Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, a supreme council leader who serves on the US-appointed Governing Council.

One group on which suspicion will fall is Muqtada al-Sadr`s supporters. Mr Sadr, the son of a former Shia religious leader, has been calling his supporters to join an armed wing and his followers have been making threatening noises towards the Americans.

They recently warned the US occupation forces of trouble if they did not withdraw from the working-class Shia neighbourhood of Sadr City in Baghdad, named after Mr Sadr`s father, after US soldiers pulled down a Shia religious flag.

The Ministry of Defence yesterday named three Royal Military policemen killed in an weekend ambush in Basra as Major Matthew Titchener, Warrant Officer Colin Wall and Corporal Dewi Pritchard.

The MoD insisted it would continue trying to win support from locals by sending troops onto the streets in lightly armed convoys, despite suggestions that the military policemen had been left defenceless in an unarmoured four-wheel drive vehicle.

The international Red Cross said yesterday it was scaling down its Baghdad workforce after receiving warnings that the organisation might be targetted.
25 August 2003 09:54

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August 25, 2003
U.S. to Send Iraqis to Site in Hungary for Police Course
By DEXTER FILKINS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 24 — Eager to have more Iraqis take responsibility for their country`s security, American officials here are planning to ferry as many as 28,000 Iraqis to Eastern Europe for an intensive police training course.

Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City Police commissioner in charge of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, said in an interview that American officials had secured permission from the government of Hungary to set up a large police academy inside an old Soviet military base there.

Mr. Kerik said the extraordinary measures were necessary because the existing police academies in Iraq were not large enough to train that many officers in the next several months.

His plan is part of a larger effort by senior American officials here to press the Iraqis to take a greater share in running the country. The Bush administration is also under growing political pressure at home to lighten the load on the American forces here.

"We want to turn Iraqi security over to the Iraqis," Mr. Kerik said. "This is the only way to do it quickly."

He said the prospective Iraqi officers would receive eight weeks of intensive training by Americans in Hungary and then return to Iraq. Early this year, the site was also used to train a group of Iraqi volunteers to work with American troops.

After the men return from training, they would be given four to six months of on-the-job instruction, similar to the training officers undergo in the United States.

Mr. Kerik said he hoped to begin training the first group of 1,500 officers in four months, with 28,000 officers ready to start work in Iraq over the next 18 months. That would bring the total number of police officers to 65,000 — the number that American officials believe is required to police the country effectively.

The program outlined by Mr. Kerik reflects the growing sense of urgency among American officials that the chaotic security situation prevailing in some parts of the country could be more effectively dealt with by the Iraqis, who are seen as more credible peacekeepers than the American occupation forces.

There has been some violence against Iraqis who worked with the Americans, including a bombing in early July near the graduation ceremony for the first class of police recruits that killed seven of them. But Mr. Kerik said the overwhelming reason for planning training outside of Iraq was to train police officers as quickly as possible.

He said it would relieve American troops of the burden of doing the policing. But it is unclear whether that would reduce the number of American troops needed in Iraq.

Four months after Saddam Hussein`s government collapsed, the streets of some Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, are still quite chaotic, with rampant robberies, kidnappings and shootings often going unpunished. The collapse of public order that followed the fall of Mr. Hussein`s government was made worse by the disintegration of the Iraqi Army, which made guns and munitions easily available on the streets.

In Baghdad, for instance, American soldiers have set up checkpoints dedicated almost exclusively to stopping armed carjackings.

Since the end of the war, American administrators have put 37,000 police officers in place around the country. Most of them worked for the former government but were judged by the occupation officials after individual reviews to be competent, honest and reasonably independent from that government, Mr. Kerik said.

He said as many as 3,000 Iraqi officers had been barred from returning to police work, usually because of a history of corruption or brutality, which Iraqis say was common under the old administration.

Each of the officers now working in Iraq has been given a mandatory American-devised training course, usually lasting a few weeks, in police tactics, democracy and human rights. Mr. Kerik said that the pool of former officers was all but tapped out, though, and that raw recruits would need far more training.

Training those new recruits in Iraq`s existing police academies would take nearly six years, he said.

Mr. Kerik, who is wrapping up his tour in Iraq, said he hoped that if the first class could begin training in four months, another group of 1,500 would begin training four weeks later. The course would last about eight weeks, he said, which is shorter than most police academies in Western countries, which typically last several months. "We don`t have that luxury," he said.

He said the police academy would be set up in Hungary in the same site where hundreds of Iraqi volunteers received military training to join American forces in the invasion of Iraq. That training took place on a base near the city of Taszar.

The Iraqi police force has been given a largely warm reception by the Iraqi people, although it has been weakened by a lack of equipment, especially guns. In the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniya, for instance, only a fraction of the city`s 2,500 police officers have guns. American marines overseeing the police have been forced to pair officers with guns with those who have none.

Mr. Kerik, acknowledging the equipment shortage, said that a shipment of 50,000 9-millimeter pistols would arrive shortly, and that 100,000 more would arrive next year.

He outlined progress in putting Iraqi border guards and customs officers in place as well. About 13,600 are on the job, he said, with about 6,000 more still to be hired and trained. American officials are also overseeing the creation of an Iraqi civil defense force, which would have about 14,000 members initially, under current plans.

Mr. Kerik, whose time here is to end in a week, said he was proud of what he had accomplished, including putting together a team of Iraqis who could serve as senior administrators for the new Interior Ministry.

He said said that although he would be returning to the United States, he expected to be engaged for some time in helping his successors.

"I`ll probably be on the phone for several weeks," he said.



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++++++++++++++++++++++++
Afghans waited to fill receptacles at a water pump on the outskirts of Kabul on Sunday. Water has been short for four years because of drought.
August 25, 2003
U.S. Said to Plan Bigger Afghan Role, Stepping Up Aid
By DAVID ROHDE


KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 24 — In the next several weeks, the Bush administration is expected to announce a major increase in aid to Afghanistan that would greatly expand the American role in this country, senior American officials here and in Washington say.

The administration appears set to embark on a vast American-led effort at top-to-bottom rebuilding and recasting of Afghanistan, those officials said in recent days.

A senior American diplomat said President Bush, viewing the situation "like a businessman," had decided that investing more reconstruction money here now could lead to an earlier exit for American forces and save money in the long run. The United States currently spends $11 billion a year on its military forces in Afghanistan and $900 million on reconstruction aid.

But officials of aid groups here contend that the presidential election in the United States next year will be the motivating factor. They say the White House is eager to have Afghanistan appear to be a success story to American voters.

Under the new initiative, American reconstruction aid is expected to double, to $1.8 billion a year, officials said. A dozen senior American government officials would work as advisers to Afghan government ministers. Up to 70 staff positions would be added to the embassy in Kabul, where virtually the entire senior staff is being replaced.

The proposals are likely to be well received in Congress, given the widespread criticism there that the aid effort so far has been inadequate, officials said. [On Sunday, a White House spokesman declined to comment on the reports.]

United Nations officials say Afghanistan is entering what is arguably the most critical period since the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. National elections are to be held next June, and American officials are eager for the moderate government of President Hamid Karzai to fare well.

Visible progress must be shown in reconstruction, disarmament and security, particularly in the south, if a Taliban insurgency is to be curbed and any semblance of a fair election held, United Nations officials said.

However, questions are already being asked here about whether a belated billion-dollar infusion of American cash and advisers would produce the desired results. Aid workers say that reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan have been stymied by a lack of political will in Washington, by what they see as draconian security restrictions imposed on American government workers here by their own security officials, by fierce bureaucratic infighting and by an attempt to rebuild Afghanistan "on the cheap."

After initially opposing the expansion of peacekeeping operations outside of Kabul, the United States is considering supporting the use of peacekeepers in other major cities, the senior American diplomat said. American officials also said that sending additional American troops to Afghanistan could not be ruled out.

In addition, four new 120-soldier American provincial reconstruction teams will be sent around the country; three American teams and one British team are already deployed. The United States would also lead an effort to build police training centers in eight cities with the aim of producing 19,000 newly trained officers by next spring.

American officials hope that a big infusion of cash and American oversight will produce change quickly. As much as half the new money is expected to be used to train police officers and to double the size of the national army, from 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers. Other funds would be spent on high-visibility reconstruction projects like roads and power plants.

But one American adviser working with Afghan officials warned that a belated influx of aid and attention might not produce immediate change. He said that after 23 years of war, Afghanistan is so shattered — from its infrastructure to its deep rivalries and archaic work force — that quick results are unlikely. He described the situation as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka."

"There is enormous pressure to demonstrate this turnabout," said the American, who has worked in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Africa. "It just can`t happen."

Others contend that even doubling the aid would not be enough.

A new Rand Corporation study examining American "nation building" efforts beginning with postwar Germany found that while there were 18.6 peacekeepers per thousand people in Bosnia and 20 in Kosovo, the 4,800 international peacekeeping force in Kabul amounts to 0.18 peacekeepers per thousand Afghans. Even including the 11,500 mostly American combat troops here, the statistic is well under one peacekeeper per thousand Afghans.

Per capita external assistance for the first two years of conflict in Bosnia was $1,390 and in Kosovo $814, the study found. In Afghanistan, it is $52.

There are unresolved, politically delicate questions about how much new aid would be delivered through the Afghan government, and over what role American-paid experts and technocrats would play.

Afghan and Western officials are acutely aware of the need to avoid the appearance of being a colonial power, particularly in a country with a long history of humbling foreign occupiers. A central tenet of Taliban propaganda against Mr. Karzai`s government is that he is an American puppet.

Afghan officials say they would welcome more aid, but must retain control of their ministries.

American officials pledged that they would and that the new advisers would not resemble the "shadow ministers" that the Soviet Union installed when it occupied the country in the 1980`s.

But aid officials say an increase in American-paid foreign advisers working in government ministries could stoke Afghan nationalism.

In stabilizing Afghanistan, the United States also faces a task whose enormous complexity, some critics say, the administration has failed to recognize. After 20 months of Western aid, Afghanistan still lacks nearly all the basic elements of a functioning national government.

Efforts to disarm militias have been delayed, opium production is booming, ethnic Tajiks still dominate the Ministry of Defense and intelligence service, and officials in rural areas struggle to pay police salaries. The country`s creaking, Soviet-trained government bureaucracies lack the administrative capacity to absorb a huge influx of aid. "There is a huge problem of capacity, that`s for sure" said Said Tayeb Jawad, Mr. Karzai`s chief of staff. "We lack skilled people to do the job."

Asked if the United States was embarking on full-blown "nation building" here, a term the administration initially shied away from, a senior State Department official said: "We are into supporting this state and we are into supporting this particular government. If that`s nation building, that`s fine."



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August 25, 2003
An Unpatriotic Act

Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a charm offensive on behalf of the USA Patriot Act. He is traveling the country to rally support for the law, which many people, both liberals and conservatives, consider a dangerous assault on civil liberties. Mr. Ashcroft`s efforts to promote the law are misguided. He should abandon the roadshow and spend more time in Washington working with those who want to reform the law.

When the Patriot Act raced through Congress after Sept. 11, critics warned that it was an unprecedented expansion of the government`s right to spy on ordinary Americans. The more people have learned about the law, the greater the calls have been for overhauling it. One section that has produced particular outrage is the authorization of "sneak and peek" searches, in which the government secretly searches people`s homes and delays telling them about the search. The House last month voted 309 to 118 for a Republican-sponsored measure to block the use of federal funds for such searches.

Congressional opponents of the act, on both sides of the aisle, are pushing for other changes. A Senate bill, sponsored by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, addresses many of the law`s most troubling aspects. One provision would make it harder for the government to gain access to sensitive data, including medical and library records, and records concerning the purchase or rental of books, music or videos.

Another change would narrow the definition of "terrorism," so the law`s expanded enforcement tools could not be used against domestic political protesters, such as environmentalists and anti-abortion activists, with no link to international terrorism. The bill would also require the government to be more specific about the targets of wiretaps obtained under the law, and would restrict the kind of information that could be collected on Internet and e-mail use.

One member of Congress, Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, has charged that Mr. Ashcroft`s lobbying campaign, in which United States attorneys have been asked to participate, may violate the law prohibiting members of the executive branch from engaging in grass-roots lobbying for or against Congressional legislation. Legal or not, the campaign seeks to shore up a deeply flawed piece of legislation. The Patriot Act is the Bush administration`s attempt to make the country safe on the cheap. Rather than do the hard work of coming up with effective port security and air cargo checks, and other programs targeted at actual threats, the administration has taken aim at civil liberties.

The administration is clearly worried, as opposition to the excesses of the Patriot Act grows across the country and the political spectrum. Instead of spin-doctoring the problem, Mr. Ashcroft should work with the law`s critics to develop a law that respects Americans` fundamental rights.



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August 25, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Weapons Cache We`ll Never See
By SCOTT RITTER


DELMAR, N.Y. — Some 1,500 American investigators are scouring the Iraqi countryside for evidence of weapons of mass destruction that has so far eluded them. Known as the Iraq Survey Group and operating under the supervision of a former United Nations weapons inspector, David Kay, they are searching mostly for documents that will help them assemble a clear, if somewhat circumstantial, case that Iraq had or intended to have programs to produce prohibited weapons.

It is a daunting task. And according to many Iraqi scientists and officials I have spoken to, it is not being done very well.

A logical starting place for such a mission is in the Jadariya district of downtown Baghdad, adjacent to the campus of Baghdad University: the complex that housed the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate. The directorate was the government agency responsible for coordinating all aspects of the United Nations inspection teams` missions. It was also supposed to monitor Iraq`s industrial infrastructure and ensure compliance with the Security Council resolutions regarding disarmament, verification and export-import controls.

As such, the directorate was the repository for every Iraqi government record relating to its weapons programs, as well as to the activities at dozens of industrial sites in Iraq that were "dual-use" — used to manufacture permitted items but capable of being modified to manufacture proscribed material.

For 12 years the Iraqis collected and collated this data. If we inspectors had a question about a contract signed between country A and Iraqi factory B, the directorate could produce it at short notice. The 12,500 page "full, final and complete declaration" provided by Iraq to the United Nations in the fall of 2002 was compiled using this archive. And the directorate`s holdings went well beyond paperwork: every interview conducted by the United Nations inspectors with Iraqi scientists throughout the 1990`s was videotaped and available for review.

Of course, all this material was put together by officials and scientists who were obedient, either out of loyalty or fear, to the former regime, and it was done in a way intended to prove that Iraq was complying with the United Nations resolutions (something that has not been proved false in the five months since the American-led invasion). Still, even if one was to discount the entire archive as simply a collection of Iraqi falsifications, it would still be a sound foundation on which the Iraq Survey Group could have started investigations. After all, some of my most fruitful efforts as a United Nations inspector were initiated using false claims by the Iraqi government as the starting point.

And it seems that after the coalition troops moved into Baghdad, the records were all there for the taking. According to several senior directorate officials I have spoken to since the war — one a brigadier general who had been a high-ranking administrator at the complex — the entire archive had been consolidated into metal containers before the war and stored at the directorate`s Jadariyah headquarters for protection.

Yet these eyewitnesses have provided me with a troubling tale. On April 8, they say, the buildings were occupied by soldiers from the Army`s Third Infantry Division. For two weeks, the Iraqi scientists and administrators showed up for work but, according to several I have spoken to, no one from the coalition interviewed them or tried to take control of the archive.

Rather, these staff members have told me, after occupying the facility for two weeks, the American soldiers simply withdrew. Soon after, looters entered the facility and ransacked it. Overnight, every computer was stolen, disks and video records were destroyed, and the carefully organized documents were ripped from their binders and either burned or scattered about. According to the former brigadier general, who went back to the building after the mob had gone, some Iraqi scientists did their best to recover and reconstitute what they could, but for the vast majority of the archive the damage was irreversible.

Obviously, I am relying on the word of former directorate officials, but these are people I knew well in my days as an inspector, and none would seem to have anything to gain by lying today. In any case, the looting of the building, if not the previous presence of American troops, has been well documented by Western news reports.

Why was this allowed to happen? I am as puzzled as the Iraqis. Given the high priority the Bush administration placed on discovering evidence of weapons of mass destruction, it seems only logical that seizing the directorate archive would have been a top priority for the coalition forces — at least as important as the Iraqi Oil Ministry or the National Museum. And it seems highly unlikely that coalition leaders didn`t know what the archive contained. I was one of many international inspectors who led investigations of the facility — and the data we produced was used by the American government as part of its case that Saddam Hussein was hiding prohibited programs.

Today, with the tremendous controversy over the administration`s pre-war assertions, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the archive that produced Iraq`s 12,500 pages of claims — none of which have yet been shown to be false — that comprise the most detailed record of Iraq`s weapons programs.

Next month the Iraq Survey Group will give a formal briefing to American and British officials on the status of its investigations. President Bush has already hinted that the group will make a case that it has found evidence of prohibited weapons programs and of efforts to hide them from international inspectors. Such a case may have merit, but without being able to compare and contrast it to the Iraqi version of events, I`m not sure how convincing it will be to the American public, or to the rest of the world.


Scott Ritter is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq and author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Administration Says U.S. Troop Levels in Iraq Are Adequate
Sen. McCain, Others Argue That More Military, Civil Affairs Personnel Are Needed to Police Country

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 25, 2003; Page A13


Bush administration civilian and military leaders took to the airwaves yesterday to counter criticism by members of Congress and others who have suggested that U.S. force levels in Iraq are inadequate.

"It`s not a question of more troops, it`s a question of being effective with our intelligence, getting more Iraqis to help us," L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, said on ABC`s "This Week."

"It`s a complex security situation," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CBS`s "Face the Nation." "There are over 50,000 Iraqis that are armed, that we have helped train, more coming on line every day. They`re going to help with the situation. And remember, it`s important to put an Iraqi face on this, too. So the more that the Iraqi people can do to help themselves, the better off we`re all going to be."

Concern about U.S. force levels in Iraq has grown with the number of American casualties in Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared the end of major combat operations there. More than 130 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq in the nearly four months since then, about half of them as a direct result of hostile actions. About 140,000 troops are currently deployed.

Critics grew more vocal after last week`s devastating suicide truck bomb attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 24 people, including the United Nations` top envoy in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said last week that "we need a lot more military" to win the final stages of the war in Iraq. And Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, also said last week that the administration had "vastly underestimated" the policing requirements for postwar Iraq.

Yesterday both senators reiterated those concerns, with McCain saying on NBC`s "Meet the Press" that at least another division is needed in Iraq. But the need is not only for combat troops, he said. "We also need people with specialized skills. Linguists we are running short of. Our [National] Guard and Reserves reservists are at the breaking point. We need civil affairs people."

Biden, speaking on the same program, agreed.

"We need more troops. We need more cops. We need more civilian affairs people," he said. "It`s time for the president to go to the American people and say, `Look, this is a gigantic undertaking. It`s going to cost billions of dollars and take more force in order to do it.` "

Administration officials said yesterday that the situation in Iraq remains fluid and dangerous and blamed the trouble on a mixture of internal and foreign elements.

"The vast majority, probably more than 90 percent of the attacks we`ve seen, have been conducted by remnants of the former regime" of Saddam Hussein, Bremer said. However, he added, there appears to be an "emerging problem" of foreign terrorists and fighters entering the country. "We are now seeing a large number of international terrorists coming into Iraq," he said, "probably several hundred."

Bremer emphasized his openness to international assistance, noting by example that a U.S. Marine division is scheduled to be replaced by a Polish unit next month. But he did not address calls by France and other nations to hand over greater control of Iraq`s political reconstruction to the United Nations.

Myers, speaking on "Meet the Press," said he trusted the judgment of combatant commander Gen. John Abizaid, who, he said, has not asked for more troops.

"If he wants more troops, he can have more troops. That is never an issue. But that`s not what General Abizaid is asking for. That`s not what his division commanders are asking for," Myers said. "The number of troops won`t help us with those random acts of violence."

Asked whether the United States might have to reinstitute the draft to deal with the many and far-flung trouble spots in the world, Myers said, "No, no, I can`t say we are anywhere close to that at this point."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
A Trustee For Crippled States


By Suzanne Nossel

Monday, August 25, 2003; Page A17


Heard among the horror and outrage over the bombing of the United Nations` Baghdad headquarters are impassioned calls on the body not to retreat from its humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts. One place to answer that plea is Liberia. The proposal to reactivate the U.N. Trusteeship Council to oversee Liberia`s recovery is good news for that country and could set a precedent that would help the United States bear the burdens of lone-superpower status.

The Trusteeship Council has been dormant since 1994, when the last territory under its control, Palau, achieved independence. When the United Nations was founded, in 1945, the council was seen as one of the world body`s most vital organs, on par with the General Assembly or Security Council. At that time some 750 million people lived under colonial rule. A primary purpose of the United Nations was to extend self-determination to these lands.

The United Nations` founders wisely understood that replacing colonial rule with successful self-government would be neither swift nor automatic. The Trusteeship Council -- consisting of the five permanent members of the Security Council and other temporary members -- supervised these transformations, ensuring that exiting colonial powers met their responsibilities for political, social and economic development. The council was also empowered to hear grievance petitions from trust territory peoples, offering an outlet of expression for populations still en route to democratic rule.

The council ultimately assumed responsibility over 11 territories, including what were later to become the nations of Togo, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Samoa, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as parts of Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Somalia. As the list attests, trusteeship was not an unqualified success. While most trust territories reached stable self-rule, long after their declared independence, Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi succumbed to murderous factional violence.

But while no panacea, a new, beefed-up Trusteeship Council starting in Liberia makes sense for three reasons. First, by vesting accountability for the country`s fate with a body of powerful member states that is solely dedicated to reconstruction, the measure would stop Liberia from once again being orphaned by the international system.

A second benefit of trusteeship is that it would avoid placing all the weight of Liberia`s reconstruction on the shoulders of a fragile new government. No elected government could single-handedly or immediately lead Liberia, torn for decades by three violent factions, out of starvation and chaos.

The third benefit extends beyond Liberia. The war on terrorism and spread of weapons of mass destruction may continue to require U.S.-led military action in difficult hot spots. The expectation is now entrenched that when such interventions occur, the lead power -- usually the United States -- becomes responsible for the costly, complex and politically fraught task of reconstruction. "You break it, you own it" has become an unwritten rule of international law.

The dilemma that poses in Liberia is not unique. Its secondary strategic importance, coupled with U.S. obligations in Afghanistan and Iraq, makes the United States flatly unwilling to assume primary responsibility there. We plainly need to further empower the United Nations to backstop situations such as this. Our difficulties in Baghdad underscore the benefits of internationalizing such operations from the start.

The United Nations has, in effect, played the role of trustee in recent years in Cambodia, East Timor and -- at present -- Kosovo. There are calls for it to do the same in the Palestinian territories. With such demands arising regularly, this capability should be institutionalized.

A trustee`s responsibilities go well beyond traditional peacekeeping, entailing tasks including infrastructure repair, the establishment of new government structures and economic development, each of which would involve different U.N. departments, other international agencies and contributions from U.N. member states. While the Security Council can in theory direct these complex processes, its busy agenda and notoriously short attention span argue in favor of a dedicated, more operational body to oversee this core function.

A critical accompaniment to reviving the Trusteeship Council would be equipping the organization`s chronically underfunded security apparatus to safeguard all field personnel. But unless the U.N. alternative is strengthened, our choice in the future may be limited to Iraq-style U.S.-led occupations, with the crushing burdens and risks entailed.

The Trusteeship Council was dismantled in the first place because it was hoped that the demise of colonialism would see the last of crippled states, unable to get back on their feet without extensive outside support and involvement. Now we know better.

The writer was deputy to the U.S. ambassador for United Nations management and reform in the Clinton administration.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Where Do They Go From Here?
We Pulled Out of Beirut. We Can`t Abandon Iraq

By Robert Baer

Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page B01


As soon as I heard about the truck bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, my first thought was, oh, no, here we go again, the nightmare of Beirut, 1983.

The U.N. bombing has all the markings of a professional terrorist attack, the same expertise we saw in Lebanon during the `80s. It even relied on the same delivery system that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in their Beirut barracks on Oct. 23, 1983 -- the bombing that brought U.S. policy in Lebanon to a halt and altered the course of Middle East politics.

Like the one in Beirut, the U.N. truck bomb was expertly placed. It wasn`t just designed to do massive damage -- although it did. It hit the office of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. secretary general`s special representative to Iraq, who was killed. Using a suicide bomber ensured that the bomb went exactly where it was supposed to go. The attack may even have been timed to coincide with a news conference underway inside the building so that the bomb would kill as many people as possible. At least 23 died in the blast, and more than 100 were injured.

The truck was packed with enough explosives (more than a thousand pounds of military munitions) to blast through a 12-foot wall. Although the FBI says the bomb itself wasn`t particularly sophisticated, I know from experience how difficult it is to string explosives together and make all or most of them detonate at the same time. And remember: This was the second successful bombing in just 13 days. Combine this well-coordinated attack with the Aug. 7 car bombing of the Jordanian embassy, which killed 17, and it is starting to look as if we are up against a lot more than the "remnants" of Saddam Hussein`s regime.

One bomb is an outrage. Two bombs are a campaign. Anybody who was dealing with the Middle East in the early `80s can tell you exactly when things began to change: April 18, 1983, the day a suicide bomber drove a beat-up GMC pickup truck through the front door of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and detonated it. The blast killed 63, including 17 Americans.

I was working for the CIA in the Middle East at the time. As best we were able to figure out, the target of the attack was Ambassador Philip Habib, the president`s special representative to the Middle East. Habib, who was trying to help negotiate a truce between Lebanon and Israel, was not in the embassy when the bomb went off. But the bombing had a larger goal than killing Habib: As we later realized, it was the opening shot in a well-coordinated and well-financed effort that eventually drove the United States out of Lebanon. After the second suicide bombing at the barracks, President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines "re-deployed" off shore.

The United States had less of a commitment in Lebanon, and it pulled out quickly when things got ugly. But Iraq is a situation we have created, and for that reason -- and because of Iraq`s central role in the Persian Gulf -- we must stay and see it through.

Those of us who lived through the Lebanon horror can`t help wondering whether Beirut 1983 is a template for what`s happening in Iraq. While Iraq isn`t Lebanon, there are enough similarities that we should be worried. Starting with the obvious, unaccounted for weapons and explosives abound in Iraq, as they did in Lebanon. Secondly, neither Lebanon then nor Baghdad now has a functioning government. At the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, that country`s government collapsed. By 1983, there was no army or police to protect our embassy, let alone an effective internal intelligence service to warn us of possible attacks.

Iraq today is probably worse off than Lebanon was in 1983. There is not even the skeleton of an army or a police force. Members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council now claim they warned us of a bombing, possibly aimed at the United Nations. But don`t forget the council includes some of the same people who were telling us that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, deployed and ready for his orders. The only intelligence in Iraq that we can count on is our own.

Both Iraq and Lebanon are fractured societies, deeply divided by ethnic and religious differences. Foreigners have tended to get caught up in these conflicts, inevitably paying a price in blood. In 1983, Lebanon`s Christian Maronites, who once ruled Lebanon, were fighting for their survival, while Lebanese Muslims were fighting to take their place. Because the Muslims thought the United States was propping up the Maronites, we became the Muslims` target.

When Baghdad fell on April 9, we put ourselves into the middle of the same sort of violent social conflict. By invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the United States in effect deposed the ruling Sunni Arab minority, about 20 percent of Iraq`s population. In case there was any doubt about the end to Sunni power, the coalition made it final on May 16 when it banned senior Baath Party members from public office and then dissolved the army on May 23 -- targeting the two organizations through which the Sunni Arabs had ruled. Having destroyed Iraq`s political balance, we can pretty much count on taking casualties.

So why was the U.N. headquarters hit rather than an American target? After all, the group behind the U.N. bombing could have easily run the same truck into an American patrol, killing dozens of soldiers. Again, I go back to Lebanon, 1983. The terrorists` objective then was to create a sense of complete hopelessness in Washington. They wanted to show the Americans that no amount of military might, money or international assistance would help -- that U.S. deaths would be in vain and that the only logical response was to pull out.

If the people behind the U.N. bombing are the same ones who are responsible for last week`s sabotage of Baghdad`s water main and the oil pipeline to Turkey, this may very well be their plan. By attacking the United Nations and other indirect targets, they are probably attempting to drive away any potential international investment. They want the Bush administration to feel isolated. They also are willing to let ordinary Iraqis, who bear the brunt of the campaign, suffer. The terrorists regard this as unfortunate but unavoidable. They think in the long term.

If things go from bad to worse in Iraq, Washington will want to blame outside agitators. It will be hard to admit that the Iraqis have turned against the occupation. We saw this happen in Lebanon: The Reagan administration convinced itself that Syria was behind the attacks on the embassy and the Marines. It came close to fighting a real war when a U.S. battleship shelled Syrian military positions around Beirut. As it turned out, it was the Lebanese (with Iranian financial backing) who had carried out the bombings against us.

It is still too early to tell how much outsiders are involved in Iraq. With the Lebanon template in mind, I tried to get a sense of this earlier this year, in the weeks running up to the war. I was on contract with ABC News at the time. My first meeting was with Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Lebanese Shiite cleric accused of issuing a fatwa that encouraged the Beirut embassy bombing. We met at his Sitt Zaynab mosque office, outside Damascus. One reason Fadlallah kept an office there was to court the support of Iraqi Shiite exiles, who also had offices in the area. I thought Fadlallah might have a good idea of what was going on in Iraq.

My first question was whether he or other Islamic leaders would declare a jihad against the United States if it invaded Iraq. "We don`t need to," he said. "The Iraqi people will spontaneously rise in opposition to a U.S. invasion." When I pressed him about whether he thought fighters from other countries would go to Iraq, he said some would -- but in the end, it would be Iraqis themselves who would expel the coalition.

I also talked to Munir Makdah, a member of Yasser Arafat`s Fatah movement and a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Lebanon -- the same resistance that forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Makdah was less guarded than Fadlallah. He said he intended to send fighters to Iraq, and if the coalition managed to occupy the country, a relentless jihad would ensue. To make his point, Makdah handed me a document circulating on the Internet that called for a jihad against the United States.

Whether you believe Fadlallah or Makdah, or even that "remnants" of the regime are behind the latest attacks, my sense is that we are in for a rougher time in Iraq.

One of the lucky ones to survive Tuesday`s bombing, Ghassan Salame, shares this view. Salame, my professor at the Sorbonne years ago and a minister in the Lebanese government until this year, was working for the U.N. mission and had left Vieira de Mello`s office just before the bomb went off.

When we talked in March, he declined to predict how the war would go, but he was certain the United States would end up in the middle of a violent social upheaval. By removing Saddam, he said, we would disenfranchise the Sunni ruling elite. Smashing Iraq`s already fractured society would lead to sustained violence, he warned, at least until a new balance is found.

"But you know," Salame said, as best I can recall the conversation, "you can`t just get up and walk away from Iraq like you did Lebanon. No matter how bad it gets. If Iraq turns into anarchy, it`s likely to spill into the rest of the Gulf. It would be a catastrophe."

Salame is right, of course. Leaving Iraq now, in a state of anarchy, would lead to civil war. And then almost anything could happen, from pulling in Iran to spreading chaos to the Arab sheikdoms of the Gulf -- which, by the way, control something like 60 percent of the world`s oil reserves. No matter how tough things get, we cannot leave Iraq until it is mended.

Robert Baer is a former CIA officer who served in the Middle East for 21 years, leaving the agency in 1997. His book "Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude" (Crown) was published last month.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Auch heute frische Ware, 39 neue Cartoons
The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary


http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030824__039toons.htm

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Das erklärt auch in D vieles. Der Herr hat es gegeben, der Herr hat es genommen, der Name des Herren sei gepriesen.

++++++++++++++++++++++
CRAWFORD, TX (IWR Satire) -- President Bush today explained the annual rise in Labor Day gas prices as part of God`s plan to reward loyal conservatives.
"When people ask me why gas prices always seem to rise on holiday weekends, I tell them it`s all due to the divine intervention of Lord. He knows that the conservatives, who control the oil, gas and energy reserves in this country, occasionally need a helping hand. He knows these kind hearted conservatives would never price gouge the American people on gasoline.

Shoot, if it wasn`t for God naturally driving up gasoline prices on holidays, prices could rise when demand was lower and then my campaign contributors wouldn`t be adequately compensated.

You see, God knows that. It`s just the Lord`s way of being compassionate to conservatives," said Mr. Bush.


Soaring Gas Prices Nearing Record

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WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY TO W. ABOUT GOOD VS. EVIL?
In Politics, Moral Clarity is Not Always Clear
by CHRISTOPHER GREEN


"Thank God he`s the president. I love him because he has moral clarity..."

That quote, appearing in a recent edition of the Long Island newspaper, Newsday, and attributed to a woman attending an early-summer George W. Bush fundraiser in New York City, sums up nicely how adoring partisans view the president. They see a man not afraid to use the word evil, a man who says what he means and means what he says. No lying, no hidden agendas -- just a straight-shooting Texan.

What a change, these folks say, from those Moral Relativists who, according to the website moral-relativism.com, believe that "morality, or standards of right and wrong, are ... a matter of individual choice." Of course, those among us who believe a higher power is responsible for all that we are, find fault with this humanistic approach to morality. Call it situational morality, if you will, or call it the `60s -- anything goes, let your hair down and inhale, if you can.

It seems we have a morality divide in this country between those deemed moral relativists, or secular humanists, and those calling themselves Christians, rooted, as Mr. Bush often claims, in the moral absolutes of the Testaments of the Bible -- emphasis on the Old rather than the New. Coincidentally, this demarcation splits between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. By openly and publicly embracing an absolute vision of morality, Republicans have been able to cast any and all aspersions at the Moral Relativists who, they claim, have taken over the Democratic Party.

From that absolute stance on morality, it`s not hard to see the end result. We, meaning Republicans, are good; they, meaning Democrats, are evil. God is on the Republican side, and He has given us a mission to purge this country of all that the Good Book, King James version, declares evil. Every political debate is suddenly between those who believe in God and those whom others claim do not.

But do these paragons of virtue and holders of righteous indignation practice what they preach, or is the idea of moral absoluteness just a debating point while political pragmatism sets the true agenda?

Question: If we had won the Vietnam War, would it have mattered if the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed under false pretext? Would it still have been rescinded?

Right now, large segments of the U.S. population are in a state of absolute jingoistic jubilance. Righteous conservatives have won a stunning victory over a despicable and immoral foe. The U.S. has dispatched a truly immoral regime in Iraq with the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Now if there are, as Mr. Bush continuously reminds us, no shades of gray but only easily defined blacks and whites, then it follows that justification for this military action taken to smite the enemy of God and man must be pure and clearly definable.

Unfortunately for Moral Absolutists, the thesis constructed by this administration to justify war in Iraq is shifting faster than the desert sands on which the battles were fought. Was it because the Iraqi regime was somehow involved with the 9/11 terrorism? Was it because Saddam had stockpiled WMD only a drone`s flight away from the heart of America? Or was he this close to getting his hands on the "Bomb?"

Since only inconclusive evidence is being discovered to bolster massive WMD deployment and development, and no evidence seems to exist for any collusion with Al Qaeda, Mr. Bush is forced to reach for yet another justification. Now Saddam had to go because of the barbaric reign of terror waged against the Iraqi people.

In the color-coded morality built by Mr. Bush, wouldn`t this continual gray-tinged search for whatever purpose finally politically justifies the decision to "go at it" undermine the strict moral reasoning for the invasion? Given this ambiguity, it seems as if Mr. Bush and his apologists are adopting a morally relativistic approach toward Iraq. In this case, Mr. Bush has subscribed to a pragmatic politics where ends are justified no matter what the means. If that is the case, then the whole Iraqi affairs appears to be on shaky moral ground, especially for absolutist fans such as the Bush-smitten New Yorker.

To those who view themselves as Moral Relativists, it gives no comfort to know Mr. Bush has built the justification for his actions on what absolutists would say is a morally corrupt foundation. Likewise, it is painful to watch the self-styled Good vs. Evil contingent of our nation`s moral leadership express no concern about the pragmatic means taken to, in the end, solve a moral dilemma. One has to wonder if a Moral Relativist, or worse, a Democrat, had built a case for war on such shaky moral ground, would the jubilation now coming from Mr. Bush`s ardent supporters be as loud? Or is it that anything goes as long as it strengthens their partisan political fortune?

One wonders what Jesus, Mr. Bush`s favorite philosopher, would have to say about all of this?

Christopher Green is a Westlake writer.

http://freetimes.com/issues/1117/oped.html

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-iraq25a…
THE WORLD


U.S. Military Strength Called Lacking in Iraq
Republican senators are among those saying more troops are needed to speed rebuilding efforts. The White House rejects the idea.
By Ronald Brownstein and Richard Simon
Times Staff Writers

August 25, 2003

WASHINGTON — President Bush faced intensified pressure Sunday to commit more troops to Iraq, even as administration officials argued that the existing deployment is sufficient and a new poll showed that nearly half of Americans want to withdraw the forces already in the field.

Appearing on Sunday television shows, several prominent senators from both parties called on Bush to bolster forces in Iraq and accelerate efforts to restore basic services to the war-ravaged nation.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), returning from a trip to Iraq, called on Bush to send "at least another division" — which could mean an additional 17,000 troops.

"We are in a very serious situation a race against time," McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on NBC`s "Meet the Press." "We need to spend a whole lot more money to get services back to the people. We need to get the electricity going, the fuel, the water. And unless we get that done and get it done pretty soon, we could face a very [serious] situation."

Administration officials rejected the call for bolstered forces. Asked on CNN`s "Late Edition" if more troops were needed, L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator for Iraq, replied, "I don`t think so."

The remarks came as a bomb exploded at the home of one of Iraq`s preeminent Shiite Muslim clerics in the southern city of Najaf, killing three guards and wounding 10 other people. The cleric, the Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim, escaped serious injury.

In Washington, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said stabilizing Iraq would require at least 40,000 more troops — and financial commitments totaling "several hundred billion dollars" over the next several years.

Biden argued that the only realistic way to meet such military and financial obligations was through a new U.N. resolution that would encourage other countries to participate.

"We have to have a U.N. resolution," Biden said on "Meet the Press." "So I don`t know why we don`t get on with it [Either] we do it all by ourselves or we get the rest of the international community to help us do it. It`s that simple."

Without offering a specific figure, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, also said that the U.S.-led occupation authority needs more forces.

Asked on "Late Edition" if the U.S. had enough troops in Iraq, Lugar said: "Perhaps not, and probably not the right ones We are not configured as a nation in our armed forces or the State Department to deal with nation-building. "

*

Troubled Occupation

The continued violence in Iraq has become an increasingly ominous political problem for Bush in the nearly four months since he declared an end to major combat May 1.

Since Bush appeared before a banner reading "mission accomplished" that day, 137 U.S. troops have died in Iraq from hostile fire and other causes, and the Democratic presidential candidates are aggressively accusing the administration of failing to adequately plan for the Iraq reconstruction. Lately, some leading Republicans, including McCain, Lugar and Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, have also said that the U.S. needs to rethink its effort in Iraq.

"It will take a concerted new plan" to calm the situation, Lugar said Sunday.

Last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell began discussions at the United Nations aimed at passing a resolution that would broaden international participation in the occupation. But his call received a cool response amid complaints from other nations that the Bush administration was asking them to assume responsibility without offering to meaningfully share authority.

At a Washington news conference Thursday, Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, said the coalition has enough forces in Iraq to secure the country. The U.S. has 146,000 troops in Iraq, while 27 other nations have contributed 21,700 — more than half from Britain.

On Sunday, other U.S. officials echoed that conclusion. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he rejected arguments that the coalition cannot secure Iraq without significantly more troops, although he acknowledged that he would defer to Abizaid`s judgment.

"If Gen. Abizaid says he wants more troops, then sure, we`ll be open to that, you bet," Myers said on "Meet the Press."

*

Clock Is Ticking

But McCain, Biden and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the former supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who is contemplating a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, all argued Sunday that Iraq could grow even more chaotic and dangerous if the occupation authority cannot quickly improve daily life there.

"Time is not on our side," McCain said. "People in 125- degree heat with no electricity and no fuel are going to become angry in a big hurry What we do over the next several months will determine whether we`re in a very difficult situation or not."

Clark, who said he will announce a decision on whether he will join the crowded Democratic presidential field "sometime in the next week or two," argued that the best way to improve security in Iraq is to increase international participation in the rebuilding.

"This is much more than a military problem," Clark said on the CBS program "Face the Nation." "The military security is a fundamental. [But] you have to have a political development strategy above it. For that, we really need the legitimacy of the United Nations. We need a U.N. mission in there."

Howard Dean, another Democratic presidential contender, made similar arguments on "Late Edition." Dean said the administration must "give up some authority over the occupation" to entice other nations to increase their military and financial support for the effort.

"We desperately need this not to be an American occupation," said Dean, a former Vermont governor. "We need this to be something more like a U.N. mandate, a temporary occupation by world forces in order to bring Iraq into a democratized situation."

A new poll released this weekend by Newsweek showed enormous public support for increasing the U.N. role in Iraq — and a continuing rise in anxiety over the direction of the reconstruction.

In the poll, 52% of respondents said the occupation was going well, while 44% said it was going badly; in late July, the figures were 57% and 40%. Nearly three in four said the U.S. should cede more authority to the U.N. if that was necessary to encourage other nations to send more troops to Iraq.

An emphatic majority — 55% to 40% — said they opposed sending more American troops to the country; perhaps most worrisome for the White House, 48% of those polled said the U.S. should withdraw its troops from Iraq, while 47% rejected that option.

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-outl…
RONALD BROWNSTEIN / WASHINGTON OUTLOOK



No Path in Iraq Is Risk-Free for Mission or Bush`s Presidency
Ronald Brownstein

August 25, 2003

For President Bush, suddenly every option in Iraq looks bad.

To simply stay the course locks him onto a trajectory that virtually guarantees steady U.S. casualties and rising violence against international and Iraqi targets.

Bolstering the force in Iraq with more American troops could increase security — but provide ammunition to critics who accused the administration of underestimating from the outset the requirements of reconstructing the country, while compounding the strain on a U.S. military already stretched thin by commitments around the world.

Providing the United Nations a larger role in the reconstruction would generate more troops at less cost — but give the Democrats running for Bush`s job in 2004 a huge opening to argue that the administration was wrong all along to assume it could invade and rebuild Iraq without broad international support.

For Bush, none of these options can look very attractive. The real question may be which is the least worst option. His choice will reveal much about his style of leadership.

As president, Bush has been far less flexible than he was as governor of Texas. At times in Washington, when faced with incontrovertible evidence he was barreling into a dead end, he`s been willing to shift direction; Bush displayed that instinct in dropping his initial resistance to a Department of Homeland Security.

More often, he`s dug in his heels even when circumstances seemingly demand a change. He`s continued to push through massive tax cuts initially designed as a response to government surpluses even after the surpluses melted into record deficits. He`s displayed an equally stubborn streak in continuing to nominate aggressively ideological judges he knows are virtually certain to provoke filibusters from Senate Democrats. Far more than in Texas, Bush in Washington equates resolve with rigidity.

From that overall pattern, the easiest course for Bush in Iraq would be to stay the course, or to make only cosmetic changes. This has been his initial instinct.

Last week, top Pentagon officials continued to argue that the force in Iraq didn`t need to be increased. For his part, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell resisted any meaningful sharing of control when he went to the U.N. seeking troop commitments from other nations. Similarly, L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, urged the Iraqi Governing Council to increase its role but immediately heard angry complaints that he was demanding responsibility without offering real authority.

Standing pat in Iraq might expose Bush to the least short-term political pain, because it doesn`t require him to implicitly acknowledge any earlier miscalculation. He can continue to accentuate the positive in his public statements and hope the violence doesn`t reach a critical mass that undermines public support in America for the mission.

But staying the course may be his most dangerous long-term strategy. Polls show Americans still committed to the goal of reconstructing Iraq, but they are increasingly uneasy about the progress toward that goal. And even among those who supported the war, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), demands are growing for Bush to try to stabilize Iraq by providing more troops.

James Dobbins, director of the Center for International Security and Defense Policy at the Rand Corp., says the history of previous occupations shows that increasing the number of troops in Iraq would reduce the number of casualties. Dobbins, who served as a special envoy for Bush in Afghanistan and helped manage the reconstruction of Bosnia and Kosovo for President Clinton, says that based on those experiences he believes it will require from 300,000 to 500,000 troops to effectively secure Iraq.

If Dobbins is right that Bush needs a lot more troops to stop the bleeding in Iraq, the president has only two real options: deploying more U.S. forces or convincing other nations to send some of their own.

Significantly enlarging the American presence seems a non-starter. It would dramatically increase the cost to U.S. taxpayers at a time when many in Congress are already reeling under the $4-billion-a-month bill for the occupation. The larger problem is that, with commitments in the Balkans and tensions in North Korea, the Army simply doesn`t have enough bodies to double its deployment in Iraq. Dobbins says the only way the administration could free more troops for Iraq is to increase the overall size of the American military, an idea that Bush`s political advisors could hardly relish on the eve of the presidential race.

Which means the only plausible way to significantly bolster the force in Iraq is to reach a power-sharing agreement at the U.N. that provides cover for countries such as Russia, France, Germany, India, Pakistan and Turkey to commit troops.

This wouldn`t be easy for Bush, either. His foreign policy has been based primarily on freeing the United States from multilateral constraints; his guiding assumption has been that if America leads forcefully enough, others will follow. To cede any meaningful control to the U.N. now would allow Bush`s Democratic rivals at home, and his critics in foreign ministries abroad, to argue that his approach was misguided.

But while a turn to the U.N. might encourage such accusations in the near-term, it would defang them in the long run. If Iraq next summer is redeveloping more peacefully under the watch of an international security force, Democratic charges that they would have recruited allies earlier are unlikely to carry much sting.

"If Bush can demonstrate that by embracing an internationalization strategy he is enhancing the chances of success and minimizing the costs, he is going to be hailed as a victor," says former Clinton national security aide Ivo Daalder, a frequent Bush critic. "And John Kerry and Ivo Daalder and all those people who have been arguing this case are going to be standing there saying, `He stole our issue.` "

Sometimes the leverage in a tug of war belongs to the side that lets go of the rope. That may be the reality facing Bush in his tug of war with allies abroad, and Democrats at home, over sharing the daunting responsibility for rebuilding Iraq.

*


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Ronald Brownstein`s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times` Web site at http://www.latimes.com/brownstein .


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sartwel…
COMMENTARY



Graffiti Gets Philosophical
Defacing ads should be allowed. The medium is the billboard and the message is freedom.
By Crispin Sartwell

August 25, 2003

Graffiti and advertising have many things in common. Both convey messages by occupying public space; indeed, both are omnipresent and unavoidable. At the upper reaches of excellence both are arts, though they are more often merely puerile and annoying noise. But there are some key differences.

Advertising is designed to manipulate people, whereas graffiti is essentially a pure mode of self-expression. Advertising is encouraged or courted by the authorities. Graffiti is illegal. And here is the difference that makes sense of all the others: money. All the legitimacy of advertising derives from the money that is paid to post it and the revenue it generates.

On the other hand graffiti is, in every sense, free and hence criminal. In fact, law enforcement is often called on to defend advertisements from graffiti.

Advertising is the public expression of wealthy people and organizations. Graffiti is the public expression of people who are more or less broke. And that is exactly why advertising is authorized and graffiti is eradicated.

The relationships of graffiti and advertising, art and vandalism, expression and manipulation, freedom and money, have been explored systematically since the mid-1980s by artist Ron English. His chosen medium is the billboard: He and his assistants, in broad daylight, repaint public billboards with subversive messages, a procedure for which they have faced arrest several times.

English, who started making these sorts of works in Texas and later moved to New York, subscribes to the basic spirit of art as vandalism by using graffiti styles and engaging in the politics of tagging.

Some examples of English`s work:

• a smiling Jesus holding a bottle of Budweiser, with the slogan "The King of the Jews for the King of Beers";

• "Forever Kool," a toe-tagged corpse over a Kool cigarette logo;

• a series involving the "Camel Kids," child versions of the Joe Camel character;

• a scary pig-clown under the golden arches with the slogan "McDonald`s, Better Living Through Chemistry";

• "Jesus drove an SUV, Mohammed pumped his gas. Hummer: Not Your Daddy`s War Wagon."

Art of this kind has been called "culture jamming," and it is designed not only to convey a message critical of existing advertisements but to make people see advertising differently, to think about the fact that advertising systematically distorts the nature and effects of the products it promotes.

Once you drive by one of English`s signs, you are going to start seeing conventional billboards differently.

"Advertising agencies are mercenaries," English told me via e-mail from his home in New York. "It`s about profit. Is the product good for the environment? Society? The individual consumer? We employ the same techniques and pirate the same spaces as the advertisers, but to different ends. Our efforts are a pure expression of free speech.

"I consider my work content. Think of TV. You have to endure a few commercials, sure, but that`s not why you watch. You watch for the content. I`m creating the same concept with billboards."

English also makes more conventional easel paintings: One of the most notorious is an American flag assembled out of dollar bills. Others make strange and subversive use of cultural icons such as the Teletubbies, Mickey Mouse, Kiss, Marilyn Monroe and Ted Kennedy.

I don`t completely endorse English`s politics — which strike me as fundamentally conventional — and for what it`s worth, I myself smoke and own a Dodge Durango. And I am not proposing, for example, state restrictions on advertising. But what I do endorse is the art of graffiti and the concept of culture jamming. If advertisers feel free to monopolize public space — from highways to the airwaves to the Internet — with their commercial messages, we ought to feel free to deface these messages, critique them and replace them with our own.

The tags that appear everywhere all the time in Los Angeles and elsewhere are themselves a form of cultural jamming: a seizure of space for art and a demonstration that public expression is illegal when it`s free.


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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His book, "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives," will be published in the fall by State University of New York Press.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Saving face, losing a war
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, August 25, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/sorensen/



"Bring `em on," the man said. He is not a brave man, but he plays one on television.

When it came his turn to fight in a war, he hid behind Daddy. Then he had another drink and hid from the National Guard. Then he had another drink.

When our nation was attacked on Sept. 11, he hid in an airplane, flying to and fro around the country. While our nation was crying for leadership, he was making sure the coast was clear.

He later had his minions blame the Secret Service.

"Bring `em on," the man said, puffing up his chest. And they did bring `em on, one bomb at a time, one rocket-propelled grenade at a time, one rifle shot at a time, so terrifying to a relative of mine that she cried herself to sleep every night she was there.

(Welcome home, baby. They can`t get you here.)

And the planes fly into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware (sometimes sneaking in at midnight), where we have the people and the equipment to make dead young people look almost like they are sleeping.

Then we send the dead young people home to their parents and brothers and sisters and grandparents and other relatives and friends, and we send pretty flags with them, and handsome men in uniform, and we call the dead young people heroes.

We call them heroes because they`re dead. If they were still alive, we`d be angling to reduce their combat pay and trying to figure out a way to close the hospitals they`ll be entitled to use if they survive.

"Bring `em on," the man said, and a nation of sheep baaed in unison and said what a good boy is Georgie, and how thankful we can be that we have a regular guy like him at the helm instead of that wimpy Al Gore.

A couple generations ago, we used to kid about "Georgie Porgie puddin` and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry," but we had no idea then that there really was a Georgie Porgie, who was just waiting for his chance to show us how brave a coward can appear if he wears a tailored flight uniform.

Our brilliant generals were outsmarted by the clever Saddam Hussein, the wily sadist who fancies himself the reincarnation of Joe Stalin. We wondered at the time why the elite Republican Guard failed to stand up and fight. Now we know.

You may recall reading about the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II. The advancing Germans were met by a thin line of Soviet troops encircling the city. The Germans pushed through that line easily enough, but then they met a second line, a little tougher than the first one and reinforced by troops that retreated from the first line.

Then there was a third line, a fourth line and so forth, and eventually the overextended Germans, who had outrun their supply lines and were freezing in the Russian winter, were ripe for a counterattack. The Soviets encircled them, trapped them and killed many. Tens of thousands more were taken prisoner and died in captivity.

Going into the battle, the Germans were the superior force, but the Soviets outsmarted them.

The Republican Guard in Iraq was no match for our airplanes and bombs and rockets, so, in a trick right out of Joe Stalin`s playbook, it melted away in civilian clothes to fight another day. Now it`s picking off our troops one by one, reinforced by volunteers from neighboring nations who knew exactly what to do when our president said, "Bring `em on."

He invited, they came. And the morticians at Dover stay busy.

Nobody doubted that America`s frontal attack on Iraq would succeed, but most of the world had doubts about what would happen next. Unfortunately for our boys and girls in Iraq, few of the doubters were residents or regular visitors of our White House.

Other than Israel, nobody in the Middle East wants us to control the flow of oil out of Iraq. Why would they? We`re the 800-pound gorilla. We`re violent and unpredictable. Nobody knows what we`ll do next. Mr. Bring-`em-On has already threatened Iran and, on the other side of the world, North Korea.

Can you imagine Mr. Bring-`em-On in a street fight? Try to picture him lipping off in a bar: "Hey, buddy, keep it up, and my bodyguards will pound the snot out of you." He`s the personification of the "let`s you and him fight" syndrome.

His crony, the aging Donald Rumsfeld, who could in his day fight his own battles, now dreams of the past. He dreams of a "fleet" and "swift" and "agile" military machine. Fleet and swift and agile were personal qualities of a younger Donald Rumsfeld, but now they exist only in his fantasies.

Rumsfeld`s dream team in Iraq is in over its head, so now the talk is of sending in more troops, or, as the Iraqis call them, targets.

Can you say "Vietnam," boys and girls? When do we start engraving names into a stark black wall?

The war is unwinnable. As in Vietnam, we are the invaders, invaders of a country that presented no threat to us. As with Vietnam, we lied to the world as to our motives. We said we wanted to destroy Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction (done) and get rid of Saddam (done).

So why are will still there?

Besides stealing Iraqi oil, our politicians want to save face. If they pull our troops out now, they reason, the rest of the world will laugh at them. "Ha-ha-ha," the world will say. "Silly Americans."

Can`t have that. Better to continue repressing the 25 million people of Iraq, who will continue to respond by picking off our troops, one by one.

Can`t have a red face.

Little do those egomaniacs realize that the rest of the world will stand and applaud if we leave Iraq. "Finally," the world will say. "Finally, the Americans are using good sense. Bully for you, Americans."

But admitting our mistake and leaving Iraq is not likely to happen. Even if we elect a new president next year, we voters can`t win. The new guy, whoever he is, will be afraid to pull out of Iraq for fear the opposition party will label him "soft on terrorism" or "weak on national defense."

We`ve seen all this before, with Vietnam. Presidents of both parties kept the war going because none wanted to be "the first American president to lose a war."

Ego. Hundreds of thousands died so that a handful of men would not (in least in their opinion) lose face.

The solution to the Iraq problem is to get out. Now. Today. Let the Iraqis rule themselves. Meanwhile, go to the U.N. and offer as much assistance as humanly possible to help the Iraqis rebuild their country.

Bush and his minions used to tell us that we had no quarrel with the Iraqi people, that it was Saddam we were after.

Well, Saddam has vanished. Who is our enemy now?

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

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Der Kollaps des Irak
von Robert Fisk
Independent / ZNet 21.08.2003
Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "Iraq Collapse"

Welches UN-Mitglied würde wohl in der jetzigen Situation darüber nachdenken, Friedenstruppen in den Irak zu entsenden? Die Männer, die im Moment Amerikas Besatzungsarmee angreifen, mögen skrupellos sein, dumm sind sie nicht. Sie wissen, die Verzweiflung Präsident Bushs wächst, er würde alles tun, selbst den verhassten Sicherheitsrat um Hilfe anrufen, um die Verluste unter den US-Soldaten im Irak zu reduzieren. Dieser jüngste Anschlag, auf das UN-Hauptquartier in Bagdad, hat die Tür zum letzten Ausweg mit einem lautem Knall zugeschlagen. Schon Stunden nach der Explosion hieß es, dies sei ein Angriff auf ein “weiches Ziel”, ein Schlag gegen die Vereinten Nationen. Natürlich war es ein “weiches Ziel” - wenngleich das Maschinengewehrnest auf dem Dach des UN-Gebäudes den Schluss nahelegen könnte, selbst die internationale Organisation militarisiert sich. Und natürlich war das gestern ein sehr schädlicher Angriff für die UN als Institution. In Wirklichkeit richtete sich die gestrige Attacke allerdings gegen Amerika - sie sollte beweisen, unter der US-Besatzungsherrschaft kann sich keine ausländische Organisation sicher fühlen - keine humanitäre Organisation, keine NGO, kein Geschäftsmann. US-Prokonsul Paul Bremer galt als “Antiterrorismus”-Experte. Aber seit er im Irak ist, hat er mehr “Terrorismus” gesehen, als er sich in seinen schlimmsten Alpträumen wird ausgemalt haben - und er ist völlig ohnmächtig dagegen. Sabotage der Pipelines, Stromsabotage, Wassersabotage, Angriffe auf amerikanische u. britische Soldaten, auf irakische Polizisten - und jetzt also auch noch der Bombenanschlag auf die UN. Was kommt als Nächstes? Die Amerikaner können zwar die Gesichter der beiden toten Söhne Saddams wiederherstellen, den Irak hingegen nicht.

Dies war nicht der erste Beleg, dass inzwischen auch die “Internationalen” ins Fadenkreuz der schnell wachsenenden irakischen Widerstandsbewegung geraten sind. Letzten Monat wurde südlich von Bagdad ein UN-Mitarbeiter erschossen. Auch zwei Angestellte des Internationalen Roten Kreuzes sind ermordet worden - beim zweiten Fall handelte es sich um einen Mitarbeiter aus Sri Lanka, der auf Highway 8 in einem klar gekennzeichneten Rot-Kreuz-Fahrzeug unterwegs war; er wurde nördlich von Hilla getötet. Als man ihn fand, lief noch das Blut aus der Fahrzeugtür. Der Chefdelegierte des Roten Kreuzes, der den armen Mann auf seine Mission ins südliche Bagdad entsandt hatte, verlässt den Irak. Und das Rote Kreuz selbst sitzt derzeit in seinen Regionalbüros fest. Es ist ihnen unmöglich, auf irakischen Straßen im Land herumzureisen. Vor einer Woche wurde in Tikrit ein US-Kontraktor ermordet, letzten Monat ein britischer Journalist in Bagdad. Wer ist noch sicher? Wer kann sich jetzt noch in einem Bagdader Hotel sicherfühlen, wo gerade eines der berühmtesten Hotels, das alte Canal-Hotel (vor der Invasion Unterkunft der UN-Waffeninspektoren), in die Luft gejagt wurde? Der nächste “spektakuläre Anschlag” - gegen wen wird er sich richten? Gegen die Besatzungstruppen? Gegen die Führung der Besatzung? Gegen den sogenannten irakischen “Interimsrat” - oder gegen Journalisten?

Durchaus vorhersehbar, wie auf die gestrige Tragödie reagiert werden wird: Die Amerikaner werden uns erzählen, das alles beweise nur, wie “verzweifelt” Saddams “letztes Aufgebot” im Grunde sei. Aber wieso sollten die Angreifer aufgeben? Sind sie doch zunehmend erfolgreich bei der Zerstörung der Herrschaft der Amerikaner im Irak. Die Wahrheit ist: Natürlich sind viele Helfershelfer des alten Saddam-Regimes mit von der Partie, aber daneben umfasst die irakische Widerstandsorganisation eben auch hunderte, wenn nicht gar tausende, sunnitische Muslime, von denen viele dem alten Regime keineswegs loyal gegenüberstanden. Und auch die Schiiten engagieren sich zunehmend in anti-amerikanischen Aktionen. Wie es weitergehen wird, ist ebenso klar: Es ist den Amerikanern nicht länger möglich, die einstige Gefolgschaft Saddams für die bitteren täglichen Schlappen verantwortlich zu machen, also wird man ausländische Einmischung erfinden - saudische “Terroristen”, Al-Kaida-”Terroristen”, pro-syrische “Terroristen”, iranische “Terroristen”. Je mysteriöser die “Terroristen”, desto besser. Hauptsache, deren angebliche Präsenz lenkt von der Wahrheit ab, einer sehr schmerzlichen Wahrheit: unsere Besatzung hat eine hausgemachte irakische Guerilla-Armee hervorgebracht, durchaus fähig, die größte Macht auf Erden zu demütigen.

Nach wie vor versuchen die Amerikaner, andere Nationen mit ins Boot zu holen - ins Boot ihres irakischen Abenteuers. Aber selbst die Inder sind so schlau, die freundliche Einladung abzulehnen. Die gestrige Bombe zielte auf die Halsschlagader jeder künftigen “Friedensmission”. Die Flagge der UN sollte eigentlich Sicherheit garantieren. In der Vergangenheit war UN- Präsenz allerdings stets abhängig von der Duldung der jeweiligen souveränen Macht. Im Irak existiert keine solche souveräne Macht, also war die Legitimierung der UN zusehends an die Besatzungsverwaltung gekoppelt. Daher könnten auch manche die UN als nichts anderes betrachten als den verlängerten Arm der Macht Amerikas - zumindest die Feinde Amerikas sehen das wohl so. Als die UN-Inspektoren keine Massenvernichtungswaffen im Irak fanden und der UN-Sicherheitsrat der (geplanten) amerikanisch-britischen Invasion nicht zustimmte, verhehlte Präsident Bush seinen Spott für die Vereinten Nationen nicht. Nun ist er seinerseits nicht einmal in der Lage, das Leben von UN-Angehörigen im Irak zu schützen. Wer wird unter diesen Umständen im Irak noch investieren wollen - und wer sein Geld auf eine künftige “Demokratie” im Irak verwetten?

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The philosophers of chaos reap a whirlwind
William Pfaff IHT


Washington`s utopians

08/23/03: PARIS The intensification of violence in Iraq is the logical outcome of the Bush administration`s choice in 2001 to treat terrorism as a military problem with a military solution - a catastrophic oversimplification.

Choosing to invade two Islamic states, Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inflated the crisis, in the eyes of millions of Muslims, into a clash between the United States and Islamic society.

The two wars did not destroy Al Qaeda. They won it new supporters. The United States is no more secure than it was before.

The wars opened killing fields in two countries that no one knows how to shut down, with American forces themselves increasingly the victims. This was not supposed to happen.

The killing was one way in September 2001: Al Qaeda killed Americans and others in New York and Washington. Later in 2001 and in 2002, the killing was overwhelmingly in the other direction. Taliban soldiers, Al Qaeda members and Afghan bystanders were the victims, in uncounted numbers.

This year began the same way, but now things have changed. Americans are no longer attacking Iraq from the unreachable sanctuaries provided by technological superiority and command of the air. They are on the ground, among 23 million Iraqis, the objects of elusive and unidentifiable attacks. This is what the U.S. Army has sought to avoid ever since the Vietnam War.

There is no victory in sight, not even a definition of victory. If Saddam Hussein were captured or killed, Washington would claim a victory, but that isn`t a victory over terrorism. A functioning democracy in Iraq, with a reconstructed economy, would be a form of victory, but the chance that this will be achieved is remote, even if the country can be pacified.

This outcome was foreseen. It was dismissed in Washington because of the radicalism of the neoconservative project, taken up by President George W. Bush with seemingly little or no grasp of its sources, objectives or assumptions.

The neoconservatives believe that destruction produces creation. They believe that to smash and conquer is to be victorious. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is an influence, although one would think they might have seen that a policy of "smash and conquer" has given him no victories in Lebanon or the Palestinian territories.

They believe that the United States has a real mission, to destroy the forces of unrighteousness. They also believe - and this is their great illusion - that such destruction will free the natural forces of freedom and democracy.

In this, they are influenced by the Trotskyist version of Marxist millenarianism that was the intellectual seedbed of the neoconservative movement. But their idea is also very American, as they are credulous followers of Woodrow Wilson, a sentimental utopian who really believed that he had been sent by God to lead mankind to a better world.

They resemble Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who in 1997 expressed astonishment at the gangster capitalism that had emerged in the former Soviet Union, and which still exists. He said he had assumed that dismantling communism would "automatically establish a free-market entrepreneurial system."

Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and their neoconservative colleagues in Washington assumed that destroying Saddam`s regime would automatically establish a liberal democracy in Iraq. But wrecking a society`s structure produces wreckage, not utopian change. To believe otherwise leads one to conduct a foreign policy of global destabilization and disruption that creates political anarchy, human suffering and new foyers of violence and terrorism capable of overtaking Americans, as well as those people America intends to benefit.

How is Iraq to be put together again? Washington doesn`t want the United Nations, and America`s prevailing insecurity deters other governments and international institutions from supporting the reconstruction effort.

What is the exit strategy? There never was one. For the philosophers of chaos in Washington, who created this situation, there is an instinctual reaction to their failure: escalation, and the pursuit of elusive victory by mounting new attacks elsewhere.

For Washington politicians, there is another possibility: Find and kill Saddam, and simply leave Iraq - whose turbulent and ungrateful people, Bush might announce, had shown themselves unworthy of America`s efforts.

Does this today seem unthinkable? If Iraq is still going badly in 2004, when the president is looking for re-election, it will be considered.
Copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune

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Groping in the Dark
By Evan Thomas, Newsweek


Iraq may be spinning out of control, but in the Bush administration, the spin was strictly controlled. From Baghdad to the White House, administration spokesmen went to elaborate lengths to argue that the presence of terrorists in Iraq was somehow a positive development.

PAUL BREMER, THE U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, adopted a tone of "we`ve got `em right where we want `em." Bremer said: "Better to fight it here than to fight it somewhere else, like the United States." At a White House briefing, a senior administration official echoed, "I would rather fight them in Baghdad than in New York." If Al Qaeda has popped up in Baghdad, the Bushies defiantly proclaimed, it only goes to show that the administration was right all along to label Iraq as a terrorist haven. "Those who said there was no link between Iraq and the war on terror were dead wrong," said the White House official. (Writing in The New York Times, Harvard lecturer and former Clinton national-security official Jessica Stern caustically observed, "America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.")
The administration strained even harder to find "I told you so" parallels between the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Palestinian suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem that killed 18 people on the same day. "It`s emblematic of the kind of problem that we are fighting," said the senior official at the White House. "There is a movement out there that simply doesn`t want to see a different future for the Middle East, and everybody is beginning to understand that."

`OUR WILL CANNOT BE SHAKEN`
Never mind that the Jerusalem bombing and inevitable Israeli retaliation (a rocket attack on a Hamas leader) threatened to demolish the rickety Middle East peace process. There is a certain doggedness, if not willful denial, in President George W. Bush`s public avowals about the war on terror. "Our will cannot be shaken. We will persevere through every hardship," Bush ritually intoned last week. Taking the president`s lead, top administration officials mocked the hand-wringing of the TV talking heads and the "liberal" press, as well as what they regard as the timidity of America`s allies. Politically, Bush has not yet suffered much: the new NEWSWEEK Poll shows his approval rating dipping only slightly to 53 percent. His negatives are creeping up, however, and one deadly bombing of a U.S. barracks could cause popular support to plunge.

The Bush team can rightfully point to all the terrible things that have not happened in Iraq: no chem-bio attacks on U.S. troops, no torched oilfields, no refugee crisis. And it`s true that during the Afghanistan conflict and the invasion of Iraq, the cries of the doomsayers on cable TV generally signaled that victory was right around the corner. Nonetheless, the Bushies are not quite as cocky as they sound.

For all their public "bring `em on" bluster, top administration officials are privately worried about the course Iraq is taking. "Stay the course is not their true feeling," one insider told NEWSWEEK. "They do not think they are on track to succeed in Iraq." One measure of the Bushies` concern is the appointment last month of Robert Blackwill to a high-level job on the national-security staff. The former Bush "41" staffer, a professor at Harvard`s Kennedy School of Government, is known as "a force of nature," said a former colleague. "He can break a lot of crockery." Blackwill has no particular ideology; he is likely to be evenhandedly blunt with neocons and internationalist moderates alike. It will be Blackwill`s job to help chart a new strategic course for the Bush administration in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and, just as important, to ride herd on feuding government agencies and Congress to make sure the new direction gets followed, and quickly.

WHICH APPROACH?
But where to? There is no clear Plan B, and there was barely a Plan A. The administration`s somewhat lax attitude to postwar planning has come home to roost, without any obvious way out. Bush`s principal advisers don`t seem to agree with each other on basic strategy (as usual, Secretary of State Powell favors a more internationalist approach, while the Defense Department neocons prefer to go it alone). The administration would like to have most of its troops out of Iraq in a year or so, but there is no sign that Iraq will be ready to stand on its own by then.

One obvious step is to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Strong conservative voices on Capitol Hill and in the media, including Sen. John McCain and columnist George F. Will, have called on the president to face up to the need for more boots on the ground. But the administration seems very reluctant. Before the Iraq war, the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, was publicly upbraided by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz for suggesting that "several hundred thousand troops" could be required to stabilize occupied Iraq. "Wildly off the mark," said Wolfowitz. The top brass seems to have gotten the message. With 139,000 U.S. troops on the ground, are more necessary? NEWSWEEK asked JCS Vice Chairman Gen. Peter Pace last week. "Not a single commander has said that`s the correct solution," Pace replied.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is known to dislike the whole idea of the American military`s serving as an army of occupation for any longer than is absolutely necessary. He wants the soldiers to be war-fighters, not peacekeepers--to get in, then get out. "American troops are good at killing people and breaking things. They`re not good at policing," said one insider familiar with Rumsfeld`s thinking.

The experience of the American GIs on the ground supports this view. In the south, where the Shiite population is friendlier towards their liberators, U.S. Marines and British troops have moved fairly freely among the people, doffing their Kevlar vests and playing soccer with schoolboys. But in the Sunni triangle around Baghdad, where the resistance stages more than a dozen attacks a day, American soldiers understandably do not like to get out of their armored personnel carriers and Humvees. Instead they drive around until they become targets. Then, hot, young, homesick and angry, they sometimes overreact, kick in doors, humiliate the men, offend the women and alienate the very people who are supposed to be providing intelligence about terrorists and Baathist holdouts. Lori, an unhappy 21-year-old private who has relatively safe and comfortable quarters at Baghdad airport, said: "I feel like I`ve died and gone to hell ... On my good days, I feel like maybe we`re at least doing something worthwhile for these people. There aren`t many good days. On my bad days, I feel like getting my machine gun and opening up on everyone of them."

HIRING PROBLEMS
Top American officials suggest the only answer is for the Iraqis to help themselves. "Iraqis need to take ownership of their own future," said General Pace. The vice chair of the JCS says the U.S. commanders on the ground do not want more coalition troops, but rather more Iraqi police and civil-defense forces. Pace says there is no shortage of volunteers, but he acknowledges that Iraqis who work with the Americans risk being targeted as stooges. (From the town of Diwaniyah, a young Marine officer e-mailed friends in Washington, D.C., to report that 2,000 men showed up recently to apply for jobs on the police force. Some 500 were chosen; the other 1,500 rioted for two days.)

And it`s not entirely clear that Iraqi policemen can be trusted not to work with the enemy. In the bombing of the U.N. headquarters, suspicion immediately fell on the local guards. Many of them had been informants for Saddam`s regime and had once spied on the United Nations. The bombing had earmarks of an inside job. The truck bomb, filled with explosives liberated from an Iraqi arms depot, blew up just below the office of the chief U.N. representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Noting that suicide bombings are more the style of Al Qaeda than Saddam`s secret police, U.S. intelligence officials wondered if some of Saddam`s "dead-enders" had formed an unholy alliance with Islamic extremists. In the past, the largely secular Baathists have loathed the zealous Jihadis. But have they joined forces against their common enemy?

The Americans don`t know for sure. "We think they`re in the same room," said General Pace. "Whether they`re in the same bed, it`s hard to tell." Since the first requirement of winning the war on terror is good intelligence, the uncertainty among top officials is not encouraging. While U.S. forces have had good luck rolling up Baathist leaders, capturing 42 of the 55 named on playing cards printed up by the CIA (last week: the King of Spades, Ali Hassan Al-Majid, Saddam`s murderous cousin known as Chemical Ali), U.S. intelligence remains largely in the dark about foreign terrorists who have infiltrated Iraq to wage jihad. One reason: the terrorists have learned to use couriers instead of mobile phones that can be traced by spy-in-the-sky satellites.

POINTING FINGERS
Are Iraq`s neighbors allowing Jihadis to cross the border and join the fight? Rumsfeld fingered Syria last week. But some intelligence officials suspect that most of the Jihadi recruits are coming from America`s oil-rich ally, Saudi Arabia. Some 3,000 Saudi men have been reported to have gone missing in recent weeks. (It is an inconvenient fact for U.S.-Saudi relations that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis.)

Stretched thin, short of military policemen (many of whom are reservists and National Guards, upset at long tours away from home), the U.S. military could use some help from abroad. A few nations may, reluctantly, send troops to Iraq to join the Americans and the British. The Eastern Europeans have already sent small detachments, and the Turks, Indians and Pakistanis are thinking about it. But while adding Muslim troops to the occupying force would be highly desirable from the American standpoint, Muslim political leaders are understandably wary about being seen as collaborators with Uncle Sam, especially as the violence escalates.

America would also welcome a NATO presence, but the Pentagon strongly insists that American troops will only follow American commanders. Though the French will be balky as ever, there may be ways to work around this impasse. Divided or joint commands have succeeded elsewhere, notably in Bosnia; in Afghanistan, NATO (a largely German force) has taken over security in the capital of Kabul. In Iraq, American troops could continue to take the combat roles fighting the resistance, while foreign troops, under international command, could guard relief organizations and "soft" targets.

Economic progress is probably the best hope for peace in the long run, but before Iraq can revive its oil industry and rebuild its infrastructure, it must have security. How bad is crime in Iraq? At a recent Washington conference on restoring the Iraqi electricity industry, one expert observed that so much copper has been looted from Iraqi power plants and smuggled out of the country that the price of copper has dropped in the Middle East. Seems there is a glut.

Rebuilding Iraq will take years and billions of dollars not yet budgeted by Congress. Iraq is far from self-determination. The members of the Governing Council are split by ethnic differences and live and work under heavy guard, afraid of being the resistance`s next victims.

Meanwhile, the mothers of American soldiers watch the hellish images on TV and listen to the gloomy commentators and want to know when their children are coming home. Perpetually conditioned by Vietnam, the pundits see a deepening quagmire and draw invidious comparisons between turning over power to the Iraqis and the ill-fated "Vietnamization" program of the early 1970s. The Vietnam analogies are facile and exaggerated. But the United States is not coming home any time soon.

With Richard Wolffe, John Barry and Mark Hosenball in Washington, Rod Nordland in Rome and Colin Soloway in Iraq



© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:43 a.m. EDT August 25, 2003

Raids on Saddam Hussein`s hometown have produced results for American troops in Iraq. They`ve captured seven men, including five who are believed to be responsible for attacks on American troops. Military officials say Americans have also found a huge arms supply south of Baghdad.
U.S. troops operating south of Baghdad report discovering a huge arms cache that included 400 cases of anti-aircraft shells.
While search and rescue missions are complete at the bombed-out U.N. headquarters in Iraq, American troops are staying on to provide security. A U.N. official says 20 people died, including the chief U.N. envoy, and an unknown number of people are missing from Tuesday`s blast. The Associated Press surveyed local hospitals and puts the death toll at 23.
The body of slain U.N. Iraq envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello arrived in Switzerland on Monday, flown in an official aircraft from his Brazilian homeland to his final resting place. Vieira de Mello, who was killed last week in a suicide bombing in Baghdad, was honored over the weekend in Brazil with a 24-hour wake.
Prime Minister Tony Blair faces questions this week about his case against Iraq, and the way his government fought back against charges that it knowingly exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction. Blair and two other top officials will testify at a judicial inquiry that is focusing on the death of David Kelly, 59, a widely respected weapons expert who committed suicide after he was identified as a possible source of a BBC report questioning the integrity of the government`s case.
The U.S. military reported the deaths of two more soldiers on Sunday raising the U.S. death toll to 275. Of those, 137 occurred in the 117 days since President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1. With the next death of an American soldier the toll from major combat and the toll from post-major combat will be equal.
No more American troops are needed in Iraq -- despite terrorism and sabotage and continued U.S. casualties. That`s the view expressed on the Sunday talk shows by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top U.S. administrator in Baghdad.
An Australian newspaper says Australia is resisting American requests for a fresh contribution of troops to Iraq as the security situation there deteriorates. The Australian, quoting unnamed Australian sources, says U.S. officials were raising the issue of a peacekeeping contribution through informal channels, but no formal appeal had been made.
The International Red Cross says it`s cutting back the number of people working in Baghdad. The decision comes amid warnings the group might be a target for terrorism. A Red Cross spokeswoman says staff members have been gradually pulled out since a worker died in an attack south of Baghdad.
Some U.S. inspectors indicate top Bush administration officials were wrong about one type of Iraqi weapon. The experts say some unmanned aerial drones weren`t designed to spread chemical or biological weapons. That claim was part of the Bush administration`s case for war in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

At least 332 Coalition forces have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
282 from the US and 49 from the UK and 1 from Denmark.

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Red Cross cuts staff as clashes spread
Infighting among Shias and between Kurds and Turkomans is undermining international efforts to rebuild Iraq

Jamie Wilson in Baghdad
Tuesday August 26, 2003
The Guardian

The US-led coalition in Iraq, beset by deadly guerrilla attacks, is facing an ominous flare-up in violence following clashes between Turkomans and Kurds in the north and an attempt to assassinate a prominent Shia cleric in the south.

Security concerns also prompted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to remove some of its personnel from the country yesterday.

Thousands of Shias marched through the streets of the holy city of Najaf yesterday during the funerals of three bodyguards killed in a bomb attack on Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim. Some supporters of Ayatollah Hakim, who suffered light wounds in the attack, blamed the incident on followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a rival leader vying to become the unchallenged leader of the Shia opposition.

Others said the attack was aimed at the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of Iraq`s main Shia groups, which has been vilified for cooperating with the coalition`s provisional authority.

Ayatollah Hakim is an uncle of the council`s leader, Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim.

Mr Sadr has condemned the occupation of Iraq and refused to join the Iraqi governing council.

"This was Muqtada al-Sadr. His people did it," said Muslim Raadi, 60, who was part of the angry crowd of at least 2,000 people which marched behind the three wooden coffins.

"Now there will be revenge. The only way to stop this is for the people of Najaf to stop it. We will have to form our own militia," he said.

The bombing took place near the Imam Ali mosque, which contains the tomb of Ali, a cousin of the Prophet Mohammed. Ten people were wounded in the attack, which ripped a hole through the wall of Ayatollah Hakim`s office.

Meanwhile 12 people were killed over the weekend in clashes between Kurds and Turkomans in and around the city of Kirkuk. Both groups have been competing for power in the city since the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

A Turkoman leader accused the US of failing to protect his community and called on Turkey to send troops to help restore order.

"The United States pledged to bring peace and democracy to Iraq... [but] we see that the Turkmans have been ignored and that peace has not been established," said Ahmet Muratli, Ankara representative of the Iraqi Turkmen Front.

Turkey is considering America`s request for it to contribute troops to Iraq. Turkish public opinion opposes any involvement, but the government wants to repair ties with Washington, damaged by Ankara`s refusal to allow US troops to attack Iraq from its territory.

Mr Muratli was in no doubt about what should happen next. "We regard the dispatch of Turkish troops to Iraq as appropriate. This is the only way peace and order can be ensured in Iraq," he said.

The unrest underscores the task faced by the coalition in knitting postwar Iraq into a unitary state.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the ICRC in Baghdad said the organisation had gradually been cutting back the size of its staff since a Sri Lankan aid worker was killed in an attack on a convoy south of Baghdad on July 22.

Nada Doumani said the ICRC would maintain about 50 workers in the country, but declined to give specific numbers of those being withdrawn from Iraq. "We are concerned about the security of the staff working with us and the people who come to visit us," she said.

"It seems some groups are not willing to let us work normally," she added. She said the agency had received warnings that it could be a target but said the threat was not specific.

In Tikrit, Saddam`s hometown, American forces captured seven men yesterday during a series of raids targeting members of the Fedayeen Saddam militia.

Two were suspected of being loyalists of the deposed regime. The other five were believed to be responsible for attacks on American troops.


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Bush may yet fall victim to the electors` revenge
The growing doubts over the Iraq war threaten the president

Hugo Young in Vermont
Tuesday August 26, 2003
The Guardian

There have been a good few wars in our time, but none like Iraq War Two. Most, in the finish, have been quite clean-cut. Even Bosnia ended. They`ve all, naturally, been messy. The Falklands, simplest of all, had its perilous moments. But few have had enduring, possibly lethal, political consequences for the main good-guy combatants, which is to say the US and the UK.

The battles finish (two months or so has often been the span), the warriors return to base and the politics are mostly over. But Iraq is quite different. The formal war is over, but the afterburn sears into the body politic of both aggressor powers. The politics are nowhere near over. There has been no catharsis of moral or strategic rectitude. Nothing has been simplified by the so-called victory. In this respect, the situation in Iraq, and probably the region, is as bad as those who opposed war foresaw. The leaders, of course, deny that. But their problems are getting deeper. Four months after President Bush declared the war was over, they face electorates that worry away, as never before, at both the causes and the consequences of an event that should, by normal reckoning, already be docketed as an historic victory. After all, we won, didn`t we?

In Britain, there`s a forum where this national angst can be played out. The Hutton inquiry into David Kelly`s death was not intended to be that theatre, and the judge`s verdict may well take refuge behind his narrow terms of reference. But whatever the judge says, the hearing itself exposes some of the big questions that victory hasn`t erased. Were we given a false account of the threat Saddam posed? Was speculation souped up into so-called evidence? And so on.

Nor are deeper issues being put to sleep. Wasn`t Blair hooked on the Bush analysis - the need for regime change in Baghdad - earlier than he ever admitted? Didn`t he trap himself into going Bush`s way, in fealty to the Anglo-American relationship? Where are all those weapons of mass destruction, whose discovery was supposed to justify the mess of terrorism and post-war coalition incompetence we see on our screens every night?

Hutton, along with the suicide bombers, keeps all this at the front of the British mind. It matters more than the row between the government and the BBC. Hutton`s micro-questions are explored against a background of macro-calamity. From questions of trust, Blair moves on to face challenges to his elementary competence. Not only did he not deliver an honest version of the threat, he completely misjudged how long, and with what accompanying disasters, the real conflict would last. That`s how Brits will soon be feeling, unless things change. Leaders have been kicked out for much lesser crimes.

Here in the US, the position is ostensibly different. There is no Hutton, nor any other single focal point where the issues can be joined. The media are too dispersed, and still mostly driven by the need to prove their own patriotism. Only events of massive fascination - the blackout, the Clinton impeachment - easily force their way into a national, all-American conversation. The war has yet to do that.

Besides, the Iraq war continues to be blessed in many minds by 9/11. Bush plays on this unscrupulously. Though there is no evidence to show Saddam`s fingers near that atrocity, half the electorate believes in the connection. This supplies a bedrock of backing for the notion that the war is about the security of the homeland. It means that Americans are staying behind Bush`s crusade for longer than was prophesied when the national distaste for a single body bag looked like a reason why they would not last the course. Over Iraq, the US has become a more stoical citizenry. For the sole hyperpower, this could be called a commendable necessity.

But questions are being asked, and because the US is the lead player they`re capable of resounding more fiercely here than in Britain. Iraq has become a vast undertaking, which everyone claimed could not develop into another Vietnam but is beginning to arouse echoes of that existential American nightmare. A recent Washington Post investigation revealed more about the twisting of pre-war propaganda than Hutton is likely to expose. With heavy guns on Capitol Hill asking why post-war planning was so woefully deficient, Bush can`t rely forever on single-syllable promises about terrorism not triumphing. Slowly, slowly, Americans confront the evidence that they are creating not a democracy but a terrorist state where there was none before.

This is the mood of doubt into which some pertinent literature is being cast. The timing is right. Imperial America, by John Newhouse (coming next month from Knopf) is important enough to make waves. As well as chronicling the opportunities scandalously cast aside (by Blair as well as Bush) in the run-up to Iraq, Newhouse dissects the perils to come if the Pentagon psyche that allowed Iraq to happen applies itself to Iran and North Korea. If Bush`s triumphant prophecies about the war being over continue to be disproved on the ground to such bloody effect as in the past two weeks, political traction against the man and his neo-con adventures can only strengthen.

It`s hard to imagine the aftermath of this unfinished conflict displacing Tony Blair. Hutton`s forensic inquiry is unlikely to come to a verdict that shatters his credibility. His reputation is already damaged. We will look with more wariness on his outrageous insistence that his moral vision of the world coincides with the British national interest. But, if only because of the arrangement of British politics, with its me-too Tory warriors and an opposition leader of pitiful irrelevance, Blair`s success in an election he`s determined to fight looks assured.

Bush is another matter. Despite the macho confidence, he looks vulnerable. He has no answer to what`s happening in Iraq, and after another year, the American people may be asking what this is all about. That depends on a few variables, chief among them the presence of a Democrat who doesn`t flinch from asking the question himself. General Wesley Clark, anti-war and once Nato`s leader in the Balkans, could soon be turning things upside down. Much will turn on the economy, where Bush has seen more jobs disappear than any president since Herbert Hoover, but which now shows signs of perking up.

The big thing, though, is this: Iraq is a war Americans bought into on grounds that turn out to be false. So far there are no WMD, and the Middle East gets rougher not smoother. Terrorism multiplies. The prophets of doom are, unfortunately, looking correct. After another year, the agent of world triumph, dressing in and out of his fake bomber jacket, could look ready for the electors` revenge.

· [e-mail]


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Beware the bluewash
The UN must not let itself be used as a dustbin for failed American adventures

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 26, 2003
The Guardian

The US government`s problem is that it has built its foreign policy on two great myths. The first is that it is irresistible; the second is that as time advances, life improves. In Iraq it is trapped between the two. To believe that it can be thwarted, and that its occupation will become harder rather than easier to sustain as time goes by, requires that it disbelieves all that it holds to be most true.

But those who oppose its foreign policy appear to have responded with a myth of equal standing: that what unilateralism cannot solve, multilateralism can. The United Nations, almost all good liberals now argue, is a more legitimate force than the US and therefore more likely to succeed in overseeing Iraq`s reconstruction and transition. If the US surrendered to the UN, this would, moreover, represent the dawning of a fairer, kinder world. These propositions are scarcely more credible than those coming out of the Pentagon.

The immediate and evident danger of a transition from US occupation to UN occupation is that the UN becomes the dustbin into which the US dumps its failed adventures. The American and British troops in Iraq do not deserve to die any more than the Indian or Turkish soldiers with whom they might be replaced. But the governments that sent them, rather than those that opposed the invasion, should be the ones that have to answer to their people for the consequences.

The vicious bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last week suggests that the jihadis who now seem to be entering Iraq from every corner of the Muslim world will make little distinction between khaki helmets and blue ones. Troops sent by India, the great liberal hope, are unlikely to be received with any greater kindness than western forces. The Indian government is reviled for its refusal to punish the Hindus who massacred Muslims in Gujurat.

The UN will swiftly discover that occupation-lite is no more viable than occupation-heavy. Moreover, by replacing its troops, the despised UN could, in one of the supreme ironies of our time, provide the US government with the escape route it may require if George Bush is to win the next election. We can expect him, as soon as the soldiers have come home, to wash his hands not only of moral responsibility for the mess he has created, but also of the duty to help pay for the country`s reconstruction. Most importantly, if the UN shows that it is prepared to mop up after him, it will enhance his incentive to take his perpetual war to other nations.

It should also be pretty obvious that, tough as it is for both the American troops and the Iraqis, pinned down in Iraq may be the safest place for the US army to be. The Pentagon remains reluctant to fight more than one war at a time. One of the reasons that it has tackled Iran and North Korea with diplomacy rather than missiles is that it has neither the soldiers nor the resources to launch an attack until it can disentangle itself from Iraq.

It is clear, too, that the UN, honest and brave as many of its staff are, possesses scarcely more legitimacy as an occupying force than the US. The US is now the only nation on the security council whose opinion really counts: its government can ignore other governments` vetoes; the other governments cannot ignore a veto by the US. In other words, a handover to the UN cannot take place unless George Bush says so, and Bush will not say so until it is in his interests to do so. The UN, already tainted in Iraq by its administration of sanctions and the fact that its first weapons inspection mission (Unscom) was infiltrated by the CIA, is then reduced to little more than an instrument of US foreign policy.

Until the UN, controlled by the five permanent members of the security council, has itself been democratised, it is hard to see how it can claim the moral authority to oversee a transition to democracy anywhere else. This problem is compounded by the fact that Britain, which is hardly likely to be perceived as an honest broker, is about to assume the council`s presidency. A UN mandate may be regarded by Iraqis as bluewash, an attempt to grant retrospective legitimacy to an illegal occupation.

None of this, of course, is yet on offer anyway. The US government has made it perfectly clear that the UN may operate in Iraq only as a subcontractor. Foreign troops will take their orders from Washington, rather than New York. America`s occupation of Iraq affords it regional domination, control of the second biggest oilfields on earth and, as deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz has hinted, the opportunity to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia and install them in its new dependency instead. Republican funders have begun feasting on the lucrative reconstruction contracts, and the Russians and the French, shut out of the banquet, are being punished for their impudence.

Now that the US controls the shipping lanes of the Middle East and the oilfields of central Asia and West Africa, it is in a position, if it so chooses, to turn off the taps to China, its great economic rival, which is entirely dependent on external sources of oil. The US appears to be seeking to ensure that when the Iraqis are eventually permitted to vote, they will be allowed to choose any party they like, as long as it is pro-American. It will give up its new prize only when forced to do so by its own voters.

So, given that nothing we say will make any difference to Bush and his people, we may as well call for a just settlement, rather than the diluted form of injustice represented by a UN occupation. This means the swiftest possible transition to real democracy.

Troy Davis of the World Citizen Foundation has suggested a programme for handing power to the Iraqis which could begin immediately, with the establishment of a constitutional convention. This would permit the people both to start deciding what form their own government should take, and to engage in the national negotiation and reconciliation without which democracy there will be impossible. From the beginning of the process, in other words, the Iraqi people, not the Americans, would oversee the transition to democracy.

This is the logical and just path for the US government to take. As a result, it is unlikely to be taken. So, one day, when the costs of occupation become unsustainable, it will be forced to retreat in a manner and at a time not of its choosing. Iraq may swallow George Bush and his imperial project, just as the Afghan morass digested the Soviet empire. It is time his opponents stopped seeking to rescue him from his self-destruction.

· George Monbiot`s book The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order is published by Flamingo.

www.monbiot.com


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August 26, 2003
Shiite Clerics Clashing Over How to Reshape Iraq
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR


NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 25 — The clerics who hold sway over Iraq`s Shiite Muslim majority are locked in a violent power struggle pitting the older, established ayatollahs counseling patience with the occupation against a younger, more militant faction itching to found an Islamic state.

The militants are suspected of carrying out a series of attacks, including one over the weekend, engineered to eliminate or at least unsettle Najaf`s religious scholars just as Shiites feel their moment has come. The bloodshed started in April with the murder of a prominent young cleric, Abdel Majid al-Khoei, inside the city`s most holy shrine. That slaying remains such a tinderbox issue that the police and prosecutors only reluctantly confirmed for the first time today that some 12 suspects had been rounded up this month and more arrests were pending.

The tense standoff, as described by clerics from both factions, is playing out among the twisting alleyways of this holy seat, a battle for the leadership of Iraq`s Shiite community, which accounts for 60 percent of the country`s population of about 25 million.

In one corner sit the senior ayatollahs clustered around Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, all betting that it is only a matter of time before the United States delivers a democratic state that the Shiites can dominate through sheer numbers.

Arrayed against them are more activist opponents of the American-led occupation who back Moktada al-Sadr and who believe that Shiites should aggressively pursue an Islamic state modeled on clerical rule in Iran.

"It goes back in history to two distinct lines in Muslim and particularly Shiite thought," said Sheik Shaibani, a 33-year-old cleric who runs the Islamic court in Najaf in defiance of the elder clergy.

"There are those who say you must undertake jihad in times of oppression, and those who say we must stay silent until the reappearance of the Mahdi," he said, referring to the Shiite savior.

Although not calling for an outright holy war, the young clerics hint at the possibility. No one points the finger directly at Mr. Sadr, the descendant of a long line of illustrious clerics, but the police, prosecutors and Americans in Iraq, not to mention ordinary Najafis, single out his group as the font of violence. "Everyone in the city was expecting something like this to happen," Qassim Shabbar, a Najaf merchant, said of Mr. Sadr`s possible role in the latest bloodshed. A bombing on Sunday outside the residence of a conservative ayatollah killed three men.

Shadowing the entire discussion about Shiites` power is the question of Iran`s role here. Officially, the Iranians have said they want a stable, democratic Iraq, expecting that it will bring Shiite dominion.

But some Iraqis harbor suspicions that Iran wants the United States kept preoccupied by an unstable Iraq, rather than turning its attention next door to the Islamic Republic, and so is supporting Mr. Sadr or worse, the scattered remnants of Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group that American officials believe has been plotting attacks against Western targets in Baghdad.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of Mr. Khoei, the son of a beloved grand ayatollah killed under Saddam Hussein, residents of Najaf were too fearful to speak about it. But a few weeks ago, they pointedly hung banners in the streets and spoke openly of their suspicions that Mr. Sadr or at least his followers had had a hand in it.

"Disgrace and humiliation to the heretics, the murderers," said one such banner near Mr. Sadr`s office. Residents said opponents were also sneaking up to the office door at night to attach pictures of Mr. Khoei.

The possible ramifications of the Khoei investigation are so sensitive that prosecutors and the police refused to discuss it, other than to say they had arrested a dozen or so men whom witnesses identified as having been involved.

Sheik Ahmed Shabani, a Sadr aide, denied that the followers of Mr. Sadr had a role in any violence.

Conservatives in Najaf view Mr. Sadr and his followers as rabble-rousers. The difference between the two groups is readily apparent during any religious event, as stark as the difference between a rave crowd and a group of symphonygoers.

The followers of Mr. Sadr are all coiled fervor, chanting ardently against America, "We are Sadr against the infidels!" while rhythmically jumping and beating their chests with their hands despite the August heat. The followers of the elderly clergy, even the young, politely sit in formation or stand chanting tepid, apolitical slogans.

Among Mr. Sadr`s most hotly disputed proposals has been to form a popular militia that his senior aides said would provide greater security in Shiite neighborhoods. It is also envisioned as a kind of morals police, upholding standards of Muslim public behavior.

"It is not an army of destabilization or to undermine security," said Sheik Muhammad Fartousi, one of Mr. Sadr`s senior aides in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum with a population of two million that is ground zero for Mr. Sadr`s supporters. "It will help the oppressed."

The militants are careful not to risk the wrath of the American forces by singling them out by name, but the threat of engaging them wafts around nearly every sermon, every interview.

"We don`t have airplanes or tanks or artillery like our enemies," said Mr. Fartousi, vowing that tens of thousands of volunteers signing up for the Army of the Mahdi will defend Shiite neighborhoods from any attack. "Even if we reach the extent where we run out of stones, we will lay down our bodies."

In Najaf, senior clergymen make sarcastic remarks about the prospect of any kind of popular militia protecting Shiite figures or shrines.

But some merchants in Baghdad worry that a violent religious underground has already formed. Practically every liquor store in the city — a trade limited exclusively to Christians because Islam forbids alcohol — has been firebombed or attacked with rockets overnight during the past few months.

The young clerics around Mr. Sadr argue that alcohol should be banned, but say they are not trying to prevent it through violence.

Officials of the American-led occupation of Iraq recognize that no community is more crucial than the Shiites. One senior coalition official described the tacit consent of the high-ranking ayatollahs to the occupation of the country as a crucial strategic factor in establishing what stability there is in Iraq. "Retaining the support of the Shiites is essential for the success of the coalition," he said.

In general, Shiites are reluctant to discuss factional rivalries. Senior officials from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party — both of which have members on the Iraqi Governing Council — paint the tension as a natural outpouring following years of oppression.

"After 35 years, people just want to express their ideas, even if it is not always in a responsible way," said Adel Abdel Mehdi, a senior official with the council. "It`s a healthy sign of the Shiites coming out of repression. You have a community trying to find its way, which could be dangerous if we are not united."

When asked directly, senior clergymen deny any deep schism, blaming Baathists seeking to destabilize Iraq for the violence. A banner hung by Mr. Sadr`s supporters outside his offices today attributed blame for the bombing on Sunday to the the American-led coalition trying to intimidate the Shiite seminary movement in Najaf, which is known as the Hawza. But the more established Shiite groups describe gangland tactics like those used on liquor stores as a sign that the militants are immature and unlikely to retain the faithful.

"This childish movement imposes its ideas on others," said Ali Abdel Mehdi, a senior official with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. "Its ideas are without thorough knowledge or study by these people who are teenagers, people who have done no religious studies."

There has been little public criticism of Mr. Sadr in Iraq, however. The Shiite establishment appears slightly at a loss over how to challenge him, sensing that his popularity among the most disenfranchised would lose them an important constituency.

Outside the Shiite community, some officials believe that Mr. Sadr serves as a useful tool. While the ayatollahs might fret about the militants, they serve as a vivid example of the holy war that could be unleashed should the occupation fail to deliver.

The question now is whether the older, more established clerics can win over the Shiite rank and file, or whether frustration will spread the appeal of an Islamic state.

The moderate clerics believe that the fastest antidote for radicalism is providing security, jobs and electricity, which they say will sway Shiites away from extremism.

"People fear chaos," said Muhammad Hussein al-Hakim, a son of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim, whose house was the scene of the bombing on Sunday. The younger Mr. Hakim suffered injuries in the attack and was himself threatened some weeks earlier. "If the occupation forces could achieve results fast," he said, "that will prevent the calls for this kind of action."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 26, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dust and Deception
By PAUL KRUGMAN


ast week a quietly scathing report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed what some have long suspected: in the aftermath of the World Trade Center`s collapse, the agency systematically misled New Yorkers about the risks the resulting air pollution posed to their health. And it did so under pressure from the White House.

The Bush administration has misled the public on many issues, from the budget outlook to the Iraqi threat. But this particular deception seems, at first sight, not just callous but gratuitous. It`s only when you look back at budget politics in 2001 that you see the method in the administration`s mendacity.

A draft E.P.A. report released last December conceded that 9/11 had led to huge emissions of pollutants. In particular, releases of dioxins — which are carcinogens and can also damage the nervous system and cause birth defects — created "likely the highest ambient concentrations that have ever been reported," up to 1,500 times normal levels. But the report concluded that because the outdoor air cleared after a couple of months, little harm had been done.

In fact, the main danger comes from toxic dust that seeped into buildings and remains in carpets, furniture and air ducts. According to a recent report in Salon, businesses that did environmental assessments of their own premises found alarming levels not just of dioxins but also of asbestos and other dangerous pollutants. So the most shocking revelation from the new report is that under White House direction, the E.P.A. suppressed warnings about indoor pollution. Scattered evidence suggests that as a result, hundreds of cleaning workers and thousands of residents may be suffering chronic health problems.

Why was crucial information withheld from the public? The report mentions "the desire to reopen Wall Street and national security concerns." Maybe — though the national security benefits of failing to remove toxic dust escape me. I suspect that there was another reason: budget politics.

Immediately after 9/11 there was a great national outpouring of sympathy for New York, and a natural inclination to provide generous help. President Bush quickly promised $20 billion, and everyone expected the federal government to assume the burden of additional security. Yet hard-line Republicans never wanted to help the stricken city. Indeed, according to an article by Michael Tomasky in New York magazine, Senators Phil Gramm and Don Nickles attempted to slash aid to New York within hours of Mr. Bush`s promise.

Matters were patched up sufficiently so Mr. Bush could make his triumphant appearance at ground zero the next day. But then the backtracking began. By February 2002, only a fraction of the promised funds had been allocated — and Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, accused New York`s lawmakers of playing "money-grubbing games."

Why this stinginess? A source told Mr. Tomasky that "Gramm just doesn`t like spending money. And Nickles . . . he`s just anti-New York." That sums it up: even after 9/11, hard-line conservatives opposed any spending, no matter how justified, that wasn`t on weapons or farm subsidies, while some people from America`s "red states" just hate big-city folk.

What does all this have to do with toxic dust? Think how much harder it would have been to stiff New York if the public had understood the extent to which Lower Manhattan had become a hazardous waste site. I can`t prove that was what administration officials were thinking, but otherwise their efforts to play down the risks seem incomprehensible.

In the end, New York seems to have gotten its $20 billion — barely. As for the additional help everyone expected: don`t get me started. There wasn`t a penny of federal aid for "first responders" — like those firefighters and police officers who cheered Mr. Bush at ground zero — until a few months ago, and much of it went to sparsely populated states. The federal government spends much more protecting the average resident of Wyoming from terrorists than it spends protecting the average resident of New York City.

All in all, the people running Washington, while eager to invoke 9/11 on behalf of whatever they feel like doing, have treated the city that bore the brunt of the actual attack very shabbily. In September 2004 the Republicans will hold their nominating convention in New York. Will New Yorkers take the occasion to remind them about how the city was lied to and shortchanged?



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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washingtonpost.com
Rising Toll Shows U.S. Challenges
138 Deaths Since May 1 Reflect Shift in Fighting

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 26, 2003; Page A01


With the death yesterday of another U.S. soldier in Iraq, the number of U.S. troops who have died there since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, rose to 138 -- the same number as perished during the six weeks of fighting that marked the fall of Baghdad and its immediate aftermath, according to Pentagon records.

The figure of 138 includes not only those killed by enemy fire -- called "hostile" deaths by the Pentagon -- but also those who died as a result of vehicle accidents, drowning, medical problems or other factors unrelated to combat. Yesterday`s casualty, for instance, involved an unidentified soldier from the Army`s 130th Engineer Brigade who suffered a "non-hostile gunshot wound" -- a phrase that can mean suicide or the accidental discharge of a weapon.

Although the 62 deaths from hostilities since May 1 remain well below the 115 that occurred in March and April, the combat death rate has been averaging one soldier about every other day since Bush flew to the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." If that trend continues through the end of the year, those killed in action after May 1 will outnumber those killed in action before then.

Yesterday`s threshold event represented a largely symbolic moment in the grinding Iraqi conflict. But by highlighting the steadily mounting U.S. death toll, it underscored the political challenge for the Bush administration in sustaining a reconstruction effort that is clearly costing more U.S. lives than winning the war did.

Instead of facing gradually diminishing resistance, which the administration had expected to find after ousting Saddam Hussein`s government, U.S. troops have encountered increasingly organized and violent opposition from Hussein loyalists and foreign Islamic militants who U.S. authorities say are flowing into Iraq. The nature of the combat also has shifted, from largely conventional warfare waged by a uniformed Iraqi force to guerrilla-style attacks and terrorist tactics employed by shadowy resistance groups and teams of hit-and-run fighters.

"The loss of every service member is deeply felt, and their courage and sacrifice will not be forgotten," said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, asked to comment on the casualty count. "Creating a stable and secure environment for the Iraqi people is important to the national interests of the U.S. and the international community. Our losses only strengthen the resolve of the coalition to accomplish their vital mission."

U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Persian Gulf region, has provided little information about the reported deaths. Official announcements have tended to consist of no more than a few sentences citing the general cause of a death and offering a cursory description of the circumstances involved.

But the announcements over time have revealed some telling trends, particularly when compared with casualty patterns before May 1.

During the invasion and immediate aftermath, many of the U.S. combat deaths resulted from military ambushes, artillery fire and helicopter crashes. Since then, most soldiers have died from attacks involving rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms fire and what the military calls "improvised explosive devices," or homemade bombs -- all reflecting the less conventional character of the fighting.

Another significant difference is where U.S. soldiers are dying. During the war, the bulk of the deaths took place south of Baghdad as U.S. troops surged from Kuwait toward the Iraqi capital. In recent months, just over half of U.S. casualties from hostile action have occurred in Baghdad, and an additional quarter have come in the "Sunni triangle" bounded by Baghdad and the towns of Ar Ramadi and Tikrit, where some of the fiercest resistance to the U.S.-led reconstruction effort has been concentrated.

During the war, too, many deaths occurred in clusters and resulted from major individual events -- an ambush in Nasiriyah by Iraqi soldiers who pretended to surrender, for instance, or an attack on Army vehicles that became separated from a supply convoy. But in recent months, death reports have trickled into U.S. military headquarters in ones and twos.

On a few days, as many as three U.S. soldiers have been killed. The worst day for U.S. deaths from hostile fire was July 26, when a grenade thrown from the window of an Iraqi hospital took the lives of three soldiers and a fourth soldier died when his convoy came under rocket-propelled grenade attack.

For the most part, there have been few pauses in the mounting death tally. The longest period in which no combat deaths were reported was the 12-day span that began May 14.

During the first six weeks of fighting, each branch of service lost members, although the Army and Marines lost the most. Since May 1, the Army has suffered nearly all the deaths from hostile action. The Navy and the Air Force each have lost one member as a result of hostile fire. The Marine Corps has not reported any combat deaths, although 17 Marines have died in Iraq since May 1 from non-hostile causes.

A sizable number of the Army`s deaths from hostilities have involved reservists called up for wartime duty, including eight members of the National Guard and five members of the Army Reserves.

The majority of soldiers killed since May 1 have been lower-ranking enlisted members. But four officers have died from hostile fire, and so have 24 noncommissioned officers. And although more than half of the dead troops were under 30 years old, 15 were in their thirties, one was 40 and another was 54.

No female soldiers have died from hostile fire since May 1. And no deaths in the past four months have resulted from mistaken fire by U.S. or allied troops.

Of the deaths categorized as non-hostile, at least 22 involved vehicle accidents, a common hazard reflecting the dangers of large-scale military operations. As many as four deaths resulted from the accidental detonation of munitions in areas where soldiers were working.

Unspecified health problems accounted for several deaths. One soldier was described as dying "after collapsing while eating dinner" July 8. In three separate instances -- on Aug. 8, 9 and 12 -- soldiers were found dead when others tried to wake them and discovered they were not breathing.

Staff researchers Robert E. Thomason and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Jets Attack Taliban Hide-Out
14 Rebels Killed, Officials Say

By Matthew Pennington
Associated Press
Tuesday, August 26, 2003; Page A10


KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 25 -- U.S. jets pounded a Taliban mountain hide-out today, killing at least 14 insurgents in the deadliest air assault since rebels launched a series of strikes against Afghan government targets, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

Sweeping through the rugged mountains of southeastern Afghanistan, scores of Afghan militiamen and U.S.-led Special Forces hunted down suspected Taliban fighters, who in recent weeks have been staging attacks on police officials and government convoys. The Taliban violence has killed dozens of people and cast a shadow over U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the war-battered country.

Today`s attack was supported by A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack jets, F-16 fighter bombers and AV-8B Harrier attack jets, said Army Lt. Col. James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman.

In the campaign, dubbed Operation Warrior Sweep, fighter jets provided air support for ground troops and blasted the mountain region that runs between Kandahar and Zabol provinces, said Col. Rodney Davis, spokesman for the U.S. military at coalition headquarters at Bagram air base, north of the capital, Kabul.

Davis said 14 enemy fighters were killed. Juma Khan, a district police chief, put the death toll at 16. Ahmad Khan, spokesman for the provincial governor, claimed that at least 50 were killed. There was no way to independently confirm the varying reports.

There were no reported coalition casualties in the operation, which was continuing, Davis said.

Afghan officials said the U.S. jets destroyed the Taliban camp, which was located in the Dai Chupan district of southeastern Zabol province.

A Taliban spokesman, Mohammed Hanif, said by satellite telephone that only civilians were killed in two separate offensives by Afghan government troops and that the Taliban contingent had fled. "It was a massive force of the government who wanted to kill and arrest the Taliban, but they were not successful," Hanif said, adding that the Taliban soldiers were led by Amir Khan Haqqani.

The recent anti-government assaults, mostly in the south and east of Afghanistan but also in some central regions, suggest that the Taliban is regrouping nearly two years after being toppled by U.S.-led forces. There have been reports that the Taliban`s leader, Mohammad Omar, has appointed military commanders to specific areas.

More than a week ago, hundreds of suspected Taliban fighters attacked police stations in Paktika province.

On Saturday, at least five government soldiers riding in a truck were killed in a Taliban ambush in Dai Chupan. The Taliban put the death toll at 12.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Think Strategy, Not Numbers


By David Ignatius

Tuesday, August 26, 2003; Page A13


Looking back on America`s military defeat in Vietnam, the late CIA director William Colby concluded that the United States had fought the wrong kind of war.

Rather than using special forces and intelligence operations to combat a shadowy enemy, Colby argued, the United States decided to wage "an American-style military war" with more than 500,000 troops whose job, as the conflict dragged on, increasingly was protecting themselves rather than securing the Vietnamese.

"American troops only rarely could find the enemy; since it proved almost impossible to fix him, fighting him generally consisted of fighting off attacks, not finishing him according to the best military tradition," Colby wrote in his book, "Lost Victory," published in 1989, seven years before his death. A far better strategy, he argued, would have concentrated on providing security to Vietnamese villages through aggressive "pacification" operations such as the controversial Phoenix program, which Colby ran from 1968 to 1971.

Colby`s critique of "overmilitarization" in Vietnam is worth reviewing now, at a time when many analysts are urging President Bush to send more troops to Iraq. The latest call came over the weekend from Sen. John McCain. "We need a lot more military, and I`m convinced we need to spend a lot more money," said the Arizona Republican after visiting Baghdad.

Sending more troops always sounds like the right answer when the going gets tough on the battlefield. But as Vietnam showed, deploying a bigger, heavier force isn`t necessarily a wise choice. The large U.S. garrison, with all its attendant logistical needs, might simply reinforce the impression that it`s America`s war -- making the enemy more aggressive, our local allies more passive and U.S. troops more vulnerable.

One former senior Pentagon official from the Vietnam era offers a pithy, five-word response to the argument that sending more troops would solve America`s problems in Iraq. The "Cam Ranh Bay Umpires Association." The U.S. troop presence in Vietnam grew so large, he recalls, that there was a demand for sports at the huge U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay; with so many players, they needed umpires, and with so many umpires, they needed an umpires` association. But none of that translated into victory.

So far Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resisted the calls for sending more troops to Iraq. Instead, with typical Rumsfeldian enthusiasm for "transforming" the Pentagon establishment, he is reportedly seeking new ways to boost military power without hiring more soldiers. Rumsfeld`s theme is that "overwhelming force" isn`t necessary if the United States uses new technology to achieve "overmatching power, " according to an article in Sunday`s New York Times.

But for all his skepticism about conventional military answers, Rumsfeld may be guilty of his own version of overmilitarization in Iraq. He failed to anticipate the postwar challenges -- especially the need to rebuild the country`s infrastructure and police. He focused instead on the American military occupation, which increasingly became a target for a small but ruthless resistance.

Robert Andrews, a Green Beret in Vietnam who served as head of special operations in Rumsfeld`s Pentagon until last year, argues that the Afghanistan war demonstrated that light, fast-moving special forces working with local allies can be far more effective against a terrorist enemy than conventional troops.

"We may be able to provide better security to Iraqis with a mobile strike force of several brigades of conventional forces based in garrisons away from the population centers," Andrews says. "These brigades would work with Special Forces teams and their Iraqi allies in the cities."

Andrews argues that if Iraq is becoming a war of counterinsurgency, the United States must make sensible decisions about strategy and troop levels. Bad news shouldn`t stampede America into pulling out. But it shouldn`t mean an automatic decision to send more troops to implement a flawed strategy.

Pentagon sources report one hopeful sign that the military is thinking creatively and unconventionally about Iraq. The Pentagon`s special operations chiefs have scheduled a showing tomorrow in the Army auditorium of "The Battle of Algiers," a classic film that examines how the French, despite overwhelming military superiority, were defeated by Algerian resistance fighters.

A Pentagon flier announcing the film puts it in eerie perspective: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. . . . Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."

The Iraq debate should be about strategy, not a numbers game. America`s job is to give Iraqis the tools to create a modern, secure country -- and then get out. The right force is the one that will accomplish this mission.

[e-mail]



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Unprepared for Peace in Iraq


By Robert C. Byrd

Tuesday, August 26, 2003; Page A13


As the situation in Iraq continues to spiral out of control, an anxious nation watches. Despite assurances to the American people that our troops would be welcomed with open arms as liberators, U.S. soldiers are increasingly being met with guns and car bombs. The bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad has clearly exposed our vacant policy in Iraq. The American people are told to be patient, that winning the peace will take time. Meanwhile, the frustration of the Iraqi people grows by the day, as does their anger. The inability of the United States even to restore basic amenities further fuels the fire.

Before the war began, I urged the president to think through the consequences. There was no doubt as to the military outcome of war between the United States and Iraq; our might was unquestioned. But I was very concerned about the repercussions that would follow, especially if we were unable to persuade key allies to join our effort.

Today I urge President Bush to review his options. It is time to ask the world community not only for assistance in restoring peace and security in Iraq but also for participation in moving Iraq toward self-government. While the secretary of state has opened a dialogue with the United Nations, it must be a true exchange and not a U.S. monologue.

What has become tragically clear is that the United States has no strong plan for turning Iraq over to the Iraqi people and is quickly losing even its ability to maintain order. The administration is stumbling through the dark, hoping by luck to find the lighted path to peace and stability.

Despite the best hopes for an Iraqi democracy, the Iraqi people and the world see only the worst fears of occupation. Instead of inspiring steps toward self-government, we witness hit-and-run murders of U.S. soldiers, terrorist attacks and sabotage. Our military action in Iraq has forged a caldron of contempt for America, a dangerous brew that may poison the efforts of peace throughout the Middle East and result in the rapid invigoration of worldwide terrorism.

The president`s stubborn insistence that much of the world be shut out of real participation in the rebuilding effort in Iraq is obviously costing lives. In addition, it is costing the United States credibility in Iraq and around the globe. We promised to improve the quality of life, yet so far we have failed to deliver. As a result, increasing numbers of Iraqis see the United States only as occupier, not liberator.

Instead of giving the young people of Iraq a reason to turn away from the violence of terrorism, we have, through failures and unkept promises, fed the seeds of discontent. The inability of the United States to secure the peace in Iraq virtually guarantees al Qaeda a fertile field of new recruits.

War has proved far easier than peace. We had the weapons to win the war, but not the wisdom to secure the peace. The coalition of those who might be willing to share the burden of building a new Iraq will be harder to muster now. But the challenge is too great for the United States alone. The rapidly rising anti-American sentiment demands that an international effort be initiated before Iraq slips from decades of dictatorship to decades of chaos.

The administration`s reconstruction effort is costing the American people $1 billion a week. It is costing the lives of American soldiers and of civilians from many nations. Only an entirely closed mind could fail to grasp the need for a change in course. Close cooperation with the international community might yet yield a plan for peace and security for the people of Iraq. Haughty statements and unilateral actions will not advance our cause. We must work with other countries to forge what we cannot achieve alone: a lasting peace for Iraq and, in fact, for the Middle East region as a whole.

A hallmark of true leadership is the ability to admit when one is wrong and to learn from errors. Candidate George W. Bush spoke about the need for humility from a great and powerful nation. He said, "Let us reject the blinders of isolationism, just as we refuse the crown of empire. Let us not dominate others with our power -- or betray them with our indifference. And let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American character. The modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness." It is time for the Bush administration to swallow its false pride and return to that philosophy of humility before it is too late.

The writer is a Democratic senator from West Virginia.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Heute 62 frische Toons

The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
IQ Warning: Each issue contains ALL of the day`s cartoons on a single printer-friendly page. If you have a slow mind i.e. regularly watch Fox News it may take several minutes to get the jokes. Please be patient - its worth the wait.


http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030825__062toons.htm

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All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror

Original Seite mit Video:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article4540.htm



After nationalizing the oil industry Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence. We speak with Stephen Kinzer author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror and Baruch College professor Ervand Abrahamian.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of America’s first overthrow of a democratically-elected foreign government.
In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup d’etat that toppled the democratically elected government of Iran. The government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The aftershocks of the coup are still being felt.

In 1951 Prime Minister Mossadegh roused Britain`s ire when he nationalized the oil industry. Mossadegh argued that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves which had been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The company later became known as British Petroleum (BP).

After considering military action, Britain opted for a coup d`état. President Harry Truman rejected the idea, but when Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House, he ordered the CIA to embark on one of its first covert operations against a foreign government.

The coup was led by an agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. The CIA leaned on a young, insecure Shah to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh as prime minister. Kermit Roosevelt had help from Norman Schwarzkopf’s father: Norman Schwarzkopf.

The CIA and the British helped to undermine Mossadegh`s government through bribery, libel, and orchestrated riots. Agents posing as communists threatened religious leaders, while the US ambassador lied to the prime minister about alleged attacks on American nationals.

Some 300 people died in firefights in the streets of Tehran.

Mossadegh was overthrown, sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life.

The crushing of Iran`s first democratic government ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under the Shah, who relied heavily on US aid and arms. The anti-American backlash that toppled the Shah in 1979 shook the whole region and helped spread Islamic militancy.

After the 1979 revolution president Jimmy Carter allowed the deposed Shah into the U.S. Fearing the Shah would be sent back to take over Iran as he had been in 1953, Iranian militants took over the U.S. embassy - where the 1953 coup was staged - and held hundreds hostage.

The 50th anniversary of the coup was front-page news in Iranian newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor reports one paper in Iran publishing excerpts from CIA documents on the coup, which were released only three years ago.

The U.S. involvement in the fall of Mossadegh was not publicly acknowledged until three years ago. In a New York Times article in March 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that "the coup was clearly a setback for Iran`s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."

In his book All the Shah’s Men, Kinzer argues that "[it is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax [the name of the coup] through the Shah`s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York." Stephen Kinzer, author All the Shah’s Men, An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror Prof. Ervand Abrahamian, Middle East and Iran Expert at Baruch College, City University of New York . Author of numnerous book including Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (University of California Press, 1993).




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TRANSCRIPT
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it`s good to have you with us. Stephen Kinzer, why don`t we begin with you. This month, August 2003, 50 years ago, the C.I.A. orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh. Can you briefly tell us the story of how this took place?

STEPHEN KINZER: This was a hugely important episode, and looking at it from the prospective of history, we can see that it really shaped a lot of the 50 years that have followed since then in the Middle East and beyond. But yet, it`s an episode that most Americans don`t even know happened. As I was writing my book, I had the sense that I was dredging up an incident that had been largely forgotten. During my work, I realized early on that Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, had been the Man of the Year for Time magazine in 1951. And after I realized that, I went to some trouble and I finally located a copy of that Time magazine. And I framed it, and I have it up on my wall. And it gave me the feeling that, not only am I digging up this episode again, but I`m bringing back to life this figure of Mossadegh. He was really a huge figure in the world of mid-century. This was a time, bear in mind, before the voice of the Third World, as we now call it, had ever really been raised in world councils. This was a time before Castro, before Nkrumah, before Sukharno, before Nasser. Mossadegh actually showing up in New York and laying out Iran`s case and by extension the case of poor nations against rich nations was something very, very new for the whole world. And what a figure he was. This book is full of amazing characters. Not just Kermit Roosevelt, the guy who planned the coup. But Mossaugh--tall, sophisticated, European-educated aristocrat--but also highly emotional, a guy who would start sobbing and sometimes even faint dead away in Parliament when giving speeches about the suffering of the Iranian people. When he embraced the national cause of that period, which was the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he set himself on a collision course with the great powers in the world. And that collision has produced effects which we`re still living with today.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Anglo- Iranian Oil Company.

STEPHEN KINZER: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company arrived in Iran in the early part of the twentieth century. It soon struck the largest oil well that had ever been found in the world. And for the next half-century, it pumped out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil from Iran. Now, Britain held this monopoly. That meant it only had to give Iran a small amount--it turned out to be 16 percent--of the profits from what it produced. So the Iranian oil is actually what maintained Britain at its level of prosperity and its level of military preparedness all throughout the `30s, the `40s, and the `50s. Meanwhile, Iranians were getting a pittance, they were getting almost nothing from the oil that came out of their own soil. Naturally, as nationalist ideas began to spread through the world in the post-World War II era, this injustice came to grate more and more intensely on the Iranian people. So they carried Mossadegh to power very enthusiastically. On the day he was elected prime minister, Parliament also agreed unanimously to proceed with the nationalization of the oil company. And the British responded as you would imagine. Their first response was disbelief. They just couldn`t believe that someone in some weird faraway country--which was the way they perceived Iran--would stand up and challenge such an important monopoly. This was actually the largest company in the entire British Empire. When it finally became clear that Mossadegh was quite serious, the British decided to launch an invasion. They drew up plans for seizing the oil refinery and the oil fields. But President Truman went nuts when he heard this and he told the British, under no circumstances can we possibly tolerate a British invasion of Iran. So then the British went to their next plan, which was to get a United Nations resolution demanding that Mossadegh return the oil company. But Mossadegh embraced this idea of a U.N. debate so enthusiastically that he decided to come to New York himself and he was so impressive that the U.N. refused to adopt the British motion. So finally, the British decided that they would stage a coup, they would overthrow Mossadegh. But what happened, Mossadegh found out about this and he did the only thing he could have done to protect himself against the coup. He closed the British embassy and he sent all the British diplomats packing, including, among them, all the secret agents who were planning to stage the coup. So now, the British had to turn to the United States. They went to Truman and asked him, please overthrow Mossadegh for us. He said no. He said the C.I.A. had never overthrown a government and, as far as he was concerned, it never should. So, now, the British were completely without resources. They couldn`t launch an invasion, the U.N. had turned down their complaint, they had no agents to stage a coup. So they were stymied. It wasn`t until November of 1952 when British foreign office and intelligence officials received the electrifying news that Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president that things began to change. They rushed one of their agents over to Washington. He made a special appeal to the incoming Eisenhower administration. And that administration reversed the Truman policy agreed to send Kermit Roosevelt to Tehran to carry out this fateful coup.

AMY GOODMAN: When we come back from our break, we`ll find out just what Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, and Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the man who led the Persian Gulf War, Norman Schwarzkopf, did in Iran. Stay with us. We`re talking to Stephen Kinzer. He`s author of All the Shah`s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. [¶MUSIC BREAK¶]

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I`m Amy Goodman on this 50th anniversary of the C.I.A.-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. We`re talking to Stephen Kinzer. He is author of a new book, All the Shah`s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. In a minute, we`re going to go to old film about the coup where former C.I.A. agents talk about their role in it. But talk about the man in the C.I.A. who spearheaded this, Kermit Roosevelt.

STEPHEN KINZER: One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was because I`ve always been curious about exactly how you go about overthrowing a government. What do you do after you choose an agent and assign a lot of money? Exactly how do you go about doing it? Kermit Roosevelt really is a wonderful way to answer that question. What happened was this: Kermit Roosevelt, who as you said was Teddy Roosevelt`s grandson, was the Near East director for the C.I.A. He slipped clandestinely into Iran just around the end of July 1953. He spent a total of less than three weeks in Iran--that`s only how long it took him to overthrow the government of Mossadegh. And one thing that I did realize as I was piecing together this story is how easy it is for a rich, powerful country to throw a poor, weak country into chaos. So what did Roosevelt do? The first thing he did was he wanted to set Tehran on fire. He wanted to make Iran fall into chaos. So he bribed a whole number of politicians, members of Parliament, religious leaders, newspaper editors and reporters, to begin a very intense campaign against Mossadegh. This campaign was full of denunciatory speeches and lies about Mossadegh, dated and passed, without bitter denunciations of Mossadegh from the pulpits and in the streets, on the houses of Parliament. Then, Roosevelt also went out and bribed leaders of street gangs. You had a kind of "Mobs `R` Us," mobs-for-hire, kind of situation existing in Iran that that time. Roosevelt got in touch with the leaders of these mobs. Finally, he also bribed a number of military officers who would be willing to bring their troops in on his side at the appropriate moment. So when that moment came, the fig leaf of the coup was, as you said, this document that the Shah had signed, rejecting the prime ministership of Mossadegh, essentially firing him from office. Now, this was a decree that was of very dubious legality since in democratic Iran only the Parliament could hire and fire prime ministers. Nonetheless, the idea was that this decree would be delivered to Mossedegh at his house at midnight one night and then, when he refused to obey it, as he probably would, he would be arrested. That was the plot. But what happened was that the officer that Kermit Roosevelt had chosen to go to Mossdegh`s house at midnight, presented the decree firing Mossadegh and preparing to arrest him but other, loyal soldiers stepped out of the shadows and arrested him. The coup had been betrayed. The plot failed. The man who was supposed to arrest Mossadegh was himself arrested. And Kermit Roosevelt woke up the next day with a cable from his superiors in the C.I.A. telling him, My God, you failed, you better get out of there right away before they find you and kill you. But Kermit Roosevelt, on his own, decided that he would stay. He figured, I can still do this, I was sent here to overthrow this government, I`m going to make up my own plan.

AMY GOODMAN: Now he had had help before from Norman Schwarzkopf, is that right, Schwarzkopf`s father?

STEPHEN KINZER: There`s a fantastic cast of characters in this story and one of them is Norman Schwarzkopf, who had been the head of the investigation into the Lindhburg kidnapping while with the New Jersey state police, had spent many years in Iran during the 1940s, and was a very flamboyant figure with great influence on the Shah. He was one of the people that Kermit Roosevelt brought in to pressure the timid Shah into signing this fateful decree. Now, the decree finally failed to have its desired effect, as I said. And then Roosevelt on his own devised this plan where, first of all, he sent rioters out into the streets to pretend that they were pro-Mossadegh. They were supposed to yell "I love Mossadegh and communism. I want a people`s republic!" and then loot stores, shoot into mosques, break windows, and generally make themselves repugnant to good citizens. Then he hired another mob to attack his first mob, thereby creating the impression that Iran was falling into anarchy. And finally on the climactic day, August 19, 1953, he brought all his mobs together, mobilized all of his military units, stormed a number of government buildings and then, in the climactic gunbattle at Mossadegh`s house, a hundred people were killed until finally the coup succeeded, Mossadegh had to flee and was later arrested, and the Shah, who had fled in panic at the first sign of trouble a few days earlier, returned in triumph to Tehran and began what became 25 years of increasingly brutal and repressive rule.

AMY GOODMAN: That issue of the U.S. government funding both the people in the streets who pretended that they were for Mossadegh but communist, and against Mossadegh, pro-Shah, I would like our guest, professor Ervand Abrahamian, Middle East and Iran expert at Baruch College, to comment on. This was a time, the British had used the ruse of anti-communism supposedly to lure in the U.S. Do you think the U.S. was fully well aware of the issue of oil being at the core of this, and also them possibly getting a cut of those oil sales.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: Yes, I think oil is the central issue. But of course this was done at the height of the Cold War, so much of the discourse at the time linked it to the Cold War. I think many liberal historians, including of course Stephen Kinzer`s wonderful book here, even though it`s very good in dealing with the tragedy of the `53 coup, still puts it in this liberal framework that the tragedy, the original intentions, were benign.--that the U.S. really got into it because of the Cold War and it was hoodwinked into it by the nasty British who of course had oil interests, but the U.S. somehow was different. U.S. Eisenhower`s interest, were really anti-communism. I sort of doubt that interpretation. For me, the oil was important both for the United States and for Britain. It`s not just the question of oil in Iran. It was a question of control over oil internationally. If Mossadegh had succeeded in nationalizing the British oil industry in Iran, that would have set an example and was seen at that time by the Americans as a threat to U.S. oil interests throughout the world, because other countries would do the same. Once you have control, then you can determine how much oil you produce in your country, who you sell it to, when you sell it, and that meant basically shifting power from the oil companies, both British Petroleum, Angloversion, American companies, shifting it to local countries like Iran and Venezuela. And in this, the U.S. had as much stake in preventing nationalization in Iran as the British did. So here there was not really a major difference between the United States and the British. The question really was on tactics. Truman was persuaded that he could in a way nudge Mossadegh to give up the concept of nationalization, that somehow you could have a package where it was seen as if it was nationalized but, in reality, power would remain in the hands of Western oil companies. And Mossadegh refused to go along with this facade. He wanted real nationalization, both in theory and practice. So the Truman administration, in a way, was not that different from the British view of keeping control. Then, the Truman policy was then, if Mossadegh was not willing to do this, then he could be shoved aside through politics by the Shah dismissing him or the Parliament in Iran dismissing him. But again, it was not that different from the British view. Where the shift came was that after July of `52, it became clear even to the American ambassador in Iran that Mossadegh could not be got rid of through the political process. He had too much popularity, and after July `53, the U.S. really went along with the British view of a coup, indeed to have a military coup. So even before Eisenhower came in, the U.S. was working closely with the British to carry out the coup. And what came out of the coup was of course the oil industry on paper remained Iranian, nationalized, but in reality it was controlled by a consortium. In that consortium the British still retained more than 50 percent, but the U.S. got a good 40 percent of that control.

AMY GOODMAN: I said at the top, this month marks the 50th anniversary of America`s first intervention in the Middle East. I should have said, of America`s first overthrow of a democratically elected government. But, Stephen Kinzer, the statement that you make in your book, it is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax, which the U.S. had called the coup through the Shah`s repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York. Can you flush that out?

STEPHEN KINZER: The goal of our coup was to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh and place the Shah back in his throne. And we succeeded in doing that. But from the perspective of decades of history, we can look back and ask whether what seemed like a success really was a success. The Shah whom we brought back to power became a harsh dictator. His repression set off the revolution of 1979, and that revolution brought to power a group of fanatic anti-Western, religious clerics whose government sponsored acts of terror against American targets, and that government also inspired fundamentalists in other countries including next door, Afghanistan, where the Taliban came to power and gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. So, I think you can--while it`s always difficult to draw direct cause and effect lines in history--see that this episode has had shattering effects for the United States. And let`s consider one other of the many negative affects this has had. When we overthrew a democratic government in Iran 50 years ago, we sent a message, not only to Iran, but throughout the entire Middle East. That message was that the United States does not support democratic governments and the United States prefers strong-man rule that will guarantee us access to oil. And that pushed an entire generation of leaders in the Middle East away from democracy. We sent the opposite message that we should have sent. Instead of sending the message that we wanted democracy, we sent a message that we wanted dictatorship in the Middle East, and a lot of people in the Middle East got that message very clearly and that helped to lead to the political trouble we face there today.

AMY GOODMAN: Right after the Shah was deposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution of 1979 and then the Iranian students took over the U.S. embassy, I`m wondering, Professor Abrahamian, how often did the press, and understanding through the hundreds of days that the hostages were held, go back to the 1953 coup and explain the fears of the students that in 1953 the Shah had fled thinking that the coup had been fought back and the U.S. brought him back and that now that Jimmy Carter had allowed him into the United States, that they might be staging another possible coup, leading the students to fear this and to take the hostages.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: I think on this issue actually you see a big cultural gap between the American public and the Iranian public. For the Iranian public, the `53 coup shapes basically Iranian history, as Stephen shows very much in his book. But for Americans, the `53 coup was something unreal for them. It wasn`t something they were aware of. If they were aware it, it was like Jimmy Carter saying that this was ancient history. For the U.S. it may have been ancient history but for Iranians it was not. So when the students took over the embassy, they actually called it the "den of spies" because they knew that in `53 the coup had been actually plotted from the U.S. compound. So they were--

AMY GOODMAN: That very building that they took over.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: That very building. And that, for Iranians, was a central issue. In the United States, if you watch how the media covered it here, it saw the hostage crisis as Iranian emotional rampaging mobs in the streets calling for death of America and the `53 coup was intentionally not brought into that context. So you can go for reams of programs on the main channels in the United States about the hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, and you rarely get the mention of the `53 coup. This was intentional. The media here did not want to make that link to `53.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we`re going to go right now back to an older documentary that very much lays out what happened in `53, with interestingly enough, former C.I.A. agents. I want to thank you, Professor Abrahamian, for being with us from Baruch College, and Steven Kinzer, author of the new book, All the Shah`s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Stay with us.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, call 1 [phone]

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-battle2…


A DEADLY DAY FOR CHARLIE COMPANY
The Marine unit was supposed to have backup as it entered battle in Iraq. But it was alone, and chaos exploded.
By Rich Connell and Robert J. Lopez
Times Staff Writers

August 26, 2003

The convoy rumbled north, through the heart of the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. It was the fourth day of the war, and the men of Charlie Company had orders to capture the Saddam Canal Bridge on the city`s northern edge.

The Marines were taking heavy fire. Then there was an ear-splitting blast. A rocket-propelled grenade ripped open one of the amphibious assault vehicles, lifting it off the ground.

A thick, dark cloud filled the vehicle`s interior. Some of the Marines donned gas masks, fearing a chemical attack. Screams pierced the smoke:

We got a man down! We got a man down!

The Marines` light armor had been pierced, and with it any illusion that this would be easy. They would take the bridge, but at a cost. Eighteen men from a single company were killed that day and 15 wounded, making it the deadliest battle of the war for U.S. forces.

Public attention, briefly riveted on the fighting in Nasiriyah, has since moved elsewhere. The struggle to rebuild Iraq and contain mounting guerrilla violence now occupies center stage. But the Marines of Charlie Company, now back home, are not ready to put that Sunday in March behind them.

They want to know why commanders sent them into an urban firefight without tanks, without protective plating for their vehicles and with only half the troops planned for the mission.

They want to know why an Air Force fighter strafed their positions as they struggled to hold the bridge, killing at least one Marine and possibly as many as six.

Five months later, the U.S. Central Command is still investigating the "friendly fire" episode. The Marine Corps has conducted its own review of the battle but said it will not release its findings until the other investigation is finished.

The Times reconstructed the battle from interviews with 11 Marines who fought that day. Their accounts paint a gory and chaotic picture of ground combat that contrasts with the many images of U.S. forces using precision bombs and long-distance weaponry against an enemy that quickly abandoned the fight.

In Nasiriyah, Iraqis stood their ground and threw all they could muster at the leading edge of the American forces. By day`s end, the price of controlling the road to Baghdad had become gruesomely clear to both sides.

Charlie Company had reached Nasiriyah after pushing up 85 miles from Kuwait. Another Marine unit had seized a bridge leading into the city over the Euphrates River.

Charlie Company`s mission on March 23 was to take a second bridge three miles north. Controlling both spans was crucial to moving a massive Marine Expeditionary Force to Baghdad.

Had things gone as planned, the 200 Marines in their lightly armored vehicles would have avoided the densely populated heart of Nasiriyah, a city of 500,000. They were supposed to take a roundabout route to the north bridge, swinging east of the city behind a dozen M1-A1 Abrams tanks and a second Marine unit, Bravo Company.

But Bravo Company`s vehicles sank several feet deep in mud flats east of Nasiriyah. Its 200 men could not help take the bridge.

The tanks were also out of the fight, diverted on a rescue mission. The Army`s 507th Maintenance Company had taken a wrong turn that morning and been ambushed near the city. Eleven soldiers were killed and seven captured, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

The Marines` tanks rushed to retrieve survivors, burning their fuel in the process. When they returned, they were sent to the rear to refuel just as Charlie Company was preparing to push north.

"Where the hell are the tanks going?" Cpl. Randy Glass recalled thinking. "Why the hell aren`t the tanks in front of us?"

Despite the lack of armor and the stranding of Bravo`s men, Charlie Company was ordered to take the north bridge and to get there by the most direct route — a three-mile stretch of highway lined by buildings and alleyways. Some intelligence reports called it "Ambush Alley."

Lt. Col. Rick Grabowski, the battalion commander, said that going ahead made sense at the time. Though concerned about Ambush Alley, commanders did not anticipate a tough fight for the bridge, he said: "None of us really knew what was on the northern side of the city."

And time was of the essence. If they waited for the tanks to return or for troop reinforcements, the Marines risked fighting for the bridge in darkness, Grabowski said.

There was another factor driving the Marines forward that day. It reflected a state of mind as much as the state of the battlefield. "Keep moving" was the motto of Charlie Company`s battle regiment.

"Once we were in the city and we made contact," Grabowski said, "there wasn`t going to be any backing down."


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When he got the order to move into the city, Sgt. William Schaefer thought he`d heard wrong.

"Say again," he called into his radio.

Schaefer was a commander at the head of Charlie Company`s 11 amphibious assault vehicles.

The men inside were from the beach towns of Southern California, the hamlets of upstate New York and many places in between. One planned to enroll at Rutgers University in New Jersey when he got home. Another wanted to be a Reno cop. Some were immigrants. Others were from proud military families.

They were part of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment and had shipped out in January from their base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Their tub-shaped assault vehicles, called "tracks," are a 30-year-old design made for taking and holding beachheads. They are 26 feet long, carry up to 20 Marines each, and are armed with .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers.

Their reinforced-aluminum skin is vulnerable to artillery and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs — unlike the heavy armor on tanks. Thick steel plating can be attached to the tracks, but none was available to outfit Charlie Company`s vehicles when they reached the war zone, the Marines said.

"Eight Ball, Oscar Mike," Schaefer barked into the radio, and with that signal the company was on the move.

The tracks crossed the Euphrates on the bridge captured earlier and moved single file up Ambush Alley. It was a little before noon. On both sides, a dense warren of mud-colored buildings pressed up against the road.

At first, the Iraqis seemed to welcome the Marines. A few waved white flags. Then, in a breath, the convoy was under attack from all directions. Iraqis were firing from rooftops, from around corners, from machine-gun nests hidden in side streets.

"We saw women shoot at us with RPGs We saw children shoot at us," recalled the company commander, Capt. Daniel J. Wittnam. "We never saw one person in uniform."

Returning the fire, Schaefer alternated between his machine gun and grenade launcher, working a foot pedal that spun his turret right, then left.

Schaefer, 25, of Columbia, S.C., said the Marines tried to distinguish between Iraqi fighters and noncombatants. "But at that point, it was hard."

The enemy, the Marines learned later, was a combination of Iraqi army soldiers, Fedayeen Saddam militiamen and Baath Party loyalists.

One man knelt and aimed an RPG at Schaefer`s track. A burst of .50-caliber fire cut off the top half of the Iraqi`s body.

"Pieces of people were all over the street," said Lance Cpl. Edward Castleberry, 21, who was at the wheel of Schaefer`s vehicle.

Near the rear of the convoy, Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, 31, of Ventura was driving a track crowded with more than 20 Marines. Bitz and his crew had picked up extra men when the company`s 12th track broke down outside town. Men were crammed on bench seats amid boxes of ammunition. Several were riding atop the vehicle.

In the middle of the column, Marines on another track shouted for more firepower to answer the torrent of incoming rounds. Lance Cpl. Eric Killeen, 22, a weightlifter from Florida`s Gulf Coast, popped out of the hatch with his 15-pound squad automatic weapon, a machine gun that can spray 1,000 rounds per minute.

Killeen poured fire down side streets, into doorways, at second-story windows.

"My adrenaline was pumping so high," Killeen said. "Every emotion you can imagine was running through your body."

Castleberry, a Seattle snowboarder who`d joined the Marines the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, steered the lead vehicle with one hand and fired his M-16 rifle with the other.

"I figured one more gun couldn`t hurt," he said.

The convoy pushed north, the tracks pausing and pivoting at times to allow gunners a better view. They were almost through the gantlet of Ambush Alley. Their objective, the Saddam Canal Bridge, was a few hundred yards away.

Inside Bitz`s overcrowded track, it was dark and noisy. The air reeked of diesel fumes. Marines were on top of one another. Some stood on the shoulders of their comrades, firing M-16s from a hatch near the rear.

Glass, a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania who had joined the Marines hoping to see combat, was sharing a menthol cigarette with Sgt. Jose Torres when an explosion lifted the 28-ton vehicle into the air. "Immediately, I went deaf," Glass recalled.

An RPG had punctured the track`s aluminum body — and with it the Marines` faith in their technological edge. Their tubs were not meant for this kind of fight — especially without the bolt-on armor plating.

"My eyes! My eyes!" shouted Torres, temporarily blinded.

"Glass is dead!" someone screamed in the chaos.

Glass wasn`t dead, but his left leg was a bleeding mass.

Up top, the explosion had torched rucksacks tied to the track, turning them into balls of fire.

Bitz drove the burning vehicle forward. This was no place to stop.

"Keep it tight! Keep it tight!" Schaefer shouted into the radio, not wanting any stragglers left behind.


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The tracks finally crossed the Saddam Canal Bridge, a nondescript concrete span over an irrigation channel. Though it seemed an eternity, the trip had taken only a few minutes. On each side were swampy irrigation ditches and brush. Beyond was open flatland. The road was raised, and Charlie Company was an easy target.

The tracks fanned out over a quarter-mile-wide area. Marines in charcoal-lined chemical suits and Kevlar flak vests poured out of the vehicles and sought cover on both sides of the road.

They had taken the bridge. Holding it was another matter. Small-arms fire exploded from the fields to the east and west and from the city to the rear.

Marines scrambled out of Bitz`s burning track. A release on the rear loading ramp didn`t work, so the men piled out through a small hatch, climbing over the wounded.

Schaefer helped carry out Glass, whose left leg had been tied with a tourniquet.

Bitz was carrying injured Marines to cover when a shell exploded, spraying him with shrapnel. Blood streamed from his face and back as he continued hauling the wounded to safety.

"He was acting like nothing was wrong," Schaefer said.

A plume of black smoke rose from Bitz`s track. Mortar shells landed on each side. The Iraqis quickly adjusted their aim and slammed the vehicle.

Burning ammunition began punching out the track`s sides.

Cpl. William Bachmann, 22, a New Jersey skateboarder, was wedging his lanky frame into a nearby depression when he saw a flash of light from the vehicle. A large-caliber round flew past him. "If I was standing up," he said, "I would have been hit."

Cpl. Randal Rosacker of San Diego set up his machine gun, providing cover for other Marines. His is a military family; his father is chief of boat on a Navy submarine. Rosacker, 21, was cut down by an Iraqi artillery round or mortar shell, said Wittnam, the company commander. He was one of the first Marines to die that day.

The company`s 15-man mortar squad set up a row of launchers on the east side of the road.

The squad had no time to dig foxholes. The Marines worked three launchers furiously, knocking out Iraqi mortar positions across the canal. They fired so many rounds so quickly that their mortar tubes were glowing, almost translucent. "They were pretty much melting their tubes," said Castleberry.

Outnumbered by the Iraqis` mortar positions, the squad was a prime target. Incoming shells were landing closer and closer. Finally, the Iraqi mortars found their mark. Nine members of the squad would die before the battle was over.

Second Lt. Frederick Pokorney Jr., a 6-foot-7-inch former basketball player, tried to call in artillery strikes on the Iraqis. A 31-year-old father from Nevada, he was the company`s forward artillery observer. He had trouble getting through on his field radio and moved to higher ground for better reception.

An RPG hit him in the chest, fatally wounding him.

As the casualties mounted, Wittnam wanted helicopters to evacuate the wounded. But there was "no way in hell" they could land, he said. "It was too hot."

Navy Corpsman Luis Fonseca, 22, was giving morphine to Glass and another wounded Marine in one of the tracks. With a black marker, he scrawled "1327" on Glass` head, indicating the time the painkiller was administered.

The medic ran up and down the road looking for wounded when he saw Wittnam. "We`re starting to win this battle," Fonseca recalled the captain saying.

Fonseca wasn`t convinced. "I know there`s a bullet with my name on it," he recalled thinking. "I`m gonna do my job until I get hit."

Machine gunners needed more ammunition. Sgt. Brendon C. Reiss, 23, a squad leader, and Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse, 22, a Thai immigrant from Connecticut, ran to get more ammo boxes from one of the vehicles.

An artillery round exploded, killing Chanawongse and fatally wounding Reiss.

Around 1:30 p.m., Schaefer decided to evacuate the wounded, even though it meant going back through Ambush Alley. All 11 tracks had made it across the bridge. Schaefer lined up six of them in a column to head south.

"I was willing to take a chance because we had guys bleeding to death," he said. "I was tired of seeing people getting killed."

Bachmann and Lance Cpl. Donald Cline, 21, a former surfer raised in La Crescenta, were firing from behind a mound of earth. Word came that volunteers were needed to load the wounded onto the vehicles.

"I`m going to help," Cline said, running toward the tracks spread out north of the bridge. It was the last time Bachmann saw his friend alive.


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The Marines heard the plane before they saw it. The Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt, known as the Warthog, flies ground-support missions, using its heavy gun.

Cpl. Jared Martin, 29, a former high school wrestler from Phoenix, was outside Schaefer`s track when he heard the growl of the jet fighter`s twin engines. Its 30-millimeter cannon, which can shoot 3,900 rounds per minute, whipped up dense clouds of sand.

"He was low," Martin said. "He was coming right toward us. The next thing I know I`m feeling a lot of heat in my back."

Blood streamed from his right knee and left hand. A piece of shrapnel lodged below his eye. "My fingers, they were pretty much dangling," Martin said.

Lance Cpl. David Fribley, 26, of Florida, was just steps from the cover of Schaefer`s vehicle when rounds from the A-10 tore into his chest. "I wore what was inside of his body on my gear for a couple of days," Martin said.

To ward off the friendly fire, the Marines shot flares, which streaked the sky with green smoke.

The Marines said the A-10 made several strafing runs before it broke away.

Schaefer hoisted a U.S. flag on his turret. He hoped the Warthog pilot would see it and hold his fire. He also wanted the tracks behind to be able to keep him in sight. "Watch for the flag," he radioed to the convoy of six vehicles heading south with the wounded.

As the column started back toward Ambush Alley, one of the tracks exploded. Inside another track, Marines heard bullets bouncing off the aluminum skin. Glass, who had already been in one track that broke down, turned to Cpl. Mike Meade, whose leg was also injured.

"This track stalls and we`re getting out," Glass said. "It`s a death trap." A minute later, the vehicle stopped. Glass and Meade struggled out.

Fonseca, the medic, heard the whistle of incoming shells and shoved a sergeant on top of Glass and another injured Marine. Then he piled on top to give added protection. Three RPGs flew by and exploded about 100 feet away.

"I need to save these boys," he recalled thinking. "I need to take them back home."

Glass saw an A-10 fire on one of the tracks. It`s unclear whether it was the same jet that had flown over earlier. Two of the aircraft appeared to be operating in the area, Marines said.

"The A-10 came down hard and lit the track up," Glass said. "There`s no mistake about it."

Torres was lying nearby when he saw the jet bearing down on him. "It was slow motion," he said. "I turned at the last moment to avoid a direct hit."

Still, the Warthog`s rounds tore through his left side. "When he pulls the trigger," Martin said of the pilot, "it`s just a wall of blood."

Grabowski, the battalion commander, said that as many as six Marines may have been killed by A-10 fire. Wittnam believes it was one.

Schaefer`s convoy, now down to five vehicles, was crossing the bridge. In front, a track that normally carried the mortar squad had several Marines inside. As the track came off the bridge, an Iraqi shell dropped down the left-side cargo hatch, ripping the vehicle in half.

"A hand and arm bounced across the front of my vehicle," said Schaefer. The remaining vehicles raced around the burning track.

The rear of one track was crushed by an Iraqi shell, killing the wounded Bitz. The driver kept going.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The four surviving tracks made it to Ambush Alley. They were met by gunfire from all sides.

Bullets ripped through Schaefer`s transmission fluid tank, and Castleberry felt the steering wheel freeze. "Hold on!" he shouted over the intercom as the track careened toward a light pole.

Castleberry gunned the 525-horsepower diesel engine, hoping to knock down the pole. But the track slammed to a halt, swinging to the left toward a two-story concrete house.

An RPG blew away the track`s front hatch, six inches above Castleberry`s head. Stunned, his face and hair singed, he jumped into the street. Schaefer radioed to the three surviving tracks: "Don`t stop. Keep going."

Inside the disabled track, a dozen Marines grabbed ammunition containers and the wounded and headed for the house.

Schaefer and two other Marines, one injured, were pinned down outside the track. "Then all hell broke out," Schaeffer said. "They just started coming out of nowhere, hundreds of them."

Iraqis were charging the Marines. Schaefer aimed his M-16 and quickly used up two 29-round clips as he killed some of the attackers and forced others to take cover.

"When you`re scared," he said, "you pull your finger pretty fast."

Two of the other Marines, meanwhile, scaled an 8-foot wall and went into the house. An Iraqi man and woman ran out the back door.

The Marines hoisted the wounded over the wall and put them inside. The windows of the house were hidden by piles of sandbags and sacks of flour. In one room were pictures of Saddam Hussein and a man who looked like Jesus.

Out on the street, Schaefer and the two other Marines were holding off the advancing Iraqis.

Then the driver and a crewman from the track that had been ripped in half at the bridge appeared in the street. One was blinded. The other was limping.

"We`re laying cover fire for them," Schaefer said, "and they hobbled inside."

Schaefer was on his last magazine clip. This is it, he recalled thinking: They`re going to overrun me.

Then he heard the roar of a track driven by Cpl. Michael Brown. He had disregarded Schaefer`s instructions to continue and had turned around. Scooping up the three Marines, Brown took off in a rain of enemy fire.

"He saved my life," Schaefer said.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


About seven Marines took up positions on the roof of the house. Martin, his wounds patched up, spotted two men peeking around a corner with an RPG. He fired and they fell.

Martin looked at his watch. It was about 3 p.m. "We have about two hours before the sun goes down," he thought. "Then we`re gonna be real screwed."

The man who lived in the house burst through the back door yelling. He entered the room where the wounded were being guarded, Castleberry said, and was shot dead.

A lance corporal with the only operable radio called other units at the south end of the city for help. But the battery was low, and he couldn`t tell whether the message was getting through.

With Iraqis now 20 yards from the building, the Marines on the roof were going through hundreds of rounds. Castleberry had fired so many grenades from his M-16 that the plastic hand grip on his launcher was melting.

Two Iraqis sped by on a motorcycle, the passenger firing an AK-47. On a second pass, one Marine hit the driver, spilling the bike. As the gunman tried to escape on the motorcycle, Castleberry unleashed another grenade. He saw a flash and the man`s body blew apart.

The ammunition was running low. Castleberry and another Marine dashed to the disabled track, grabbing antitank missiles and crates of bullets as they dodged enemy rounds.

On the roof, Martin and other Marines were trying to use shards of broken glass to reflect sunlight and get the attention of U.S. Cobra helicopter gunships overhead.

Below, Iraqi fighters were trying to reach the abandoned track, with its load of weapons and ammunition. "We`re hitting them," Martin recalled, "watching them drop."

He remembers a strange sensation. "Your body and brain ain`t working like a normal person`s would. Some people will snap. Some people will go off the edge. Everyone reacts differently," Martin said. "I was having fun."

Marines at the south bridge had picked up the radioed pleas for help and organized a rescue party.

The first vehicle to arrive was a Humvee carrying a grizzled gunnery sergeant from another company. He was firing a pump-action shotgun out the passenger window as Marines on the roof sprayed cover fire.

"What do you need?" he shouted.

Water and radio batteries, the Marines answered.

"I`ll be back," the sergeant said.

An M1-A1 tank arrived soon after and took away the wounded. The gunnery sergeant returned with Humvees to rescue the remaining Marines.

As the vehicles unleashed heavy fire in several directions, forcing the Iraqi fighters to take cover, the sergeant stepped onto the street and lit a cigarette.

"God, I hate this place," he said. "Let`s get the hell out of here."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Part of Charlie Company was still pinned down at the north bridge.

Lance Cpl. Killeen, the Florida weightlifter, and his platoon were in the swamp near the span. He could hear enemy soldiers nearby.

"I thought they were going to sandwich us," Killeen said. "I figured my life was all over."

It was nearing 4 p.m. and the sun was getting low.

The ground rumbled and Killeen climbed toward the bridge. If Iraqi tanks were coming, then the company was almost certainly lost, he recalled thinking.

As the tanks neared the canal, he saw they were American. These were the tanks that had spent their fuel retrieving members of the Army maintenance company that had been ambushed. Refueling had taken longer than expected because the pumps malfunctioned; it had to done by hand.

When they learned that Charlie Company was taking a pounding, the tank crews cut short the refueling and rushed back to Nasiriyah.

Now they were firing their 120-millimeter guns at Iraqi positions.

"It was the best feeling in the world," Killeen recalled.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


As the Marines prepare for a memorial service today at Camp Lejeune, many are trying to recover from wounds both mental and physical.

Glass, recuperating in his hometown of Bethlehem, Pa., has had 11 surgeries to remove shrapnel, dead muscle and metal pins from his leg, wounded by an Iraqi RPG. His fibula has been removed and he`s had several skin grafts. He`ll be on crutches at least two more months.

Martin had eight chunks of shrapnel from the A-10 removed from his hands and legs on the battlefield. Two additional pieces were removed from his arm in June on a Navy ship returning him to North Carolina. He`s awaiting plastic surgery to remove another piece below his right eye.

Torres, who was also hit by the A-10, walks with the help of crutches as he recovers from shrapnel wounds to his right leg and left side. He was recently released from the Bethesda naval hospital in Maryland and is working to regain movement in his left foot.

"I`m still here," he said. "That`s all I thank God for."

Some of the Charlie Company Marines prefer not to talk about what happened that day. Others break down as they recall how the men around them fell. Castleberry still pictures the faces of the youngest Iraqi fighters. Some looked to be 12 years old.

"It was kind of sad," he said. "You see these kids who don`t know anything getting shot to pieces because they`re trying to shoot at you."

Others talk about waking up in the night, the battle for the bridge playing over and over in their heads.

"We all have nightmares every night. We`re in some combat scenario and it`s always the same guys getting killed," Schaefer said. "Your memory`s just like a damn camera. Especially when you`re alone."

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The men who died

On March 23, the fourth day of the Iraq war, 18 Marines died fighting to take a bridge in Nasiriyah. Nine served in a mortar squad that came under intense Iraqi bombardment.

*

Sgt. Michael E. Bitz, 31, of Ventura drove an amphibious assault vehicle, or track. He was wounded helping injured Marines and was killed by an Iraqi shell.

*

Lance Cpl. Thomas A. Blair, 24, of Broken Arrow, Okla., was part of an air-defense team. He disappeared in the fighting and was later confirmed as killed in action.

*

Lance Cpl. Brian R. Buesing, 20, of Cedar Key, Fla., was in the mortar squad. His grandfather served in the same squad in the Korean War and won a Silver Star.

*

Pfc. Tamario D. Burkett, 21, of Buffalo, N.Y., was a poet, an artist and the oldest of seven children. He was with the mortar squad.

*

Cpl. Kemaphoom A. Chanawongse, 22, of Waterford, Conn., a Thai immigrant, was a crew commander. He was hit by artillery fire while trying to retrieve ammunition.

*

Lance Cpl. Donald J. Cline Jr., 21, of Sparks, Nev., was a rifleman. He said he was going to help wounded Marines and was not seen again. He was later confirmed dead.

*

Lance Cpl. David K. Fribley, 26, of Fort Myers, Fla., joined the service after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was killed by friendly fire from an Air Force A-10 fighter.

*

Cpl. Jose A. Garibay, 21, of Costa Mesa, a Mexican immigrant, was part of the mortar squad. A shell destroyed a vehicle evacuating him and other wounded Marines.

*

Pvt. Jonathan L. Gifford, 30, of Decatur, Ill., an outdoorsman, was a member of the mortar squad.

*

Cpl. Jorge A. Gonzalez, 20, of El Monte wanted to become a police officer. He was with the mortar squad.

*

Pvt. Nolen R. Hutchings, 19, of Boiling Springs, S.C., enlisted in the Marines after high school. He was with the mortar squad.

*

Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Jordan, 42, of Enfield, Conn., had served 15 years in the Marines. He was with the mortar squad.

*

2nd Lt. Frederick E. Pokorney Jr., 31, of Tonopah, Nev., was a forward artillery observer. He died trying to call in artillery strikes on Iraqi positions.

*

Lance Cpl. Patrick R. Nixon, 21, of Gallatin, Tenn., came from a family whose members had served in every major conflict since World War I. He was with the mortar squad.

*

Sgt. Brendon C. Reiss, 23, of Casper, Wyo., was a squad leader who had recently reenlisted. He was running to get more ammunition when he was hit.

*

Cpl. Randal K. Rosacker, 21, of San Diego was a machine gunner who was providing cover fire after the Marines crossed the bridge. He was one of the first Americans killed.

*

Lance Cpl. Thomas J. Slocum, 22, of Thornton, Colo., was in the hatch of a vehicle taking wounded Marines to the rear when he was hit.

*

Lance Cpl. Michael J. Williams, 31, of Phoenix gave up a flooring business to join the Marines. He was with the mortar squad.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer2…
COMMENTARY
a d v e r t i s e m e n t




Arrogant Arnold or Capable Cruz?
Robert Scheer

August 26, 2003

Cruz Bustamante it is. Or should be if not for the "giggle factor" that might propel a Jesse Ventura wannabe into management of the world`s sixth-largest economy.

Even if one accepts the false assumption of the recall — that California`s governor, reelected by a clear majority less than a year ago, is suddenly unfit to govern — then the logical and fair alternative is to replace him with the lieutenant governor, who was selected by the voters for just that purpose.

Bustamante has the training, experience and track record required to work with the Legislature to produce a budget come January. Contrast this with the GOP`s muscleman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who admits he finds the budget process baffling and doesn`t plan to pull in his financial experts to study it until after the election — a couple of months before a new one is due. As the Democratic state Senate Leader John Burton (D-San Francisco) told me over the weekend, "I hope those will not be the same trusted accountants responsible for the debacle of Enron and so many other companies."

The giggle factor, for a state that`s survived the contrived "energy crisis" as well as the dot-com crash and a sick national economy, is that for some it sounds like a fun diversion to make the old Terminator our new Governator.

Running the excruciatingly complex California government is serious business, however. That was acknowledged even by former actor Ronald Reagan, who spent years familiarizing himself with the state government`s workings before announcing his 1966 campaign for governor. I interviewed him at the time, and there was no question of his being prepared.

Reagan came to grips with economic reality quickly, as Lou Cannon, Reagan`s definitive biographer, pointed out in the New York Times: "In the first week of his governorship Mr. Reagan proposed a $1-billion tax increase, then the largest tax hike ever sponsored by any governor of any state." And, Cannon noted, it was mostly aimed at banks and corporations.

Burton, a young assemblyman in those days, recalled Reagan`s comment that his feet were set in concrete on no new taxes, and how he then had to ruefully admit as he raised taxes that the concrete was cracking around him. The same was true for Republican Govs. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, both of whom raised taxes substantially.

That is Schwarzenegger`s fate should he win, Burton said. "There`s no chance at all to balance the budget or have a budget without new revenue, and if Schwarzenegger sticks to his commitment to not cut education, including higher ed, then he has no chance of having a budget. It wouldn`t do much for his hero image if he starts taking away $75 from aged, blind and disabled people — and there`s very little money he could get out of single mothers with young children."

Certainly one of Schwarzenegger`s economic advisors, Warren E. Buffett, understands all this, but will he be writing the actor`s lines? He hasn`t so far. Schwarzenegger is betraying the public trust — and sounding like a typical I`ll-do-anything-to-win politician — when he insists that Californians are overtaxed and promises to alleviate that condition without cutting any programs.

If he wins, Schwarzenegger will have to raise taxes or his promise to improve the lives of citizens will ring as hollow as the initiative he pushed through on last year`s ballot. In his one previous public foray into politics, Schwarzenegger helped pass an initiative for after-school programs that failed to provide funding and therefore was a nonstarter.

Schwarzenegger is arrogant enough to suggest that he can solve the budget shortfall by mouthing a few lines from action flicks. In the real world, every program turns out to be sacrosanct to the very voters now clamoring for a recall; all but a measly 4% of the state`s general fund expenditures are allocated to education, health care, the courts and prisons. Where is the fat in K-12 education or emergency-room care that Schwarzenegger will terminate? Will he cut the prison population?

Burton relishes the thought of going one-on-one in Sacramento against an actor shorn of his Hollywood props. But as Burton pointed out, for Californians facing real problems, politics is not a game, making it crucial that we defeat the recall — or failing that, elect Bustamante.

That is the only way to stop the cynical right-wing Republicans who control the party. They are willing to swallow Schwarzenegger`s pro-choice position and other liberal social views in their zeal to seize the statehouse, which they failed to win in the last election.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

For Halliburton, Iraq Is a Cash Cow

08/23/2003 @ 10:49pm [permalink]
E-mail this Post

War is a tragedy for some and a boon for others. As American soldiers continue to die in Iraq, and the length of the war and its costs escalate, Halliburton, the company headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney before the Bush Administration took office, announced that it had converted a half billion dollar quarterly loss of a year ago into a quarterly profit of $26 million for the same period in 2003. This profit comes largely from hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi rebuilding and oil contracts awarded by the Bush Administration.



But why should war be good for those who have been good to the Republican party? "The Bush Administration," the Baltimore Sun recently reported, "continues to use American corporations to perform work that United Nations agencies and nonprofit aid groups can do more cheaply." "Both for ideological reasons," Paul Krugman observed in the New York Times, "and, one suspects, because of the patronage involved, the people now running the country seem determined to have public services provided by private corporations, no matter what the circumstances."



Representatives Henry Waxman, John Dingell and Maxine Waters are to be commended for monitoring the war profiteers and the conflicts of interest so pervavsive in this Administration. (In March, Waters offered an amendment that would have prohibited the Administration from awarding contracts to companies which had employed senior administration officials. In April, Waxman and Dingell sent letters to the General Accounting Office demanding an investigation into how the Pentagon was handling the bidding process for lucrative contracts for rebuilding Iraq.)



But where`s the broader outrage? Isn`t the issue of war profiteering a strong one for Democratic Presidential candidates? Or even for common-sense Republicans who put their country before profit? They could lead their party against a President and Vice-President rolling in corporate cash--some of it from companies that have directly profited from war. Where is the leader with the courage to say, as Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II, `"I don`t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster`"? Even Harry Truman, considered a model centrist by DLC types, referred to profiteering during World War II as "treason."



With all due credit to the World Policy Institute`s new report ,"New Numbers: The Price of Freedom in Iraq and Power in Washington," let`s call for:



*Transparency and Accountabilty: Let`s demand a Senate Investigation on war profiteering comparable to the one that Truman conducted at the end of World War Two.



*Curbs on Profiteering: All contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq should be on a limited profit basis, not the open-ended deals that Halliburton and other US contractors have received thus far.



*Legislation which would require all rebuilding contracts for Iraq to be subject to an open bidding process, and a temporary "Truman Committee" to oversee all Iraqi war contracts, as The Nation proposed in an editorial last May.



*Putting the Political Money Machine on Hold: To avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest, Bush and all of his challengers should pledge that they will not accept campaign contributions from companies that have profited from the war in Iraq, or the subsequent rebuilding effort.



Muscular Congressional actions like these would go a long way toward tempering some of the most corrupt practices of this ethically-challenged and political tone-deaf Administration.

http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?bid=7

[Joerver]

Rules for Being A Good Republican


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



1) You have to believe that the nation`s 8-year prosperity prior to W`s administration was due to the work of Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush, but that today`s growing deficit and rising gas prices are all Clinton`s fault.

2) You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

3) You have to be against government programs, except Social Security checks on time.

4) You have to believe that government should stay out of people`s lives, yet you want government to regulate your personal sexual and reproductive decisions.

5) You have to believe that pollution is ok, so long as it makes a profit.

6) You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don`t pray to Allah or Buddha.

7) You have to believe that a woman cannot be trusted with decisions about her own body, but that large multi- national corporations should have no regulation or interference whatsoever.

8) You love Jesus and Jesus loves you and, by the way, Jesus shares your hatred of AIDS victims, homosexuals, and former President Clinton.

9) You have to believe that society is colorblind and growing up black in America doesn`t diminish your opportunities, but you still won`t vote for Alan Keyes.

10) You have to believe that it was wise to allow Ken Starr to spend $50 million dollars to attack Clinton because no other U.S. presidents have ever been unfaithful to their wives.

11) You have to believe that a waiting period for purchasing a handgun is bad because quick access to a new firearm is an important concern for all Americans.

12) You have to believe it is wise to keep condoms out of schools, because we all know if teenagers don`t have condoms they won`t have sex.

13) You have to believe that the ACLU is bad because they defend the Constitution, while the NRA is good because they defend the Constitution.

14) You have to believe the AIDS virus is not important enough to deserve federal funding proportionate to the resulting death rate and that the public doesn`t need to be educated about it, because if we just ignore it, it will go away.

15) You have to believe that biology teachers are corrupting the morals of 6th graders if they teach them the basics of human sexuality, but the Bible, which is full of sex and violence, is good reading and right on the mark.

16) You have to believe that Chinese communist missiles have killed more Americans than handguns, alcohol, and tobacco.

17) You have to believe that even though governments have supported the arts for 5000 years and that most of the great works of Renaissance art were paid for by governments, our government should shun any such support. After all, the rich can afford to buy their own art and the poor don`t need any.

18) You have to believe that the lumber from the last one percent of old growth U.S. forests is well worth the destruction of those forests and the extinction of the several species of plants and animals therein.

19) You have to believe that we should forgive and pray for Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Bob Livingston for their marital infidelities, but that bastard Clinton should have been impeached.

20) You have to believe that George W. Bush really won the last election



Thanks Scott.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Joerver]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[Joerver]

[rightnow]

hi joerver,

ich meine bei dir den cartoon gesehen zu haben, bzgl.
us - debts...

das bild zeigt einen riesig aufgeblähten ballon
mit kl. kopf -halb in rückenlage, u. ein fernseher davor.

kannst du dich an so ein bild erinnern ?

wenn ja,
ich bin daran interessiert. habe es leider nicht mehr gefunden. dürfte einige tage her sein -ich habe gescrollt wie ein wilder, aber ..

cu
rightnow

[Joerver]

Rightnow
Drei Sammelseiten. Die erste ist nach Tagen geordnet, die beiden anderen nach Zeichnern.
Ich meine den Toon gesehen zu haben, habe aber kein Verzeichnis, wenn ich ihn finde Stelle ich ihn ein.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyardmenu.htm

http://cagle.slate.msn.com/politicalcartoons/

http://www.ucomics.com/editorials/

[Joerver]

Der Star von der WP: Tom Toles. Das müsste es sein . Von gestern.

[rightnow]

mein lieber herr gesangverein:

du hast es einfach drauf.
treffer.

danke.

cu
rightnow

[Joerver]

Tom Toles bekommt jeden Tag eine Extraseite

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 4:00 p.m. EDT August 26, 2003

There have now been 140 American soldiers killed in post-war Iraq -- two more than the total killed in the major fighting. One soldier died in a roadside bombing in suburban Baghdad. Another soldier died in a separate traffic accident.
Hundreds of U.S. soldiers raided a northern town on Tuesday in a bid to smash a crime ring wanted for murder, gunrunning and a terrorist attack on a police station that killed an American soldier earlier this month. The raid, codenamed "Operation Jimmy Hoffa," netted at least 24 members of the "terrorist organization" but its leader appeared to have eluded capture.
Belgium is unlikely to send troops to Iraq, even if a new United Nations mandate is passed authorizing wider international participation, Foreign Minister Louis Michel said in comments published Tuesday.
The U.S. military reports another soldier has died of a non-hostile gunshot wound, bringing the number of soldiers killed since major combat was declared over to 138. A total of 276 soldiers have died in combat or by accident since the war began March 20.
Thousands of Shiite Muslims protested peacefully Monday night outside the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, charging the occupation force was lax on security and did too little to stop a weekend of ethnic bloodshed in the north and the bombing at the house of an important Muslim Shiite cleric in the south.
In Najaf on Monday, mourners buried three guards who were killed in a bomb attack Sunday on the house of Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, one of Iraq`s most important Muslim Shiite clerics. The bomb, a gas cylinder wired to explode, was placed along the outside wall of the house.
An investigator with the U.S. Army says his team`s work is done at the bombed-out U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. While search and rescue missions are complete, U.S. troops will continue to provide security. At least 20 people were killed in last Tuesday`s bombing.
U.S. officials say the Bush administration is encountering resistance after seeking a U.N. resolution to get more countries to send troops to Iraq. As a result, it may not pursue a Security Council resolution after all. Last Thursday, Secretary of State Colin Powell interrupted his vacation to make the case for a new council resolution. He hoped that the bombing of the U.N. compound in Iraq would make the council receptive to broadening the U.S.-led coalition.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Summary
++++US+++++UK+++++Other+++++Total+++++Avg

++++277++++49++++++2+++++++++328++++++2.06++++159

Latest Fatality Date: 8/26/2003
Estimated Wounded: 1206
Ander5e Schätzung:
At least 332 Coalition forces have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
282 from the US and 49 from the UK and 1 from Denmark.


08/26/03 CENTCOM
A 4th Infantry Division soldier died as a result of injuries sustained in a traffic accident between Tikrit and Forward Operating Base Anaconda in Balad at approximately 6:40 p.m. on Aug. 25.
08/26/03 CENTCOM
One 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed and two wounded in improvised explosive device attack on a military convoy near the town of Hamariyah at approximately 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 26.
08/25/03 Associated Press (pending confirmation)
The U.S. military reported a soldier died of a non-hostile gunshot wound, bringing the number of soldiers killed since major combat was declared over to 138. A total of 276 soldiers have died in combat or by accident since the war began March 20.
08/24/03 CNN
Coalition officials say there are about 12 attacks daily against U.S. military convoys
08/24/03 CENTCOM
US SOLDIER DROWNS IN EUPHRATES RIVER ON AUG. 23RD
08/24/03 CENTCOM
A 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment soldier died on August 23 from a non-hostile gunshot wound
08/24/03 CNN
U.S. military vehicle reportedly hit by an explosion on the Amriyah Bridge, west of Baghdad. Eyewitnesses reported injuries...
08/23/03 AP via The New York Times
Three British soldiers killed, one seriously wounded, Saturday morning in Basra, the British military

[Joerver]

Published on Tuesday, August 26, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Grassroots Democracy in Iraq, American Style
by Medea Benjamin

BAGHDAD -- Majid Muhammed Yousef yearns for democracy. As an Iraqi Kurd, he and his family suffered tremendously under Saddam Hussein. After the US overthrew Saddam, Majid was grateful and excited about building a new Iraq.

But the first four months of US occupation have left him wondering what the US means by democracy.

At the end of May, a group of US soldiers came to his neighborhood in a dangerous section of Baghdad and convened a meeting. The neighborhood badly needed some help. Since the war, there was a breakdown in law and order. Gangs roamed at will, looting the small businesses and shooting each other and innocent bystanders in turf wars. The women were afraid to go outside, and businesses were closing down. Majid, who sold electrical appliances out of his home, was having a hard time supporting his wife and three children. Something had to be done to make the neighborhood safe again.

At the meeting, the soldiers announced that they were going to supervise elections for a local council and asked people to put themselves forward as candidates. The council members would not be paid, they were told, but they would receive the assistance of the US military in making local improvements.

Majid was happy to see this initiative, but he decided not to put his name forward for the local council. He didn`t like the American occupiers. He cringed when he saw the soldiers barreling down the narrow streets in their ferocious tanks, guns pointed at the locals. "It`s just like Palestine or Beirut," he said disapprovingly. "No one likes to have their country occupied, and I didn`t want to be a collaborator."

But his neighbors pushed him forward. Majid was a natural community leader. When the garbage had piled up in streets, threatening the health of the community, Majid used his own money to have a truck come clear it up. When robbers were entering the shop on the corner, Majid quickly gathered a group of men to chase them out of the neighborhood. He was a local hero and the people clamored for him to represent them. "I reluctantly entered the race at the last minute and got 55 of the 80 votes," he recalled. Then he broke into a smile and said, "Imagine if I had campaigned. It would have been a landslide."

Five local councils members were selected from a slate of 11. Majid, the highest vote getter, was made president.

The elections took place on June 2, and their first meeting with the US authorities was scheduled for June 7 at 10am. The five members of the newly elected council were at the designated meeting place bright and early. Standing outside in the hot sun, they waited and waited and waited. After several hours, they were told to go home, the meeting had been cancelled. "There was no explanation," said Majid, annoyed, "and no apology about keeping us waiting for hours."

A few days later the Americans came to Majid`s house with an assignment. They wanted him and the council to do a report about the neighborhood`s problems and suggest solutions. They also wanted him to do an inventory of the weapons people kept in their homes. He bristled at the latter task, feeling it was too intrusive and an attempt to make people even more helpless by taking away their ability to defend themselves. But Majid set about the first task with great enthusiasm. He and his fellow council members went from house to house, asking for input. They came up with a thick report chock full of suggestions that ranged from turning off the electricity during the day so it could be on in the evening to keep away the nocturnal looters to outlawing dark windows in cars so they could see who was driving in them.

With a great sense of accomplishment, the council finished its report on June 11, a mere 9 days after they were elected. When they went to turn in the report, however, they were told that the council had been disbanded and they should go home.

Majid and his fellow council members were stunned. They were given no reason for their dismissal. In less than two weeks, they had been elected and fired. It made no sense.

"Perhaps we made too many suggestions. Perhaps they didn`t like our suggestions," said Majid, struggling to find an explanation. "Or perhaps this is democracy, American-style. In any case, what can we do? They are the occupiers and we are the occupied."

Medea Benjamin is the founding director of the human rights group Global Exchange and the International Occupation Watch Center.

###

[Joerver]

IRAQ: A BAIT-AND-SWITCH CON JOB
Fri Aug 22, 9:00 PM ET Add Op/Ed - Richard Reeves to My Yahoo!


By Richard Reeves

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- We were in North Carolina on Tuesday, delivering the last of our children to college. I left my wife at a Borders bookstore along the way to meet a friend for tea, then headed for Durham. I turned on the radio and heard that the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad had been bombed and that Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.`s special representative in Iraq , was dead along with at least a dozen more U.N. employees.


Richard Reeves



My wife`s colleagues and friends. She works for the United Nations, is director of one of their principal offices. I turned around, went back to the bookstore and told her what had happened. "The U.N. will stay in Iraq," she said.


"So will we," I thought, meaning the Americans.


"We," Americans, are victims of one of the great "bait-and-switch" con jobs in recent history, taken into harm`s way by history-ignorant ideologues. We were told we were in imminent danger, that a truly evil regime in Baghdad had the means and will to do us immediate and mortal harm, that the fools in "Old Europe" and the rest of the world were just cowards when they disagreed with us or tried to warn us it would not be that simple.


Vice President Richard Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, leaders of the zealots, told us how easy it would be, particularly after the initial fighting ended. War on the cheap (they refused to talk about costs) and then Iraqis would greet us with flowers. "Many other countries will want to be with us when that evil regime is removed from power," Wolfowitz said last October. "Some who now criticize us will want to be part of that very positive opportunity to build a more peaceful and just and representative nation in this criticially important Arab and Muslim country. ... Unlike the Balkans, Iraq`s recent history is not one of bloody ethnic conflict but rather one of bloody repression by the regime of all ethnic groups."


On the day after the U.N. bombing, The Financial Times quoted Wolfowitz saying it was a mistake for Defense Department to assume Iraqi troops and police would be in place to maintain law and order as crowds cheered American leaders. The paper introduced his quote by saying, "Wolfowitz, in an unusual moment of candor ..."


The zealots seemed capable of saying anything to "bait" us into war -- and they have prevailed. Their dream, essentially a unilateralist, single-superpower dream, was of a Middle East controlled by the United States, with the rest of the world, led by the United Nations, cleaning up the mess and the details.


Americans, deceived and conned, have woken up to find their magnificently trained, equipped and motivated young soldiers pinned down in a hostile environment, stalked by mujihadeen from other Islamic countries sneaking into the chaos of Iraq. It was not bad enough that terrorists were able to find ways to get into the United States and harm us greatly; we have now set ourselves up on their territory -- as targets.


So what? The odds are that President Bush and his men will tough this out, at least politically. The irony of the moment is that the worse they do, the better off they are. On a strategic level, they will argue that any withdrawal now will only embolden terrorists and governments that secretly support them. That is almost certainly true, as argued in an editorial in Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, on Thursday:


"In the past, Washington has set bad examples of its fortitude by pulling out from Beirut after the bombing of the Marine barracks and from Somalia after the Special Forces casualties in Mogadishu. The world must know this won`t happen in Iraq, whatever it takes."


Bush can get away with this because -- like his coalition junior partner, Tony Blair in England -- his opposition is too intimidated by patriotism to argue with him. Most of the Democrats chasing the chance to run against him next year are now criticizing the war, mildly to be sure, but they voted for it when they had a chance to slow him down and ask what exactly he had in mind. They know, as the president knows, that now that our troops are in harm`s way, most politicians must "support" them, whatever that means. That`s the "switch."

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=123&u=/030823/79/…

[Joerver]

August 26, 2003

Bush at the Helm
A Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
By SAUL LANDAU

KB Toys has released a George W. Bush "Action Figure" entitled "Naval Aviator," produced by Blue Box Toys in China. It sells for $39.99 and it commemorates the "historic" May 1 Bush dressed-as-combat-pilot landing on the USS Lincoln. We won, he said. Hostilities in Iraq were over.

When some Iraqis resisted, Bush taunted them. "Bring `em on." Scores of dead U.S. soldiers have paid the price for Bush`s challenge. Hey, that`s war! Leaders lead and soldiers die!

Similarly, Bush appears to scoff at Nature. The President, a feisty sort of guy, fears no one and nothing. Then again he spends most of his time in the White House, his Texas ranch or at fundraisers. Is he a flesh and blood, wind-it-up-and-it-talks toy, or should we compare him to the skipper who commanded the literary ship Pequod in Herman Melville`s tale?

Like Ahab, Bush pursues personal crusades behind a religious facade. Cursed Al Qaeda! Cursed whale! Ahab defied the white beast, God`s symbol of power in the ocean. Bush took on Osama bin Laden--for a short time--and now has switched his attention to God`s earthly resources.

"We`ll smoke `em out," he might have goaded the trees in the forests as he boasted about getting Osama bin Laden; or was he referring to the Virgin lands on which he planned to order new oil and gas drilling?

Melville`s indomitable sea creature may have represented the inscrutable power, will and presence of God, as if to say: "You may go so far with your exploration of ways to dominate Nature and no further." Speaking through Moby Dick, God had warned Ahab by biting his leg off. Ahab dismissed the warning and continued his unnatural hunt.

God or Nature tuned all species to persevere; thus, most animals know instinctively not to foul their nests or commit acts that endanger the species. Biologists have even explained the behavior of the supposedly suicidal lemmings, the Norwegian rodents that seem to commit suicide by marching into the ocean every so often.

According to University of Connecticut biologist Peter Turchin, writing in the June 2000 Nature, lemmings appear to respond to scarce food supply rather "than the widespread belief that the furry rodents commit suicide en masse when their numbers grow too large." These predators eat moss, but "as their numbers grow, lemmings deplete their forage in arctic and alpine habitats more rapidly than the slow-growing mosses can replenish themselves. Faced with a desperate shortage of food, the lemmings attempt to migrate in search of areas where food may still be remaining."

But the humans running the United States sneer at the environment. Do they have something to prove like Ahab in his mortal struggle with the whale? That man can exert his will over His domain?

When global warming, thinning ozone layers, melting ice caps in the Andes and Mt. Kilimanjaro occur in a short period of time, alongside the breaking up of arctic ice blocks, the recurrence of El Nino and growing desertification, the proverbial global alarm clock has rung.

We cannot trust the corporate CEOs to take responsibility for the earth`s environment. Even the best and brightest of the corporate CEOs prove themselves more dedicated to the bottom line than to the public welfare.

The much-heralded GE CEO Jack Welch responded testily to 60 Minutes` Lesley Stahl about his company`s policy of dumping dangerous chemicals in the Hudson River.

"The word `dump` is used! We didn`t dump! We had a permit from the U.S. government and the State of New York to do exactly what we did. Do you think I`d come to work in a company that would do that or condone that? I wouldn`t do it, Lesley! This is nuts!" (CBS News Transcripts, 60 Minutes, October 29, 2000).

In fact, GE`s "dumping" violated the permits and the water quality laws, ruled a New York State administrative law judge in 1976. Indeed, in 1970, Monsanto, the manufacturer of the deadly PCBs, had warned GE not to emit PCBs into the environment. GE nevertheless continued to dump the lethal substances until 1977.

Welch`s behavior followed from earlier capitalists. Before the Peqod left port, Bilbad, one of the ship`s owners, counsels the crew: "Don`t whale it too much a Lord`s day men; but don`t miss a fair chance either, that`s rejecting Heaven`s good gifts." Some code of ethics!

"Rejecting Heaven`s good gifts" means don`t waste money to properly neutralize toxic waste. Welch and others have "dumped" PCBs or hydrofluorocarbons in the water, air and soil. Or, they looked the other way as branch-plant managers in Third World countries engage in those practices. The successful CEOs in the main offices don`t want to know the details: no environmental "excuses" will improve a bad bottom line.

In Ecuador, the oil companies created havoc. A May 2, 2003 Reuters dispatch states that between 1971-1992, Texaco Petroleum Co, a subsidiary of Texaco Inc., which merged with Chevron in 2001, dumped almost 19 billion gallons of "oil-laden water into unlined pits, estuaries and rivers during its operations in Ecuador`s Oriente province."

Years later, thousands of Ecuadorians sued the company, charging that Texaco/Chevron had polluted "sources of drinking water, caused health problems, and led to deaths of farm animals."

Chevron/Texaco officials predictably denied the allegations, claiming they treated the water properly before replacing it. "Texaco made a decision to dump these toxins into the Amazon in order to save money and increase its profits," said the plaintiff`s attorney Steven Donziger, who estimated that Texaco between 1964 and 1992 had "increased its profits $4.5 billion by dumping the produced water instead of re-injecting it."

Reluctantly recognizing, thanks to the efforts of environmental activists, that corporations had no intention of stopping--or could not stop--their global fouling of the human nest to make profits, governments of most nations signed the 1989 Montreal Protocol to force industry to stop producing and using materials that thinned the ozone layer.

Not a moment too soon! In southern Chile, where the layer had grown flimsiest, residents began to develop skin cancers in record numbers. Indeed, without ozone to protect human skin from ultraviolet radiation, life itself becomes unsustainable.

When past "civilizations" ignored Nature`s rules, they devastated the environment. The Spaniards unleashed their pigs onto the delicately balanced landscapes of the Aztecs in Mexico. The U.S. tested A-bombs on ecologically fragile Pacific atolls in the 1940s and 50s. Cancer and habitat destruction resulted.

Since then, strong reaction to environmentally destructive policies by activists led governments to face the issue in Kyoto in 1997. After President Clinton made overtures to get the Treaty approved, Congress dissented. Some fifty Senators, many of whom sat on energy committees, coincidentally received more than $10 million in donations from oil and gas companies. Ah, "Heaven`s good gifts" again!

In 2001, Bush simply dismissed the treaty signed by the United States and 54 other nations. Government leaders and environmentalists around the world wring their hands. The energy company CEOs rejoiced!

Kyoto aimed to limit emissions by industrial nations of greenhouse gases. "I will not accept a plan," Bush said defiantly on March 30 2001 (UPI), "that will harm our economy and hurt American workers." The vast majority of relevant scientists declared that more than sufficient evidence existed that global warming would lead to devastating consequences. Governments had to contain environmental threats. Bush sneered.

Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe suggested that global warming might be "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." Ranting Rush Limbaugh spoke on radio for countless other Bush supporters when he declared global warming to be a liberal plot.

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman (August 8, 2003) charged the Administration with "pursuing a strategy of denial and deception." Krugman cited a Fall 2002 memo from Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, "about how to neutralize public perceptions that the party was anti-environmental."

The memo acknowledged that although scientists had practically closed the debate on global warming, but that the Republicans still have a narrow window. "There is still an opportunity to challenge the science," Luntz offered. Lobbyists for industries that have a stake in de-regulating emissions (cars and trucks, coal, oil and gas for examples) keep fibbing about science`s uncertainty. Recall the tobacco lobbyists` sneering at evidence that smoking caused cancer.

Bush, a religious, born-again Rapturist, also shows little concern for what scientists predict as dire consequences due to U.S. industrial policies. In an August 8, 2003 e-mail, Beah Robinson described Rapture for the Christians she knew growing up "as a sort of protection from God`s wrath on the hard headed sinners of this world. Because "born agains" have a `personal` relationship with Jesus, they look to Him to spare them from the end time battles. They feel their job is to be good Christians, follow the Bible, and be prepared for the end times to come at any moment."

I`m not concerned with my final destiny. But I`m worried now. The President and those around him seem to covet destruction. Ahab destroyed his crew and ship in pursuit of vengeance or conquest. Bush`s impulse to dominate Nature may go beyond his obligations to the fossil fuel burning industries. Rapture may have captured him. Or is he no more than a model for a company that manufactures its toys in China?

Saul Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University. For more of Landau`s writing visit: www.rprogreso.com. His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, will be published in September by Pluto Books. Landau can be reached at: [e-mail]
http://www.counterpunch.org/

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[ODDLOT]

Ich will mal etwas Farbe in die Bush-Cartoons bringen.

[ODDLOT]

[ODDLOT]

[rv_2011]

Bush will den "totalen Sieg"

Herbert Hasenbein 27.08.2003

Gestern überstieg die Zahl der "nach dem Krieg" getöteten US-Soldaten die Zahl der während des Krieges Gefallenen

"Our only goal, our only option, is total victory in the war on terror." Mit dieser Mission reist George W. Bush durch sein Land. Kriegsveteranen sind ein dankbares Publikum. Mitglieder der American Legion in St.Louis verstehen besser als andere die starken Worte und auch dies: "More progress will come in Iraq and it will require hard and sustained efforts." In simplem Deutsch beginnen damit Durchhalteparolen, die eines vergessen machen sollen: Am gestrigen Dienstag überstieg die Zahl der "nach dem Krieg" getöteten US Soldaten (140) die Zahl der während des offiziellen Krieges Gefallenen (138). Ein Ende ist nicht abzusehen.

"Die Fahrzeuge der US Streitkräfte sind zu gering armiert und besonders empfänglich für die Panzerabwehrraketen aus dem alten Arsenal der irakischen Armee", schreibt Victor O`Reilly in seiner 108-seitigen Analyse für James H. Saxton, den republikanischen Abgeordneten von New Jersey.

George W. Bush hingegen sieht sich auf dem rechten Weg. 1100 Gefangene, 8200 Tonnen Munition und Tausende von sichergestellten Waffen, 42 von 55 meistgesuchten Irakern gefangen oder getötet, 38000 Iraker als Polizisten angeheuert und bereit zur Ausbildung in einer ehemaligen ungarischen Kaserne, sowie 31 Länder, die insgesamt 21000 Soldaten in den Irak entsandt haben.

Aus der Umgebung des Präsidenten wird erklärt: die bisherige Unterstützung für den Irak und den Mittleren Osten ist ungleich geringer als für den Wiederaufbau Deutschlands. Der über 4 Jahre laufende Marshall-Plan hatte den Gegenwert von 100 Milliarden US Dollar. In den Irak sind von den vorgesehenen 70 erst 2,5 Milliarden US Dollar geflossen.

Die Senatoren Chuck Hagel (Republikaner aus Nebraska) und Joseph Biden (Demokrat aus Delaware), Mitglieder des Foreign Relations Committee, äußerten sich anlässlich der abendlichen Newshour bei PBS [1] sichtlich beunruhigt über die Rede des Präsidenten, die da erst wenige Stunden zurücklag, und über das Ziel, nämlich bis zum totalen Sieg.

Chuck Hagel, kürzlich von einer Irakreise zurückgekehrt, betont: der Kampf im Irak ist nur einer von vielen Schauplätzen. Amerika benötige Hilfe von der ganzen Welt, weil auch die ganze Welt betroffen ist. Keine Nation allein sei mächtig genug, um diese Aufgabe zu bewältigen. Die Menschen im Irak sind ausgegrenzt, leiden an gesundheitlichen und wirtschaftlichen Problemen, sind sich uneins und hoffnungslos. Das schaffe Probleme über "years of years to come". "Solange der afghanische Präsident nicht mehr ist als der Bürgermeister von Kabul, und die indonesischen Islamisten und viele andere Terrorgruppen ungehindert aktiv bleiben, wird es keinen amerikanischen Sieg geben."

Joseph Biden wendet sich vehement gegen die vom US Präsidenten in seiner St.Louis-Rede benutzte Formulierung, Irak sei die amerikanische Herausforderung (challenge), an der die Zukunft gemessen werde.

Warum sollen wir darauf bestehen, dass die USA 95 Prozent der Truppen, der Kosten und des sonstigen Personals stellen? Ich würde es besser finden, wenn der Präsident sagt: ich habe mit Putin am Telefon gesprochen und mit den Chefs der Natoländer, und mich darüber verständigt, wie wir eine gemeinsame Lösung erzielen können. Ich weiß nicht, was der totale Sieg bedeuten soll. Für mich wäre es ein Sieg, wenn sich im Irak eine Republik aller Bürger bilden würde, ein Land, das zusammenhält, ein islamisches Land, das wie die Türkei säkular und stabil ist. Und wenn unsere jungen Männer und Frauen wieder zu Hause wären. So aber werden weder der Irak, noch die Roadmap für Palästina und Israel vorangebracht. Sollte gar unter dem Druck der militanten Islamisten Ägypten fallen, käme es zum Chaos.

Beide Senatoren gehören zu einer Gruppe, die versucht, den US-Präsidenten zu bewegen, die Last ehrlich mit den Gutmeinenden auf der Welt zu teilen. "Es wäre dumm (stupid), wenn wir nur wegen der Ölfelder und der Aufträge für den Wiederaufbau in den Irakkrieg gezogen wären", erklärt Joseph Biden. Wahrscheinlich, so formulieren beide Senatoren, ist der Vorstoß am Widerstand von Dick Cheney und Donald Rumsfeld gescheitert, auch wenn bisher die formale Antwort des Weißen Hauses aussteht.

Mit diesem Gespräch ist erstmals eine Bresche in die Mauer der Neocons (vgl. Die Machtergreifung der Neocons in Washington [2]) geschlagen worden. Wenn sich Demokraten und Republikaner zusammentun, könnte passieren, was William Kristol in der Septemberausgabe vom Weekly Standard [3]) befürchtet: Sollte Bush im Herbst die Wahl zum Präsidenten verlieren, hätten die Demokraten viermal hintereinander die Mehrheit gewonnen, und das würde manchen Republikaner veranlassen, mit den Demokraten gemeinsame Sache zu machen. Aus der Sicht der Neocons gibt es deshalb nur eine Konsequenz: Ein Fehler im Irak setzt "die amerikanische Außenpolitik, die Führungsrolle (world leadership) und die amerikanische Sicherheit aufs Spiel." So die Bewertung von William Kristol and Robert Kagan, ebenfalls im neuesten Weekly Standard [4]. Mehr Soldaten ("there are too few good guys chasing the bad guys" ), mehr Geld (put a little money in Iraqi pockets), und mehr westliche Umerziehung heißt demnach die Lösung.

Die Vorschläge der Senatoren Chuck Hagel und Joseph Biden haben viele Gemeinsamkeiten mit den Überlegungen von Leon T. Hadar vom Cato Institute, (vgl. Der amerikanische Macho-Mann und die kastrierten Euroweenies [5]).

Weitaus radikaler kommt die Meinung von Lawrence F. Kaplan und John B. Judis in The New Republic [6] daher. Die USA sollen die Truppen abziehen, bis an die Grenzen irakischer Anarchie, um dem imperialistischem Eindruck, der durch das Zusammengehen mit der früheren Kolonialmacht Großbritannien entstanden ist, zu begegnen. Ferner müssten die USA den jahrhundertealten Konflikt zwischen Imperialismus und Nationalismus entschärfen. Es sei wichtig, die Vereinten Nationen einzubinden, noch wichtiger sei es allerdings, die irakischen Nachbarn zu beteiligen. Man wird fragen: war es die Invasion wert? (Milliarden US Dollar, Tausende Kriegsopfer, und das Zerschlagen eines weltweiten Systems, das auf kollektive Sicherheit und internationalem Recht gegründet ist).

That is a question, unfortunately, that the geniuses in the Bush administration should have been asking last March.

Noch scheinen die Würfel nicht gefallen zu sein: Bush hat in St.Louis keine Truppenverstärkung in Aussicht gestellt und auch nicht mehr Geld. Möglicherweise ist es auch nur eine wohldosierte Kunstpause.

Links

[1] http://www.pbs.org
[2] http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/15425/1.html
[3] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00…
[4] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00…
[5] http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/irak/15485/1.html
[6] http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=judiskaplan082603

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/special/irak/15510/1.html

[bofex]

Hallo Joerver, du fehlst uns. Mach bitte weiter mit der guten Arbeit. Danke.

[wohans]

Joerver, bitte mach den Thread weiter!
Ist mein all time favourite. H.

[Joerver]

Ich komm wieder keine Frage, wenn mein PC wieder mitspielt.

[bofex]

Joerver, was fehlt denn deinem PC? Kann man helfen?

[Joerver]

Das Motherboard hat voll ein mitgekriegt, wurde ausgetauscht. Nun muß ich den PC noch richtig einstellen. Wenn ich ich zu viele Farben reinhaue, wird die Schrift unklar. Jetzt ist alles viel zu groß. Mit dem Motherboard hat er auch eine neue Grafikkarte bekommen.

[Joerver]

August 29, 2003
Fistfuls of Dollars
By PAUL KRUGMAN


It`s all coming true. Before the war, hawks insisted that Iraq was a breeding ground for terrorism. It wasn`t then, but it is now. Meanwhile, administration apologists blamed terrorists, not tax cuts, for record budget deficits. In fact, before the war terrorism-related spending was relatively small — less than $40 billion in fiscal 2002. But the costs of a "bring `em on" foreign policy are now looming large indeed.

The direct military cost of the occupation is $4 billion a month, and there`s no end in sight. But that`s only part of the bill.

This week Paul Bremer suddenly admitted that Iraq would need "several tens of billions" in aid next year. That remark was probably aimed not at the public but at his masters in Washington; he apparently needed to get their attention.

It`s no mystery why. The Coalition Provisional Authority, which has been operating partly on seized Iraqi assets, is about to run out of money. Initial optimism about replenishing the authority`s funds with oil revenue has vanished: even if sabotage and looting subside, the dilapidated state of the industry means that for several years much of its earnings will have to be reinvested in repair work.

At a deeper level, the wobbling credibility of the occupation undermines that occupation`s financing. American officials still hope to raise money by selling off state-owned enterprises to foreign investors, though they have backed off on proposals to sell power plants and other utilities. But after the bombing of U.N. headquarters, who will buy? Officials have also floated the idea of pledging future oil revenues in return for loans, but it`s far from clear whether an occupying power has the right to make such deals, let alone whether they would be honored by whoever is running Iraq a few years from now.

So Mr. Bremer was telling his masters that they can no longer fake it: he needs money, now.

The biggest cost of the Iraq venture, however, may not be Mr. Bremer`s problem; it may not even come in Iraq. Our commitment of large forces there creates the need for a bigger military, even as it degrades the effectiveness of our existing forces.

These days it`s hard to find a military expert not reporting to Donald Rumsfeld who thinks we have enough soldiers in Iraq. But to those who say, "Send in more troops," the answer is, "What troops?"

Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army`s chief of staff, prophetically warned that the postwar occupation would require more soldiers than the war itself. In his farewell address he made a broader point, that if we`re going to do this sort of thing, we need a bigger military: "Beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army."

The rule of thumb, according to military experts, is that except during crises, only one brigade in three should be deployed abroad. Yet today 21 of the Army`s 33 combat brigades are deployed overseas, 16 of them in Iraq. This puts enormous stress on the troops, who find that they have only brief periods of rest and retraining between the times spent in harm`s way. For example, most of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne that is about to go to Iraq returned from Afghanistan only six months ago.

So unless we can somehow extricate ourselves from Iraq quickly, or persuade other countries to bear a lot more of the burden, we need a considerably bigger military. And that means spending a lot more money.

For now, the administration is in denial. "There will be no retreat," President Bush says — Churchillian words, but where are the resources to back them up?

Mr. Rumsfeld won`t admit that we need more troops in Iraq or anywhere else. We could use help from other countries, but it`s doubtful whether the administration will accept the kind of meaningful power-sharing that might lead to a new Security Council resolution on Iraq, which might in turn bring in allied forces.

Still, even the government of a superpower can`t simultaneously offer tax cuts equal to 15 percent of revenue, provide all its retirees with prescription drugs and single-handedly take on the world`s evildoers — single-handedly because we`ve alienated our allies. In fact, given the size of our budget deficit, it`s not clear that we can afford to do even one of these things. Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they`ll have quite a mess to clean up.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

[Joerver]

August 27, 2003
The Jihad All-Stars
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON — Yep, we`ve got `em right where we want `em.

We`ve brought the fight to their turf, they`re swarming into Iraq and blowing up our troops and other Westerners every day, and that`s just where we want to be.

Our exhausted and frustrated soldiers are in a hideously difficult environment they`re not familiar with, dealing with a culture America only dimly understands, where our desperation for any intelligence has reduced us to recruiting Saddam`s old spies, whom we didn`t trust in the first place, and where we`re so strapped that soldiers may have to face back-to-back yearlong overseas tours.

We don`t know exactly which of our ghostly Arab enemies are which, how many there are, who`s plotting with whom, what weapons they have, how they`re getting into Iraq, where they`re hiding, or who`s financing and organizing them.

And we certainly don`t understand the violent internecine religious battles we`ve set in motion. At first the Shiites were with us, and the Sunnis were giving us all the trouble. Now a new generation of radical Shiites is rising up and assassinating other Shiites aligned with us; they view us as the enemy and our quest as a chance to establish an Islamist state, which Rummy says won`t be tolerated.

In yesterday`s milestones, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died since the war now exceeds the number who died during the war, and next year`s deficit was estimated at a whopping $480 billion, even without all the sky-high costs of Iraq.

But Republicans suggest that Iraq`s turning into a terrorist magnet could be convenient — one-stop shopping against terrorism. As Rush Limbaugh observed: "We don`t have to go anywhere to find them! They`ve fielded a Jihad All-Star Team."

The strutting, omniscient Bush administration would never address the possibility that our seizure of Iraq has left us more vulnerable to terrorists. So it is doing what it did during the war, when Centcom briefings routinely began with the iteration: "Coalition forces are on plan," "We remain on plan," "Our plan is working."

Even though the Middle East has become a phantasmagoria of evil spirits, and even though some Bush officials must be muttering to themselves that they should have listened to the weenies at State and nags at the C.I.A., Team Bush is sticking to its mantra that everything is going according to plan.

As Condoleezza Rice put it on Monday, the war to defend the homeland "must be fought on the offense."

Taking a breather from fund-raisers yesterday, Mr. Bush discreetly ignored his administration`s chaotic occupation plan and declaimed, "No nation can be neutral in the struggle between civilization and chaos."

Echoing remarks by other officials implying that it`s better to have one big moment of truth and fight our enemies on their turf rather than ours, Mr. Bush said, "Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles."

So that`s the latest rationale for going into Iraq? We wanted an Armageddon with our enemies, so we decided to conquer an Arab country and drive the Muslim fanatics so crazy with their jihad mentality that they`d flip out and storm in, and then we`d kill them all?

Terrorism is not, as the president seems to suggest, a finite thing.

Asked at a recent Pentagon town hall meeting how he envisioned the end state for the war on terror, Donald Rumsfeld replied, "I guess the end state in the shortest response would be to not be terrorized."

By doing their high-risk, audacious sociological and political makeover in Iraq, Bush officials and neocons hoped to drain the terrorist swamp in the long run. But in the short run, they have created new terrorist-breeding swamps full of angry young Arabs who see America the same way Muslims saw Westerners in the Crusades: as Christian expansionist imperialists motivated by piety and greed.

Just because the unholy alliance of Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters and Islamic terrorists has turned Iraq into a scary shooting gallery for our troops doesn`t mean Americans at home are any safer. Since when did terrorists see terror as an either-or proposition?

"Bring `em on" sounded like a tinny, reckless boast the first time the president said it. It doesn`t sound any better when Mr. Bush says it louder with a chorus.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

August 29, 2003
Tony Blair`s Iraq Dossier

The secret workings of Tony Blair`s government have been on public display this month as a judicial inquiry has gathered testimony on the death, apparently by suicide, of a British weapons scientist, David Kelly. Yesterday, it was Mr. Blair`s turn to testify. His defense of almost all aspects of his government`s use of intelligence material during the months leading up to the Iraq war was spirited but unconvincing. Despite all the protestations of innocence by Mr. Blair and his aides, it is clear that his government embellished the truth in its stark warnings of an imminent Iraqi threat.

Just as President Bush`s State of the Union address went beyond hard intelligence in its assertions about the supposed Iraqi effort to purchase uranium from Niger, the intelligence dossier the Blair government released last September brazenly overreached in its claims that Iraq could field biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes of Saddam Hussein`s giving the order.

In his testimony yesterday, Mr. Blair said the BBC had been wrong in reporting that his government had deliberately "sexed up" the dossier with dubious information, and he defended his top aides` vigorous efforts to refute the BBC charge. Those efforts led to the government`s identification of Dr. Kelly as the BBC`s probable source. Days later, Dr. Kelly was dead in what appeared to be a suicide.

Yet in arguing that his office had intervened only in the packaging of the dossier and had left a senior intelligence adviser, John Scarlett, in charge of all substantive intelligence findings, Mr. Blair claimed an implausibly superfluous role for a leader preparing to take his nation to war. An e-mail note from Mr. Blair`s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, reported that the dossier had gone through a "substantial rewrite" to address points Mr. Blair had personally raised. Mr. Powell earlier told the inquiry that in mid-September last year he had warned Mr. Blair that it would be inaccurate to claim that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Yet one week later, in presenting the dossier to Parliament, Mr. Blair implied just that by saying Mr. Hussein`s unconventional weapons programs were "up and running."

The widespread belief in Britain that the government was deliberately misleading about the Iraqi threat explains Mr. Blair`s recent downward plunge in the polls. Most Britons now say they no longer trust him to tell the truth. Regaining their trust will not be easy.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

[Joerver]

IRAQ
Oil

Updated: August 27, 2003
http://www.cfr.org/background/background_iraq_oil2.php

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who controls Iraqi oil?
The United States and Britain have some rights to use the oil to fund their occupation, international lawyers say, but Iraq`s oil legally belongs to the Iraqi people. Long-term plans to develop or privatize Iraqi oil fields would have shaky legal justifications under an occupation government. Many experts say an internationally recognized Iraqi government should be in place before such decisions are made.

Who is actually making decisions for the Iraqi oil industry?
Industry experts say they believe day-to-day decisions are being made by Iraqis, in particular, by the Iraqi interim oil minister, Thamir al-Ghadhban, and authorities at the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), the state-run monopoly that controlled Iraqi oil exports under Saddam Hussein`s government. Philip Carroll, the former president and chief executive officer of Shell Oil, is serving as an adviser to the Iraqi oil ministry. U.S. postwar plans called for Carroll to head up an international board of advisors to oversee the oil industry, but the coalition recently backed away from that idea, leaving the industry more firmly in Iraqi hands, says Karen Matusic, a senior editor at Energy Intelligence, an information company covering the energy industry.

What international law governs issues surrounding Iraqi oil?
International humanitarian law (IHL), the same branch of law that defines the rules of war and describes the obligations of occupying powers. The issue of using an occupied nation’s natural resources is addressed specifically in the 1907 Hague Regulations and in the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. In addition, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, approved in May 2003, recognized the U.S. and British-led occupation and set out specific regulations regarding Iraqi oil sales.

Can occupiers just take and use whatever property they like in an occupied state?
No. In general, private property cannot be confiscated or destroyed without compensation, nor can the property of religious, charitable, or educational institutions. Public property, such as Iraq’s state-owned oil fields, falls under different guidelines. “Movable” government properties that can be used for military purposes —such as weapons and trucks—are considered “spoils of war” and may be seized without compensation, according to a Human Rights Watch dossier. “Immovable” government property, such as public buildings, real estate, and natural resources, cannot be appropriated or destroyed, but can be used by the occupying power, in a kind of trust, to defray the cost of the occupation.

Can occupiers use oil revenues to fund their own military expenses?
Many international lawyers, quoting Article 49 of the Hague Regulations, say that the law of occupation does allow occupying powers to use a state’s resources—and even tax its people—to pay for “the needs of the [occupying] army or of the administration of the territory in question.” But the United States and Britain, in agreeing to U.N. Resolution 1483, appear to have foregone this option in exchange for international recognition of their occupation.

What does Resolution 1483 say about how Iraqi oil proceeds can be used?
It says that all oil proceeds will be deposited in a special account, the Development Fund for Iraq, to be administered by the authorities from the U.S.-led occupation government in consultation with the Iraqi interim administration. For now, the Iraqi interim administration consists of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. These proceeds are “to be used in a transparent manner” and limited to:

humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people
economic reconstruction and repair of Iraq’s infrastructure
continued disarmament of Iraq
costs of Iraqi civilian administration
“other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq.”
Is the U.N. Oil for Food Program still selling Iraqi oil?
No. Under U.N. sanctions imposed after the Gulf War in 1991, all legal Iraqi oil sales were managed by the Oil for Food Program, which allowed Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to pay for food, medicine, and other civilian needs. The program stopped handling oil sales when the United Nations pulled out of Iraq last March before the U.S.-led invasion, says Ian Steele, a U.N. spokesman. Under the terms of Resolution 1483, Oil for Food is continuing to spend down the approximately $10 billion in its accounts from before the start of the war. Purchases are focusing on food and other emergency items for Iraqi people. After November 21, 2003, the program will be closed completely, and any leftover funds will pass to the coalition-managed Development Fund for Iraq.

How much oil does Iraq have?
Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, totaling some 110 to 115 billion barrels. Iraq may have much more oil, however, as the country is largely unexplored due to years of war and sanctions. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, only 15 of the 73 discovered oil fields have been developed, and few deep wells have been drilled compared to Iraq’s neighbors.

How much oil was Iraq pumping before the war?
In January and February of 2003, Iraq produced approximately 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was producing some 2.8 million barrels per day. Heavy damage to Iraq’s oil fields in the 1991 war, combined with the effects of U.N. sanctions, which limited Iraq’s ability to repair and modernize the fields, stunted oil production in the 1990s.

How much oil is Iraq pumping now?
Somewhere between 1.2 million and 1.5 million barrels a day: about 1.5 percent of world output, Iraqi oil officials say. However, the amount can vary widely due to continuing acts of sabotage, looting, and technical problems that beset the fields. Among the worst setbacks was an explosion August 15 that shut down the 600-mile oil pipeline from the northern city of Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast: repairs are continuing. In addition, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition troops in Iraq, said in mid-August that smugglers were tapping oil lines and stealing up to 2,500 tons of fuel each day.

What’s the target?
U.S. and Iraqi officials say the goal is to pump 2.5 million barrels a day by early next year. But industry analysts who have recently visited Iraq say they think such forecasts are optimistic, given the industry’s dire straits. To bring production up to prewar levels, the Army Corps of Engineers is currently taking bids on contracts worth up to $1.14 billion to improve the oil fields by March 31, 2004. These contracts will replace the controversial, non-competitive contract for emergency oil service work that was secretly awarded to Kellogg Brown & Root Services (KBR) by the Corps prior to the start of the war in Iraq.

What has Brown and Root done so far in Iraq?
The company has been extinguishing oil fires and repairing Iraq’s oil wells and pipelines. They are also running laundry services and a hair salon at U.S. occupation headquarters and doing a variety of other tasks, leading some critics to charge that they may be taking advantage of their flexible contract, which is worth up to $7 billion, according to the Corps. KBR’s parent company, Halliburton, was headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney between 1995 and 2000. It showed $324 million of second-quarter revenue from work in Iraq.

Have the Iraqis begun to sell oil?
Yes. Since the end of the war, SOMO has drawn up contracts for the sale of approximately 34 million barrels of oil to some of the world’s largest oil companies, including British Petroleum, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, ChevronTexaco, Petrobras of Brazil, China’s Sinochem International, and French concern TotalFinaElf. Most of this oil is coming from Iraq’s southern oil fields and being transported to tankers at Iraq’s Persian Gulf export terminal at Mina al-Bakr.

Are buyers of Iraqi oil getting a discount on the world oil price?
The exact terms of the deals are not publicly disclosed, but industry experts say they believe the Iraqi oil is being sold at standard prices—and not only to U.S. firms. “SOMO says the contracts are being awarded on a strictly commercial basis, and it certainly does look that way,” says Matusic. There have been few reported complaints worldwide about the transparency of recent oil sales, except from some Russian oil firms, who have not yet won any contracts. Under Oil for Food, a considerable amount of Iraqi oil went to Russian middlemen known as resellers— now, SOMO is trying to sell directly to refiners, says Ronald Gold, vice president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.

How much will the reintroduction of Iraqi crude affect the world oil market?
Initially, not much, industry analysts say. Even if Iraq starts pumping 2 million barrels a day, that’s still only 2.5 percent of world production—enough to lower world oil prices by a few dollars a barrel, but not much else, says John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation. Iraq is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), but it hasn’t participated in the cartel’s quota system for crude since the 1991 Gulf War, and its current capacity is so low that the organization’s quotas may not be a problem for the near future. There is currently no Iraqi representative to OPEC, but the Iraqi Governing Council is reportedly in the process of selecting one. Deciding whether or not to remain in OPEC “will be the decision of the people of Iraq,” U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said August 7.

What are Iraq’s long-term plans for its oil industry?
They have not yet been decided. Many experts expect some future private investment in Iraq’s state-run oil fields, perhaps in the area of developing new fields or working in partnership with Iraqi companies. But some caution against making any long-term moves until an internationally recognized government is in place. Completely privatizing Iraq’s oil industry is also unlikely, given the history of state-owned oil in the Persian Gulf and widespread suspicions surrounding U.S. involvement in Iraq. “I don’t think there will be any takeover by foreign companies—the U.S. government is very sensitive to the impression that would create,” Lichtblau says.

Could the Iraqi people be given a direct share of Iraq’s oil revenue in the future?
L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation government in Iraq, has repeatedly mentioned his desire to create some kind of trust or fund that would distribute Iraq’s oil profits among its people. The basis for this model could be Alaska, which distributes a percentage of its oil revenues in the form of checks directly to its 630,000 residents: last year, each received $1,540. But some oil experts warn that this model is not feasible for Iraq’s 24 million citizens, at least for the short-term. In Iraq, the political situation remains chaotic and there are many demands on the limited revenue from Iraqi oil sales. Even if oil production meets the coalition’s most optimistic projections of $14 billion in 2004, that still falls far short of the overall reconstruction price tag, estimated by Bremer to be up to $100 billion.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Deficit Delusions




Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A22


NEXT YEAR`S DEFICIT is on course toward an ugly milestone -- nearly half a trillion dollars -- but that`s not the bad news. The bad news, as a report from the Congressional Budget Office makes clear, is that budget deficits -- big ones -- are here to stay under the Bush administration`s economic plan. The administration would have everyone stop worrying because, it assures us, spending discipline and robust economic growth will cut the deficit in half by 2008. But a close look at the CBO estimates shows that the more likely picture is annual deficits around $400 billion for the next decade, piling on more than $4 trillion in debt through 2013.

These numbers don`t appear explicitly in the CBO report, which projects that the budget will show a deficit of $197 billion by 2008 and a $211 billion surplus by 2013. That is because budgetary rules require CBO to conduct its analysis in a way that ignores reality. CBO`s new director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who arrived earlier this year from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, deserves applause for candidly explaining those limitations and presenting a series of build-your-own-deficit alternative scenarios. As CBO summarized the situation with characteristic mildness, "Various combinations of possible actions could easily lead to a prolonged period of budget deficits, although other scenarios could be more favorable."

By law, the budget office can`t include in its official estimates legislative proposals that haven`t yet been enacted -- for example, the $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill, or the need to fix the alternative minimum tax (at least $400 billion, according to CBO, and possibly much more). Similarly, CBO must assume that current law will continue as written, including that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will expire as scheduled. But the Bush administration intends for the cuts to be made permanent, as budget director Joshua B. Bolten reaffirmed during a visit to The Post last week. That would cost another $1.1 trillion through 2013 (CBO puts the figure at $1.6 trillion but that includes an equipment depreciation provision that the administration hasn`t advocated extending).

CBO`s spending estimates must, likewise, be divorced from history: They assume that discretionary spending grows only at the rate of inflation (projected to average 2.7 percent during the next 10 years), though in fact discretionary spending has grown by an annual average of 7.7 percent during the past five years. At the same time, though, CBO must assume that the $79 billion in emergency spending approved by Congress this year to pay for the war in Iraq will be repeated (and grow with inflation) during the next 10 years, for a total of $818 billion. For our calculation, to give the administration the benefit of every doubt, we`ve taken all those Iraq costs out -- though they will clearly amount to many billions.

Additions to Deficit

(in billions)

2008

2013

2004-13Extend 2001, 2003 tax cuts $50 $330 $1,133Fix alternative minimum tax 46 49 400Medicare prescription drugs 43 64 400Grow discretionary spending 121 279 1,392Additional interest 22 137 427(Subtract Iraq costs) (-86) (-98) (-818)Total addition to deficit 196 761 2,934CBO projection 197 (-211) 1,397Possible deficit 393 550 4,331

The above chart shows how this could all add up. It assumes extension of the tax cuts, a prescription drug bill and a fix for the alternative minimum tax -- all three of which the administration favors. It also assumes a rate of discretionary spending increase equal only to the growth in the economy (more than the administration says it wants but less than past practice).

And the result? Cumulative deficits of $4.3 trillion through 2013 -- three times the CBO`s official projection. To look at it another way, in 2008 -- the point at which the administration insists the deficit will be cut in half -- the deficit would be just under $400 billion. By 2013, it would be $550 billion. This, remember, envisions only policy changes favored by the administration plus a remarkable level of spending discipline; if spending were to continue to grow at the rate of the past five years, the deficit would exceed $1 trillion by 2013. Indeed, even if the administration could hold discretionary spending to its stated goal of 4 percent growth, the cumulative deficit would total $3.3 trillion through 2013. Manageable? For President Bush, sure. For the next generation, by no means.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Do Jobs Not Matter Anymore?


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, August 29, 2003; Page A23


Maybe we should just scrap Labor Day and rename it "Capital Day."

After all, aren`t we now a "nation of investors"? Isn`t most business reporting, especially on television, about stock prices and "returns on capital"? If you care about wages and working conditions, you must be some sort of dinosaur.

And, hey, who cares about unemployment? Productivity is growing, which means we`re more efficient. Sure, we`re losing manufacturing jobs. But worrying about manufacturing is so Old Economy. Yeah, yeah, a lot of those manufacturing jobs helped people build middle class lives. But won`t they make it all up in their portfolios? Income is old hat. Wealth is the thing.

This Labor Day is as good a time as any to begin rolling back the effects of roughly a quarter-century of propaganda that sought, quite successfully, to diminish the role of labor -- which is to say real human beings living primarily on wages and salaries -- in creating prosperity.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the promoters of supply-side economics tried to resell us on the economic ideas of the 1890s and obliterate the assumptions that had dominated thinking about the economy from the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 during the Great Depression.

The lesson of the Depression was that if ordinary workers lacked jobs and adequate incomes, the economy would crash because too few people could afford to buy what businesses hoped to sell. This was demand-side economics and it laid heavy stress on spreading incomes and job opportunities broadly.

The supply-siders insisted that supply created its own demand. In plain English, this meant we should think less about labor and more about capital -- specifically, investors who created the means to produce the goods. If the New Dealers glorified the role of the worker, the supply-siders glorified the entrepreneur.

"One of the little-probed mysteries of social history is society`s hostility to its greatest benefactor, the producers of wealth," wrote George Gilder in "Wealth and Poverty," his influential supply-side manifesto published in 1980. "How much easier it is -- rather than learning the hard lessons of the world -- merely to rage at the rich and even steal from them."

Supply-side theories on the urgency of cutting taxes on the rich were exploded when Bill Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and -- contrary to the supply-side predictions -- helped unleash a remarkable period of economic growth. But the supply-siders have had a great run, and their latest rationales focus on how many Americans own stock.

The theory is that if we`re all entrepreneurs, then all of us benefit from policies that benefit investors. Our role as employees -- as workers -- is shoved up there in the attic with that old lady Ross Perot used to talk about.

No one is more evangelical about the new investor nation than Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who has devoted his life to eliminating taxes, especially taxes on savings and investment -- which means taxes on the best-off Americans. Norquist speaks constantly of the 70 percent of voters who own shares of stock.

But let`s look at those numbers. Norquist speaks of voters. According to the Federal Reserve, half of all Americans have some connection to the stock market, which means that half do not. And even for the happy 50 percent, their major connection to the stock market is through pension funds they do not themselves control.

It`s still the case that most stock is owned by a small percentage of Americans. An analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for example, recently found that the top 10 percent of income earners owned 70 percent of directly held equities. The bottom 60 percent of earners owned just 9 percent of directly held equities. That`s why policies that benefit investors (such as the dividend tax cut) shower huge benefits on a small number of Americans.

The simple truth is that the standard of living of most Americans depends on getting jobs that pay well. This means that unemployment matters not just for those out of work but also for those whose wages are depressed when too many people are competing for too few jobs. For most Americans, the best economic policy is still low unemployment. That`s why the late 1990s produced income growth for the poor and the middle class as well as the wealthy.

I am all for a nation of owners and investors. But most people need jobs. For 25 years, we have been hearing that labor depends upon capital. It`s time to resurrect the other, buried truth: that capital depends upon labor. Our prosperity really does require keeping the "Labor" in Labor Day.

[e-mail]




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[bofex]

Ist ja echt strange. Ich hab ne Matrox Millenium rumliegen, wenn du die willst...

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Danke Bofex aber es läuft schon wieder fast normal. Das andere mach ich morgen.

[Joerver]

[/url]


Heute 88 frische Toons
The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030828__088toons.htm

[Joerver]

Iraq Mosque Bomb Kills 75, Including Shi`ite Leader
Fri August 29, 2003 12:30 PM ET


By Michael Georgy
NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - A car bombing killed 75 Iraqis, including a top Shi`ite Muslim leader, on Friday in an apparent assassination that dealt a grave blow to the U.S. occupation and left carnage at the holiest shrine of Shi`ism.

The blast tore through worshippers as they streamed away from Friday prayers in the Imam Ali mosque in the holy city of Najaf. It was by far the worst such atrocity in Iraq since the U.S.-led war toppled Saddam Hussein in April.

In the aftermath, Iraqis burrowed into rubble strewn with body parts in a hunt for survivors. Volunteers screaming "God is Great" pulled out a severed foot and dug frantically around a deep crater filled with twisted metal and stinking black water.

Some supporters of the slain Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, 63, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), blamed Saddam loyalists.

But some commentators pointed to bitter faction-fighting among Iraq`s long-repressed Shi`ite majority that has raged in Najaf since the end of the war.

Hakim was for many the leading Shi`ite figure in Iraq and his cooperation with the U.S.-led administration through its Governing Council was seen as crucial to U.S. efforts to stabilize the country and install democratic rule.

"We have at least 75 dead and that could go up to 80 because of severe injuries. There are 142 wounded," Dr Safaa al-Aneedi, director of the Najaf teaching hospital, told Reuters.

Three gutted cars lay in the street by the mosque. Some witnesses said there had been more than one explosion.

Witnesses said Hakim had been about to drive away from Friday prayers when the blast destroyed his car.

A U.S. military spokesman confirmed there had been a bomb. "No coalition forces were in the area or on the ground because it is considered to be sacred ground," he said.

POWER STRUGGLE

The attack is the latest in a series of bloody incidents in Najaf, several of them aimed at religious leaders of the Shi`ite branch of Islam followed by a majority of Iraqis.

On Sunday three men were killed in a bombing that injured Hakim`s uncle, also a cleric associated with SCIRI. Some SCIRI supporters blamed that bomb on a rival Shi`ite leader opposed to the presence of foreign troops in Iraq.

The Shi`ite power struggle in Najaf is viewed as one of the keys to the future of Iraq. Washington is keen to discourage those Shi`ite leaders who favor Islamic clerical rule like that of Shi`ite Iran, where many lived in exile during Saddam`s rule.

With many Iraqis belonging to Saddam`s once dominant Sunni Arab minority or to other ethnic and religious groups like Kurds and Christians, the prospect of domination by the 60 percent Shi`ite majority is one that many regard with anxiety.

"There is a very serious chance that what we are entering here is a Shi`ite civil war akin to what happened in Iran in 1979-80 with rival factions jockeying for power," said Ali Ansari, an expert on Iran at Britain`s Durham University.

"The repercussions within the Shi`ite community will be problematic for the British because they are in control of the south."

Hamid al-Bayati, SCIRI`s London representative, said: "It could be either Saddam loyalists using new techniques such as remote control or even suicide bombs, or it could be another extreme group.

"We proposed to the allies a long time ago...to have a special security organization to protect the holy places and the religious scholars," he said.

"The allies did not respond to this proposal."

At the scene, some called for a stronger American presence around holy places where a few months ago Shi`ites demonstrated to keep the troops away.

"The world is going to be turned upside down after this. This is our holiest site," said Qusay Jaber. "If the Americans don`t secure our sites anything is possible. We will stage an uprising."

Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim was tortured under Saddam`s rule and spent more than 20 years in exile in Iran before returning to Iraq earlier this year after the U.S.-led victory over Saddam.

"We deplore this horrible act of terrorist violence," said a White House official. "We will not be deterred in our efforts to help the Iraqi people rebuild their country and establish a representative democratic government."

U.S. TROOPS AMBUSHED

Further north, guerrillas ambushed a U.S. military convoy with rocket-propelled grenades on Friday, killing a soldier and wounding three others amid growing calls for a United Nations force to pacify the country.

A U.S. Army spokesman said the six-vehicle convoy was attacked on a main road near the town of Baquba, part of the so- called "Sunni Triangle" north and west of Baghdad which is a bastion of anti-occupation sentiment.

With the Bush administration signaling for the first time it might agree to a U.N.-sponsored multinational force in Iraq, the United States and Britain are expected to explore a new U.N. resolution to encourage nations to send troops.

In Britain, an opinion poll on Friday showed support for Prime Minister Tony Blair had plunged during the controversy surrounding the suicide of a weapons expert caught up in a row between the BBC and the government over the Iraq war.

Blair`s much-criticized media spokesman Alastair Campbell announced his resignation on Friday.

[IMG]http://lunaville.org/WC/wc6.jpg[/url]
Summary
++++US++++UK++++Other++++Total++++Avg++++Days

++++282++++50+++++2++++++++334++++2.06++++162

Latest Fatality Date: 8/29/2003
08/29/03 CENTCOM
One U.S. special ops soldier dies in Afghanistan from accidental fall during nightime operations.
08/29/03 The London Guardian
Huge bomb blast in Najaf reportedly kills Shia Muslim leader ... plus additional details on death of U.S. soldier near Baqubah this AM
08/29/03 CENTCOM
One 4th ID soldier was killed, three wounded, in hostile fire attack north of As Suaydat (near Baqubah) today
08/28/03 CENTCOM
A U.S. soldier died of undetermined causes at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, on Aug. 27th
08/28/03 SEATTLE POST
Six Fort Lewis soldiers serving in Iraq are being treated for injuries in a military hospital in Germany after their truck hit a mine as they traveled north of Tikrit, about 120 miles north of Baghdad.
08/28/03 Ministry of Defense
A British soldier was killed and another wounded in an incident in Ali As Sharqi in southern Iraq on 27 August 2003.
08/27/03 CENTCOM
One U.S. soldier killed in Baghdad in attack on military convoy on Aug. 27th
08/27/03 CENTCOM
One U.S. solder was killed and 3 wounded by an improvised explosive device in Al Fallujah on Aug. 27th
08/26/03 CENTCOM
CENTCOM confirms: US soldier died on Aug. 25th from a "non-hostile" gunshot wound.
08/26/03 CENTCOM
A 4th Infantry Division soldier died as a result of injuries sustained in a traffic accident between Tikrit and Forward Operating Base Anaconda in Balad at approximately 6:40 p.m. on Aug. 25.
08/26/03 CENTCOM
One 3rd Corps Support Command soldier was killed and two wounded in improvised explosive device attack on a military convoy near the town of Hamariyah at approximately 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 26.

[Joerver]

Iraqi resisters are patriots

By TED RALL

08/29/03: (Yahoo!News) NEW YORK - Nearly 70 percent of Americans tell Newsweek that “the United States will be bogged down in Iraq for years without achieving its goals.” Yet 61 percent tell the same poll that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. The reason for this weird disconnect: people think that we’re in Iraq to spread democracy and rebuild the Middle East. They think we’re The Good Guys. But the longer we keep patting ourselves on the back, the more we tell ourselves that the Iraqi resistance is a bunch of evil freedom-haters, the deeper we’ll sink into this quagmire.

It’s time to get real.

In war, the side that most accurately sizes up the situation ultimately prevails. In this war in Iraq, our leaders thought the fall of Baghdad meant the end of the conflict. “Mission accomplished,” as the banner behind George W. Bush read on the aircraft carrier. But Saddam understood the truth: the war began with the occupation. Guerilla warfare offered the only way for Iraq’s tiny, poorly armed military to resist the US. The Baath Party planned to provoke US occupation forces into mistreating the population.

It worked.

Random bombings and sniper hits have made the American occupiers jittery and paranoid. They’ve withdrawn into fortified cantonments where they’ve cut off contact with civilians. Their ignorance causes them to offend Iraqi cultural and religious sensibilities. Even better, from Saddam’s perspective, US troops push people around: shooting unarmed motorists, stealing their money and jewelry at roadblocks, breaking into houses in the middle of the night, manhandling wives and daughters, putting bags over men’s heads and carrying them off to God knows where for who knows how long.

“US troops put their boots on the back of men’s heads as they lay face down, forcing their foreheads to the ground,” the Associated Press’ Scheherezade Faramarzi writes about the procedure used by US troops during sweeps. “There is no greater humiliation . . . because Islam forbids putting the forehead on the ground except in prayer.” Amnesty International says the US subjects Iraqi prisoners to “cruel, inhuman or degrading” conditions.

In Iraq, we are the bad guys.

What about the “terrorists” who bombed the UN headquarters and Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, who sabotage oil and water pipe­ lines, who use rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and remote-controlled mines to kill our soldiers? Aren’t these “killers” evil, “killing people who just want to help,” as another AP writer puts it?

In short: no.

The ad hoc Iraqi resistance comprises indigenous fighters ranging from secular ex-Republican Guards to radical Islamist Shiites, as well as foreign Arab volunteers waging the same brand of come-one-come-all jihad that the mujahedeen fought against Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan. While one can dismiss foreign jihadis as naïve adventurers, honest Americans should call native Iraqi resistance fighters by a more fitting name: Iraqi patriots.

I collect propaganda posters. One of my favorites, from World War II, depicts a strapping young SS officer holding a smiling local kid in his arms. “Trust the German soldier,” the caption exhorts citizens of occupied France. But when liberation came in 1945, French­ men who had obeyed that poster were shot as collaborators. The men and women who resisted—the “terrorists” who shot German soldiers, cut phone lines and bombed trains—received medals and pensions. Invaders always say that they come as liberators, but it’s almost never true. Whether you live in Paris or Baghdad or New York, you’re expected to know that, and to act accordingly.

“We want deeds, not words,” says Abu Mohammad, a retired teacher about our inability (unwillingness?) to restore basic services to the city of Baghdad. Here are our deeds: Talking about democracy as we cancel elections. Guarding the oil ministry building while museums are sacked. Exporting Iraqi oil to Turkey as Iraqis suffer fuel and power shortages. Iraq’s natural resources are being raped. Its people are being murdered. Yet it’s the patriotic Iraqi resistance, which is trying to stop these outrages by throwing out the perpetrators of an illegal war of aggression, that the Bush administration dares call “terrorists.”

On July 5 a bomb killed seven recruits for a US-trained Iraqi police force in Ramadi. US occupation administrator Paul Bremer deplored the murder of “innocent Iraqis.” Cops who work for a foreign army of occupation are not innocent. They are collaborators. Traitors. They had it coming.

Under George W. Bush, truth and justice are no longer the American way. The US occupation of Iraq is misguided, evil and doomed to failure. The sooner we accept this difficult truth, the sooner we decide to stop being the bad guys, the sooner we’ll withdraw our troops. The bloodshed may continue after we leave—and we’ll be partly to blame for that. But until we pull out, the carnage is all ours.

Sami Tuma’s brother was shot to death when he drove past a US military checkpoint. (The psychotic US military policy in Iraq, despite countless killings of innocent civilians and at least five reporters to date, is not to warn victims before opening fire.) “It is simple,” says Tuma. “If someone kills your son, wife or brother without any reason but only that they happen to be walking or driving in the street, what you will do? You retaliate.”

It’s what I’d do. It’s probably what you’d do too.

Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue To Afghanistan and Back, an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the US invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.

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Thursday, August 28, 2003

OPERATION: ENDURING FREEDOM
Poll: Iraq war makes
U.S. less safe
Survey also finds just 44% believe Bush handling conflict well

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Posted: August 28, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

A new survey shows more Americans now believe the war in Iraq will make the U.S. less, not more, safe from terrorism, representing a reversal of public opinion in recent weeks.

The survey, conducted by pollster Scott Rasmussen for Rasmussen Reports, found 41 percent of Americans now believe the U.S. is a more dangerous place since the war in Iraq. Just 39 percent, meanwhile, think that the war will make the U.S. safer in the long run.


Member of 101st Airborne aims a Humvee-mounted TOW missile before firing. [DoD photo]


"Those numbers represent a significant decline from earlier in the year," said the survey. "In April, while Operation Iraqi Freedom was in progress, 50 percent of Americans believed the war would make the U.S. safer, while 32 percent said it would make our country a more dangerous place to live."

The number of Americans who believe President Bush is handling Iraq effectively has also slipped. The poll said just 44 percent believe the president is doing a good or excellent job in Iraq, down from 62 percent four months ago. A majority – 52 percent – now give Bush a fair or poor rating regarding Iraq.

The data is from a national telephone survey of 1,000 adults conducted Aug. 24 and 25 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.

The survey comes on the heel of reports earlier this week that said the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq since the end of the war May 1 have exceeded those killed during the campaign.

Since the war began March 20, about 280 American military personnel have been killed in Iraq. But despite ongoing guerrilla warfare and mounting casualties, Bush said Tuesday the U.S. would not be driven out of Iraq.

Speaking in St. Louis to the 85th annual convention of the American Legion, Bush said the current struggle in Iraq was a "point of testing in the war on terror."

"[Terrorists] have declared war on the entire civilized world," he said. "The civilized world will not be intimidated. Retreat in the face of terror would only invite further and bolder attacks. There will be no retreat. We are on the offensive."

Despite increased pessimism of the progress of the war, Rasmussen said the number of Americans who believe the U.S. is winning the war on terror has remained stable. According to the latest figures, 49 percent say America is besting terrorism, while 25 percent say the terrorists are winning.

Though casualties are mounting, administration and Pentagon officials say the U.S. will not send more troops to Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday troop levels in Iraq currently meet commanders` needs, despite calls from some in Congress to dispatch more American forces.

Rumsfeld said Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid, who is in charge of operations in Iraq, has told him the number of troops in Iraq is "appropriate at the present time for the tasks that he has," Reuters reported.

"There are some recommending that more U.S. forces go in. I can tell you that if Gen. Abizaid recommended it, it would happen in a minute. But he has not recommended it," Rumsfeld said.




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The Mendacity Index
Which president told the biggest whoppers?
You decide.
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.mendacit…



This summer, after it became clear that President George W. Bush had made false statements about Iraq`s nuclear weapons capacity and links to al Qaeda in his January State of the Union address, some commentators accused him of being the most dishonest president in recent American history. There has been, however, no scientifically serious attempt to test such accusations--until now.

To come up with our Mendacity Index, we asked a nominating committee* of noted journalists and pundits to pick the most serious fibs, deceptions, and untruths spoken by each of the four most recent presidents. We selected the top six for each commander-in-chief, then presented the list to a panel of judges** with longtime experience in Washington. Panel members were instructed to rate each deception on a scale of 1 (least serious) to 5 (most serious). Then we averaged the scores for each deception and for each president. We believe their validity rests somewhere between the Periodic Table and the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. To view the results, click here.

But why trust the experts? We`d like to hear from you. The Washington Monthly and Beliefnet invite you to take the survey yourself and give each president a mendacity rating. We`ll be keeping a running tab of the results. May the best man win!

Instructions: Read the lists below of deceptions spoken by the four most recent presidents. Click the link after each president to give him an overall untruthfulness score from 1 (least serious) to 5 (most serious).

Click here to go directly to a specific president`s profile:

Ronald Reagan . . . George H. W. Bush. . . Bill Clinton . . . George W. Bush


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Ronald Reagan

Killer Trees.
After opining in August 1980 that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do," Reagan arrived at a campaign rally to find a tree decorated with this sign: "Chop me down before I kill again."

Balance the Budget And Increase Defense Spending?
The Reagan administration introduced the 1981 Economic Recovery Act by claiming that it would cut taxes by 30 percent, increase defense spending by three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and achieve a balanced budget within three years. Budget director David Stockman admitted in November of 1981 that, "None of us really understands what`s going on with all these numbers" and that supply-side economics "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate."

Guns of Brixton.
"In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn`t use it, he was tried for first-degree murder and hung if he was found guilty," Ronald Reagan claimed in April 1982. When informed that the story was "just not true," White House spokesman Larry Speakes said, "Well, it`s a good story, though. It made the point, didn`t it?" Reagan repeated the story again on March 21, 1986 during an interview with The New York Times.

The Liberator.
In November 1983, Reagan told visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. He repeated the story to Simon Wiesenthal the following February. Reagan never visited or filmed a concentration camp; he spent World War II in Hollywood, making training films with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps.

Arms for Hostages.
"We did not--repeat, did not--trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we," Reagan proclaimed in November 1986. Four months later, on March 4, 1987, Reagan admitted in a televised national address, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that`s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

Cadillac Queens.
Over a period of about five years, Reagan told the story of the "Chicago welfare queen" who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for "four nonexisting deceased husbands," bilking the government out of "over $150,000." The real welfare recipient to whom Reagan referred was actually convicted for using two different aliases to collect $8,000. Reagan continued to use his version of the story even after the press pointed out the actual facts of the case to him.

Your turn: Rate Reagan`s overall mendacity on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).



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George H. W. Bush

Read My Lips.
In his speech to the Republican Convention on Aug. 18, 1988, Bush predicted that, if he was elected, "the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I`ll say no, and they`ll push, and I`ll say no, and they`ll push again, and I`ll say to them, `Read my lips: no new taxes.`" In his budget for 1991, Bush raised the top income-tax rate and boosted levies on gasoline, tobacco, and booze.

Drugs in Lafayette Park.
Addressing the country about the war on drugs on September 5, 1989, Bush held a plastic bag of crack cocaine before the television camera and said it had been "seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House." In order to obtain the prop, however, undercover DEA agents had lured a teenage drug dealer from southeast D.C. to Lafayette Park. The dealer`s initial response to the request was, "Where the [expletive] is the White House?"

SCUD Studs?
On March 14, 1990, President Bush bragged that Patriot missiles placed in Israel and Saudi Arabia had successfully intercepted "41 of 42" Iraqi SCUD missiles. "Thank God for the Patriot missile," Bush said. But an Israeli Defense Ministry study found that only 1 of 17 Patriot missiles fired in Israeli had actually hit a SCUD. Studies by an MIT physicist suggested that the hit rate from Patriot missile launchers in Saudi Arabia was not substantially better.

The Best Man For The Job?
Upon nominating Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States, Bush told reporters, "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this sense that he is the best qualified at this time. I kept my word to the American people and to the Senate by picking the best man for the job on the merits." Thomas had served only one year as a judge and was given the middling endorsement of "qualified" by a divided American Bar Association panel.

Iran Contra.
In 1986, when asked whether he had participated in White House discussions about the Iran-Contra arms program as vice president, Bush claimed to have been "out of the loop." He specifically denied attending a January 1986 meeting at which Secretary of State George Schultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger opposed the arms-for-hostages deal. But White House logs, made public by independent counsel Kenneth Walsh in 1992, revealed that Bush had attended that meeting, and several others. In response, Bush claimed not to have heard Schultz`s and Weinberger`s objections, though Weinberger`s journal entry for the meeting noted of the deal "VP favored."

Bill Clinton, Taxaholic.
During the 1992 campaign, Bush repeatedly claimed that Bill Clinton had "raised taxes 128 times" as governor of Arkansas. The Wall Street Journal and the Congressional Research Service found that, to reach 128 increases, Bush had counted as "raising taxes" such acts as lengthening the state`s dog-racing season and simply counted many taxes twice. As governor, they concluded, Clinton had cut taxes about as many times as he`d raised them.

Your turn: Rate Bush Sr.`s overall mendacity on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).



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Bill Clinton

Draft-Dodging.
In a 1991 interview with The Washington Post, Clinton said: "The rule was there was no graduate deferment, but you got to finish the term you were in . . . I wound up just going through the lottery, and it was just a pure fluke that I was never called." But as both the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal reported in 1992, Clinton received an induction notice before promising to join an ROTC program in 1969 and later wrote to a reserve colonel expressing thanks for "saving" him from the draft by letting him take the deferment even though he never in fact joined the ROTC.

Sending Troops to Bosnia.
In 1995, after deciding to deploy U.S. troops to Bosnia--in violation of a 1993 pledge not to deploy troops without a clear exit strategy--Clinton pledged that they would not be sent "unless I was absolutely sure that the goals we set . . . are clear, realistic, and achievable in about a year." U.S. troops are still in Bosnia today.

Remembering The Iowa Caucuses.
At the start of the 1996 election season, Clinton commented, "Since I was a little boy, I`ve heard about the Iowa caucuses." There were no Iowa caucuses when Clinton was a boy. They began in 1972, while Clinton was a graduate student at Oxford University.

Black Church Burnings.
During a weekly Oval Office radio address on June 8th, 1996, Clinton told his audience that "I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child." The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported the following day that there was no evidence available of a black church ever being burned down in Arkansas.

That Woman.
During a press conference on Jan. 26, 1998, Clinton declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." But Clinton had, indeed, received oral sex from Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern at the time.

Rwandan Inaction.
In March of 1998, Clinton traveled to Rwanda to apologize for U.S. inaction during the 1994 genocide, saying that he and others "did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." But international press coverage, American intelligence, and reports from human rights organizations all indicated early on that hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis were the victims of systematic, state-sponsored killing. Just 11 days after the start of the killings, Secretary of State Warren Christopher had ordered U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright to call for an immediate withdrawal of all U.N. troops from Rwanda.

Your turn: Rate Clinton`s overall mendacity on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).



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George W. Bush

The Trifecta.
On many occasions during 2001 and 2002, President Bush talked about a campaign promise made in Chicago that he would only deficit spend "if there is a national emergency, if there is a recession, or if there`s a war," sometimes adding, after 9/11, "Never did I dream we`d have a trifecta." Reporters pressed the Bush`s communications staff to prove that Bush had actually made such a statement during the 2000 campaign, but the White House couldn`t turn up any proof. Bush continued to insist he`d made the promise.

Cutting AmeriCorps.
In his 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush made AmeriCorps the centerpiece of his new, post-9/11 service agenda, promising to expand the program`s roster by 50 percent in order that Americans might serve "goals larger than self." But in 2003, he signed legislation that cut the program`s operating budget by 30 percent. This year, AmeriCorps has half as many members as it did in 2001.

Going to War.
During a visit to West Virginia in January 2002, Bush joked, "I`ve been to war. I`ve raised twins. If I had a choice, I`d rather go to war." During the Vietnam War, however, Bush served with the Air National Guard in Texas, and had specifically noted on his Air Force officers test that he did not wish to serve overseas.

16 Words.
In making the case for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush stated in early 2003, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Yet the CIA had itself previously warned top White House officials and British intelligence that the reports of an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from African countries were almost certainly untrue, and no nuclear program nor weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq.

"Average" Tax Cuts.
Announcing his second big tax cut package in January 2003, Bush stated that "These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans. Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money." But because the package was tilted heavily towards the very wealthy, the average tax cut for households in the middle quintile of the income spectrum was only $217, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

What WMDs?
In May 2003, President Bush stated, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." U.S. forces have yet to find any evidence of chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons in Iraq.

Your turn: Rate W.`s overall mendacity on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).



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*Nominating Committee: Tony Blankley, Sidney Blumenthal, James Carville, John Fund, Joe Conason, Jonah Goldberg, Hendrick Hertzberg, Haynes Johnson, Hamilton Jordan, Michael Kinsley, Victor Navasky, Bruce Reed, Wlady Pleszczynski, and David Tell

**Panel of Judges: Jodie Allen, Russell Baker, Margaret Carlson, Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein, Richard Reeves, Larry Sabato, and Juan Williams

All artwork by Taylor Jones (L.A. Times Syndicate/ Newscom)

CLICK ON A PICTURE TO HEAR AND READ EACH REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL RHETORIC

http://www.allhatnocattle.net/DubyaQuotes.htm

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq29a…
EDITORIAL

Deepening Doubts on Iraq

August 29, 2003

Where are the weapons of mass destruction? As President Bush and other administration officials made the case for war with Iraq, their biggest selling point was the claim that Saddam Hussein`s Iraqi regime possessed chemical weapons. Allegations he had biological weapons were shakier; assertions he had nuclear arms or could build them were even more dubious. There were other ever-shifting official rationales for the Iraq invasion, like Hussein`s torture and killing of his own people and promoting Mideast democracy through his ouster. The main justification, however, for sending Americans to die in the desert was Hussein`s earlier use of chemical weapons, his continued possession of them and the imminent threat he would inflict them on the United States.

In this year`s State of the Union speech, Bush cited United Nations reports or U.S. intelligence that showed that Hussein had failed to account for 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and material for 500 tons of sarin, mustard agent and VX nerve agent. "From three Iraqi defectors, we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapon labs designed to produce germ warfare agents," Bush said. Where are those chemicals, those poisons or those labs?

Times staff writer Bob Drogin reported Thursday the deeply disturbing news that U.S. intelligence officials were now laboring to learn whether they had been fed false information about Iraq`s weapons, especially by defectors. U.N. inspectors` prewar searches found no chemical, biological or nuclear stockpiles. Hundreds of inspectors combing Iraq since major combat ended May 1 have fared no better. One U.S. intelligence official says analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support White House claims about Iraqi arms. Intelligence and congressional sources told Times reporters in October, five months before the invasion, that senior Bush officials were pressuring CIA analysts to shape their assessments of the threat to build the case against Hussein.

On the eve of war, this editorial page said Iraq should be given more time to disarm, otherwise the U.S. "risks being branded as the aggressive and arrogant superpower that disregards the wishes of the international community." The United States now wears that label, especially in light of the administration`s vacillations on involving other nations` forces in postwar Iraq.

But worse is the possibility that nearly 300 American personnel and dozens of British soldiers, plus U.N. officials and untold numbers of Iraqis, have died due to incredibly bad or corrupted intelligence. In Britain, a Sunday Telegraph poll showed that 67% of the public thought that their government, the main U.S. ally, had deceived the British people to get them into Iraq.

The war was more popular in the U.S. But Bush, administration officials, intelligence analysts and Congress need to keep asking: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? And if they are not found, was the defiant U.S. insistence that Iraq had them the result of incompetence or lies?


If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
Click here for article licensing and reprint options


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Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kuttner…
COMMENTARY

Four-Star Rating for a Wesley Clark Campaign
Retired general has the stuff to put himself in the top tier of Democrats.
By Robert Kuttner
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the American Prospect.

August 29, 2003

Wesley Clark has told associates that he will decide in the next few weeks whether to declare for president. If he does, it will transform the Democratic race. Call me star-struck, but I think he`d instantly be in the top tier.

Clark, in case you`ve been on sabbatical in New Zealand, is all over the talk shows. He`s the former NATO supreme commander who headed operations in Kosovo, a Rhodes scholar who graduated first in his class at West Point and a Vietnam vet with several combat medals, including a Purple Heart.

He has been a tough critic of the Bush foreign policy, including the Iraq war. His domestic positions are not as fully fashioned, but he would repeal President Bush`s tax cuts and revisit the so-called Patriot Act.

More interesting, many of Clark`s progressive views on domestic issues come by way of his military background. Though it is very much a hierarchy, the military is also the most egalitarian island in this unequal society. Top executives — four-star generals — make about nine times the pay of buck privates. In corporate life, the ratio of many chief executives` compensation to worker bees` is more like 900 times.

The military also has the most comprehensive child-care system in the United States. And, as Clark likes to point out, everyone has health care. Clark is also pro-affirmative action and pro-choice.

My favorite Clark riposte is on guns. He grew up hunting, in a family that had more than a dozen hunting rifles. But he`s pro-gun control. "If you want to fire an assault weapon," he has said, "join the Army." The National Rifle Assn. can put that in its AK-47 and smoke it.

Clark is the soldier as citizen. Even better, he`s the soldier as tough liberal. Just imagine Clark, with his real and distinguished military record, up against our draft-dodger president who likes to play Top Gun dress-up. Imagine the Rhodes scholar against the leader who can`t ad-lib. Oh, and he`s from Arkansas.

The draft-Clark people have already raised more than $1 million. Clark`s not-yet-announced campaign is the second Internet phenomenon this year, after Howard Dean`s.

He would be a terrific draw for political independents, as Republican John McCain was.

The downside is that it`s hard to get into the race this late. A lot of the fund-raisers and campaign professionals are already committed.

Bobby Kennedy jumped into the 1968 presidential campaign much later, after the February New Hampshire primary, when Eugene McCarthy proved that LBJ was vulnerable. But that was a different era and he was Bobby Kennedy.

On the other hand, a lot of the support for the existing candidates is soft, with the exception of Dean`s. Some of Richard Gephardt`s closest backers wonder whether he can really do it, and that also goes for John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards.

This year, just about everyone engaged in Democratic politics has a higher commitment to the goal of ousting George W. Bush than to any single Democratic candidate. Clark could probably peel off a lot of donors and campaign professionals — and grow some new ones.

If Clark gets in, Kerry would be hurt the most, because Kerry is most like Clark. His military record and defense expertise make him the most bulletproof of those in the Democratic field on national security issues.

Paradoxically, Dean too might be hurt. Dean has been the favorite of the antiwar activists and he`s also the freshest face. But Clark is also an antiwar candidate, as well as a former four-star general, and an even fresher face. As someone from a culturally conservative part of the country, he`d also pull from Lieberman, Edwards and Bob Graham.

Who might Clark pick as a running mate? Someone with domestic political experience: a Western or Midwestern governor or senator. Maybe New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former Clinton Cabinet official and a Latino. Or how about Illinois` popular progressive Sen. Dick Durbin?

Dwight Eisenhower was the last general to make it to the White House. He could have had the nomination of either party. He decided that he was a Republican, but he governed as an old-fashioned moderate.

Now all of this may just be an August sunstroke fantasy. We`ll soon find out. And if Clark doesn`t get in, he`d make one fine vice presidential candidate.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Dear Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys
August 28, 2003
By Mike McArdle

My dearest friends Jacques and Gerhard,

I realize that we haven`t always seen eye-to-eye about things but I think it`s time we all kind of sat down and talked things out if you get what I mean. Man to man – like we do down here in Texas. Hey, why don`t I have you guys over for a barbecue? Pickles would love to see the two of you.

We`ve let this Iraq thing get between us for too long, you know. Old friends like we are should be able to put this kind of thing behind us.

Yeah, I know you warned me that it would be a disaster. I know you sent people over there to look for the weapons and they didn`t find any and I wouldn`t believe it and started the war anyway. But you guys know how it is. We`re in the leadership business and we get advice from a lot of people but you see I was listening to all these guys from the think-tanks and they were telling me that everything would be okay and all those Arabs were going to be dancing in the streets and how the hell was I to know it was all bullshit ? Hell, I can`t even find Iraq on a map. I can`t even find Crawford, Texas for chrissakes.

Jacques, Gerhard, you gotten bad advice sometimes, haven`t you?

Kind of funny I guess that we didn`t find any weapons either and you better believe we`ve turned the place upside down looking. So Hans and the guys were right, I guess.

I mean I`ll admit that. Okay? Hans was right. There. I said it.

We all make mistakes and I know we all said some things that we regret. The "freedom fries" and stuff like that, I mean, who knows how these things get started. Someday we`re all going to laugh about this but right now I`m in a jam and I really need your help.

I need troops and money. And I need them like yesterday.

And I know what you`re thinking but it won`t be like it was last time. I`ll be good boy from now on. I promise. I`ve changed. I really have. If you just send a bunch of troops and big pile of those euros we can make things work over there and we`ll be allies again just like it used to be. No more think-tankers. I mean it this time. I really do.

No more wars without you guys and Kofi and the Security Council. Promise. Done deal. How`s that ? You have my word on it. But ya gotta help me – our people keep getting killed and we`re spending a billion and a half a week and my poll numbers are going into the crapper and there`s an election next year.

Jacques, Gerhard please. Help me out here. At least return my phone calls for crying out loud. Look, I`ll give you some of the oil, a lot of the oil, just as soon as we can stop the bastards from blowing up the pipelines every couple of days.

Come on guys. Just some troops and money. That`s all I need.

Jacques, Gerhard. You`re my only hope. I`ll be waiting to hear from you.

Your friend forever,



George W. Bush



© Democratic Underground, LLC

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:47 a.m. EDT August 29, 2003

The White House says a U.N. peace-keeping force in Iraq is just "one of many" ideas being discussed. A spokeswoman said at the Texas ranch says U.N. chief Kofi Annan made the proposal recently but said no decisions have been made.

There`s no apparent success yet in the Bush administration`s effort to find other nations willing to send peacekeepers to Iraq. Sources say other countries are also demanding a greater voice in economic and political decisions in post-war Iraq.

President Bush`s top foreign policy adviser says the United States is no global bully. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- in an interview on German television -- also said the United STates needs allies and needs them badly.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq says there is no need for more U.S. troops in the country. Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez blames continuing violence on insufficient intelligence and lack of cooperation from the Iraqi people. He says what he really needs is better intelligence for soldiers to act on.

An Iraqi Kurdish official says an agreement has been signed by Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an Iraqi Kurdish faction, and an ethnic Turkish group in northern Iraq. It`s aimed at preventing ethnic violence after clashes left eleven people dead last week.

United Nations envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello was buried in a place of honor in Geneva, Switzerland -- the city where he launched his humanitarian career. About 400 mourners attended his funeral. Vieira de Mello was killed in the suicide truck bombing at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

Tony Blair is again denying that his office exaggerated when it spoke of the threat from Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war. The British prime minister says if the charges were true, he would have had to leave office. He testified during a probe into the apparent suicide of a British weapons expert.

A British soldier has been killed and a second injured in a crossfire between two crowds in southern Iraq. The British military says the action occurred yesterday when a convoy was caught between two crowds and fired on with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades in a town north of Basra.

There`s a George Bush in Baghdad -- not the president, but a six-week-old baby. His Iraqi parents named him after President Bush to show their gratitude for Saddam Hussein`s ouster. They say if they`d had twin boys, the other one would have been named Tony Blair.


CASUALTIES

A total of 281 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began in Iraq. Some 143 of those deaths have come after major combat was declared over.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


At least 339 Coalition forces have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
288 from the US and 50 from the UK and 1 from Denmark.

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Blair all alone at the end of an era
Jonathan Freedland
Saturday August 30, 2003
The Guardian

And then there were two. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are now the sole surviving members of British politics` most exclusive, and garlanded, club: the men who founded New Labour.

Peter Mandelson was the first to go - twice. Now Alastair Campbell is stepping out of the golden circle that reshaped a party and went on to govern a nation. Like Mandelson, and the pollster Phillip Gould, who can also claim a creator`s hand in the New Labour project, he will not disappear. He may continue to whisper advice from the shadows. But he will no longer be at the heart of the enterprise. Instead, only two of those original pioneers will push on: the prime minister and the man who doubles as both his coarchitect and greatest rival.

For Blair it will be a grievous loss. He depended on Mandelson like a political soul brother, famously casting him as Bobby to his Jack Kennedy. But his reliance on Campbell was of a different order. If there was room for only one other person on the back seat of a prime ministerial limo or around a negotiating table, it was Campbell Blair wanted at his side. He was more than a chief aide: he was like an extra limb. Blair seemed unable to function without him.

Campbell was there from the very beginning, an ally and co-conspirator in those long-ago days when Blair was a young shadow energy secretary in a hurry. Once officially installed, he gave advice on everything: from when to smile on TV, to what to say and how to say it. Campbell was not just a co-founder of New Labour; he was a co-creator of Tony Blair.

They complemented each other perfectly. Campbell gave Blair, nicknamed "Emily" at school and "Bambi" in opposition, some macho cover. Campbell is not just the tabloid bruiser of modern myth. He is one of those men whose bullying charisma makes other men crave his approval. You would see it whenever he was surrounded by a pack of hacks, which was often. He had locker room magnetism, which he deployed to great effect. Blair has none of it.

Different as they are, the two men built up an understanding that verged on the telepathic. The director of communications needed to give only the baldest of prompts and the PM knew what to do: Campbell was like the unseen TV producer who feeds raw lines into the earpiece of a smiling anchorman, who magically turns them into poetry. How will Blair cope, now that he has to face the world alone?

But Campbell`s place at the founders` table was earned through more than media mastery. Together with Gould, he boasted an unerring instinct for middle Britain, incarnated as Sierra Man then Worcester Woman. Gould had his poll numbers, but Campbell had his gut - telling his charge what would "play" out there and what would not. This was the New Labour revolution, to put the party back in touch with the British mainstream; and Campbell was as much a part of that turnaround as the two men who now head the government.

For proof, look no further than the rewriting of clause 4 of Labour`s constitution, to reassure the voters that state socialism was dead. It is said the idea came to Campbell while on holiday - with Tony Blair.

This is what Blair has lost. A servant who, as the PM`s own farewell statement put it yesterday, was "immensely able, loyal and fearless" and a man whose dedication was not only to the transformation of Labour but to Blair himself -and who saw the two as inseparable. Like Mandelson, Campbell was prepared to confront anyone who stood in his boss`s way, including the biggest beast of them all, Gordon Brown. He was said to be the source of the description of the chancellor as "psychologically flawed" and that would have fitted: he always seemed ready to do anything and destroy anyone who imperilled his man. Now Blair will face Brown bereft of both Mandelson and Campbell; within New Labour`s innermost circle, the balance of power has evened up.

Campbell will leave a wider gap too. Spin is not about to end: in a modern, 24-hour media culture there is little alternative to some form of news management. But big personalities have a habit of embodying the period they dominate, and so Campbell`s going will mark the end of one kind of era. The late 1990s Labour insistence on party discipline, staying "on message", pagers and bleepers, initiativitis, rapid rebuttal - when people remember all that, they will think of Alastair Campbell. Maybe not of the man himself, for few outside the Westminster bubble ever saw or heard him speak. But perhaps that "caricature" the PM referred to yesterday, the one barking the orders to the hapless Blair on the Rory Bremner show. They will remember that man.

And Tony Blair will miss him. Perhaps he will poke his head around Campbell`s old office, hoping for some spine-stiffening advice. But the room will be empty. He is on his own now. The New Labour adventure that began a decade ago is down to two, and they will be eyeing each other closer than ever.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Murdered ayatollah was seen as key player by Tehran
Jonathan Steele and Dan de Luce in Tehran
Saturday August 30, 2003
The Guardian

The murder of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, the most prominent Shia leader in Iraq, drives another large hole into US claims that security is improving. But it may not have more than a temporary impact on the debate among Shi`ites over their role in post-Saddam Iraq.

His younger brother, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, is a member of the US-appointed governing council, which is about to nominate an interim government. He will continue in that position.

Ayatollah Hakim devoted his life to fighting Saddam`s regime. He was seen as the spiritual and tactical mastermind behind the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), allowing Abd al-Aziz to assume a more operational role. Now authority in SCIRI will be concentrated in Abd al-Aziz`s hands, and the murder may force him to adopt a more radical stance.

The Ayatollah initially refused to let SCIRI join Iraq`s new governing council because of long-standing suspicions of US intentions, and his view that any group which endorsed the US invasion would lose credibility.

Although Hakim had begun to distance himself from Iran`s hardline politics, his ties to the country`s clerical leadership ran deep. His father was a mentor to Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic, and Hakim had a strong affinity for mixing religion with politics.

The assassination removes a figure who Iran saw as an important channel and potential counterbalance to US influence in post-Saddam Iraq.

Iranian leaders had expressed outrage this week about the recent attempt on the life of Hakim`s rela tive, Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim. Iran`s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, castigated US forces for failing to provide sufficient security.

Another opposition Shi`ite cleric, Sheikh Abd al-Majid al-Khoei, was murdered in Najaf in April, a few days after returning from exile in London. He had actively supported US intervention in Iraq.

By contrast, Ayatollah Hakim did not feel Iraqis should rely on the US to get their freedom.

He preferred to fight the regime with his own militia, the so-called Badr brigade, which was armed by the Iranian government.

Although he refused to meet US and British officials, he agreed to meet the then UN head, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who persuaded him to let SCIRI join the governing council. US forces continued to raid SCIRI offices, apparently hunting for links with Iran.

In recent years, Hakim had distanced himself from ideas of creating an Islamic republic in Iraq, saying he favoured an elected, broad-based government.

The assassination injects an element of uncertainty into an already chaotic climate in Iraq. Iran will now be worried that a power vacuum among the Shia community could produce more infighting.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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A prayer for unity, then carnage
Relatives of murdered cleric blame Saddam loyalists seeking to destabilise Shia groups

Jamie Wilson and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Saturday August 30, 2003
The Guardian

Less than four months ago at the Imam Ali shrine, thousands of devoted followers greeted Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim`s return after more than two decades.

That hot May afternoon, he spoke of a future in which Iraqis would at last elect their own government and live independent of dictatorship and foreign occupation. "By blood, by the sword, we are going to sacrifice for you, Hakim," the cheering crowd chanted.

Yesterday the same mosque in Najaf, the holiest site in the Shia Islamic faith, was the scene of his assassination in a well-orchestrated but brutal attack on the most influential Shia force in Iraq.

Ayatollah Hakim had just delivered a sermon at noon prayers from a balcony inside the mosque. As he was leaving the main entrance, thousands of worshippers streaming out in his wake, the car bomb exploded.

The force of the blast was so great it left a 4ft deep crater and blew mosaic tiles off the shrine. Nearby cars were turned into twisted hunks of metal and shops on the opposite side of the square collapsed into rubble.

The scene was one of carnage, body parts strewn across the square. Hours later there was still pandemonium as people screamed in grief and anger, and searched the rubble for more victims.

"Even the Americans didn`t bomb us like this," one woman screamed through her tears.

"I saw al-Hakim walk out of the shrine after his sermon and moments later there was a massive explosion. There were many dead bodies," said Abdul Amir Jassem, a 40-year-old merchant who was in the mosque. "He was praying for Iraqi unity."

Doctors at a nearby hospital were overwhelmed by the numbers of dead and injured. Wards were soon full and a call went out for relatives and friends of the victims to give blood.

The fury on the streets was reflected by Nagih Salah, 40, a truck driver who was near the shrine at the time of the blast. "The people who did this are traitors and bastards. They are not real Iraqis," he said.

It is ironic that the unity Ayatollah Hakim prayed for in his sermon yesterday could be dealt one of its greatest blows by his death. Exactly who was responsible is likely to have a profound effect on what happens next in Iraq.

So far nobody has claimed responsibility, but supporters and family of the slain ayatollah, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), blamed Saddam loyalists.

Others, however, suggested it might have been the work of a rival Shi`ite faction, led by the fiery young cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, which is vehemently opposed to Ayatollah Hakim`s support for the US military occupation of Iraq.

Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, blamed the US for failing to provide adequate security and said Saddam loyalists had carried out the bombing to create discord between Shias and Sunnis.

While Shias make up 60% of Iraq`s 24 million population, they were repressed by Saddam`s regime, whose power base was taken from the Sunni strongholds around Baghdad.

Ghaleb al-Mesawi, editor in chief of the SCIRI newspaper al-Adala, blamed Sunni regime loyalists for the attack. "The people who have done this are supporters of Saddam, and they are Sunnis. They are hoping to draw battle lines between the Sunnis and the Shi`ite in Iraq."

But Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi scholar with the Royal United Services Institute in London, said he believed the attack was a result of Shia infighting.

"I think that the group of al-Sadr might be behind it because, of all the Shia groups, they are the only ones using violence," he said. "Without violence I don`t think al-Sadr would be able to play a major role because he is not a high-ranking religious leader or a high-ranking political leader."

Whatever group carried out the bombing investigators are likely to have a hard job finding out. American experts are unlikely to help as Najaf has been a no-go area for US troops since April.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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US decree strips thousands of their jobs
Anti-Ba`athist ruling may force educated Iraqis abroad

Jonathan Steele
Saturday August 30, 2003
The Guardian

Tarik al-Kubaisy, vice-president of the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists, is a worried man. It`s not just that the queue of patients suffering from severe stress disorders in Iraq`s war-torn society is growing longer by the day.

Nor that a country of 25 million has fewer than 100 psychiatrists and many are planning to emigrate now that Saddam Hussein`s restrictions on foreign travel have gone.

The other concern for Dr Kubaisy, who was awarded a London University PhD after four years at the Maudsley hospital, is that the Americans have taken away his job.

Like many young Iraqi professionals, he joined the Ba`ath party several years before Saddam became its leader and turned Iraq into a one-party state. But under Order Number One, issued by Paul Bremer, Iraq`s US administrator - the so-called "de-Ba`athification" decree - Dr Kubaisy`s position as a professor in Baghdad University`s college of medicine has ended.

When Baghdad University and Iraq`s other colleges re-open next week, around 2,000 senior staff have been told to stay at home, Dr Kubaisy estimates. Although they were Ba`ath party members, none was connected to the former regime`s security apparatus.

"It`s collective punishment. It`s conviction without any charge," Dr Kubaisy said yesterday. "I`m becoming a bit paranoid but I think the Americans intend to force Iraqi brains to go abroad".

Coalition officials argue that every Ba`athist has not been purged. Only those who held one of its top four ranks are barred from public service.

"The de-Ba`athification decree is the most popular thing we have done here," a senior coalition official said.

It was strongly promoted by Washington neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, and his friend, Ahmed Chalabi, a businessman convicted in Jordan of fraud who is now a member of Iraq`s governing council.

"The problem is they didn`t look at who were really leaders. They made the issue of rank too important and went down too low," said Husam al-Rawi, a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a professor in Baghdad University`s architecture department. "Instead of targeting a thousand or a few hundred people, they targeted 80,000."

Prof Rawi joined the Ba`ath party as a 15-year-old in 1958 and was a section head, the third rank down. Dr Kubaisy was even lower, a secretary of a branch.

He was never asked to spy on other faculty members, he insisted. "We weren`t involved in policing. We had no association with the security organisation. They had their own informers, who didn`t have to be party members," he said.

"If you wanted to go abroad to attend a conference, you had to apply to the dean of the faculty and then the university and then the ministry of the interior. It didn`t depend on us. I was often refused permission myself."

Prof Rawi joined the Ba`ath party when it stood for socialism and opposition to religious extremists. "After Saddam Hussein took power, the party became a skeleton with no spirit." By then it was too late to get out.

The de-Ba`athification decree is also causing turmoil in government ministries, hospitals and other bodies considered part of the civil service. Anyone in the top three levels of management loses their job if he or she was a party member, regardless of rank.

"History teaches us that victors have to be magnanimous, but what are we seeing here? A new society created on the basis of hatred and revenge," said a senior official who declined to be named.

"When I joined the party in the 1970s, it was the party of oil nationalisation, eradicating illiteracy, autonomy for the Kurds, and national reconciliation ... Then Saddam destroyed the party. He executed more Ba`athists than anyone else ... Most of us felt relieved when he was overthrown.

"When this war began to loom, we were in an intellectual dilemma. Mounting an insurrection against the regime meant helping the powers which wanted to invade us. But if we supported the dictatorship, it was against our basic interests."

Anger was the prevailing mood among large sections of the Baghdad middle class, he said. People felt criminalised.

The de-Ba`athification decree provides for appeals and exemptions, if a person has the support of staff, for example, and their jobs are judged indispensable. A petition for Prof Rawi, signed by 350 students and 30 staff, was sent to the US administration two months ago, so far to no avail.

With the weeks ticking by and universities about to re-open, most sacked academics have lost hope. The decree says nothing about protecting pensions and they may not be paid. At least half the 2,000 university staff who have been dismissed are likely to lose their government housing too.

Prof Rawi said this violated the fourth Geneva convention. "An occupier cannot dismiss people from jobs, administer collective punishment, and discriminate against people on the basis of political belief".

A coalition spokesman said that only between 15,000 and 30,000 people had been affected: "The suggestion that there are lots and lots of innocent people who have been unfairly dismissed is not true. Less than 5% of the Ba`ath party members are covered".



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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After the car bombing in Najaf, Iraqis searched the debris of a destroyed building for human remains. There was little official reaction.
August 30, 2003
NEWS ANALYSIS
Death and Hesitation in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 29 — The car bomb that killed one of Iraq`s most important spiritual leaders today was apparently met by a political vacuum in the nation`s capital, where the Iraqi and American officials charting the country`s future seemed unsure who should respond and how.

Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a symbol of moderation in this restive land, was dead. Religious leaders called for blood and vengeance, and in some places the ayatollah`s mourners took to the streets. Yet here in Baghdad, the Iraqi and American officials charged with shepherding this country toward democratic rule went about their business as if little had changed.

There were no speeches calling for calm and few public appearances by anyone in charge. L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, was on vacation. Nobody seemed to know when exactly he would return. The American military command here said nothing.

"I think someone is writing up a statement, somebody, I`m not sure," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, one of the few who could be found this afternoon. "We don`t have satellite, you know, that`s one of the problems. The Americans should give us a satellite."

Mr. Bremer`s office issued a brief statement saying: "The Iraqi police have our full cooperation in this important investigation. I pledge that the coalition will do everything possible to see that the perpetrators are brought to justice."

The confusion today, at a moment of potentially explosive tension, highlighted the sometimes tetchy stalemate that has grown up between fledgling Iraqi leaders and their American sponsors in the six weeks since the interim government was formed.

That stalemate could now prove very costly. By removing a central force for political and religious moderation, the assassination of Ayatollah Hakim, a Shiite, threatens to complicate the ambitious political talks being undertaken here, at a time when both the Iraqis and the Americans often seem stalled by inertia, at least here in the capital.

Until now, the Americans have enjoyed relative stability among the country`s Shiite and Kurdish populations, in the south and north, as they have battled a ferocious insurgency in the central part of the country.

The killing of Ayatollah Hakim, by stirring up the country`s Shiite population, threatens to spread the chaos. Much will depend, it seemed today, on whom the Shiites blame for Ayatollah Hakim`s death: remnants of Saddam Hussein`s government, composed mainly of Sunni Arabs, or radical members of their own religious group.

The Governing Council, a group of Iraqis representing the tapestry of Iraq`s ethnic and religious groups, has long been seen as a central piece in the American plan to nurture democratic government here.

But in recent weeks, American officials have expressed frustration over what they describe as the reluctance of the 25-member Council to seize the reins of political power. The Iraqis, meanwhile, have complained that the Americans, while talking about democracy, have refused to turn over power where it matters.

A kind of paralysis has resulted, according to both Iraqis and American officials, with the Governing Council taking little action in its first six weeks. "On the Council, someone makes a suggestion, then it goes around the room, with everyone talking about it, and then by that time, it`s late afternoon and time to go home," said an aide on the Council. "We don`t get a lot done."

As they have done on several previous occasions, American officials stood back today and waited for the Iraqis to act, reluctant to upstage them. "The Iraqi interim government is in control of the situation," said a spokesman for the Coalition Public Authority, the American branch of the government. "We have issued a statement, and that is all we have for now."

The studied reluctance by American officials and military officers to move in place of the Iraqis appeared risky. Shiites, accounting for 60 percent of the population, are deeply divided between moderates and radicals; those divisions are now likely to grow. At the same time, the entire Shiite population is suspicious that Sunnis loyal to Mr. Hussein may be behind the killing, Iraqi analysts said. All these tensions could quickly lead to further violence.

At a time when there have been three deadly car bombings in little more than three weeks, some Council members are still traveling without bodyguards. Until Thursday, when a shipment of cars arrived in the capital, some members were still driving around in taxis or borrowed cars.

Tonight, Ahmad Chalabi, a Governing Council member with an abundance of his own armed guards, said he had dispatched several of them to Council members who did not have any.

In an interview, Mr. Chalabi said the Iraqi leaders needed to be given more control over Iraqi security. A partial solution, he said, could lie in the formation of an Iraqi militia, put together by political leaders like himself, who could screen out applicants for former members of Mr. Hussein`s government.

"The Iraqi people need to know that we will not go back to business as usual," Mr. Chalabi said. "We need something visible, something dramatic, different from what we have done in the past."

On the streets of Baghdad today, skirmishes erupted when a group of Shiite Muslims, goaded by a cleric, marched across the Tigris River into a Sunni neighborhood known for its loyalty to Mr. Hussein.

The march began at a mosque in the Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, where the cleric, Sheik Raed al-Kadhimi al-Saadi, urged the group to avenge Ayatollah Hakim`s assassination. "Death to the Baathists," he said. "Death to Saddam`s men."

Some at the mosque said Sheik Saadi`s calls amounted to a fatwa, an edict carrying a religious obligation. In his sermon, the sheik attributed the ayatollah`s death to "Zionist occupational conspiracies" as well. When he declared that any Baathist who violated people`s rights should be killed, the crowd roared its assent.

The marchers then trod through their own neighborhood chanting, "No to America! No to Saddam! Yes, yes, to Islam!"

They crossed the river into Adhamiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood where Mr. Hussein is reputed to have made his last public appearance before vanishing during the war. There the demonstration lost its steam. Some of the marchers said they would be back. "Death to Saddam`s men," they said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 30, 2003
The Port Authority Transcripts

On Thursday, the Port Authority at last released hundreds of pages of transcripts of telephone conversations and radio transmissions recorded on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. It takes only a few pages of reading to rekindle the intensity of those hours just after the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. In a real sense, these transcripts and the recordings on which they are based are forensic documents. They help piece together a clearer picture of how Port Authority employees responded to the almost impossible crisis of that morning. The mistakes that were made — like advising one group of people not to evacuate the World Trade Center — were more than counterbalanced by genuinely heroic efforts to free others trapped in burning offices or disabled elevators.

The value of these transcripts is to take us back to those moments before anyone could wonder how we would ever tell this story. The transcripts — from desks at Port Authority Police Department posts, from Newark Airport, from high in the towers and down in the trains that ran under them — are crowded with efforts to work around damaged communications systems, to piece together a sense of who was where and what had happened. They do not record the tone of most of the voices that appear, and as a result an eerie calm seems to hang over most of the conversations. One woman calls repeatedly from Windows on the World, on top of the north tower, wondering, politely enough in the circumstances, what quadrant of the building to go to for fresh air. It was, of course, an impossible question to answer.

Inevitably, the moments in these transcripts that will draw the most notice are calls like hers, placed by people trapped in the towers or by Port Authority workers trying to bring aid. But there is something no less striking — if inherently less dramatic — in the glimpses of ordinary lives coming unraveled even among people far from the towers. One woman patiently explains to her husband where their children go to school and what time to pick them up. Mothers call, and their sons, who are manning Port Authority switchboards, do their best to comfort them while also doing their best to get them off the line. Men and women assure each other of their love in a language that would sound unfeeling if we didn`t know how resonant ordinary words can become in times of crisis.

The Port Authority has to judge the tools it had to work with on Sept. 11: its radio and phone connections, its emergency channels, its ability to track and direct its employees. But there can be no question of how it judges the people it had to work with. These are the voices of people giving everything they have, listening, counseling and rushing to the assistance of office workers who were also giving everything it was possible to give that morning.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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American soldiers conducted a patrol with Spanish troops in Diwaniya, Iraq, this week. The U.S. Marines are in the midst of carrying out a transfer of power to a multinational division in southwestern Iraq.
August 29, 2003
DISPATCHES
Mind the Gap
By MICHAEL R. GORDON


Direct your attention for a moment away from the bombings, intrigue and frustrations of Baghdad to the swath of southwestern Iraq that has been controlled by the United States Marines.

The Marines are in the midst of carrying out an important transfer of power to a Polish-led multinational division. After a long summer for the Marines, it is a very welcome development. The Bush administration, which is anxious to enlist more foreign troops for duty in Iraq, clearly hopes it is a harbinger of more to come.

But the handover for the region, which will be officially completed on Sept. 3, is trickier and far more important than it seems. The Marines have been doing a lot more than providing security in the south. With the assistance of Army civil affairs troops, they have also been up to their necks in nation-building tasks, like helping the Iraqis to organize new local governments, training the police and distributing fuel. They have done a good job of it.

So the urgent question is, who will shoulder that burden now and how well will they execute the task? The question is all the more pressing since Najaf has become the scene of violent attacks against established Shiite clerics. The blast on Friday that killed the Shiite leader Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim eliminated a figure who had cooperated with the American-led occupation. It also came just five days before the Marines officially vacate the Najaf area and turn it over to the new multinational division.

There are several players waiting to fill the vacuum in the Marines` area, including the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which is headed by L. Paul Bremer III, Washington`s top-ranking civilian in Iraq, and the newly arriving multinational forces. We are about to find out how well they are prepared for the new mission.

One of the surprising facts about Mr. Bremer`s authority is how sparse its presence is outside Baghdad. The occupation authority provides millions of dollars for projects throughout Iraq, including those overseen by the American military. That certainly has been a major plus. But the staff of the occupation authority is concentrated in Baghdad. It has a full-time representative in only about half of the 18 governorates or administrative regions in Iraq, according to a spokesman for Mr. Bremer.

There are some important gaps in the south. Mr. Bremer`s authority, for example, has no full-time representatives in the governorate of Najaf or Karbala, the districts where Iraq`s holy Shiite cities are located. Nor does it have a full-time representative in the Qadisiya governorate, where the town of Diwaniyah is, or in Wasit, the district where the town of Kut is situated, according to a spokesman for the occupation authority.

The occupation authority plans to staff all these areas, but the timetable for doing so is unclear. And when it does, it will probably send small teams.

So far, the authority`s limited presence in the south has not been a show-stopper because the Marines moved to fill the nation-building gap. But a look at the multinational force taking over from the Marines shows that this is not a homogenous division — it will have a Polish headquarters and brigade, a Spanish brigade and a Ukrainian brigade.

The Polish-led divisional headquarters will be based at Camp Babylon in Hillil. The Spanish will be based in Diwaniyah and the Ukrainians in Kut. There will also be smaller contributions from a host of nations, including forces from Eastern Europe, Asia and Central America. Even Mongolia is sending a small contingent.

When I recently visited the Marine headquarters at Camp Babylon, it already had a decidedly international flavor. I even saw a Macedonia patch on a few troops. It was just two years ago that NATO-led peacekeepers were being deployed to Macedonia to collect arms from ethnic Albanian rebels and head off a brewing civil war there.

The symbolism of having forces from a wide array of nations is impressive, but stitching all those odds and ends together to make an efficient division will not be a simple task. These are forces that are not accustomed to working together, have little or no experience in this region and varying degrees of experience in civil affairs.

American officials speak positively about the Polish commander, and the Spanish are said to have struck up a bit of a rapport with the Iraqis. But it is unclear how closely the Ukrainians will work with the Poles, let alone with the Iraqis. To communicate with each other and with the Iraqis, English will be the multinational division`s common language.

It helps that the Marines` area of operation has been far more hospitable than the Sunni Triangle that is defined by Baghdad, Ramadi and Tikrit. No marine has been killed in action since April 12, though a United States naval officer attached to the Marine headquarters was shot to death last week in a traffic jam in Hillil.

Iraq`s majority Shiites were brutally repressed by the Sunni minority under Saddam Hussein and have long had to put up with electrical shortages and poor services. So they have a lot to gain by the dismantling of the old order.

One development that will also help the new international division is the decision to remove one of the most troublesome areas — the northern part of the Babil governorate, the district where Hillil is located — from the Marines` area of operation and put it under the control of the Army`s 82nd Airborne Division. That region is a Sunni-dominated area close to Baghdad. The argument for the transfer is that it is more logical that this area be secured by Army forces based in and around Baghdad, but the move will also make the multinational division`s task easier.

But now that Shiite religious figures have become the target of bomb attacks by unknown enemies, and the Shiite population appears to be engulfed in a struggle between established ayatollahs who were prepared to work with the coalition and young clerics who seem determined to push for an Islamic state, the timing of the Marines` departure from Iraq does not seem auspicious. It introduces yet another variable into an already unstable situation.

Steps are being taken to facilitate the transition to the multinational division. The plan is for Army civil affairs teams that have been attached to the Marines to stay for two weeks after the Sept. 3 transfer of authority. Those teams will try to arrange for local Iraqi officials to take more responsibility for local governance.

After that, the responsibility for administrating the Marines` former area in the south will rest with Mr. Bremer`s occupation authority, assisted by contractors paid for by the United States Agency for International Development, Iraqi exiles and civil affairs teams from the new Polish-led division. The Marines have been trying to prepare the Iraqis for the change by depicting the Poles as a people who, like the Iraqis, have suffered from a long history of repression.

Much depends on the ability of the American-led authority to deliver on its promise to restore basic services and on the new troop skills in forging links and building ties with the Iraqis, which is the best way to gather intelligence to fend off attacks.

"It depends on your relationship with the people and the trust you build up with them," a senior Marine officer said, referring to intelligence-gathering efforts.

And it is important to remember that the coalition troops are not immune from attack. Spanish troops have already come under mortar fire.

With American military forces spread thin, the Bush administration has been eager to hand over control of much of the south to the Polish-led forces. With bombings and shooting and high drama in Baghdad, the arrangement has received relatively little attention. Now it is going to be put to the test.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Heute 65mal frische Toonware
The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
aber immer dran denken. (Nannsen und CO)
IQ Warning: Each issue contains ALL of the day`s cartoons on a single printer-friendly page. If you have a slow mind i.e. regularly watch Fox News it may take several minutes to get the jokes. Please be patient - its worth the wait.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030829__065toons.htm

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Grieving Shiite Muslims in Baghdad hold up a portrait of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim after he was killed in a car bomb attack outside a Shiite shrine in Najaf.
washingtonpost.com
Ayatollah`s Death Deepens U.S. Woes
Spiritual and Political Figure Backed Transition Effort

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 30, 2003; Page A01


NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 29 -- The death of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, a rare cleric with political acumen and religious pedigree, may pose the greatest challenge yet to U.S. efforts to court Iraq`s Shiite Muslim majority and bring stability to Iraq.

Hakim, 64, a member of one of Iraq`s most prominent clerical families, headed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an opposition group he founded in 1982 while exiled in Iran.

Though his ties to the Islamic government in Iran long made him suspect in the eyes of U.S. officials, his decision to enroll his movement in the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and, by default, act as a proponent of U.S. efforts here, counted as one of the true achievements of American diplomacy in postwar Iraq.

His death in today`s car bombing at the Imam Ali shrine removes his credibility and prestige from SCIRI, which is already locked in a growing rivalry with younger, more militant clerics seeking to give voice to Iraqis` growing frustration with the occupation.

Without him, U.S. officials lose perhaps their most important interlocutor with the Shiite community at a time the Americans acknowledge is, at best, delicate.

"There`s no political replacement for him," Sheik Hamid Ali Jaff, a 33-year-old cleric, said as he wandered through the devastation left by the attack. "We`ll have to wait many years for another replacement."

U.S. officials have acknowledged the key role that Shiites will play in any postwar arrangement.

Shiites suffered some of the worst brutality meted out by President Saddam Hussein, with tens of thousands executed and exiled in a repression that was especially pronounced after their failed uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In contrast to Sunni Muslims, the community that provided Hussein much of his support, Shiites jubilantly welcomed his fall, even as some remained suspicious of U.S. intentions.

In the crucial battles ahead over a new constitution and a postwar government, their support is essential, and U.S. officials have described the prospect of turmoil and infighting within Shiite ranks as a nightmare scenario.

As evidenced by the outpouring of sentiment in Najaf, Baghdad and other cities, Hakim`s death will, in the short run, probably conceal divisions among Shiite factions.

In a statement tonight, Moqtada Sadr, his chief rival and a virulent opponent of the occupation, called for a three-day strike to protest Hakim`s death and a week of mourning to mark his passing. In Sadr City, a sprawling Baghdad neighborhood where Hakim`s support was limited, thousands poured into the streets to demonstrate their sympathy.

"Saddam is the enemy of God," they shouted.

But in the long term, those divisions seem likely to be exacerbated, given tension already evident in recent months in politics that, even to insiders, remain Byzantine and are marked by shifting allegiances.

In the days after Hussein`s fall, an angry mob murdered Abdel-Majid Khoei, a well-known cleric who was flown into Najaf by the United States from exile in London. In the West, he was seen as moderate, and his stated mission was to unify Shiite ranks.

Hakim, too, had emerged as a flexible figure. In 23 years of exile, he advocated an Islamic state, reflecting the position of the Iranian government that sheltered him and sanctioned the creation of his military wing, known as the Badr Brigades.

On his return in May, his public statements softened. He still criticized the occupation, but he spoke less of an Islamic state. In his Friday sermons at the Imam Ali shrine, his message focused more on Islamic unity and less on the shortcomings of the U.S.-led administration.

His replacement will likely be his brother, Abdel-Aziz Hakim, who already holds a seat on the 25-member Governing Council. Abdel-Aziz Hakim headed the Badr Brigades but lacked his brother`s connections with more senior clergy and his reputation as an opponent of Hussein.

In the political arena, that leaves Sadr with perhaps the greatest popular voice. A son of another prominent cleric, Sadr, 30, has used his sermons at the mosque in Kufa, just a few miles from Najaf, to deliver a message of empowerment for the Shiite poor and disenfranchised, and his street support overshadowed Hakim`s.

As a rallying cry, he has denounced the U.S. occupation and proclaimed the formation of the Mahdi Army, so far an unarmed group that seems more akin to a morals police force than a militia.

While both Hakim and Sadr were overshadowed in spiritual matters by Iraq`s most senior clerics, men like Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, those clerics have eschewed a political role, deeming it beneath their spiritual calling.

They have tacitly supported U.S. efforts, mainly by remaining silent, but would be loath to play a more assertive role. In the face of U.S. pressure they have resisted taking a more aggressive line against Sadr, fearful of the strife such a confrontation might unleash.

Despite Sadr`s denials, many in Najaf blamed him for Khoei`s killing and for an assassination attempt last week on another grand ayatollah, Mohammed Saeed Hakim, the slain cleric`s uncle. He escaped with only scratches to his neck.

But in the streets around the shrine, where charred carcasses of cars lay in pools mixed with blackened debris and blood, many insisted that only loyalists of Hussein could carry out such carnage. No Shiite, they said, would intentionally damage the gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and the man Shiites consider his heir.

If the car bomb was planted by Hussein loyalists, it shows a telling recognition of the weaknesses of the U.S. occupation, which to many here seems increasingly isolated.

The bombing of the Jordanian Embassy on Aug. 7 sent a chill through Arab capitals still debating whether to engage the Governing Council, which is struggling for credibility among its own people.

The devastation of the U.N. headquarters drove the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and some humanitarian groups out of the country.

The attacks come at a time that U.S. officials are struggling on multiple fronts in their efforts to bring order to a country beset by crime, anger and frustration.

A simmering guerrilla war against U.S. forces in Sunni Muslim areas -- marked by increasingly sophisticated attacks -- shows little sign of abating. Last week, ethnic strife flared in northern Iraq between Kurds and Turkmens, a dispute that U.S. forces seemed ill-prepared to resolve. While still sporadic, attacks have increased against British troops patrolling southern Iraq, a Shiite-dominated region that until recent weeks was notable for its calm but which has grown restive because of a continued lack of basic services.

In the latest incident there, a bomb was set off today near the British base in Basra. There were no casualties.



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U.S. Views Car Bomb As Sabotage
Campaign of Chaos Is Underway, Officials Say

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 30, 2003; Page A17


Bush administration officials view yesterday`s assassination of a leading Shiite cleric in Iraq as part of an increasingly sophisticated and well-organized campaign to sow chaos and anarchy in the country, sabotaging U.S. attempts to create a functioning democracy.

Intelligence officials and administration experts on Iraq said it is still much too early to pinpoint responsibility for the car bomb attack that killed Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir Hakim or establish an organizational link with a string of other incidents, including the bombings of the U.N. headquarters and the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. But they were in little doubt that one of the principal motivations behind the attacks is to drive the United States out of Iraq.

"The general aim is to create chaos," said Nabil Khoury, a State Department official who serves as a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He said the goal is "to put more obstacles in the way of the reconstruction effort and the transition to democracy."

The attack on the mosque in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, a sacred shrine for millions of Shiite Muslims, came as the Bush administration is seeking ways of broadening the peacekeeping effort in Iraq. The White House said yesterday that President Bush has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin for talks next month at Camp David that are expected to focus on Iraq, and State Department officials have floated the idea of establishing some kind of U.N. peacekeeping force.

Bush released a statement saying that he has instructed U.S. officials in Iraq to "work closely with Iraqi security officials . . . to determine who committed this terrible attack and bring them to justice." He said that the murder of Hakim illustrates "the cruelty and desperation of the enemies of the Iraqi people." He added: "The forces of terror must and will be defeated."

Critics accused the administration of failing to ensure basic security in the country, and not doing enough to transfer political authority to Iraqis. One leading Iraqi politician, Ahmed Chalabi, said the incident illustrates the need for the United States to grant more power to the Iraqi Governing Council, which is viewed in Washington as the first step to the creation of a new government.

"Iraqis should have a much bigger role in maintaining security in the country," Chalabi told Reuters in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "I propose the creation of an Iraqi security force, a serious one, but we also need to empower the Governing Council quickly."

While accepting responsibility for maintaining security throughout Iraq, U.S. officials said U.S. troops have avoided patrolling in the immediate vicinity of the holy sites of Najaf and Karbala out of respect for followers of the Shiite faith. They described the Najaf mosque as a good example of a "soft target" for terrorists seeking to create turmoil in Iraq, similar to the U.N. compound in Baghdad.

"This is a scorched-earth policy," a State Department official said. "It`s impossible to prove, but you have to entertain the idea that all these incidents are connected: first the attack on the Jordanian embassy, then the attack on the U.N., and now the attack of the holiest shrine in the Shiite world."

Officials said that FBI investigators would be helping the Iraqi police comb through the wreckage of the car bomb attack to see if there are any similarities with the earlier bombings in Baghdad. Some pointed the finger at loyalists of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, while others said that the bombing might have been the work of a rival Shiite faction or al Qaeda.

Signs pointing to remnants of the Hussein government include the use of a remote-controlled device to detonate a car bomb -- a favorite technique of the Iraqi secret police under Hussein -- and the choice of target. A State Department official pointed out that one of Hakim`s brothers was assassinated by Hussein agents in 1988, and Hakim himself mobilized opposition to Hussein as head of the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Iranian officials reacted with dismay to the killing of Hakim, who spent two decades in exile in Iran before returning to Iraq in May. "The only people to profit from his martyrdom are those who do not want a stable and independent Iraq," Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi told Reuters.

Judith Yaphe, an Iraq expert at the National War College, said that the assassination of Hakim is likely to seriously complicate U.S. efforts to transfer power to an Iraqi provisional government. "Although this may not be directly aimed at us, it highlights just how fragile the situation is," she said. "It could make it even more difficult for us to get the cooperation of leading Iraqis."

Although Hakim had spoken out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the ayatollah was seen in Washington as a voice of pragmatism and moderation who was working behind the scenes to facilitate the establishment of a provisional government. One of his brothers is a leading member of the Governing Council.

U.S. officials insisted that Hakim`s assassination will not disrupt either plans to transfer power to the Council or the U.S. military presence in Iraq. "We will not be deterred by such unacceptable and immoral acts," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said.



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Mr. Bush and the Flag




Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page B06


THE WHITE HOUSE supports the wrongheaded constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power "to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States." Yet in light of an incident last month, Mr. Bush should consider whether he might be the first person jailed should this perennial foolishness -- passed most recently by the House of Representatives earlier this year -- ever become part of the Constitution. Mr. Bush, at a political event in Livonia, Mich., autographed supporters` flags, an apparent violation of an obscure provision of American law that details the respect with which flags should be treated. "The flag," reads the code, "should never have placed upon it . . . any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature." The last time Congress sought to ban flag-burning, in a statute the Supreme Court struck down in 1989, it made a criminal out of anyone who "defaces" a flag -- language Mr. Bush likewise appears to have violated. Never mind the fact that he clearly meant no disrespect; if Congress had the power to criminalize flag desecration, he would at least arguably be indictable.

We say arguably because there`s no telling what "desecration" actually means. The proposed amendment is meant to deal with flag-burning, but what about that American soldier who, in a moment of unadulterated patriotism, wrapped a flag around a statue of Saddam Hussein? What about a person who proudly wears a ripped T-shirt displaying the flag? Of course, such cases would never be brought in court. The amendment, in practice, would be used to punish only unpopular political expression, expression that, though sometimes odious, is today unambiguously protected by American constitutional law -- as it should be. But the notion that the president, or anyone, could be charged with signing a flag should not be even arguable. It should be laughable -- as it would be if politicians such as Mr. Bush had the guts to stand against constitutional pollution rather than pandering to it.



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Roy`s Rock: No Place in a Courthouse


By Ellen Goodman

Saturday, August 30, 2003; Page A29


BOSTON -- Earlier this summer a young Iraqi went to one of the Islamic courts springing up in the holy city of Najaf to confess to the judge that he`d killed his mother. She`d dishonored the family by committing adultery, he said to the cleric-turned-judge. The son later explained that he`d chosen to make his case to the self-proclaimed Islamic court because it would "rule according to our Shiite traditions. This is the true court. This is the ruling of God."

It was a chilling story to Americans wary about the future of Iraq. In the troubled wake of Saddam Hussein, we are worrying over the struggle between democracy and theocracy. We are watching it play out in the streets and in the courts.

I never found out how the radical jurists who use the Koran as the lawbook ruled in this matricide. But I`ve been thinking of them for the past week as people gathered outside an Alabama courthouse to protect "Roy`s Rock." After all, Americans have our own struggles with theocracy and democracy.

The protesters in Montgomery are fans of Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has been dubbed the "Moses of Alabama," though his namesake would have had trouble carrying a 5,280-pound set of tablets down from the mount.

A West Point graduate, a man who herded cattle in Australia and trained as a kickboxer, Moore became known as the "Ten Commandments Judge" after placing rosewood tablets behind his bench in 1995. He was elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000 on a platform that read, "Still the Ten Commandments Judge."

Was that election a moment of Judeo-Christian democracy? The majority vote for religious justice?

Two years ago, Moore had his huge monument installed in the rotunda of the courthouse. But ultimately a federal judge ruled that it was "nothing less than an obtrusive year-round religious display." When the other eight members of the Alabama Supreme Court said it must be removed, Moore refused to obey. Now suspended, he will face a hearing of his own.

The chief justice as chief protester is an odd role reversal. But then his conservative followers sing "We Shall Overcome" wearing T-shirts with mottos like, "Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder."

This is not just an Alabama thing. The movement to put the Ten Commandments into the public square is more active now than at any time since Cecil B. DeMille gave away 4,000 granite tablets as a promotion for the Charlton Heston movie. There have been dozens of protests against the removal of plaques and statues. Some of the same people once found outside abortion clinics have moved on to courthouse lawns.

The Ten Commandments is a crowd-pleasing cause. A huge majority of Americans regard these words as a map for a good life, though an equally large majority has trouble reciting them. In this Disney culture, it`s entirely possible more people can name the seven dwarfs -- including Doc -- than the Ten Commandments.

Americans seem to want the Commandments displayed even if they don`t want them all enforced. When was the last time we arrested people at the local mall for dishonoring the Sabbath? When was adultery last a felony?

The Ten Commandments grace the walls of the U.S. Supreme Court building without controversy. Moses stands along with Confucius and Mohammed in a frieze celebrating the history of the law. But Roy`s Rock is about as nonsectarian as a sign over a judicial bench reading "What Would Jesus Do?"

Whenever I write about the wall separating church and state, someone dares me to find it in the Bill of Rights. Indeed, the Constitution says the government cannot establish religion and must protect the freedom to practice any religion or, indeed, no religion.

We`ve had bitter fights over when the state is endorsing religion. Prayer in the schools? Crèches in front of the library? We`ve had people who believe that government-enforced neutrality is really hostility. Jerry Falwell calls it "religious genocide."

But these days we Americans look at ourselves in the global light of places such as Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Our breed of democracy does more than let the majority rule. It also protects the minority -- the Zoroastrian, Zen Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, Muslim -- and lets us live together.

A protester carrying a 10-foot-tall cross in front of the Alabama courthouse said, "Maybe they can move the monument, but they can`t take it out of our hearts." But that, of course, is where it belongs.

Now the monument has been removed. As for the Ten Commandments Judge? Roy Moore has said that religion is above the law, that his monument means more than his job: "To do my duty, I must obey God. . . . I cannot violate my conscience."

May he follow his path -- and his rock -- right out of the courthouse.

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Prove the Weapons Case


By Colbert I. King

Saturday, August 30, 2003; Page A29


"When I was working for Henry [Kissinger], the president was signing 500 letters a week to widows," said L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, during an interview this week with Washington Post editors and reporters. Bremer cited Richard Nixon`s volume of sympathy notes to families of U.S. troops killed in Vietnam to suggest that the current rate of U.S. soldiers` deaths in Iraq -- one every two days since May 1 -- pales against the Vietnam death toll, isn`t a strategic problem for U.S. forces and won`t fuel sentiment to get out of Iraq. "I do not believe that the American people are quitters," he told us.

Bremer is not alone. Other administration and think tank hawks, columnists and TV talking heads also have a comfort level with the current American fatality rate in Iraq -- a sentiment not likely to be widely shared among families with loved ones on the line in Iraq.

Just ask the District`s Vernon Dent. On Tuesday in an area 16 miles northwest of Baghdad, Dent`s youngest child, Darryl, a D.C. National Guard soldier, was killed in action. "That`s my baby boy. He was a good kid," said the grieving and emotionally spent father. "You saw him, you saw me. . . . We were best friends."

But to America`s national security elite, both in and out of government, what`s one or two dead GIs every two days, especially when compared with Nixon`s hundreds of body bags each week?

For nearly an hour, the dapper and sharp-witted Bremer fielded a range of questions about the American occupation, reconstruction costs, terrorist threats, the U.S.-appointed 25-member Iraqi Governing Council and the U.N. role in postwar Iraq. But as the interview drew to a close, one topic had not come up. So it fell to me to raise the unmentionable with the U.S. occupation chief: How goes the search for weapons of mass destruction?

I was the skunk at the party.

Bremer didn`t say much beyond the fact that David Kay has about 1,200 people in Iraq working for him on weapons of mass destruction. Bremer indicated the team was making progress. And in a comment I found pregnant with significance, Bremer said he was confident they would find evidence of the biological and chemical "programs." Left unsaid was whether Kay and company would get beyond discovering "evidence of . . . programs" and actually find the weapons, there being a difference between the two. The word "nuclear," by the way, never passed Bremer`s lips.

Which gets us back to why we went to war.

For that, let`s revisit the day our nation marched to the brink: Wednesday, Feb. 5,when Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the United Nations to tell the rest of the world what the Bush administration knew about Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein`s efforts to build a stockpile of them. And as if to underscore their confidence in the intelligence on which Powell`s speech was to base his unqualified declarations, the Bush administration arranged for CIA Director George Tenet also to be seated in the Security Council chamber.

That day Powell, a highly decorated former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convinced me and plenty of others that Iraq, already in violation of U.N. resolutions, continued to harbor and build weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein was a threat to this country and must be disarmed. I wrote as much in a column the following Saturday.

The ensuing mail wasn`t pretty. A former Army lieutenant, I soldiered on.

Well, now Iraq is occupied; so are our troops, trying to stay alive. Occupation forces are struggling mightily to bring democracy and electricity to Iraq, not necessarily in that order. But the big question lingers: Where are those weapons of mass destruction?

I`ve come to discover -- belatedly some might say -- that the Bush administration is great at changing the subject when it comes to Iraq. Pro-administration revisionists would now have us think that the March invasion was really, truly, cross-their-hearts-and-hope-to-die all about liberating Iraqis from a tyrannical regime and bringing democracy to that country and its Arab neighbors.

Whoa.

That`s not what Powell told the world. There wasn`t a word in his speech about transforming the Arab world. Powell`s message was all about the dangers we faced and how time was a wastin.` "The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world," he told the United Nations. Weapons of mass destruction "are real and present dangers to the region and the world."

He described a frightening future unless the world acted quickly. "Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few months or years is not an option," Powell said. And he left no doubt that the United States had the goods on Iraq. "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we`re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid evidence."

So where are the "real and present dangers?" The administration`s failure to produce the goods is deeply troubling, especially for those of us who bought what Powell was selling.

Am I now off the reservation? Not yet. But if at the moment Powell can`t put his hands on those weapons, it sure would be helpful if he and his administration colleagues produced for public viewing the sources of his vaunted intelligence on making the case for a U.S.-British preemptive strike. For starters, I have in mind:

• Proof that Hussein`s late son, Qusay, issued an order directing the removal of all prohibited weapons from Hussein`s palaces.

• Evidence that Hussein directly participated in efforts to prevent interviews with Iraqi scientists.

• Public appearances by: first, the Iraqi chemical engineer who allegedly witnessed a biological agent production run and saw an accident at a production site in 1998; second, the Iraqi civil engineer knowledgeable about the biological agent program who confirmed the existence of transportable facilities moving in trailers; third, the human source who corroborated the movement of chemical weapons in May 2002; fourth, the eyewitness who saw prisoners being experimented on to perfect biological or chemical weapons; fifth, the sources that said a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations in western Iraq.

Whatever the circumstances at the time, those sources have nothing to fear from Hussein today. Produce them.

The Bush administration beat the drums for war, with Powell among those pounding the loudest. And since the invasion, hundreds of Americans have died -- we`re taking casualties every day -- and the nation is bleeding a billion dollars a week. Iraqis are bearing the heaviest burdens of all.

Produce the goods.

Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz and the administration`s whiz kids cut no ice with me; they seem to make it up as they go along and can be expected to say anything to get their way. The thought of Powell squandering his credibility on them is hard to stomach, especially given this nation`s outpouring of precious blood and treasure. So because I think better of Powell and hope that his case for disarming Iraq holds up, I`m not yet off the reservation.

But my bags are packed.

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Friday, August 29, 2003

Global Eye -- Die Laughing

By Chris Floyd


Here`s a headline you don`t see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that`s not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime`s new campaign to put Saddam`s murderous security forces on America`s payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush`s Iraqi Raj are now doling out U.S. tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo -- perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that`s the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad -- and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people -- even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" -- aren`t exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam`s goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they`re certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also reopened Saddam`s most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis -- men, women and children as young as 11 -- seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times of London reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Anna Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

However, the sahibs` unabashed embrace of their soulmates in the Saddamite security forces did provide some sinister comedy in the Post story. The wary reporters and Raj officials displayed the usual hilarious delicacy in coming up with reality-fogging prose to protect the tender sensibilities of the American people, who must never be told what their betters are really getting up to.

For example, the U.S. alliance with Saddam`s killers -- yes, the very ones who inflicted all those human rights abuses which, we`re now told, was the onliest reason the Dear Leader attacked and destroyed a sovereign nation in an unprovoked war of aggression -- was described demurely as "an unusual compromise." (As opposed to, say, "a moral outrage," or "a putrid stain on America`s honor," or "a monstrous copulation of rapacious conquerors with bloodthirsty scum.") However, the Post hastens to assure us that the wise sahibs do recognize the "potential pitfalls" of hooking up with "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment."

Those kidders! Surely they know this "potential pitfall" is actually one of the main goals of the entire bloody enterprise: to intimidate the "Arab world" until they straighten up and fly right -- i.e., turn their countries over to Halliburton, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group. That`s why you buy an "instrument" like the Mukhabarat in the first place. You certainly don`t employ professional murderers and rapists if you are genuinely interested in building a "decent, open, democratic society," as the Bushists claim in their imperial PR.

But like vaudeville troupers of old, the media-sashib double act saves the best gag for last. First the Postmen present the seamy Bush-Mukhabarat humpa-humpa as some great spiritual agon -- "an ongoing struggle between principle and-the practical needs of the occupation" -- instead of what it is: business as usual for the American security apparatus, which happily incorporated scores of its Nazi brethren into the fold after World War II, and over the years has climbed into bed with many a casually raping and murdering thug -- such as, er, Saddam Hussein, who spent a bit of quality time on the CIA payroll.

In fact, the entire Baathist organization -- including the Mukhabarat -- was midwifed into power by not one but two CIA-backed coups, as historian Roger Morris reports in The New York Times. And shall we mention the intimate relations between Saddam`s regime and U.S. intelligence services back when Saddam was merrily gassing his own people -- and the Iranians -- with the eager connivance of Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and their "special envoy" to Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld? Yes, let`s.

So the new alliance is no "struggle:" It`s a veritable Bush family reunion, a happy homecoming for Rummy and his old Mukhers. But "this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood" -- or to Post readers, anyway. Our vaudevillians, eager to keep the fleecy Homeland flock nestled comfortably in its cozy amnesia, skip the history and go straight to the punchline: Raj officials say that it`s OK to hire the most hardcore killers, rapists and torturers -- as long as you "make sure they are indeed aware of the error of their ways."

You guys! What yocks! "So, Mr. Mukhabarat Man, are you indeed aware of the error of your ways?" "Oh yes, boss, I got my mind right!" "Not going to rape or torture anybody anymore?" "Oh no, boss, no -- not unless you tell me to!" "Okey-dokey then! You`re hired! Get on over to Abu Ghraib -- you`ve got some interrogating to do!"

What? It`s not funny? What do you mean? Look at those Iraqi kids over there, those American soldiers -- they`re grinning from ear to ear! No, wait -- that`s just their skulls. The new Bushabarat are using them for soccer practice.

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ZNet | VisionStrategy

Intellectuals

by Noam Chomsky ; August 29, 2003

D: Last year we worked on a seminar, made by the students, called Genealogy of dominion. We studied Max Stirner, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Etienne De la Boetie and Hannah Arendt. I worked on Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, he believes language has a disciplinary effect that through the words goes straight to ideology. So for Stirner, you have to free yourself from this kind of language and have a personal rebellion, not a revolution. This is something different from your language conception that is free and creative. I want to know what you think about that.

C: I think Stirner is confusing language with the use of language. I mean it is like asking whether you have to free yourself from a hammer because a hammer can be used by a torturer. It is true that a hammer can be used by a torturer but the hammer can be used also to build houses. The use of a hammer is something we must pay attention to, but the language can be used to repress, can be used to liberate, can be used to divert. It is like saying you have to liberate yourself from hands because they can be used to repress people but it`s not hands` fault.

D: It is very hard to live in the U.S. for a left activist. I don`t feel very comfortable in your country. What is the condition of activism in the U.S.?

C: The situation is really complicated. There are no labor-based groups and there is no labor based political party. People are completely disconnected and this lack of connection is a real problem. Don`t forget that the Marxist movements were never very strong in U.S. in all of its history: there were ambiences in which independent Marxists gained influence but this didn`t happen in the main part of the country. Also remember that the U.S. government is an extreme radical and nationalist group with some similarities to European Fascism. It has proclaimed "imperial ambitions" relying on its overwhelming predominance in the military dimension, and is unusual in its dedication to the needs of narrow sectors of wealth and private power. People in the United States work really hard, much harder than any other
advanced industrial society and this causes a lot of stress. People are always concerned about their work and they live in fear. Although there is a lot of crime in the United States, it is approximately the same as comparable societies, but fear of crime is far higher. In many ways, this is the most frightened nation in the world! Moreover, the level of activism depends upon which part of the United States you are thinking of: United States is a very complicated country with many different tendencies. For example, last week I was in the largest university in the country, which is not exactly the liberal centre of the nation: Texas. In Houston and Austin, where I was, there were all kinds of community and campus-based activities. At the University of Texas there were thousands of people involved in protest after Congress authorized the use of force, and the student government passed a strong anti-war resolution. One finds similar things all over the country, at a level that is quite without precedent. There has never been anything like such protest before a war is officially launched, and war-peace issues are only one element of the broad popular movements that are taking shape, committed to a wide range of issues and concerns.

D: I was impressed by the fact that everywhere, in shops, in bars, at the movies, there is the same poster about 9-11 with the sentence, "We`ll never forget". In Europe, maybe we would have written something like, "We`ll always remember". It seems that there is a taste for revenge in your ad…

C: You have all sorts of different reactions, I mean, right after September 11, it was reported that a big proportion, or a high majority, of the population wanted the attack against Afghanistan. It`s a normal feeling; now the same majority would pursue diplomatic solution.

D: In a text of yours you say that the world is ruled by a "virtual senate". Can you tell me something more about this?

C:The term is not mine. I am borrowing it from the professional literature on international economics. The "virtual senate" consists of investors and lenders. They can effectively decide social and economic policy by capital flight, attacks on currency that undermine the economy, and other means that have been provided by the neoliberal framework of the past 30 years. You can see it in Brazil right now. The "virtual senate" wants assurances that the neoliberal policies of the Cardoso government, from which foreign investors and domestic elites greatly benefit, will not be changed. As soon as international investors, lenders, banks, the IMF, domestic wealth, and so on, recognized that Lula might win the elections, they reacted with attacks on the currency, capital flight, and other means to place the country in a stranglehold and prevent the will of the majority from being implemented. When they regained confidence that Lula would not be able to depart fundamentally from the international neoliberal regime, they relaxed and welcomed him. As they put it, Lula reassured people that he would keep Brazil safe. That specific use of language has: two faces: if he keeps it safe for the financial investors, will he keep it safe for the Brazilian? Governments face what economists call a "dual constituency" : voters, and the virtual senate. Lula promised his country that he will keep Brazil safe for the population, but the IMF wants to keep it safe for the its own constituency: the virtual senate. They will act so that the money comes right after the elections and only if Lula keeps up with creditors. This is the effect of financial liberalization and other measures that have established the virtual senate as the dominant force in determining social and economic policy within a country. It means the population doesn`t have control of the decisions taken by his own country. One consequence of liberalization of capital is rather clear: it undercuts democracy.

D: This is a big win for the left in the world; Brazil is such a big country.....

C: I have a lot of respect for Lula but the problem is that he has very little space to maneuver. Actually he has some choices: he can become some sort of figurehead in the hand of IMF or he can do some good for Brazil. If he doesn`t get killed first...

D: We hope not...

C: Lula could direct resources for internal development but unregulated capital flow can be used very effectively to undermine attempts by individual governments to introduce progressive measures. Any country trying to stimulate its economy or increase its health spending is likely to find this deviant behavior instantly punished by a flight of capital.

D: It seems to me, with a certain degree of difference, that the concept of a virtual senate is similar to Negri`s and Hardt`s concept of Empire.

C: Empire, yes, but I have to say I found it hard to read. I understood only parts, and what I understood seemed to me pretty well known and expressible much more simply. However, maybe I missed something important.

D: Yes, and the book arrives to the same conclusion as yours but through a more complicated, less readable way...

C: If people get something out of it, it`s OK! What I understand seems to be pretty simple, and this is not a criticism. I don`t see any need to say in a complicated way what you can say in an easier way. You can make things look complicated, that`s part of the game that intellectuals play; things must look complicated. You might not be conscious about that, but it`s a way of gaining prestige, power and influence.

D: Do you look at Foucault`s work in this prospective?

C: Foucault is an interesting case because I`m sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it. The only way to understand Foucault is if you are a graduate student or you are attending a university and have been trained in this particular style of discourse. That`s a way of guaranteeing, it might not be his purpose, but that`s a way of guaranteeing that intellectuals will have power, prestige and influence. If something can be said simply say it simply, so that the carpenter next door can understand you. Anything that is at all well understood about human affairs is pretty simple. I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression. I find that I have to decode him, and after I have decoded him maybe I`m missing something. I don`t get the significance of what I am left with. I have never effectively understood what he was talking about. I mean, when I try to take the big words he uses and put them into words that I can understand and use, it is difficult for me to accomplish this task It all strikes me as overly convoluted and very abstract. But -what happens when you try to skip down to real cases? The trouble with Foucault and with this certain kind of theory arises when it tries to come down to earth. Really, nobody was able to explain to me the importance of his work...
.
D: Do you think intellectuals should free themselves from theory, from visions, such as Zapatistas, and Marcos?

C: Marcos` own thoughts were interesting, but there is no such think as an "absence of theory", I mean, you always have a commitment to some set of beliefs, goals and visions and so on, or to some kind of analyses of society. That is true whether you are expressing your views on torture, or freedom of speech, or in fact any issue beyond the most utterly superficial.

D: I was thinking of your text, Goals and Visions, and I think that sometimes it is much more important to concentrate on goals and forget the visions…

C: You don`t have to forget them; there is a balance. You have to make your own choices; I mean close friend of mine may make very different choices than me. For example Michael Albert thinks that is really important to spell out the visions. My feeling is that we don`t know how to do that, so this kind of work is less important than that on goals. These are speculations about reasonable priorities, doubtless different for different people, as they should be. There is no general "right or wrong" about it.


D: When you talk about the role of intellectuals you say that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country. Could you explain this assertion?

C: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn`t much that you can do about them. If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the US, which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized "that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country." And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms. It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms. In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government policy. So if we adopt truisms, that is where we will focus most of our energy and commitment. The explanation is even more obvious than in the case of official enemies. Naturally, truisms are hated when applied to oneself. You can see it dramatically in the case of terrorism. In fact one of the reasons why I am considered public enemy number one among a large sector of intellectuals in the US is that I mention that the U.S. is one of the major terrorist states in the world and this assertion though plainly true, is unacceptable for many intellectuals, including left-liberal intellectuals, because if we faced such truths we could do something about the terrorist acts for which we are responsible, accepting elementary moral responsibilities instead of lauding ourselves for denouncing the crimes official enemies, about which we can often do very little. Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people who make great efforts to evade it. For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated into dominant institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power concentrations, often taking a critical look but in very limited ways. For example, one may criticize the war in Vietnam as a "mistake" that began with "benign intentions." But it goes too far to say that the war is not "a mistake" but was "fundamentally wrong and immoral" - the position of about 70 percent of the public by the late 1960s, persisting until today, but of only a margin of intellectuals. The same is true of terrorism. In acceptable discourse, as can easily be demonstrated, the term is used to refer to terrorist acts that THEY carry out against US, not those that WE carry out against THEM. That is probably close to a historical universal. And there are innumerable other examples.

Antasofia

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&Ite…

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NEWS ANALYSIS


Discord May Be Deepening in Iraq
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

August 30, 2003

BAGHDAD — It may have been his tolerance for the U.S. occupation that made Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim a target.

Or, as a returned exile vying for power with entrenched Shiite factions, he might have incited extremist rivals to mass murder.

Or, he might have been the victim of Saddam Hussein loyalists bent on pitting factions of the Shiite Muslim majority against each other to divide and conquer their empowered enemies in the roiling politics of the new Iraq.

Whatever hand felled the revered cleric and scores more in the deadliest act of religious violence since Hussein was deposed in April, the aftermath threatens to sow deeper discord and instability, undermining the U.S.-led coalition`s efforts to bring peace to a country it took over four months ago but has yet to pacify.

The attack is expected to raise tensions among Shiites, and between that group and the minority Sunni Muslims who oppressed Shiites under Hussein, and between Iraqis and American soldiers. The attack also brought the gears of government-building grinding to a halt. The 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, which was to have announced Cabinet appointments today, declared three days of official mourning.

Although Muqtader Sadr, a radical cleric in Baghdad, had been waging ideological battle with Hakim over the U.S.-led occupation, Iraqi Muslims expressed skepticism that any devout Islamic faction would attack even archenemies at Najaf`s Imam Ali Mosque. It is the holiest Shiite place in the country.

Most suspicion settled on remnants of the former regime, because Hussein`s Sunni followers routinely tortured, imprisoned and executed Shiites during the 35-year Baathist dictatorship that ended with the fall of Baghdad on April 9. The deposed leadership would have the most to gain by simultaneously outraging Shiite enemies and casting U.S. occupiers as inept in securing the peace.

Daily attacks on coalition convoys, electricity and water supplies and other infrastructure vital to the economy, such as an oil pipeline to Turkey, have embarrassed the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Each act of sabotage further erodes public confidence and discredits the Governing Council and foreign occupiers as unable to guarantee law and order.

Even before the extent of Friday`s bloodshed was known, Muslim leaders were calling on their followers to pursue the perpetrators and bring them to justice. Some called for revenge, raising the prospect of escalating clashes that could quickly overwhelm the already stretched coalition forces.

While in exile in Iran, Hakim helped form the Badr Brigade, a Shiite force that waged a limited guerrilla war against the Hussein regime. The exiles returned to Iraq after Hussein was deposed and served as a security force.

If the Najaf tragedy instigates further sectarian violence, the Bush administration may be compelled to look to U.N. peacekeepers to prevent widespread fighting and chaos. The Pentagon has so far refused to consider transforming its occupation into a peacekeeping operation under United Nations leadership. But such help might be necessary if the coalition, with 150,000 troops to contain 25 million Iraqis and administer a nation the size of California, decides it needs reinforcements. Ninety percent of the coalition forces are Americans, many already here for months and eager to return home.

"Those within the administration who are arguing for a bigger U.N. role certainly have had their hand strengthened," said Tamara Wittes, a Middle East expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged Iraqis to "refrain from further acts of violence and revenge," condemning the Najaf attack as the work of criminal extremists. In a rebuke to the Bush administration, Annan`s statement added that "only a credible, inclusive and transparent political process can lead to peace and stability in Iraq."

Shiite leaders accused Hussein supporters of orchestrating the bombing, but they also blamed the coalition for failing to ensure the security for which they are legally responsible following the invasion. Even the Iraqi exile groomed by Washington as a possible Hussein successor, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, implied that the U.S.-led forces are culpable for failing to maintain order.

"I don`t hold the American forces responsible for the Hakim assassination. But I hold the coalition forces responsible for security in Iraq," Chalabi told Al Jazeera television.

U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, who left Iraq this week for vacation and consultations in Washington, acted quickly to express U.S. sympathies and denounce "the enemies of the new Iraq" for the attack.

"Again, they have killed innocent Iraqis. Again, they have violated one of Islam`s most sacred places. Again, by their heinous action, they have shown the evil face of terrorism," Bremer said in a statement.

Hakim`s death wasn`t the first killing of a moderate urging patience with the national chaos and reconciliation among Shiites after years of oppression. On April 10, a day after Baghdad`s fall, prominent cleric Abdel Majid Khoei was shot and stabbed to death at the same mosque where the bomb killed Hakim.

Hakim, like most Iraqis, had expressed opposition to the occupation. But he had encouraged followers to take a peaceful, civil path to restoring Iraqi leadership, to the point of letting his brother, Abdelaziz Hakim, take a seat on the Governing Council that was appointed by U.S. officials to guide a transition to Iraqi rule.

Hakim might have run afoul of other Shiite groups because his more than two decades in exile gave many here reason to believe that he hadn`t shared their suffering under Hussein. Among impoverished Iraqis, there is broad resentment of wealthy and powerful families like the Hakims.

Muqtader Sadr, the young cleric in Baghdad`s biggest Shiite-controlled slum, has called for driving out the occupiers and establishing an Islamic state. He has amassed a sizable and vocal following by virtue of being the son of a revered Shiite ayatollah, Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, who was killed by Hussein`s forces in 1999. The younger Sadr accused the Governing Council this month of being a U.S. puppet.

Tensions between Shiites and the Americans have been growing. On. Aug. 13, a U.S. helicopter knocked down a banner — intentionally, the military admits — in Sadr City, the Shiite area of Baghdad. The action precipitated a riot that left one teenager dead when American troops opened fire.

"If it turns to chaos, we`re going to find ourselves very lonely in Iraq very soon," warned Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who once operated here. "If all the aid organizations leave and all the foreign investors leave, you`re going to have this place that could make Somalia look civilized."



*


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Times staff writers Sonni Efron, Paul Richter and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

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THE WORLD
a d v e r t i s e m e n t




Key Leaders Among Iraq`s Shiite Muslims
From Times Staff and Wire Reports

August 30, 2003

The Muslim world is divided into two principal groups. There are about 112 million Shiites among the 1.2 billion Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims are Sunnis.

There are differences between the groups in ritual and political organization, but the main division is over the Shiite belief that Imam Ali was the legitimate successor to the prophet Muhammad. Najaf is considered Ali`s burial site.

About 60% of Iraq`s population is Shiite. Among the most prominent figures:



Grand Ayatollah

Ali Sistani

The most senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, he heads the Hawza, the historic center of learning in Najaf that produces clerics serving throughout the Shiite world. Hawza leadership has traditionally avoided claiming direct political power.

The 72-year-old Sistani has rejected "foreign rule" but urged followers not to interfere with U.S. forces. He says he will accept whatever "form of government that the Iraqi people approve of."

The grand ayatollah was thrown into the thick of Shiite tensions the day after Saddam Hussein`s ouster.

Close associate and prominent cleric Abdel Majid Khoei was killed April 10 by a mob at the tomb of Imam Ali in Najaf. Khoei had just returned from exile in London and was calling for reconciliation among Shiites.

Several days later, a crowd surrounded Sistani`s Najaf home demanding that he leave Iraq. Sistani has since refused to leave his house. Supporters flocked to Najaf to help protect him.

*

Ayatollah Mohammed

Saeed Hakim

The uncle of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, who was killed Friday, and a leading cleric in his own right. Unidentified assailants tried to kill him Aug. 24, placing a bomb outside his house in Najaf. The explosion killed three guards and wounded a number of relatives. He suffered cuts to his neck.

Known for opposing Hussein, he was placed under house arrest during the regime`s final days. Iraqi newspapers reported last week that Hakim had received threats against his life.

*

Grand Ayatollah

Mohammed Ishaq Fayed

A leading figure in Najaf. Born in Afghanistan but immigrated to Iraq at an early age. Studied under one of Iraq`s most prominent clerics.

*

Muqtader Sadr

He is the son of Sistani`s predecessor, Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, who was killed by Hussein`s regime in 1999 and is now revered as a martyr.

Witnesses said followers of Muqtader Sadr were behind Khoei`s slaying in April and the siege of Sistani`s house. Sadr has insisted that he has no dispute with Sistani, according to Arab newspapers.

Though only in his 20s, Sadr enjoys a wide following because of his family name. Residents of Baghdad`s main Shiite neighborhood renamed it Sadr City after his father.

*

Ayatollah Sayed

Hadi Mudarrasi

Returned to Iraq in July after many years in exile. He was born in the holy city of Karbala, in central Iraq, and studied there until Hussein`s government began detaining Shiite clerics. He lives in Karbala.


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THE WORLD


A Suspected Operative of Al Qaeda Is Held in Iraq
U.S. forces also seized 11 missiles. The weapons prompt fears of deadlier attacks on troops.
By John Hendren and Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writers

August 30, 2003

WASHINGTON — A man believed to be an Al Qaeda operative, found with 11 surface-to-air missiles, has been arrested in Iraq by U.S. troops and has acknowledged that he had been training with Ansar al Islam fighters to use the weapons against American forces, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

The arrest marks the first time the U.S.-led coalition has apprehended someone believed to be a member of Osama bin Laden`s Al Qaeda terrorist network who is operating in Iraq.

The unnamed suspect was captured during an Aug. 20 raid in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, along with two other unnamed men, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. At least one of the other men was believed to be a member of the extremist group Ansar al Islam, the official said.

Intelligence officials said they found the suspected Al Qaeda member`s account, given during interrogation, "credible."

They declined to characterize how senior the alleged operative was or whether he had directed attacks on American troops or elsewhere before his capture.

A senior FBI official said that he was unaware of the arrests but that the capture of self-described Al Qaeda terrorists with such weapons is cause for significant concern.

"Lord yes, that concerns us. That type of equipment has the capability to do extensive damage," said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If they want to bring down an aircraft, or fire that into a building or a compound or anything like that, you are going to do significant damage in terms of injury and death."

The FBI official said it appeared to be the first time anyone believed to be an Al Qaeda member had been caught while in possession of surface-to-air missiles. Last year, the official noted, suspected Al Qaeda members fired two such missiles at an Israeli commercial jet as it was leaving an airport in Mombasa, Kenya, just missing the plane. The official said that one firing device was recovered but that no suspects have been apprehended in that case.

"Everyone thinks terrorists would use those [missiles] to fire at planes, which are hard to hit," the official said. "But there are any number of targets they could fire on that are stationary and much easier to hit, and they would cause mass casualties too."

Before the Iraq war, the Bush administration had contended that Iraq had links to Al Qaeda through Ansar al Islam, a claim used to bolster its allegation that the country was involved in international terrorism. But no hard evidence of such a link has been uncovered. The arrest of the suspected Al Qaeda member does not resolve whether Al Qaeda was operating in Iraq before the war or was drawn by the conflict.

"It would be amazing if Al Qaeda did not have operations in Iraq," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former senior Pentagon official who is now a military analyst on Iraq at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "What surprises me is the number of [surface-to-air missiles]. When you get that many missiles in-country, you`ve got a problem."

U.S. officials in Iraq recently told reporters that Ansar al Islam, expelled from its northern Iraqi bases by American forces during the war, had regrouped and was operating in Baghdad and elsewhere.

The organization recently intensified its activities, U.S. officials said Friday. U.S. intelligence officials said they have recent human and signal intelligence indicating that a senior leader of the group, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has returned to Iraq. He had been rumored to be in Iran.

"Intelligence says Zarqawi is back in Iraq and he`s planning operations against U.S. forces in Iraq," the senior official said.

A United Nations committee report last week found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Administration officials describe Zarqawi as an Al Qaeda operative linked to the assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan last year. U.S. intelligence officials have said Zarqawi operated in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, although there has been no definitive evidence that Saddam Hussein`s government collaborated with Al Qaeda.

"Zarqawi`s network inside of Baghdad ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen," President Bush said in June. "Time will prove that the United States made the absolute right decision in freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein."

In a Feb. 5 speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell focused on Zarqawi as a link between Bin Laden and Ansar. Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times, along with interviews with U.S. and Kurdish intelligence operatives, indicate that Ansar was partly funded and armed from abroad; was experimenting with chemicals, including toxic agents and a cyanide-based body lotion; and had aspirations to carry out international terrorism.

U.S. officials acknowledge that Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists. Of the 9,000 people detained in Iraq, about 240 are non-Iraqis, analyst Cordesman said. Administration officials say most of the foreign suspects have come through Syria.

A team of agents is still in Baghdad investigating the bombings this month of the U.N. compound and the Jordanian Embassy, but the agents "are not involved in the ongoing roundups" of suspected terrorists, the senior FBI official said.

The FBI is concerned about the threat of Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq, particularly ones who may have come in recent weeks and are preparing attacks, the official said.

"We don`t know for sure if there are Al Qaeda there, but that has always been our concern," the official said. "And we are very concerned about the number of jihadists who are in the country. There are a lot of questions as to who is responsible for the bombings, and we don`t have a lot of answers."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL


Increasingly, U.N. Is Needed

August 30, 2003

The car bombing Friday that killed scores of Iraqi worshipers, including a prominent cleric, should push the United States to move as fast as possible to share military and political power with other countries under the United Nations banner. U.S. efforts to restore security are at the gate of failure.

The U.S. and its coalition partner, Britain, have responsibility for Iraq as the occupying power. But the United Nations told U.S. officials to keep their forces away from U.N. headquarters in Baghdad before the Aug. 19 bombing that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. diplomat in Iraq, and more than a dozen others. Also, coalition forces did not provide security at Najaf`s Imam Ali Mosque, where Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim was killed Friday. The reason they gave: respect for Muslim sensibilities. Yet after the U.N. and mosque bombings, Iraqis blamed the U.S. for a lack of security.

The mosque attack demonstrates the complexities facing occupiers of a region rife with historic conflicts. Opponents of this war had warned of the danger of Iraq splitting into the Kurdish north, Shiite south and Sunni middle, as other groups sought vengeance against the Sunni minority for its oppressive rule under Saddam Hussein. Concern had grown recently about foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq, possibly some of them extremist Wahhabi Muslims. Now the tensions among Iraqi Shiite factions make the situation even more difficult. Hakim, exiled for years in Iran and a favorite of Shiite rulers there, sometimes called for an Islamic Iraq, disconcerting Washington and secular Iraqis. But he cooperated with occupation forces, and his family and organization are represented on the U.S.-appointed temporary governing council.

Bringing in help from nations with large Muslim populations like India, Pakistan and Turkey will not impose harmony or guarantee greater cooperation; their presence, however, could diminish resentment and anger at Western, non-Muslim occupiers. The death tolls have increased with each bombing — Aug. 7 at the Jordanian Embassy, Aug. 19 at the U.N. headquarters and Friday at the mosque. Aid agencies have withdrawn workers as chaos threatens to become anarchy. Yielding some political authority to the U.N. can speed the transition to an Iraq governed by Iraqis. Getting more troops from other nations, with the U.S. in command, can improve security and make it easier to fully restore electricity and oil pumping. Instability has long threatened the Mideast; an Iraqi civil war would be grave. Arab nations need to preach calm to fellow Sunnis; Iran should send the same message to Shiites so Hakim is the last cleric made a martyr.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Iraqis took to the streets today to protest and mourn the slaying of a leading Shiite Muslim cleric and scores of others in a suicide bombing Friday.

August 30, 2003
Four Men Arrested in Mosque Bombing
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 9:44 a.m. ET

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi police have arrested four al-Qaida-linked suspects in the bombing of Iraq`s holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, a senior police official told The Associated Press on Saturday.

The official, who said the explosion death toll had risen to 107, said the men -- two Iraqis and two Saudis -- were caught shortly after Friday`s car bombing.

The attack killed one of the most important Shiite clerics in Iraq, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who had been cooperating with the American occupation force.

On Saturday, 4,000 mourners chanted for vengeance in Najaf. In Baghdad, about 3,000 Shiites protested peacefully for about an hour at the gates of the U.S.-led coalition headquarters, complaining that the coalition`s failure to provide security led to al-Hakim`s death.

The police official, who led the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, said the prisoners told of other plots to assassinate political and religious leaders and to damage vital installations such as power plants, water supplies and oil pipelines.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bomb was made from the same type of materials used in the Aug. 19 bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, which killed at least 23 people died, and the Jordanian Embassy attack on Aug. 7, which killed 19.

The FBI said the U.N. bomb was constructed from ordnance left over from the regime of Saddam Hussein, much of it produced in the former Soviet Union.

The Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite broadcaster, quoting the Najaf governor, said 1,550 pounds of explosives were planted in two cars.

The police official said the suspects claimed a recent wave of bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus attention on the country`s porous borders, where suspected foreign fighters are believed to be infiltrating.

The four men arrived in Najaf three days before the bombing and had been staying with a friend who did not know their intentions, the official said.

American officials believe militants from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran are coming to Iraq to attack Western interests. President Bush said earlier this month that more foreign ``al-Qaida-type fighters`` have moved in.

Last week, a shadowy group that takes its name from the alias of Mohammed Atef, Osama bin Laden`s top deputy, claimed responsibility for the U.N. headquarters bombing.

The Abu Hafs el-Masri Brigades -- one of three groups to claim responsibility for the attack -- made its claim on a Web site, but U.S. officials said they could not authenticate it and it remained unclear if the group exists or has any link to al-Qaida. Atef was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in November 2001.

In Baghdad, 150 U.N. employees held a somber memorial service on Saturday to remember their colleagues killed in the Aug. 19 bombing of the U.N. office.

Meanwhile, thousands of angry mourners called for vengeance as they gathered outside the Imam Ali shrine, site of the bombing in Najaf.

``Our leader al-Hakim is gone! We want the blood of the killers of al-Hakim!`` a crowd of 4,000 men chanted while beating their chests.

The bombing was certain to complicate American efforts to pacify an increasingly violent Iraq. A moderate cleric, al-Hakim was seen as a stabilizing force in Iraq. He repeatedly asked the country`s Shiite majority to be patient with the United States.

Al-Hakim was the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. A member of the group`s politburo, Ali al-Ghadban, said the bombing would not deter it from cooperating with the Americans.

``We will continue in our dealing with the Americans, but the Americans should now be more aware of the fact that the Iraqis only are capable of preserving the security in the country,`` al-Ghadban said Saturday in Baghdad.

``They (the Americans) are responsible for the incident because of their failure to provide security in Iraq.`` He said the group would press the Americans for more powers for Iraqis.

Tens of thousands of worshippers filled the shrine and the surrounding streets for a funeral services for the victims. There was to be a service for al-Hakim in Baghdad early Sunday with the body then taken to Karbala, near Najaf. It was to be buried in Najaf on Tuesday.

In Najaf, the main road leading to the shrine was open only to pedestrians, and residents were seen carrying coffins on the tops of cars and backs of trucks for the service.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. occupation`s coordinator for Iraq, was out of the country on vacation and had no plans to return early because of the bombing.

While many here blamed the attack on the Sunni Muslim followers of Saddam Hussein, there has been fighting between Shiites as well.

Najaf, 110 miles southwest of Baghdad, is the headquarters of Iraq`s most powerful Shiite rivals, including followers of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad, Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr. Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraq`s population.

Also Saturday, a U.S. soldier was in critical condition after his Humvee plunged into a canal during preparations for a raid on the outskirts of al-Abbarah, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, the military said.

During the raid, dozens of soldiers supported by tanks and helicopters stormed seven houses and detained three men, including two suspected officials from Saddam`s regime, said Lt. Col. Mark Young, commander of 3rd Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.



Copyright 2003 The Associated Press |

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A burned car is removed from in front of the main Mosque in Najaf on August 30, 2003. A senior U.S. military officer said U.S. forces and Iraqi police have detained three people in connection with the car bomb attack that killed a top Iraqi Shi`ite Muslim cleric and scores of followers. Immediately after the bombing - which took place on August 29, 2003 - local people turned over to U.S. troops two people they believed looked like outsiders, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Woodbridge told Reuters. Photo by Peter Andrews/Reuters

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Saturday August 30, 20:17 PM


Iraqi Shiites mourn slain leader as world condemns car bombing

Thousands of Iraqis angrily mourned the country`s top Shiite Muslim leader, killed with at least 81 other people in the worst bombing since the start of the US-led occupation, while the attack was condemned around the world.

Thousands of mourners poured onto the streets of the holy city of Najaf, south of Baghdad, where the attack happened, and the southern city of Basra, crying for revenge and denouncing the failure of the US-led coalition to bring law and order to the country.

The United Nations and the White House also vigorously condemned the assassination on Friday, the Islaimc holy day, of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim, while analysts said it would deal a blow to efforts to rebuild the war-shattered country.

The blast, along with deadly attacks on the UN headquarters and Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, have created the impression the country is spinning out of control five months into the occupation.

In Najaf, 180 kilometres (110 miles) south of Baghdad, more than 2,000 mourners demonstrated, shouting: "We swear on Hussein to take the revenge of Hakim," and invoking the name of the grandson of the Muslim prophet Mohammed, one of the most venerated figures in the canons of the Shiite faith.

Gathered near the charred cars, heaps of brick and shattered glass from the explosion, they also shouted slogans against the United States over the death of their leader who discreetly cooperated with the US presence in Iraq.

Ammar Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the son of Hakim`s brother and Governing Council member Abdel Aziz, lashed out out at the US-run coalition while addressing the demonstrators, saying it was not welcome in Iraq.

"We have told the occupation forces that Iraq is for Iraqis and not for them," Hakim`s nephew said. He urged the Americans to hand over security control.

In the southern port of Basra, more than 5,000 people marched from the local office of Hakim`s political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to el-Ebla mosque in the heart of Iraq`s second largest city.

"There is no God but Allah. Death for Israel. Death for Baathis," chanted the marchers, who also blamed the Americans for their leader`s death.

"The responsibility of Hakim`s death lies on the British and American forces because they neglected security," they shouted.

Even as demonstrators raged against America, rescue workers in Najaf combed the mountains of rubble for Hakim`s body, which still has not been found.

But family members said one of his hands and some of his flesh had been recovered and that his funeral will be held Tuesday.

Moments before his death, Hakim had delivered his weekly sermon in the Tomb of Ali, in which he denounced Saddam loyalists.

The car bombing, which wounded 229 other people, followed an August 19 suicide truck bombing on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 22 people, including top UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and wounded more than 100.

Earlier this month another attack at the Jordanian embassy in the capital claimed 14 lives.

UN staffers in Baghdad paid a final tribute Saturday to those killed in the attack on the UN offices, which has since led to a substantial reduction in the number of world body staff in the Iraqi capital.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also strongly condemned the attack in Najaf and called on all groups in Iraq to refrain from violence and revenge.

US President George W. Bush denounced the bombing as "vicious" and said the United States would help hunt down those responsible.

"I strongly condemn the bombing today (Friday) outside the Imam Ali mosque," he said in a statement from his Texas ranch, where he is vacationing.

"This vicious act of terrorism was aimed at (Hakim), at one of Shia Islam`s holiest sites, and at the hopes of the people of Iraq for freedom, peace, and reconciliation," he said.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell labelled the car bombing "a heinous crime against the Iraqi people and the international community."

The US overseer in Iraq, Paul Bremer, said it "shows that the enemies of the new Iraq will stop at nothing. They have killed innocent Iraqis. Again they have violated Islam`s most sacred places," he said.

For its part, Iran declared three days of mourning for the slain cleric and placed ultimate responsibility for the attack on the "occupation forces."

Firebrand Iraqi Shiite Imam Moqtada Sadr called for three days of strikes in Iraq after the blast.

"We are calling for the people ... to demonstrate to condemn this crime. We are calling for a three-day strike," Sadr told Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera in an interview from Najaf.

Sadr also lashed out at the Americans, labelling them the greatest enemy in post-war Iraq.

Elsewhere in Iraq, there was a small explosion near the entrance to the British forces headquarters in Iraq`s main southern city of Basra Friday night.

The explosion wrecked two cars but caused no injuries.

Witness Mohammad Hussein said someone had thrown a grenade toward the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway that runs along the base, one of Saddam`s former palaces, "because the people sit on the bank and drink alcohol."

In Sardinia, where he was taking a weekend break at the Mediterranean island home of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for "real involvement" by the United Nations in Iraq if the escalating violence there is to be halted.

[Joerver]

Published on Friday, August 29, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Hooray for GI George
by Jill Rachel Jacobs

Evildoers everywhere: Beware. “GI George,” is here. Blue Box Toys, the same company that brought you the “Hello Kitty” merchandising line, has announced the limited edition of “Elite Force Aviator,” the George Bush action figure doll, available at Kay Bee toy stores beginning September 15.

Dressed in traditional naval aviator garb, this sleek action figure will bring back fond memories of that historic, yet very costly day for taxpayers, when George Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln, signifying the end to major combat in Iraq. Though the real George W. never actually made it to combat, this 12 inch replica will make you think he did as it comes equipped with the standard helmet, extra oxygen, a parachute harness, miniature flares--all replicating Bush’s historic aircraft carrier landing.

And for just $39.99, the George Bush action figure can be yours! Be the first on your block to own a piece of history commemorating the demise of society as we once knew it, as the merging of politics and commercialism has created an alarming new low for civilized people everywhere.

Why not collect the whole set?

BUFF PRESIDENTIAL GEORGE: Boasting a resting heart rate of 45 and a body fat percentage to die for, when this trim Presidential action figure says, “Let’s Get Physical,” its one thing he really means. Though many Americans find themselves struggling to find time for even the basics during these tough tumultuous times, “Buff George” knows how to prioritize, never misses a workout and has even managed to increase his muscle mass during times of national peril. Now that’s dedication.

Treadmill, Walkman and headband sold separately.

GOP FUNDRAISING GEORGE: Doubling as a piggy bank, this action figure knows no bounds when it comes to raising a buck. With a hollowed head doubling as a bank, your children will enjoy hours of fun stuffing large bills into his empty head, believing that their money is secure, even as the greenback begins to fall and interest rates rise. Lost your nest egg during the stock market crash? Worried about your future and our record-breaking national debt? Forget your financial woes for now and marvel in the wonderment of “GOP George” as he continues to shatter all political fundraising records.

Nominal tax break included with most dolls.

LEISURE COMMANDO GEORGE: Whether home on the range at “The Western White House,” or kicking back on the golf course, this not so action figure brings new meaning to the word “relaxation.” So the unemployment rate is skyrocketing, 44 million Americans don’t have health insurance and the sanest among us spend inordinate amounts of time purchasing large quantities of duct tape and plastic. With this action figure’s laissez-faire attitude, you’ll start to wonder what all the fuss is about. Forget Saadam. Osama who? WMD’s? Oh pa-leeze! Relax and take comfort with “Leisure George” in your camp, because when the going gets tough, the tough get going--on vacation.

Cowboy hat, golf cart and Ford pick-up not included.

CHATTY PRESIDENTIAL GEORGE: ”Is our children learning ?” They will be now as one can never “misunderestimate” the importance of language and the hours of fun you and your family will have learning new words on the spot with this talking wind-up action figure. You say “nuclear,” he says, “nookular," with “Chatty George,” you’ll be so mixed up that you too will begin to wonder what words are real and what words are just figments of the imagination of this irrepressible and zany doll.

Dictionary and Yale Diploma sold separately.

THE DICKIE DOLL: Kudos to the creators of this replica of The Veep who were forced to rely solely on memory when re-creating this remarkable life-like image of the second in command. While this action figure is almost impossible to find, those willing to risk going underground may be able to get a glimpse of what is sure to be a rare collector’s item.

Extra batteries included.

Jill Rachel Jacobs is a New York based writer and humorist whose recent publishing credits and appearances include Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Independent, The Toronto Star, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Daily News, Tom Paine, Pundit Magazine, The New York Times Syndicate, National Public Radio and CBS Sunday Morning.

[Joerver]

The Inconveniences Of Liberty And Bush`s `Straussian` Ideas


Dr. Gerry Lower, Keysone, South Dakota
Bush Watch, www.bushwatch.com

Even the national press has sounded the alarm about the "Straussians." The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, has been and is still heavily influenced by neoconservative "intellectuals" who are themselves under the influence of the teachings of Leo Strauss. These include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon`s Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council.

Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, came to America in the late 1930s and was particularly interested in political philosophy and the study of tyranny. He taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s during the Cold War, when capitalism went on a global manic binge and liberalism died a silent death with its conversion to "liberal" capitalism (an oxymoran) and away from socialism (Death of the American Politic, BushWatch, August, 2003).

Much has been written recently about Strauss and his ideological influence on the Bush administration, and opinion varies from seeing Strauss as a loyal defender of Democracy to seeing him as a dangerous foe of Democracy. He is neither. He is a would-be philosopher whose Old World fears and prejudices took him, the political right wing and American democracy backward instead of forward. Strauss, like most conservative Americans, simply did not understand Jeffersonian democracy at all.

Even as the Bush administration takes refuge in Straussian ideas, it remains the Bush administration who is responsible for implementing any action based on those ideas. It seems more likely the case that the Bush administration is simply "using" Straussian ideas to promote it`s own agenda, as it likewise "uses" Old Testament JudeoRoman attitudes and ideas for nothing but it`s own ends.

The philosopher, Michael Polanyi ("The Study of Man, 1964), noted that it serves no good purpose to be judgemental of the thinkers of past worlds by the standards of our own world. So, for starters, we must be aware that Strauss was born and raised into a harshly tyrannical world quite different from the free world that most Americans knew in the 1960s. Strauss was from an Old World filled with grotesque notions to which 1960s Americans could not relate.

That Leo Strauss would occupy a conservative right wing stance during the 1960s is not surprising, but it says very little, in retrospect, about his grasp of political causation and course. The 1960s were simply replete with bright young Americans who were quite aware that the American sociopolitical "system" was corrupting itself, selling out on traditional family, community and national values at the expense of the the people. It was self-evident to most dissenting Americans that greed was ruining their homeland and compromising their rights, from whence their freedoms flow.

Today, of course, the utter corruption ("Enronization") of corporate America and the emergence of "influence-for-a-fee" government and despotic right wing Republican dominion stand as tangible proof that the dissenters of the 1960s were remarkably insightful. Strauss passed away in 1973 and has been spared this awkward outcome of "conservative" political philosophy. Strauss has not had to witness the production of the largest gap between the rich and the poor in human history, all in the name of conservative, right wing notions of "fairness." There is something of a minor tragedy in not living to see the fruits of one`s labor.

Strauss, in other words, did not deal with "here and now" reality (where all good philosophy begins). He did not deal with the self-evident socioeconomic shortcomings of the greed-driven capitalism of his day. He claimed to love Democracy but he unfortunately assumed, even following two decades of post WWII capitalization and commercialization, that the 1960s dissenters were wrong. Strauss assumed that America still represented the democracy that Jefferson and Franklin had in mind. This was an error common to the entire conservative right wing.

Doing philosophy, of course, is an ordered and integrated process. First comes the development of a rigorously-defineable world view, a conceptualization embracing the world, how it works and why it works. Political philosophy is then derived from that larger conceptual world view and no where else. The political philosophy emergent in Jefferson`s Declaration, for example, was derived largely from the dialectic values of science and nascent Christianity and the knowledge of science, no religion in sight. In Jefferson`s world, there was no external authority, our problems on this earth were our own. Strauss, on the other hand, proceeded on the assumption that one can legitimately derive new political philosophy by re-interpreting old political philosophy.

In this regard, Strauss never made the grade to philosopher, being typical of post WWII academic thinkers in America. He did not do philosophy. He simply read and reinterpreted the work of previous philosophers who have influenced the evolution of political thought. Had he known about Deism and natural philosophy, and given his love of democracy, Strauss would have begun at the evolutionary cutting ege of the art, with the ideas of Spinoza, Locke, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. But, no. Strauss, with his Old World background, began with philosophers of the distant past to create a political philosophy so full of ideas rejected by America`s fathers and so full of inconsistencies, it literally required abandoning the common sense logic of the EuroAmerican Enlightenment and Jefferson`s Declaration.

Strauss was just one of several influential American "philosophers" who failed utterly to recognize that Jefferson`s democracy is the political philosophy of science and nascent Christianity (no relationship to religion whatsoever), who failed utterly to comprehend the dialectic middle human ground values upon which Jefferson and our Deist fathers built democracy, and who failed utterly to recognize that American democracy actually came, right out of the box, with its own theology, based on the rejection of "external authority" (supernatural gods) and "absolutism" (religious self-righteousness) in order to achieve a society in which the people could think for themselves and approach the control of their own destinies.

Philosophy, of course, is entirely conceptual and built from contemporary human (scientific) knowledge assembled into views embracing the world as a whole. The very fact that the bulk of human knowledge has been generated during the latter half of the 20th century pretty much relegates Strauss` views to the evolutionary waste basket. Natural philosophy, for example, can no longer be considered without the incorporation of contemporary molecular biologic knowledge. With the mapping of the human genome, it is clear that all people on this planet have common origins, that all people are interrelated, that the concept of race is a good deal of superficial nonsense. It is this kind of emergent knowledge, so integral to human self-concept, that properly drives the continuous renewal of political philosophy. In Jefferson`s eyes, for example, the people were not children of God but the embodiment of God.

Now more relevant than ever (and unaddressed by Strauss), Jefferson`s theology was bottom-lined in the concept that Deity was located on the human inside, in the "head and heart" of every person, that the highest authority is the "will of the people, substantially declared." From this concept of Deity and from nascent (dialectic) Christian values comes the concept of universal human rights (Christian Values and Human Rights, BushWatch, July, 2003). These are the theological first precepts of Jeffersonian democracy. Strauss had little option but to miss them in his studies, because they are so entirely at odds with and they properly replace JudeoRoman notions of "theology" in a democracy under Jefferson`s Deist God.

Strauss saw JudeoRoman religion (which Jefferson ousted from the American political arena for very well-defined reasons) as a necessary opiate for those being controlled (the people) in the interest of those rightfully in control. Strauss, in other words, did not see government "of, by and for the people," he saw a JudeoRoman two-tiered world of the powerful and the powerless. In this, he missed the rather obvious, that JudeoRomanism also provides the justification for self-righteous, despotic dominion. The Straussian world was created entirely outside the boundaries of Jefferson`s democracy, as if Jefferson and Franklin couldn`t possibly have known anything about theology.

Strauss suffered from the European delusion that philosophy never crossed the Atlantic ocean. Liberal Democracy was wonderful but due to its own "liberalism" (e.g., the 1950s and 1960s), America had lost its way, to threaten not only itself but also the pillars upon which western culture had been built.

The pillars of western culture, according to Strauss, are represented by the great cities of Athens and Jerusalem, icons of the forces of reason and revelation. Modern culture, in his conservative mind, was certainly going to destroy these pillars of western culture. The "relativism" of American society in his time was seen as a "moral disorder" that could stop America from identifying its real enemies. This "crisis of the West" required the impossible, a reaffirmation of both science and religion, two mutually-exclusive approaches to comprehension from the start.

Strauss was seemingly unaware of the millennial conflict between science and religion and seemingly ignorant of what America`s fathers had rejected in the interest of defining and implementing American democracy. Strauss was unseeing and unquestioning of religion`s dark side and capitalism`s greed, and he essentially recommended that conservative America preserve itself by fighting tyranny with tyranny. This is classic Old Testament self-righteous morality, being willing to leave Jefferson`s Christian morality behind and drop to the same moral level as that occuppied by one`s enemies.

In truth, the pillars of western democracy are Athens and Bethlehem, not as icons of reason and revelation, but as icons of reason and compassion. Again, Strauss missed the Enlightenment distinction between Old Testament vengeance-based moralities and New Testament compassion-based moralities. Nascent Christianity is a rejection of Judaism and Romanism. These were the voices, afterall, that silenced Christian compassion.

In this, Strauss presented his conservative ignorance of history and causation in the cultural realm. The failures of Democracy were ascribed by the right wing to America`s departure from the religious morality of the past, when in truth those failures were due to the inherent unfairness and injustice of post-World War II greed-driven capitalism. It was also due to the fact that teaching Jeffersonian democracy had been largely eliminated from public education, as lamented by Saul Padover, a Jefferson historian ("Thomas Jefferson on Democracy") in 1939. Rather than start where Jefferson left off, Strauss attempted to rewrite American democracy within the context of the JudeoRoman world view rejected by America`s Fathers. Go figure.

Robert Pirsig ("Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," 1974) has noted that there is a world of difference between philosophy and rhetoric, the former an approach to comprehension and control, the latter an approach to manipulation. All political philosophy derived from nothing more than previous political philosophy has nothing new to offer and is necessarily geared to manipulation. Leo Strauss held an untrue world view of interest to the right wing and, in their hands, his contributions have become pure rhetoric, riddled with inconsistencies, which is to say there is no logic required.

It was not so much a matter of Strauss telling the right wing what they wanted to hear, but of the right wing listening only to what they wanted to hear, and they heard justifications for their political agenda. While not out to destroy Jefferson`s democracy, Strauss certainly contributed nothing to its advancement. Carol Burnett`s television show was more richly steeped in American philosophy than anything Strauss ever contributed.

The right wing adherents of Strauss, however, have proceeded to destroy Jefferson`s democracy and discredit the dialectic values which gave it birth. Were Jefferson religious, like these people, they would all burn in Jefferson`s hell. Fortunately, Jefferson was a Christian "in the only way ever intended." He knew that the principles of democracy (and nascent Christianity) cannot be imposed, least of all with despotic approaches, upon dull, closed minds. These values must be accepted, as Franklin pointed out, by free acceptance of the thoughtful and caring mind.

That someone would synthesize Old World JudeoRoman political philosophies into a view that would ultimately justify and nourish an American takeover by the religious right wing was inevitable, given the people`s neglected education and capitalism`s thirst for dominion. Straussian views are important only in the cultural evolutionary sense, only insofar as they have nourished religious crony capitalism in its quest for global dominion, only insofar as this quest ultimately leads to discrediting vengeance-based religion and crony capitalism from the global political arena. Would this not open the doors, once again, to democracy, this time on a global basis?

With this glorious and necessary outcome, we will not know whether to bless or blame Leo Strauss. Strauss was both inevitable and necessary for this evolutionary outcome to unfold. But, of course, Strauss was wrong, and wrong about most everything, because he failed to define and think within the frameworks of the Enlightenment`s Deist Democracy. Democracy will be revitalized in America and the world only after that becomes recognized and America returns to the theology from whence it emerged.

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it." Thomas Jefferson, 1791. 08.25.03

[Joerver]

From the way Bush is cupping his fingers,
he appears ready to give his buddies a helping hand

[Joerver]

Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
NEW YORK, Aug. 29, 2003
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/29/opinion/polls/prin…" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/29/opinion/polls/prin…

Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.

Although the public expresses more concern about U.S. involvement in Iraq, and American troops continue to experience casualties -- the number of American lives lost in Iraq since the war was officially declared over has now surpassed the casualties experienced during combat -- the public still supports a U.S. troop presence. Only a third want U.S. troops brought back home.

As they have for many months, Americans support a multilateral approach to rebuilding and governing Iraq, and that support has grown in this poll. 69% of Americans think the United Nations, and not the United States, should have the lead responsibility for setting up a new government in Iraq, even more than felt that way last April. 25% want the U.S. to be responsible for building an Iraqi government.

Democrats are strongly supportive of this multilateral approach; 83% want the United Nations to have the lead role in Iraq. A smaller majority of Republicans (56%) also prefers the U.N. to lead the government rebuilding effort.

The desire for U.N. involvement may be fueled by the growing perception that the U.S. is having difficulty in Iraq. Nearly half of Americans now think things are going badly for the U.S. in Iraq. That number has continued its rise since early last month.

HOW ARE THINGS GOING FOR U.S. IN IRAQ?

Now:
Well
51%
Badly
47%

8/12-13:
Well
53%
Badly
40%

7/8-9:
Well
60%
Badly
36%

There is a strong partisan element to these views, with Republicans offering a much more optimistic assessment than Democrats. 73% of Republicans think things are going well in Iraq (compared to 30% of Democrats), and 57% of Republicans think the U.S. is in control there (compared to 27% of Democrats).

Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.

IS THE U.S. IN CONTROL IN IRAQ?

Now:
Yes
42%
No
47%

8/12-13:
Yes
45%
No
43%

4/26-27:
Yes
71%
No
20%

Older people are especially likely to think the U.S. is not in control in Iraq. More women than men think things in Iraq are going badly, and fewer women think the U.S. is in control of the situation in Iraq.

But so far, there is no public demand for a withdrawal of American troops. Although just under a third think the number of U.S. troops in Iraq ought to be decreased, 41% think the U.S. should keep the same number of troops in Iraq, and 22% think the U.S. military presence in Iraq ought to be increased.

Those who think things in Iraq are going badly for the U.S. are over twice as likely as those who think it is going well to want U.S. troop presence decreased.

Before the war’s start, more than half of Americans expected the war against Iraq would increase the threat of terrorism against the U.S. That perception decreased as combat wound down, and now a third think the threat of terrorism against the U.S. has increased as a result of the war against Iraq. 48% think the threat of terrorism hasn’t been affected by the war, and 19% think the threat has decreased.

Americans do think the Bush Administration has not been forthright about its dealings with Iraq; 61% think the Administration has usually told the truth but has hidden some things. 19% think it has mostly lied, while 17% think the Administration has told the entire truth about Iraq.

ON DEALINGS WITH IRAQ, BUSH ADMINISTRATION HAS:

Told entire truth
17%
Hidden some things
61%
Been mostly lying
19%

Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.

Earlier CBS News Polls have also asked if ousting Saddam Hussein from power was worth the costs. Mentioning Saddam’s ouster increases public perception that the war has been worth it.

THE PRESIDENT

So far, the president does not appear to be affected by public restlessness over Iraq. President George W. Bush’s overall job approval rating is 55% in this poll, the same as it was earlier this month. 37% disapprove of the job he is doing as president.

His current ratings on handling foreign policy and the economy are also similar to those he received a few weeks ago. Now, 50% approve of his handling of foreign policy, and 39% approve of his handling of the economy.

BUSH’S JOB APPROVAL RATINGS:

Overall
55%
Handling foreign policy
50%
Handling the economy
39%

THE ECONOMY

Despite the ongoing conflict in Iraq, this poll shows some improvement on another issue the public cares deeply about – the economy.

While current assessments of the country’s economy are more negative than positive, views of the economy have improved slightly in the past few weeks. Now, 44% think it is in very or fairly good shape, and 54% think it is in bad shape. A few weeks ago, 38% thought it was in good shape and 60% thought it was bad.

25% think it is getting better (not much different from earlier this month), but slightly more – 31% -- think it is getting worse. 43% think it is staying the same.


For detailed information on how CBS News conducts public opinion surveys, click here.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 930 adults interviewed by telephone August 26-28, 2003. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus three percentage points for results based on the entire sample.

[Joerver]

Killing of Ayatollah Is Start of Iraqi Civil War
Commentary, William O. Beeman
Pacific News Service, Aug 29, 2003: The bombing of one of Islam`s holiest shrines not only killed an important Shi`a leader, it also signals the first shot in an Iraqi civil war that Middle East experts warned would ensue if Saddam were removed without careful planning.

The assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim in Najaf on August 28 is the opening volley in the coming Iraqi Civil War. The United States will reap the whirlwind.

One of the most consistent and ominous prewar warnings to the Bush administration by Middle East experts was that removal of Saddam Hussein without the most careful political and social engineering would result in the breaking apart of Iraq into warring factions that would battle each other for decades.

The hawks in the White House would not listen. They were so wedded to the fantasy scenario that the removal of Saddam in an act of "creative destruction" would result in the automatic emergence of democracy. They brushed aside all warnings.

Present-day Iraq was three provinces of the Ottoman Empire before World War I. It was cobbled together by the British for their own convenience after that conflict. The British installed a king, the Saudi Arabian son of the chief religious official of Mecca (Faisal, of Lawrence of Arabia Fame) and glued the whole mess together with the resident British Army.

The three regions were incompatible in ethnicity, religious confession and interests. The Sunni Muslim Kurds occupied the north. The Sunni Arab Bedouins occupied the center and Southwest. The Shi`a Arab and Persian population occupied the South and Southeast. Of the three groups, the Shi`a were largest, with 60 percent of the population. With oil, an outlet to the Persian Gulf and good agricultural land, they would be the natural dominant force in the state the British created. The Kurds would be important, too, because they lived in the region of the country with the largest oil reserves.

However, the British wanted the Sunni Arabs, the smallest faction of the population, to be dominant. They wanted this both to reward Saudi Arabians for helping them fight the Ottomans, and because they had existing clients in the sheikhs who ruled the Arab states of the Gulf.

When the British were finally expelled, and their Saudi ruling family deposed in Iraq in a 1958 nationalist coup, the new Ba`athist Iraqi nationalist rulers had a supremely unruly nation on their hand. The only way to keep power in Sunni Arab hands, and away from the Shi`ites was through ruthless dictatorship and oppression. Saddam Hussein was the supreme master of this political strategy.

Ayatollah al-Hakim`s family was victimized by this oppression. Virtually every one of the Ayatollah`s male relatives was executed by Saddam`s regime. He fled to Iran for years of exile, returning only after Saddam was deposed by the United States. He became one of the principal leaders of the Shi`a community, and a symbol of rising Shi`a power in post-War Iraq. His triumphant return to Iraq and the holy city of Najaf was one of the most celebrated events in recent Iraqi history.

It is still not known who set off the explosion that killed him at the shrine of Ali, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad. It could have been Sunni Arab factions who fear the rise of Shi`a dominance in Iraq, or it could have been his own Shi`a supporters, disappointed with him for cooperating with American policies in Iraq. Or it could have been someone else. What is clear is that his death will now forever be a rallying cry for the Shi`ite community against its enemies.

It is notable that in Shi`ism virtually all significant leaders have been "martyred." Of the 12 historical Imams of the Ithna `ashara branch of Shi`ism dominant in Iraq and Iran (Ithna `ashara means "twelve" in Arabic), ten are buried in shrines in Iraq. Their tombs are ever-present reminders of the oppression and struggle of the Shi`a. Now Ayatollah al-Hakim will join them, and with the power of a saint, will inspire generations of grimly dedicated young warriors, determined to wreak vengeance and assert the power of their community. They will be led by his own paramilitary group, the Badr brigade.

Shi`a fury will be directed at the Sunnis to the north. It will also be directed toward United States as the occupying force who both did nothing to prevent this tragedy, and further continued the British doctrine of Sunni favoritism by insisting that the Shi`a religious leaders would never be allowed to come to power. In any case, the forces of retribution are about to be unleashed in a manner hitherto unseen in the region.

Could the United States have done anything to have prevented this tragedy? Of course it could have. As the occupying power U.S. officials knew acutely about the danger to Ayatollah al-Hakim. Since Washington opposed the rise of Shi`a power in Iraq, charges of American indifference or even complicity in his death will soon be flying.

The final question Washington must now face is how to stop this inevitable civil war? When the factional shooting starts, where does the U.S. army, caught in the crossfire, aim its own guns?

William O. Beeman, Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is author of the forthcoming book, Iraq: State in Search of a Nation.

[Joerver]

Das sind zusammengerechnet 37 137 zivile Tote vom Beginn der Invasion bis Mitte Juni. Ohne die Zahl der Opfer in den Kurdengebieten.
Eine Beurteilung über die Richtigkeit der Zahlen ist von hier aus nicht durchzuführen.
Die Partei irakische Freiheit (Iraqi Freedom Party)
ist mir nicht bekannt.
Ob jemand die Zahlen glaubt, ist jedem selbst überlassen. Ich werde versuchen mehr über die Zusammenhänge zu erfahren.
Auch über die Webseite weiß ich nichts.
http://www.wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2855
Civilian War Deaths in Iraq


Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: A Freedom Party report

You probably did not notice, but I doubt you have ever read an estimate, formal or informal, of the number of Iraqi civilians who were killed in the recent Gulf War. Collateral damage in the USA’s liberation” of the Iraqi people. I’m not in any position to validate the report you will see here from Dr. Mohammed Al-Obaidi, the general coordinator of the Iraqi Freedom Party, but it does not seem unreasonable. I’ve run reports from the Freedom Party from time to time and its arguments on what is really happening on the ground have proven far more accurate than the rosy scenarios coming from the Pentagon. The report on civilian FATAL casualties in a nation of 23 million is staggering, the equivalent in percentage terms of 460,000 civilian deaths if such havoc were wrought in the US.

To add in the number of young Iraqi soldiers killed in the conflict – an equal number? -- further staggers the mind. It is only when you contemplate these horrific statistics can you understand why there is such crazed hatred of the US and why it cannot be smothered by killing more Iraqis. Al-Obaidi writes to me personally because he knows I have been able to get these reports of his Freedom Party -- which has for years opposed the Saddam regime -- circulating in the US. The report may not be entirely accurate, but I would hope it would spur the press corps into investigating on its own. Reporters who would like to contact Dr. Al-Obaidi can contact me for his e-mail address in the U.K.

* * * * *

To: Mr. Jude Wanniski
From: Dr. Mohammed Al-Obaidi
General coordinator of the Iraqi Freedom Party

The World, and particularly the peace-loving World is far from knowing the truth of the real number of civilian casualties during the American led aggression on Iraq.

Although we know that there were groups of organizations (see http://www.iraqbodycount.net) who tried their utmost best to come up with an accurate figure of the total civilian death, but reaching the sites where these deaths occurred was one major obstacle in their effort. Besides, the language barrier and hesitation of the people in Iraq to talk to foreigners were also part of the lack of accurate information regarding this issue.

As the general coordinator of the Iraqi Freedom Party, I made a request to our Party Headquarters in Iraq to fully investigate this matter and to come up with accurate and up to date information of the total civilians killed during the invasion of Iraq.

After more than five weeks of intensive and thorough investigations carried out by hundreds of our party’s cadre, which included all villages, towns, cities and some of the desert areas etc. affected by the aggression (with exception of the Kurdish area), and also by interviewing hundreds of undertakers, hospitals officials and ordinary people in these places, the figure of civilians killed since the beginning of the invasion came to 37,137. This figure does not include militia, para-military or Saddam’s Fiday’een.

The breakdown of the total number of civilians killed during the invasion of Iraq is as follows (Please note that the names underneath represent that of 14 Governorates, excluding Iraqi Kurdistan):

Baghdad 6103
Mosul 2009
Basrah 6734
Nasiriyah 3581
Diwaniyah 1567
Kut 2494
Hillah 3552
Karbala (including Najaf) 2263
Samawah 659
Amarah 2741
Ramadi 2172
Kerkuk 861
Diyalah 604
Tikrit 1797

The above figures were the actual civilian deaths killed violently since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in March this year and until the middle of June (including those killed after the fall of Saddam’s regime and who in a way of another caught between gunfire of the US troops and the Iraqi resistance).

Due to the absence in Iraq (with the exception of the Kurdish area) of functional communication systems with the outside World, our party headquarter in Baghdad tried to send me a fully comprehensive and detailed report by fax from Al-Sulaymaniyah (a Kurdish area). However, by crossing to the Kurdish area, the Kurdish “Peshmarga” searched the person carrying that report which was found with him and confiscated. According, he was handed over to the American troops where he was arrested and no one knows yet of his whereabouts.

This incident clearly indicates that the US Army does not want the truth of the civilian casualties made public.

We want the whole World knows the reality behind what misery was inflicted on our people during this aggression, not to mention the 14 years of economic embargo.

We believe that our people, like all the people of the World, deserve to live decently and without any more oppression. But what we see in Iraq since its occupation was nothing but more oppression and more humiliation, and this time by the aggressors.

The appointment by the American Administrator to Iraq of what is known as “Iraq`s interim governing council” is another slap on the face of the Iraqi people, who genuinely believe that this “Council” is nothing less than another “Vichy Government” similar to the one appointed by the Nazis in France. Also, the biggest lethal mistake committed by the American Administrator was to dissolve the Iraqi Army, and other government personnel leaving Iraq without any efficient technocratic power.

What we and the majority of the Iraqis were looking for was an Interim Council appointed by the Iraqis and not by the occupier. We also believe that what was brought by the occupier will not serve the Iraqis, but the occupier and its interests. After four months of the fall of Saddam’s regime, and following the continued volatile situation in Iraq, and the lack of the basic needs of the Iraqi people, Iraqis are talking now about what President Nasser of Egypt said: “what was taken by force must be retrieved by force”.

If Iraq will not be handed over soon to the real patriotic Iraqis, a black page will be written again in the history of America and its allies in Iraq.

* * * * *

[If you would like to receive these commentaries automatically, without charge, please register at the link provided at the upper left. You need provide only your name and e-mail address. You can end the service just as easily. The recommended readings in the right hand column are only accessible to subscribers and clients. JW]

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:09 a.m. EDT August 30, 2003

An Iraqi police official says two Iraqis and two Saudis with ties to al-Qaida are being held in connection to Friday`s deadly car bombing of a mosque in Najaf (NAH`-jahf). The official also tells The Associated Press that the bomb was made from the same type of materials used in the attacks on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Jordanian Embassy.
The Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite broadcaster quotes the governor of Najaf governor as saying more than 15-hundred pounds of explosives were planted in two cars that blew up outside Iraq`s holiest Shiite shrine Friday.
Thousands of angry mourners chanted for vengeance as they gathered this morning at the site of the mosque bombing in Najaf.
In Baghdad, 150 U.N. employees held a somber memorial service on Saturday to remember their colleagues killed in the August 19th bombing of the U.N. office.
Safety worries have prompted the United Nations to sharply reduce its staff in Iraq. The U.N. has about 400 people there -- and a source says it wants to slash that number by almost 90 percent. A bombing ten days ago devastated U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
American troops watched from a distance Saturday as dozens of Iraqi police stormed a farm near Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit. The commander says they found ammunition and artillery fuses buried in a dusty field.
A U.S. soldier was killed in an attack Friday on a convoy in Iraq. The military says four soldiers were hurt and one will need to have a leg amputated. Attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades at the supply convoy on a main road 40 miles northeast of Baghdad.
U.S. authorities involved in the rebuilding of Iraq say an international consortium of financial institutions led by J.P. Morgan Chase and Company will run a trade bank aimed at helping the Iraqi government make big-ticket purchases from other countries. The new Trade Bank of Iraq may be operating by the end of September.
Russia is helping draft a resolution to get the U.N. more deeply involved in rebuilding Iraq. But Russia and France want more concessions from the U.S. than the Bush administration seems willing to give. The U.S. still wants to keep overall control.
The Bush administration is optimistic it can attract peacekeeping troops for Iraq from at least India, Pakistan and Turkey by placing the operation under the U.N. flag. But as tentative drafts of a U.N. Security Council resolution were circulated Friday among administration officials, the State Department had yet to attract a consensus among them for expanding the U.N. role in Iraq.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair`s powerful communications chief Alastair Campbell, a central figure in the controversy over whether Britain exaggerated the Iraqi weapon threat to justify war, announced Friday that he will resign. In a statement issued by Blair`s office, Campbell said he intended to step down in "a few weeks" for family reasons.

CASUALTIES

A total of 282 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began in Iraq. Of those, 67 have died in combat since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Keine Aktualisierung

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Revealed: How Kelly article set out case for war in Iraq
· Unpublished analysis supports Government
· Military action only way to disarm country
· `Modest threat` but WMD on Saddam`s agenda

Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

A remarkable article by Dr David Kelly, published for the first time today, reveals the government scientist`s true views ahead of the war on Iraq and his expert assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

In a development which could have a major influence on the Hutton inquiry, Kelly said that, although the threat was `modest`, he believed military action was the only way to `conclusively disarm` the country.

He also argued that there was evidence Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons and regime change, the policy of the United States, was the only way to stop the Iraqi dictator.

The article was written for a major report on Iraq being compiled a few weeks before the war. Kelly had agreed to write it anonymously, but the piece was never published.

It will be sent to the Hutton inquiry this weekend and provides one of the few direct pieces of evidence of Kelly`s views since the row between the Government and the BBC broke out at the end of May.

Kelly apparently committed suicide last month after he was `outed` as the source for claims by Radio 4`s Today programme that the Government had `sexed up` intelligence against the Iraqi dictator to make a stronger case for war.

He insisted to the Ministry of Defence that he was not the source of claims that Number 10 deliberately inserted intelligence into the dossier, even though it knew it was `probably wrong` and against the wishes of the intelligence community.

The Observer obtained the article from the editor of the report, the journalist and Middle East expert Julie Flint, who writes in today`s paper about the man she came to know as a friend.

Its publication comes the day before the appearance of Kelly`s wife, Janice, before the inquiry. She is likely to testify by video link to avoid the media scrum created by other witnesses` arrival at the Royal Courts of Justice. Her evidence to the inquiry, set up to find out the cause of her husband`s death, has the potential to undermine fatally the evidence of both the BBC and the Government.

Last week Tony Blair admitted he was `fully responsible` for moves to name Kelly, believing it was inevitable the weapons expert would eventually be unmasked.

Kelly`s article reveals a hawkish stance on Iraq which will come as some comfort to Number 10. `Iraq has spent the past 30 years building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction [WMD],` he wrote. `Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use.`

Kelly argues that any co-operation with UN weapons inspectors was superficial and that rockets specifically for chemical and biological use had been found.

`Amer al-Saadi - formerly responsible for conserving Iraq`s WMD, now its principal spokesman on its weapons - continues to mislead the international community,` Kelly said before the war. `It is difficult to imagine co-operation being properly established unless credible Iraqi officials are put into place by a changed Saddam.

`Yet some argue that inspections are working and more time is required; that increasing the numbers of inspectors would enhance their effectiveness. Others argue that the process is inherently flawed and disarmament by regime change is the only realistic way forward.` Kelly said the UN had been trying to disarm Iraq since 1991, but had had no success in what he described as an `abject failure of diplomacy`. He argued that diplomatic splits had only served to exacerbate the problem.

`The threat of credible military force has forced Saddam Hussein to admit, but not co-operate with, the UN inspectorate,` he wrote. `So-called concessions - U2 overflights, the right to interview - were all routine between 1991 and 1998. After 12 unsuccessful years of UN supervision of disarmament, military force regrettably appears to be the only way of finally and conclusively disarming Iraq.`

`War may now be inevitable,` he wrote. `The proportionality and intensity of the conflict will depend on whether regime change or disarmament is the true objective. The US, and whoever willingly assists it, should ensure that the force, strength and strategy used is appropriate to the modest threat that Iraq now poses.`

`The long-term threat, however, remains Iraq`s development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction - something that only regime change will avert.`

Flint says Kelly was incredibly discreet, casting doubt on whether he would have told Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who initially claimed that Downing Street had tried to manipulate intelligence, anything of significance.

`Getting secrets from David was like getting blood from a stone,` she said. `But his knowledge was encyclopaedic. In the quicksand of reporting on Iraq, he was a completely safe house.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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What Kelly really thought about the war in Iraq
Julie Flint, a Middle East expert and former Observer reporter, describes the UN weapons inspector she knew and respected and how he agreed to write down his thoughts on Saddam`s weapons and menace

Julie Flint
Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

It was 18 July, unseasonably hot in Beirut, and I got back from the vet`s just in time to catch the end of the 12 o`clock news. A body had been found in the Oxford countryside. There was no name and no context, but I knew immediately whose it was. The storm around the Today report had broken on the edge of my consciousness when I was in Iraq a few weeks earlier and I knew how distressed David Kelly, the man in the eye of the storm, would be. But I was in Baghdad, Saddam wasn`t, and I didn`t have David`s details with me. To my shame, I made no attempt to get them.

Now, too late, I did. A friend in London went to my house and located my phone book. One of David`s daughters answered the phone and I asked to speak to her mother, Jan. I felt I had to say I was a journalist, but a friend too. Jan, ever generous, came to the phone - and I had nothing to say. What can you say? I was, and am, brokenhearted, for you all? In the end I said something like that, something utterly inadequate.

`It`s a terrible day, Julie,` she said, several times. We are both good talkers, but on this occasion we were not. `David would be happy you called,` she said - and we hung up.

I don`t remember when I first spoke to David Kelly, but we originally met at Didcot station in 1996 when I was making a film on Saddam for the BBC and he invited me home for the day. He had rather large glasses and a baggy sweater that looked, given his general demeanour, as if it should have a crease in it. At our last meeting he recalled what we talked about on the drive from the station. I had forgotten, and have forgotten again. What I remember is how well, and how fast, he drove.

The Kelly home is beautiful, a real family home. We pottered around the garden, which David loved but neglected this year, and petted pets before demolishing a lunch prepared by Jan, who was on crutches because of arthritis. Then we got down to anthrax and botulinum toxin and the most effective ways of delivering them, the right weight and size for droplets contaminated with bacterial agents and the difficulties of aerosolisation...

Getting secrets, or even soundbites, from David was like getting blood from a stone, but his knowledge was encyclopaedic. In the quicksand of reporting on Iraq, he was a completely safe house because he had no axe to grind. He was concerned with facts and facts alone. He relished what he was doing - deconstructing what another UN inspector called Iraq`s `full, final and complete fairy tales` and making sense of them to others.

In August 1991, David had led the first team of UN weapons inspectors to look for biological weapons in Iraq. It was his first visit to Iraq and the first no-notice inspection of that kind in a country that was hostile to being inspected. But it achieved much: Iraq was forced to concede that it had a military programme for biological agents and had deliberately lied about it. David was convinced the programme was an offensive one and believed it could be uncovered not only by swooping on suspect sites - provided you could get there before the Iraqis emptied them out or barred the way - but by following the paper trail the regime left and identifying the people who headed the programmes.

More than 30 visits to Iraq convinced David that Saddam was uniquely evil. He had no doubt he would never stop trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, no matter how beleaguered. He was moved to quiet fury by the divisions that plagued the UN Security Council and the way diplomatic wrangling undercut, at every turn, the work of the inspectors.

Less than a month before Bush-Blair invaded Iraq in a quasi-colonial enterprise unlike anything since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, I was editing a report on the war that combined Iraqi voices with expert analysis. British and US soldiers were about to become the neighbours of millions of Arabs who disbelieved their stated reason for threatening war - Saddam`s WMD.

Yet sensible debate over the real threat Saddam posed and the rightness - or wrongness - of war was lost in a frenzy of emotional grandstanding and governmental manipulation, in every country concerned. I asked David to write for me. He agreed, asking that he be identified only as a former weapons inspector. The problem of anonymity in such a piece was one of the reasons I eventually decided against publishing the article, which appears on the right in a gently edited version that David approved in the first days of March.

Last week the Hutton inquiry heard how Tony Blair asked top officials `what we knew about Dr Kelly`, the Ministry of Defence`s chief scientific officer, `and whether we could find out more about his views`. David`s views, which surely should have been known, would not have frightened the horses. His article shows what concerned him, as opposed to the journalists who sought him out. Not Blair or Alastair Campbell, but Saddam and what he might one day be able to do.

At our last meeting this year, before I returned to the Middle East at the end of February, I sensed a change in David. He had had an unexpectedly long meeting at the MoD because of an al-Qaeda alert and was tired. He worried about what to do with his briefcase: leave it at my place or take it to supper? (It came to supper.)

He looked back rather than forward, reviewing his career and our friendship. He seemed to be feeling sidelined, even isolated; worried, too, that the wrong case was being made, unnecessarily, for war. In his years as a weapons inspector, he said, he had done the briefings. Every detail, every nuance, was correct. Now he briefed politicians who briefed the public - and didn`t always get it right.

David`s concern was generic, methodological. There was no mention of Blair`s claim that some WMD could be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. (That assertion, so imprecise, is one David would never have permitted himself. What mattered, I think he would have said, is how effective the WMD would be - not how quickly they could be fired. Had Iraq made any progress towards weaponising its chemical and bacterial agents? In 1996, certainly, he believed weaponisation was still rudimentary). He didn`t speculate about motive or use words like spin. He told me, as he told his family, there was always someone who might know more than him.

In his statement to Parliament on 24 September, Blair indulged in a soundbite David would not have tolerated. It was imprecise and potentially, if not wilfully, misleading. `At some point, in a future not too distant,` Blair said, `the threat [of Saddam`s weapons] will turn into reality.` Then, 18 words later: `The history and the present threat are real.` Future threat, or present? David believed Saddam`s tattered weapons programme was most significantly just that - a programme, a future threat that required present action. He had, regretfully, come to the belief that war was probably the only way `of finally and conclusively disarming Iraq`. Not the war we fought, or at the time we fought it, or against the enemy we constructed - but war nonetheless.

In David`s opinion, Saddam was less of a threat in 2003 than he had been in 1991. For that reason, he said, any war fought on the grounds of WMD would have to be `limited` and `carefully targeted`. It was January, though, and he thought there was still some life in the UN process. Two weeks later The Observer published an editorial making the case for war. I pointed it out to David. He disagreed with only one sentence: `It is only when [the existence of WMD] is confirmed that the UN will have to decide whether to take substantive military action.` At that point, he said, it would be too late. The purpose of war would be to stop Saddam bringing his WMD to military maturity.

On the day David killed himself, having earlier told Jan this was really not a world he cared to live in, the news from Iraq was bad and sad: a young British soldier, Corporal Russell Aston, buried after a mob killing in southern Iraq ... MI6 duped by another dodgy dossier, this time about alleged uranium purchases ... a surface-to-air missile fired against Baghdad airport ... refusals by Bush-Blair to allow UN inspectors, the people David most trusted, to finish the job.

Jan testifies to the Hutton inquiry this week. David was so proud of her determination earlier this year when she walked unaided to a daughter`s wedding. But the last month has taken its toll on her and at David`s funeral she had to borrow an arm to lean on. She wants no special treatment for her husband - even though, as she said last week, `I loved him all my life`. She wants the truth. But she also wants the spotlight returned to the mess that is Iraq, where other women`s husbands are dying. David, like her, will be muttering darkly about getting on with what matters - not shoring up reputations or playing politics, but making the world a better, safer place.

I don`t know why David killed himself. I think many things conspired to drive him to it - including the fact that he briefly fell short of his own standards when cast into the limelight he never sought. One thing I do know, though: Saddam, in his bunker, will be cheering.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Iraqi shrine blast linked to UN attack
Identical explosives and al-Qaeda arrests suggest bombings are part of a larger strategy

Peter Beaumont in Najaf and Edward Helmore in New York
Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

The explosives used in the devastating bomb attack on the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf that may have killed over 100 worshippers, including a leading Iraqi Shia cleric, are identical to those used in last week`s bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

The disclosure, by Iraqi police sources, came as they announced that they had arrested four men - including two Saudis - in connection with the bombing of Iraq`s most holy Shia shrine. All four had links to an al-Qaeda terror network.

US military sources confirmed three arrests - two of them brought to soldiers by angry locals who said they believed they were suspicious strangers.

If the al-Qaeda link is true, the arrests would confirm claims by coalition officials in Baghdad that former members of Saddam`s security apparatus have formed an alliance with the hundreds of Jihadist fighters entering Iraq to fight US troops.

Although the motives for the murder of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim - which also killed between 80 and 110 bystanders - are still unclear, fighters from the Wahabi sect, prevalent in Saudi Arabia, regard Shia rituals as idolatrous. Hakim too had been co-operating with the American occupation force.

Hakim`s Supreme Council for an Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which operated out of Iran until Saddam was ousted, has a seat on Iraq`s US-appointed Governing Council.

The police official, who lead the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, told Associated Press that the captured prisoners told of other plots to kill political and religious leaders and to damage vital installations such as electricity generation plants, water supplies and oil pipelines.

The police official said the men arrested after the attack claimed the recent bombings were designed to `keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces are unable to focus attention` on the country`s porous borders, through which suspected foreign fighters are said to be infiltrating.

The attack in Najaf on Friday came amid a rapidly worsening security situation in the country. Despite claims by senior Coalition Provisional Authority officials that security is improving, the forces are encountering a wave of improvised explosive devices, which according to some security sources, have been placed on almost every major thoroughfare in the city in the last week.

Although US forces here have uncovered several bomb-making factories in recent weeks, it appears to have had little impact.

The most common device being planted is a 155mm tank shell rigged with a grenade on a tripwire or command wire, which while extremely crude, has been devastatingly effective against early-morning US patrols.

It has also followed threats to foreigners and international organisations working in Iraq, which has led some to evacuate completely, like Oxfam last week, or the UN to draw down its staff by almost 90 per cent.

The arrests came as tens of thousands of Shias gathered in the streets of Najaf to mourn the dead Ayatollah, and to protest his slaying and lack of protection by coalition forces.

In a mark of the declining relationship between ordinary Iraqis and foreigners in the country, correspondents for both the Arab and international media were threatened with violence by mobs in the city for the second day, some of them having to be rescued by armed Iraqi police.

Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Warwick University, said the Najaf attack was a blow to the occupiers` efforts to bolster moderate Shias.

`It`s also a dire and public warning to all Iraqis with links to theUS-led Coalition Provisional Authority and a drive to heighten sectarian tensions,` Dodge said. Some Iraqis working for the Coalition have already been killed while others have been threatened. `As with the Jordanian embassy,` said Dodge, `and UN bombings, they are cutting off the moderate pillars of a future Iraqi state.`

The Bush administration`s muted reaction to Friday`s bomb in Najaf exposed the US paralysis on governance in post-war Iraq and underscored the confusion of who should respond - and how - to the latest terror attack.

On Friday, the lack of reaction from US officials in Baghdad and Washington illustrated how unevolved the nascent administration of Iraq remains three months after the official end of hostilities.

In an apparent power vaccum after the bomb, Paul Bremer, the chief American administrator, was on vacation. The US military command said nothing and the Bush administration distanced itself from taking the lead role in the investigation.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Lim

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A resignation is worth a thousand smiles
Terry Jones
Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

So Tony Blair considers his only reason for resigning would be if Andrew Gilligan`s story that Alastair Campbell inserted the 45 minute claim was true.

Well, if it`s any help, Tony, I can think of a lot of other reasons why you could resign.

You might consider resigning because you lied about your part in outing Dr Kelly. I don`t suppose you remember, but on the plane from Shanghai to Hong Kong, 21 July 2003, you told reporters that you "emphatically" did not authorise the leak. Hard to know quite how you "don`t do something" emphatically but that`s what you said. To the Hutton inquiry, however, you admitted overall "responsibility" for the decision to announce that a government official had admitted talking to the BBC`s Andrew Gilligan. Now you might say that was not "authorising the leak" - but then from what I understand Hitler never gave orders to build the extermination camps - it`s just his subordinates knew it was what he`d want. Same with Henry II and the murder of Thomas Becket I suppose.

You could also resign on the grounds of incapability. After all, anybody who actually thought that Iraq was an imminent threat to the UK obviously hasn`t got much grasp on reality. Was Iraq about to bomb London? Did Saddam Hussein have designs on occupying Gibraltar, or perhaps East Cheam? Wasn`t he rather preoccupied with keeping himself in power in his own country? But then I suppose you`ve got more sympathy for the Iraqi dictator`s position nowadays.

Or why not resign on the grounds of mismanagement? I mean, you have tolerated unbelievable incompetence in your Intelligence Agencies. Sir John Scarlett told the Hutton inquiry that he knew of not a single intelligence officer who had any doubts about the September dossier. Well, we now know that at least one of his officers, Dr. Kelly, had such grave doubts that he told the press about them. If Sir John Scarlett doesn`t know what`s going on in his own department he can`t be much of a spymaster can he?

And then again, if not a single intelligence officer doubted the September dossier - why in heavens didn`t they? We now know the thing to be total tosh. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear capability, didn`t buy uranium from Nigeria, couldn`t assemble nuclear weapons in 45 minutes - it`s all rubbish. So why didn`t any of our so-called Intelligence Officers realise it was rubbish? Are they so out of touch with what`s actually happening out there? Maybe we should close the Intelligence Services down and spend the money on something useful - like making movies.

In fact, while you`re at it, you might also consider resigning on the grounds of your own ineptitude. After all, your policies regarding Iraq have resulted in the exact opposite of what you claimed they would do. You said that by bombing Iraq you were going to bring Iraqis a better way of life. Yet your policies have actually resulted in the destruction of Iraq`s infrastructure. They have meant millions of Iraqis have had to endure the summer without proper supplies of water and without electricity. They have brought chaos and lawlessness and misery to the country.

You also promised your policies were going to bring freedom to Iraq. But this week, the US supremo in Baghdad introduced a regime of political witch-hunting. Thousands of decent, law-abiding Iraqis, lawyers, doctors, university professors, now find themselves thrown out of their jobs because they had once belonged to the Ba`athist party. That`s not freedom in any sense of the word as I understand it, Tony.

You also claimed you wanted to make the world a safer place and to stamp out terrorism. Now call me naive, but I`m prepared to take a bet with you that there are now thousands - if not millions - more potential terrorists in Iraq and in the Arab world in general as a direct result of your obsession with dropping bombs on a defenceless country.

These are all much better reasons for resigning than what a BBC reporter might have said.

Or you could resign because of unsuitability for the post. I mean at any moment you could be charged as a war criminal - certainly by any definition that the UN has to offer. You personally authorized the dropping of bombs on another country when your own nation was under no threat of attack from that country. You`ve also been responsible for the killing of somewhere in the region of 40,000 Iraqi civilians and soldiers (mostly wretched conscripts). Personally I don`t like being governed by a man with blood on his hands or who may one day have to go and answer questions in the Hague.

Or why not resign over the general fact that you misled Parliament and the country into thinking that Iraq was an imminent threat to the UK? That`s more to the point than whether Alastair Campbell inserted the 45 minutes line or not.

Or how about resigning on the grounds that you are already no longer actually running this country anyway? It`s quite obvious to anyone (who is not in politics) that you simply do whatever it is that George Bush`s advisers tell you to do.

I mean do you think we`re stupid? How come the only people in the world who thought Iraq was a threat were you and George Bush? And we know he didn`t really. His advisors, Cheney, Perle, Wolfovitz etc had been planning to invade Iraq since at least September 2000 when they publicly announced that Iraq was a top target for American aggression should they ever get into power. In their seminal document Rebuilding America`s Defences they wrote: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

So my advice, Tony, is resign now regardless of whether Andrew Gilligan got it right or not, and simply let Bush, Cheney, Perle and the rest of that gang take over running the UK.

It`ll be more honest in the end than forty thousand of your smiles.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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New terror army fulfils prophecy
Jason Burke on an unholy alliance of Muslim extremists

Jason Burke
Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

First, it was Afghanistan, then Bosnia and Chechnya, then, briefly, Afghanistan again. Now it is Iraq.

Islamic militants talk of `theatres of jihad`. The phrase, with its dual military and dramatic senses, connotations of combat and of audience, is significant. Iraq is the latest stage on which militants can demonstrate their faith to fellow Muslims and unbelievers. It is the latest zone of battle where, in the militants` twisted world view, the aggressive West, supposedly set on subordinating and humiliating the lands of Islam, can be resisted.

Yesterday Iraqi police sources said they had seized four men whom they believed were behind the bombing of the Najaf shrine which killed 75 people on Friday. They said they were linked to `al-Qaeda`.

Police always say this, and any claims of direct links to Osama bin Laden or those of his aides still at large should be treated with some scepticism. Al-Qaeda is a useful scapegoat. Any one with any knowledge of the practicalities of modern Islamic militancy knows that the chances of bin Laden ordering last week`s attack are slim.

But, whatever the actual identity of the bombers or their commanders, the growing resistance networks in Iraq include a component made up of Islamic militants. If al-Qaeda is conceived of as the phenomenon of contemporary Sunni Muslim jihadi militancy, then al-Qaeda is indeed in Iraq. The bomb against the Jordanian embassy this month is likely to have been the work of a militant group which, though actually rivals of bin Laden, share much of his broad agenda. Though those who organised the devastating attack on the UN in Baghdad may well have been diehard Saddam Hussein loyalists, it seems probable that it was an Islamic militant who drove the bomb into the building. And though reports of more than 3,000 Saudi Arabian militants heading across the border into Iraq are likely to have been exaggerated, Islamic fighters have certainly been infiltrating Iraq in relatively large numbers, probably the low hundreds.

There is a dark irony in the growing co-operation between the Baathists, with their secular, Arabist, quasi-socialist traditions, and the militants, to whom Saddam was an apostate to be hated more than an unbeliever until very recently. Before the war in Iraq, most experts agree that such an alliance was impossible. Claims of a Saddam-bin Laden link were never substantiated.

However, during the war a series of religious opinions were issued by militant clerics which said that it was a Muslim duty to help any Muslim, even a bad one, in the face of any attack by an unbeliever.

That assistance is now being made available and is being accepted. The hawks` prophecy of potential, if not extant, links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, conceived in the widest sense, has become self-fulfilling.

· Jason Burke`s Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror is published by I.B.Tauris


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Bush pals hired to rewrite Iraqi law
Ben Wootliff
Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

An American law firm with ties to the Bush administration has been hired to help set up a legal system in Iraq.

The firm, Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, has been drafted in by USAID to advise on privatising former government-held industries, structuring government economic and regulatory agencies, and developing a tax structure.

The legal deal is part of a larger package worth up to $79.6 million taken on by Bearingpoint, formerly called KPMG consultants, to advise on the restructuring of Iraq. The deal is expected to lead to several million dollars of work for Squire, Sanders, effectively as sub-contractor.

It was also announced on Friday that the administration in Iraq has appointed a JP Morgan-led consortium that includes France`s Credit Lyonnais to set up and manage a trade bank for Iraq.

The Coalition Authority in Baghdad created the bank to allow Iraqi ministries and oil concerns to begin making big-ticket purchases abroad.

The purchases are likely to start at an average of about $100m a month but the bank`s overall business could balloon to $500m a month as Iraq`s oil industry gets back on its feet.

The number of contracts awarded to companies with close connections to the Bush administration is increased by the Squire, Sanders` deal. The firm donated $41,350 to George W Bush`s election campaign in 2000, and earlier this year a Sanders partner, Ronald James, was made personnel chief of the new Department of Homeland Security.

James used to work for Donald Rumsfeld, now Defence Secretary, when Rumsfeld was a member of Congress, and during the Nixon administration he shared a White House office with Dick Cheney, now Vice President.

Recipients of contracts in Iraq already include Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton which was run by Cheney and is a major Republican Party donor.

The company has been given more than $1 billion dollars worth of contracts to reconstruct postwar Iraq and help repair its oilfields. The decision to award these contracts to Halliburton became even more controversial after it emerged that they were given without competition.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Blair plans new `Ministry of Truth` for the post-spin era
By Andy McSmith and Jo Dillon
31 August 2003


A new "Department of Truth" headed by a top-ranking civil servant is to be set up in Whitehall after the departure of Tony Blair`s leading spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell.

The decision to appoint a new Permanent Secretary in charge of the entire government communications network will be part of an effort to end damaging publicity about the role of politically appointed "spin-doctors".

But one rumour causing grim amusement in Whitehall is that the brain behind the strategy is Peter Mandelson, the former Labour Party communications director who is credited with being the first of the new wave of spin-doctors when he worked for the party in the 1980s.

Downing Street will announce details this week of an internal shake-up following Mr Campbell`s announcement that he is leaving his post as director ofcommunications and strategy in a few weeks.

The Cabinet Office is also expected soon to announce the outcome of a "radical" review of government communications by an outside team led by Bob Phillis, chief executive of the Guardian Media Group. A leading member of the review team was David Hill, who is to take Mr Campbell`s place as the Prime Minister`s chief spin-doctor.

Mr Mandelson said yesterday: "The Phillis review has nothing to do with me.

"I don`t want to talk to you any more. I`d like to have my Saturday back."

But a government insider said: "The key thing people have missed is that Peter Mandelson is the brains behind this whole thing. He is the one advising Tony Blair. The King of Spin is in charge of the death of spin."

Matthew Taylor, a personal friend of Mr Mandelson and head of the Institute for Public Policy Research, an independent think tank, is expected to be brought in as head of a reorganised Downing Street policy unit. Mr Taylor is seen as a "media-friendly" political researcher. Geoff Mulgan, another ally of Mr Mandelson currently working at No 10, is expected to take over part of Mr Campbell`s role overseeing government strategy.

Putting a civil servant with the rank of Permanent Secretary in charge of the Government`s information service will eliminate the possibility that another political adviser could have the same influence as Mr Campbell. In 1997, Mr Campbell and Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair`s chief of staff, were given authority to issue instructions to civil servants - other political aides can only offer advice to politicians.

Mr Hill, like other political advisers, will be supervised by a Permanent Secretary.

The proposed changes have alarmed other ministers, who fear its effect will be to centralise government communications under Mr Blair`s personal control, instead of allowing departments to run their own media operations.

Mr Blair has been accused today of being the "real misleader" whose "culture of deceit" has "poisoned the whole of politics", with Mr Campbell acting as his loyal assistant. The leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, writing in today`s Independent on Sunday, says the "excesses of the New Labour project" - personal vendettas, the emasculation of the civil service and the "shameful" treatment of Dr David Kelly - carried out by Mr Campbell, all had Mr Blair`s "blessing".

He writes: "While it is true that the British people are now angry at New Labour, they don`t just want to change the occupant of Downing Street. They want a different kind of government altogether."

"As Alastair Campbell goes ... it`s not the resignation of the servant that matters but the departure of his master. The real Downing Street director of communications must go: Tony Blair himself."

Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat chairman, accused Mr Campbell of engineering his departure to obscure more important issues.

He told BBC Radio 4`s Today programme: "In his own departure Alastair Campbell has managed his greatest spin ever. When we should be talking about where those weapons of mass destruction are, about what is happening in Iraq where our soldiers are being killed and peace is a long way off, he has taken those headlines away and made himself again the major news story."
31 August 2003 10:13



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Bogus Iraqi defectors may have duped Allied spies
By Raymond Whitaker and Paul Lashmar
31 August 2003


Intelligence agencies in the US and its allies, including Britain, are carrying out a major review to determine whether they were duped by false information from Iraq before the war, including the possible use of bogus defectors. The outcome could undermine key British claims about Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction.

The review began after the US was forced to admit that a passage in President Bush`s State of the Union speech in January, saying Iraq had sought uranium from Africa for its nuclear weapons programme, was based on forged documents. Mr Bush said the information came from Britain, but the Government has refused to withdraw the claim, saying it has other evidence. It also sticks by its assertion that Iraq was capable of deploying WMD within 45 minutes, despite further doubts raised by evidence at the Hutton inquiry into Dr David Kelly`s death.

A senior US intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times that the aim of the review "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it". He added: "We`re re-interviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the US."

Former Iraqi intelligence officials are said to have confirmed that Saddam sent double agents abroad to spread fabricated intelligence on WMD and that some genuine defectors were fed misleading information. His apparent aim was to deter his enemies and boost his prestige at home and in the Arab world, which would help to explain why the West has failed to find WMD in Iraq so far, despite the conviction that it existed.

"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," the LA Times quotes a senior US weapons expert who recently returned from Iraq as saying.

An anonymous article now known to have been written by Dr Kelly will form part of the evidence to the Hutton inquiry this week. Written as part of a report on pre-war Iraq, the article said that the threat from Saddam`s regime was "modest" but conceded that military intervention was the only way to "conclusively disarm" the country.
31 August 2003 10:14


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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US says CO2 is not a pollutant
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
31 August 2003


The Bush administration has decreed that carbon dioxide from industrial emissions - the main cause of global warming - is not a pollutant.

The decision by the Environmental Protection Agency - announced with minimal fanfare on the eve of the Labor Day weekend - reverses the stance taken under President Clinton and allows industry to increase emissions with impunity.

It is also part of a pattern of casting doubt on scientific evidence, going back to the US`s rejection of the Kyoto Protocols in 2001. Earlier this year, the Bush administration excised a 28-page section on climate change from an EPA report. It also ignored a report by the US Academy of Sciences that argued that the evidence of climate change could not be ignored.

"Saying that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming is like refusing to say smoking causes lung cancer," said Melissa Carey, a climate change expert with the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

Environmental groups are now considering suing the EPA to force the regulation of greenhouse gases.

The Bush administration appears to be guided by a leaked memo by the political consultant Frank Luntz, which advised: "Should the public believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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On a dusty road 3,000 miles from home, a young unemployed Briton is cut down
Territorial Army rifleman Russell Beeston was the 50th soldier to die since Tony Blair sent the army into Iraq. His family, like 49 before them - and an untold number in the future - have now lost a loved one. Tim Luckhurst reports on the life and death of a reservist who was also someone`s son, brother, and uncle
31 August 2003


Fusilier Russell Beeston, the 50th British soldier to die in Iraq, falls into a category this country has not committed to combat since the Suez crisis of 1956. Beeston, 26, an unemployed man from Glasgow, was the closest thing the modern British Army has to a conscript. He joined the Territorial Army of his own volition in 2000, but his call-up to serve in Iraq came under the terms of the Reserve Forces Act 1996. His unit, the 52nd Lowland Territorial Regiment, confirms that the summons was mandatory.

His commitment ended on a dusty road 3,000 miles from Glasgow at 6.45pm last Wednesday. He was part of a six-vehicle British convoy ambushed as it returned from an operation in which two Saddam loyalists were arrested in Ali al-Gharbi near the Iranian border. The soldiers of the King`s Own Scottish Borderers found the main road to their base at Amarah blocked by vehicles driven across the carriageway by Iraqis determined to release the captives. The convoy diverted through the village of Ali al-Sharqi, but again the Iraqis anticipated their arrival. Near the village they encountered an angry crowd.

Fusilier Beeston was ordered to dismount from his Land Rover. He was part of a group instructed to walk the convoy through the crowd by acting as armed escorts. It must have been instantly apparent that the tactic would fail. As soon as the riflemen left their vehicles a second group of Iraqis emerged to seal the road behind them. With hostile men to their front and rear, Russell Beeston and his colleagues fired two volleys into the air. The show of force was intended as a warning, but Iraqi fighters responded with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Fusilier Beeston was hit in the chest by rifle bullets. He was treated at the scene but died from his injuries while his unit was still under fire.

Russell Beeston received his call-up papers at the end of June. Days later he reported for duty at the Army`s dedicated Reserve Training and Call-Up Centre at Chilwell in Nottinghamshire. There he underwent a fortnight of intensive training in weapons use and protection against nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. He passed a combat fitness test which requires soldiers to run a four-mile course in less than an hour carrying a 55lb pack and an SA80 assault rifle. Training completed, he was flown from RAF Brize Norton to Basra.

Among the 160 Territorial soldiers from his regiment who were summoned to serve in the Gulf, there were some who had already demonstrated a taste for frontline service. Several had completed six-month deployments alongside regular soldiers in Bosnia or Kosovo. Russell Beeston did not volunteer to go to the Balkans. His experience as a rifleman was based on the combat infantryman`s course which he completed at Catterick, North Yorkshire.

In Iraq, Beeston and his TA comrades were spread out to serve alongside regulars from the King`s Own Scottish Borderers. They were filling gaps in full-time regiments stretched to the limit by overdue leave and cumulative fatigue. An Army spokeswoman describes him as "a rifleman in an infantry battalion".

Whether Beeston enjoyed the challenge is not clear. His distraught relatives have released only a brief statement in which they state: "Russell was a soldier doing his duty in Iraq and he will be sadly missed by all his family."

There have been no references of the "doing the job he loved" variety typical among regular service families. Lieutenant Jim Wilson, commanding officer of the 52nd Lowland Regiment, came closest to that when he offered the regiment`s condolences and said Beeston had recently revealed "how fulfilling he found the task in Iraq".

What is clear is that Beeston actively disliked a previous separation from family and friends. He left school in the small Argyllshire town of Kinlochleven in 1993 with SCE passes including physics and maths, and enrolled on a course at the Glasgow College of Nautical Studies. Captain Christopher Hunter, principal of GCNS, recalls: "He was sponsored at the college as a trainee engineer officer for the merchant navy. Initially he studied for a GSVQ in engineering, which he completed in 1995. Then he moved on to study for an HND. Initially he was very successful, his marks were very good, but he did not sit the final exams in 1997."

Joyce Downie of Clyde Marine Training Ltd, the company that arranged Beeston`s naval training, remembers why. "Russell Beeston started his cadetship with us in 1994. He was sponsored by a Norwegian shipping line called Bergesen. At the end of July 1996, he joined Bergesen`s gas tanker MV Havfrost. After a couple of months he was paid off in France. His personnel record says `after two months decided sea life was not what he expected it to be`."

Russell Beeston was separated from his wife and had no children. Yesterday, at their tenement home in Rosneath Street, Govan, Glasgow, his mother Marion, brother John and his nephew were requesting privacy. In a statement they said: "The family is totally devastated." An Army spokesman confirmed that the family was "furious" about press attention.

At Govan Cross, not far from the family home, a memorial records the names of local men who died fighting with British forces in the wars of the 20th century. The area is visibly poor, devastated by the collapse of the shipbuilding industry that once employed its menfolk. For many of them military service is an alternative to the dole queue. Russell Beeston was not typical. His qualifications set him apart from those for whom military service is the only way out. There is no doubt that he would have been accepted for regular service if he had wanted a full-time military career. His commanding officer describes him as "a well-liked and popular man who was utterly dedicated and had a good TA career ahead of him".

Fusilier Beeston`s body has not yet been brought home. His regiment expects repatriation to take about a week. He will not be the first unemployed man from Govan to return home in a coffin, but he is one of only three TA men on compulsory call-up to be killed on active service. His final email to contemporaries from GCNS was sent on 4 July. It read: "Well, as of a couple of weeks ago I was still living in Glasgow. However I have been called up for service and I am currently serving with the Army out in Iraq. If you want to get in touch with me ... you can do this by emailing. Bye for now." The farewell was for ever. He had not intended his military service to last for more than the TA requirement of 27 days per year.

Fifty Britons fallen in Iraq

Fusilier Russell Beeston, 26; Maj Matthew Titchener, 32; WO Colin Wall, 34; Cpl Dewi Pritchard, 35; Capt David Jones, 29; Pte Jason Smith, 32; Capt James Linton, 43; Sgt Simon Hamilton-Jewell, 41; Cpl Russell Aston, 30; Cpl Paul Long, 24; Cpl Simon Miller, 21; L/Cpl Benjamin Hyde, 23; L/Cpl Thomas Keys, 20; Leonard Harvey (civilian fire-fighter); Cpl David Shepherd, 34; Gunner Duncan Pritchard, 22; Pte Andrew Kelly, 18; L/Cpl James McCue, 27; Fusilier Kelan Turrington, 18; L/Cpl Ian Malone, 28; Piper Christopher Muzvuru, 21; L/Cpl Karl Shearer, 24; Lt Alexander Tweedie, 25; Staff Sgt Chris Muir, 32; L/Cpl Shaun Brierley, 28; Marine Christopher Maddison, 24; Maj Stephen Ballard; L/Cpl Matty Hull, 25; Cpl Stephen Allbutt, 35; Trooper David Clarke, 19; L/Cpl Barry Stephen, 31; Sgt Steven Roberts, 33; Sapper Luke Allsop, 33; Staff Sgt Simon Cullingworth, 36; Flt-Lt Kevin Main, 37; Flt-Lt David Williams, 35; Lt Philip Green, 31; Lt Antony King, 35; Lt Marc Lawrence, 26; Lt Philip West, 32; Lt James Williams, 28; Lt Andrew Wilson, 36; Col-Sgt John Cecil, 36; Lance Bombadier Llywelyn Evans, 24; Sgt Les Hehir, 34; Operator Mechanic Ian Seymour, 28; Maj Jason Ward, 34; Signalman Sholto Hedenskog, 26; Capt Philip Guy, 29; WO Mark Stratford, 39.
31 August 2003 10:20


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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August 31, 2003
Shiites Mourn Death of Cleric in Iraq Bombing
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR


NAJAF, Iraq, Aug. 30 — A tide of grief surged through this holy city today as thousands of Shiite Muslim mourners poured in from throughout Iraq, walking silently to the corner of the sacred shrine where their revered spiritual leader was assassinated.

The funeral for the slain ayatollah, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was killed outside the Imam Ali Mosque here along with 81 others by a huge car bomb on Friday, is to start Sunday in Baghdad and travel around the center of the country.

But there is no body for the funeral, said his nephew, who is also a cleric.

All that was readily identifiable were parts of the black turban that marked the ayatollah as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and a couple of prayer books, the nephew, Amar Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, said in an interview.

"The occupation forces bear full responsibility for this due to their misguided methods in treating the security situation," said the cleric, sitting just off the slain ayatollah`s prayer room, which was draped with yards of black cloth.

Hospital officials had at first put the death toll as high as 95, but they adjusted it downward today.

The police investigating the attack, the worst since the government of Saddam Hussein fell, said the explosives used in the booby-trapped car resembled those used in the fatal bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19. They included old mortar shells and other military munitions bundled together, said Gen. Hussein Yassin, the Najaf police chief, and were ignited by remote control.

Four suspects were detained, the police said, but they rejected reports quoting anonymous police sources as saying that the suspects had been carrying identification cards from the former intelligence services or were foreigners. Officials increasingly focused on the theory that the car bomb was the work of members of the toppled government.

The police criticized the ayatollah`s bodyguards — there were about 16 with him in various vehicles — for allowing an unknown vehicle to park so close. But the general sentiment is that American forces have failed to ensure security throughout Iraq.

Mr. Hakim, the nephew, said the United States had insisted that the ayatollah disarm his militia, the Badr Brigade, which he had assembled over 23 years in Iran, but that the Americans had not replaced it. Only in the north, where the Kurds have been allowed to provide their own security, does the country have any stability, he said.

The occupying forces had relied on the ayatollah, one of four grand ayatollahs in Iraq, to secure the support of the general population that the occupiers be given at least a year to establish a better government for Iraq. Mr. Hakim said the support of his political group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would continue.

The ayatollah`s brother, Abdel al-Aziz, who sits on the American-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council, is likely to take his place. But the brother`s pronouncements do not carry the same religious weight, and it was unclear which senior cleric might fill that role of spiritual guide. The senior clerics in Najaf other than Ayatollah Hakim have a tradition of avoiding politics.

As the size of the blast and the toll sank in, the idea that it might have stemmed from the rivalry pitting Najaf`s elderly, revered clerics against a younger more militant group began to fade. The carnage seemed too horrific, the desecration of the shrine right after Friday Prayers too appalling, no matter how high the stakes in the fight for predominance over the Shiite community.

"They want to assassinate one man so they slaughter all these people?" said Barhan Doush, a bank manager in Najaf who lost three cousins in the blast. "It`s not against the person alone, it`s against the whole religion."

Many argued that it was an attempt to warn the Shiite clergy not to take part in politics. But followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a militant young cleric who would like to model Iraq on the clerical rule next door in Iran, said he would not be deterred and was a viable alternative.

The deaths left many lost and angry, wondering if such violence would prevent the Shiites from gaining a place in ruling Iraq that reflects their 65 percent of the population of 25 million.

"He was the voice of the Shiites," said Mehdi Falah, 30, a laborer from Basra who braved Iraq`s dangerous nighttime roads to reach the shrine for the funeral. "We were looking to him to deliver a just, free state." Nothing worse could have happened than the ayatollah`s death, he said.

"I feel a deep sense of loss, desperation and despair," he said, sitting on the pavement, exhausted after taking part in a round of ritual mourning. "Nobody will be able to fill the gap he left."

The funeral industry in Najaf has a long history. For centuries, the faithful have believed that being buried next to the tomb of Imam Ali, whose own assassination in the seventh century led to the founding of Shiism, would speed their acceptance into heaven.

But no one could quite remember a single day with so many funerals since the darkest moments of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980`s.

One side of the shrine seemed to be a continuous stream of coffins, with the relatives of those killed taking the dead on one final visit to the shrine before burying them.

Traditionally they circle Imam Ali`s gold-domed tomb inside, but with the shrine closed they contented themselves with laying the coffins on the sidewalk near one doorway.

Cries of "there is no God but God" echoed through the streets as each new coffin appeared, the poor wrapped in blankets, the rich in black cloths embroidered in gold with sayings from the Koran. The names of the dead were read out from the minaret of the small mosque adjacent to the shrine. Then the street would grow quiet for a moment until the next cortege passed.

Funeral announcements painted on black cloth and strung between the city`s low mustard-colored buildings billowed in a hot, irritating wind blowing in off the desert. Ayatollah Hakim`s funeral will take place over several days, moving from Baghdad through several other holy cities before reaching Najaf on Tuesday. Tens of thousands are expected to follow from city to city.

Repeated scenes of despair unfolded in the vast cemetery, which stretches to the horizon from the shrine. One young man hugged the tombstone of his brother, accidentally shot and killed, he said, by American soldiers in Kut on July 3. His mother and 24-year-old sister had come to visit the grave and then gone to pray, leaving the mosque just as the bomb erupted.

Two bodies were wrapped in blankets — one checkered green and the other orange. When the family arrived at the washing house where all bodies are bathed before being wrapped in their shrouds, they discovered to their horror that a man`s severed leg had been included with the bodies of their two female relatives.

The undertakers told them to take it back to the hospital, but the family members insisted that it be buried immediately somewhere else in the cemetery.

At one small mosque where the caskets were stacked up 10 at a time for the prayers for the dead, one man rebuked the mourners for crying. They should be happy, he yelled, because there is no greater honor than dying at the shrine in the company of a revered cleric.

The other side of the mosque, where the bombing took place, was the scene of frenetic activity. After walking past the charred wreckage of the vehicles, hundreds of visitors joined in impromptu circles of ritual mourning — beating their chests with their hands. So many joined at once that the small square seemed to echo with drumbeats.

"Saddam, you oppressor, the blood of the Shiites will not flow without revenge," they chanted in unison at one point.

The original schism that led to the foundation of the Shiite branch of Islam stems from both the assassination of Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, and the death of his son Hussein on the battlefield some 1,400 years ago.

The Shiites have made a cult of martyrdom in the service of their religion ever since, and Ayatollah Hakim was seen as one of a long line of victims.

"It is one continuous line," said Sheik Ali al-Mohamadawi, a clerical student. "As long as the Shiites do not accept oppression, the oppressors will always want to harm them and their clerics."

The three remaining grand ayatollahs went into hiding, the narrow alleyways leading to their raw cement offices guarded by men bearing Kalashnikov rifles who would not let anyone linger.

"There are many threats directed against them and there is insufficient security, so they are exposed to danger at any moment," said Hassan al-Jarrah, a student of Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim, an uncle of the slain ayatollah.

He was one of the grand ayatollahs who issued a statement condemning the attack and also the American forces for failing to provide security in Iraq.

The statements were plastered on bulletin boards outside the shrine and on the pillars of the shopping arcade along the main streets — men eagerly gathering around to read the first reaction from their spiritual guides.

Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim called the attack the work of "saboteurs and infidels who want to spread chaos, to desecrate this holy site and bar the path of the senior clerics trying to heal the wounds of the Iraqi people."

Residents of Najaf said immediately after the bombing that men bearing guns had rushed to the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior cleric in Iraq, begging him to issue a edict consecrating an immediate jihad, or holy war, against the assassins.

The ayatollah`s aides conveyed the request to him, said Tariq Ghazi, a Najaf resident, but they returned with a terse answer, "Jihad against whom?"



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August 31, 2003
U.S. and the Iraqis Discuss Creating Big Militia Force
By DEXTER FILKINS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 30 — Stung by Friday`s deadly car bombing, American and Iraqi officials said today that they were discussing the possibility of forming a large Iraqi paramilitary force to help improve security in the country.

Iraqis involved in the talks said the force could consist of thousands of Iraqis already screened by the various political parties for prior affiliations with Saddam Hussein`s government. Iraqi officials said such a militia could ultimately take control of Iraqi cities from American soldiers.

Some Iraqi leaders said a force of several thousand men, most of them with military experience, could be ready in little more than a month.

"The situation has changed, and there is a new receptiveness to the idea," said Mudhar Shahkawt, a prominent Iraqi exile who took part in the discussions today. "This force could move inside the cities and allow coalition forces to withdraw to places outside."

American officials acknowledged that discussions were under way, but declined to talk about them in detail. They suggested that for the talks to succeed, they would have to address American worries about unregulated, untrained bands of armed men operating under separate commands around the country.

Security details "should be unified, and they should be recognized as Iraqi security forces, and not belonging to individual groups or parties," said Charles Heatley, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority here.

The fear among the Americans has long been that the militia groups, far from bringing order to Baghdad, would attack one another.

Plans for an Iraqi militia have already been in the works, to guard such things as power plants and troop convoys. But the Iraqis said the force under discussion could be much more ambitious.

One difference being discussed, the Iraqis said, is to deploy members to various parts of the country, instead of relying on local unregulated militias now at the disposal of political parties.

Several questions remained unresolved, including who would command the forces, the American military or the interim government.

The discussions about an all-Iraqi security force followed the devastating car bombing in the holy city of Najaf on Friday, when 82 people were killed and 95 were listed as wounded. Prominent among the dead was Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, one of the most revered leaders of the world`s 120 millions Shiite Muslims and a political moderate who had showed himself willing to deal with the American occupiers.

The attack, coupled with the repeated assaults on Americans and Iraqis here, has prompted leaders of several political parties to declare that they have lost confidence in the ability of the Americans to protect their leaders and sacred places.

Today, they began to demand that Iraqis become more involved in security. Indeed, some political leaders said they might be unable to keep their own followers from moving against their enemies, especially if the attacks continued.

"The knife is at our neck," Said Nael Musawi, a Shiite religious leader, told a group of American soldiers guarding the gate of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad, as thousands of demonstrators swirled about them. "I don`t know how much longer I can control my people."

The Iraqi force under discussion today could be drawn from the several militias already maintained by many of the leading Iraqi groups and political parties. These militias are sometimes used to control turf, fight petty crime and settle political scores. They are often composed of undisciplined young men, some of them fired by religious zeal.

The young radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr has an unknown number of militiamen in a group called Jaish Mehdi, and Ahmad Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress still commands the loyalties of hundreds of Iraqi fighters trained to assist American soldiers in the war.

Mr. Musawi`s party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, maintains its own militia as well, called the Badr Brigade, whose members are believed to number in the thousands. Adil Abdul Mahdi, one of the leaders of the party , said today that it was "seriously reconsidering" its policy of restraining its militias.

The party, known by its acronym Sciri, is considered an important moderating force in Iraq, not least because its representative on the Iraqi Governing Council, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is the brother of the slain ayatollah.

Mr. Mahdi, speaking at a news conference, indicated that his party`s tolerance for the disorder in the country was running out. "I cannot say that Badr has already spread its forces in the street," he said, referring to the party`s militia. "But Badr`s people are Iraqis, and they will join Iraqi forces."

The tug of war over security that unfolded in the streets and the meeting rooms seemed to raise central questions for the American occupation. Faced with a guerrilla insurgency by supporters of Mr. Hussein, the Americans have found themselves hard-pressed to protect their own people and the rest of the country.

Now, with the car bombing Friday outside the Imam Ali shrine, one of Islam`s holiest sites, the Americans seem unable to guarantee the safety of the most sacred places in Iraq.

The bombing in Najaf was the third such deadly car bombing in Iraq in little more than three weeks. On Aug. 19, the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was bombed.

Part of the problem, American and Iraqi officials say, is a severe shortage of Iraqi police officers, who have gradually been taking over responsibility for security from the American forces. The 37,000-man Iraqi police force is still short some 18,000 officers, and the Americans recently announced a crash program to fly an equivalent number of Iraqis to a special police academy in Hungary to train them. But the entire force will not be in place for 18 months.

The United States is also considering a greater role for the United Nations in Iraq. On a visit to Italy, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said today, "Regarding the possible participation of international forces in Iraq under U.S. command, we don`t see anything wrong with this." But he added, "It would require a decision from the U.N. Security Council."

In the meantime, Iraqis say they would be better able than Americans to track down former members of Mr. Hussein`s government and to prevent terrorist attacks.

The Americans say they want to hand over responsibility for security to an official Iraqi government. And on that front, the Americans have been frustrated; despite their urging, the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council has yet to agree on a cabinet that could begin to take responsibility for police protection and security.

As American and Iraqi political leaders talked today, the questions were being contested on Baghdad`s streets. Thousands of Iraqis marched today across the Jumhuriya Bridge over the Tigris River and to the gates of the Republican Palace, where the Governing Council meets. There they mourned their leader, Ayatollah Hakim.

At the edge of the crowd, young cadre of the radical Mr. Sadr`s movement seemed at once to be trying to keep order and to disrupt it. On one end of the crowd, they pushed the marchers back whenever they got too close to the American barbed wire.

Yet in the crowd itself, Mr. Sadr`s men weaved in and out, denouncing the American forces, blaming them for Ayatollah Hakim`s death and urging them to leave the country.

Over to the side, a leader of Mr. Musawi`s Sciri party looked on with a troubling glare.

"These people are getting the crowd excited, " said the leader, Abdul Rad al-Haideri. "They can`t be allowed to do that."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Vehicles negotiating a still unrepaired section of the Kabul-Kandahar road. For two decades, the 305-mile route has been a 15-hour drive.
August 31, 2003
Potholes and Promises Line an Afghan Highway
By CARLOTTA GALL


N THE KABUL-KANDAHAR ROAD, Afghanistan, Aug. 30 — Camels chew on thorn bushes along the highway, oblivious to the traffic in front of them. This road is one of the great obstacle courses of Afghanistan, choked with trucks creaking and jangling over the ruts, and jeeps and taxis making their way through the clouds of dust.

It is perhaps the most important highway in the country, and a key to Afghanistan`s future security and unity. It links the Tajik-dominated capital, Kabul, to the Pashtun city of Kandahar in the south, once the city of the country`s kings and later the spiritual home of the Taliban.

Residents of Kandahar remember that in the 1970`s they could drive north to Kabul for the evening to catch a movie. But for two decades now, the 305-mile stretch has presented travelers with a bone-crushing, 15-hour journey that has done as much as anything to divide the Persian-speaking north of the country from the Pashtun south.

From Kabul, the trip begins with some 28 miles of paved road built by the Taliban, extending to the first town of Maidan Shahr in Wardak Province. From there a Turkish-American-Afghan company financed with American money has started work and so far has paved five and a half miles more.

After that the condition goes downhill, from recently graded dirt to a roller coaster of dips and potholes to a final few miles of asphalt just outside the city of Kandahar.

Although the road is under repair, its crumbled condition is a reminder of Afghanistan`s enormous obstacles — the painfully slow reconstruction and the growing doubts of a population that foreign powers will keep their promises of assistance and that the current Afghan government will prove better than ones in the past.

"People have been thinking for nearly two years that the Americans, and not just Americans, but hundreds of foreign troops, came to rebuild the country," said Hajji Baz Muhammad, district chief of Shah Juy, a town north of Kandahar. "But now the people are thinking they just came for their own ends, because they have done nothing to rebuild.

"The people are thinking, `If they came to rebuild, then we say welcome,` " he added. " `But if they came to occupy our country and oppress us, we don`t like that, and they will become our enemies.` " The same refrain is repeated by farmers, taxi and truck drivers, police officers, soldiers and shopkeepers the length of the road.

This is the Taliban`s argument — that the United States never intended to rebuild, but just wanted to occupy a Muslim country, and so should be expelled. Not everyone sides with the Taliban, but almost everyone complains that until now, international aid has been almost invisible.

But, to look at this highway, no one can deny that some rebuilding has started. Sections have been parceled to different construction companies for repair. There are at least five camps along the road, run by Indian, Turkish and Afghan companies, with cabins, crushing plants, piles of gravel and stones, and huge colorful machines called aggregate separators, trucks, bulldozers, diggers and rollers.

Surveyors in bright orange and yellow caps stand with their instruments on hillsides, and road workers wave red flags to slow the traffic along the road`s smoother sections.

Over half of the road has been graded, and on those stretches traffic is speeding along, kicking up loose stones with glee. Engineers say they hope to put down asphalt on the whole road this year, and next year to add more layers of asphalt and to repair some of the bombed bridges.

The first few hours from Kabul bring travelers to the ancient city of Ghazni, with its minarets and holy shrines. It is a ramshackle town far enough away from the capital to have a neglected provincial feel. Mechanics shops and gasoline stalls line the main route, and the city is swollen with homeless refugees.

In Ghazni, local officials have greeted the belated construction work with tangible relief, hoping it will swing support behind the government and away from the Taliban. "It`s organized and going well," said Gen. Shaista Turabi, the police chief of Ghazni Province, the third of five provinces that the road traverses. "People are very happy about the road, prices are already coming down, on transport, and on food and fruit. This is a big change, because people are very happy with the government."

The taxi and truck drivers are overwhelmingly enthusiastic. "We were hoping they would build it, because they did a bit of work last year, and because a lot of trucks and cars have overturned on this road," said Nawab Khan, a 22-year-old truck driver from Ghazni, who was making the six-day drive from the western town of Herat to Kabul with a cargo of Indonesian tea. "Now it is better, things are getting good." Compared with the Taliban years, business is much better, he said.

But this southeast region is still insecure because of the Taliban threat, the United Nations has banned its staff from traveling along portions of the road, and some aid agencies have pulled out. Two Afghan Red Crescent workers were shot to death in the middle of August in Ghazni Province, in the latest attack on aid workers by suspected Taliban militants. Threats have started against the construction companies, and two rockets were fired at one of their camps recently.

The city of Ghazni, too, is not considered safe, but it has a working hospital and some wealth as a trading crossroads. Farther along, toward Kandahar, through desert where only thorn bushes grow and huge dust storms sometimes shroud the way ahead, the villages and towns are smaller, poorer and, because of the rough condition of the road, so cut off that few people can reach a hospital in an emergency.

In Moqor, which is the halfway point between Kabul and Kandahar, aid workers are confident the repaired road will improve people`s lives. "Can you believe it?" said Hamida Zafari, 28, a doctor who runs a clinic in Moqor. "I was just in Ghazni at 4 p.m. this afternoon and now I am here back home." What was usually an agonizing four-hour journey had just taken her an easy 90 minutes. The road, she said, would save lives. Pregnant women would be able to get to the hospital in Ghazni. In the past, if they had complications, they simply died at home, she said.

President Hamid Karzai pressed early for help rebuilding Afghanistan`s roads, arguing that the repairs would allow traders and businesses to get started and the local economy to flourish. He won the backing of the departing American ambassador, Robert Finn, who gained support in Washington and the personal commitment of President Bush. The United States has ended up footing the bulk of bill, contributing $180 million so far, with Japan putting in $50 million and Saudi Arabia offering a loan of $30 million. But $70 million more must be raised to finish the road next year, said a Western aid official familiar with the project.

The plan came perilously close to disaster earlier this year when the Taliban carried out a series of armed attacks on mine-clearing organizations and on aid workers in the area. The shootings left one Afghan aid worker dead, and eight more wounded, three seriously.

The United Nations suspended all mine-removal work — a crucial preliminary to the road construction — in 10 provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan in May.

As foreign aid workers also left, and the road project began to look like it might founder, the United States government stepped in once more. "We realized we needed to do something on security and we determined that the best way was to get the road patrolled constantly," the Western aid official said. The United States Agency for International Development is now paying, through the prime contractor, the American company Louis Berger, hundreds of Afghan police officers $5 a day to patrol the road at all times. The construction companies, too, have brought in security. Police officers seem to stand at the elbow of almost every road worker and mine clearer.

Afghan officials insist that security has improved, but the police recently rounded up a gang of robbers and pursued carjackers into the next province. Lawbreakers are not all Taliban; some are simply men with guns, the officials say.

In farming villages all along the road, the cry is for water, for help to deepen wells, repair irrigation channels and build dams.

Farmers bringing their grain to the mill in the village called Abdul Aziz Kala in Zabul Province at the south end of the road, said the harvest this year had been poor, for lack of water. A four-year drought has not yet lifted in the south, and many springs and wells are dry.

"We did not even get enough wheat from the fields to feed the family, so how can we find the money to dig a deeper well," said Wali Muhammad, 17, who runs the family mill.

Life is harsh and many families are going hungry, according to Abdul Majid Wasili, head of an Afghan aid agency, Coordination of Afghan Relief, in the town of Moqor. Some are abandoning their villages because of the drought, he said. The police chief in Ghazni said refugees had returned from Iran and Pakistan only to find their houses destroyed.

Even in the more prosperous villages closer to Kabul, where the fruit trees are heavy with golden apricots and green apples, some people are leaving the hills.

"There is no water; they have to make the three-hour journey every day with donkeys to the river here," said Ahmad Shah, 36, a fuel pump worker in the village of Shekhabad, an hour`s drive from Kabul. "Nobody is helping them so many are leaving the village."

Life along the road continues an age-old pattern in its rhythms and simplicity. Old men beg beside the road, covered in dust. Grave sites fill the hillsides, decorated with fluttering silk flags on tall poles to mark the resting place of martyrs. Farmers lie under brush shelters hiding from the blistering sun while they guard their melon fields from thieves.

Kuchis, the nomadic herders, are strewn across the desert landscape on either side of the route, pitching their goat-hair tents, already moving down from the central highlands to the warmer lowlands around Kandahar or in Pakistan for the winter.

"It is better now," said Bakhtiar Khan, 35, owner of 25 camels. "There is peace now and we can go easily up to the mountains." And now the road is being rebuilt.

"But we are poor people, and we just go on our way," he said. "Nothing has changed for us. But if it is built and it`s good for Muslims, then let them build it."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 31, 2003
A French Roadblock to Free Trade

French farmers and government officials are fond of saying that the word "culture" is contained within the term "agriculture" for a reason. Farming is a way of life, the French argue, which governments are entitled to protect from the impact of "mindless trade liberalization" in a way that they ought not protect, say, refrigerator manufacturers. The French have a strong attachment to the ideal of the bucolic countryside, and a change in agricultural policy can be blown up into a threat to national identity.

Those attitudes are important because they make France the leading supporter of the European Union`s costly protectionist agricultural policy, and the major opponent of any serious change. That intransigence hurts developing countries, where farmers often find themselves competing with the artificially low prices of subsidized European produce that gets dumped on the international market.

As members of the World Trade Organization meet in Cancún, Mexico, next month, they`ll be trying to overcome French protectionism that threatens to stall momentum toward expanding global trade. Great Britain, the Netherlands and some Scandinavian countries tend to be more open to change — something that is not surprising because they pay in more to the European farm support system than they take out. (American trade negotiators support reducing subsidies and trade barriers on agriculture — though their sentiments are not always shared by the farm lobby in Congress.)

Europe`s protectionism stems from the Continent`s political determination to sustain agriculture even when it makes little economic sense. European farms are, on average, far smaller than those in the United States — the European Union has more than three times as many farms even though it has only about one-third as much cultivated farmland. The idea of bigger farms frightens the French, just like the idea of depopulated farming communities. But it is possible to advance some of the more sensible goals of Europe`s agriculture policy, like land conservation and environmentalism, without losing touch with reality. Europe loses about 3 percent of its farming population a year, and more consolidation, in the form of larger-scale farming and an abandonment of absurdly inefficient production, is inevitable. And while there is no question that Europe has a right, even an obligation, to spend money on rural development and the protection of open space, it is not sensible to believe that every village that was inhabited in Charlemagne`s day must be sustained. Moreover, Europe`s common agricultural policy in its present form does not always advance the humble family farmers often pointed to in its defense. Larger corporate agricultural interests get a disproportionate share of farm aid, giving Europeans who pay for the subsidies the worst of both worlds. And the current subsidies actually often hurt the environment by promoting overproduction.

A sensible compromise would provide government support for farmers who protect land from development and maintain high environmental standards. But it would not pay farmers to grow crops they couldn`t sell under normal circumstances and dump the result on the global market, driving prices down too low for poor countries to make a profit on their own exports. The European Commission recently moved in that direction. It proposed reforms to the common agricultural policy that would stop linking farmers` subsidies to the amount they produce. But farmers across Europe hated the idea. "We don`t want to get checks simply because we live somewhere remote and are nice people," said Franz-Josef Feiter, who heads the Committee of Agricultural Organizations in the European Union, the main farm lobby in Brussels. "Ours are industrialized societies with high wages and we must assure similarly good wages for our farmers."

France led the fight against the commission`s reform and, with the help of German allies, was able to water down the final deal announced in June. Now, on the eve of the W.T.O. gathering in Cancún, European and American trade officials are negotiating the details of a common approach to reducing their harmful restraints to trade in farm goods. If this effort is to succeed, France must come to terms with the fact that at the very least, the time has come to renounce the dumping of any subsidized farm products on world markets, and to open its domestic market to imports from poor nations, free of any tariffs or quotas.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 31, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Bombing Democracy in Iraq
By REUEL MARC GERECHT


Of all the bad news from Iraq recently — the bombing of the United Nations headquarters, ongoing attacks on coalition soldiers, hints of foreign terrorists being drawn to a holy war — Friday`s car bombing in the Shiite holy city of Najaf is clearly the most worrisome.

The attack, which killed scores of Iraqis, including the prominent cleric Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim — and which came less than a week after a bomb went off at the home of Mr. Hakim`s uncle, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim — has convulsed the Shiite community. That should be of vital concern to the United States, whose fortunes in Iraq will rise or fall with the political sentiments of the Shiites, who make up at least 60 percent of Iraq`s population.

These bombings were undoubtedly intended to terrorize Iraq`s clerical establishment and to snuff out the growing dialogue between mainstream Shiites and Americans. Both ayatollahs had been talking directly to American officials and favored democracy. Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim controlled the only effective Shiite paramilitary force, but had chosen not to direct it against the occupation. This had angered Shiite extremists, notably the young cleric Moktada al-Sadr, leader of a violent faction known as the Sadriyyin.

There is already a lot of finger-pointing, but it may never be totally clear who planned the two bombings: the Sadriyyin, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, Baath Party loyalists or agents of Iran`s hard-core mullahs. Some American officials and Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, quickly blamed anti-American Sunnis.

This may well be true, but it is important to note that the Baath Party loyalists and Sunni fundamentalists, at least until now, have kept their distance from the Shiite south, killing "collaborationists" and American G.I.`s only in the Sunni regions. Killing Americans in the south wouldn`t be hard — many operate there with light security — and could be the best way to derail the United States` post-Saddam planning. Nor, according to Pentagon officials, have the jihadists coming over the Syrian and Iranian borders tried to attack Americans in the south. (These holy warriors appear to be Sunni.)

It is also possible that the bombings were the result of an unexpected marriage of convenience. When I was in Iraq in June, there was much gossip among Shiites that Mr. Sadr and his Sadriyyin were trying to forge an alliance with Sunni fundamentalists. If so, American G.I.`s may face an ugly two-front war, far worse than the relatively isolated attacks they have endured so far.

Still, whether or not Sunnis were involved in the bombings, the greater concern is that they will spur a Shiite-versus-Shiite tug of war. The Sadriyyin movement has aggressively vied for power with the grand ayatollahs of Najaf. The Sadriyyin are hard-core revolutionaries, spiritual disciples of the "Khomeini of Iraq," Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam Hussein in 1980.

In recent weeks Moktada al-Sadr had been ramping up his anti-American vitriol. The reason is clear: time is working against him. Local governance in the Shiite regions has been solidifying as American administrators have passed more responsibility to Iraqis. As services improve and Iraqis (slowly) gain confidence in the governing council, the debate over the coming constitutional convention will dominate Iraqi politics. And if Iraqis succeed in drawing up a new, broadly accepted constitution, the radicals know they will be exiled to the fringes of society.

Indeed, the two bombings can be seen as evidence of extremists` failure to gain traction on the "Shiite street." If so, the decision to resort to violence may backfire. Few Shiites, no matter their political views, will countenance violence against such respected figures, or such ghastly slaughter so near the Imam Ali mosque.

It is critical for the American administration to react decisively. Until now it has has shown commendable restraint toward the Sadriyyin movement, not wanting to aid the extremists` recruitment efforts. But if American officials get solid proof that Mr. Sadr`s followers were involved in the bombings, the military should move quickly and ruthlessly.

And Washington should not tolerate the small stream of holy warriors coming over the Syrian and Iranian borders. Shiite leaders, both the elder clerics and the Sadriyyin, are always assessing America`s resolve and capacities, and view our efforts against these foreigners as a test case. The only way to stop the flow of jihadists will be to apply pressure on Syria and Iran to end it; Saddam Hussein was never able to seal the Iranian-Iraqi border, and thousands of additional American troops won`t either.

In the long term, America`s goal must be to create a civil society among Iraqis of all faiths and races. But the principal focus for now must be helping the Shiites and their senior clergy, our strongest allies in the country. They — not the United Nations and more foreign troops — are the key to creating the democracy we have promised.


Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 31, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Policy Lobotomy Needed
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


No one can say with any certainty who was behind the bombings at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Shiite holy place in Najaf, but here is what you can say about them: They are incredibly sick and incredibly smart.

With one bomb at the U.N. office, they sent a warning to every country that is considering joining the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq: Even the U.N. is not safe here, so your troops surely won`t be. They also stoked some vicious finger-pointing within the Western alliance. And with the bomb Friday in Najaf, they may have threatened the most pleasant surprise about post-Saddam Hussein Iraq: the absence of bloodletting between the three main ethnic groups — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. After the Najaf bombing, Shiites started blaming Sunnis, and Shiites started blaming each other.

If you think we don`t have enough troops in Iraq now — which we don`t — wait and see if the factions there start going at each other. America would have to bring back the draft to deploy enough troops to separate the parties. In short, we are at a dangerous moment in Iraq. We cannot let sectarian violence explode. We cannot go on trying to do this on the cheap. And we cannot succeed without more Iraqi and allied input.

But the White House and Pentagon have been proceeding as if it`s business as usual. It is no wonder that some of the people closest to what is happening are no longer sitting quiet. The gutsy Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, acting on his own, told reporters last week that the U.S. would consider a new U.N. resolution that would put U.S. forces in Iraq under U.N. authority — which is the precondition for key allies to send troops. And Paul Bremer, who oversees Iraq`s reconstruction, told The Washington Post that it was going to cost "several tens of billions" to rebuild Iraq. Both men were telling the American people truths that should have come from the White House.

Our Iraq strategy needs an emergency policy lobotomy. President Bush needs to shift to a more U.N.-friendly approach, with more emphasis on the Iraqi Army (the only force that can effectively protect religious sites in Iraq and separate the parties), and with more input from Secretary of State Colin Powell and less from the "we know everything and everyone else is stupid" civilian team running the Pentagon.

There is no question that we would benefit from a new U.N. mandate that puts U.S. forces in Iraq under a stronger U.N. umbrella. It would buy us and our Iraqi allies more legitimacy, as well as help, and legitimacy buys time and time is what this is going to take. "Other nations are prepared to help, but they do not want to join what is perceived as an American `occupation,` " Secretary General Kofi Annan told me. "If the forces in Iraq are put under a U.N. mandate, they can still be commanded by an American, like in Bosnia, but it will be perceived differently and provide the legitimacy for others to join."

But this will not be a cure-all. Countries are not exactly lining up to send their troops into harm`s way in Iraq. So, the only way we get a big troop increase quickly is for the Pentagon to reverse its awful decision to disband (and unemploy) the Iraqi Army — most of whom refused to fight for Saddam in the first place. We should be going to Iraqi colonels and offering to pay them to rebuild their units. They can prune out the bad guys.

Also, the hard part of any new U.N. mandate will be what to do with Mr. Bremer, who, up to now, has done a tough job well. No serious allies are going to send forces to Iraq just to be under U.S. military command. They will demand a voice in shaping the political future of Iraq, which is right now the exclusive role of Mr. Bremer, reporting to the Pentagon. If the U.N. is brought into the political rebuilding of Iraq, a way must be found to tightly define its role so that we don`t have 15 chefs in the kitchen. That would make a mess. Maybe the solution is to have the Iraqi Governing Council spell out to the U.N. what political role it should play — where it should stop and start.

I don`t know what Mr. Bush has been doing on his vacation, but I know what the country has been doing: starting to worry. People are connecting the dots — the exploding deficit, the absence of allies in Iraq, the soaring costs of the war and the mounting casualties. People want to stop hearing about why winning in Iraq is so important and start seeing a strategy for making it happen at a cost the country can sustain.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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August 31, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who`s Losing Iraq?
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

Karl Rove has got to be nervous.

The man who last year advised Republican candidates to "focus on war" is finding out that the Bush doctrine of pre-emption cannot pre-empt anarchy.

Now, General Rove will have to watch Democratic candidates focus on war.

We`re getting into very volatile territory in the Middle East.

As Paul Bremer admitted last week, the cost of the Iraq adventure is going to be spectacular: $2 billion for electrical demands and $16 billion to deliver clean water.

We`re losing one or two American soldiers every day. Saddam and Osama are still lurking and scheming — the "darkness which may be felt."

After a car bomb exploded outside a Najaf mosque on Friday, killing scores of people, including the most prominent pro-American Shiite cleric, we may have to interject our troops into an internecine Shiite dispute — which Saddam`s Baathist guerrillas are no doubt stoking.

With Iraqis in Najaf screaming, "There is no order! There is no government! We`d rather have Saddam than this!," we had one more ominous illustration that the Bush team is out of its depth and divided against itself.

You can`t conduct a great historical experiment in a petty and bickering frame of mind. The agencies of the Bush administration are behaving like high school cliques. The policy in Iraq is paralyzed almost to the point of nonexistence, stalled by spats between the internationalists and unilateralists, with the national security director, Condoleezza Rice, abnegating her job as policy referee.

The State Department will have to stop sulking and being in denial about the Pentagon running the show in Iraq. And the Pentagon will have to stop being dogmatic, clinging to the quixotic notion that it only wants to succeed with its streamlined force and its trompe l`oeil coalition. Rummy has to accept the magnitude of the task and give up running the Department of Defense the way a misanthropic accountant would.

Big deeds need big spirits. You can`t have a Marshall Plan and a tax cut at the same time.

It has also now become radiantly clear that we have to drag Dick Cheney out of the dark and smog. Less Hobbes, more Locke.

So far, American foreign policy has been guided by the vice president`s gloomy theories that fear and force are the best motivators in the world, that war is man`s natural state and that the last great superpower has sovereign authority to do as it pleases without much consultation with subjects or other nations.

We can now see the disturbing results of all the decisions Mr. Cheney made in secret meetings.

The General Accounting Office issued a report last week noting that the vice president shaped our energy policy with clandestine advice from "petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists."

Favoritism to energy pals led to last week`s insane decision to gut part of the Clean Air Act and allow power plants, refineries and other industrial sites to belch pollutants.

Another Bush-Cheney energy crony is Anthony Alexander of Ohio`s FirstEnergy Corporation, which helped trigger the blackout after failing to upgrade its transmission system properly since deregulation. He was a Bush Pioneer, having raised at least $100,000 for the campaign.

This logrolling attitude has led to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allowing Halliburton — which made Mr. Cheney a rich man with $20 million worth of cashed-in stock — to get no-bid contracts in Iraq totaling $1.7 billion, and that`s just a start.

All this, and high gas prices, too?

When he wasn`t meeting secretly with energy lobbyists, Mr. Cheney was meeting secretly with Iraqi exiles. The Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi and other defectors conned Mr. Cheney, Rummy and the naïve Wolfowitz of Arabia by playing up the danger of Saddam`s W.M.D.`s and playing down the prospect of Iraqi resistance to a U.S. invasion.

According to The Los Angeles Times, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies are investigating to see if they were duped by Iraqi defectors giving bogus information to mislead the West before the war.

Some intelligence officials "now fear that key portions of the prewar information may have been flawed," the story said. "The issue raises fresh doubts as to whether illicit weapons will be found in Iraq."

Karl Rove has got to be nervous.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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The other face of booming Las Vegas: Calvary Downtown Outreach, which helps feed the needy, estimated at up to 10,000 homeless people. Each Saturday brings free food and sermons.
washingtonpost.com
A Gamble on Hitting the Payroll in Las Vegas
For Texas Couple, Life on the Margin Just Got Worse

By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page A01


One in a series of occasional articles

LAS VEGAS

The worst year in the life of Alex Arreguin III ends where it began, in the Greyhound bus station on Main Street.

This time Arreguin, 43, isn`t arriving, he`s leaving. It isn`t midnight, but the afternoon, and instead of walking out of the bus station, he is sitting on the dirty floor while his companion, Diane Garcia, 39, is out front, wrestling down her doubts with a cigarette.

Stay or go? That`s what she is out there wondering.

What happened? That`s what he is wondering.

In search of a better life, the two came here from recession-hit Texas last summer. With Las Vegas`s distinction as the fastest-growing area of the United States, there seemed no better place for two people to find good jobs.

But 54 weeks have taught them a hard-earned truth: that in a fragile economy, if one thing goes wrong, a person on the margins can very quickly skid into what they have become -- broke, jobless and without a home. Silly with promise when they arrived, they are now creatures of charity, from the donated clothes they are wearing, to the dismal places they have been sleeping, to the bus tickets back to Houston that they were presented with just an hour before by a local social services organization.

"It`s going to be all right," Arreguin says as he watches Garcia, who is in tears for the third time this day. "Everything`s going to be all right."

All that`s left for them to do is give up the last bit of optimism that brought them here, get on the bus and go home.

A one-way bus ticket out of town: This is what the economy has come to in one corner of the place that has come to symbolize endless jobs in America.

Since last month, dozens of people who came here to work have been sent back to home towns from Florida to Alaska, and dozens more will be getting tickets until the $10,000 donation from a private business owner to fund the program runs out. Administered by the local police and Lutheran Social Services of Nevada, the program has succeeded not only in getting some people off the streets but also in revealing the day-to-day exigencies of people that Sandra Lewis, interim executive director of the charity, refers to as "the situational homeless."

"Those are the ones we`re targeting, people who are homeless because of loss of a job, or they`re unable to find employment, or a promised job didn`t materialize, or someone got sick," she says.

"We`re not shipping out people who are homeless to be homeless in another state," adds Jeremy Levy, a police officer who helped start the program, explaining that the people return to relatives so they have a place to stay while finding their way back into the economy. "This is about people who want to get a job, want to be employed, want to better themselves."

Levy and Lewis say they knew such a program would be popular; what they didn`t expect was that the little charity would be overwhelmed. "I don`t know, the world must think Las Vegas has jobs aplenty," Lewis says, scanning the waiting room as another day begins. Every seat is filled. People are waiting outside. The faces are homeless faces, street faces, bus-station faces; the faces of people long used to dysfunction rather than comfort.

Arreguin and Garcia are two of the people waiting. It is a week before they will be at the bus station.

"How can I help you?" asks Ozzie Adamicska, a volunteer who screens people to see if they qualify for the program.

"I`ve been here a year, and I just can`t find any work," Arreguin says, and that`s how this day becomes the beginning of their last week in Las Vegas.

"On the Internet, it`s very deceiving. It makes it look like you can start working the day you arrive," Arreguin says, explaining the decision to come to Las Vegas. He says he has worked in construction for 24 years, that he did metal framing on just about every skyscraper in downtown Houston, and that contractors in Las Vegas couldn`t have cared less. Every one of them said the same thing, he says, that without a driver`s license, which he didn`t have, and access to a reliable car, which he didn`t have, they had no use for him.

"I see," says Adamicska.

"Believe me, I`ve tried," Arreguin goes on, outlining his and Garcia`s downward spiral. There was Day One, when they got off the bus with $900 -- all the money they had. There was Day Two, when $600 was stolen from their hotel room. There was the night the following week when they paid their hotel bill with what remained of their money, put their clothes in a bus station locker and, not knowing what else to do, slept under the stairwell of a parking garage, their first time out on the street.

There was the following day when they returned to the bus station and saw the locker hanging open, with everything, including their Bible, gone. There were the three months in the Salvation Army shelter, and the walks along the Strip where they were told they could not be hired as waiters or busboys or janitors without an identity card from the Sheriff`s Department ($35) and a health card showing they had been tested for communicable diseases ($35), money they didn`t have.

There was the daily two-mile walk they began to make from the shelter to the intersection where landscapers troll at sunrise for day laborers. There were six good months in a small apartment when a landscaper hired them to pass out fliers door-to-door in a 6,000-door retirement community, and another month at the Salvation Army when that work ran out.

"I`m not a quitter," Arreguin says of why he and Garcia stayed on, and on, but now, he says, the time has come. Adamicska begins filling out paperwork and asks for their address. Garcia, remaining quiet, fiddles with a cross she got from a church one day along with a complimentary hot dog lunch. Arreguin says they are living for free at the moment in the trailer of a woman who has so many ailments, physical and mental, that her prescription bottles fill up a cardboard box.

The part of Las Vegas they are in is referred to by police as the homeless corridor. When people talk about the phenomenal growth of Las Vegas -- a doubling of the population in 12 years; a saleswoman in a community of new homes who says of her job, "There ain`t no recession here! We`re more or less doing crowd control!" -- they are not talking about this corridor.

But it has been growing, too. Estimates of Las Vegas`s homeless population now go as high as 10,000 people, and while that number includes the broken gamblers particular to Las Vegas and the chronic homeless of any city, it is also swollen by people who are characterized by Mary Riddel, associate director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, as "economic migrants."

"We`ve had very, very strong job growth for the last 12 years," averaging 6 percent per year, Riddel says. The recession and 9/11 changed that, however. Riddel says 15,000 jobs vanished on the Strip alone in the first three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and last year`s job growth was 1.3 percent. Additionally, the rate declined by 0.1 percent during the first six months of 2002, which is when Arreguin and Garcia were deciding to leave Houston.

Not that they knew of the slowdown; they came expecting a boomtown, and so did thousands of others. For years, Las Vegas has been averaging a net increase in population of 5,000 people per month, and the month they arrived was no different.

But now came unavoidable results. "The shelters are just swamped. There`s way too many people. The streets are lined," says Levy, the police officer, of the effects on those arriving from the fringes of the economy with plans no more specific than to do better. "It`s so hard," Levy says of what it can be like. "They have to get work cards, and health cards, and state IDs, and it all costs money, and it`s not working for these people."

Or as Sandra Lewis says, "Maybe one or two are scamming for a bus ticket, but most of the people who come here, they really need help. You can tell."

Or as Adamicska said earlier this day, after a woman told him, "I can`t take no more here," and broke down: "Sometimes I get so sad hearing these stories."

He finishes the intake form for Arreguin and Garcia. He tells them the police will run a background check on them and make sure they have a place to go. He says there`s a waiting list and that it will be a week before they can leave -- if they`re approved. "Call me next Wednesday," he says.

`I`ve Never Been Homeless`


With six days to go, they count how much money they have. Arreguin empties his pockets. Garcia checks under the mattress for some pennies she thought she had seen the day they dragged the mattress in from a Dumpster.

At this particular mobile home park, called the Bluebird, trailers are divided in half and rented out as two places, so Arreguin and Garcia have spent the past several weeks squeezed into one room with the woman who pays the rent and her boyfriend. Their mattress is where the woman puts her feet when she gets out of bed. The kitchen is an electric pot and a refrigerator that has been struggling for three days to turn out a tray of ice. The bathroom is where the woman and her boyfriend have been going every night for privacy while Arreguin turns up the volume on a TV that cost them $7.50 and shows only ghosts.

Anything`s better than the shelter, though, and making it better still: The woman announced last night that she was relocating, immediately, to a vacant apartment she heard about, leaving the trailer to Arreguin and Garcia until the next time rent is due, by which point they will be gone.

A place of their own: It is the first time in nearly two months.

"Three dollars and three cents," Arreguin says.

Garcia shows him four pennies.

"That`ll get me to my plasma appointment tomorrow," he says, "which`ll get me $27, and that`ll get us through the weekend, and I`ll do plasma again on Monday."

Twenty-seven dollars for blood plasma, a newspaper that costs 35 cents at McDonald`s rather than 50 cents anywhere else; free food and clothes every Wednesday at the Presbyterian church -- these are the calculations they have lived by for a year.

It wasn`t like this in Texas. From high school on, Arreguin worked steadily. Busboy. Dishwasher. Drywaller. "I love to work. Love to work," he says. He worked in the oil refineries and in construction. "It`s the self-satisfaction of doing something, not just laying around." He wrapped fiberglass around PVC pipe and started a business mixing 500-gallon vats of chemicals into automobile cleansers, called Heavenly Shine. "The Bible says if you don`t work, you shouldn`t eat." Some years he made enough money to get by on, some years he approached $50,000. A high school graduate, he married young, had a child, divorced, had two more children, drove a fast car, had his license suspended, didn`t bother to renew it, kept driving, and 10 years ago met Garcia.

She had three children, too, after an upbringing she condenses to beatings with belt buckles, brooms broken on her back, keys swiped across her face, an assault by a close relative and not a day spent in school after junior high. "So I never had direction in my life until I met Alex," she says.

She worked with him at Heavenly Shine, and when the business failed, she agreed that they had reached a point in their lives where it was time to try something new. In Las Vegas, they decided, they could make more money, maybe enough to travel, and certainly enough to help their six children, all of whom were now grown and starting out on their own.

Every one of the children said the same thing: Don`t go. But they went anyway.

"Oh, hell, we never thought we`d end up like this," Arreguin says.

He says it wasn`t a big deal in Houston not to have a driver`s license, he just drove slower, so he didn`t expect it to be a factor in Las Vegas. "I`ll get there," he told construction contractors who insisted on a license. "I`ll take the bus. I`ll walk." When none hired him, he and Garcia talked about getting his license, but it involved going back to Texas and taking care of old, unpaid fines that had led to the suspension of his license. He says their inability to get casino jobs was just as insurmountable, that $70 may not sound like much to get the required health and identity cards, but it was. "We didn`t have no money for the bus," he says. "We were walking everywhere. Our feet were aching." At one point, he says, they took jobs on the Strip handing out fliers for an escort service, but "I did it for 10 minutes and gave up. I`m supposed to be with God, and I`m handing out pornography? Even if you need money that bad, you got to have some values."

"It`s easier for us to talk about right now, because we`re going home," Garcia says.

"We`re going home," Arreguin says, and something about those words, or the way he says them, causes her to weep. Arreguin watches her. She has been crying more and more frequently. Neither of them knows why.

"That`s why I don`t drink," she says. "When I drink, I start crying so hard. It`s like when somebody dies, I can`t stop crying."

She can`t stop now, either. After awhile, to make her laugh, Arreguin tells how they met.

"I was sitting outside, and this one slithered up, sat in my lap, and put her claws in me," he says.

She doesn`t laugh, though. Instead, she looks at him and says, "I just seen a lonely boy sitting there."

The next day, while Arreguin is inside the plasma center, Garcia says the hardest day in the whole year was the day Arreguin called home, and his mother said she had bad news, that his father had died two weeks before. That night, she says, he drank until he staggered along a street, punching everything he passed. He punched light poles. He punched walls. "He felt like such a failure," she says. "It was so sad. Even the cops wouldn`t touch him." He kept walking and swinging. He punched a truck. "He didn`t hurt it, but it already had a dent, and the next day I took him to the truck and said, `Look at what you did!` Just to make him feel bad."

Because she was feeling bad, too.

"I said, `I`ve never been like this. I`ve never been homeless. Let`s go home.` He said, `But they`ll all be saying, `We told you so, we told you so, we told you so.` I said, `It doesn`t matter!` He said, `Things are going to get better.` "

Out he comes from the plasma center with a fresh hole in his right arm and $27. They now have $30.07. They go to the 99¢ Only Store and spend $4.95 on eggs, cheese slices, pancake mix and two telephone cards. They spend $7 at another store that sells off-brand cigarettes and throws in a free lighter. They spend $6.86 at Wal-Mart for syrup, a bag of potatoes, butter and a gallon of juice. They go back to the trailer and run into the woman renting it who has come back for her pills and begins yelling that she wants them out, right now.

"I`m going to turn in the keys tomorrow," she says.

"But what about us?" Arreguin says.

"I need some money," she says.

"I only got 10 bucks," Arreguin says.

"Well, I need money!" the woman screams.

So they give her $10 and, with five days to go, are down to $1.26.

Counting Pennies, Days


They are not the only ones whose days are spent in crisis, not even close.

As Arreguin was selling his plasma, police were firing concussion grenades into a second-story apartment just down the street where a drunk, 60-year-old man had been taking potshots after being served with an eviction notice.

"He`s upset because he lost his job," said the police spokesman on the scene.

"He`s a decent guy, man, that`s what`s so messed up," added a neighbor, Leroy C. Vingoe.

Now, on Saturday, as Arreguin and Garcia reach four days to go, the line outside a downtown church for a free lunch of hot dogs and beans and salad is long, even though the temperature is up to 105. "I thought I`d be making all kinds of money," says John Walden, 36. "Didn`t work out as well as I`d planned," says Peter Bolzan, 57. "Just a little hungry," says Jerry Mancini, 36.

Now, on Monday -- two days left -- Arreguin and Garcia are back at the plasma center. There are 33 chairs. There are 59 people. Garcia waits outside. She tried several times to sell plasma, but she has been afraid of pain since her childhood and to endure the needle she would have to wrap her legs around the chair legs and pull her shirt over her eyes. This time it takes Arreguin nearly three hours, and he earns $25 instead of $27 because it`s his first donation of the week, but they are back up to $26.26. And then, walking away, Garcia finds a penny on the ground, so they are up to $26.27.

Tuesday. One day left.

They start the day by visiting a free health clinic. In the back, Arreguin is weighed. He left Texas at 285. He`s down now to 209. The doctor gives him pills for a bleeding ulcer and tells him to avoid stress, and with that Arreguin and Garcia are back outside with nothing to do until they leave.

So they decide to turn their final day into a vacation day and visit the casinos.

They wonder if they should walk the six miles to the heart of the Strip but go instead to some of the less glamorous downtown casinos, the ones with the penny slot machines and stacks of toilet paper in the restrooms that Garcia would take when they were in the shelter. The casinos also have $1 drinks, and by late afternoon they are down $4 and a little drunk, just like tourists, when, out on the street, they run into a man they know from the plasma center who is passing out fliers.

"You looking for work, man?" he says.

"We`re leaving," Arreguin says.

"Tomorrow," Garcia says.

"Man, there`s so much work right now," the man says. "We`re hiring. Five-fifteen an hour. Eight hours a day. All you have to do is stand in front of City Hall and pass these out."

Arreguin takes one of the fliers. "Wedding of your dreams. $99," it says. The man goes on his way. Two more hours pass. And maybe it`s liquor sentimentality, but as afternoon turns to evening and they are down to their last hours, they find themselves talking not about leaving, but finding a way to stay.

"Say we work for this guy two days a week. That`s $80," Arreguin says. And if the landscaper hires them back, like he once said he would? "That`s another $220." And if both of them did plasma, twice a week? "Another hundred." That`s $400 a week. That`s $21,000 a year.

"Maybe," Garcia says.

"Maybe," Arreguin says.

"You`re assuming," Garcia says.

"I`m assuming," Arreguin says. "But we could get our own place, we wouldn`t have to worry about. . . ." He doesn`t finish. "Ah, we`re gonna go," he says. "We gotta go. We have no choice."

They each get another drink. Garcia`s comes with whipped cream and a cherry.

Now it`s her turn. "I don`t want to go home," she says. "I don`t want to go home. I mean I want to see the kids, but it`s just going to be so hard."

She looks at Arreguin, who says, "Don`t start boohooing, okay?" He puts his arm around her, and now he is hugging her, and now it is almost midnight and they are back at the trailer, sitting on the wooden steps that lead to the front door, and he is saying, "We have no choice. We got to go."

"We got to go," she repeats.

"Passing out fliers is no life," he says.

"I know," she says. "But I`m thinking."

No Looking Back


They don`t finish packing till mid-morning. At Lutheran Social Services, the lobby is so overcrowded they are brought discreetly in a side door and given seats outside Adamicska`s office, where they hear a woman yell, "I`m down to $30," when she is told the waiting list for buses is now up to three weeks. At the bus station, Adamicska gives them their tickets and wishes them luck, and Garcia goes to smoke a cigarette while Arreguin sits against a wall.

"Everything`s going to be all right," he says, and then he goes outside.

The sidewalk is a gallery of stains. The air carries the smells of another hot day. The sound is of a homeless woman, familiar from the shelter, filthy and ill, hitting herself in the chest and shrieking at the top of her lungs. Life in Las Vegas. It has been 54 weeks to the day.

And so at 5 p.m., when it`s time to get on the bus, they do.

"Here we go. Kiss my behind, Las Vegas," Arreguin says as the bus heads down Main Street. They pass the plasma center and the casinos. They reach the outskirts, get on the highway and feel the bus accelerate.

"You sure?" Arreguin says.

Garcia leans to him. He kisses her. She settles against him and they both look out the window as the city goes to desert, and the desert of Nevada becomes the desert of Arizona. The trip to Houston will take 40 hours in all, and if the view out the window has any meaning to them other than landscape, it is the mocking reminder that America, above all, is a place of opportunity. There are the trucks they pass with the signs that say, "Drivers Needed." There is the billboard they pass that says, "Great Nursing Jobs" and gives a toll-free number. There is the restaurant sign they pass -- "Try our new quesadillas" -- and indeed, somebody is inside, at that very moment, making money by cooking up those quesadillas, just as somebody is making money erecting the cell phone towers they pass, and manufacturing the manufactured homes, and growing cotton and alfalfa, and climbing onto the bus at 3 a.m. to search for illegal immigrants.

There is another view, of course. In Las Vegas, where the unemployment rate was down to 4.9 percent last fall, the current rate is 5.6. In Phoenix, where they stop the first night to change buses, the pre-recession unemployment rate was 2.7 percent; now it`s up to 5.8. In Luna County, N.M., where they stop for a snack break, the rate is 24.1 percent. In El Paso, it has gone from 8.8 percent when they passed through on their way to Las Vegas to 10.1, and in Houston, now less than eight hours away, the rate has gone from 7.9 percent when they left to 9.3.

This is the economy that did them in, but they prefer the optimistic view of the tow-truck driver who comes out in the middle of the night to the middle of nowhere when a bus tire goes flat. "Eight seventy-five an hour," he says of how much he`s paid to change tires, "plus a commission of at least $50." Land of opportunity: Forget the 9 million people who aren`t working. One hundred thirty-seven million people are working, and all that Arreguin and Garcia want is to be two of them.

"Oh I feel good," Arreguin says as they get closer to Houston. "Oh I feel good."

They get to the outskirts.

"Go home. Shower. Visit with my family. Go from there," he says of his immediate plans.

They wind through downtown.

"Fix myself up," Garcia says of her plans, "because this is not me."

They arrive at the bus station, home at last.

In the next several hours, this is what will happen:

There will be a reunion with Arreguin`s mother, who will give them cold drinks with ice cubes and say sweetly, "When they left, they said they were going to sweep up money with a broom."

There will be a reunion with one of Arreguin`s daughters, who will say that things have been rough at her job lately as a bank teller and that she`s doing the best she can, but she doesn`t know how long she`ll be able to hang on.

There will be a reunion with another of his daughters, who will say she loves her job at a day care center, but it pays only $5.50 an hour, and money is tight, and she`s been thinking of going to a plasma center because she is $600 behind in her bills.

And there will be a reunion with Garcia`s daughter, who has just given birth to a new baby, lives in an apartment with nothing in the refrigerator and doesn`t work. "Come see my baby," she will say, leading her mother toward her bedroom where a week-old infant is lying in borrowed clothes, and in that moment it will become clear what is happening.

For three more people, the skidding has begun.

That`s what`s ahead as the next year of a fragile economy gets underway for Arreguin and Garcia, who walk now out of the bus station with $1.37 to their name.

"It`s like we never left, huh?" he says. Garcia`s eyes become weary and worried and watery, all at the same time.

"It`s just a year later," he says.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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In the Annals of Bank Robbery, He`s One for the Ages

Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page A02

At 91, J.L. Hunter "Red" Rountree wasn`t letting age -- or past failures -- slow him down. On Aug. 12, for the third time in five years, Rountree robbed a bank. And for the third time in five years, Rountree was promptly apprehended.

This time, he tried the First American Bank in Abilene, Tex., a city about 100 miles northwest of his home in Goldthwaite. According to police, an unarmed Rountree sauntered into the bank, passed a teller an envelope marked "ROBBERY" and made off with $2,000. He cruised toward home in his white Buick for about 30 minutes before authorities pulled him over and arrested him.

On Wednesday, Rountree was arraigned in a Lubbock federal court. He could face 20 years in prison -- which, in all likelihood, would be a life sentence.

"I`ve never heard of a bank robber this old," said Sgt. Mike Perry of the Abilene Police Department.

The charges are just the latest in Rountree`s unsuccessful criminal history in his golden years. A onetime Houston businessman who reportedly frittered away his fortune on younger women, Rountree was arrested minutes after holding up a Biloxi, Miss., bank in 1998. After robbing a Pensacola, Fla., bank a year later, he got as far as the parking lot before customers wrestled him down. He went on to serve three years as Florida`s oldest inmate.

In a 2001 prison interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Rountree said he robbed banks to supplement scanty Social Security earnings. "I might rob another bank," he said. "I`m not saying I will or I won`t. But, hey, I might need to."

-- Karin Brulliard



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Dozens of Taliban Militants Killed

Associated Press
Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page A26


QALAT, Afghanistan, Aug. 30 -- The U.S. military said today that a weeklong campaign of bombing and intense ground battles on the craggy mountain ridges of southeastern Afghanistan has killed dozens of Taliban holdouts.

U.S. Special Operations forces and hundreds of allied Afghan soldiers were pressing their assault, taking several strategic peaks and laying siege to positions of the hard-line Islamic militant group. Two U.S. soldiers were wounded in the fighting, but their lives are not in danger, according to Col. Rodney Davis, spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

A provincial intelligence chief, Khalil Hotak, said that for the first time in the recent assault, U.S. warplanes operated during daylight hours, in support of a joint U.S.-Afghan operation that has met stiff resistance.

After two nights of bombing, the planes pounded the Chinaran mountains and two nearby areas in the southeastern Zabol province, Hotak said from his command center in Qalat, 45 miles south of the fighting.

This week`s fighting follows a recent surge in military action by the Taliban, which has staged deadly attacks on Afghan forces, officials and aid workers in an apparent bid to undermine the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Davis said at least 33 insurgents had been killed in fighting with coalition and Afghan militia forces between Monday and Wednesday.

The battles in Zabol have been "at times, intense," Davis said.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Let Venezuela Vote




Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page B06


FOR YEARS Venezuelans have debated whether President Hugo Chavez is prepared to impose his quasi-socialist "Bolivarian revolution" on the country by force or will respect the country`s increasingly fragile democratic rules. Now they will likely learn the answer. Unless Mr. Chavez directly violates or obstructs the constitution promulgated under his own government, he probably will have to face a recall referendum in the coming few months. Such a vote, nominally agreed on by the president and opposition in June, would give Venezuela a peaceful way out of a civil conflict that threatens to tear the country apart. But polls show that if the vote were held, Mr. Chavez would probably lose -- and so the president has made it clear he will do everything he can to prevent it. The challenge for Venezuelans, and for their neighbors, will be to ensure that democracy in this important oil-producing country is not disrupted.

The chances that Venezuelans will be able to vote their way out of crisis grew considerably last week when the country`s Supreme Court, ending months of impasse, named the last member of an electoral council that must oversee the process. Days earlier, opposition organizers had turned in recall petitions bearing 3.2 million signatures, more than enough to meet the constitutional requirement. The council has 30 days to judge whether the petitions are valid and, if it rules they are, 60 days to schedule an election. The referendum requirements in Mr. Chavez`s constitution are quirky: Some experts believe the signatures may be ruled invalid for having been collected before this month, a problem the opposition believes it could overcome by quickly collecting new petitions. If a vote takes place, it won`t be enough for Mr. Chavez to lose (polls show him failing by a margin of 2-to-1); the constitution says more people must vote "no" than the 3.8 million who voted for Mr. Chavez when he was reelected three years ago. That, too, is a threshold the opposition believes it can cross -- and if it does not, Mr. Chavez will have earned a mandate to remain in power for three more years.

The real danger is that the president, who once attempted a military coup, will block the vote by fraud or force. Already he claims, without evidence, that the petition signatures are falsified. His supporters in Venezuela`s Congress have been trying to pass measures changing the composition of the Supreme Court and imposing new restrictions on the media. Violence against opposition supporters, including shootings and bombings, has happened before and could return. Opposition leaders themselves backed an unsuccessful coup and later led a disastrous general strike; now they must avoid being provoked by Mr. Chavez and must build a platform that bridges the gap between Venezuela`s rich and middle classes and the poor -- most of whom also want to see the president go. The Bush administration, the Organization of American States and key neighbors such as Brazil have all supported the electoral solution. In the coming weeks they must make clear to Mr. Chavez that any attempt to stop a referendum by violent or illegal means will be regarded as an interruption of Venezuela`s democracy.




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Why We Must Win


By John McCain (The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona.)

Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page B07


A recent visit to Iraq convinced me of several things. We were right to go to war to liberate Iraq. The Iraqi people welcome their liberation from tyranny. A free Iraq could transform the Middle East. And failure to make the necessary political and financial commitment to build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, empower our enemies and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny.

If we are to avoid a debate over who "lost" Iraq, we must act urgently to transform our military success into political victory.

We fought a just war in Iraq to end the threat posed by a dictator with a record of aggression against his people and his neighbors and a proven willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against both.

Iraq`s transformation into a progressive Arab state could set the region that produced Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and al Qaeda on a new course in which democratic expression and economic prosperity, rather than a radicalizing mix of humiliation, poverty and repression, define a modernity in the Muslim world that does not express itself in ways that threaten its people or other nations. Conversely, a forced U.S. retreat from Iraq would be the most serious American defeat since Vietnam.

America`s mission in Iraq is too important to fail. Given the stakes, we cannot launch this "generational commitment" to changing the Middle East on the cheap. The administration should level with the American people about the cost and commitment required to transform Iraq.

Americans must understand how important this mission is and be prepared to sacrifice to achieve it. Without an intensive campaign now to explain what is at stake and absent the necessary political and financial commitment, we raise the potential for a defeat that will deal a lasting blow to American interests and freedom`s progress.

Having liberated Iraq, we must demonstrate the tangible benefits of occupation, which the Iraqi silent majority will tolerate if it successfully delivers services, law and order and a transition to Iraqi rule. The danger is that our failure to improve daily life, security, and Iraqis` participation in their own governance will erode their patience and fuel insurrection.

We do not have time to spare. If we do not meaningfully improve services and security in Iraq over the next few months, it may be too late. We will risk an irreversible loss of Iraqi confidence and reinforce the efforts of extremists who seek our defeat and threaten Iraq`s democratic future.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, an able administrator, lacks resources and the political commitment to achieve his goal of Iraq`s transformation. His operation is nearly broke, and he admits Iraq will need "tens of billions" of dollars for reconstruction next year alone. Yet there is an insufficient sense of urgency in Washington, and needs on the ground in Iraq are going unmet.

Security remains a serious problem in Iraq partly because, contrary to administration assurances, our military force levels are obviously inadequate. A visitor quickly learns in conversations with U.S. military personnel that we need to deploy at least another division. We need more foreign troops, particularly from Muslim allies such as Turkey and Pakistan, but security does not necessarily improve with each new country that deploys forces. It is the number and quality of military forces, not the number of countries that send them, that matters.

Iraq`s reconstruction requires not simply more troops but a different mix of troops -- linguists, civil affairs officers, military police, engineers -- as well as a significant increase in civilian experts in development and democracy-building. The number of civilian advisers in Iraq is astonishingly low. I was struck by the near-unanimity of opinion among American officers in Iraq that civilian expertise -- on reconstruction, judicial reform and local governance -- is as important as our military presence.

I was also struck by the distrust many Iraqis hold for the United Nations. It is questionable whether U.N. authority over Iraq`s political transition would enhance its legitimacy. A U.N. peacekeeping force like the one that stood by as thousands of Bosnians were massacred at Srebrenica would not inspire the Iraqi people`s confidence. U.N. blessing of the occupation authority, recognition of the Iraqi Governing Council and advising on Iraq`s reconstruction could help in soliciting foreign troops and reconstruction aid, but U.N. primacy would endanger Iraq`s transformation.

Iraqis must have a greater role in determining their future. Training a new Iraqi army, civil defense force and police force is critical. We should be equally aggressive in training and advising political parties, transferring more authority to Iraqi leaders and establishing a framework and timeline for a political transition.

Let there be no doubt: Iraq remains the central battle in the war on terror. We must succeed in Iraq because every bad actor in the Middle East -- Baathist killers, terror`s sponsors in Iran and Syria, terror`s financiers in Saudi Arabia, terror`s radical Shiite and Wahhabi inciters, the terrorists of al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, Hamas and Hezbollah -- has a stake in our failure. They know Iraq`s transformation would be a grave and perhaps fatal setback to them.

Iraq must be important to us because it is so important to our enemies. That`s why they are opposing us so fiercely, and why we must win.

The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona.




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Stemming Job Losses


By David S. Broder

Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page B07


The economy is getting better, so the experts say. But this is anything but a joyful Labor Day for the 9 million Americans without jobs or for the businesses that once employed many of them. As the union-backed Economic Policy Institute pointed out in a report last week, "in terms of employment growth, the current recovery is the worst on record since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking employment in 1939."

Instead of the job picture improving as economic activity has accelerated, more than 1 million jobs have disappeared since the recession officially ended. The reason is clear: The manufacturing sector has hit the skids. The number of factory workers has declined every month for three years. From July 2000 until last month, industrial jobs fell from 17.3 million to 14.6 million -- a loss of almost one job in six. And these were, for the most part, good jobs, averaging $54,000 a year.

It has taken a while for this problem to penetrate the consciousness of official Washington. Even now, despite the warnings from both labor and management, many officials seem to think that the economic recovery underway will itself restore a healthy labor market and bring back the vanished jobs.

Governors, who live closer to the everyday lives of their constituents, know better. The issue of industrial job loss was very much on the minds of the state executives who met in Indianapolis earlier this month. Indiana`s retiring Democratic Gov. Frank O`Bannon briefed his colleagues on his ambitious plan to stimulate four industrial sectors, with hopes of creating 200,000 new high-wage jobs. The plan was whittled down in the Legislature -- and now the jobs issue dominates the campaign to choose his successor.

No state has felt the loss of manufacturing jobs more than Indiana, but from South Carolina to Washington state, other governors cited examples of whole communities devastated by plant closings.

To many of them, the future appears bleak. "The manufacturing jobs are gone, and they`re not coming back," South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford said with finality. "Just look at the cost of labor in India." Others think something can be salvaged. Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, said: "Manufacturing has been in decline in our state for over 10 years now. Most of what can be done in China is already being done there. We`re pursuing the kind of manufacturing that needs to be done in a high-tech state."

But even high-end manufacturing jobs are facing increased competition, as foreign countries build up their work force skills. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), for example, noted last week that "more than a quarter (28 percent) of the U.S.-China trade deficit is now in computers and electronics, the fastest growing manufacturing industry in the 1990s."

Foreign competition is one big piece of the problem. The NAM`s president, Jerry Jasinowski, cautions against "a protectionist impulse that would shut us off from the world," but says, "It is time for the administration to get tough with the Chinese."

Rep. Vern Ehlers, a Michigan Republican whose Grand Rapids district has been shedding furniture and auto parts jobs, said that "the refrain at my district meetings has been uniform: China. Jobs. Will the work come back?"

Even free-traders such as Jasinowski and Ehlers complain that the Chinese enjoy a 40 percent competitive advantage because they won`t let their currency "float" to a realistic level.

But not all the problems originate abroad. Jasinowski says regulatory and litigation costs and the ever-rising expense of health insurance are squeezing domestic producers who cannot raise their own prices. And government policies designed to help one set of producers can harm others. Sugar duties have driven candy manufacturers from the United States into Canada, and Ehlers says the administration`s decision to impose steel tariffs has added to the woes of his industrial constituents, who are steel consumers.

Secretary of Commerce Don Evans is scheduled to announce a Bush initiative for manufacturing at a Sept. 15 speech in Detroit. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates are zeroing in on the issue. Sen. Joe Lieberman has been out front in proposing a mix of possible approaches, and Rep. Dick Gephardt has used the crisis to spotlight his record as a longtime opponent of the free-trade agreements with Mexico and China.

The United States and its economy have a large stake in international trade -- one that could be lost if policy takes a turn toward the sort of short-term protectionism embodied in the steel tariffs. But the wasting of the manufacturing sector is a large fact of life, far too important to be ignored in pursuit of some economic theory. It is a problem crying out for a solution.

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Not Like Ike


By George F. Will

Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page B07


For some Republicans, Howard Dean`s supremacy among Democratic presidential aspirants -- $10 million expected to be raised in the July-September quarter; a 21-point lead in New Hampshire -- causes merriment. They think a Dean nomination, featuring opposition to the war, enthusiasm for higher taxes and approbation for same-sex civil unions, would mean four more years of what Dean considers the Bush-Ashcroft Terror.

Unless Dean wins. Which is unthinkable.

As unthinkable as a twice-defeated Senate candidate from Illinois, whose single congressional term was more than a decade earlier, being elected president with 39.9 percent of the vote. As unthinkable as a vice president losing a presidential race, then a California gubernatorial race, then six years later winning the presidency. As unthinkable as a movie actor becoming president.

A Dean presidency is not inconceivable. Granted, it is unlikely for reasons that make it undesirable. He may not wear well with the public. If he is half as bright as he thinks he is, he is very bright. And his is no uncertain trumpet: The brio with which he proclaims his beliefs proves that he is not paralyzed by the difference between certitude and certainty.

But there is danger as well as benefit for Dean in his very Deanness. The obverse of his high opinion of himself is his low opinion of President Bush. So he probably would sigh, or do the functional equivalent.

If Al Gore had not expressed his disdain for Bush by those exasperated sighs during the first debate, Gore might be president. But Gore had to sigh. Expressing disdain of Bush was for Gore a sensual delight, almost a metabolic necessity. It might be for Dean, too. But most of the electorate would be unforgiving of bad manners toward any president.

Another potential Dean weakness, implicating his political judgment, is suggested by believable reports that he admires retired Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander. Dean, more than any other possible Democratic nominee, might need a running mate who would assuage anxieties about a former Vermont governor`s lack of national-security experience.

Other Democrats see Clark as a solution to a problem their party has had since the McGovernite takeover in 1972: the problem of voters` doubts about its competence in the area of national security. But the fact that Clark is the kind of military man who appeals to Democrats -- and that they appeal to him -- helps explain why the party has that problem.

Comparisons of Clark to Dwight Eisenhower are ludicrous. Eisenhower, as well-prepared as any president for the challenges of his era, had spent three years immersed in the political complexities of coalition warfare, dealing with Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle and others. Clark`s claim to presidential stature derives from directing NATO`s 78 days of war at 15,000 feet over Serbia. It was the liberals` dream war: tenuously related to U.S. security, with an overriding aim, to which much was sacrificed, to have zero U.S. fatalities.

As Clark crisscrosses the country listening for a clamor for him ("I expect to have my decision made by Sept. 19," when he visits Iowa -- feel the suspense), he compounds the confusion that began when he said on June 15 that on 9/11 "I got a call at my home" saying that when he was to appear on CNN, "You`ve got to say this is connected" to Iraq. "It came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over." But who exactly called Clark?

July 1: "A fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank." There is no such Canadian institution. Anyway, who "from the White House"? "I`m not going to go into those sources. . . . People told me things in confidence that I don`t have any right to betray."

July 18: "No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11."

Aug. 25: It came from "a Middle East think tank in Canada, the man who`s the brother of a very close friend of mine in Belgium. He`s very well connected to Israeli intelligence. . . . I haven`t changed my position. There`s no waffling on it. It`s just as clear as could be."

Now Clark darkly says there are "rumors" that in February "the White House" tried -- well, "apparently" tried -- "to get me knocked off CNN." Clark still coyly refuses to say he is a Democrat but forthrightly confesses to being a "centrist." As he prepares to heed the clamor for him to join the pursuit of Dean, he is earning the description National Review has given to Sen. Bob Graham: "a deranged moderate."

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Burning money in Iraq
David Lazarus
Friday, August 29, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar…


A mid all the recall-related fretting over California`s budget, it`s been hard to keep up with the money mess at the federal level. Let`s refresh ourselves.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office revised its estimates yet again this week and announced that the federal budget deficit will soar to a record $480 billion next year, reaching $1.4 trillion over the coming decade.

That alone is very bad news. Many economists, including Fed chief Alan Greenspan, have warned that chronic deficits of this magnitude can cause interest rates to rise and the economy to sputter.

But things are worse than the budget office lets on. These new estimates don`t include the rising cost of the war in Iraq, which, if factored into the mix, would push the 2004 deficit well beyond $500 billion.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has estimated that the "burn rate" -- his words -- for our little exercise in Mideast nation-building is currently running $3.9 billion a month, or nearly $48 billion a year.

That`s a highly conservative figure. It doesn`t include the cost of replacing damaged vehicles and equipment, or the cost of munitions used in daily skirmishes. Some experts say the annual war cost is actually closer to $60 billion.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let`s take Rumsfeld at his word.

At $3.9 billion a month, that means the nation`s 105 million households are each ponying up $37 every four weeks to cover the cost of the war.

That doesn`t sound so bad, does it? OK, let`s look at this another way.

The average middle school teacher in the United States earns $43,570 a year,

according to the Department of Labor. If all households coughed up an extra $37 a month, we could have 1.1 million more teachers.

Or we could have:


-- 1.3 million more firefighters.

-- 1.2 million more police officers.

-- 995,000 more registered nurses.

-- 2.8 million more child care workers.

But we don`t pay more for such things because most Americans believe they`re taxed heavily enough already. We aren`t being asked to pay an additional war-in-Iraq tax for just that reason.

Instead, we expect the government to do the best it can with what we give it.

That`s the idea, anyway.

The Bush administration, which has cut taxes three times in the past three years, is determined to spend whatever it deems necessary in the "war on terrorism" even as it systematically slashes the government`s revenue.

"In the last two and half years, this nation has acted decisively to confront great challenges," President Bush said the other day while raising money for his re-election. "I came to the office of president of the United States to solve problems, instead of passing them on to future presidents and future generations."

He was referring to problems like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, wherever they are. Bush apparently doesn`t see a budget deficit lasting until at least 2012 as a problem for future presidents and future generations.

Moreover, he seems blissfully unaware that if his tax cuts are made permanent -- a goal he has sworn to achieve -- the cumulative deficit over the next decade will balloon to almost $3 trillion.

The $400 billion Congress plans to spend overhauling Medicare over the same period would push the total even higher.

"It`s like living off your credit card," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization advocating fiscal responsibility. "Eventually, taxes will have to go up to pay the bill."

He added: "Things aren`t going to get any better as we go on. The retirement of the Baby Boomers is looming right at the end of the next 10 years."

Indeed, and current projections don`t begin to estimate the strain on federal coffers as 77 million Boomers start cashing in on Social Security and Medicare benefits.

I`ve noted before that the next five years represent our best chance to get the nation`s finances in order. Until 2008, Baby Boomers will be at their peak earning power. They`ll never be pulling down more money on an aggregate basis than right now.

Yet the Bush administration is determined to forgo as much of that money as it can, thus missing a golden opportunity to prepare for the coming fiscal storm.

At the same time, though, the White House is spending like a sailor on shore leave. Paul Bremer, the administration`s man in occupied Iraq, was asked in a recent interview how much it will cost to rebuild the country.

"It`s probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion," he answered. Then, as if that didn`t sound wishy-washy enough, he added, "It`s a lot of money."

Bremer flew back to Washington this week to ask the White House for a few billion more to tide him over until a larger budget bill can be introduced this fall.

For his part, Bush said he`d help out by cutting annual raises for more than 1 million federal employees -- a move that will free up billions for Iraq but impact the spending power of Americans on the home front.

We could have more teachers, or firefighters, or police officers or nurses. Instead we have an open-ended commitment to policing and reconstructing a Mideast nation that may or may not have posed a threat down the road.

And we`ll put off paying the cost for many years, leaving a mountain of debt and obligations for our children to somehow tackle -- the president`s self-congratulatory remarks notwithstanding.

Kind of makes California`s troubles seem quaint by comparison.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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300,000 Iraqis Join March for Cleric
By SAMEER N. YACOUB
Associated Press Writer

2:09 AM PDT, August 31, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Beating their chests and calling for revenge, more than 300,000 Muslims began a two-day, 110-mile march to the holy city of Najaf on Sunday to mourn a cherished Shiite leader who was assassinated in a car bombing that killed at least 85 people.

The faithful followed a flatbed truck carrying a symbolic coffin for Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a moderate cleric and Saddam Hussein opponent. Authorities said they could only find al-Hakim`s hand, watch, wedding band and pen in the wreckage.

"Our revenge will be severe on the killers," read one of the many banners carried by the marchers.

Red and white roses were laid on the coffin and a large portrait of al-Hakim was placed in front of it.

The Iraqi police handling the investigation into Friday`s bombing say they have arrested 19 men -- many of them foreigners and all with admitted links to al-Qaida -- in connection with the blast. However, many Shiites blame the cleric`s death on Saddam Hussein loyalists and the U.S.-led coalition, which they say has failed to provide adequate security in the country since the dictator`s fall.

"Saddam and Bush will not humiliate us," read another banner.

The procession began at the al-Kadhimiyah Shrine, one of Baghdad`s most sacred Shiite sites, and was expected to grow as it weaved its way southward. The marchers were to stop at holy sites in Karbala before arriving at the blast site, Najaf`s Imam Ali Shrine, for the funeral on Tuesday.

Police detained two Iraqis and two Saudis shortly after the Friday attack, and they provided information leading to the arrest of 15 other suspects, said a senior police official in Najaf, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Two Kuwaitis and six Palestinians with Jordanian passports were among the suspects, the official said. The remainder were Iraqis and Saudis, the official said, without giving a breakdown.

Initial information shows the foreigners entered Iraq from neighboring Kuwait, Syria and Jordan, the official said, adding that they belong to the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam.

"They are all connected to al-Qaida," the official said.

Wahhabism is the strict, fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam from which al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden draws spiritual direction. Based in Saudi Arabia, its followers show little tolerance for non-Wahhabi Sunnis and Shiites.

Al-Hakim had only returned in May from exile in Iran. While backing the formation of an Islamic state in Iraq, he had also urged unity among rival Shiite factions and tolerance of the American-led coalition.

Police said there were similarities between the mosque bombing and two recent attacks.

The bomb at the Imam Ali Shrine -- the burial place of the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad -- was made from the same type of materials used in the Aug. 19 truck bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, which killed 23 people, and the Jordanian Embassy vehicle bombing Aug. 7, which killed 19, the Iraqi official said.

U.S. officials have not confirmed any details of the arrests, which would substantiate Bush administration claims that bin Laden`s followers have taken their war against the United States to Iraq.

The bombing in Najaf added urgency to U.S. plans to create a 7,500-strong Iraqi militia that would eventually take over civil defense duties in the country`s cities. Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, announced plans to create the new militia, called the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, on July 21.

A day before the bombing, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said mobilizing the Iraqi militia -- rather than bringing in more U.S. or coalition troops to Iraq -- was the key to stabilizing the country.

American authorities have not taken an active public role in the mosque investigation because of Iraqi sensitivity to any U.S. presence at the Najaf shrine. The mosque is the most sacred Shiite shrine in Iraq and the third holiest in the world after Mecca and Medina.

Hospital officials said 85 people died in the shrine bombing, including al-Hakim. Earlier tolls were reduced after some deaths were found to have been reported twice.

In response to the bombing, a highly respected Shiite cleric suspended his membership in the U.S.-chosen Iraqi interim Governing Council, citing a lack of security.

Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum, in exile in London until Saddam`s ouster, said Saturday that his return to the council depended on the U.S.-led coalition`s handing security matters to Iraqis, so that Muslim shrines could be under Islamic protection.

"This act has pushed me to postpone my membership in the governing council because it can`t do anything concerning the security situation," he said.

The men arrested claimed the recent bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus on the country`s porous borders, the Iraqi official said.

The Najaf police official, who led the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, said the prisoners described plots to assassinate political and religious leaders and to damage power plants, water supplies and oil pipelines.

In the latest sabotage, an explosion and fire on Saturday struck the pipeline carrying oil from Iraq`s northern Kirkuk fields to Turkey.

The blaze further delayed resumption of the vital link, which costs Iraqis an estimated $7 million each day it is out of operation. The blast was the fourth to hit the line since it briefly reopened earlier this month.

* __

Associated Press reporter Tarek al-Issawi contributed to this report from Najaf.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD



Taliban Finds New Strength in Pakistan
By Paul Watson
Times Staff Writer

August 31, 2003

DIR, Pakistan — A revitalized Taliban army is drawing recruits from militant groups in Pakistan, including Al Qaeda loyalists, as it fights an escalating guerrilla war against U.S. forces and their allies across the border in Afghanistan.

These fighters are answering the call from Muslim clerics to wage jihad, or holy war, against U.S.-led forces, according to Taliban members and supporters as well as Pakistani militants interviewed on both sides of the border. The Taliban is also exploiting the alienation felt by ethnic Pushtuns in Afghanistan because of continued insecurity, a scarcity of development projects and ongoing U.S. military operations.

But even as fighting increases, a relatively moderate element of the Taliban is said to be interested in participating in national elections next June, and discussing a replacement for Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban`s fugitive leader. He is believed to still be in Afghanistan despite a $10-million reward for his capture.

Afghan authorities have blamed the Taliban for a string of attacks in eastern and southern Afghanistan that have killed more than 60 Afghan civilians, pro-government Muslim clerics, police and soldiers since mid-July. U.S. and Afghan forces say they have killed at least several dozen suspected Taliban fighters in the same period.

Despite the presence of thousands of U.S. and other international troops, the Taliban fighters and their allies hope to eventually retake the southern city of Kandahar, once Omar`s seat of power, said a local Pakistani commander of Harkat-ul-Moujahedeen, a longtime ally of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

The commander, who was interviewed in this mountain town near the Afghan border, spoke on condition that he not be identified. As a member of a group banned by the Pakistani government, he fears arrest.

He runs a madrasa, or Koranic school, and says he has crossed into Afghanistan seven times since late 2001, to aid the Taliban`s war against U.S.-led forces. In one case, he said with a sly smile, Pakistani soldiers guarding the border saw him and did nothing.

In any case, he said, borders are irrelevant for him and like-minded Muslims.

"We don`t believe in any boundaries or separate countries for Muslims — there is only one Islam," he said. "These people are going [to Afghanistan] because there is a fatwa from religious scholars that says there is a jihad against Americans there." A fatwa is a religious edict.

"The fact is that now the situation in the Pushtun belt is very critical compared with other parts of Afghanistan," he added. "Now all Pushtuns are reuniting against the Americans."

Afghan government officials speak of hundreds of Taliban members and their allies filtering back and forth across the border from Pakistan. The Harkat commander, who wore brown-tinted rectangular sunglasses and a small, tightly wrapped black turban, declined to provide a figure.

However, he added: "People sitting in government offices can`t imagine how many Pakistanis are still operating inside Afghanistan, supporting the Taliban."

Local residents say other Pakistan-based militant groups crossing into Afghanistan include the Al Badr militia and Hizbul Moujahedeen. The latter is an old ally of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received large shipments of weapons from the United States during the war against Soviet forces in the 1980s. But after the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Washington accused him of plotting against President Hamid Karzai and targeted him with a missile strike in May 2002. He survived.

Harkat, Hizbul Moujahedeen and Al Badr are among the main militant groups fighting in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. But under U.S. pressure Pakistan has curbed those infiltrations, leaving militants ripe for recruitment to the pro-Taliban jihad in Afghanistan.

Harkat was one of the founders of Osama bin Laden`s "International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," announced at a news conference near the Afghan frontier town of Khowst in 1998.

Khowst remains a power base for the Taliban. U.S. fighter jets and helicopters patrol day and night here in support of ground troops searching for weapons and militant fighters. Often the enemy is close — but invisible.

Taliban member Nadir Khan recently sat in the back seat of a reporter`s car not far from a U.S. base and described how he and other Taliban members move back and forth across the Pakistani border, about an hour`s drive away. They carry out attacks and return to their bases in Pakistan, he said. Khan was contacted through an intermediary and agreed to talk on condition that the precise location of the interview not be revealed.

He said he attended a meeting of Taliban commanders in Peshawar, northwestern Pakistan`s largest city, on July 12.

"It was like a Cabinet meeting," he said.

"The people I met in Peshawar even had guns with them," Khan said. "Pakistan is not stopping all these meetings because Pakistan does not like the government in Afghanistan. And they will work hard to destroy the government here."

The Taliban also crosses the border to silence informants aiding the U.S.-led coalition, such as a man beaten unconscious outside his Khowst home on July 19 because he spoke to U.S. troops based at the airport, Khan said.

Taliban defector Mullah Khaksar Akhund, who is now Afghanistan`s deputy intelligence chief, agrees that fighters are crossing the Pakistani border to launch attacks.

Karzai recently joined those accusing Pakistan of harboring Taliban fighters. "Definitely there are Taliban coming from across the border [to] conduct operations in Afghanistan," he told a Pakistani television interviewer on July 30.

The Afghan government has provided Pakistani and U.S. authorities with a list of Taliban officials and where they live in Pakistan, said Khaksar, who was the Taliban`s deputy interior minister until he switched sides toward the end of the U.S.-led war against Afghanistan in 2001.

"It isn`t possible anywhere in the world for leaders of one country to live in the territory of another country without its leaders knowing," Khaksar said.

Kabul`s list of Taliban leaders said to be in Pakistan includes Haji Abdul Kabir, the former Taliban deputy prime minister of Afghanistan who is No. 3 in the Taliban hierarchy.

Kabir would probably be well known to Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which helped train, arm and direct the Taliban before U.S. pressure forced Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to officially cut ties with the movement after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Afghan authorities say Kabir lives in Kohat, a Peshawar suburb that also is home to a Pakistani army base. A resident said Kabir was a regular visitor to Peshawar`s busy Khyber Bazaar and was seen there as recently as mid-August. But Kabir is careful not to give out a phone number or address, the resident said.

A source in another border city, Quetta, said the Taliban`s high-profile former consul general in Peshawar, Maulavi Najibullah, is now raising funds in Quetta for the guerrilla war.

The whereabouts of the two Taliban officials could not be confirmed independently.

Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, an aide to Musharraf, denied that the Taliban was operating from Pakistan, and said his government has asked Kabul and the U.S.-led coalition for any information that has led them to conclude otherwise.

Qureshi also said it would be impossible for provincial governments in Pakistan`s border areas to defy the federal government and aid the Afghan insurgency. Those areas are now run by elected hard-line Islamic parties openly sympathetic to the Taliban.

"If there is anyone trying to organize such an activity inside Pakistan, the government of Pakistan and the forces here will arrest them and try them in a court of law," Qureshi said from Islamabad, the capital. "It is not possible that they would escape anyone`s attention in Pakistan."

Khan, the Taliban member interviewed near Khowst, is a university-educated man in his mid-20s. He said he joined the Taliban four years ago when Omar was neutralizing warlords and winning a war to unite the country. Many of those warlords are wielding power again with weapons and money they received for helping the U.S. military defeat the Taliban.

"In the beginning, people liked Mullah Omar very much because he was the only man who could bring security to Afghanistan. And he did it," Khan said. "But soon it was difficult to study for women, and boys as well, so people turned their faces away from Omar. Now he is not as popular as he was in the past."

A new Taliban leadership is emerging under commanders such as Mullah Mohammed Hassan and Mullah Qadir, Khan said. Hassan was the Taliban regime`s deputy leader, but little is known about Qadir. The two are probably leading forces around Kandahar, Khan said.

The Harkat commander in Dir also said talks are underway to find a possible replacement for Omar. He said Omar might no longer have enough support among the growing number of allied groups fighting alongside the Taliban.

He suggested that Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour, former head of the Taliban`s air force, might be more acceptable to allies such as Hekmatyar. Mansour was reported killed in a U.S. bombing raid October 2001, but his death was never confirmed and Afghan sources say he commanded Taliban troops against U.S. forces during Operation Anaconda in early 2002.

Some Taliban members and supporters say there is a strong faction within the movement that is more moderate than Omar, and wants to field candidates in Afghanistan`s national elections.

The idea of Taliban participation in an Afghan government that it does not control is not new. As the Taliban regime crumbled in late 2001, Pakistan pressed Washington to include moderate leaders such as Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel in a postwar government. Mutawakel turned himself in to U.S. authorities early last year.

Karzai, who like the majority of the Taliban is an ethnic Pushtun, said in a speech broadcast on Afghan television this summer that not all Taliban members were bad people.

But angry protesters took to the streets of Kabul, the capital, the next day, demanding a blanket denunciation of the Taliban. And ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, whose soldiers helped win the war and who now dominate Karzai`s government, refused to let the Taliban return in any form.

Regional powers such as Iran, Russia and India, which are maneuvering to increase their influence in Afghanistan, also staunchly oppose the Taliban.

Mullah Abdul Rahman Hotak, the Taliban`s former deputy minister of information and culture who now leads a pro-Taliban party in Peshawar, said no government could bring peace to Afghanistan unless it included Taliban leaders and Muslim scholars.

By refusing to allow the Taliban at least a share of power, President Bush is denying Afghanistan the democracy that he promised, Hotak said.

"Mr. Bush is always saying, `We are fighting for civilization in Afghanistan, a very important part of which is democracy,` " he said. "If this problem in Afghanistan is not solved, there would be a question for the people of the United States: `What does democracy mean?` "

Many Afghan Pushtuns now speak nostalgically of Taliban rule. Support is spreading among disaffected college students who once saw the Taliban as oppressors. A blast killed two Kabul university students in mid-August, and police said they were making bombs. The Taliban is increasingly popular on Khowst`s college campus, students there said.

First-year engineering student Abdul Qayom Zalan, 20, said that for all its failings, the Taliban`s severe Islamic rule kept the streets safe, and that the Taliban is now the only force defending Afghan nationalism. He said he is not a Taliban member, but supports its guerrilla war.

"If you look at history, nobody ever liked foreigners in Afghanistan," Zalan said. "The Taliban are an enemy of the foreigners, and these Americans who have come to Khowst have not done anything for us. They only say, `We will bring you security,` and that doesn`t even exist."

Zalan lives rent-free with 15 other students in a two-story house with cracked walls decorated by United Nations posters warning of the dangers of land mines.

Most of the window panes are shattered, and there isn`t any furniture, so the students eat, sleep and study on the floor. They usually read by kerosene lamps because the electricity is off three nights out of four. It`s rarely on during the day. Zalan rarely goes out after dark because there are too many kidnappings.

"When the Taliban first came to power, they were a bit brutal and we didn`t like that," Zalan said. "But the current government isn`t giving us anything either. If the situation continues like this every day, without security, more people will be interested in joining the Taliban."

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THE WORLD





U.S. Presses for Aid to Iraq, but Few Give -- or Give In
Governments that opposed the war refuse to fund reconstruction unless they have a role.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

August 31, 2003



WASHINGTON — Soldiers aren`t the only foreign contribution in short supply for the U.S. effort in Iraq. So is money.

U.S. officials are finding it hard to persuade allies to help underwrite the costs of policing and rebuilding the ravaged country, even as Congress steps up pressure on the administration to find a way to share the burden.

After months of appeals from U.S. and U.N. leaders, key foreign governments including Russia, China, France and Germany remain adamant that they will not contribute in those areas, U.S. officials say.

The issue has taken on new urgency in recent days as the Bush administration has begun preparing a supplemental budget request that officials say could reach as much as $3 billion. U.S. officials had expected that renewed Iraqi oil exports would help finance reconstruction, but exports have rebounded more slowly than expected, at least in part due to looting and sabotage.

The anticipated budget request is alarming lawmakers, who see it as evidence that the burden on U.S. taxpayers will far outstrip expectations.

To increase foreign contributions, U.S. officials have been working with the United Nations to arrange a "donors conference" in Madrid in late October that they hope will bring commitments of billions of dollars. Yet one U.S. official acknowledged the frustration of trying to gain aid commitments.

"We are really puzzled on how to get more aid from these countries, when they have been refusing now for such a long time," the official said.

Officials of the reluctant countries, all of which opposed the Iraq war, insist that they intend to help the Iraqis. Several say they are already contributing to humanitarian relief. But they also say they cannot contribute to the reconstruction and security effort unless the United States agrees to give other governments a role, and agrees to more transparency on how aid money is used.

The issue has become entangled in an intensifying behind-the-scenes debate among diplomats over whether there should be a new U.N. Security Council resolution that would shift some authority in Iraq from the U.S. to the international community.

In the past week, U.S. diplomats have stepped up their efforts to find a compromise that would give other countries a voice in Iraq, and by doing so, bring in more foreign money and peacekeeping troops. President Bush has said that he wants to give the United Nations a "vital role" in Iraq. Yet it remains unclear whether the White House would agree to a new arrangement — long opposed by the Pentagon — that would divide decision-making in the country.

U.S. officials say their effort to secure more aid, which some jokingly call "Operation Tin Cup," has been long and frustrating.

Before the war, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked countries for financial aid to deal with an expected humanitarian crisis in Iraq. His appeals were rejected by many opponents of the war, who believed they would be contributing to an effort of which they did not approve. After the war, Annan made new appeals as the U.N. opened an office in the country, and passed two Security Council resolutions that offered a limited U.N. blessing to what the U.S.-led coalition was doing there.

The United States has had support from some countries in its efforts. Britain has contributed millions of dollars in aid, in addition to the commitment of thousands of British troops. Japan has made contributions for humanitarian purposes and reconstruction, and has been considering sending troops.

A number of countries have provided aid for humanitarian needs, but not security or reconstruction. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are in this category, as are a number of European countries. A European Union official said that it has contributed $70 million in humanitarian assistance this year and that EU contributions will grow to $340 million if its member nations` direct contributions are included.

Most Arab countries, where the U.S. occupation is highly unpopular, have been leery of contributing to the U.S. and U.N. reconstruction efforts. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage is due to visit a number of Middle Eastern countries in September, in part to seek more aid.

Yet one Arab diplomat said he believed that Arab countries would hold back — at least until a new U.N. resolution gives some authority to other countries.

"Washington is pushing hard on that issue, but I`m skeptical," the diplomat said. "To have commitments like that without the U.N. umbrella would be very difficult."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, backed the war but has pushed the administration to spread the postwar burden. He has said the United States still shoulders by far the largest share of the cost.

"Ninety percent of the forces on the ground are ours, 90% of the casualties are ours, and we are paying the vast majority of the costs of reconstruction, after you discount the Iraqi funds," Biden said during a Senate hearing in July.

It is clear those costs are rising quickly.

In the current year`s federal budget, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for reconstruction in Iraq. If the administration returns to Congress to ask for $3 billion more, it will be just to keep the reconstruction going until the next budget is introduced late this year.

"It will be tough for the White House," said one State Department official. "Lawmakers are going to say, `Wait, you were just up here telling us $2.5 billion was enough.` "

The administration, after months of playing down the costs and refusing to provide concrete estimates, has this month begun trying to prepare the public for sobering news.

In an interview last week with the Washington Post, L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, said the country`s economic needs were "almost impossible to exaggerate." Iraq would need tens of billions of dollars from outside sources just in the next year, he said.

The U.S. government is already paying about $4 billion a month to support its force of about 140,000 in the country. That`s on top of the $1 billion being paid to support U.S. forces still in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials say they hope the donor conference will prove to be an effective way to enlist other countries but acknowledge that they don`t know how successful they will be.

Technical specialists are studying Iraq`s future needs. They will report to the conference on what Iraq will require for agriculture, housing, education and other areas. Donors can contribute funds for specific needs to ensure that their money will go to expenditures that are most likely to be supported at home.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD

Kurdish Rebel Group Warily Watches Americans` Moves
The PKK moved into the Iraqi region years ago to fight for independence from Turkey. Little did it know a more powerful military was coming.
By Amberin Zaman
Special to The Times

August 31, 2003

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Faruk Yigit was just 18 when he headed for the rugged mountains bordering Iraq in 1992 to become a fighter for Kurdish independence against his traditional enemy, Turkey.

Everything changed when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq this spring and unseated Saddam Hussein. As part of the war on terrorism, the United States pledged to take military action against about 5,000 Turkish Kurd rebels in the part of northern Iraq, who are controlled by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

The PKK "will be gone because we have always said that one of the visions that all of us, Turks and Americans, have for Iraq is an Iraq that has no connection to terrorists, and the PKK is a terrorist organization," Marc Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of State for political affairs, said in a recent interview with private Turkish news channel CNN-Turk.

The comments have fueled a growing fear of what the U.S. will do next.

"What I never imagined," said Azize Yigit, 52, mother of nine children including Faruk, "was that he might be butchered by Americans instead" of by the Turks.

Turkey accuses the PKK of being a terrorist organization for waging a 15-year insurgency. But to millions of ethnic Kurds, the guerrillas are freedom fighters. Pressure on Washington to dislodge the rebels has been mounting in recent weeks as the Ankara government weighs whether to send up to 10,000 troops to help U.S. forces bring Iraq under control.

"The United States remains committed to working with Turkey to eliminate the PKK threat in Iraq, and to ensure that a free Iraq does not serve as a sanctuary for terrorists," a State Department official said recently.

The official was careful not to link U.S. action against the PKK to Turkish cooperation on troops for Iraq.

"I don`t think there`s any explicit quid pro quo anyplace," the official said. "But we`re working with them on PKK. We have been for a long time."

For Turkey, the proposal to send troops is aimed at mending relations with the U.S. while giving Turkey a say in shaping the future of its Arab neighbor to the south. Turkish officials have made it clear that they expect the U.S. to disarm and evict the PKK in exchange for the help.

Turkey`s ruling Justice and Development Party is expected to come up with a final decision on dispatching forces in the coming days and will probably present a motion to parliament authorizing their deployment next month, said Murat Mercan, a party legislator. Even though a majority of Turks are opposed to the move, Mercan insists that "the motion will pass this time for sure."

On March 1, parliament rejected a bill to allow thousands of U.S. combat troops to use Turkey as a launching pad to invade northern Iraq, straining Ankara`s relations with Washington.

Acrimony between the traditional allies mounted in July when U.S. troops captured 11 Turkish special forces in the Kurdish-controlled Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah and accused them of plotting to kill a Kurdish governor from the oil-rich Iraqi province of Kirkuk.

About 3,000 Turkish troops are deployed in northern Iraq to hunt down PKK rebels. Iraqi Kurdish leaders say the soldiers are there to undermine Kurdish self-rule, which Turkey fears could reignite separatist passions among its own 12 million Kurds. Both the Iraqi Kurds and the U.S. want the Turks to pull out of northern Iraq, and stress that any Turkish military presence would be welcome only outside the Kurdish zone. Turkey`s military leaders have pledged to withdraw from northern Iraq once the PKK is gone.

The dilemma for U.S. policymakers, according to some Western analysts, is how to move against the PKK without risking further instability in Iraq.

"The U.S. is in so much trouble in central and southern Iraq that I don`t believe there`s much stomach for action in the one place [the Kurdish-controlled north] that`s in good shape," Peter Galbraith, a retired U.S. ambassador and expert on Iraq, said in a telephone interview.

Bulent Aliriza, an expert on Turkey at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that the U.S. has not acted against the PKK so far because "its military machine in Iraq is overstretched and its decision-making process overloaded." But failure to do so ahead of any further Turkish troop deployment in Iraq would be wrong, he said, and would lead to further "Sulaymaniyah-type dust-ups between the Americans and Turks."

A U.S. failure to act against the rebel group would also make it harder for the Turkish government to justify potential casualties in Iraq to the public.

Counted among the world`s toughest guerrilla groups and deployed in the forbidding Qandil mountain range separating Iraq from Iran, the PKK has said it would resist any U.S. attack. The rebels also have threatened to end on Monday a cease-fire declared after the capture of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999 and to carry their armed battle outside Turkey`s predominantly Kurdish southeastern region to urban centers in the country`s west.

"Violence could resume and on a much broader scale," warned Firat Anli, chairman of the Diyarbakir branch of Turkey`s largest legal pro-Kurdish party, Dehap. Like many here, Anli points out that anti-American feelings fed by tacit U.S. backing for Turkey`s campaign against the rebels — both in providing weapons to the Turkish army and providing intelligence that led to Ocalan`s capture in Kenya — had eased over the last year because of perceived U.S. support for Kurdish autonomy in Iraq.

"Now we see that the Americans are applying double standards again, with the Iraqi Kurds treated as the good guys and our [Turkish] Kurds as the bad guys," said Ahmet Turan Demir, who leads a smaller pro-Kurdish group.

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Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.



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TERRORISM



To Rescue Islam From Jihad, Muslims Must Look Within
By Donald K. Emmerson
Donald K. Emmerson is a senior fellow in the Stanford Institute for International Relations.

August 31, 2003

STANFORD — August was a bloody month. There was barely time to mourn between the exploding bombs: first at the Marriott hotel in Jakarta on Aug. 5, at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and on a bus in Jerusalem on Aug. 19, then the two in Bombay on Monday. These were the latest sites in a chronology of carnage running from Casablanca through Riyadh and Bali to Manhattan`s crumbling towers.

Each atrocity involved local actors and local motives. Each was perceived differently by the local populace, and the local repercussions of each terrorist act varied widely. Yet all were attributed to a single global menace: jihad. For three years now, acts of violence done in Allah`s name have made terrorism and Islam almost synonymous, not just in Westerners` vocabularies but around the world.

From this blight, who will rescue Islam?

The nearly reflexive association of Islam and terrorism is not simply the creation of rush- to-judgment pundits and politicians. Not when the terrorists proudly proclaim religious inspiration for their acts. Both Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden have maligned Islam. But it is, above all, the jihadists who have distilled their faith to sacred hatred — of Americans, Christians, Jews and the millions upon millions of moderate or secular Muslims who disdain this perversion from within.

Muslims respond in different ways to Islamist violence. In Jakarta a few days after 11 Indonesians and a Dutchman were killed in the blast at the Marriott, I met up with two Muslim friends. They were brimming with conspiracy theories. Why, they asked, had 20 Americans reportedly canceled their reservations before the bomb went off? Could these no-shows have known in advance of the attack? Why was the severed head of the alleged perpetrator later found on the hotel`s fifth floor? Had the CIA planted it there? Why were arrests made so soon? Could the U.S., or perhaps the Indonesian military, have staged the event?

Behind their questions lay an unspoken one: How could Muslims have done such a thing?

It would be convenient if my two friends despised Americans and were products of Islamist schools. But both men hold advanced degrees from top universities in the U.S. and exhibit no obvious animosity toward Americans. That two such people could give voice to such dark misgivings about U.S. intentions shows that Islam is not alone in its association with violence.

The flip side of denial is demonization. For some in the West, the enemy is not jihadists but all Islamists. Never mind that the vast majority of Muslims who promote their faith do so peacefully. The PowerPoint charts of counter-terrorism experts that ignore Muslim diversity and feature the evil genius Bin Laden reinforce a distorted, top-down view of Islam.

Al Qaeda`s responsibility is all too real. But local context matters. For jihad to succeed, an outside agitator needs inside sympathizers, and their receptivity to recruitment will depend on local circumstances. Recognizing that Muslim societies are autonomous and heterogeneous is a necessary first step to realizing that Bin Laden and his version of Islam aren`t absolute control.

Defenders of Islam in the West stress the fact that most of its billion-plus adherents are moderates who reject violence. Such reassurance is far preferable to demonization. But understanding is not served by exaggerations — that Islam or Muslims are always peaceful, or that jihadists entirely lack sympathy in the Muslim world. In Muslim communities, extremist and mainstream views intersect in many places, including schools, mosques and organizations. It is in these myriad local settings that Islam`s connection to violence will or won`t be broken.

Regrettably, reassurance sometimes lapses into denial. In Indonesia recently, several leading Muslim figures urged journalists to stop using the words "Islam" and "Muslim" in their coverage of the Marriott bombing. I`ve even heard Muslims object to the phrase "moderate Muslims" because it implies the existence of immoderate ones. Islam will never be rescued by language inspectors who would substitute deflection for introspection.

Can reform rescue Islam? In principle, yes, but in practice, not necessarily. There are at least a few individuals and groups in every Muslim society striving to make the practice of their faith more tolerant of difference and dissent, less restrictive toward women, more compatible with secular democracy and less preoccupied with imposing Islamic law. Liberal American observers tend to celebrate these reformers as rescuers of Islam.

Yet the sheer diversity of Muslim societies suggests that efforts to liberalize Islamic doctrine will face varying prospects of success. Before assuming that liberals and jihadists have nothing in common, one should remember that both advocate far-reaching changes that threaten the conservative views and habits of many mainstream Muslims. Reformers deserve American support. But preventing the status quo from getting worse may be a more realistic goal of such help than winning "hearts and minds" for humanism, let alone making the Muslim world look as secular and democratic as, say, Turkey.

Is America responsible for Islam`s predicament? Some U.S. actions have fueled jihad. The American presence in Iraq could become a magnet for holy warriors comparable to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Muslims pressed by Washington to oppose the hijacking of Islam by jihadists may instead decry the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by hard- liners around President Bush.

But jihadists were fighting enemies long before the United States was born. The drive to create Islamist states is more than an attempt to check American hegemony. Different U.S. policies might shrink Muslim hostility toward U.S. actions. But intransigent theocrats will not be assuaged by the compromises necessary to resolve the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Nor will either the failure or success of U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq remove the reasons for Islamist violence in other Muslim societies.

Also shaky is the notion that "they hate us for our values." The democracy Americans espouse remains popular in the Muslim world. American notions of equal treatment for women are less welcome. But a woman`s opportunities vary among Muslim-majority countries, including those in Asia that preceded the U.S. in having female heads of state.

Americans are disproportionally responsible for a modern world most Muslims feel they never made. Extremists have used such alienation to justify jihad. But it is not up to Americans to rescue Islam.

Non-Muslims can avoid unnecessary provocations and false reassurances. They can facilitate liberal reform. But it is Muslims, acting in diverse local circumstances, who will or won`t break the cycle of jihadist demonization and naive denial that is ruining the image of their religion. Whether to rescue their faith is a choice only they can make.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Mom attacks male stripper for poor performance
Associated Press
Thursday, August 28, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive…


WHEELING, Ill. -- A woman has pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery, admitting she attacked a male stripper who failed to meet expectations during her daughter`s bachelorette party.

Jacqueline McMahon, 52, was sentenced to 30 days of court supervision and ordered to pay $2,500 restitution to the victim in a plea deal reached Monday. Prosecutors also agreed to drop battery charges against McMahon`s daughter, Carrie McMahon, 22, of Loveland, Colo., and bridesmaid Kelly Meyer, 33.

The 28-year-old man suffered head injuries, bruises and scratches when he was punched, kicked and hit over the head with a bottle after his July 2002 performance at a hotel in Crystal Lake.

Police said attendees at the party became angered when the stripper showed up late and turned out to be a stand-in for the dancer requested by the hosts. Tensions increased when the man allegedly ended his performance sooner than expected and without paying enough attention to the bride.

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WASHINGTON ZEPHYRS
A Proposal That Takes Your Breath Away
The act of breathing becomes a very private moment
Adam Hochschild
Sunday, August 31, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar…


Washington -- Following the Bush administration`s recent proposals to privatize parts of Amtrak and to transfer to private contractors thousands of federal jobs in national parks, air traffic control towers and elsewhere, the White House has announced its latest candidate for privatization: air.

"The public has been getting a free ride here for too long," said presidential political strategist Karl Rove. "The idea that air is something you don`t have to pay for is a remnant of Democrat free-wheeling tax-and-spend days. Free air is costing American industry billions in lost opportunities. And when industry profits, the economy grows, and we all benefit."

A senior White House official, speaking not for attribution, added, "It`s only those latte-sipping liberals who think there`s always a free lunch -- or a free breath."

The president`s plan envisions "the genius of private enterprise" taking over the task of selling breathing permits. Volume discounts would be available for the military, for corporations wanting to offer the permits as a perk for employees, and for Bible colleges and similar educational institutions wanting to buy them for students. But Mr. Bush brushed aside any suggestion of discounting the price of breathing permits for lower-income people. "As with food, housing and so much else," Bush said yesterday, "I think there`s a key role here for faith-based initiatives. Let the churches step in to help."

The Halliburton company has already been granted a license to sell the first 30 million breathing permits. Unavailable at an undisclosed location yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney declined all comment about whether plans for air privatization had been discussed during his tenure as Halliburton`s CEO. A spokesperson of his said, "The vice president has only the best interests of all Americans at heart."

An early wrinkle in the plan, insiders said, had been how to overcome the obstacle posed by the fact that the nation`s air supply, unlike most other privatization targets, had not previously been owned by the federal government.

This problem was solved by adopting a model followed by the biotechnology industry: patenting. Mr. Rove`s office disclosed that the patent on the basic air molecule is now owned by Enron BioEther Partnerships, a unit of the Enron corporation spun off just before the parent company`s bankruptcy.

Challenges to the American patent are expected to come from other countries,

via the World Trade Organization. "It`s the `old Europe` again," the unnamed White House senior official said.

In response to the president`s bill, Congressional Democrats have put forth their own air-privatization measure.

"We`re willing to work with the president on this," a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said. "We just think he may be going too far, too fast." He announced the introduction of the rival Daschle-Lieberman Act, which would leave the nitrogen and carbon dioxide components of air at least temporarily in the public realm, while privatizing only the oxygen.

Adam Hochschild, the author of "King Leopold`s Ghost," lives in San Francisco.

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Unless The White House Abandons Its Fantasies, Civil War Will Consume The Iraqi Nation

Robert Fisk
08/30/03: In Iraq, they go for the jugular: two weeks ago, the UN`s top man, yesterday one of the most influential Shia Muslim clerics. As they used to say in the Lebanese war, if enough people want you dead, you`ll die.

So who wanted Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim dead? Or, more to the point, who would not care if he died? Well, yes, there`s the famous "Saddam remnants" which the al-Hakim family are already blaming for the Najaf massacre. He was tortured by Saddam`s men and, after al-Hakim had gone into his Iranian exile, Saddam executed one of his relatives each year in a vain attempt to get him to come back. Then there`s the Kuwaitis or the Saudis who certainly don`t want his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to achieve any kind of "Islamic revolution" north of their border.

There are neo-conservatives aplenty in the United States who would never have trusted al-Hakim, despite his connections to the Iraqi Interim Council that the Americans run in Baghdad. Then there`s the Shias.

Only a couple of months ago, I remember listening to al-Hakim preaching at Friday prayers, demanding an end to the Anglo-American occupation but speaking of peace and demanding even that women should join the new Iraqi army. "Don`t think we all support this man," a worshipper said to me.

Al-Hakim also had a bad reputation for shopping his erstwhile Iraqi colleagues to Iranian intelligence.

Then there`s Muqtada Sadr, the young - and much less learned - cleric whose martyred father has given him a cloak of heroism among younger Shias and who has long condemned "collaboration" with the American occupiers of Iraq; less well-known is his own organisation`s quiet collaboration with Saddam`s regime before the Anglo-American invasion.

Deeper than this singular dispute run the angry rivers of theological debate in the seminaries of Najaf, which never accepted the idea of velayat faqi - theological rule - espoused by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. Al-Hakim had called Khomeini, and his successor Ayatollah Khamanei, the "living Imam". Al-Hakim also compared himself to the martyred imams Ali and Hussein, whose family had also been killed during the first years of Muslim history. This was a trite, even faintly sacrilegious way of garnering support.

The people of Najaf, for the most part, don`t believe in "living Imams" of this kind. But in the end, the bloodbath at Najaf - and the murder of Mohamed al-Hakim - will be seen for what it is: yet further proof that the Americans cannot, or will not, control Iraq. General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, said only 24 hours earlier that he needed no more troops. Clearly, he does if he wishes to stop the appalling violence. For what is happening, in the Sunni heartland around Baghdad and now in the burgeoning Shia nation to the south, is not just the back-draft of an invasion or even a growing guerrilla war against occupation. It is the start of a civil war in Iraq that will consume the entire nation if its new rulers do not abandon their neo-conservative fantasies and implore the world to share the future of the country with them.

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History, religion, power: understanding Iraqi Shiites
Knowing events of the past would spare reporters from making many unnecessary mistakes
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh

No story has been more confusing for the Western news media to cover in post-war Iraq than the politics of the country’s Shiite majority. That they would be a central story was expected. They had suffered systematic repression under now-deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, especially after the 1991 Gulf War, when they staged a revolt in the south. If anyone required liberation in Iraq, it was the Shiites.
After they failed to welcome their liberators with rapturous joy, and one of their religious leaders was murdered by followers of another one of their religious leaders, the rosy storyline of liberation collapsed amid a many unanswered questions.
Were the Shiites pro-American or anti-American? Why did they have so many leaders? Did they look for direction to the Shiite religious leaders in neighboring Iran? What did they want?
There were, of course, the normal orthographical problems associated with transliterating a strange alphabet, and some of these had more than merely orthographic significance. For example, after some floundering, the New York Times ­ followed by most other papers ­ decided to identify the leader of the Shiite Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq as Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, not realizing that “Bakr” is conventionally used by Sunni Muslims, “Baqir” by Shiites.
Observing such linguistic niceties mattered less than making readers aware of the basic outlines of Shiite religious history. At best the news media offered brief accounts of the figures of Ali and Hussein, but while useful, that was not enough to make Shiite behavior in Iraq understandable.
Ali was the first cousin of the Prophet Mohammed and the husband of his eldest surviving child, Fatima. According to Shiite belief, he was designated by the Prophet as his successor, and endowed with divine guidance so that the community of Muslims would not go astray.
In 661 Ali was murdered, an event that for Shiites represents the rejection by the Muslim majority of the opportunity for a truly godly government. His burial at Najaf, now an Iraqi city with a population of 585,000, established a religious center for Shiism. Shiites believe that a succession of Imams, each appointed by his predecessor from the line of Ali, possesses the same infallibility that Ali possessed.
After Ali, only the third of these Imams, Ali’s son Hussein made a bid to be an actual political ruler, and he was murdered in 680. To their eternal shame, his followers, afraid of the anti-Shiite government of the time, failed to come to his aid. It was not long before some Shiites began to flagellate themselves on the anniversary of his death, and his martyrdom is still commemorated on this date.
Reliving Hussein’s passion is, for Shiites, what reliving the passion of Jesus is for many Christians. Hussein is buried at Karbala, which became the second most important Shiite shrine city and now boasts a population of 572,000.
If some newspapers did get the bare bones if not the emotional significance of this early Shiite history right, they almost universally skipped everything between 680 and the 21st century. For present purposes the crucial issues in subsequent Shiite history are: the absence of a current Imam; the establishment of a madrassa, or seminary, at Najaf; and the change in Shiite leadership in the 19th century.
In 941 Shiite leaders declared that the 12th Imam had disappeared to return as the Messiah at the end of time. Those Shiites who accept this disappearance are often called Twelvers. The Twelvers are the overwhelming majority of Shiites in the present day, maybe 14 percent of the 15 percent of Muslims who call themselves Shiites. This left Shiites with the same dilemma faced by the Jews in the absence of their Messiah. Many Shiites chose to withdraw from politics and quietly await his coming.
Around 1057 a man named Tusi, the leading Shiite scholar of his day, migrated from Baghdad, where Sunnis had burned his house and books, to Najaf, where he began the systematic teaching of Shiite learning. Shiites understand this to be the parent of all their madrasas down to the present.
By the end of the 10th century, Shiite scholars had already developed full systems of theology and jurisprudence based like Catholic thought but unlike Sunni thought on natural law. In the 19th century, Shiite thought underwent a dramatic transformation when, after much controversy, the majority of madrassas accepted that only the most qualified jurists could establish norms of behavior for the ordinary Shiite believers.These few jurists, who seldom numbered as many as 10, were called “sources of imitation” (singular: marjacat-taqlid). Consequently, unlike most other Muslim groups, the Twelver Shiites have a semi-hierarchy with figures roughly equivalent to Catholic bishops or the Grand Rabbi of Vilna.
Knowing this history would have saved English-speaking reporters from many mistakes. Take, for example, the hawza of Najaf, identified by the Los Angeles Times’ Megan K. Stack on April 29 as a “council of scholars” and by the Washington Post’s William Booth on May 15 as an “open university.” Abbreviated from “al-hawza al-ilmiya” (the learned area), the hawza was supposedly established by Tusi and is now used to designate that part of the city where the madrassas are located and, metaphorically, the seminary community as a whole.
Western reporters sniffed but could not identify the Shiite hierarchy. By far the most important source currently on the scene in Najaf is Ayatollah Sistani, making him, as many reporters did say, the “senior” cleric. In fact, no other Iraqi mullah possesses his learning or piety, and he has more followers in the Twelver Shiite community than any other source alive.
Also confusing to reporters were the Sadrs, an important clerical family that has been a source of at least two sources. Mohammed Baqir as-Sadr (or al-Sadr) was the most innovative Iraqi Shiite thinker of the 20th century.Aware that the Communists had a disproportionate appeal to Shiites in Iraq, Sadr studied Marxist thought with a view to fighting back.He believed in “Islamic government,” but felt the time was not ripe for it, and his exposition of the principles of Shiite jurisprudence has replaced older books both in Iran as well as Iraq.
In the 1970s Sadr’s followers founded a political party, and excited by the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979, attempted to assassinate Foreign Minister Tareq Aziz.The shock was enormous when Saddam Hussein had him and his sister killed in 1980, because he seemed destined to head Iraqi (and possibly Iranian) Shiites. When the Shiites in the south revolted in 1991 it was Mohammed Baqir as-Sadr’s portrait that was seen everywhere.
After the revolt, the Baathist government asked the leading member of the Kelidar family in Najaf to suggest, as the Kelidars had done for generations, an official head of the Shiite community.Rather than consult the sources or their close associates, the man put forward a list of clergymen considered to be politically pliant and of strong Arab identity. One of these was a remote cousin of Mohammed Baqir as-Sadr named Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. Mohammed Sadiq was pious, and he had written on morality and the history of Shiism, but he was not a great legal expert. Nevertheless his “pastoral” ability gained him increasing favor with the ordinary Shiites and he was accepted as a Source.
Eventually Sadr’s piety and pastoralism led him to voice the desires of his flock and he became his own man to an extent intolerable to Saddam Hussein. In 1999 he was killed along with two of his sons. But another son, Muqtada as-Sadr, survived, and now seeks to play an important role in post-Saddam Iraq. While the press caught the essence of this father-son story, the relationships were often jumbled. Thus on May 14, Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor wrote that Muqtada “derived” most of his popularity from his relationship with his grandfather, Mohammed Bakr Sadr, and his uncle, Mohammed Sadeq Sadr.

This is the first of a two-part article that originally appeared in Religion in the News (volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2003), published by Trinity College, and is published in THE DAILY STAR with permission.

Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is professor of history at Harvard University
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/Default.htm

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Eco-Economy: Bruce Dyer - The Almighty Dollar?
Friday, 29 August 2003, 12:41 pm
Opinion: Bruce Dyer
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00223.htm

The Almighty Dollar ?

by Bruce Dyer
In the face of the underlying weakness of the American economy, there is a growing sense of inevitability that sooner or later the dollar will be forced to depreciate, an event that will have significant repercussions for the USA and the world economy.

The US dollar accounts for almost 70% of global currency reserves - the money that nations use to finance international trade and hold to protect their own currencies against financial speculators. Because it is so dominant any marked shift in its value would inevitably have major repercussions around the world.

The global demand for dollars has enabled the US to pay for considerably more than it earns from its domestic production with 1991 being the only year in the past 20 in which the US supplied more goods and services to the rest of the world than it took in. In the other 19 years, the US has run a deficit on its import-export account to the point where it has become the leading debtor nation with a mind boggling $6.3 trillion dollar deficit (60% of GDP).

Other structural imbalances in the US’s economy include the recent return to annual budget deficits in the hundreds of billions due to unaffordable 2001 tax cuts, unsustainable credit expansion, corporate accounting abuses, near zero personal savings, record personal indebtedness, and reliance on and over consumption of Middle Eastern oil. i

These together with the build-up of military spending, the Iraq war and the new Bush doctrine of pre-emptive attacks on any country deemed to threaten the US’s future national security, have led global investors and currency speculators to unload dollars and US assets which in turn, has contributed to a rapid deterioration in the US’s financial position. ii

According to William Grieder, the national editor of The Rolling Stone, the US’s ambitions to run the world, are heavily mortgaged. Fifteen years ago, its net foreign indebtedness was zero. Before the US’s net balance of foreign assets turned negative in 1988, it was a creditor nation itself, investing and lending vast capital to others, always more than it borrowed. Now Greider sees the trend line as most alarming. "Like any debtor who borrows more year after year with no plausible way to reverse the trend, a nation sinking deeper into debt enters into an adverse power relationship with its creditors - greater and greater dependency." iii

The Euro meanwhile, is moving closer to being a competing world currency. It suffers from none of the major underlying crises afflicting the US economy and has appreciated by one third against the dollar since early 2002, when it traded at 84 cents. This is remarkable in view of the fact that the European Union’s economy is neither booming nor absorbing huge investment funds from around the world. Moreover when next year the European Union acquires 10 new members, its GDP will be roughly the same as that of the US, and its population 60% bigger. If adopted by all the members of the union, the Euro will begin to look like a more stable and more attractive investment than the dollar. iv

Despite these developments Japan holds more than 90% of its reserves, and China the bulk of her reserves in US dollars. While agreeing with the need for the dollar to depreciate, Brendan O’Donovan chief economist with Westpac in New Zealand expects that because the US remains the powerhouse of the world economy and Asia’s main trade is with the US, the US dollar will maintain its importance as a reserve currency.

An article in the Financial Times on the 30th July 2003 by Chen Zhao notes that China and Hong Kong have been buying more US Treasury securities than any other creditor nation, with combined annual purchases of $290bn. Also bigger than with any other country, is the US`s bilateral trade deficit with China which has reached $110bn.

With their reserves accumulating rapidly, buying dollars is helping the Chinese keep their own currency steady. It has also allowed US interest rates to remain low, which in turn has encouraged American consumers to buy more Chinese goods.

While this game serves the purposes of Chinese and US policy makers alike, Zhao believes it also creates economic and financial distortions that are both self-limiting and self-defeating. With a collapse in interest rates fuelling consumer spending, it is conceivable that the US current account deficit will increase rapidly. Zhao warns that "there is no magic number the current account deficit must reach to signal an impending crisis – but there has never been a nation that has been able to increase its reliance on foreign savings without eventually hitting a brick wall ". (Emphasis added.)

In response to his question "When will the game playing come to an end?" he says "When the Chinese have had enough." v

Some economists are concerned that a collapse in US living standards might be imminent because they believe the US current account deficit is reaching unsustainable levels. In 1999, Professor Catherine L. Mann of Vanderbilt University, investigated iv previous current account corrections in industrialised countries in the past twenty years. She concluded that a current account deficit of over 4.2% was unsustainable and that a correction in the US was likely in two or three years.

"The US cannot live beyond its long-term means forever, nor will US assets always be so favoured by global investors" Mann wrote in an article vii ‘Is the US Current Account Deficit Sustainable?’ published by the IMF in March 2000. "When a change in investor sentiment comes, it could be dramatic. Were the dollar to be depreciated by a significant amount of say 25 percent, she believes "US consumers would shift from buying imported goods and services to buying those made domestically and US labour markets would tighten further. The combination of rising wages and a falling dollar likely would drive up prices." Then, she believes, the Federal Reserve would try to choke the developing inflation by raising interest rates, thus disrupting financial markets around the world.

Caroline Freund of the Federal Reserve researched the same ground as Mann and also found that the US deficit was unsustainable except that she reckoned that the markets normally bring about these corrections when the deficit rises above 5% of GDP rather than 4.2%.viii With US deficit being expected to exceed 5% by the end of 2002, Mann and Freund’s work led economists employed by stockbrokers and merchant banks to alert their clients to the dollar’s potential fall.

Morgan Stanley is one of the world’s leading financial investor firms. Steven Roach, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist, warned ix several times early in 2002 of ‘a US balance of payments crisis by 2003’ and ‘America’s looming current-account adjustment’ while his colleague, Eric Chaney, talked x of ‘a massive devaluation’. Their predictions will certainly help bring about the crisis they warn of since they will be used by Morgan Stanley’s 61,000 employees around the world to encourage clients to switch out of the dollar into sterling or the euro. In short, the present system of world money creation is clearly unstable.

Roach again - "Can a saving-short US economy continue to finance an ever-widening expansion of its military superiority? My answer is a resounding `no.`" What will therefore happen? The prices of dollar-denominated assets compared to those of non-dollar-denominated assets" must fall, and fall drastically soon. Roach estimates: "a 20% drop in real exchange rates and nearly double that in nominal terms, higher real interest rates, reduced growth in domestic demand, and faster growth overseas." ix

Opposition to US policies growing
Unprecedented global demonstrations

On 15 February 2003 in an unprecedented display of solidarity more than 10 million people in 600 places around the world delivered a clear NO! to the impending attack on Iraq by the US and UK. Writing in the UK’s Guardian, George Monbiot has called for those opposing the US to switch to Euro as a means of curbing American power. xii

Brand-power starting to sink

A report completed in late July by the New York consulting firm RoperASW, has shown that the value of America’s favourite brands has slipped. Based on hour-long interviews with 30,000 consumers in 30 major economies around the world, the report saw only one of the top 10 global US-based firms increase its brand-power compared with a year earlier. This is the 5th year that the survey has been carried out and the first time that American companies have seen their brand-power start to sink.

Professor John Quelch, dean of the Harvard Business School believes that "Never before have global concerns about American foreign policy so threatened to change consumer behaviour. We are not speaking here of the frivolous grandstanding associated with temporary boycotts by a student minority. We are witnessing the emergence of a consumer lifestyle with broad international appeal that is grounded in a rejection of American capitalism, American foreign policy and Brand America." xiii

While the survey was not about the standing of the dollar, given the decline in the brand-power of US-based firms, the prospect of a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar as the brand that underpins them all, will come as no surprise.

Warning signals coming from within the American establishment.

Writing in Morgan Stanley’s Global Economic Forum, Stephen Roach asserts that a "US-centric world" is unsustainable for the world-economy and bad in particular for the United States. He argues that the US will be unable to remake the world in its image and that the attempt to do so is distinctly negative from the point of view of large US investors. He believes the global economy is lopsided and "a weaker dollar may be the only way out." xiv

The likely outcome.

Immanuel Wallerstein, one of America’s foremost scholars expects the dollar’s collapse and everything to change geopolitically. "The U.S. will no longer be able to live far beyond its means, to consume at the rest of the world`s expense. Americans may begin to feel what countries in the Third World feel when faced by IMF-imposed structural readjustment - a sharp downward thrust of their standard of living. xv

The rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America`s pre-eminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future. At the same time because Asian countries – the US’s main creditors - are so heavily invested in the US and while the US remains dependent on their investments, the dollar’s reserve currency standing is unlikely to be superseded in the near future.

In theory, the problems facing the US economy might still be corrected, but only in theory, because it is impossible to imagine such a dramatic policy reversal from Washington without some great crisis to provoke it. According to Greider, American leadership has instead become blind to the adverse balance of power accumulating against it.

References.


i) The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War With Iraq - A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth by W. Clark 6 March 2003 www.indymedia.org

ii) Iraq, The Dollar and the Euro by Hazel Henderson April 2003 http://www.hazelhenderson.com/Iraq,%20the%20Dollar%20and%20t…

iii) The End of Empire by William Greider http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020923&s=greider

iv) The bottom dollar - There is only one way to check American power and that is to support the euro George Monbiot, Monday April 21 2003, The Guardian

v) The Fed is in a Dangerous Game with China by Chen Zhao Financial Times, July 30, 2003

vi) Is the US Trade Deficit Sustainable? Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, 1999.

vii) See Finance & Development, Vol. 37, No. 1, March 2000. Can be downloaded from www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/mann.htm

viii) ‘Current Account Adjustment in Industrialized Countries, ’ International Finance Discussion Paper No. 692, Board of Governors, Federal Reserve Board, Washington DC, December 2000. Available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2000/692/ifdp692.pdf

ix) ‘When the Tide Goes Out’, European Investment Perspectives, Morgan Stanley, 13th February 2002. Also ‘Global Decoupling’ Global Economic Forum, Morgan Stanley, 30th January, 2002.

x) Europe Economics: Global Decoupling: Chaotic or Orderly?, Global Strategy Bulletin, Morgan Stanley, 17 February, 2002.

xi) Empire and the Capitalists by Immanuel Wallerstein May 15, 2003 http://fbc.binghamton.edu/113en.htm

xii) The bottom dollar - There is only one way to check American power and that is to support the Euro George Monbiot, Monday April 21 2003, The Guardian

xiii) BRAND AMERICA: IRAQ`S CORPORATE COLLATERAL DAMAGE THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER July 21, 2003, Issue #271

xiv) Empire and the Capitalists by Immanuel Wallerstein

xv) ibid

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August 30, 2003

Spain`s José Aznar
Bush`s Super Lackey
By AUGUSTIN VELLOSO

Spain has emerged recently as a middling power, well integrated in the European Union, and participating in international institutions and treaties. She took pride in siding with the majority of States within the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies in issues related to upholding international law. Surprisingly, however, the current government under Jose Aznar overturned this emerging tradition and sided with the US in its aggression against Iraq. Spain`s support for the US-Iraq war was given in the face of widespread popular opposition at home, and it also undermined the country`s relationship with the more powerful and experienced European Union countries. It can only be said that the opportunistic posturing of its current government has tarnished Spain`s image and harmed its relations with its neighbors.

Aznar`s enthusiastic cheerleading of Bush`s war carefully neglected the history of Spain`s relationship with the United States. Perhaps the disastrous 1898 Cuban war that sealed Spain`s ambitions of empire may be "old history", although the controversy about the "sexed-up" intelligence dossier on Iraq echoes that about the explosion on board the USS Maine in Havana harbour. However, other chapters are fresh in Spaniards` minds and are more relevant today. The US was one of the very few supporters of the Fascist (in the true sense of the word) Franco dictatorship. It can be argued that this relationship was very damaging to Spain since it led to forty years of isolation--which ended only after the dictator`s death. It was clear that US interests were either directly in conflict with Spain`s, or that the US pursued policies that harmed the interests of the majority of the Spanish population.Aznar also didn`t seem to care too much about international law, and decided to cast Spain into the role of a new vassal servile to American power. Perhaps Aznar is heeding the old Spanish saying: "allá van leyes do quieren reyes" (laws will go wherever kings tell them to go). The allure of putting Spain among those states given the American designation of "New Europe" proved too much for Aznar to resist--his place in history (albeit a footnote) and a tiny place in the international stage.

The shameful "war council" in the Azores was the first time Aznar truly indicated his intended new role for Spain. His personal role was grotesque because he sought to outdo both Bush and Blair in terms of bellicose statements and, on occasion, it seemed that he sought to give lessons in international relations and military intelligence.

Spain`s top newspaper, El País, published on August 11th that Aznar distorted a United Nations Arms Inspectors` report by stating that Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction. He added that Iraq "stores 3,000 tons of chemical devices, 300 tons of pure chemical agents, 30,000 special missiles for chemical and biological warfare, let alone several components for the construction of nuclear arms, 1,000 tons of VX nerve gas, 6,500 chemical warheads, 8,800 l. of anthrax and 380 chemically charged missiles".

On February 5, 2003, Powell gave a remarkably childish presentation about Iraqi WMD. He perspired while showing the slide presentation, and it seemed that he was not as certain as Aznar about the exact quantities of WMD Iraq supposedly had. It seems the Spanish secret services are better at spotting anthrax spores hidden 5,000 km away than the US or British secret services--not bad, considering Spain doesn`t have agents on the ground in Iraq or satellites overhead.

It is difficult for Spaniards other than Aznar to see how the Spanish intelligence service could count 30,000 missiles that the UN inspections, satellites, and other agencies have been trying to find for the past decade or more. While Aznar showed so much certainty about Iraq, the Minister of Defense, Trillo, was not able to say if US bombers on their way to Iraq refueled in Spanish air space. When asked by journalists about overflights he simply said he did not know!

Just like Franco before him, Aznar also believes in blind loyalty. If our friend, the US, attacks Iraq, Spain will stand by its side no matter what the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the centuries-long Spanish-Arab friendship, or even minimum commonsense advises. But never mind commonsense or international law; Aznar will go one step further. Just like Tony Blair, he lied to the Spanish parliament ­even though there was no reason for him to do so. He then determined that Spain will fight against "terror" no matter when and where. That is, Spain has been firmly stitched onto the US "war on terror". Evidently, Aznar was willing to play along with an illegal "preventive war" and, as Chomsky reminded us, a preventive war is a supreme crime.

No wonder Aznar has been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal: "The Congress finds that President Jose Aznar of Spain has clearly demonstrated () that he is a staunch and steadfast ally of the United States of America". He must be very proud of sharing this honor with Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Elie Wiesel, Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, Ronald Reagan and some other most distinguished "protectors" of human rights and international justice.

However, Aznar could hardly convince Spaniards that he has done the right thing simply by showing off the medal on national TV. The Americans knew that this was not enough, and therefore sent House Speaker Dennis Hastert and a delegation of Congressmen to meet with President Aznar to discuss the continuing war on terrorism, other security issues and efforts to increase trade and commerce between the two nations. The result was another attempt to portray Aznar as a statesman by posing him for photographs next to the motley American gang. However, the clear implication of this meeting was that Spain would send more soldiers to Iraq and buy more US second-hand military hardware, specially used F-18s. Aznar got a medal for sending Spaniards to reinforce the US occupation of Iraq, and the Congressional visit just aimed to reinforce this role.

At present Spain has sent around 1,300 soldiers to Iraq. Their rules of engagement are A mix of the banal standard statements and empty good intentions: Spanish soldiers are in Iraq to contribute to its security and stability. Fortunately, they will not be required to act in defiance of international law, their right to self-defense will be restricted to using minimum force, and they shall respect local mores. The soldiers may scratch their heads over becoming part of an illegal occupation force and yet being compelled to respect the Iraqis and their traditions. The implicit questions may become more pressing when the Spanish soldiers come under fire.

Maybe Aznar will still pay for the folly of dragging Spain into someone else`s war. He recently declared that he will not be running for a third term in office. He may need to seek some refuge from the popular resentment; if things become uncomfortable for him in Spain, then perhaps he will be offered a cushy job at the Carlyle Group--joining other useful fools like the ex-prime minister John Major. His bellicose policies may have damaged his party, the Popular Party (PP), and it is difficult to predict the outcome of the 2004 general elections. If the recently-held local and regional elections are any indication, Spanish voters--despite the mass demonstrations against the war - have not substantially withdrawn their support for the PP. Broadly speaking, neither the Left nor the Right could claim a clear victory.

Aznar accused opposition leaders that they are hoping for Spanish soldiers to return in body bags to win votes; he is right to be worried. If Spaniards went to the streets to say no to war for "ethical" reasons, it can be expected they will cast ballots to say no to the government that sent soldiers to die in Iraq for more "practical" reasons. It is very likely that the PP will then pay a price. In a few months, we could see Aznar despised in Spain, and abandoned by his party if it becomes more critical of the consequences of his policies. Maybe Berlusconi and Blair will remain his only "friends", but politicians out of power have a tendency to be abandoned in quick order.

If Aznar disappears or if popular discontent increases against the PP, then Bush and his gang will hardly care. Aznar played a useful role in undermining international opposition to the war, Spain also has been dragged into the US`s wars, and therefore now the useful fool is expendable. Even if at this late stage Aznar were to repent, his political obituary has already been written.

Many Spaniards are deeply uncomfortable with the role the current government played in the American war of aggression against Iraq. Spain has been subject to widespread criticism, and now the country may become a potential target for those seeking revenge and who cannot reach the US mainland. In exchange for a lousy Gold medal, Spain contributed to undermining the UN Charter and the possibility of organizing a more assertive European role opposed to the New Empire, never mind the soldiers put in harm`s way. Although maybe unaware of it, Spaniards will pay a heavy price for the folly of their leadership.

Agustin Velloso is a lecturer at the Spanish National University for Distance Learning. He can be reached at [e-mail].

http://www.counterpunch.org/velloso08302003.html

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Hillary Clinton urged to take on troubled Bush in 2004 contest
By Toby Harnden in Washington
(Filed: 30/08/2003)


Hillary Clinton, the darling of the Democratic Party, is under growing pressure to make a late bid for the White House in 2004 from supporters who believe that only she can defeat George W Bush.


Hillary Clinton: `star quality`
Democrats, who have been in the doldrums since the September 11 attacks sent Mr Bush`s poll ratings soaring into territory that made him seem impregnable in 2004, have recently begun to believe that the President could be in trouble.

But senior party figures worry that none of the nine candidates currently contesting the Democratic nomination has the ability fully to capitalise on Mr Bush`s new vulnerability on foreign policy and the economy.

"Hillary could do it," said a Democratic official. "She could rid us of Bush. Launching a campaign now would transform the 2004 race and leave the White House quaking. But will she run? I just don`t know."

Speculation that she was seriously mulling over the issue was heightened yesterday by a report that she would meet aides next week to make a decision.

She has until Nov 21 to register for the important New Hampshire primary, to be held in January.

When asked by The Telegraph about the report, Amy Bonitatibus, a spokesman for Mrs Clinton, replied: "Not true."

Those close to the senator, however, seemed to be happy for the rumour mill to keep grinding, perhaps because it helps her to gauge how she might fare if she did decide to announce.

Mrs Clinton has repeatedly ruled out running in 2004, stating that she is concentrating solely on being re-elected to the Senate in 2006, the end of her first term in Congress.

But it is an open secret that she has been laying the foundations for a White House challenge in 2008 when, until now, her strategists had assumed that Mr Bush would be stepping down after being re-elected comfortably in 2004.

They had also calculated that by Sept 1, the unofficial start of the 2004 presidential primary campaign, Democrats would have begun to rally around one figure as the challenger to Mr Bush.

To the dismay of the party establishment, however, Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor running on a populist, anti-war platform, has emerged as the narrow front-runner, eclipsing stalwarts such as Sen John Kerry and Representative Dick Gephardt.

Although it is possible that a liberal candidate such as Mr Dean could secure the Democratic nomination, in post-September 11 America it is highly unlikely that he would unseat Mr Bush in a general election.

Gen Wesley Clark, the former Nato commander in Bosnia, is expected to enter the fray within weeks. He might damage Mr Kerry, who often emphasises his credentials as a Vietnam war hero, but his political inexperience and late entry into the race will count against him.

There have even been calls for Al Gore, the former vice-president who announced last December that he would not run in 2004, to change his mind and come to the party`s rescue, although many political operatives believe that he ran an inept campaign in 2000.

Mrs Clinton undoubtedly has the political network and "star quality" that would transform the Democratic contest overnight and cause money to flood into her coffers.

A majority of Democrats still believe that President Bill Clinton was the victim, in Mrs Clinton`s famous phrase, of a "vast, Right-wing conspiracy" and that his wife is best placed to avenge him.

She sold more than a million copies of her memoir Living History over the summer and there is some evidence that her image is softening and she has become a less divisive figure than before.

A June Gallup poll found that she had a favourability rating of 53 per cent, a rise from 43 per cent before the book was published.

Republicans in the Senate have said, only a little grudgingly, that she has worked hard as a junior senator, co-operating with her political opponents and mastering the minutiae of congressional business.

If she did decide to run for the White House next year, Mrs Clinton would be following the example of Robert Kennedy, another New York senator who was accused of being a "carpetbagger" because he did not hail from the state.

President John F Kennedy`s brother entered the 1968 presidential race when President Lyndon Johnson withdrew, despite earlier protestations that he had no intention of running. He was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California primary.

One factor that may weigh against Mrs Clinton running is a judgment that while Mr Bush has hit a bumpy patch he is far from being badly wounded politically.

A Gallup poll released on Wednesday found that support for the Iraq war was 63 per cent, exactly the same as a month earlier, and his popularity ratings remain above 50 per cent, indicating that he would easily win another election if it were held at the moment.

For the time being, this is not stopping Mrs Clinton`s fans dreaming and hoping. On the friendsofhillary.com website, officially launched by Mrs Clinton last month, many of the comments from supporters posted by the site`s staff beg her to take on Mr Bush.

"Please run for President in 2004," begged Josh B. "We need you. We need your leadership, ideas, and changes."

A message from Kim C said: "I would love nothing more than to see you in the White House - the sooner the better. You will always have my continued support whether it`s for the Senate or president. Go get `em, girl!"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/08…

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Time for Blair to follow Campbell out of No 10




What we think



THE King of Spin is leaving. To the sound of cheers across much of the country and many, though not all, media offices, Labour`s director of communications Alastair Campbell on Friday carried out a long-promised threat to resign. For many who see him as the key malign practitioner of the black arts at the heart of Tony Blair`s administration, there was an almost naive belief that his going might at long last usher in a new kind of No 10: less abrasive, less abusive, less bullying and less manipulative. But should we hold our breath in anticipation?
What is undoubtedly clear is that, along with Peter Mandelson, aka the Prince of Darkness, and Blair, Campbell was at the heart of the New Labour project. Although it was initially Gordon Brown and Blair who conspired to take over the old Labour Party and turn it into a new-era social democratic party based loosely on what they learned from the Democratic Party in the USA, Brown was partially sidelined by the triumvirate following the now-legendary Islington summit at the Granita restaurant. Blair, as usual, went into the meeting having been briefed on what to say by Mandelson. When he secured Brown`s withdrawal in the race to take over from John Smith, Blair`s first port of call was Campbell, who at the time was holidaying in France. With the Holy Trinity, established the Blair project was ready to roll.

All three were messianic in their desire to see Labour become electable after suffering the humiliation of four successive defeats at the polls. This meant that only those who would genuflect to, and share, this One True Faith were admitted to the inner sanctum of The Project. Loyalty had to be total and anyone who stood in their way was cast aside. You were either with them or agin them. When, as editor at The Observer, I interviewed Blair he asked me why we did not offer 100% support to him: `What`s your problem?`

He could not understand that newspapers are not political parties and, should we relinquish our role as independent sources of information, we also risk losing credibility with our readers. The role of a responsible Fourth Estate is to hold those in power to account: not to act as cheerleaders. That editorial line is not one necessarily shared by many papers who see themselves as mouthpieces for their chosen party, while telling their readers how to vote at elections.

But Blair, with Campbell always at his side with a tape-recorder to ensure accurate reporting of the interview, had the upper hand. With a thought-through and logical strategy, they ignored the papers of the centre and left and set about wooing the very papers that had undermined Labour in the past; namely Daily Mail, The Sun and The Times. In the case of the latter two, this meant cravenly courting Rupert Murdoch. If this Lion King could be persuaded that Blair could win, and that such a win would be good for his newspapers then he would instruct his editors to vote Labour. The architect of all this was Campbell, the former tabloid political editor of The Mirror. His knowledge of how Fleet Street worked and how to spin good political stories for the mass circulation readerships were put to good use by Blair. In many ways, getting The Sun and then The Mail on side will in hindsight be seen as Campbell`s greatest achievement. In politics, without power you are nothing. Campbell ensured New Labour crossed the victory bridge from its years in the political wilderness.

But in that victory in 1997 were also sown the seeds of New Labour`s own destruction: their arrogance and insensitivity made them look like the new bully boys of Number 10. In short, they failed to make the transition from being in opposition to being in power. It`s all very well behaving in a certain way when, as a party, you have no power. In many ways you can do as you like when there is no responsibility to anyone except from getting the government out. But once a party achieves power, the leaders face issues of accountability, protocol, dealing with the civil service and maintaining standards expected in parliamentary democracy. Instead Campbell just carried on first installing The Labour Rebuttal And Spin Machine and then rooting out virtually all the politically neutral civil service press officers and replacing them with Campbell`s cronies, mostly ex-Mirror staff. Even his partner, Fiona Millar, whom he met at The Mirror became installed as Cherie Blair`s private adviser. Once in power Campbell continued to feed stories to his chosen `government-friendly papers`. He was up to that until even a few weeks ago, as Lord Hutton discovered. While discussing how to unmask Dr David Kelly, Campbell suggested that his name be given to one `government-friendly newspaper`.

Over the years the Campbell approach to the media has looked two-faced: bullying and boorish in certain cases and oleaginous and charming to others. This led to an increasingly corrosive relationship where, as director of communications, he became almost unable to get his message across, except to those he favoured. In recent months because of his vendetta against the BBC, the government has been unable to communicate anything of its agenda or initiatives on any other subject. The breakdown became almost complete. Trust has gone and whatever message No 10 tries to get out is met with downright cynicism. `What are they trying to spin us now?` is how any government initiative is now met by the press and public.


So with his going, will things change? Perhaps. The appointment of Dave Hill as Campbell`s successor is welcome in that he is less abrasive, but he remains another political appointee. The politicisation of government and the undermining of the culture of the civil service is one of the chief legacies of the Blair government. John Major, for all his faults, employed career civil servants -- such as Chris Meyer and Gus O`Donnell -- to run the communications office who, aside from anything else, were civil and straightforward. Blair has not chosen this path. He still does not seem to understand that public trust must be at the heart of good governance. He need only check the latest YouGov poll which finds 69% do not trust Blair compared to 30% two years ago. His approval rating has also dropped from 52% to 26%. This wide chasm between Number 10 and the electorate is now reaching crisis proportions.

The public may feign indifference in politics, but they are not fooled. The vast majority never believed Blair when he told us there was a case for war against Iraq. Some suspended their scepticism when Blair pleaded with us to: `Trust me, I know they have the weapons.` His own chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, the man who runs his office (and now also wants out of No 10) told Lord Hutton that, though the Iraq dossier was a good read, it contained nothing to suggest Iraq was an imminent threat and therefore had to be attacked. Even the MI6 man who was meant to have officially drawn up the report, John Scarlett, told the Hutton Inquiry that Iraq posed no threat to Western interests, particularly British bases in Cyprus as Blair told parliament. But Blair and Campbell had made their minds up and they went to war. When it was over and no-one could find any WMD, they spotted the danger. When the BBC suggested that members of the intelligence community had voiced concerns about the basis for going to war, Campbell pulled out every trick he knew in his little black book. Rule number one is that attack is the best form of defence, so he went for the BBC`s jugular to divert the heat from Blair. He wanted to plant the story that it was the BBC who lied, not Blair. Blair, we learned last week,even called the BBC`s chairman, Gavyn Davies, telling him to apologise for the untrue story. Whether the BBC story was accurate was not the issue for Blair and Campbell, they simply wanted to steamroller the BBC into submission.

That is the Blair-Campbell-Mandelson way; they know no other. Intoxicated and isolated by a massive Commons majority, they have lost their moral and political compass. However, they will have recognised of late that without the consent of the electorate their authority is sapped. Maybe for the good of the country, and to safeguard the advances and successes of the first six years of Labour government, this is perhaps a good time to stand aside and pass the mantle to Gordon Brown. Our view is not based on any inside knowledge that Brown would run things differently. It is simply that Blair has now passed the point of no return in terms of trust. Brown will understand the pitfalls and dangers of repeating the same mistakes. So he should be given the chance to prove that he can restore to Labour an administration fit to govern and one that the country is once again prepared to listen to, respect and -- crucially -- trust.

31 August 2003

http://www.sundayherald.com/36361

[Joerver]

Sunday, Aug. 31, 2003
Confessions of a Terrorist
Author Gerald Posner claims an al-Qaeda leader made explosive allegations while under interrogation
By JOHANNA MCGEARY
By March 2002, the terrorist called Abu Zubaydah was one of the most wanted men on earth. A leading member of Osama bin Laden`s brain trust, he is thought to have been in operational control of al-Qaeda`s millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. After the spectacular success of the airliner assaults on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, he continued to devise terrorist plans.

Seventeen months ago, the U.S. finally grabbed Zubaydah in Pakistan and has kept him locked up in a secret location ever since. His name has probably faded from most memories. It`s about to get back in the news. A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden.

Details of that terrorism triangle form the explosive final chapter in Posner`s examination of who did what wrong before Sept. 11. Most of his new book, Why America Slept (Random House), is a lean, lucid retelling of how the CIA, FBI and U.S. leaders missed a decade`s worth of clues and opportunities that if heeded, Posner argues, might have forestalled the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories. He wrote controversial assessments dismissing those surrounding the J.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. And the Berkeley-educated lawyer is adept at marshaling an unwieldy mass of information—most of his sources are other books and news stories—into a pattern made tidy and linear by hindsight. His indictment of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies covers well-trodden ground, though sometimes the might-have-beens and could-have-seens are stretched thin. The stuff that is going to spark hot debate is Chapter 19, an account—based on Zubaydah`s claims as told to Posner by "two government sources" who are unnamed but "in a position to know"—of what two countries allied to the U.S. did to build up al-Qaeda and what they knew before that September day.

Zubaydah`s capture and interrogation, told in a gripping narrative that reads like a techno-thriller, did not just take down one of al-Qaeda`s most wanted operatives but also unexpectedly provided what one U.S. investigator told Posner was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11 ... the details of what (Zubaydah) claimed was his `work` for senior Saudi and Pakistani officials." The tale begins at 2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, when U.S. surveillance pinpointed Zubaydah in a two-story safe house in Pakistan. Commandos rousted out 62 suspects, one of whom was seriously wounded while trying to flee. A Pakistani intelligence officer and hastily made voiceprints quickly identified the injured man as Zubaydah.

Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugs—an unnamed "quick-on, quick-off" painkiller and Sodium Pentothal, the old movie truth serum—in a chemical version of reward and punishment to make Zubaydah talk. When questioning stalled, according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.

Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd`s and a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby in 2002. To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle.

Zubaydah, writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom`s longtime intelligence chief. Zubaydah said bin Laden "personally" told him of a 1991 meeting at which Turki agreed to let bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom. The Pakistani contact, high-ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir, entered the equation, Zubaydah said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan also attended by Zubaydah. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence (isi), to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaeda. Zubaydah told interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was "blessed by the Saudis."

Zubaydah said he attended a third meeting in Kandahar in 1998 with Turki, senior isi agents and Taliban officials. There Turki promised, writes Posner, that "more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban, and the Saudis would never ask for bin Laden`s extradition, so long as al-Qaeda kept its long-standing promise to direct fundamentalism away from the kingdom." In Posner`s stark judgment, the Saudis "effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade." Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named.

The last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development. Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at age 43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident. The last member of the trio, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, officially "died of thirst" while traveling east of Riyadh one week later. And seven months after that, Mushaf Ali Mir, by then Pakistan`s Air Marshal, perished in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants.

Without charging any skulduggery (Posner told TIME they "may in fact be coincidences"), the author notes that these deaths occurred after cia officials passed along Zubaydah`s accusations to Riyadh and Islamabad. Washington, reports Posner, was shocked when Zubaydah claimed that "9/11 changed nothing" about the clandestine marriage of terrorism and Saudi and Pakistani interests, "because both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day." They couldn`t stop it or warn the U.S. in advance, Zubaydah said, because they didn`t know what or where the attack would be. And they couldn`t turn on bin Laden afterward because he could expose their prior knowledge. Both capitals swiftly assured Washington that "they had thoroughly investigated the claims and they were false and malicious." The Bush Administration, writes Posner, decided that "creating an international incident and straining relations with those regional allies when they were critical to the war in Afghanistan and the buildup for possible war with Iraq, was out of the question."

The book seems certain to kick up a political and diplomatic firestorm. The first question everyone will ask is, Is it true? And many will wonder if these matters were addressed in the 28 pages censored from Washington`s official report on 9/11. It has long been suggested that Saudi Arabia probably had some kind of secret arrangement to stave off fundamentalists within the kingdom. But this appears to be the first description of a repeated, explicit quid pro quo between bin Laden and a Saudi official. Posner told TIME he got the details of Zubaydah`s interrogation and revelations from a U.S. official outside the cia at a "very senior Executive Branch level" whose name we would probably know if he told it to us. He did not. The second source, Posner said, was from the cia, and he gave what Posner viewed as general confirmation of the story but did not repeat the details. There are top Bush Administration officials who have long taken a hostile view of Saudi behavior regarding terrorism and might want to leak Zubaydah`s claims. Prince Turki, now Saudi Arabia`s ambassador to Britain, did not respond to Posner`s letters and faxes.

There`s another unanswered question. If Turki and Mir were cutting deals with bin Laden, were they acting at the behest of their governments or on their own? Posner avoids any direct statement, but the book implies that they were doing official, if covert, business. In the past, Turki has admitted—to TIME in November 2001, among others—attending meetings in `96 and `98 but insisted they were efforts to persuade Sudan and Afghanistan to hand over bin Laden. The case against Pakistan is cloudier. It is well known that Islamist elements in the isi were assisting the Taliban under the government of Nawaz Sharif. But even if Mir dealt with bin Laden, he could have been operating outside official channels.

Finally, the details of Zubaydah`s drug-induced confessions might bring on charges that the U.S. is using torture on terrorism suspects. According to Posner, the Administration decided shortly after 9/11 to permit the use of Sodium Pentothal on prisoners. The Administration, he writes, "privately believes that the Supreme Court has implicitly approved using such drugs in matters where public safety is at risk," citing a 1963 opinion.

For those who still wonder how the attacks two years ago could have happened, Posner`s book provides a tidy set of answers. But it opens up more troubling questions about crucial U.S. allies that someone will now have to address.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,480226,00.…


Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy

[Joerver]

August 31, 2003
The Bush Cartel Takes the American Public for Fools: Now They Say Saddam "Duped" Them Into Believing He Had WMD`s. You Wouldn`t Accept This Sort of Inept Lying From a Five-Year-Old.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Las Vegas Radio Talk Show Host Doug Basham

According to an August 28 article in the LA Times by Bob Drogin,

"Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein`s suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war. Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein`s suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war."

As evidence, "officials" say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein`s regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases -- the Bush administration tall tale goes -- Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites. See [LINK].

Now let`s forget for a moment the reported pressure this administration (read Dick Cheney) placed on our intelligence agencies to "cook the intelligence books." Let`s forget for a moment that the primary "defector" the administration was taking their cues from was their very own handpicked Saddam successor, Ahmed Chalabi, who the Busheviks even touted as the possible "George Washington of Iraq." (You might recall that Chalabi was convicted in absentia in a Jordanian court for embezzlement and fraud -- personally, I don`t think it had anything to do with stealing cherry trees). The Jordanians have sought Chalabi`s extradition. See [LINK].

Chalabi has dearly wanted Hussein`s job. I think it`s safe to say any information Chalabi handed this administration was for Ahmed`s benefit, not brother Saddam`s. I would not be surprised at all if this "bogus Iraqi defectors" story is yet one more Chalabi "bogus" creation. But, let`s put all that aside for the moment.

I`ve chosen instead to focus on the motivations Saddam Hussein would`ve had for planting "bogus" defectors in the United States to tell this administration what they wanted to hear.

I envision Mr. Hussein sitting down crafting this plot. Perhaps he said:

"Granted, when my ‘`bogus` defectors tell the Americans I have continued my quest for weapons of mass destruction, including `nu-cu-lar` weapons; this will only provide them with more justification for attacking my country and my regime. It will undoubtedly lead to my removal as leader of Iraq, along with the destruction of much of my country`s infrastructure, history and culture. It might even lead to my death, and/or, the deaths of many of my friends and relatives, including my two beloved warrior sons. It also might lead to me living the life of a fugitive (God, I loved that American television program -- David Janssen was the bomb!), with me having to change sleeping locales more often than I did when I was in power…. . . but HEY! . . . at least the Bush administration will look rather foolish when they discover they were ‘`duped.`"

Now come on. Don`t you feel even the slightest bit "insulted" by this story? The bottom line is real simple folks, and maybe that`s why the administration decided to release this "gem" of a tall tale. Perhaps they know full well that sometimes the obvious can be obscured by the details. The Bush administration is still clinging to their "WMD" fantasy in order to prevent their having to admit they flat out lied.

They`ve gone from "We know the weapons are there," to "We still believe the weapons are there," to "We believe we will find evidence of weapons `programs,`" to, now, "We were duped into believing the weapons were there." They`re counting on you to keep clinging to their WMD fantasy as well, so you won`t focus instead on stories that outline the absolutely shameless level of war profiteering that is currently taking place. Or haven`t you heard? According to story by Michael Dobbs` in the August 28 Washington Post, Halliburton`s going to make even more money than was originally reported. See [LINK].

And surprise, Halliburton`s not the only one: See [LINK].

The bottom line is simple. The old saying "We get the government we deserve" has never been truer than presently. I contend the Bush administration wouldn`t release a whopper like this unless they viewed the American public as a bunch of mindless dolts. And why wouldn`t they? Why would they think any differently of a citizenry who refuses to hold their already grammatically challenged leader accountable when he appears on international television and pronounces to the world "We`ve already found WMD`s in Iraq," or "We went to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein wouldn`t allow weapons inspectors back in."

Forget the "dubious" 16 words. The Niger story took some research and some fact assimilating -- two things most Americans who are just trying to keep their heads above the rapidly rising tax cut waters have little time to engage in. The aforementioned two lies were available to anyone who only receives their news from 10-second sound bytes. And still, they let their leader slide. Why? Because the media they misguidedly trust to keep them informed neglected to inform them that their leader was lying on both counts. The media let him slide as well. So much for a "liberal media."

The Los Angeles Times article conveys this bizarre Bush Cartel pretzel logic:

"Critics had charged that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence on Iraq to bolster support for the war. The broader question now is whether some of the actual intelligence was fabricated and U.S. officials failed to detect it."

No it isn`t. The broader question is whether or not the American people are going to swallow yet one more gross, insulting lie from this administration. This long held M.O. of conservatives to "play the victim" (again, read "liberal media"), is starting to wear mighty thin. It is common knowledge this administration willingly surrounded themselves with people who would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. In fact, they actively sought out the same. When our conventional intelligence agencies wouldn`t do it, the Pentagon formed their own intelligence unit that would (OSP - Office of Special Plans).

To play the victim one more time now, and whine pathetically that "We were duped" is a ploy that will only work on either: a) the weak minded, much like Jedi mind control (can you just imagine Obi Wan proclaiming "Luke, when the force doesn`t work, lie your ass off"); or b) those who either won`t, or don`t pay attention to what their government is doing, which unfortunately, describes the majority of the American public. It doesn`t change the overall fact that they lied and our soldiers died as a result –- and continue dying. Are family members of fallen ones supposed to feel better because the administration that sent their loved ones to die did so because they were grossly stupid and incompetent as compared to being just natural born liars? I think not.

As much as I despise a tyrannical regime like Saddam Hussein`s, I equally despise a regime that will lie its country into war, caring not how many of our finest die as a result. And for them to lie even further and claim they were "duped" by the people that they as much as bullied into telling them what they wanted to hear, is unconscionable behavior, even for this crowd. And for all the phony patriots who equate criticism of this regime with "hating America," your rhetoric is as embarrassing as it is dishonest.

I love this country; I just hate a regime that lies the country I love into war. And if you understood the true meaning of patriotism, you would to. I would submit that it is those who continue to cover up this administration`s lies while hiding behind a flag that are the real America haters. I suspect the families of the fallen might agree.

To my way of thinking, the only "bogus" defectors in this country are presently "squatting" in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As one bumper sticker says, "In 2004, fire George W. Bush, before he fires you."

A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/08/31_duped.html

[Joerver]

Herrlich, die betrogenen Betrüger. Oder ein starkes Stück, um den Kopf aus der Schlinge zu ziehen. Ansich hätte das Tony einfallen müssen. Da hat der böse Saddam angegeben, dass er so viele Waffen habe, und die kleinen dummen Amis haben ihm das geglaubt.
Und was hat der Saddam nun davon, die bösen Amis haben ihn aus seinen schönen Palästen gejagt und sitzen nun da mit der Scheiße, keine Waffen, einen Haufen Guerillas am Hals, kein Öl und eine Menge Geld müssen sie auch noch bezahlen. Ist der Bush-Clique garnichts peinlich? Jeder macht sich so lächerlich, wie er es nötig hat.
Die USA hat eine bessere Regierung verdient.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-wmd28au…

U.S. Suspects It Received False Iraq Arms Tips
Intelligence officials are reexamining data used in justifying the war. They say Hussein`s regime may have sent bogus defectors.
By Bob Drogin
Times Staff Writer

August 28, 2003

WASHINGTON — Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein`s suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.

The goal, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it." He added, "We`re reinterviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the U.S."

The far-reaching review was started after a political firestorm erupted this summer over revelations that President Bush`s claim in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought to import uranium from Niger was based on forged documents.

Although senior CIA officials insist that defectors were only partly responsible for the intelligence that triggered the decision to invade Iraq in March, other intelligence officials now fear that key portions of the prewar information may have been flawed. The issue raises fresh doubts as to whether illicit weapons will be found in Iraq.

As evidence, officials say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein`s regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.

"They were shown bits of information and led to believe there was an active weapons program, only to be turned loose to make their way to Western intelligence sources," said the senior intelligence official. "Then, because they believe it, they pass polygraph tests and the planted information becomes true to the West, even if it was all made up to deceive us."

Critics had charged that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence on Iraq to bolster support for the war. The broader question now is whether some of the actual intelligence was fabricated and U.S. officials failed to detect it.

One U.S. intelligence official said analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support the White House`s claims. As a result, he said, defectors "were just telling us what we wanted to hear."

Hussein`s motives for such a deliberate disinformation scheme may have been to bluff his enemies abroad, from Washington to Tehran, by sending false signals of his military might. Experts also say the dictator`s defiance of the West, and its fear of his purported weapons of mass destruction, boosted his prestige at home and was a critical part of his power base in the Arab world.

Hussein also may have gambled that the failure of United Nations weapons inspectors to find specific evidence identified by bogus defectors ultimately would force the Security Council to lift sanctions imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. U.S. officials now believe Hussein hoped to then covertly reconstitute his weapons programs.

"We`re looking at that and every other possibility," the first intelligence official said. "You can`t rule anything out People are really second-guessing themselves now."

The current focus on Iraqi defectors reflects a new skepticism within the Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-member team responsible for finding any illicit arms. In interviews, several current and former members expressed growing disappointment over the inconclusive results of the search so far.

"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," said a senior U.S. weapons expert who recently returned from a stint with the survey group. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn`t find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."

The survey group is jointly led by David Kay, a former U.N. nuclear inspector who was named a CIA special advisor in June, and Army Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, who headed the "human intelligence" service at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kay has said he will issue a preliminary report next month.

Evidence collected over the last two months suggests that Hussein`s regime abandoned large-scale weapons development and production programs in favor of a much smaller "just in time" operation that could churn out poison gases or germ agents if they were suddenly needed, survey group members say. The transition supposedly took place between 1996 and 2000.

But survey group mobile collection teams are still unable to prove that any nerve gases or microbe weapons were produced during or after that period, the officials said. Indeed, the weapons hunters have yet to find proof that any chemical or bio-warfare agents were produced after 1991.

The veracity of defectors is a key part of the puzzle, but only one aspect of it.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell quoted several defector accounts in February, when he presented U.S. findings to the United Nations Security Council in an unsuccessful bid to win broad backing for military action in Iraq. But Powell also cited spy satellites, electronic intercepts of telephone and other communications, reports from U.N. inspectors and other intelligence sources.

Some defectors have come under fire previously. U.S. experts have long questioned the value of informants provided by pro-invasion Iraqi opposition groups in exile, saying they routinely padded their resumes or exaggerated their knowledge in exchange for asylum, visas or money.

The CIA and the State Department, in particular, distanced themselves from Iraqi defectors handed over by the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. CIA and State Department officials repeatedly warned that the group`s intelligence network had proved unreliable in the past.

Senior Pentagon officials, however, supported the former Iraqi banker`s bid as a possible successor to Hussein. Chalabi, who now sits on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad, has said his group provided the Defense Intelligence Agency with three defectors who had personal knowledge of Hussein`s illicit weapons programs.

One, an Iraqi engineer, told the DIA in 2001 that he knew the location of biological weapons. However, no bioweapons have been found at the sites he named.

A second defector from Chalabi`s group described what he said were mobile labs that could produce several hundred tons of biowarfare agents per year. The CIA has concluded that two trucks found in northern Iraq after the war were probably designed for biowarfare, but outside experts have sharply disputed those claims.

U.S. intelligence authorities dismissed the third defector, who claimed to be an expert in nuclear isotope separation, as a fraud.

The CIA launched its own internal review of intelligence in February before the war but did not re-interview defectors. The four-member panel, headed by Richard Kerr, former CIA deputy director, has only reviewed "finished" intelligence, not the "raw" reports that form their basis. The panel is awaiting the Iraq Survey Group report before judging whether CIA assessments were on target.

"So far, all they did was look at documents and see if they were well founded, and if the conclusions were justified based on the underlying intelligence," said a CIA spokesman. "Now they`re waiting to see the outcome of what we find [in Iraq] so they can compare the two. It`s in limbo."

With the Iraq Survey Group still at work, CIA and Pentagon officials declined to make Kay or Dayton, its leaders, available for interviews. But other survey group members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security clearances they are required to sign, said the evidence reviewed so far — including more than 30 million pages of documents — still doesn`t support charges that Hussein secretly built chemical and biological weapons after U.N. inspectors were forced out of Iraq in 1998, as the Bush administration repeatedly warned.

"I haven`t heard anyone run into the SOG [Survey Operations Center] saying, `Eureka! We found the smoking gun,` " said a senior survey group member. "It`s all still murky as hell."

The issue of timing is critical because a formal U.S. intelligence estimate sent to the White House and Congress in October starkly warned that Iraq had "begun renewed production" of mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX nerve gases and had 100 to 500 tons of chemical agents, "much of it added in the last year." The report also said that "most of the key aspects" of Iraq`s bioweapons program "were more advanced" than before the 1991 war.

Evidence recently found by survey teams in Iraq includes detailed schedules, outlines and instruction sheets, among other documents, indicating covert plans to purchase and install "dual use" equipment in civilian laboratories and factories that could be quickly converted to military use if an order were suddenly issued.

"We`ve got a whole lot of documents that would substantiate a `just in time` capability," said one of the recently returned survey team members. "They set up dual-use facilities so they could cook up what they needed, when they needed it. But otherwise they would be making whiter-than-white washing detergent or something."

In addition, some Iraqi scientists and technicians have claimed during interrogation that chemical and biological agents were produced under the "just in time" system as recently as 2002. But other Iraqis have said the system was never used or only produced small "test batches" in the mid- to late 1990s.

"We have some people who say, `Yes, we were doing it,` or who say they exercised the production periodically," said the former survey official. "But you try to pursue it and it`s not a clear picture. What they did with the material is unclear. If they did produce, what did they do with the results? If you just have a textbook or something on paper, that doesn`t mean you can actually make this stuff. It`s all still very fuzzy."

Another former survey team member said the evidence of a "just in time" program justifies the prewar concerns, even if the program was never activated.

"To me, there`s no difference between finding a warehouse full of aerial bombs with nerve gas and a pencil-and-paper plan that will allow them to use their existing production capabilities to produce those same weapons in one week`s time," he said.

U.N. weapons inspectors who scoured Iraq from 1991 to 1998 also theorized that Hussein sought to hide new weapons programs in civilian factories, hospitals and laboratories. Hussein had hidden much of his chemical and biological weapons production in pesticide plants, water-treatment facilities and other civilian infrastructure in the 1980s, but the U.N. teams found no newly built production operations in the 1990s.

Kay and Dayton briefed the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees behind closed doors in late July. They later told reporters that the survey group was making "solid progress" in unraveling Hussein`s illicit programs. That led to sharp criticism from some Democrats.

"I remain cautious about whether we`re going to find actual WMD," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Not just a program, but the very extensive weapons — ready for attack — that we all were told existed."

Rockefeller said he was "concerned" that the weapons hunters had not found "the 25,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and the 500 tons of mustard, sarin and VX nerve gas" that Bush cited in his State of the Union speech in January.

Administration officials say they are still confident that weapons of mass destruction will be found. They note a sharp increase in the number of Iraqis providing useful information over the last month. One such tip last week led to a cache of shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles in northern Iraq, officials said.

In a television interview on Sunday, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited the discovery this month of about 30 Soviet-era high-speed fighters and reconnaissance aircraft that had been buried in desert sands near the Taqqadum airfield west of Baghdad. U.S. troops had been operating in the area for more than three months before a sandstorm exposed a tail fin.

"They went to extraordinary lengths to bury an aircraft," Myers said.

"A 55-gallon drum with anthrax in it would be a lot more difficult to find and dig up. So it will work and we`ll find what we`re after."



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 7:18 a.m. EDT August 31, 2003

Iraqi police say al-Qaida-linked terrorists organized the car bombing at a shrine in the holy city of Najaf. A high-ranking police official says at least 19 suspects have been arrested in the attack -- and that all have admitted links to al-Qaida. About four-thousand mourners gathered outside the damaged mosque Saturday and called for vengeance.
More than 300,000 Muslims are making their way on foot to the holy city of Najaf in a two-day, 110-mile march from Baghdad to mourn a cherished Shiite leader. Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim died along with 85 others in Friday`s mosque bombing.
In response to the mosque bombing, which killed at least 85, a highly respected Shiite cleric suspended his membership in the U.S.-chosen Iraqi interim Governing Council on Saturday, citing a lack of security.
The Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite broadcaster quotes the governor of Najaf as saying more than 1,500 pounds of explosives were planted in two cars that blew up outside Iraq`s holiest Shiite shrine Friday.
Saudi Arabian officials deny it, but there are signs Saudi Muslim extremists have traveled to Iraq to take on U.S.-led forces. Internet memorials to those who died fighting American troops have popped up.
In Baghdad, 150 U.N. employees held a somber memorial service on Saturday to remember their colleagues killed in the August 19th bombing of the U.N. office.
Safety worries have prompted the United Nations to sharply reduce its staff in Iraq. The U.N. has about 400 people there -- and a source says it wants to slash that number by almost 90 percent. A bombing ten days ago devastated U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
American troops watched from a distance Saturday as dozens of Iraqi police stormed a farm near Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit. The commander says they found ammunition and artillery fuses buried in a dusty field.

CASUALTIES

A total of 282 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began in Iraq. Of those, 67 have died in combat since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



Keine Aktualisierung

08/31/03 CENTCOM
TWO U.S. SOLDIERS DIE OF WOUNDS SUFFERED DURING ACTION NEAR SHKIN, AFGHANISTAN
08/29/03 CENTCOM
One U.S. special ops soldier dies in Afghanistan from accidental fall during nightime operations.
08/29/03 The London Guardian
Huge bomb blast in Najaf reportedly kills Shia Muslim leader ... plus additional details on death of U.S. soldier near Baqubah this AM
08/29/03 CENTCOM
One 4th ID soldier was killed, three wounded, in hostile fire attack north of As Suaydat (near Baqubah) today
08/28/03 CENTCOM
A U.S. soldier died of undetermined causes at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, on Aug. 27th
08/28/03 SEATTLE POST
Six Fort Lewis soldiers serving in Iraq are being treated for injuries in a military hospital in Germany after their truck hit a mine as they traveled north of Tikrit, about 120 miles north of Baghdad.
08/28/03 Ministry of Defense
A British soldier was killed and another wounded in an incident in Ali As Sharqi in southern Iraq on 27 August 2003.
At least 340 Coalition forces have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
289 from the US and 50 from the UK and 1 from Denmark.

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Grief and anger on the streets as funeral of murdered cleric begins
Hundreds of thousands mourn ayatollah in Baghdad

Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Monday September 1, 2003
The Guardian

Few among the crowd had ever met Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim. At best they remembered but a glimpse of the elegant, grey-bearded figure who had come to represent so much for Iraq`s Shia majority after years of brutal repression under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Yet even as dawn broke over Baghdad yesterday the first crowds were gathering to mark the funeral of one of Iraq`s most revered clerics and political leaders, murdered in a brutal car bombing outside the country`s holiest shrine.

Within hours, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis poured on to the streets surrounding the Kadhimain mosque on the west bank of the Tigris River to begin three days of mourning.

Shops lining the broad avenue that leads up to the golden dome and minarets of the 16th century mosque kept their shutters down. Police barricaded the streets and hundreds gathered in small circles, chanting prayers and beating their chests. "Merciful God, al-Hakim has gone," they sang.

Ayatollah Hakim`s coffin was carried on the back of a large, flatbed truck, draped in a thick, black cloth and covered with dozens of white and red flowers. Several gunmen stood along the length of the truck.

The coffin was virtually empty: the bomb had been of such devastating intensity that the only identifiable remains of the cleric found were one of his hands, with his watch and wedding ring intact, and the pen he frequently used.

The hurriedly arranged funeral procession was a remarkable testament to the organisational power of the Shia movements in Iraq and their strength on the ground. The march began at the Kadhimain mosque and then crossed to a second revered mosque nearby at Baratha, where the Imam Ali was said to have opened a spring of fresh water from the ground. Later in the day the mourners continued down to the holy city of Karbala, where prayers will be said today, before the final funeral ceremony in Najaf tomorrow.

A US military helicopter circled overhead during the march, but there were no US soldiers on the ground. Instead security was handed over to the small and under-resourced Iraqi police force and the Badr Brigade, the well-armed militia wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), Ayatollah Hakim`s party.

Dozens of armed Badr fighters, many dressed all in black and wearing strips of black cloth across their foreheads, walked through the procession. The size of the Badr Brigade is unclear, though it has been put as high as 15,000.

There was a simmering, undisguised anger in the crowd. As thousands of mourners, men and women alike, marched outside the mosque at Baratha, the crowd chanted: "All the people are the Badr Brigade now. Death to the Ba`athists."

One mourner insisted the ayatollah was "killed by the hands of infidels." As many as 125 others died in the same blast after lunchtime prayers at the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf on Friday; up to 200 were injured, many seriously.

"Hakim was a great Islamic cleric. His family had suffered so much under Saddam," said Shayal Mezher, one of the thousands who gathered at the Kadhimain mosque yesterday. "All the people are in mourning."

Like many in the crowd he believed that those responsible for Friday`s attack were either Wahhabis, Sunni extremists who follow the ultra-orthodox vision of Islam espoused in Saudi Arabia, or loyalists of Saddam. "But no good man can be destroyed by an enemy of God and Saddam was an enemy of God," said Mr Mezher. "This bombing was carried out by people who hate the Iraqis and who don`t want the Iraqis to have a democratic future or to choose their own government."

Many believe the attack was also an attempt to split rival Shia groups, a tactic employed by Saddam to considerable effect. "They are trying to split the Shia, but God willing that will not happen," he said.

Although the ayatollah had spent the past 23 years in exile in Iran, where he established his influential party, Sciri, he had gathered considerable support from ordinary Iraqi Shias after less than four months back in his homeland.

"Al-Hakim wanted freedom for the people, he wanted prosperity for the people," said Syed Abu Syed Jaffar, a cleric from the southern town of Amarra. "He sacrificed his soul for the sake of Iraqis."

For now the leaders of the Shia community have urged restraint and encouraged Iraqis to cooperate with the US-led occupation force. Ayatollah Hakim`s party embodied that uneasy relationship. Sciri offices were frequently raided and the Badr Brigade a subject of considerable suspicion for its continued links to Tehran. Yet at the same time the ayatollah`s brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, took up a seat on the US-appointed governing council, the supposed forerunner of an Iraqi government.

Many in the crowd yesterday were deeply critical of the US military for failing to secure the town of Najaf. US troops had largely pulled back to the outskirts of the city several weeks ago, fearful of causing resentment at such a sensitive religious site.

"This attack was the fault of the coalition forces. It was a catastrophe for us," said Salim Hashmi, one of the mourners in the crowd. "The coalition forces should arrest all the loyalists of the former regime. The people who did this should be punished."

Shia leaders are now likely to push harder to wrest more control over Iraq`s security from the US military.

US commanders have already cut back patrols in Baghdad to save their troops from attack and to encourage the fledgling Iraqi police force to take over.

For now the military is unlikely to endorse a greater role for unlicensed party militias like the Badr Brigade. Yet the US-led authority risks even greater chaos if it finally loses the support of the hundreds of thousands of well-organised and frustrated Shia who appeared on the streets of Baghdad yesterday.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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John Sutherland
Nowhere has post-9/11 paranoia struck more deeply than in American universities. Just ask Ali

Monday September 1, 2003
The Guardian

When travellers at US airports bitch at having to take off their shoes at gate security the staff quip: "Be glad Richard Reid didn`t hide the bomb in his underpants." Since 9/11, airport security has been overhauled by the federally appointed Transport Security Administration.

There are innumerable pre-boarding delays. And do passengers feel safer as they file through the long lines at LAX or JFK? They certainly feel more nervous. America is currently in the business of exporting "freedom" globally - even to countries which seem indifferent to the idea. Yet the US itself is becoming, month by month, a palpably less free society. Much of the change is attributable to the Patriot Act, whose Mel Gibsonish acronym stands for "Provision of Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". In short: "hassle". Nowhere is the hassle more oppressive than in higher education. If airline passengers are grateful Reid didn`t hide the explosives in his boxers, university officials curse the fact that those murderous 9/11 Saudi terrorists were, many of them, in the US on student visas.

The Patriot Act impacts painfully on American universities. Campus police are obliged, under the pretext of "homeland security", to liaise with the FBI. So, to their indignation, are college librarians ("What is Ali reading?"). The Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) requires universities to provide confidential information about their Middle Eastern and Muslim students - those from countries suspected of "harbouring" al-Qaida ("Who is Ali emailing?").

In February 2003, the INS began fingerprinting 44,000 immigrants from specified Arab and Islamic countries. Students were overwhelmingly targeted. Those I spoke to felt grossly humiliated by the experience of being treated like drunk drivers. The net is widening. At the beginning of this month, American college officials were required to register all foreign students with federal authorities under the provisions of Sevis, the newly established student and exchange visitor information service. The aim is to compile a comprehensive and "dynamic" (ie, constantly updated) database, monitoring every overseas student in the US.

New York, traditionally the open door to America, has protested vociferously. "It couldn`t have been done worse," says Gail Szenes, director of New York University`s office for international students and scholars. Renewal of visas for overseas students has become a nightmare. There are deportations on grounds of incomplete documentation.

Even more nightmarish is the situation for those applying from outside. In order to get into the Sevis system, applicants must first be interviewed by US officials in the would-be student`s home country. It can take a year to get through the necessary hoops and bottlenecks. Nor, as the bureaucracy expands, is it just applicants from terrorist-harbouring states. Tony Blair may have the congressional medal of freedom: but Euan, if he wants to study in the land of the free, will have to take his place in the Sevis queue.

In an article published last Wednesday ("Foreign students need not apply") Catharine Stimpson, dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at NYU, complains bitterly that "Some of our most talented applicants have been rejected after five minutes or less of questioning, with no indication as to why." Sevis`s inefficiencies, she says, "would be laughable if a student`s education were not on the line".

From her office, Stimpson can see the ugly gap in the skyline where the twin towers used to be. But Sevis does not make her, as a citizen, feel safer: it makes her, as an educator, feel poorer. One third of all "American" Nobel prize- winners, Stimpson points out, were not born in America. Nearly 50% of graduates in subjects such as engineering have, traditionally, been "international". No more. It is sad to see a great country systematically divesting itself of some of the very qualities that made it great. They should rename it the Statue of Security.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Generally speaking
Wesley Clark eyes a White House run

Leader
Monday September 1, 2003
The Guardian

The last time that a United States general headed for the White House was half a century ago in the days when Chevrolets had fins, McCarthyism was raging, and Dwight D Eisenhower seemed the right Republican choice for a country engaged in cold and hot war. Now the presidential chances of another general, ex-Nato commander Wesley Clark, are being talked up among US Democrats in the context of another more divisive war. Supporters say that his solid military credentials would allow him to criticise the Iraq disaster without appearing unpatriotic. He maintains that he never saw Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the US or to the region and says that the refusal now to put Iraq under UN auspices is a "strategic blunder," creating chaos and drawing in terrorists.

These are sensible words for an increasingly bewildered US public, but do they make Gen Clark the right candidate for the Democrats - if he finally decides to run? The websites which have sprung up on Gen Clark`s behalf admit that he has said very little about most other issues, with the important exception of women`s rights where he has declared himself "pro-choice". Anyone worried, for example, about the environment will be much more impressed by Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who is seen by the pollsters as the candidate Gen Clark would currently have to beat.

Mr Dean is already ahead in the polls for several early primaries over his main rival candidates, Senator John Kerry and former House minority leader Dick Gephardt. He has not only struck a deep vein of dissent over the war, but has called for fewer new power plants, energy conservation and has even denounced "gas-guzzling" SUVs. He has spoken forthrightly in support of universal health care, protection of workers` rights, and affirmative action. Unless Hillary Clinton plays the wild card as some still predict, Mr Dean would seem the more attractive candidate to many core Democrats.

Yet voices of caution are already warning that he risks the fate of George McGovern who went down in splendid defeat to Richard Nixon in 1972, while Gen Clark will play a safer game. Sticking to the centre is an obvious temptation when the electoral goalposts have been moved by Mr Bush so far to the right. Yet this is a race in which many Americans, and most of the world, are entitled to hope for some courageous opposition.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Did al-Qa`ida really kill Ayatollah Hakim, or was it one of his rivals for Shia leadership?
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
01 September 2003


As hundreds of thousands of mourners brought Baghdad to a standstill yesterday with a funeral procession for Ayatollah Mohammad Bakr al-Hakim, the Shia cleric killed in Friday`s car bomb massacre, Iraqi police claimed they had captured those responsible ­ and that they were members of al-Qa`ida.

But the claims served only to deepen confusion, and to reopen the debate over who killed Ayatollah Hakim, and at least 125 other people.

The police said they had arrested 19 suspects, including two Kuwaitis, six Jordanians and unspecified numbers of Saudis and Iraqis. They were "all committed to al-Qa`ida" said a spokesman. But no sooner had the police made their claim than the Governor of Najaf said that only six suspects were under arrest, and that they were all Iraqi.

The type of bomb used was reported to be similar to those used in the attacks on the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters in Baghdad earlier this month, which could suggest the same people committed all three bombings.

Claims that al-Qa`ida was behind the bombing would correspond with American assertions that "hundreds" of foreign Islamic militants have crossed the border into Iraq, but if the police have really arrested some foreign militants that would be the first evidence anyone has come up with to back the American claims.

In Najaf over the weekend, angry crowds were looking for someone to blame, and any foreigner was at risk of being held responsible. One American reporter was trapped by a crowd who accused him and his translator of being the bombers, and they had to be rescued by police. It is possible non-Iraqis who were arrested were victims of similar suspicions. Ayatollah Hakim had so many enemies that plenty of people might have wanted to assassinate him. Despite the outpourings of grief yesterday, Ayatollah Hakim was a figure of hate for many Iraqis, even among the Shia, because he lived in voluntary exile in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died.

The armed wing of his Iraqi opposition movement, the Badr Brigades, operated from Iran, and Iraqi prisoners claimed they had been interrogated by the Badr Brigades inside Iranian prisons.

Some authoritative commentators have suggested that his enemies also included the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, who feared that his Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq could import an "Islamic revolution" north of their borders.

Ayatollah Hakim was also condemned by more radical Shia groups after he made a U-turn on his insistence that even a temporary American military government in Iraq was not to be tolerated. He then accepted the occupation and even sent his brother and deputy, Abd al-Aziz, to serve on the US-appointed Governing Council.

Ayatollah Hakim, one of the contenders for political leadership of Iraqi Shias, could have been the target of a rival.

The bomb was carefully timed. It was set off as Ayatollah Hakim left the Shrine of Imam Ali mosque after delivering the Friday sermon, a time when he was routinely surrounded by crowds of Shias. That indicated the bomb was planned to kill not only the Ayatollah, but as many other people as possible.

The most likely intention was to destabilise the American occupation, by whipping up Shia anger against the Americans for the lack of security ­ in which it clearly succeeded ­ and by fomenting suspicion among Shias that it was the work of Sunni militants, or of a rival Shia faction.

Plenty of groups have something to gain by destabilising the occupation. Many Shias blamed Saddam loyalists. Resistance groups loyal to Saddam still launch attacks on American occupation forces.

There are also, despite the Americans` refusal to acknowledge their existence, Sunni groups who are as opposed to the old regime as they are to the occupation, among them both Islamic nationalists and Wahabi islamic extremists.
1 September 2003 09:16

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Pakistani soldiers patrolling the vast semiautonomous tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan pause to pray. Despite their presence, young men from religious schools still manage to cross over to join the Taliban.
September 1, 2003
Taliban Raids Widen in Parts of Afghanistan
By DAVID ROHDE


KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The Taliban, backed by new volunteers from Pakistan, are regrouping and steadily expanding their attacks in southern and eastern Afghanistan, their former stronghold, according to Afghan officials, Western diplomats and captured fighters.

The clashes have increased since mid-August, particularly in Zabul Province and other parts of the southeast. [Two American soldiers were killed on Sunday in a 90-minute gun battle in Paktika Province, after a week of fighting that was the fiercest in months, the Pentagon said. It said dozens of Taliban had died, as had nine Afghan soldiers. To date, 35 American soldiers have been killed in action in Afghanistan.]

In the region generally, Western diplomats said, the Taliban have changed their tactics. Not only are American forces being attacked, but so are Afghan policemen, aid workers and midlevel officials. The United Nations reports that attacks on aid workers, most of them Afghans, have "intensified significantly" since May.

The intermittent assaults have made the south and the east an unpredictable mosaic of territory that is safe one day and dangerous the next. As a result, United Nations officials say the pace of reconstruction and investment is slowing and that the populace, nearly all of whom are ethnic Pashtuns, is becoming more alienated from the government in Kabul and its American backers.

Westerners active in the area warn of a slow deterioration, though not an immediate collapse.

American military officials agree that the Taliban are becoming more sophisticated in their tactics but say they are failing to regain power.

"They`re trying to reinvigorate and resurrect their movement," said Col. Pat Donohue, who is about to step down as commander of allied forces in Kandahar, "but they haven`t been very successful."

But other Westerners are urging the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the United States to immediately increase aid, security and ties to Pashtun tribes in the area. "There needs to be a political offensive in the south," said a Western diplomat, who warned that the Taliban were trying to destabilize the southeast.

The Bush administration is expected to double reconstruction aid to Afghanistan, and a new American military unit of 120 soldiers is to be established in December in Kandahar, to coordinate and provide security for aid projects. But United Nations officials and aid workers say international peacekeepers now confined to Kabul must also be deployed to the south and other regions.

As the weak central government has failed to extend its writ in isolated parts of the south, Western diplomats say, the Taliban are trying to fill the vacuum. In many districts, the only evidence of government authority is a district leader protected by a small group of poorly paid and ill-equipped police. Residents complain of lawlessness and say that while they do not support the Taliban, they miss the strict law and order they enforced.

Some of the stepped-up Taliban campaign has involved basic propaganda. "Night letters" left in villages and cities play on the lack of aid and a sense among Pashtuns that they are not adequately represented in the new national government. Residents are told that the United States is simply interested in occupying Muslim countries, not in aiding them.

Taliban gunmen are also showing a new, uncharacteristic diplomacy, according to reports received by aid groups. On rural roads, gunmen give men who shave their beards or listen to music a brief sermon and send them on their way. In the past, such offenders landed in jail.

The gunmen are "smiling and friendly," said Nick Downie, a security coordinator with the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, a nonprofit group.

But Afghans who cooperate with the government or the United States are being killed. Two police chiefs, two pro-government imams, and more than 30 policemen were killed in the south and east in July and August, Afghan officials said.

An attempt to assassinate the governor of Helmand Province was thwarted in early August.

The increased attacks on Afghans coincide with the release in late June of an audiotape said to be from Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban commander. The speaker announced the formation of a 10-member leadership council to "expedite jihad against occupation forces" under a new strategy.

Western diplomats say the Taliban seem to have begun "psychological warfare."

"They have a sophisticated strategy of going after local people," a senior Western diplomat said. "The mantra they use is that the Americans and the international community will leave someday, and we will come back."

Attacks are on the rise in Wardak and Logar Provinces, both just south of Kabul, where nine policemen were killed in August, aid officials said.

Because of the danger, the number of aid groups operating in Kandahar, the south`s largest city, has dropped by 50 percent, to a dozen, Mr. Downie said. United Nations officials say the number has remained constant.

But the attacks have led the United Nations intermittently to bar its staff from entering almost all parts of two southern provinces, Zabul and Oruzgan, and large parts of six other provinces near the border with Pakistan: Helmand, Kandahar, Paktika, Paktia, Logar and Khost.

Cities, like Kandahar, remain relatively safe. But aid workers warn that Kandahar, once the Taliban`s de facto capital and now a bustling city brimming with construction projects, could become an island of security in a sea of needy and religiously conservative villagers.

Colonel Donohue said American forces see different Taliban tactics in different areas. In the east in Paktika and Paktia Provinces, up to two dozen Taliban fighters, who sometimes include Arabs, boldly ambush American forces. Others detonate remote-controlled bombs and mines under American vehicles.

"We have seen very sophisticated operations up there," the colonel said. Militants there, for example, try to avoid American thermal night sights by wrapping themselves in blankets, military officials said.

Closer to Kandahar, the Taliban mount fewer attacks on American forces, and focus on Afghans.

Colonel Donohue, as well as Afghan officials, said the struggle in the south would be won by aid workers, not soldiers. The problem is stabilizing the area so they can create jobs and gain popular support.

"Those are the guys who are going to win it for us," he said, referring to aid workers. "That`s how we`re really going to defeat the root causes."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Shiite women beating their chests in mourning for Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim in Baghdad on Sunday.

September 1, 2003
Iraqi Shiites Flex Muscle Even as They Mourn
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR


KARBALA, Iraq, Aug. 31 — The funeral cortege for the slain Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim crawled south from Baghdad today in a tumultuous cavalcade freighted with both political and religious symbolism, with Iraq`s Shiite Muslims determined to assert their importance even as one of their most significant voices has been stilled.

The United States Central Command said, meanwhile, that it would postpone turning over control of the area around Najaf to Polish-led forces following the bombing last week at the city`s holiest shrine that killed Ayatollah Hakim.

In Baghdad, members of the Iraqi Governing Council met today to agree on a final list of members of the cabinet. Naming a government is regarded as the first big step for the Council, which was formed in July. Iraqi and American officials here said they hoped the naming of the cabinet would allow the Iraqis to begin to take over responsibilities from the Americans.

One responsibility that many Iraqis are eager to take on is security; American and Iraqi officials have begun talking about the possibility of using Iraqis to form a large militia that could patrol the cities and hunt down loyalists of Saddam Hussein.

Aides to the Council members said they hoped the final list would be ready Monday.

In the first day of a three-day funeral today, tens of thousands of mourners marched through the streets of Baghdad and lined the route south. Keening men rushed forward to hang onto the 18-wheel flatbed truck serving as a hearse or ritually beat themselves as the procession passed by.

Many pushed up small pieces of paper, tattered cloth, stones or even small boulders to be rubbed against the coffin, with one of the many clerics riding on the truck handing back the now blessed object.

"People are mourning the loss of a political leader and a religious one," said Salman Hassan, 45, a government employee who accompanied the coffin from Baghdad to Karbala, getting down to march in every town. The journey, which normally takes an hour, took more than 12.

The loudspeaker at the shrine of the Prophet Muhammad`s grandson Hussein, a gold-domed mosque here where the casket was lodged for the night, also boomed with invective against the occupying power. "Yesterday we faced the tanks of Saddam Hussein, today the tanks of the Americans," the cleric there said. "We are not afraid of the Americans, who are not innocent of the blood of the grandson of Hussein."

The cleric was apparently referring symbolically to Ayatollah Hakim as Hussein`s grandson.

No remains of the ayatollah, one of the four leading clerics in Iraq, could be identified after he died in the car bombing in Najaf after Friday prayers. The bombing killed more than 80 people and wounded scores more.

Yet the Shiite sect thrives on its cult of martyrdom and grief, with today`s procession echoing the annual passion play in which the faithful march to Karbala to evoke Hussein`s pain. He was slain 1,200 years ago while battling those who thereby wrested the line of succession away from his family, where Shiites believe it properly lies.

"They always end up like this — their destiny is martyrdom," said Said Muhammad Bakr al-Musawi, one of the clerics on the hearse, noting the ayatollah was also a "said," the title given to descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.

That was the theme in Karbala, too, where hundreds of mourners shouted "God is Great!" as the casket was lifted up off the truck garlanded with strings of pink and yellow plastic flowers.

"They cut off your head just as they cut off the head of Imam Hussein," boomed an unidentified cleric through the loudspeaker at the imam`s shrine. "The martyr has come to the lord of the martyrs."

Saddam Hussein`s government banned such processions, so Ayatollah Hakim`s funeral was the largest many people could remember here since the last one allowed by the Baath Party — that of his father, Ayatollah Mohsen al-Hakim, in 1970.

But it has proven to be a bittersweet victory because the same freedom that gained the Shiites the right to perform their rituals also robbed Iraqis of security in their daily lives. "To some extent it`s a relief," said Abdel Hadi Abdul Jaleel, a 63-year-old retired teacher in Karbala. "But if we have the rituals without security, we haven`t achieved anything."

Indeed, the funeral brimmed with anti-American sentiment and chanting, more vociferous than previously voiced in the moderate Shiite group that Ayatollah Hakim led. He counseled patience with the occupation to give it a chance to help build a democratic government that could no longer shunt aside the Shiites, as Saddam Hussein and his government, dominated by the Sunni Muslim minority, had done.

"We won`t be humiliated," chanted mourners filling the streets of Baghdad early today, echoing an old Shiite battle cry, "We will humiliate Saddam, we will humiliate Bush."

The American effort to establish democratic rule suffered another setback this weekend, at least temporarily, when a respected Shiite cleric suspended his membership on the Governing Council. Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum said Saturday that he was suspending his membership until Iraqis were given more control over the country`s security, Governing Council aides said.

The United States military said today that a soldier died and two others were injured early Saturday when the Humvee they were driving plunged into a canal near the Iraqi city of Tikrit. The accident occurred at 2:15 a.m.

As the funeral cortege wound its way south from Baghdad today, the unanswered question hanging over the ceremonies was who would fulfill the role of spiritual guide to push the political aspirations of the Shiites. Ayatollah Hakim had insisted that the American invasion provided the opportunity for the Shiites to gain a voice corresponding to their numbers — 65 percent of Iraq`s 25 million people.

Senior officials in his political party insisted that Ayatollah Hakim`s movement, The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would continue. But it lost the guiding spiritual voice that remains all important in a group that looks to its senior clerics for guidance in virtually every aspect of daily life.

"It is impossible to replace the man, but this is a question of a movement and a people," said Adel Abdel Mehdi, a spokesman for the group. "It is not a question of one person."

Ayatollah Hakim led his movement from exile in Iran for the last 23 years, and the men who were with him there, many of them members of the Badr Brigade, a militia, were heavily represented among today`s mourners.

"I spent 23 years with him because he was against oppression; he has been fighting it for years," said Abu Muayyid al-Kinani, 47, who was jammed into the back of a Toyota pickup truck with a dozen other Badr Brigade veterans under a brutal sun. "He did not want to be president, he did not want to rule. He wanted an Islamic government, yes, but to bring relief."

Ayatollah Hakim acceded to an American demand that the force be disarmed, although Mr. Kinani said that many still kept weapons stashed at home and were ready to use them if the killers were identified.

Oddly, it was the Badr Brigade that colored Ayatollah Hakim`s reputation in Iraq and somewhat tempered the emotional outpouring that might have been expected for a grand ayatollah.

"You know, he wasn`t loved," said one Karbala resident, referring to the tales that Iraqi prisoners of war brought home from the Iran-Iraq war of being interrogated by the Badr Brigade and given the choice of being tortured or joining it.

Karbala residents also still resent the fact that when they began their uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991, they felt they only received tepid support from the ayatollah. They say that he should have come over the border then to lead the uprising rather than waiting to come back in May of this year, after the American invasion.

Still, he was highly respected, and that accounted for today`s emotional outpouring. Even women in their long black chadors were taking part in the ritual beating in which participants lean forward and then fling themselves upward, beating themselves in the chest in unison. Some drivers also took part, taking their hands off the wheel for each blow.

A similar march is expected to cross several towns near Karbala on Monday — including Hilla and Kufa — before heading on Tuesday for Najaf, where the burial will take place.

Given the magnitude of the car bombing in Najaf — which the F.B.I. will reportedly help investigate — the numerous guards for today`s procession were noticeably jumpy. The extended hearse carried about equal numbers of armed men, brandishing AK-47`s and pistols, and clerics. The guards tensed and surveyed the distant palm groves every time somebody marked the passage of the cortege by firing into the air.

It was impossible to estimate the number of cars, trucks, ambulances, buses and myriad other vehicles edging south on Iraq`s main highway, but there were so many that looking back from the front of the procession, one could make out black flags fluttering from vehicles as far as the eye could see.

On Ayatollah Hakim`s coffin was a black turban, the color marking his lineage. Pieces of his turban were among the few identifiable remnants from the blast.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Thousands of Iraqis surrounded the truck carrying an empty coffin in the funeral cortege of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim in Baghdad.

September 1, 2003
U.S. Troops Delay Exit From Najaf
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 31 — The United States Marines have postponed turning over control of the area around the city of Najaf to Polish-led forces after last week`s devastating bombing at the city`s holiest Shiite shrine.

A spokesman for the United States Central Command, Col. Ray Shepherd, said the planned transfer had been delayed by at least two weeks. He said the American military authorities in Iraq were working out the details of how many members of the force would remain in Najaf.

In Najaf, Maj. Rick Hall, spokesman for the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, said the transfer of the south-central territory around Najaf to an international force led by Poland, set for this week, had been put on hold.

"We now want to stay here and assist as much as possible," Major Hall said.

Until a week ago, Najaf, about 110 miles south of Baghdad, had experienced little of the violence that has been common in Baghdad and some other parts of Iraq. The explanation lies in the memories here of Saddam Hussein`s vicious persecution of the Shiites, compared with the favoritism he showed Sunni Muslims in central Iraq — who are believed to have instigated much of the resistance against the American troops.

The 900 marines in Najaf have not entirely avoided confrontations with residents, but they have won cooperation in return for taking a nonhostile approach. They have sought to limit antagonism and instead defer, whenever possible, to the wishes of local political and religious leaders.

"That doesn`t mean we ask permission before taking action," said Lt. Col. Chris Woodbridge, a battalion commander here. "But everything we do is weighed against what we`ve learned from the locals about this city and how they believe things should be run in a stable, free Iraq."

"Wave tactics" are also important, he said. "A wave, a friendly face, a thumbs up, just to know you are making contact with people, is critical."

In the wake of Friday`s bombing, which killed more than 80 people, including Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a leading Shiite cleric, other Shiite leaders accused the American-led occupying forces of failing to provide adequate security.

But the bombing took place in the middle of a nearly one-square-mile sacred area that the marines have not been patrolling out of deference to a request by Shiite leaders.

In response to another attempted assassination here a week ago — of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim, another leading Shiite cleric — the Americans say, 400 new Iraqi police officers will be assigned to the area this week.

Few people in Najaf had been cheering the plans for the marines to depart, especially with the sudden burst of violence.

"We want them to stay because there are so many things happening now," said Hassan Hamza Ali, a Najaf police lieutenant.

North of Najaf, in Hilla, Polish forces had been planning to take over from the marines. "They showed us how each day would look like, and we follow the plan," Col. Andrzej Przekwas of the Polish Army said of the marines. He said he hoped that when they took over, the Poles could match the marines` performance, but "it won`t be easy," he said.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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August 19, 2003
Hegemony or Empire?
By NIALL FERGUSON
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030901fareviewessay82512/nia…
From the September/October 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He is the author of "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power."

Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. ... It is [not] the wish of [our] government to impose upon you alien institutions. ... [It is our wish] that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world. ... It is [our] hope that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realized and that once again the people of Baghdad shall flourish, enjoying their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and their racial ideals.

-- General F. S. Maude to the people of Mesopotamia, March 19, 1917

The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you. ... We will end a brutal regime ... so that Iraqis can live in security. We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq`s future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent, and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world. You are a good and gifted people -- the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.

-- President George W. Bush to the people of Iraq, April 4, 2003

It is fast becoming conventional wisdom that the power of the United States today closely resembles that of the United Kingdom roughly a century ago. In the conclusion of my latest book, I attempted a brief comparison between British and American imperial rule, and I am far from the only historian to think along these lines: both Walter Russell Mead and Joseph Nye have also alluded to the continuities in their recent work.

Indeed, the two empires have many superficial similarities. Take Iraq. As the epigraphs show, President Bush, when he addressed the Iraqi people on television shortly after the United States seized Baghdad earlier this year, unmistakably (although no doubt unconsciously) echoed the rhetoric used by the British commander who occupied the city in 1917. And the similarities are not limited to language. In both cases, Anglophone troops swept from the south of Iraq to Baghdad in a matter of weeks. In both cases, their governments disclaimed any desire to rule Iraq directly and hastened to install a government with at least the appearance of popular legitimacy. In both cases, imposing law and order proved harder than achieving military victory (the British had to use air power to quell a major insurrection in the summer of 1920). And in both cases, the presence of substantial oil reserves -- confirmed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1927 -- was not a wholly irrelevant factor, despite protestations to the contrary.

Nevertheless, whereas the British were generally quite open about the fact that they were running an empire, few American politicians today would use the "e" word as anything other than a term of abuse. As the military analyst Andrew Bacevich has noted, this goes for both Democrats and Republicans. Speaking in 1999, Sandy Berger, President Clinton`s national security adviser, declared that the United States is the "first global power in history that is not an imperial power." A year later, then candidate George W. Bush echoed his words, arguing, "America has never been an empire. ... We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused." Reverting to this theme aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1 this year, President Bush insisted, "Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home." A few days previously, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had picked up the refrain in an interview with al Jazeera, when he claimed, "We`re not imperialistic. We never have been."

Americans, in short, don`t "do" empire; they do "leadership" instead, or, in more academic parlance, "hegemony." That is the concept that needs to be employed, therefore, to make any systematic comparison between the British and the American experience of overseas power. Presciently, in 1997 the British economic historian Patrick O`Brien and the Luxembourg scholar Armand Clesse invited a collection of eminent scholars to undertake just such a comparison. The resulting book, belatedly published last year, has not received the attention it deserves. Among the 18 contributions are some of the most rigorous pieces of work yet published on a subject that is as important as it is topical.

EMPIRE BY ANOTHER NAME

What is this thing called hegemony? Is it a euphemism for "empire," or does it describe the role of a primus inter pares, a country that leads its allies but does not rule subject peoples? And what are the motives of a hegemon? Does it exert power beyond its borders for its own self-interested purposes? Or it is engaged altruistically in the provision of international public goods?

According to S. Ryan Johansson, one of the contributors to Two Hegemonies, the word "hegemony" was used originally to describe the relationship of Athens to the other Greek city-states that joined it in an alliance against the Persian Empire. "Hegemony" in this case "mean[t] that [Athens] organized and directed their combined efforts without securing permanent political power over the other." By contrast, according to the "world-system theory" of Immanuel Wallerstein, the book`s final contributor, "hegemony" means more than mere leadership but less than outright empire. A hegemonic power is "a state ... able to impose its set of rules on the interstate system, and thereby create temporarily a new political order." The hegemon also offers "certain extra advantages for enterprises located within it or protected by it, advantages not accorded by the `market` but obtained through political pressure."

Yet another, narrower definition is offered by Geoffrey Pigman, in his introduction to a useful and original chapter in Two Hegemonies on agricultural trade liberalization in the 1990s. Pigman describes a hegemon`s principal function as underwriting a liberal international trading system that is beneficial to the hegemon but, paradoxically, even more beneficial to its potential rivals. Pigman traces this now widely used definition of the word back to the economic historian Charles Kindleberger`s seminal work on the interwar economy, which describes a kind of "hegemonic interregnum." After 1918, Kindleberger suggested, the United Kingdom was too weakened by war to remain an effective hegemon, but the United States was still too inhibited by protectionism and isolationism to take over the role. This idea, which became known, somewhat inelegantly, as "hegemonic stability theory," was later applied to the post-1945 period by authors such as Arthur Stein, Susan Strange, Henry Nau, and Joseph Nye. In this literature, the fundamental question was how far and for how long the United States would remain committed to free trade once other economies -- benefiting from precisely the liberal economic order made possible by U.S. hegemony -- began to catch up with it. Would Americans revert to protectionist or mercantilist policies in an effort to perpetuate their hegemony, or stick with free trade at the risk of experiencing relative decline? This is what Stein called "the hegemon`s dilemma," and it appeared to him to be essentially the same problem faced by the United Kingdom before 1914. Paul Kennedy drew a similar parallel in his influential The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

THE BRITISH MYTH

Having defined "hegemony," the next question becomes which of the two states, the United Kingdom or the United States, was more hegemonic? In the book`s introduction -- a tour de force of truly magisterial scope and penetration -- O`Brien gives an unequivocal answer: the United States. To be sure, the United Kingdom had a moment of "hyperpower" in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, when, as one Prussian general noted, it was "mistress of the sea. ... Neither in this dominion nor in world trade has she now a single rival to fear." Yet the United Kingdom was never truly hegemonic in the century that followed. The "Pax Britannica" depended mainly on the Royal Navy, O`Brien explains, "and was therefore bound to be far more constrained than the `penetrative` military power which allowed governments ... in Washington to become really `hegemonic.`" For a century, with the sole exception of the Crimean War, the United Kingdom avoided military interventions, preferring to "placate the sensitivities and political antagonism of European governments."

Moreover, the international spread of free trade and free navigation -- the "public goods" most commonly attributed to the British Empire -- were as much spontaneous phenomena as they were direct consequences of the United Kingdom`s power. Indeed, when "neomercantilism" reared its baleful head in the later nineteenth century, the empire actually acted as "an impassable barrier to the formulation of a clear and effective strategy" that might have otherwise preserved the "liberal international order." Likewise, the spread of the gold standard was achieved "more by example than by any exercise of authority"; "the diffusion of gold simply evolved at its own pace." O`Brien is dismissive of the idea that the Bank of England was an "agency of Britain`s hegemony before 1914." In short, he sees British hegemony as a "myth." Also unfounded is the idea of "two interconnected and evolving hegemonies" linking the United Kingdom and the United States in a line of "hegemonic succession." Such notions, O`Brien mischievously concludes,

[have been] propagated by historians and social scientists [as] part of the cultural foundations of a prolonged and now indisputably unprofitable special relationship (of Greece to Rome, as Macmillan suggested to Kennedy) pursued by British political elites since the War.

John Hobson, another of the book`s contributors, broadly shares O`Brien`s view of the British Empire. According to Hobson, the era of free trade supposedly engineered by British hegemony came a good 45 years after the post-Napoleonic zenith of British military power and was in any case short-lived. As with the decision to join the gold standard, countries took the decision to adopt free trade for reasons of their own, not because London forced them to. In any case, by the time free trade and gold had become widespread, the United Kingdom`s military power was far from hegemonic. This was not a function of incipient economic decline induced by imperial overstretch. In reality, the British Empire was (in the words of the international political economist Susan Strange) "comparatively cheap to run," and before 1914, "the British taxpayer was actually undertaxed relative to the nationals of rival great powers." Hobson calculates that the British "military burden" between 1870 and 1913 averaged a mere 3.2 percent of net national product; by contrast, the figure for the United States between 1950 and 1974 was 9 percent -- nearly three times higher. The British problem was not one of resources, then, but of political will. As the Princeton historian Aaron Friedberg argued some 15 years ago, "with a larger, more capable and more readily expandable army, the British might have been able to indefinitely deter a German assault on France [or at least] to have played a decisive role in the early stages of the continental conflict." Alternatively, they might have opted to appease the Kaiser`s Germany, leaving France to her fate. Instead, British politicians chose the worst of both worlds, committing themselves to a war against Germany for which they were militarily unprepared and that they could only win at a crippling cost and with considerable assistance from the United States.

Hobson shrewdly points out a contradiction within the work of Paul Kennedy. Kennedy`s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers -- that the United Kingdom had been overstretched before 1914 (and, famously, that the United States might be in the same predicament today) -- conflicts with Kennedy`s other work, in which he has acknowledged the relative lightness of the United Kingdom`s imperial burden. Rather than refuting Kennedy, however, Hobson seems chiefly interested in postdating the era of overstretch. In a characteristically combative essay, Correlli Barnett restates his well-known thesis that by the 1920s "the British Empire was one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overextension in history," and that this overstretch had profound and deleterious economic consequences. The logical inference from his and Hobson`s chapters is that the United Kingdom`s overstretch was a consequence of the First World War, whereas its understretch was among the war`s causes.

According to O`Brien and Hobson, the situation is very different in the case of the United States, which, for over half a century now, has represented (in O`Brien`s words) "the sole example of geopolitical hegemony since the fall of Rome." As he explains, Hegemony appeared when a young, extremely well-endowed state, after just a century or more of relevant experience in successfully managing the colonization of a largely uninhabited continent, of assimilating diverse ethnic and religious populations into a nation with a self-confident and homogeneous identity, decided to take on the task of creating external conditions for peace and prosperity, primarily for its own capitalists, but by extension for the rest of the world itself.

The authors` argument about the uniqueness of American hegemony rests on four main pillars. The most obvious is economic: as they point out, the U.S. economy has outstripped almost all of its competitors for much of the past century. This point is developed by another of the book`s contributors, Angus Maddison, and explored in almost encyclopedic depth in the chapter by Moses Abramovitz and Paul David. According to these authors, nothing achieved by the United Kingdom -- not even in the first flush of the Industrial Revolution -- ever compared with the United States` recent economic predominance.

Second, the authors point to the way the United States has very deliberately used its power to advance multilateral, mutually balanced tariff reductions under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization). As Robert Gilpin argues in his chapter, the tariff reductions achieved in the 1967 Kennedy Round negotiations (and subsequently) owed much to "American pressures." Such pressure was classically exerted through "conditionality" -- that is, the terms under which the Washington-based International Monetary Fund granted its loans. This deliberate process contrasts markedly with the willy-nilly way free trade spread in the nineteenth century, as described by O`Brien and Hobson.

The third pillar of American dominance can be found in the way successive U.S. governments sought to take advantage of the dollar`s role as a key currency before and after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods institutions, which, according to O`Brien, enabled the United States to be "far less restrained ... than all other states by normal fiscal and foreign exchange constraints when it came to funding whatever foreign or strategic policies Washington decided to implement." As Robert Gilpin notes, quoting Charles de Gaulle, such policies led to a "hegemony of the dollar" that gave the U.S. "extravagant privileges." In David Calleo`s words, the U.S. government had access to a "gold mine of paper" and could therefore collect a subsidy from foreigners in the form of seigniorage (the profits that flow to those who mint or print a depreciating currency).

Finally, although this point gets much less attention than the others, U.S. hegemony has also resulted in some part from the way the country has led, for half a century now, a "formally constituted alliance of states" -- namely NATO -- "committed ... to the containment of two rival superpowers."

THE RELUCTANT READER

As the above suggests, the majority view that emerges from Two Hegemonies is that recent history has only known one hegemon: the United States. At a time when the world is as awed by American "hyperpower" as it is bored by British "minipower," the conclusion is no doubt seductive. But is it correct?

The authors` answer is not entirely convincing, thanks in part to several links missing from this volume -- omissions that are perhaps inevitable for an effort cobbled together by 18 scholars from diverse disciplines. One assumption that goes largely unchallenged is that there is some direct correlation between productivity growth rates and hegemony. The authors seem to ignore the evidence that the United States has not suffered any material diminution of its hegemonic position since 1950, despite the fact that most European and East Asian economies have achieved much higher rates of productivity growth since then. As Angus Maddison said during the conference that inspired this book, "to become a successful hegemon, it helps to be both very rich and very big." But the United Kingdom was neither when it embarked on its imperial enterprise in the early seventeenth century, whereas India, which became a British dependency, was both. The United States is rich and big today, but so are Japan and Germany, which nevertheless remain geopolitical pygmies. The deterministic economic assumptions that underlie so much "hegemony theory" deserve to be challenged; unfortunately, this book does not do it.

In rather the same way, its authors tend to exaggerate the importance of systems of fixed exchange rates. Was the Bretton Woods structure, for example, really so important to the United States? De Gaulle thought so, of course, but he was hardly a neutral economic analyst. From quite an early stage, the system came to depend on legislative restrictions on American capital exports (John F. Kennedy`s Exchange Equalization Act), and by the early 1970s, maintaining gold convertibility looked to many like an anachronistic constraint on U.S. growth. In any case, American power can scarcely be said to have waned significantly since the advent of fiat money (that is, currency not backed by gold or silver) and floating exchange rates. The dollar remains the world`s main reserve currency today. And the United States is, in many ways, just as economically and militarily powerful as it was before 1971 (when President Richard Nixon closed the gold window), if not more so.

O`Brien`s rejection of the idea of hegemonic succession also seems at odds with well-documented reality: the fact that many British policymakers (and some of their American counterparts) fully expected the United States to take on at least some of the "weary Titan`s" global burdens as British power waned. In his chapter in Two Hegemonies, the British historian Anthony Howe quotes a letter from the British free trader Sir Louis Mallet to his fellow liberal, the American David Ames Wells, in which Mallet argued that the American adoption of free trade would: determine the course of human progress during the next century. ... Any such event... would have an enormous retentissement [repercussion] in Europe. Freed from its present fetters, your trade and industry would assume proportions which would make them the dominant factor in the commerce of the world.

That was in 1885. By 1941, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was just one of many influential figures in Washington to acknowledge that "the trade policies of the British Empire during the latter portion of the nineteenth century ... contributed enormously to the sane and prosperous condition of the world." And by 1945, key figures around President Franklin Roosevelt had been converted to the idea that the United States had to perform an analogous role in the postwar era.

Two Hegemonies also seems to overlook the small matter of will. Calleo rightly notes "a strong diffidence toward exercising world leadership ... as a continuing element in American political culture." This was never a handicap for the British. To be sure, there were always domestic critics of the way the empire was run, from Edmund Burke to George Orwell. But the ideology of imperialism -- the sense of a British mission to rule -- was remarkable for its longevity. It can be discerned even in the Elizabethan period, before an empire had been acquired, and it did not really expire until the humiliation of the Suez Crisis.

Many Americans, on the other hand, have always been reticent about their nation`s global role. This reluctance limits the potency that O`Brien, Hobson, and others attribute to the United States and helps explain its distinctly mixed record as a hegemon. How else to account for the many ignominious retreats, from Havana to Saigon to Beirut? Between 1846 and 1914 -- the period when the British claim to hegemony seems most plausible -- the United Kingdom too suffered a few reverses, of course. But not one went unavenged.

Perhaps the book`s real problem is that the very concept of "hegemony" is really just a way to avoid talking about empire, "empire" being a word to which most Americans remain averse. But "empire" has never exclusively meant direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants. Students of imperial history have a far more sophisticated conceptual framework than that. During the imperial age, for example, British colonial administrators such as Frederick Lugard clearly understood the distinction between "direct" and "indirect" rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. A further distinction was introduced by the British historians Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in their seminal 1953 article on "the imperialism of free trade," in which the authors showed how the Victorians used naval and financial power to open markets well outside their colonial ambit. There is an important and now widely accepted distinction between "formal" and "informal" empire. The British did not formally govern Argentina, for example, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted such a powerful influence on that country`s fiscal and monetary policy that its independence was heavily qualified.

A more sophisticated definition of "empire" would have allowed the book`s authors to dispense with the word "hegemony" altogether. Instead, they could have argued that the United States is an empire -- albeit one that has, until now, generally preferred indirect and informal rule. (Whether its recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq presage a transition to more direct and formal imperial structures remains to be seen.)

The reason the choice of terms matters is that to compare, as the authors do, the United States and the United Kingdom as hegemonies is to miss differences that become obvious when the two are compared as empires. It is certainly true that in economic terms, the United States accounts for a much higher share of global output than the United Kingdom ever did, and it is also true that in military terms, the United States enjoys a greater lead over its rivals (one even bigger than that enjoyed by the United Kingdom immediately after 1815). But in other respects, the two countries` positions are reversed. A century ago, the United Kingdom`s formal empire was very large indeed, covering nearly a quarter of the world`s surface and ruling roughly the same proportion of its population. Today, on the other hand, the United States` formal empire includes just 14 dependencies (of which the largest is Puerto Rico) and covers less than 11,0000 square kilometers. A century ago, the United Kingdom could draw wealth and personnel from the 15 million of its subjects who had settled in the temperate zones of the empire. Today, by contrast, fewer than four million Americans reside abroad, and nearly all of them live in Canada, Mexico, or Western Europe. A century ago, the United Kingdom was a net exporter of capital, on such a scale that it truly deserved to be called "the world`s banker." Today, the United States is a net importer of capital on almost as large a scale. A century ago, British leaders could devote the lion`s share of their attention and taxpayers` money to imperial defense and grand strategy, since before 1910, government provided only minimal care for the sick and elderly, and most of that was local. Today, Washington spends its money on social security, defense, welfare, and Medicare -- in that order.

As an exercise in comparative history, then, Two Hegemonies is a curiously skewed work. It spends much more time on trade and monetary policy than it does on the civil and military structures that allow power to be directly exerted. If Joseph Nye is right to think of international politics as a game of three-dimensional chess, then most of the players assembled by this book seem trapped on a two-dimensional board. "Hegemonic stability theory" has offered helpful insights into the way that economic power works. But its neglect of the military and cultural aspects of power leads it to overestimate the current American empire and to underestimate the power of its British predecessor.



Copyright 2003

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September 1, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Home Alone
By BOB HERBERT


There was an interesting lead paragraph in an article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal last Thursday:

"The blackout of 2003 offers a simple but powerful lesson: Markets are a great way to organize economic activity, but they need adult supervision."

Gee. They`ve finally figured that out. The nuns I had in grammar school were onto this adult supervision notion decades ago. It seems to be just dawning on the power brokers of the 21st century. Maybe soon the voters will catch on. You need adults in charge.

We barreled into Iraq with no real thought given to the consequences, and now we`ve got a tragic mess on our hands. California looks like something out of "Lord of the Flies," and yet the person getting the most attention as a candidate to clean up that insane situation is an actor with a history of immature behavior whose cartoonish roles appeal most strongly to children. Maybe he`ll shoot the budget deficit. Hasta la vista, baby.

Appalling behavior and appalling policies have become the norm among folks entrusted with the heaviest responsibilities in business and government. The federal budget deficit will approach half a trillion dollars next year. And that will be followed by huge additional deficits, year after irresponsible year, extending far off into the horizon. And, of course, the baby boomers, the least responsible generation in memory, will soon begin retiring and collecting their Social Security and federal health benefits, leaving the mountains of unpaid bills for the hapless generations behind them.

What this nation needs is a timeout.

Imagine if we had done some things differently. If, for example, instead of squandering such staggering amounts of federal money on tax cuts and an ill-advised war, we had invested wisely in some of the nation`s pressing needs. What if we had begun to refurbish our antiquated electrical grid, or developed creative new ways to replenish the stock of affordable housing, or really tackled the job of rebuilding and rejuvenating the public schools?

What if we had called in the best minds from coast to coast to begin a crash program, in good faith and with solid federal backing, to substantially reduce our dependence on foreign oil by changing our laws and habits, and developing safer, cleaner, less-expensive alternatives? This is exactly the kind of effort that the United States, with its can-do spirit and vast commercial, technological and intellectual resources, would be great at.

Imagine if we had begun a program to rebuild our aging infrastructure — the highways, bridges, tunnels and dams, the water and sewage facilities, the airports and transit systems. Imagine on this Labor Day 2003 the number of good jobs that could be generated with that kind of long-term effort.

All of these issues, if approached properly, are job creators, including the effort to reduce our energy dependence. The big hangup in the economic recovery we are supposed to be experiencing now is the continued joblessness and underemployment.

A fellow I ran into recently in San Jose, Calif., Andy Fortuna, said: "I`ve got a college degree and I`m washing cars. I`m working, but I`d like a good job. If the idea is for business to employ as few people as possible and keep their pay as low as possible — well, how`s that good for me? Who speaks for me?"

Wise investments along these lines have dual payoffs — they help us take care of critical national needs and they help sustain the high levels of employment that are needed to keep the nation`s high-powered consumer economy humming.

One other critical need that is not getting enough attention is homeland security. A series of recent reports has shown that two years after the Sept. 11 attacks we remain dangerously unprepared for another terrorist strike inside the U.S. And one of the major reasons we remain unprepared is that so many of the agencies responsible for our domestic defenses against terror are undertrained, understaffed and underfinanced.

We are at a stage now where mature, responsible leadership is more essential than ever. All of the problems that we have ignored until now remain with us. But the money that might have started us on the road to solutions is gone. We are mired in Iraq, and not properly prepared at home.

We could use some adult supervision.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Tens of thousands gather in Baghdad to mourn Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, who was among scores killed Friday when a mosque in Najaf was bombed.
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Cleric Mourned By Huge Crowds
With Emotional March Through Capital, Iraq`s Majority Shiites Display Strength

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 1, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Aug. 31 -- Waves of mourners, grieving and vengeful, swept through Baghdad`s streets today to usher the coffin of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim on a three-day funeral pilgrimage to the sacred Shiite city of Najaf where he was assassinated, a march by tens of thousands that was a powerful expression of sorrow and a demonstration of collective strength.

In scenes repeated in towns along the funeral route, Shiite Muslims beat their chests in a ritual show of anguish, setting a somber cadence to the march. Women wearing black abayas slapped their heads, sprinkled with mud to signify their sorrow. Immersed in religious imagery -- a Shiite narrative of martyrdom and suffering -- mourners called for unity among their ranks and retribution against their enemies. "Revenge, revenge, revenge against the enemies of faith and Islam," read a black banner hung over a street as the coffin passed.

The march, drawing numbers not seen in Baghdad in a generation, seemed to mark a defining moment of the country`s majority Shiites in the still uncertain period after the ouster of president Saddam Hussein. For three decades of his rule -- and through centuries of oppression -- they have laid claim to a panoply of slain saints, leaders and respected clergy. But in today`s Iraq, the Shiite community appears emboldened and, in the eyes of many at the funeral, power is no longer out of their reach.

In paying homage to a slain cleric who was a key interlocutor with the U.S. occupying authority here, some Shiites called for a more assertive leadership within their community at a time of rising sectarian resentments. Anger has grown against the U.S. forces that have occupied Iraq for nearly five months, along with doubts that they can bring order to Iraq and meet expectations for a better life.

"The occupation authority, which occupied the country by force, is ultimately responsible for achieving security and stability," Abdel Aziz Hakim, the ayatollah`s brother and successor, told thousands gathered in the Kadhimiya shrine in Baghdad at the start of the funeral. "They are responsible for all the blood that is shed in every part of Iraq."

The slain Hakim, 64, was a preeminent figure in U.S. efforts to fashion a postwar government. After 23 years of exile in Iran, he returned to Iraq in May as head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The group, which is the best organized among Shiite parties, was enlisted in the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, and his blessing of its participation bestowed a stamp of religious legitimacy and political credibility on a body still struggling to win the confidence of many Iraqis.

Hakim and scores of others were killed in a car bomb detonated after he delivered a sermon at Friday prayers in Iraq`s most holy site, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. U.S. officials have put the death toll at 125. Hospital officials said 95 were killed in the blast, which collapsed buildings, sheared off storefronts and damaged the shrine`s brick walls and turquoise-tiled portico.

Cloaked in green and black and covered in plastic red and white flowers, Hakim`s coffin was largely symbolic. His body was never found, and his followers gave various accounts of how he was identified: by a single stone from his string of prayer beads, his amber ring, a pen or his watch.

Lt. Col. Chris Woodbridge, the commander of Marines in Najaf, said today that police had arrested five or six people since the attack. Haidar Mayyali, the governor of Najaf, told reporters that no more than five were detained, and he believed all were Iraqis.

The funeral procession began today in Baghdad, the country`s seat of political power, and will end Tuesday, 90 miles to the south in Najaf, which lies at the center of Shiite spirituality. Throughout the day, a caravan of dozens of cars led by the yellow truck carrying Hakim`s coffin journeyed through Shiite towns before stopping at night in Karbala, another city sacred to Shiites.

The largest crowds gathered in the capital, where Hakim`s coffin was brought to the Kadhimiya shrine, a sprawling complex of four gold-leafed minarets, its entrance gilded with five pointed arches in shades of blue, green and black.

A sea of humanity swept across the shrine and its courtyard, crowds so large that mourners could only guess at the numbers -- 50,000 or perhaps 70,000 and, in the exaggerated words of a grieving guard, 2 million. Only a portion could enter. As men carried Hakim`s coffin to the waiting truck balanced on two poles, it tilted toward the ground, and crowds surged forward to steady it.

"It`s a black day for all Shiites," cried Alaa Hussein, 40, a white cloth over his head.

In the miles-long march that followed, men, some of them shirtless, chanted so fervently that they collapsed and were carried away by ambulances. The sirens clashed with the cacophony of grief. Shiite chants blaring from scratchy speakers washed over Koranic recitations from mosques. Drummers led the procession, their cadence mirrored by the rhythm of fists beating chests.

The truck carrying Hakim`s coffin crawled through neighborhoods, escorted by knots of mourners. Along the sides of streets, men lined up in rows two and three deep to watch the procession. Some sobbed openly. The eyes of others were red. Many stared ahead, with a blank look of grief.

Police cars were stationed along the route, but most of the security was provided by Hakim`s followers in plain clothes, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and pistols. U.S. troops stayed far from the funeral. A few helicopters hovered overhead, drawing curious stares. Two U.S. tanks passed the start of the march, one with the word "cremator" scrawled on its barrel.

The coffin was treated with a reverence that suggested Hakim was elevated in death to an exalted status that sometimes eluded him in life.

"When a clergyman dies, there`s no way to replace him," said Mohammed Jassim, 33, as red, green and black flags of Shiite mourning billowed in a strong wind over the procession. His friend, Zuheir Abed, 28, shook his head. "He didn`t die. We consider him a martyr. He`s living with God."

Martyrdom has an elevated status among Shiite Muslims, whose division from Sunni Muslims dates to a dispute over succession to the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Shiites believe his rightful heir was Ali, his son-in-law, who then passed political and spiritual authority on to his direct descendants. The pivotal moment in Shiite spirituality was the death of Ali`s son Hussein, who, outnumbered and dying of thirst, was killed with his followers on a battlefield in Karbala in 680.

In the procession, mourners time and again drew parallels to Hussein`s death. Men wore black headbands inscribed with the vow, "Hakim, we will sacrifice for you." Red flags read, "Hussein, the martyr of Karbala." Draped on the front of the truck carrying Hakim`s coffin was a white banner with a slogan in blue. "Death is our custom and our dignity," it said.

Hakim was not without his enemies among Shiites. He was locked in a bitter rivalry with a younger cleric, Moqtada Sadr, who enjoys fervent support among poor and dispossessed Shiites that overshadows Hakim`s following. Some were suspicious of Hakim`s ties to Iran or dismissive of his credentials as a political leader, given his decades in exile while his countrymen suffered under Saddam Hussein. But on this day, he was all things to all people -- a descendant of the prophet known as a sayyid, a grand ayatollah, a holy fighter. To the mourners in Baghdad`s streets, he was another Shiite martyr at the end of a long line.

"God`s mercy on Sayyid Hakim," a black banner read over one street, a representation of blood dripping from the delicate letters of Arabic script. "He was the pride of Muslims in his life, he is a call to unity of ranks in his death."

"This crime will unite us," said Qahtan Hamid, 58, as he thumbed amber worry beads and men sprayed water over a sweltering crowd. "Every time we present more martyrs, we will gain more strength."

Those responsible for Hakim`s death remain a mystery, although many at the funeral blamed the bombing on loyalists of Saddam Hussein, who hailed from a small Sunni Muslim village near Tikrit called Owja. Only someone with such enmity for Shiites could carry out a crime that desecrated Ali`s shrine, some mourners insisted. The prospect of the fallen government`s responsibility seemed to both enrage and invigorate the crowd. No longer were they under his thumb, no longer were they powerless to act.

"The slipper of the sayyid is equal to Owja," some chanted.

Others hinted that responsibility lay with Wahhabis, a fundamentalist Sunni sect dominant in Saudi Arabia with a history of antagonism toward Shiites. To many Shiites, Wahhabis have become synonymous with Sunnis, who, despite being a minority, had ruled Iraq since the country`s independence in 1932. Calls for justice were as frequent as pleas for unity.

In the unease, some called for a more assertive clergy, a leadership that would defend their community.

"The clergy are too quiet," said Mohammed Hassan, 34, an engineer, while watching the procession weave through his village, which is south of Baghdad. "We are in this miserable situation because the clergy say we should forget, forgive and be patient."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Workers arrive at the Guangdong Galanz Enterprise Group factory, the world`s largest maker of microwave ovens.
Es gibt noch andere Länder als den Irak.

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China Is Resisting Pressure to Relax Rate for Currency


By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 1, 2003; Page A01


SHUNDE, China -- Inside a sprawling factory here, 18,000 laborers each work for about $6 a day against the ceaseless clatter of machinery, cranking out more than 15 million microwave ovens a year, about 40 percent of those sold worldwide. Two-thirds of them are destined for the United States, Europe and Japan in a flow of exports that has roughly doubled over the last three years, fueled in part by China`s cheap currency. In the process, the factory`s owner, Guangdong Galanz Enterprise Group Co., became the largest maker of microwave ovens on earth.

No single reason explains how factories such as this one in the booming southern province of Guangdong have turned China into the world`s workshop, churning out a growing variety of goods. In a mostly poor country of 1.3 billion people, labor is cheap and in virtually bottomless supply. State subsidies, a flood of foreign capital and rapidly developing technology have enabled China`s manufacturers to expand dramatically. But as leaders in the United States, Europe and Japan confront the implications of China securing an increasing share of global trade, they are complaining about one factor in particular: the low value of its currency, the yuan, also known as the renminbi.

China`s government has pegged its currency at a fixed exchange rate of about 8.3 to the dollar for nearly a decade. The relatively low price of the currency -- some economists say the yuan`s value against the dollar would jump by 10 to 40 percent if it were allowed to float freely -- makes China`s exports cheaper on world markets, helping companies such as Galanz undercut its competitors abroad. For example, an imported Chinese microwave oven that costs a U.S. consumer $100 under the fixed currency system might cost $110 to $140 under a floating currency system, if the economists` estimates are right and the seller maintained the profit margin.

Bush administration officials and members of Congress have clamored in recent weeks for China to lift the value of the yuan. In the ongoing political recriminations over the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs, China has emerged as a prime target for criticism, a role not unlike that occupied by Japan in the mid-1980s. U.S. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow plans to visit Beijing this week to press his case for a lower yuan.

So far, China has dismissed such pressure from Washington and elsewhere. Analysts assume that Snow is unlikely to get much besides vague talk from his Chinese counterparts that one day, not soon, they might float the currency, and might first expand slightly the band within which the yuan trades against the dollar.

The Chinese government is trying to create tens of millions of jobs to compensate for those lost in the transition from Communism to a market economy, as state-owned factories close and farm incomes fall. The export boom, centered in the coastal provinces of Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang, is one of the key forces of job creation -- one China is loath to dampen by raising the value of its currency, which would make its goods more expensive abroad.

"Job protection is so important," said Joan Zheng, chief economist for greater China at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong, and a former official with China`s central bank. "They are greatly reluctant to let the currency fluctuate."

Beijing asserts that a cheap yuan also benefits world trade by fueling Chinese growth, enabling the country to buy more of its neighbors` products.

"To keep the stable yuan will not only benefit the stability and development of the economic and financial order in China, but also the economic and financial order of surrounding countries, and fundamentally the international economic and financial order," Premier Wen Jiabao said in a recent speech to foreign bankers. "As we deepen financial reform, we will further explore and perfect the renminbi exchange rate-formation mechanism."

Many analysts view Snow`s visit to Beijing and the administration`s larger pressure campaign as political theater aimed at shoring up the support of old-fashioned manufacturers and labor interests in Rust Belt states. But while some U.S. industries, such as textiles and furniture, have been hammered by cheap Chinese imports, others benefit from the low yuan. U.S.-based multinational companies such as Dell Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. use cheap labor here to make products that are shipped for sale in other markets; if the yuan rose in value against the dollar, it would raise these companies` labor costs because they would need more dollars to pay the same salaries here. And with a fixed currency, companies that make and sell goods within China, potentially the world`s largest consumer market, are girded against any change to the lucrative status quo.

"If you change the peg and revalue the renminbi it`s going to disrupt the supply chain, the way that we are set up here," said Mark Steele, president of China operations for ITT Industries Ltd., a multinational company that makes keypads for phones built here by Motorola for sale in China, which has more mobile-telephone subscribers than any other country. "I don`t think, economically, you can stop the shift of manufacturing jobs to China. If you change the value of the renminbi, all it`s going to do is make us less competitive."

Bush administration officials have tacitly acknowledged their low expectations for change and the varying desires for it among U.S. business interests. Speaking recently about discussions with China about the prospect of a free-floating yuan, Grant Aldonas, the Commerce Department`s undersecretary for international trade, said the administration had applied "consistent pressure to move them in that direction." But while Treasury officials said they were discussing internally a timetable for Chinese progress, officials would not disclose even an estimated time frame for its realization.

Another factor limiting the force of the U.S. campaign is the fact that the Bush administration is counting on Beijing`s cooperation to force North Korea not to develop nuclear weapons, making it reluctant to get into a trade fight.

The conflict over the value of the yuan is on the surface of a deeper debate about the nature of China`s growing stature in global trade and claims that its prosperity is coming at the expense of other nations. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers and lobbyists representing those hardest-hit by China`s ascent have warned about China`s intention to manipulate the rules of international trade to the detriment of U.S. workers. In Japan and Taiwan, politicians worry about the "hollowing out" of manufacturing, as more factories shift to China to take advantage of cheaper labor.

But many economists take issue with the notion that China`s economic growth is a malevolent force. Consumers around the world are enjoying ever lower prices for a widening range of goods produced here. More and more of China`s new wealth is being spent on imported goods, fueling growth in other economies, particularly in Southeast Asia and Japan.

"Everyone is focusing on what China is exporting, but in fact China is creating lots of jobs," said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

Many analysts say China is being cast as a scapegoat for manufacturing weakness in countries that would be suffering the pains of such restructuring regardless.

"The U.S. simply cannot have manufacturing," said Larry Lang, chairman of the department of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "It`s not the American comparative advantage. There`s no point in focusing on China. Even if these cheap products weren`t coming in from China, they would be coming in from the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia. This debate is all politics, not economics."

In another sign of the Bush administration`s divided interests on the issue, John B. Taylor, the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, recently undercut the notion that China is the primary cause of pain for suffering manufacturers. "The share of jobs in manufacturing has been going down for 50 years, so that particular development cannot be attributed to any one country or any one event," Taylor said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

The perception of China as an economic threat is largely the result of its exports, the value of which increased 22 percent last year, compared with the previous year, and 34 percent in the first half of 2003 -- to $190 billion -- compared with the same period of the previous year. Two-thirds of the telephones sold in the United States are made in China, as are nearly three-fourths of the toys, according to Chinese government statistics. The Chinese company Qingdao Haier claims half of the American market for small refrigerators, according to the official Jiefang Daily newspaper. About 70 percent of artificial Christmas trees in the United States are made in factories in Guangdong, according to a Chinese financial Web site, Homeway.com, and 80 percent of the world market for cigarette lighters is controlled by small-scale factories in the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province.

But China`s imports are growing faster than its exports, reaching $186 billion over the first half of this year, a climb of 45 percent compared with the same period in 2002.

This is the key difference between China and the Japan of the 1980s. Japan was an extremely closed and protected market that was largely hostile to foreign investment. It enjoyed an enormous trade surplus not only with the United States but also with the rest of the world. China, on the other hand, took in more than $50 billion in foreign investment last year alone, making it the world`s largest recipient. More than half of China`s exports are being produced by foreign-invested companies, much of it from Taiwan and Hong Kong, according to J.P. Morgan.

While China does have a trade surplus with the United States of more than $100 billion, it ran a small overall trade deficit in the past quarter.

China`s Asian neighbors are supplying much of the raw material for the goods it is producing, both for export and domestic consumption. China`s ongoing boom in real estate construction and automobile manufacturing has turned it into the largest buyer of steel in the world, $143 billion worth last year. Caterpillar has seen strong sales in construction machinery as skyscrapers proliferate in Chinese cities and roads and rails spread across the country.

Last year, China imported $30.4 billion in semiconductors, according to Chinese customs statistics, or more than 20 percent of all the chips sold in the world.

Boeing Co. and Airbus Industrie are selling jets to China`s airline industry.

Galanz typifies the complexities that go into tallying the costs and benefits of global trade. The company makes microwave ovens for more than 80 different brands around the world, including General Electric Co. and Sanyo Corp. Last year, the firm took in export revenue of $300 million. This year, it plans to spend $250 million on imported parts and materials for its products, said the company`s deputy general manager, Yu Yaochang.

Still, economists generally agree that China`s currency is undervalued. The strongest piece of evidence is China`s buildup of foreign-exchange reserves, the result of its central bank buying other currencies to maintain Chinese money at the favored price. Since October 2002, China`s foreign exchange-reserves have increased about $10 billion a month, said Sun Bae Kim, an analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Hong Kong.

China`s resistance to changing its currency system partly reflects worries that a significant increase in the value of the yuan could prompt households and corporations that now hold $150 billion in foreign exchange to pull them out of Chinese banks, convert them into yuan and invest them domestically, adding fuel to a real estate market that many economists say is already overheated.

But the strongest argument for holding the line was voiced indirectly on a recent afternoon outside the deafening assembly line at Galanz by a former farmer named Sang Zeyang. He left his village in inland Anhui province to look for a way to sustain his wife and two children. He found it here, making ovens for families in lands he can only imagine.

"In Anhui, I had no work," he said. "We lived on several thousand renminbi a year [about $400.] Here, I make more than 1,000 renminbi in a single month."

Special correspondents Wang Ting in Shanghai and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo contributed to this report.



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The Lost Factory Job




Monday, September 1, 2003; Page A24


MANUFACTURING IS the problem child of the U.S. economy. Of the 3.1 million jobs lost since President Bush took office, 2.5 million have been in manufacturing. July was the 36th consecutive month that manufacturing jobs have fallen, the longest stretch since the Depression. But while the past several years have been particularly bad, with manufacturing jobs down 16 percent in three years, the trend lines have been bleak for years. In the mid-1960s, manufacturing accounted for 30 percent of all jobs; now it`s down to 11 percent. That`s in part because production has moved overseas, where it can be done more cheaply, in part because of improved technology that`s made it easier to create more goods with fewer workers. Indeed, while manufacturing jobs have fallen over the past few decades, manufacturing output has grown.

Is this cause for concern? Some economists don`t think so. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan was uncharacteristically plain-spoken in recent congressional testimony in which he essentially wrote off manufacturing as the job creator of the past. "Ideas," not physical goods, "are becoming increasingly the predominant means by which we create wealth," Mr. Greenspan said. "I think that`s good, not bad, for the economy as a whole. But if you`re a maker of stuff, it isn`t." Not surprisingly, the makers of stuff and their employees didn`t take terribly well to this brush-off. They argue that sustaining a vibrant manufacturing base is essential to maintain U.S. productivity and even national security -- particularly if, as has begun to happen, high-paying, high-skill manufacturing jobs begin to move overseas. National Association of Manufacturers President Jerry Jasinowski dismisses what he calls "the silly notion that we can all be shopkeepers."

As a political matter, it doesn`t much matter who has the better of this argument, because politicians in both parties are competing to be the loudest in bemoaning the loss of manufacturing jobs and proposing solutions. Manufacturing is emerging as an issue in the presidential race, because many of the states that have been hardest hit by the decline in manufacturing are also electoral battlegrounds. Earlier this summer, Bush dispatched three Cabinet secretaries -- Treasury, Labor and Commerce -- on a bus tour to Wisconsin and Minnesota, where they found themselves besieged by anxious workers. The Commerce Department is working frantically to produce a report later this month about how to respond.

In the Democratic field, candidates are scrambling to come up with plans to staunch the job losses, including tax breaks specifically targeted at manufacturers. This fall the House will take up a corporate tax bill that has become a forum for debating how, and how much, to help U.S. manufacturers. But whether additional tax breaks are warranted -- on top of accelerated depreciation for business equipment, on top of research and development tax credits, on top of immediate deductions of investment costs for small business -- is something that Congress ought to consider carefully before it acts.

To the extent the decline in manufacturing jobs is a natural evolution toward cleaner, less back-breaking and more brain-powered work, it is for the most part to be welcomed. But if part of the accelerated decline of the past few years reflects distortions in domestic, foreign or trade policy -- a manipulated Chinese exchange rate, say, or trade barriers that violate international agreements -- specific policy solutions or administrative actions may be needed. There also should be answers for the very real pain of people who have lost manufacturing jobs and may not have much opportunity to move into the brave new economic world that Mr. Greenspan hails. Those distinctions will be hard to draw, of course -- especially in an election season in which states with a disproportionate share of manufacturing jobs are among those not clearly red or blue.



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Why Iraq Needs More U.S. Troops


By Robert Kagan

Monday, September 1, 2003; Page A25


It was just a coincidence that a car bomb killed at least 95 people and a leading Shiite cleric in Najaf on the same morning that the New York Times headline read: "General in Iraq Says More G.I.`s Not Needed." But a few more such unfortunate juxtapositions will sooner or later force the Bush administration to do what it is now desperately trying to avoid doing: Send more American troops to Iraq.

One thing is certain: There are not sufficient forces in Iraq today to create the secure environment within which essential political and economic development can proceed. The Bush administration knows this better than anyone. That`s why it has suddenly launched an all-out drive to get a new U.N. resolution, and is contemplating negotiations and compromises with the French that would have been unimaginable even a month ago. Whence comes this unprecedented bout of multilateralist spirit? It derives exclusively from the need to get more foreign forces on the ground in Iraq so that American forces now holding static positions can get to the vital task of hunting proliferating numbers of Iraqi and non-Iraqi terrorists and saboteurs. Or, to put it another way: To make up for the fact that we don`t have enough troops.

The same desperation to get more boots on the ground is behind the administration`s new, hurried effort to get more Iraqis involved in security operations. Loyal fans of Ahmed Chalabi may exult that Bush officials have finally seen the light. But the Iraqization program comes not from newfound confidence in Chalabi`s or any other Iraqi`s ability to govern but purely and simply from the need to make up for the shortfall in troops to guard pipelines and government offices and to patrol borders.

In theory, both prongs of the administration`s strategy are sound. It would be good to get more international forces into Iraq. And getting the Iraqis themselves to take charge of their own country is the goal of the whole enterprise. But what are the odds these two efforts can bear fruit in time to keep the security situation in Iraq from deteriorating to the point of crisis?

The administration`s U.N. gambit will take more than a month and could well fail. The French government has, to say the least, no great interest in helping the United States out of the mess. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has been writing poems in anticipation of the day when the Americans would come begging for help, and the price he and President Jacques Chirac want to exact in exchange will be exorbitant. Probably the French demands will be set deliberately so high as to preclude agreement. France`s strategy within Europe is not to save America`s bacon but to convince the European public that every leader who followed the United States into Iraq -- and especially Tony Blair -- should be thrown out on his ear.

The little secret, moreover, is that neither France nor any other of our leading NATO allies has more than a handful of troops to spare for Iraq. France and Germany are tapped out in missions in Africa, Afghanistan and the Balkans. The British and Spanish are tapped out in Iraq. Polish public opinion is already turning against the deployment in Iraq, and the mounting security problems in Iraq understandably discourage other countries from wanting to participate. The administration`s search for a U.N. resolution isn`t even aimed at getting European forces but at bringing in the larger forces available from Turkey, India and Pakistan. Never mind whether Turkish and Indian troops in Iraq are really the answer to all our problems in Iraq -- or would instead become part of the problem themselves. The fact is, we may never get them. The Turkish public remains hostile to any deployment. The Indian government is reluctant to take part without a U.N. resolution. And the French have little interest in passing a U.N. resolution solely to help the Americans get Turkish and Indian troops to relieve the American burden in Iraq.

The administration`s hopes for getting a capable Iraqi force in place in a timely manner may be misplaced, too. Today there are about 37,000 Iraqi police officers spread around the country. The Bush administration plans to put 28,000 more on the streets -- but only over the next 18 months. Even assuming all goes according to plan, this gradual increase in Iraqi capabilities is not going to make a big difference before next spring.

The problem is, the next few months may be critical to the fate of Iraq and to the American mission there. Insecurity and instability in Iraq will make it difficult if not impossible to bring real improvements in the average Iraqi`s standard of living. And as the administration well knows, Iraqis want and need to see progress right now, or more and more of them may turn to opposition, in both its passive and active, violent forms.

There are good reasons why the administration is not sending more troops to Iraq, of course. But they are not the reasons outlined by U.S. commanders. Those generals are saying we have enough troops in Iraq chiefly because they know full well they dare not ask for more. The price of putting another division or more of American troops into Iraq will be high. It means mobilizing more reserves and using more National Guard forces. It either means pushing the Army to the breaking point or making the very expensive but necessary decision to increase the overall size of the American military, and fast. Right now administration officials don`t want to think the unthinkable. Unfortunately, they may be forced to in a month or two. And, unfortunately, by then it may be too late.

The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, writes a monthly column for The Post.



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Connect the Dots on Crime


By William Raspberry

Monday, September 1, 2003; Page A25


The combination of miscommunication, ignored warnings and general hubris -- all in a culture that discouraged internal criticism -- virtually guaranteed disaster.

No, this is not a follow-up on NASA and the Columbia space shuttle tragedy. It is a commentary on criminal justice in America.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, after months of painstaking investigation of the Feb. 1 space calamity, has issued a scathing report of those in charge. A similarly independent body ought to take a look at our criminal justice system.

It would find, as the NASA investigators found, not so much a lack of information but rather an almost willful failure to connect the dots.

For example, the Department of Justice recently issued its annual report on crime, which contained this wonderful news: Violent crimes and crimes against property declined last year to the lowest levels since the department started compiling such records in 1973.

That`s from the August report of the department`s Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Criminal Victimization 2002." This is from BJS`s July report entitled "Prisoners in 2002": America`s prison and jail population increased by 3.7 percent from 2001 to 2002 -- three times the rate of increase recorded a year earlier.

An independent board of inquiry might wonder at the logic of increasing levels of incarceration at a time of significant decreases in crime.

Perhaps someone would raise the possibility that the increased incarceration rates produced the decreases in crime. Well, that someone ought to talk to Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute. It was Schiraldi who called my attention to the inconsistency between the crime statistics and the policy.

The Justice Policy Institute looked at the FBI Uniform Crime Report`s homicide data and found this interesting tidbit: The regions of the country with the slower growth in prison population from 2001 to 2002 (the Northeast and the Midwest) had declines in homicides, while those regions with the greater increases in incarceration (the West and the South) had increases in homicides. Schiraldi`s point is not that incarceration causes violence; it is that there is no credible link between crime rates and incarceration rates.

Okay, you say. That`s incompetence, but disaster?

Try this: According to another BJS report released last month -- "Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Populations, 1974-2001" -- one out of every 37 adults living in the United States at the end of 2001 had been to prison at some time during his or her life. That`s about 2.7 percent. But for adult black males, the been-incarcerated rate was 16.6 percent (compared with 7.7 percent for Hispanic males and 2.6 percent for white males).

And it gets worse. By the Justice Department`s projections, 32 percent of black males born in 2001 will spend some time in prison, unless something is done to change the trend.

And what might change it? Well, education might. As Schiraldi notes, there is a very strong correlation between educational failure and incarceration -- especially among African American males. But according to a report the Justice Policy Institute released on Thursday, by the time they reach their thirties, nearly twice as many black men will have been to prison as will have earned bachelor`s degrees. Slightly more than half of black male dropouts will spend time in jail in their lifetime.

So why are we cutting funds for education -- both K-12 and higher ed?

It is, says Schiraldi, our failure to connect the dots. "Schools are facing the largest budget shortfalls since World War II," he says. "And the decreases in state spending for schools are occurring at a time when drops in crime would allow the states to sensibly reexamine their prison policies.

"Look, I`m not saying people in jail are all innocent. I grew up in a blue-collar family in Brooklyn. Members of my family got in trouble from time to time -- but none ever went to prison. If a third of my [white] nephews were looking at prison, we wouldn`t have this policy. The president would declare a state of emergency, bring the best minds together to talk about education and treatment. Mandatory sentencing wouldn`t even be on the table."

In other words, like the Columbia investigators, we`d connect the dots.

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Für alle, die nicht genug kriegen können, heute 50 frische Toons mit dem Warnhinweis für alle Nannsen-Schill`s:
IQ Warning: Each issue contains ALL of the day`s cartoons on a single printer-friendly page. If you have a slow mind i.e. regularly watch Fox News it may take several minutes to get the jokes. Please be patient - its worth the wait.

The Cartoon Graveyard

Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030831__050toons.htm

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Corporate America - Too lean, too mean


An editorial
August 31, 2003

No one who watches Wall Street has failed to notice the way in which the stocks of companies that cut employment always seem to spike right after layoff announcements are made.

In a country that used to make things, the pressure is on corporate executives to move production - and jobs - out of the United States and over to countries where wages are low, and protections for the environment and human rights are weak.

But even the most cynical Wall Street watchers had to be surprised this week when two groups with a long history of ably monitoring U.S. corporate policies and practices distributed a shocking new study of the connection between job cuts and executive compensation.

According to the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy organization and the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, median CEO pay rose 44 percent from 2001 to 2002 at the 50 companies that reported the most layoffs in 2001, while overall CEO pay rose just 6 percent. The CEOs who laid off the most American workers collected median compensation of $5.1 million in 2002, compared with $3.7 million at the 365 large corporations surveyed by Business Week.

CEOs also appear to be collecting greater compensation when they put employee pension plans at risk. According to the study, at the 30 companies with the greatest shortfalls in employee pension funds, CEOs collected 59 percent more compensation than the median CEO.

A good example of CEOs making money by making employees miserable can be found at Procter & Gamble, where chief executive Alan Lafley oversaw deep cuts in production of P&G products in the United States, which were accompanied by the loss of almost 10,000 jobs. His reward? A pay increase of almost 400 percent.

Lafley`s case is not an anomaly. As United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies have illustrated in shocking detail, the link between layoffs and executive pay hikes is a constant. Yet, while the job-slashing CEOs are rewarded as if they are corporate champions, the CEOs who preserve jobs and receive more modest pay increases are frequently more efficient and more profitable.

Unluckily, too many CEOs go for the big bucks for themselves - even if cutting U.S. jobs ultimately harms their firms and their communities.

No wonder, then, that the gap between the pay of U.S. workers and the CEOs of their companies has leapt from 42-1 in 1982 to 282-1 in 2002.

If this keeps up, the U.S. will be a land of a few very rich CEOs and a lot of unemployed workers. That may sound fine to the CEOs who go for the big bucks. But the CEO buccaneers might want to consider this caution: When there are no more American workers to lay off in the name of corporate "efficiency," it will no longer be possible for swashbuckling corporatists to foster the fantasies they now use to justify excessive pay hikes.

http://www.madison.com/captimes/opinion/editorial/55780.php

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Published on Sunday, August 31, 2003 by the Baltimore Sun
Change Needed by U.S. in Iraq
Resistance to American Occupation is Growing, Thriving on the Country`s Instability

by Scott Ritter

DELMAR, N.Y. - Nestled in the center of the Balidiyat district of Baghdad, Iraq, the Canal Hotel was a distinctive landmark for those who traveled on the major highway that swung through the eastern Baghdad suburbs.

A former tourist facility, the hotel was converted into a bustling home for numerous U.N. offices in the early 1990s, when that organization increased its operations in Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

One of these U.N. operations was that of the weapons inspectors, with whom I served from 1991 to 1998. The Canal Hotel was our field operations headquarters; to many inspectors (including me), it was our home away from home while in Iraq.

Security was always a concern. Unarmed U.N. guards, recruited from the population, controlled the single entrance, making sure those who entered had permission. Armed Iraqi soldiers patrolled the periphery.

The hotel was adjoined by a complex that housed the Military Hospital for the Treatment of Spinal Injuries, and an aviation medicine unit of the Iraqi Air Force.

In January 1998, my team and I inspected the facilities, concerned that their proximity to our offices in the hotel posed a security risk. On Aug. 19, someone else apparently reached a similar conclusion, driving a construction vehicle filled with explosives into the parking lot of the Spinal Treatment Hospital, detonating it with devastating effect on the Canal Hotel and those inside.

The attack underscores the reality that resistance to the American-led occupation of Iraq is not diminishing, but growing. The resistance is nebulous, scattered and poorly defined, and yet seems to thrive on the instability that exists in Iraq.

For the enemies of the United States in Iraq, the key to creation of a sustainable popular-based resistance to the occupation rests in maintaining this instability. The key to getting the U.S. military out of Iraq rests in killing and wounding as many American soldiers as possible.

The attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad demonstrates sophistication, not only in terms of ability to conduct a large terror operation, but also in regard to ability to pick the right target. Those who launched this attack appear not only to understand these two points, but also demonstrated through their actions the ability to combine what appears to be two disparate objectives into a single, horrible action.

In the aftermath, there is talk of increasing the U.S. military presence in Iraq to more robustly confront the growing resistance. This might be exactly what those who carried out the attack want.

The greatest recruiting tool for the Iraqi resistance effort is the presence of the American military. Holed up in Saddam Hussein`s palaces, the U.S. military has, according to news reports, simply replaced one form of tyranny with another in the minds of many Iraqis.

Combined with an almost stunning inability to restore even the most basic of public services, the U.S. military has squandered its honeymoon phase, during which the goodwill of the Iraqi people would have tolerated almost anything as long as life got better.

But life hasn`t gotten better. For many, it`s gotten worse, creating a festering resentment from which those orchestrating anti-American activities can draw willing recruits to their cause. The aggressive tactics of the American occupiers in Iraq have backfired.

The American military presence in Iraq has, for the most part, become a "Fort Apache"-type environment, with soldiers barricading themselves in heavily fortified garrisons, emerging in heavily armed convoys to conduct their operations, only to return to the safety of their bases at mission`s end.

The cordon and sweep operations that roust hundreds of men in the middle of the night, subjecting them to humiliation in front of their loved ones, has produced far more anti-American sentiment than captured anti-American fighters.

Confident-sounding American commanders speak of "owning the night," and having "freedom of operations," but they are only renting those times and spaces. Iraq belongs to those who occupy the turf on a continual basis, and that is not the U.S. military. The harsh calculus of the anti-American resistance is simple: Kill Americans.

For a few months, U.S. authorities in Baghdad have been trying to reduce the American military role in Iraq, pushing humanitarian and basic civil and economic administrative duties onto the shoulders of the United Nations and civilian contractors.

The attack on the hotel was not an attack against the United Nations as an organization. Rather, it was designed, along with recent attacks against foreign civilian targets, to paralyze the nonmilitary organizations. The longer civil operations are stopped, the more anti-American discontent will grow because America, as occupying authority, is responsible for these, and all, operations in Iraq.

To prevent this, the U.S. military will be forced to increase its presence by providing security for these nonmilitary operations, or by assuming responsibility for their work.

Either scenario results in the exposure of U.S. military personnel to attacks on terms more favorable to the Iraqi resistance. As casualties mount, American tactics will become more brutal in suppressing the resistance, increasing the level of anti-American hostility and creating a vicious cycle of violence from which the United States cannot hope to emerge victorious.

The struggle in Iraq centers on who can win the hearts and minds of the people. Instability has created an environment conducive for the resurrection of Hussein`s Baath Party.

The American military confronts a small, growing, insurgency with unknown depth of popular support. If events do not change, it will soon face widespread resistance with support in the general population. Something must change.

The Bush administration must swallow its pride and acknowledge that an American-only solution in Iraq will not work. Political control of the occupation of Iraq must be transferred to the United Nations as soon as possible, and rapidly thereafter to the people of Iraq.

Isolation of the Baath Party must end. The net result of allowing the former Baathists a role in the formation of a new Iraq would be to undermine those who would resist the occupation by giving them a vested interest in cooperating.

Likewise, the U.S. administrators of Iraq should reverse their decision regarding the dissolution of the Iraqi Army, resurrecting the Ministry of Defense under the control of an interim Iraqi governing authority and reorganizing the military into a security force inside Iraq that has the trust and confidence of the majority of the Iraqi people. This would provide much-needed Iraqi muscle to the governing authority, whether U.N. or Iraqi, while removing a base of recruits from those who would resist change in Iraq.

Such policies do not represent a stepping away from democracy in Iraq, but rather a recognition that the path toward democracy might be different than the one now chosen.

Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and is author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America" (Context Books).

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-afghana…
THE WORLD

Afghan Aid Faces Hurdles
Reconstruction effort is plagued by management failures, confused priorities and sheer need, although large projects are planned.
By Paul Watson
Times Staff Writer

September 1, 2003

KABUL, Afghanistan — From this capital, Afghanistan looks like it`s recovering fast from a generation of war.

Incoming flights are full of aid workers and entrepreneurs armed with laptops, eager to pitch reconstruction projects. So many people are talking on cell phones that the system is chronically overloaded. Where once there were only dingy kebab houses, restaurateurs are now serving Italian, Thai, Chinese and Indian dishes to the new dealmakers and administrators.

But the bustle in Kabul masks mounting troubles elsewhere in Afghanistan. So far, the reconstruction effort is showing only scattered progress.

In part, it has been hampered by mismanaged projects, confused priorities and plain theft, aid officials and experts say. And in part, it is slowed by sheer need in a country that is struggling to emerge from a generation of war.

Overall, roughly half of the $4.5 billion in promised foreign aid grants has been spent, but the money has bought little more than a mirage of success, they say.

While plans for new hotels, clinics and even a new city are winning approval and initial funding — attracting entrepreneurs and others — many schools are closing for lack of money and farmers are struggling as war-damaged irrigation systems remain in disrepair. Many Afghans lack basic services such as clean water and sewer systems.

Such problems threaten to destabilize the interim government of President Hamid Karzai and undermine goodwill toward the United States following its overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime in 2001. And as Iraq draws attention and money away, time to get things right is running out, experts warn.

"Our biggest fear is that this opportunity will be lost because pressures for the appearance of success, particularly internationally, will lead to money being spent in the wrong way, on the wrong kinds of investments," said Paul O`Brien, advocacy coordinator for the U.S.-based aid agency CARE International. "What we need is long-term, sustainable benefit for Afghan people so that we help to create an environment where they can rebuild their country."

The U.S. has paid $60 million to build schools, provide textbooks and train teachers. However, Afghanistan`s cash-poor government is responsible for paying the teachers — and it doesn`t have the money. Teachers are quitting and schools closing because warlords who helped the U.S. military during the 2001 war — and received money and weapons in return — are resisting Karzai`s order to hand over an estimated $800 million in annual tax revenue.

"We have to worry about our priorities if we can`t find enough money to pay teachers $100 a month," said Paul Barker, CARE`s director in Afghanistan.

In March, Washington agreed to give $35 million in financing and political risk insurance to Hyatt International to construct a five-star hotel where the legions of entrepreneurs and aid officials can stay when they visit Kabul.

Yet the city`s estimated 3 million people live without such basics as a sewer system, and there is no plan to build one.

The Afghan government has borrowed $3.4 million from the Asian Development Bank to prepare the ground for a $400-million city of at least 750,000 people, to be built on disputed government land in semi-desert territory northeast of Kabul. Yet it doesn`t know if any donors or investors will pay to complete the city or if there will be enough clean water and jobs for residents. When crews tried to drill test wells recently, militia members who claim the land is theirs opened fire. About 1,600 foreign and local aid agencies are working in Afghanistan, more than three times the number under the Taliban. But the government finds it difficult to weed out the bad from the good.

It shut down the Peace Humanitarian Agency in July and arrested its Afghan head on suspicion that the organization, which claimed to be based in the Netherlands, was ripping off aid money, said Abdul Qayom, who heads the office overseeing nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. It`s difficult to know how many may be stealing, he said.

"There are some `Mafia` NGOs that have heard on the news there is so much opportunity in Afghanistan because of all the donations, so they have just showed up," Qayom said. "Our policy in the government of Afghanistan is that whoever comes can have registration.

"It`s not easy for us to prove the identity of any NGO until it is implementing a project," he added. "There are only 18 people in this department, including maids and office boys."

Reconstruction Minister Amin Farhang is investing a lot of faith in the promise of private capital. He is enthusiastic about a $2-billion farming and forestry project proposed by Permanente Corp., a new company headed by a Los Angeles entrepreneur, Marc Seidner.

Seidner and his mainly Afghan American partners say that over the next decade they can transform vast dust-blown wastelands into rich forests, chicken and turkey farms and fruit and nut orchards that could generate about $6 billion a year.

A commission of Afghan government ministers approved Seidner`s project in principle on July 30, without calling for competitive bids. His company now has to do a feasibility study, but Farhang said he is confident the plan will be implemented.

Seidner has never managed an agricultural mega-project or been to Afghanistan, where the best intentions must withstand a brutal climate, rampant corruption, warlords and a Taliban insurgency.

His small accounting-software firm, FlexWare International, and FibreForm Wood Products Inc., a company he once ran in partnership with his father, ran up unpaid bills and taxes in the U.S. totaling more than $57,000. Several tax liens are registered against the two companies, filed from 1998 to 2003 and totaling $12,000.

Two U.S. companies got court orders in 2001 for FibreForm to pay more than $45,000 in unpaid bills. Seidner blamed the difficulties on partners in joint ventures.

"We had to lean on some of our former partners to deal with their own bills when they parted company, so we`ve been settling up all of that," Seidner said in a telephone interview.

Seidner declined to disclose details of how he and his new partners will implement or finance the project until a contract is signed with the Afghan government.

In March, the Bush administration doubled to $100 million the total line of credit that the Overseas Private Investment Corp. offers to private U.S. investors in Afghanistan. More than a third of that has been committed to the Hyatt hotel project in Kabul. OPIC, a federal agency with a mandate to promote U.S. foreign policy goals, can support projects with direct loans, loan guarantees and risk insurance, which makes it easier to attract private creditors.

President Bush has repeatedly promised that Afghanistan will not be forgotten, as it largely was before the Sept. 11 attacks. But Afghanistan`s government and international aid agencies continue to complain that the effort is long on delays and short on money.

Foreign governments have promised aid grants totaling just under $4.5 billion over five years — less than a third of what the Afghan government says it needs to reconstruct the country. And the amount of promised aid drops sharply over the next three years, from $910 million in 2004 to only $391 million in 2006.

According to an Afghan government report released in April, 45% of the aid has been spent on immediate humanitarian needs, while only 29% went to projects such as rebuilding roads, schools and hospitals.

A senior State Department official said the United States has allocated $1.8 billion for aid to Afghanistan in the past two years. About half of that money has been spent.

As complaints about the slow recovery mount, Washington is considering awarding up to $1 billion more over the next 10 months.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters July 28 that any new aid would be used to speed up reconstruction efforts. "These projects that we undertake with new money, with this other money, will be designed to actually do real things on the ground," Boucher said.

Meanwhile, millions of farmers are struggling to survive because traditional systems destroyed by war and neglect are only slowly being repaired.

Taj Mohammed Khan, 88, is a wakil, or local leader, elected to represent villages outside Kapisa, north of Kabul. Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, his people have seen little improvement in their lives, he said.

Aid workers delivered more than 100 pounds of wheat seeds last year to replenish the stocks villagers ate to survive a drought. They must repay the loan in kind after harvest.

A local school has reopened, but there are no desks and not enough teachers or classroom space, so children sit on the floor and attend class in half-day shifts. Another aid project is building a health clinic while, Khan complained, the main source of illness remains: There isn`t enough clean water.

That problem could be fixed by digging wells and repairing irrigation canals and dams that, for generations, have channeled water from the Panjshir River about 12 miles away. The collapsing system can`t deliver enough water, so while crops wither, farmers must wait for their turn to open the small, iron gates that divert the flow into their fields. Militia commanders and their friends get water when they want, Khan said.

"Nobody can stop them," Khan said. "We are not powerful enough to deal with them. If you try, they will beat you with the butt of a rifle and tell you to go away." Given the choice between the clinic under construction and a reliable water supply, Khan would pick the latter.

"If there is no hospital here, we will just go to Kabul for treatment," he said. "But we can`t go to Kabul for water. And if we die from thirst, what will we do with the hospital?"

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-comm…
THE WORLD


White House Likens Iraq to Postwar Germany to Retain Support
A `generational commitment` is sought by invoking a noble but expensive cause.
By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

September 1, 2003

WASHINGTON — With violence escalating and the death toll mounting, the Bush administration insists it will stay the course in Iraq. But only in the last few weeks has it said how long that might take: a generation or more.

"We and our allies must make a generational commitment to helping the people of the Middle East transform their region," national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said last month.

Administration officials describe Iraq as the linchpin in their ambitious plans to transform the entire Mideast from autocracy and conflict to democracy and peace. But while they express no doubts about the course they have chosen, they are increasingly concerned about keeping the country on board. As a result, top officials have adopted a new communications strategy: comparing the occupation and rebuilding of Iraq to the occupation and rebuilding of West Germany after World War II.

In choosing to compare Iraq to Germany, the administration appears to be sending several messages.

First, that the Iraq war was a noble cause, as noble as fighting the Nazis. Second, that the rebuilding will be lengthy, costly and complicated. And third, that despite the difficulties, the United States can be successful in Iraq, just as it was ultimately successful in Germany.

For all its expressions of confidence, the administration is clearly concerned about maintaining public support for an occupation that has suffered serious setbacks, among them the morale-sapping death toll from guerrilla attacks on U.S. soldiers, the bombing of United Nations headquarters and, on Friday, the assassination of Iraq`s most prominent pro-American Shiite leader.

Acknowledging the importance of public opinion, a senior Pentagon official told The Times last week that three conditions are needed for success in Iraq: "Patience, a commitment by the American people to sacrifice and the will to win."

To maintain widespread public support, the official said, the administration also needs to keep trumpeting another theme — that if we don`t fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, we will wind up fighting it at home.

Polls show that Americans still overwhelmingly support the Iraq operation — nearly two-thirds of respondents told a Gallup Poll last week that they believe the war was worthwhile. But the polls also show signs of growing anxiety.

For instance, the Gallup Poll found 54% of respondents thought the administration didn`t have a clear plan for Iraq; just 44% believed it did. Respondents were divided in assessing the postwar effort in Iraq: 49% said they believed it was going moderately or very badly, and 50% said it was going moderately or very well. That was before Friday`s bombing in Najaf, which killed 100 people, including Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, an influential Shiite cleric.

With Congress reconvening this week and the race for the Democratic presidential nomination heating up, criticism of the administration`s Iraq policies is expected to intensify.

"It`s a very uncertain situation as far as the public is concerned, so [White House officials] are trying to clarify their long-term goals," said Karlyn Bowman, a political analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

In a recent interview, Rice compared the United States` commitment to rebuilding Iraq to the Marshall Plan, which helped turn not only West Germany but other parts of a devastated, war-ridden Europe into one of the world`s most stable and prosperous regions.

But such a comparison is likely to make a deficit watcher break out in a cold sweat. In today`s dollars, the Marshall Plan would cost about $88 billion. But as a proportion of GDP, it was even more pricey — between 2.5% and 5% of the U.S. national economy each year. One scholar has estimated that such a commitment would amount to $200 billion a year today.

Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution, a frequent administration critic, sees a "huge disconnect between the stakes that are implied by the analogy and the commitment this administration is making to bring the transformation about."

If the administration were serious about transforming the Middle East, it would have planned better for the war`s aftermath and would be asking Americans for more substantial sacrifices, Daalder said. "Now, we`re cutting taxes, asking nothing of the American people," he said.

Historians see other problems with the analogy. Gerhard Weinberg, an eminent German historian who is retired from the University of North Carolina, said the devastation of Germany after the war went far beyond the current situation in Iraq — cities flattened by carpet bombing, more than 25% of homes destroyed, most able-bodied men dead, injured or captured, millions of refugees, roads and bridges blasted by retreating Nazis.

"You have a very much simpler problem in many ways in Iraq, but handled with nothing like the care, planning and resources of postwar Germany," Weinberg said.

Lee Edwards of the conservative Heritage Foundation points out that while the Marshall Plan is now widely considered a success, it was hotly debated at the time of its inception. Congress took a full year to deliberate before passing it, and that was during a period of congressional bipartisanship on foreign policy.

"Any big, full-fledged Marshall Plan-style plan is probably not possible today," Edwards said. "But something smaller-scale, with international cooperation and semi-administration with the U.N. would encourage and convince the American people that this was a good idea."

The Iraq issue is expected to come front and center after the administration approaches Congress with a new funding request for the rebuilding effort, perhaps as soon as this month. Many on Capitol Hill expect the number to be large — in the tens of billions of dollars. But some say that will be a good thing.

"There is a hope here that they do it in one fell swoop," said a well-placed congressional aide. "It will send clear signals that we`re in for the long run, and it will create a more stable dynamic inside Iraq."

And if the German analogy holds, that could create a more stable dynamic at home.

"The polls have always said people believe the peace would be much more difficult than the war," Bowman said. "What [the administration] is trying to say is, `We`ve been here before. We`ve succeeded at this before. We can do it again.` "

*

Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-outl…
RONALD BROWNSTEIN / WASHINGTON OUTLOOK



Dean`s Antiwar Stance Creates a Force to Be Reckoned With
Ronald Brownstein

September 1, 2003

Austin, Texas

Joseph Seringer, a mortgage company manager here, is calm, rational and well-spoken. But he`s also furious at President Bush for instigating a war in Iraq that Seringer believes was based on lies and deceit. He`s just as mad at Democrats in Washington who signed up for the ride.

Maybe it goes without saying that in the Democratic presidential race, Seringer would walk over broken glass for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

"Dean is the only one who had the guts to stand up and oppose the war in Iraq," Seringer said as he stood in the crush of a Dean fund-raiser at a stylish coffeehouse here last week. "The others were sissies; they just fell in line behind the Bush propaganda. And that war was a lie from the beginning."

If Dean wins the Democratic nomination next year, the explanation may be as simple as this: He opposed a president most Democrats detest when that president launched a war most Democrats loathe.

Lots of ingredients have contributed to Dean`s rise this year: his blunt, plain-spoken style, his outsider status, his campaign`s mastery of the Internet and his charge that Washington Democrats haven`t been tough enough on Bush.

But it was Dean`s opposition to the war in Iraq that crystallized all of these factors, and it still provides the most dynamic source of energy for his campaign.

Some Democrats are drawn to Dean`s support for universal health care or gay civil unions, and his promise to balance the federal budget always wins dutiful applause. But none of these topics has emerged as real differences between him and his Democratic rivals. To Dean`s following, the moment he stood out from the pack is when he stood up against the war. Opposition to the war in Iraq seems every bit as important to Dean`s campaign as opposition to the Vietnam War was to George McGovern`s successful bid for the Democratic nomination in 1972.

Consider Mary DaSilva, a nurse from Austin who paid $125 to see Dean at the fund-raiser. The first time she heard of him was when someone gave her a Dean flier at a rally against the Iraq war in March. She put the flier in a drawer but found it again in April while the war was raging and virtually all figures in public life were supporting the effort.

"I was thinking, `Where are the Democrats?` " she said. "I just felt so betrayed by them. So when Howard Dean stood up and said it was wrong, it just drew me to him like a magnet."

Not all Democrats are so fervent. But most share DaSilva`s basic verdict on the war. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released last week, nearly three-fifths of Democrats said the United States never should have gone to war with Iraq. Only about 40% of Democrats said they considered the Iraq war part of the struggle against terrorism, as Bush has portrayed it. And nearly 70% said the war`s aftermath was going badly.

What`s more, it appears the Democratic activists critical of the war are much more energized than the war`s supporters. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the controversies over Bush`s use of prewar intelligence, and the postwar casualties and violence are reinforcing a sense among the war`s opponents that they were right all along. "Those of us who said the war was a bad idea now have a chance to say it was a bad idea," said James Hargrove, a retired programmer who was at Dean`s Austin fund-raiser.

The resurgence of that antiwar sentiment is unsettling the ground for everyone else in the 2004 race.

Most immediately affected are the leading Democrats who supported U.S. action — Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, John Edwards of North Carolina and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. All are facing scorn from an antiwar left that sees their enlistment not only as a policy mistake but a character flaw. Except for Lieberman, who many believe was operating on ideological conviction, the verdict at Dean`s Austin fund-raiser was that the Democratic contenders who voted for the war knew it was misguided but supported Bush because they believed it would inoculate them in a general election.

"I think the war right now is a total negative for anyone who was for it," says a senior strategist for one of the Democrats who backed Bush. "And the only thing that changes that is conditions improving on the ground in Iraq. If things continue to deteriorate, we are swimming upstream."

The force of that current has encouraged all the Democrats to more harshly criticize Bush`s handling of the prewar intelligence and postwar reconstruction. In that way, Dean`s rise guarantees Bush will face a more aggressive critique of the way he has managed the war and, especially, its aftermath, no matter who wins the Democratic race. After the grass-roots outpouring for Dean, no Democratic nominee can afford to submerge the issue as the party did in the 2002 midterm elections; Bush will have to work to defend his decisions.

But the war may create the greatest challenge for Dean himself. It has provided the foundation of his campaign; it might also impose the ceiling. While most Democrats now consider the war a mistake, 60% of independents in last week`s Gallup Poll said it was the right decision. Those are voters Dean will need if he makes it to a general election. And while opposition to the war benefits Dean among Democrats overall, recent polls suggest it could still be a problem for him in more conservative states that vote early in the primary season, such as South Carolina.

For Dean, the critical question is whether he can maintain the passionate enthusiasm of his antiwar foot soldiers while convincing more moderate voters, even in the primary, that he can be trusted with the nation`s security. Tellingly, Dean reminds voters in his stump speech that he supported the first Gulf War and the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Yet conviction and political necessity virtually ensure that Dean will continue to stress his opposition to the war in Iraq. The biggest applause in his speech still comes when he reminds audiences he was the only leading Democratic contender who opposed the war, and aides say that if nominated, he is committed to arguing that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time.

Republicans believe that`s an argument Dean ultimately can`t win. Many Democratic strategists privately agree. But a party rank and file eager to hear that case made against Bush is propelling Dean to the front of the Democratic field — and the war in Iraq back to the center of campaign 2004.

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ronald Brownstein`s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times` Web site at http://www.latimes.com/brownstein .

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres313435634aug…

Voice She Is Longing To Hear
Jimmy Breslin





August 31, 2003

The World Trade Center transcripts were sealed for over a year by the United States attorney in Virginia. He said he needed them to prove in a trial that the trade center had been blown up.

The Port Authority then held the transcripts for about 10 months. They did not release them because they did not release them.

Last weekend, Stella Olender flew here from Chicago and finally read the last words of her daughter, Christine. The daughter died on her job, which she did wonderfully well, as assistant manager at Windows on the World, on the 106th floor of the north tower.

Stella sat in a downtown office of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and whatever they were doing with the details of her daughter`s life was a criminal trespass. "I only read those with my daughter. I could have read about the others, but I don`t do that." She read what her daughter said on the phone, and this is what her daughter said:

"We`re having a smoke condition," Christine`s words said. "We have most people on the 106th floor, the 107th is way too smoky. We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees as soon as possible."

The cop on the other end of the phone asked if all the stairways were blocked.

"The stairways are full of smoke -

" - we, we have the fresh air going down fast! I`m not exaggerating!"

The cop said the Fire Department is on the way.

"What are we going to do for air?" Christine asked. "Can we break a window?"

"Do whatever you have to do," the cop said.

"All right," Christine said, and that was all she said.

Stella Olender thought she could keep the transcript.

"They said we can`t have any copy," she said she remembered one of the Port Authority or Lower Manhattan shills and frauds saying.

She asked why. "Because we`re not letting people have them," she was told.

"Am I going to hear the tape? I want to hear my daughter`s voice."

Stella has listened to that voice running through her mind on every day since her daughter died. She still wanted to hear the tape. She was told she couldn`t listen.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because there is no tape," she was told. She was told something about law courts holding it up.

"I`ll cry," she said, "but I still want to hear her. I better hear them now. Don`t release them after I`m dead so I can`t hear them."

She went back to Chicago, where she and her husband have a specialty clothing shop for men and women. On Friday morning, she received a Federal Express with a printed transcript of her daughter`s phone calls to a cop.

There are still no tapes of her daughter`s voice. Among the lawyers and the corporation flunkies and these vile Port Authority jobholders, she can`t hear her daughter`s voice.

There is no reason why these transcripts and tapes were withheld for one hour after the attack two years ago. That the voice tapes are still not released is a criminal act.

Nobody knows the pain these people are causing a decent woman.

There are some family members who didn`t want anything released. "It`ll come up no matter what," Stella was saying. "Some young people won`t know in 15 years, they`ll be oblivious. We need all this out."

Already, we`ve found that the trade center attack has produced monstrous lies by the government, lies day in and day out, about the air people were breathing at the trade center.

Now people from many agencies get together and lie to a woman whose daughter died.

There was no subterfuge in the event. That morning, Christine called her mother at 7 Chicago time. "She told me she was at work," Stella Olender was saying on Friday. "She always called us, two or three times a day. If she was going out at night, she`d call to tell us don`t worry if we tried to call her and she wasn`t home. This time, she was letting us know she was at work."

Then on a small television in her store, Stella watched the black hand of death rule the trade center.

She and her son, Conrad, drove to New York and took rooms in a Fort Lee motel. Then Stella became the mother of a World Trade Center victim. She made sure her daughter`s picture was up on walls. She gave DNA samples. One morning, while Christine was still listed as missing, Stella took credit cards out of her daughter`s apartment at 90th and Riverside Drive, and her husband said, "Leave some money for Christine. She might need it when she gets back."

Now on Friday, Stella was in Chicago with the transcripts and waiting for tapes. Her weekend was to consist of working on Saturday, Mass and a cemetery visit on Sunday, and nothing on Monday. "We used to have a Labor Day cookout, but I don`t feel much for it. This makes three bad dates a year for us. Christine was born on the Fourth of July, then there`s September and Labor Day."

Of the transcripts, she says, "Whoever reads it and don`t know her, knows her now."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

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Abbott and Costello and class warfare

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Andrew Bard Schmookler
Originally published September 1, 2003

http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.class31sep01…

IT LOOKS as though a long-running Abbott and Costello routine in American politics may finally be coming to an end. I hope so.
You know the routine - it`s about "class warfare." The Republicans push through laws that enrich the rich. The Democrats protest the injustice of such policies. The Republicans then accuse the Democrats of waging "class warfare" - which forces the Democrats into impotent silence, until the next round.

Watching over the years how effectively this rhetorical strategy has worked to shield our "them that has, gets" politics has filled me with the same feeling of frustrated rage that I felt as a boy when I saw a brilliant Abbott and Costello routine in one of their films.

In it, as I recall, the two men are stranded on a desert island with no food - until Costello finds a bag of beans. Abbott argues successfully that, as the two of them are buddies - share and share alike - the beans should be divided between them.

Abbott then eats all his beans, while Costello slowly makes ready to enjoy his small trove of food. But before he can take his first bite, Abbott protests: How can it be that he has nothing to eat while Costello has all those beans? Aren`t they buddies? Shouldn`t the beans be divided?

Costello senses something`s wrong, but the appeal to this ideal of buddies sharing silences his misgivings. So the beans are divided again, and again Abbott eats his share while Costello again prepares to eat his, and again is interrupted by Abbott`s outraged protestations. Aren`t we buddies, share and share alike?

And so it goes until they`re down to the last bean - Abbott having eaten all the others, and then challenging Costello for half the remaining bean. If I remember correctly, Costello ends up throwing his last remaining bean fragment away - still having eaten nothing - furious but bewildered.

I could hardly bear to watch this scene.

That same rage at palpable injustice has filled me at those times over the years when I`ve watched the success of the Republicans at waging class warfare - shifting the tax burden down the social ladder, dismantling social protections, removing obstacles that were erected to protect the public interest from the free play of mighty economic powers - and then clobbering anyone who protests with the charge that they are waging class warfare.

The equivalent in American politics to Abbott`s ploy - "We`re buddies, aren`t we, in this together?"- is the notion that America is free of the politics of class, that we`re perhaps even a classless society. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity where a fair game is played on a level playing field. Class warfare has been seen as part of the corruption of the Old World, while the land of the free has no use for the pinko politics or the resentments of the oppressed.

That`s what gives the accusation that someone is waging class warfare such power in America: the deep-seated notion that calling attention to differences in class interests is un-American. We`re buddies, aren`t we?

Lately, however, there`s been growing evidence this class warfare ploy is losing its long-standing power to intimidate. The evidence lies in who it is that brings the phrase class warfare into the political debate: Over the course of this year, for the first time, it`s the liberals.

In previous years, among liberal columnists, the phrase class warfare simply did not appear. But lately, one finds it being used - often with irony - to call attention to the reality that much of the power now being wielded in Washington is indeed being used by one class to gain advantage over other classes.

Why now? My guess is that it`s because in recent years the conservatives have simply overreached. Overreaching seems a tendency of the right in today`s America.

Several years ago, its overreaching in an attempt to destroy President Bill Clinton ended up fortifying his public support. Now some of those same people are overreaching by so blatantly using their political power to aid the privileged in their class warfare against the middle and lower strata of American society.

And perhaps the effect of this blatancy is to enable those who protest these injustices to turn at last the rhetorical cannon of class warfare around and fire it in the other direction. On this Labor Day, that might be something worth celebrating.


Andrew Bard Schmookler is a writer who teaches American studies at the Albuquerque Academy in New Mexico.


Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun |

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Iraqi history is back
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 8/29/2003 5:18 PM

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 (UPI) -- The devastating bomb attack that took the lives of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and at least 74 other people at the Ali Imam mosque in Najaf, Iraq, on Friday grimly confirmed warnings and themes we have been sounding over the past year in UPI Analysis columns. First and foremost, it teaches that Iraq history is back.

The Pentagon civilian hawks and their neo-conservative media allies who preached the necessity for toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and building a shining monument to American democracy never referred much to Iraqi history and they seem to have known little or any of it, which is not surprising, as few of them had ever visited Iraq.

The general impression one got from their writings, and from the pronouncements of President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the other masterminds of the war was that Iraq, the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, had indeed been one, and that that state of innocence had endured until Saddam and his allies seized power to establish the Second Baath Republic in 1968 or, at least until the pro-Western monarchy with its trappings of parliamentary democracy was destroyed in the bloody coup of 1958.

But that was not the case.

The history of Iraq before the 35-year-long night of the Baath Republic descended upon it should have provided ample warning that once the lid was lifted off, those long decades of repression, more years of terrorism, assassination and massacre were only too likely to follow. For they were what had gone before.

Kanaan Makiya -- today one of the leading figures in the Iraqi democratic opposition and over the past decade and a half, one of the most fearless and perceptive critics of Saddam`s tyranny -- summed up the history of Iraq`s last decade of political turmoil before Saddam and his colleagues of the Baath took power -- and kept it -- in 1968.

Writing in his classic study "The Republic of Fear," he recalled, "Between 1958 and 1968 there were more than 10 coups and attempted coups two armed rebellions and a semicontinuous civil war against the Kurds."

The 37 years of supposedly constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy which the British Empire created in 1921 until its destruction in the frightful military coup and killings of 1958 was hardly a model of democratic and political propriety either. The late Professor Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics, the greatest Western authority of his day on the modern political history of Iraq, described it up this way:

"Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine and, however pitiful its end, we may now say this was implicit in its beginning."

In 1933, right after Britain granted Iraq titular independence, the Iraqi army under Gen. Bakr Sidqi launched a massive pogrom against the Assyrian community in northern Iraq, slaughtering many thousands of them. So frightful were the killings that there was a serious move in the League of Nations to try and rescind full Iraqi independence, but it was blocked by Iraq`s British protectors.

Three years later, on Oct. 29, 1936, the first military coup in the Arab world took place in Iraq when Gen. Sidqi overthrew the government of the day. In June 1941, British forces in Iraq who had just foiled another coup planned to bring Iraq over to the Nazi-Axis side in World War II stood back passively while forces led by frustrated young Iraqi army officers killed hundreds of Iraqi Jews and despoiled their community.

Repeated local Arab tribal rebellions were crushed by the British-supported regimes during this period with the utmost severity. Discussing the crushing of the 1936 Rumaitha revolt, Kedourie wrote, "The killing, it seems, was indiscriminate, and old men, women and children were the victims of machine-gunning and bombing from the air."

This, it should be noted, was a year before the Nazi Condor Legion bombed the Spanish Republican-held city of Guernica, indiscriminately, arousing shock and outrage throughout the world.

The British, it should be remembered, ruled Iraq directly for 15 years from their military conquest in 1918 to 1933. And they remained the real power in the country behind a succession of puppet governments -- the most long-lasting of them led by Nuri e-Said -- for the next quarter of a century until 1958. It was an era when the technology did not yet exist to threaten the homeland of a world-spanning empire with weapons of mass destruction. But in all that time, the British failed dismally in their sincere efforts to bring political stability and Western institutions of government, law and freedom to Iraq.

Although Britain came to Iraq as its military conqueror in 1918 with a 300-year long record of imperial conquest and colonial administration unequalled by any other power in modern history, it failed to successfully transplant any of the institutions of freedom and Western democracy there, even though it tried hard to do so for 40 years. And almost as soon as they entered the country, the British faced a ferocious popular uprising of Sunnis and Shiite alike, though dominated by Sunnis, which it mercilessly crushed at the cost of thousands of dead.

The end of empire was as bloody as its beginning. The Royal family were first massacred by mutinous troops wildly firing their automatic weapons, then their bodies were mutilated. Nuri e-Said, seeking to flee disguised as a woman was recognized in a street crowd and instantly torn limb from limb. The remains of his body were then repeatedly driven over by a small family car until it had been reduced to the consistency of porridge.

Friday`s frightful bombing in Najaf, coming so soon as it does after the destruction of the U.N. compound in Baghdad and the murder of the chief U.N. envoy within it, serves notice that the bullet, the knife and the bomb are reigning again in Baghdad, just as they did during all those four long decades of supposedly enlightened British rule. U.S. policymakers should cease laboring under the delusion that they are about to change it.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030829-041655-8925r

Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International

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Another Fine Mess
It began as a quiet plot to protect UK and US interests in Iran. Fifty years on, the fall-out of Operation Boot can still be felt through the Middle East. Robert Fisk, who knew the British classical scholar who helped mastermind it, reflects on a saga of unintended consequences and unlearnt lessons

Robert Fisk
09/01/03: Not long before he died, old "Monty" Woodhouse asked himself if his role in the 1953 coup d`état in Iran had led, indirectly, to Ayatollah Khomeini`s Islamic Republic. "Regime change" hadn`t attracted President Truman, but when Eisenhower arrived at the White House in 1953, the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq`s democratically elected government was concocted by the CIA with the help of Woodhouse, an urbane Greek scholar and ex-guerrilla fighter and Britain`s top spy in Tehran. America was fearful that Mossadeq would hand his country over to the Soviets; Woodhouse was far more concerned to return Iran`s newly nationalised oil fields to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The restoration of the young Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi - our policeman in the Gulf - was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of million dollars, a plane-load of weapons and 300 lives. And 26 years later, it all turned to dust.

The Americans called their plot to restore the Shah Operation Ajax. The MI6 plan, dreamt up by Woodhouse, had the more prosaic title of Operation Boot. It was all a long way from Operation Iraqi Freedom, although there must be a few conservatives in the Pentagon now wishing that they`d dusted off their archives of the early Fifties to see how to topple Middle East leaders without an invasion. But then Operation Ajax/Boot - though it was undeniably about oil - was never intended to change the map of the Middle East, let alone bring "democracy" to Iran. Democracy, in the shape of the popular, effete Mossadeq, was the one thing Washington and London were not interested in cultivating. This was to be regime change on the cheap.

The CIA end of the operation was run by the splendidly named Kermit Roosevelt (the grandson of the buccaneering ex-president Theodore), and his victim was the very opposite of Saddam Hussein. "No nation goes anywhere under the shadow of dictatorship," Mossadeq once said - words that might have come from today`s President George Bush. But Mossadeq did have one thing in common with the Iraqi dictator: he was the victim of a long campaign of personal abuse by his international opponents. They talked about his "yellow" face, of how his nose was always running, and the French writer Gérard de Villiers described Mossadeq as "a pint-sized trouble-maker" with the "agility of a goat". On his death, The New York Times claimed that he had "held cabinet meetings while propped up in bed by three pillows and nourished by transfusions of American blood plasma". True, Mossadeq had a habit of dressing in pink pyjamas and of breaking down in tears in parliament. But he appears to have been a genuine democrat - he had been a renowned diplomat and parliamentarian - whose condemnation of the Shah`s tyranny and refusal to sanction further oil concessions gave his National Front coalition a mass popular support.

Woodhouse was practised in the art of subversion. He had distinguished himself as an SOE leader with the Greek partisans during the Second World War, and his vigorous pursuit of his opposite number in the Wehrmacht, a certain Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim, continued to the day of his death. My own investigations into Waldheim`s activities as intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht`s Army Group "E" in Bosnia had unearthed Waldheim`s familiar "W" initial on the bottom of a report of the interrogation of one of Woodhouse`s young officers - a man who was subsequently executed by the Nazis - and this brought Woodhouse and myself together. But the war had cast a dark shadow over Woodhouse, who to his death was haunted by the image of a young collaborator whom he had hanged in the mountains of Greece.

When he arrived in Tehran - officially he was the British embassy`s "information officer" - Iran was already on the brink of catastrophe. Negotiations had broken down with the AIOC. The British ambassador was, according to Woodhouse, "a dispirited bachelor dominated by his widowed sister", and his opposite number an American business tycoon who was being rewarded for his donations to the Democratic Party. "One of the first things I had to do was fly a plane-load of guns into Iran," Woodhouse told me late in his life. He travelled on the aircraft from the Iraqi airbase at RAF Habbaniya west of Baghdad - decades later, it would be one of Saddam Hussein`s fighter-bomber stations - and then bought millions of Iranian riyals with gold sovereigns, handing them over at a secret Tehran location to two brothers called Rashidian. They were to be organisers of the mobs that would stage the coup. The guns were to serve a similar purpose - unless the Soviet Union invaded Iran, in which case they were to be used to fight the Russians.

"We landed in Tehran after losing our way over the Zagros Mountains," Woodhouse was to recall. "They were mostly rifles and Sten guns. We drove north in a truck, avoiding checkpoints by using by-roads. Getting stopped was the sort of thing one never thought about. We buried the weapons - I think my underlings dug the holes. And for all I know those weapons are still hidden somewhere in northern Iran. It was all predicated on the assumption that war would break out with the Soviet Union."

When Woodhouse took up his job at the embassy, the plot to overthrow Mossadeq and give the oil fields back to the AIOC was in the hands of a British diplomat called Robin Zaehner, later a professor of Eastern religions at Oxford. It was Zaehner who had cultivated the Rashidian brothers, each of whom had worked against German influence in Iran during the Second World War. Iran was on the point of throwing the British embassy staff out of Tehran; so Woodhouse made contact with the CIA station chief in the city, Roger Goiran. "He was a really admirable colleague," Woodhouse said. "He came from a French family, was bilingual and extremely intelligent and likeable... an invaluable ally to me when Mossadeq was throwing us out."

Once back in London, Woodhouse took his plans to Washington: the Rashidians, along with an organisation of disenchanted army and police officers, parliamentary deputies, mullahs, editors and mob leaders, would seize control of Tehran, while tribal leaders would take over the big cities with the weapons that Woodhouse had buried. Mossadeq rejected the last proposals for a settlement by the AIOC and threatened the Shah - who had already left Iran. His fate was sealed. Kermit Roosevelt travelled secretly to Tehran, while Woodhouse met the Shah`s sister in Switzerland in an attempt to persuade her brother to stay on the throne. The Shah himself received a secret American emissary bent on the same purpose, a certain General Norman Schwarzkopf - father of the Norman Schwarzkopf who led US forces in the 1991 Gulf War.

The Shah went along with the wishes of his superpower allies. He issued a "firman" dismissing Mossadeq as prime minister and, when Mossadeq refused to obey, the mobs that Roosevelt and Woodhouse had organisedduly took to the streets of Tehran. Woodhouse never changed his view of Mossadeq. "It was all Mossadeq`s fault. He was ordered by the Shah`s firman to leave. He called out his own thugs and he caused the bloodbath. Our lot didn`t - they behaved according to plan. What if we`d done nothing? What would relations have been between Mossadeq and the mullahs? Things would have got steadily worse. There would have been no restoration of AIOC. And the Shah would have been overthrown immediately, instead of 25 years later."

History might not regard the coup quite so kindly. The first street violence actually failed to topple Mossadeq and Roosevelt had to summon the mobs for a second attempt. The Iranian army initially obeyed the Prime Minister`s orders to attack the crowds. Along with the 300 dead, many thousands of Iranians were wounded. When the US ambassador approached Roosevelt to seek his advice on what he should say to Mossadeq after the first coup attempt had failed, Roosevelt persuaded him to lie. "I will make it quite plain that we have no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of a friendly country." Roosevelt was later to write that "to this noble sentiment I made no comment. Diplomats are expected, if not required, to say such things."

But if American intervention "saved" Iran from communism - Stalin had just died and the Russians were, in fact, in no mood to invade Iran - it also ended a century of American-Iranian friendship. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the US and Britain. As James A Bill wrote in his excellent book The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations, "the fall of Mossadeq... began a new era of intervention and groping hostility to the US among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism". Another American author warned after Mossadeq`s overthrow that the new US-installed Iranian government "won`t be with us long unless it can prove that being nice to the West is more profitable for Iran than being as consistently nasty as old Mossy was".

Woodhouse was more phlegmatic. "It`s quite remarkable that a quarter of a century passed between Operation Boot and the fall of the Shah. In the end, it was Khomeini who came out on top - but not until years later. I suppose that some better use could have been made of the time that elapsed."

Khomeini`s 1979 revolution left Woodhouse deeply depressed. "I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored in 1953. Things were taken for granted." Woodhouse went on to become an Oxford MP, but always remembered what Allen Dulles, the CIA director, told him when he returned to Washington: "That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!"

But we don`t go in for "little eggs" any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies - and bigger egos - are involved in regime change today. Maybe that`s why they fail so quickly and, in the case of Iraq, so bloodily. The coup against Mossadeq was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War - and the last by the British. At least we never claimed that Mossadeq had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to Kermit Roosevelt. "If we are ever going to try something like this again," he wrote with great prescience, "we must be absolutely sure that (the) people and army want what we want."

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August 29, 2003

Who`s Wrong Now, Mr. Rumsfeld?
What Victory?
By DAVID KRIEGER
http://www.counterpunch.org/krieger08292003.html
What a difference a few months can make.

At the end of April 2003, just four months ago, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Qatar headquarters of General Tommy Franks, effusively comparing the US victory in Iraq to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War and a reuniting of East and West, and the people of Paris actually welcomed the Allied forces as liberators from the Nazis in World War II. In neither case was it necessary for American forces to remain as an occupying force; in neither case did the US government have its eyes on the oil.

As Rumsfeld savored US military dominance over the far inferior Iraqi forces, he triumphantly crowed, "Never have so many been so wrong about so much." He was presumably referring to the "many" who doubted American military tactics in the war, not those who thought the war was immoral, illegal and unnecessary.

It was clearly a day of jubilation for Rumsfeld and he was enjoying trumpeting to the world that he had been right all along.

A few days later, a triumphant George W. Bush, dressed up like a combat pilot, was flown some thirty miles off the California coast to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Bush announced to the assembled troops on the carrier that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

Bush said: "With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians." He did not mention that approximately twice as many innocent civilians died in the Iraq War as had died on September 11th. Nor did not mention the Iraqi children who had lost arms and legs and parents as a result of the war, and would carry their injuries through their lives.

The president, looking to all the world like the military hero he was not, continued: "No device of man can remove the tragedy from war." He did not say, presumably because he did not think, that with wisdom the tragedy of war might be prevented. Nor did he say that, in the case of this war, it was initiated illegally without UN authorization based on arguments by him and his administration to the American people that the Iraqi regime posed the threat of imminent use of weapons of mass destruction.

The combat pilot impersonator went on, "Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent." He might have added that this is especially true when it is he and his colleagues, and them alone, who decide who is guilty and who is innocent.

As the television cameras rolled on, Bush said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on." Four months out his perspective on victory is questionable, and there remains no established link between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists. He was also wrong to conclude that the "battle of Iraq" was a victory or had ended.

While an action doll of Bush in military garb is being marketed across the country, almost daily young Americans in the occupation force are being killed in what now appears to be an on-going war of liberation from the Americans.

Saboteurs are blowing up and setting fire to oil pipelines, disrupting water supplies, and attacking UN relief workers. US occupation forces appear helpless to stop the new terrorists that have been created as a result of this war.

The former Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, had argued for a far larger occupying force in Iraq. Rumsfeld overruled him, concluding that a larger force wasn`t needed. It now appears that General Shinseki was right and Rumsfeld was wrong.

The weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration alluded to in order to frighten the American people and justify the war have not been found, despite our being told by Cheney that he knew where they were located.

Four months after Rumsfeld crowed about the liberation of Paris and Bush declared an end to the major combat phase of the war, there is a deadly continuing war of attrition against US and British troops in Iraq. America, far from being hailed as a liberator, has created even more enemies in the Middle East and terrorists seem to be growing in numbers and boldness.

Paraphrasing Rumsfeld, who himself was paraphrasing Churchill, it might be said: "Never have so few been so wrong about so much." Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz are the leaders of the militant and shortsighted few. There has been no victory in Iraq, and under the circumstances victory is not possible. We now need a public dialogue on how best to extract ourselves from the perilous situation these men have created before we become ensnared in an oil-driven equivalent of the Vietnam War.

The starting point for ending this peril is to awaken the American people by a full and open Congressional investigation of the misrepresentations by the Bush administration regarding Iraq`s purported weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war. In Britain, the misrepresentations of the Blair government are being vigorously investigated by Parliament, but in the US an investigation of the Bush administration is being blocked by Congressional Republicans. What is needed is an investigation as rigorous as that being pursued in Britain.

Additionally, as an intermediate step to transferring full administrative authority to the Iraqi people, the United States and Coalition Forces should move immediately to turn over authority for the administration of Iraq to the United Nations. Such a recommendation assumes, perhaps too readily, that the UN would be willing to accept this role and would be able to act with sufficient independence of Washington. By entrusting the future of Iraq to the UN, the United States would make clear that it is not administering Iraq in order to dictate the political future of the country or to enrich US-led corporations with ties to the Bush administration. It would also allow for sharing the security burden in Iraq and make possible the earlier return of the US troops presently in Iraq.

David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time (Capra Press, 2003), and author of Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (Middleway Press, 2002).

He can be contacted at: [e-mail].

[Joerver]

The loneliness of Noam Chomsky

by Arundhati Roy ; September 01, 2003

"I will never apologise for the United States of America — I don`t care what the facts are."
President George Bush Sr.


SITTING in my home in New Delhi, watching an American TV news channel promote itself ("We report. You decide."), I imagine Noam Chomsky`s amused, chipped-tooth smile.

Everybody knows that authoritarian regimes, regardless of their ideology, use the mass media for propaganda. But what about democratically elected regimes in the "free world"?

Today, thanks to Noam Chomsky and his fellow media analysts, it is almost axiomatic for thousands, possibly millions, of us that public opinion in "free market" democracies is manufactured just like any other mass market product — soap, switches, or sliced bread. We know that while, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highest bidders. Neoliberal capitalism isn`t just about the accumulation of capital (for some). It`s also about the accumulation of power (for some), the accumulation of freedom (for some). Conversely, for the rest of the world, the people who are excluded from neoliberalism`s governing body, it`s about the erosion of capital, the erosion of power, the erosion of freedom. In the "free" market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else — — justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It`s available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how they do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky`s political writing.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. "[T]he prime minister in effect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership," reports the Financial Times. What price free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. In other democracies — the United States in particular — media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and government officials are imbricated in a more elaborate, but less obvious, manner. (George Bush Jr.`s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and Enron`s infiltration of U.S. government institutions and the mass media — all this is public knowledge now.)

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the mainstream media`s blatant performance as the U.S. government`s mouthpiece, its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and its explicit censorship of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humour in the rest of the world.

Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to the government for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare (much more important, and urgent of course, than the production of generics to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem as though the twin myths of Free Speech and the Free Market might come crashing down alongside the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

But of course that never happened. The myths live on.

There is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the establishment pours into the business of "managing" public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they might act upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not always reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guarded against reality, reared in a controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens or pigs in a pen.

Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in the backyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV. We put our ears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story, the mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to a full-page advertisement for lace underwear.

We don`t always remember, and many don`t even know, that this way of thinking, this easy acuity, this instinctive mistrust of the mass media, would at best be a political hunch and at worst a loose accusation, if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one of the world`s greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in which we live. Or should I say, our understanding of the elaborate rules of the lunatic asylum in which we are all voluntary inmates?

Speaking about the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, President George W. Bush called the enemies of the United States "enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he said. "They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

If people in the United States want a real answer to that question (as opposed to the ones in the Idiot`s Guide to Anti-Americanism, that is: "Because they`re jealous of us," "Because they hate freedom," "Because they`re losers," "Because we`re good and they`re evil"), I`d say, read Chomsky. Read Chomsky on U.S. military interventions in Indochina, Latin America, Iraq, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary people in the United States read Chomsky, perhaps their questions would be framed a little differently. Perhaps it would be: "Why don`t they hate us more than they do?" or "Isn`t it surprising that September 11 didn`t happen earlier?"

Unfortunately, in these nationalistic times, words like "us" and "them" are used loosely. The line between citizens and the state is being deliberately and successfully blurred, not just by governments, but also by terrorists. The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as "retaliatory" wars against governments that "support terrorism", is the same: both punish citizens for the actions of their governments.

(A brief digression: I realize that for Noam Chomsky, a U.S. citizen, to criticize his own government is better manners than for someone like myself, an Indian citizen, to criticize the U.S. government. I`m no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.)

If I were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky`s major contributions to the world, it would be the fact that he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless universe that exists behind that beautiful, sunny word "freedom". He has done this rationally and empirically. The mass of evidence he has marshaled to construct his case is formidable. Terrifying, actually. The starting premise of Chomsky`s method is not ideological, but it is intensely political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with an anarchist`s instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through the bog of the U.S. establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze of corridors that connects the government, big business, and the business of managing public opinion.

Chomsky shows us how phrases like "free speech", the "free market", and the "free world" have little, if anything, to do with freedom. He shows us that, among the myriad freedoms claimed by the U.S. government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and dominate other people. The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators across the world. The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple democratically elected governments. The freedom to amass and use weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, and nuclear. The freedom to go to war against any country whose government it disagrees with. And, most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the name of "justice", in the name of "righteousness", in the name of "freedom".

Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that U.S. freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but... our endowment from God". So, basically, we`re confronted with a country armed with a mandate from heaven. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others. (Any attempt to do this is shouted down as "moral equivalence".) Its technique is to position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it`s trying to free, whose societies it`s trying to modernise, whose women it`s trying to liberate, whose souls it`s trying to save.

Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains why the U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people "for their own good".

When he announced the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan, President Bush Jr. said, "We`re a peaceful nation." He went on to say, "This is the calling of the United States of America, the most free nation in the world, a nation built on fundamental values, that rejects hate, rejects violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil. And we will not tire."

The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought to America" — Bob Marley`s "Buffalo Soldier" contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness. It tells of the loss of dignity, the loss of wilderness, the loss of freedom, the shattered pride of a people. Genocide and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning of the nation whose fundamental values reject hate, murderers, and evil.

Here is Chomsky, writing in the essay "The Manufacture of Consent," on the founding of the United States of America:

During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a national park. We came across a gravestone, which had on it the following inscription: "Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow."

Of course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous population gave of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather, they were slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of the greatest exercises in genocide in human history... which we celebrate each October when we honour Columbus — a notable mass murderer himself — on Columbus Day.

Hundreds of American citizens, well-meaning and decent people, troop by that gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without reaction; except, perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are giving some due recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples.... They might react differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau and find a gravestone reading: "Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family and people gave of themselves and their possessions that this great nation might grow and prosper."

How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologising to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it way ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood.

In the best-selling version of popular myth as history, U.S. "goodness" peaked during World War II (aka America`s War Against Fascism). Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government actually looked away. When Hitler was carrying out his genocidal pogrom against Jews, U.S. officials refused entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. The United States entered the war only after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Drowned out by the noisy hosannas is its most barbaric act, in fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was nearly over. The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations to come, were not a threat to world peace. They were civilians. Just as the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were civilians. Just as the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Iraq because of the U.S.-led sanctions were civilians. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a cold, calculated experiment carried out to demonstrate America`s power. At the time, President Truman described it as "the greatest thing in history".

The Second World War, we`re told, was a "war for peace". The atomic bomb was a "weapon of peace". We`re invited to believe that nuclear deterrence prevented World War III. (That was before President George Bush Jr. came up with the "pre-emptive strike doctrine". Was there an outbreak of peace after the Second World War? Certainly there was (relative) peace in Europe and America — but does that count as world peace? Not unless savage, proxy wars fought in lands where the coloured races live (chinks, niggers, dinks, wogs, gooks) don`t count as wars at all.

Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also include the U.S. government`s covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel`s U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed. It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel`s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include America`s role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which more than one million people were killed. It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led directly, and indirectly, to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq.

Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists.

Most of the essays in Chomsky`s For Reasons of State are about U.S. aggression in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a war that lasted more than 12 years. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and approximately two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives. The U.S. deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more than six million tons of bombs. And yet, though you wouldn`t believe it if you watched most Hollywood movies, America lost the war.

The war began in South Vietnam and then spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After putting in place a client regime in Saigon, the U.S. government invited itself in to fight a communist insurgency — Vietcong guerillas who had infiltrated rural regions of South Vietnam where villagers were sheltering them. This was exactly the model that Russia replicated when, in 1979, it invited itself into Afghanistan. Nobody in the "free world" is in any doubt about the fact that Russia invaded Afghanistan. After glasnost, even a Soviet foreign minister called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan "illegal and immoral". But there has been no such introspection in the United States. In 1984, in a stunning revelation, Chomsky wrote:

For the past 22 years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina — without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defence of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam).

There is no such event in history!

In 1962, the U.S. Air Force began to bomb rural South Vietnam, where 80 per cent of the population lived. The bombing lasted for more than a decade. Thousands of people were killed. The idea was to bomb on a scale colossal enough to induce panic migration from villages into cities, where people could be held in refugee camps. Samuel Huntington referred to this as a process of "urbanisation". (I learned about urbanisation when I was in architecture school in India. Somehow I don`t remember aerial bombing being part of the syllabus.) Huntington — famous today for his essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"— was at the time Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Chomsky quotes him describing the Vietcong as "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist". Huntington went on to advise "direct application of mechanical and conventional power"— in other words, to crush a people`s war, eliminate the people. (Or, perhaps, to update the thesis — in order to prevent a clash of civilizations, annihilate a civilisation.)

Here`s one observer from the time on the limitations of America`s mechanical power: "The problem is that American machines are not equal to the task of killing communist soldiers except as part of a scorched-earth policy that destroys everything else as well." That problem has been solved now. Not with less destructive bombs, but with more imaginative language. There`s a more elegant way of saying "that destroys everything else as well". The phrase is "collateral damage".

And here`s a firsthand account of what America`s "machines" (Huntington called them "modernising instruments" and staff officers in the Pentagon called them "bomb-o-grams") can do. This is T.D. Allman flying over the Plain of Jars in Laos.

Even if the war in Laos ended tomorrow, the restoration of its ecological balance might take several years. The reconstruction of the Plain`s totally destroyed towns and villages might take just as long. Even if this was done, the Plain might long prove perilous to human habitation because of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs, mines and booby traps.

A recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what less than three years of intensive American bombing can do to a rural area, even after its civilian population has been evacuated. In large areas, the primary tropical colour — bright green — has been replaced by an abstract pattern of black, and bright metallic colours. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by defoliants.

Today, black is the dominant colour of the northern and eastern reaches of the Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the grass and undergrowth that covers the Plains and fills its many narrow ravines. The fires seem to burn constantly, creating rectangles of black. During the flight, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from freshly bombed areas.

The main routes, coming into the Plain from communist-held territory, are bombed mercilessly, apparently on a non-stop basis. There, and along the rim of the Plain, the dominant colour is yellow. All vegetation has been destroyed. The craters are countless.... [T]he area has been bombed so repeatedly that the land resembles the pocked, churned desert in storm-hit areas of the North African desert.

Further to the southeast, Xieng Khouangville — once the most populous town in communist Laos — lies empty, destroyed. To the north of the Plain, the little resort of Khang Khay also has been destroyed.

Around the landing field at the base of King Kong, the main colours are yellow (from upturned soil) and black (from napalm), relieved by patches of bright red and blue: parachutes used to drop supplies.

[T]he last local inhabitants were being carted into air transports. Abandoned vegetable gardens that would never be harvested grew near abandoned houses with plates still on the tables and calendars on the walls.

(Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race towards other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.)

The centerpiece of For Reasons of State is an essay called "The Mentality of the Backroom Boys", in which Chomsky offers an extraordinarily supple, exhaustive analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which he says "provide documentary evidence of a conspiracy to use force in international affairs in violation of law". Here, too, Chomsky makes note of the fact that while the bombing of North Vietnam is discussed at some length in the Pentagon Papers, the invasion of South Vietnam barely merits a mention.

The Pentagon Papers are mesmerizing, not as documentation of the history of the U.S. war in Indochina, but as insight into the minds of the men who planned and executed it. It`s fascinating to be privy to the ideas that were being tossed around, the suggestions that were made, the proposals that were put forward. In a section called "The Asian Mind — the American Mind", Chomsky examines the discussion of the mentality of the enemy that "stoically accept the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives", whereas "We want life, happiness, wealth, power", and, for us, "death and suffering are irrational choices when alternatives exist". So, we learn that the Asian poor, presumably because they cannot comprehend the meaning of happiness, wealth, and power, invite America to carry this "strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide". But, then "we" balk because "genocide is a terrible burden to bear". (Eventually, of course, "we" went ahead and committed genocide any way, and then pretended that it never really happened.)

Of course, the Pentagon Papers contain some moderate proposals, as well.

Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however — if handled right — might... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided — which we could offer to do "at the conference table".

Layer by layer, Chomsky strips down the process of decision-making by U.S. government officials, to reveal at its core the pitiless heart of the American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of war, blinded by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings, civilians, soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems — with scientifically honed methods of brutality.

Here`s an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn`t so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so`s to make it burn better. It`ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it`ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.

So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.

Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America`s mass media, all these years later, the world views the war as an American story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonised over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props. Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks.

The only real lesson the U.S. government learned from its invasion of Indochina is how to go to war without committing American troops and risking American lives. So now we have wars waged with long-range cruise missiles, Black Hawks, "bunker busters". Wars in which the "Allies" lose more journalists than soldiers.

As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India — where the first democratically elected Communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born — I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.

As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralised each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshalling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little — how shall I put it? — insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky`s work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he`s up against. He`s like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It`s as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him Chompsky.

Being an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point of view must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.

Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was 16 years old:

I remember that I literally couldn`t talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone`s reaction. I felt completely isolated.

That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky`s work will survive.

It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)

As a could`ve been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day goes by when I don`t find myself thinking — for one reason or another — "Chomsky Zindabad".

Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things.

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 6:18 p.m. EDT August 31, 2003

Senators from both parties called on the Bush administration Sunday to be more specific about what it will take to finish stabilizing Iraq. Appearing on the Sunday talk shows, they said they want to know how long it will take, and how much it will cost. But none is suggesting leaving Iraq before the job is done.
The provincial governor in Najaf , Iraq, has called for FBI help in investigating the bombing at Iraq`s holiest Shiite Muslim shrine. FBI agents are already in Iraq, investigating the bombings of the Jordanian embassy and the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Iraqi police say the bomb used in the mosque explosion was the equivalent of about 16-hundred pounds of TNT. They say there are similarities between the mosque bombing and the recent attacks at the Jordanian Embassy and the U.N.`s Baghdad headquarters.
More than 300-thousand Shiites are marching toward Najaf from Baghdad behind a truck carrying a symbolic coffin representing their beloved Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, killed in Friday`s blast. The funeral for the revered cleric is set for Tuesday. Most of his remains have not been recovered.
Iraqi police say al-Qaida-linked terrorists organized the car bombing at the shrine in the holy city of Najaf. A high-ranking police official says at least 19 suspects have been arrested in the attack -- and that all have admitted links to al-Qaida.
A U.S. Marine spokesman says the involvement of al-Qaida members in the Friday explosion is "an option we are looking at." Major Rick Hall also says U.S. forces are questioning two men handed over by the Iraqis but will likely release them.
Marine spokesman Major Rick Hall says the transfer of the south-central territory including Najaf to an international force led by Poland, set for this week, has been put on hold.

CASUALTIES

A total of 282 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began in Iraq. Of those, 67 have died in combat since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

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Schon wieder Schwierigkeiten mit WO

Meeting Mr Bechtel
The conference was called Doing Business with Iraq. I pinned the badge on my blouse and walked in

Betool Khedairi
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian

Why do you refuse to talk politics? You`re an Iraqi woman, a writer and you live in the free world. Why have you not mentioned Saddam or Bush even once in your work?" This is a question I`m repeatedly asked by interviewers.

My late father, an Iraqi businessman, made me promise that I would never discuss or get involved in politics. In our part of the world, a promise made to a father is a spiritual tie, even more so after he dies. I tried my best not to break this father-daughter bond but, growing up in Baghdad, it wasn`t always easy.

I can now appreciate his insight. My promise to him bought me time and, thanks to his advice, I have survived to tell some tales. But I had to start sometime, and so it was with political intent that I pinned a badge on my blouse and attended a conference at the Hayat hotel here in Amman, Jordan, called Doing Business With Iraq. As a lay person, I gathered this conference was an attempt to "do business" in a triangular form: the US, Jordan, Iraq and back again. The ballroom was packed with more than 1,000 people as the panel of foreign experts explained the mechanics of every businessman`s fantasy: rebuilding a country.

Bechtel, Halliburton, the Jordanian minister of industry and trade, McKinsey & Company, the deputy chairman of the Iraqi Industries Federation, the WHO and many others had gathered. A plastic folder containing details of speakers, participants and briefs about the countries represented lay in every lap. The man from Bechtel started off by saying that the time for heroics was over. Now was the time for reconstruction. They used terms like "institutional strengthening", "getting the government in shape" and "self-sufficiency".

They underlined the need for internationally recognised standards of quality. They insisted on the importance of bridges. At the heart of their plans for a new Iraq was the dictum that ports lead to rails and rails lead to roads.

The Jordanians were worried about their pre-produced goods for Baghdad, piled up in warehouses thanks to existing contracts. How were they to free their funds from the banks with the country at a standstill? The panel assured them that they would take their concerns to the administration team in Baghdad to find solutions. They would also discuss these issues with the Central Bank of Jordan.

A heated question from the Jordanians regarded what was going to happen to their frozen letters of credit. How were they going to work with Iraq when there was no electricity or water and very tired human beings in such an insecure situation? Answer: "The timing is unclear. The key word of free economy is free. These answers have to come from the Iraqi government. We are in the process of de-Ba`athification, and that will take time."

In spite of the difficulties, it seemed that the panel`s aim was to educate Iraqis on how to work with Americans. Terms like "affectionate", "with love" and "interest in the Iraqi people" were used alongside pie charts on how to save the economy and pictures of Iraqis working on construction sites.

During the discussions mobile phones were not turned off. An Iraqi tune, High Over the Palm Trees, was ringing out next to me, followed by a snatch of Tchaikovsky from an Indian investor`s bag, then calls to prayer from an Islamic mobile. People were talking constantly during the gathering and the microphones kept switching themselves off, so at one stage the participants had to share one mic that kept shifting from hand to hand.

Mr Hikma Pharmaceuticals gave a balanced, short speech, saying that he thought nothing would be stable before next January, and that working with Iraq meant working with the Iraqi people and respecting their needs. I looked around me. I couldn`t recognise many Iraqi faces. Many of the profiles were of men with bumpy noses and tummies sticking out. They looked like sets of Hitchcocks. Mr deputy chairman of the Iraqi Industries Federation welcomed any help Iraq could get, from anybody who could help.

Mr Jordanian ambassador to the United States summed up his view via the conference screen: "Jordan has always been the lungs that have allowed the Iraqis to breathe".

After hours of watching westerners floating around in light linen suits and easterners fiddling with their worry beads, the finale went something like this: "Privatisation of the public sector and diversification in the private sector." Eventually.

I miss my father. He was right. There are so many hidden truths that we, people outside politics, will never know about. He believed in building countries, not destroying them. Today I see another view taking shape: deconstruct countries in order to reconstruct them.

At six in the evening, a friend caught up with me in the corridor and asked: "So, if you`re not here for business and you`re not from the media, why did you pay the exorbitant subscription fee and waste a whole day?"

I answered: "Actually, I came here to gather information. I want to write a comedy."

· Betool Khedairi, born of an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother, lived in Iraq until she was 24. Now 37, she lives in Amman. She is the author of a novel, A Sky So Close.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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So George, how do you feel about your mom and dad?
Psychologist Oliver James analyses the behaviour of the American president

Oliver James
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian

As the alcoholic George Bush approached his 40th birthday in 1986, he had achieved nothing he could call his own. He was all too aware that none of his educational and professional accomplishments would have occured without his father. He felt so low that he did not care if he lived or died. Taking a friend out for a flight in a Cessna aeroplane, it only became apparent he had not flown one before when they nearly crashed on take-off. Narrowly avoiding stalling a few times, they crash-landed and the friend breathed a sigh of relief - only for Bush to rev up the engine and take off again.

Not long afterwards, staring at his vomit-spattered face in the mirror, this dangerously self-destructive man fell to his knees and implored God to help him and became a teetotalling, fundamentalist Christian. David Frum, his speechwriter, described the change: "Sigmund Freud imported the Latin pronoun id to describe the impulsive, carnal, unruly elements of the human personality. [In his youth] Bush`s id seems to have been every bit as powerful and destructive as Clinton`s id. But sometime in Bush`s middle years, his id was captured, shackled and manacled, and locked away."

One of the jailers was his father. His grandfather, uncles and many cousins attended both his secondary school, Andover, and his university, Yale, but the longest shadow was cast by his father`s exceptional careers there.

On the wall of his school house at Andover, there was a large black-and-white photograph of his father in full sporting regalia. He had been one of the most successful student athletes in the school`s 100-year history and was similarly remembered at Yale, where his grandfather was a trustee. His younger brother, Jeb, summed the problem up when he said, "A lot of people who have fathers like this feel a sense that they have failed." Such a titanic figure created mixed feelings. On the one hand, Bush worshipped and aspired to emulate him. Peter Neumann, an Andover roommate, recalls that, "He idolised his father, he was going to be just like his dad." At Yale, a friend remembered a "deep respect" for his father and when he later set up in the oil business, another friend said, "He was focused to prove himself to his dad."

On the other hand, deep down, Bush had a profound loathing for this perfect model of American citizenship whose very success made the son feel a failure. Rebelliousness was an unconscious attack on him and a desperate attempt to carve out something of his own. Far from paternal emulation, Bush described his goal at school as "to instil a sense of frivolity". Contemporaries at Yale say he was like the John Belushi character in the film Animal House, a drink-fuelled funseeker.

He was aggressively anti-intellectual and hostile to east-coast preppy types like his father, sometimes cruelly so. On one occasion he walked up to a matronly woman at a smart cocktail party and asked, "So, what`s sex like after 50, anyway?"

A direct and loutish challenge to his father`s posh sensibility came aged 25, after he had drunkenly crashed a car. "I hear you`re looking for me," he sneered at his father, "do you want to go mano a mano, right here?"

As he grew older, the fury towards his father was increasingly directed against himself in depressive drinking. But it was not all his father`s fault. There was also his insensitive and domineering mother.

Barbara Bush is described by her closest intimates as prone to "withering stares" and "sharply crystalline" retorts. She is also extremely tough. When he was seven, Bush`s younger sister, Robin, died of leukaemia and several independent witnesses say he was very upset by this loss. Barbara claims its effect was exaggerated but nobody could accuse her of overreacting: the day after the funeral, she and her husband were on the golf course.

She was the main authority-figure in the home. Jeb describes it as having been, "A kind of matriarchy... when we were growing up, dad wasn`t at home. Mom was the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline." A childhood friend recalls that,"She was the one who instilled fear", while Bush put it like this: "Every mother has her own style. Mine was a little like an army drill sergeant`s... my mother`s always been a very outspoken person who vents very well - she`ll just let rip if she`s got something on her mind." According to his uncle, the "letting rip" often included slaps and hits. Countless studies show that boys with such mothers are at much higher risk of becoming wild, alcoholic or antisocial.

On top of that, Barbara added substantially to the pressure from his father to be a high achiever by creating a highly competitive family culture. All the children`s games, be they tiddlywinks or baseball, were intensely competitive - an actual "family league table" was kept of performance in various pursuits. At least this prepared him for life at Andover, where emotional literacy was definitely not part of the curriculum. Soon after arriving, he was asked to write an essay on a soul-stirring experience in his life to date and he chose the death of his sister. His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong when writing to repeat words already used. Having employed "tears" once in the essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given him and wrote "the lacerates ran down my cheeks". The essay received a fail grade, accompanied by derogatory comments such as "disgraceful".

This incident may be an insight into Bush`s strange tendency to find the wrong words in making public pronouncements. "Is our children learning?" he once famously asked. On responding to critics of his intellect he claimed that they had "misunderestimated" him. Perhaps these verbal faux-pas are a barely unconscious way of winding up his bullying mother and waving two fingers at his cultured father`s sensibility.

The outcome of this childhood was what psychologists call an authoritarian personality. Authoritarianism was identified shortly after the second world war as part of research to discover the causes of fascism. As the name suggests, authoritarians impose the strictest possible discipline on themselves and others - the sort of regime found in today`s White House, where prayers precede daily business, appointments are scheduled in five-minute blocks, women`s skirts must be below the knee and Bush rises at 5.45am, invariably fitting in a 21-minute, three-mile jog before lunch.

Authoritarian personalities are organised around rabid hostility to "legitimate" targets, often ones nominated by their parents` prejudices. Intensely moralistic, they direct it towards despised social groups. As people, they avoid introspection or loving displays, preferring toughness and cynicism. They regard others with suspicion, attributing ulterior motives to the most innocent behaviour. They are liable to be superstitious. All these traits have been described in Bush many times, by friends or colleagues.

His moralism is all-encompassing and as passionate as can be. He plans to replace state welfare provision with faith-based charitable organisations that would impose Christian family values.

The commonest targets of authoritarians have been Jews, blacks and homosexuals. Bush is anti-abortion and his fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible would mean that gay practices are evil. But perhaps the group he reserves his strongest contempt for are those who have adopted the values of the 60s. He says he loathes "people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering".

He has always rejected any kind of introspection. Everyone who knows him well says how hard he is to get to know, that he lives behind what one friend calls a "facile, personable" facade. Frum comments that, "He is relentlessly disciplined and very slow to trust. Even when his mouth seems to be smiling at you, you can feel his eyes watching you."

His deepest beliefs amount to superstition. "Life takes its own turns," he says, "writes its own story and along the way we start to realise that we are not the author." God`s will, not his own, explains his life.

Most fundamentalist Christians have authoritarian personalities. Two core beliefs separate fundamentalists from mere evangelists ("happy-clappy" Christians) or the mainstream Presbyterians among whom Bush first learned religion every Sunday with his parents: fundamentalists take the Bible absolutely literally as the word of God and believe that human history will come to an end in the near future, preceded by a terrible, apocaplytic battle on Earth between the forces of good and evil, which only the righteous shall survive. According to Frum when Bush talks of an "axis of evil" he is identifying his enemies as literally satanic, possessed by the devil. Whether he specifically sees the battle with Iraq and other "evil" nations as being part of the end-time, the apocalypse preceding the day of judgment, is not known. Nor is it known whether Tony Blair shares these particular religious ideas.

However, it is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice of his citizens - in surveys, half of them also agree with the statement "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word".

Bush`s deep hatred, as well as love, for both his parents explains how he became a reckless rebel with a death wish. He hated his father for putting his whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing him. He hated his mother for physically and mentally badgering him to fulfil her wishes. But the hatred also explains his radical transformation into an authoritarian fundamentalist. By totally identifying with an extreme version of their strict, religion-fuelled beliefs, he jailed his rebellious self. From now on, his unconscious hatred for them was channelled into a fanatical moral crusade to rid the world of evil.

As Frum put it: "Id-control is the basis of Bush`s presidency but Bush is a man of fierce anger." That anger now rules the world.

· Oliver James`s book They F*** You Up - How to survive family life is published by Bloomsbury, priced £7.99.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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LATEST: Two huge explosions reported at a police station near the Iraqi Interior Ministry building in central Baghdad. More details soon ...

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How Tony Blair climbed the foothills of the big lie
The Hutton inquiry is a brilliant distraction from the real issues of war

Hugo Young
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian

The leading theorist of the big lie was Adolf Hitler. "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed," he wrote in Mein Kampf. This was his propaganda technique. A falsehood of sufficient audacity was "bound to have an effect on public opinion, even if not given total credence by a majority" (William Safire`s New Political Dictionary). The most notorious exponent of the big lie in our modern world was Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose contention in the 1950s that 81 card-carrying communists were at large in the state department was later branded by the Senate as "the most nefarious campaign of half truths and untruth in the history of the Republic".

Tony Blair is not in this league of mendacity, and I don`t suppose that when he set up the Hutton inquiry he had in mind for it a role as the great deceiver. He saw it as the only way to clear the air after the unscripted shock, delivered to him on his Asian journey, of David Kelly`s death. None the less, seen from a distance, as I watched it in August, Hutton has the features of a pretty big lie. It creates a huge furore. It fascinates a big audience. It apparently brings to book some of the largest characters in the political class. Entire careers are said to be awaiting their fate. Yet, in reality, Hutton is little more than a brilliant, beguiling distraction from the questions on which the future of this government ought to rest.

The issues it is addressing are not unimportant. Dr Kelly deserves a decent inquest, and he`s getting it. Every insight into the chaotic workings of a panicky government is a disillusion worth remembering for the next time. The BBC, which I was defending a few weeks ago, is now revealed as having made one or two stupid editorial decisions, for which it ought to have apologised. Billowing out from this comes the titanic struggle, for which some in government have long lusted, between the unelected corporation and they themselves, the elected democrats.

That edges us into the foothills of the big lie. But we move further up the slopes with Mr Blair`s own excursions into hyperbole. It is he who has now given Hutton the character he probably did not intend at the start, by pinning his entire reputation to the judge`s verdict. Nothing, he said, could have done more damage to his integrity - indeed to the integrity of our country in the eyes of the world - than the suggestion that he had doctored the infamous dossier. It would be a resigning matter, he said solemnly. It was the foulest charge imaginable. Thus did Blair seek to persuade a gullible public that a narrow, ultimately trivial, matter is the alpha and omega of the greatest public scandal in half a century. And the Hutton inquiry is his proof.

I can think of several issues that damage Blair`s reputation as badly as, or worse than, the little matter of who advanced the claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a weapon of mass destruction in 45 minutes. Every inch of coverage of Hutton serves the purpose of obscuring them.

First, whoever wrote the dossier, it was an official government document. It was the government`s big statement of imminent threat, compiled by the best available officials and vetted for "presentational" effect by Downing Street. Never mind the 45-minute detail, nobody denies that Blair`s personal circle had a large hand in the words that finally came out. Yet the substance turns out to have been thinly based. This collective state paper was a bummer, just as some of George Bush`s contentions about Saddam Hussein`s nuclear readiness, likewise designed to scare a people into backing war, were conclusively shown (in the Washington Post, August 10) to be falsehoods in which Tony Blair played his part.

We are told to be patient. It`s said evidence of WMD will be discovered, though I notice that the timescale now inches forward into years, not months. But the more time passes, the more incredible looks the official assertion that the threat to Britain from Iraq was "imminent". We must take care not to let amnesia, a useful supporter of big lies, enter the frame.

Second, we must not allow the rationale for war to change. How would this have sounded last March? "We think Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, though we`re far from proving it. We don`t think he has links with al-Qaida, or had anything to do with 9/11. But we are determined to get rid of him. We need regime change. We will risk British lives to that end, and then play our part alongside our faithful friend George Bush in rebuilding Iraq into a democracy. It may be an expensive business, but it is our national duty." That statement represents roughly the true assessment most politicians and intelligence people were making before war began. If Blair had put it in those terms to parliament and the country, does anyone think he would have secured national assent for what he wanted to do?

Plainly he didn`t himself. It would have been the honest pitch to make, but he didn`t make it. He didn`t level with the people. Maybe this is why, despite the efforts of Whitehall and himself before Hutton, the level of trust in him has plummeted. Maybe the big lie embodied by Hutton isn`t going to work.

Third, sooner or later it`s going to be time to look at the consequences of the war as well as its disputed beginnings. Here, too, is a larger question than who wrote which words into a dossier, and who misreported that shard of truth. At some point, false assessments about what war would entail must come to judgment. Again, this cannot await a timeline being stretched ever further to suit the convenience of politicians. Elections supply their own terminal moment.

The consequences are beginning to look terrible. Iraq descends into terroristic chaos. Electricity and water continue to be unavailable across tracts of the country. Street and home security is totally unreliable. The coalition forces, expecting to be greeted as liberators, are reviled as ineffective and hostile occupiers. These awakenings bear heaviest, of course, on the Americans. The misjudged condition of Iraq may yet have catastrophic political consequences for Bush at home. However, Blair, too, is caught. He led the country to war on a prospectus that turned out to be false, with results that may soon have to be judged, without exoneration, shameful.

To all of this, Hutton is a sideshow. It looks like working out conveniently. It gives insights into a process we haven`t seen before, though we`ve surely suspected them. We find we have a defence secretary as cauterised as he is evasive. A fastidious judge will apportion a bit of blame all round. But there is a large mendacity behind it all. Small issues are talked into huge ones. A big lie remains unexamined. This says that the war was unavoidable, that its motives were of the purest, that it was in the British national interest, that the people were told the truth about why it happened. Let Hutton not deceive us.

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IRAQ
Oil

Updated: August 27, 2003

http://www.cfr.org/background/background_iraq_oil2.php
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Who controls Iraqi oil?
The United States and Britain have some rights to use the oil to fund their occupation, international lawyers say, but Iraq`s oil legally belongs to the Iraqi people. Long-term plans to develop or privatize Iraqi oil fields would have shaky legal justifications under an occupation government. Many experts say an internationally recognized Iraqi government should be in place before such decisions are made.

Who is actually making decisions for the Iraqi oil industry?
Industry experts say they believe day-to-day decisions are being made by Iraqis, in particular, by the Iraqi interim oil minister, Thamir al-Ghadhban, and authorities at the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), the state-run monopoly that controlled Iraqi oil exports under Saddam Hussein`s government. Philip Carroll, the former president and chief executive officer of Shell Oil, is serving as an adviser to the Iraqi oil ministry. U.S. postwar plans called for Carroll to head up an international board of advisors to oversee the oil industry, but the coalition recently backed away from that idea, leaving the industry more firmly in Iraqi hands, says Karen Matusic, a senior editor at Energy Intelligence, an information company covering the energy industry.

What international law governs issues surrounding Iraqi oil?
International humanitarian law (IHL), the same branch of law that defines the rules of war and describes the obligations of occupying powers. The issue of using an occupied nation’s natural resources is addressed specifically in the 1907 Hague Regulations and in the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. In addition, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, approved in May 2003, recognized the U.S. and British-led occupation and set out specific regulations regarding Iraqi oil sales.

Can occupiers just take and use whatever property they like in an occupied state?
No. In general, private property cannot be confiscated or destroyed without compensation, nor can the property of religious, charitable, or educational institutions. Public property, such as Iraq’s state-owned oil fields, falls under different guidelines. “Movable” government properties that can be used for military purposes —such as weapons and trucks—are considered “spoils of war” and may be seized without compensation, according to a Human Rights Watch dossier. “Immovable” government property, such as public buildings, real estate, and natural resources, cannot be appropriated or destroyed, but can be used by the occupying power, in a kind of trust, to defray the cost of the occupation.

Can occupiers use oil revenues to fund their own military expenses?
Many international lawyers, quoting Article 49 of the Hague Regulations, say that the law of occupation does allow occupying powers to use a state’s resources—and even tax its people—to pay for “the needs of the [occupying] army or of the administration of the territory in question.” But the United States and Britain, in agreeing to U.N. Resolution 1483, appear to have foregone this option in exchange for international recognition of their occupation.

What does Resolution 1483 say about how Iraqi oil proceeds can be used?
It says that all oil proceeds will be deposited in a special account, the Development Fund for Iraq, to be administered by the authorities from the U.S.-led occupation government in consultation with the Iraqi interim administration. For now, the Iraqi interim administration consists of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. These proceeds are “to be used in a transparent manner” and limited to:

humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people
economic reconstruction and repair of Iraq’s infrastructure
continued disarmament of Iraq
costs of Iraqi civilian administration
“other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq.”
Is the U.N. Oil for Food Program still selling Iraqi oil?
No. Under U.N. sanctions imposed after the Gulf War in 1991, all legal Iraqi oil sales were managed by the Oil for Food Program, which allowed Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to pay for food, medicine, and other civilian needs. The program stopped handling oil sales when the United Nations pulled out of Iraq last March before the U.S.-led invasion, says Ian Steele, a U.N. spokesman. Under the terms of Resolution 1483, Oil for Food is continuing to spend down the approximately $10 billion in its accounts from before the start of the war. Purchases are focusing on food and other emergency items for Iraqi people. After November 21, 2003, the program will be closed completely, and any leftover funds will pass to the coalition-managed Development Fund for Iraq.

How much oil does Iraq have?
Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, totaling some 110 to 115 billion barrels. Iraq may have much more oil, however, as the country is largely unexplored due to years of war and sanctions. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, only 15 of the 73 discovered oil fields have been developed, and few deep wells have been drilled compared to Iraq’s neighbors.

How much oil was Iraq pumping before the war?
In January and February of 2003, Iraq produced approximately 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was producing some 2.8 million barrels per day. Heavy damage to Iraq’s oil fields in the 1991 war, combined with the effects of U.N. sanctions, which limited Iraq’s ability to repair and modernize the fields, stunted oil production in the 1990s.

How much oil is Iraq pumping now?
Somewhere between 1.2 million and 1.5 million barrels a day: about 1.5 percent of world output, Iraqi oil officials say. However, the amount can vary widely due to continuing acts of sabotage, looting, and technical problems that beset the fields. Among the worst setbacks was an explosion August 15 that shut down the 600-mile oil pipeline from the northern city of Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean coast: repairs are continuing. In addition, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition troops in Iraq, said in mid-August that smugglers were tapping oil lines and stealing up to 2,500 tons of fuel each day.

What’s the target?
U.S. and Iraqi officials say the goal is to pump 2.5 million barrels a day by early next year. But industry analysts who have recently visited Iraq say they think such forecasts are optimistic, given the industry’s dire straits. To bring production up to prewar levels, the Army Corps of Engineers is currently taking bids on contracts worth up to $1.14 billion to improve the oil fields by March 31, 2004. These contracts will replace the controversial, non-competitive contract for emergency oil service work that was secretly awarded to Kellogg Brown & Root Services (KBR) by the Corps prior to the start of the war in Iraq.

What has Brown and Root done so far in Iraq?
The company has been extinguishing oil fires and repairing Iraq’s oil wells and pipelines. They are also running laundry services and a hair salon at U.S. occupation headquarters and doing a variety of other tasks, leading some critics to charge that they may be taking advantage of their flexible contract, which is worth up to $7 billion, according to the Corps. KBR’s parent company, Halliburton, was headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney between 1995 and 2000. It showed $324 million of second-quarter revenue from work in Iraq.

Have the Iraqis begun to sell oil?
Yes. Since the end of the war, SOMO has drawn up contracts for the sale of approximately 34 million barrels of oil to some of the world’s largest oil companies, including British Petroleum, Royal Dutch/Shell Group, ChevronTexaco, Petrobras of Brazil, China’s Sinochem International, and French concern TotalFinaElf. Most of this oil is coming from Iraq’s southern oil fields and being transported to tankers at Iraq’s Persian Gulf export terminal at Mina al-Bakr.

Are buyers of Iraqi oil getting a discount on the world oil price?
The exact terms of the deals are not publicly disclosed, but industry experts say they believe the Iraqi oil is being sold at standard prices—and not only to U.S. firms. “SOMO says the contracts are being awarded on a strictly commercial basis, and it certainly does look that way,” says Matusic. There have been few reported complaints worldwide about the transparency of recent oil sales, except from some Russian oil firms, who have not yet won any contracts. Under Oil for Food, a considerable amount of Iraqi oil went to Russian middlemen known as resellers— now, SOMO is trying to sell directly to refiners, says Ronald Gold, vice president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.

How much will the reintroduction of Iraqi crude affect the world oil market?
Initially, not much, industry analysts say. Even if Iraq starts pumping 2 million barrels a day, that’s still only 2.5 percent of world production—enough to lower world oil prices by a few dollars a barrel, but not much else, says John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation. Iraq is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), but it hasn’t participated in the cartel’s quota system for crude since the 1991 Gulf War, and its current capacity is so low that the organization’s quotas may not be a problem for the near future. There is currently no Iraqi representative to OPEC, but the Iraqi Governing Council is reportedly in the process of selecting one. Deciding whether or not to remain in OPEC “will be the decision of the people of Iraq,” U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said August 7.

What are Iraq’s long-term plans for its oil industry?
They have not yet been decided. Many experts expect some future private investment in Iraq’s state-run oil fields, perhaps in the area of developing new fields or working in partnership with Iraqi companies. But some caution against making any long-term moves until an internationally recognized government is in place. Completely privatizing Iraq’s oil industry is also unlikely, given the history of state-owned oil in the Persian Gulf and widespread suspicions surrounding U.S. involvement in Iraq. “I don’t think there will be any takeover by foreign companies—the U.S. government is very sensitive to the impression that would create,” Lichtblau says.

Could the Iraqi people be given a direct share of Iraq’s oil revenue in the future?
L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation government in Iraq, has repeatedly mentioned his desire to create some kind of trust or fund that would distribute Iraq’s oil profits among its people. The basis for this model could be Alaska, which distributes a percentage of its oil revenues in the form of checks directly to its 630,000 residents: last year, each received $1,540. But some oil experts warn that this model is not feasible for Iraq’s 24 million citizens, at least for the short-term. In Iraq, the political situation remains chaotic and there are many demands on the limited revenue from Iraqi oil sales. Even if oil production meets the coalition’s most optimistic projections of $14 billion in 2004, that still falls far short of the overall reconstruction price tag, estimated by Bremer to be up to $100 billion.

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Hier noch ein Artikel aus `Foreign Affairs` Viele Dinge, die in den Threads angesprochen werden, werden in der zeitschrift ausführlich behandelt.
Der folgende Artikel ist zu lang, um ihn in voller Länge einzustellen, daher bitte direkt dort lesen. Um den Arikel in einem Stück angezeigt zu bekommen auf Print klicken. Hier die Homepage:
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Stumbling Into War
By James P. Rubin
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030901faessay82504/james-p-r…
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A DIPLOMATIC POSTMORTEM


After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States put together a historic, worldwide coalition to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan and destroy al Qaeda. China, India, Japan, Pakistan, and Russia all supported the enterprise, as did Europe. The subsequent war may have scattered al Qaeda rather than destroyed it -- key operatives remain at large today -- but the mission was widely seen as a success.

Eighteen months later, the Bush administration went to war again, this time to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On this occasion, however, most of the same countries that had backed the United States in Afghanistan bluntly opposed the campaign -- as, indeed, did most of the world. Washington`s failure to muster international support to depose a despised dictator was a stunning diplomatic defeat -- a failure that has not only made it harder to attract foreign troop contributions to help stabilize post-Saddam Iraq, but will more generally damage U.S. foreign policy for years to come.

Support for the Bush administration`s Iraq policy should not have been so hard to gain. After all, Baghdad was in clear violation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions. And Bill Clinton had also deemed Iraq a substantial threat, both because of its apparent capability to field weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and because of its demonstrated willingness to use them. For those reasons, coupled with Saddam`s history of gross human rights violations and his refusal to comply with the demands of the international community, the Clinton team had also supported regime change in Iraq.

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September 2, 2003
STRATEGY
G.I.`s Shift to More Precise, Smaller Raids
By ERIC SCHMITT


WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — A new series of major raids in northern Iraq against supporters of Saddam Hussein`s government and criminal operatives is the first wide-scale use of a revamped American strategy in which troops carry out more precise attacks instead of broad sweeps, American commanders say.

In the last week, several hundred troops from the Army`s Fourth Infantry Division, supported by tanks and helicopters, have raided suspected guerrilla hideouts in a swath of territory north of Baghdad. Military officials have provided few details, citing continuing operations, but at least seven Iraqis suspected of carrying out attacks against American troops have been arrested.

The new approach reflects the views of senior commanders that the American military`s large sweeps that sometimes rounded up several hundred ordinary Iraqis were alienating the public. At the same time, officials said, Iraqis are providing more and better information about suspected supporters of Mr. Hussein that has enabled the military to plan raids that are better focused on specific targets.

"The main difference is the ability to focus more precisely because of better intelligence," said Col. Guy Shields, a military spokesman in Baghdad. "Because of better intelligence, we may know the exact house, rather than just the block. That makes a big difference in the number of people you inconvenience."

The shift in tactics, which commanders began formulating last month, reflects the military`s delicate balancing act between maintaining the support of an Iraqi public that is increasingly restless over the continuing disorder and slow pace of restoring electrical power and water, and combating Baathist Party operatives, foreign fighters, Islamic militants and criminals.

With American commanders acknowledging that the presence of 140,000 United States troops has attracted foreign fighters and terrorists from outside Iraq, developing accurate and timely intelligence has become increasingly important to the American-led occupation.

"Ultimately, the people who are going to be most effective against the pockets of extremism, Baathist remnants and other threats to internal security will be Iraqis, not Americans," Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in Iraq, said in an interview on Thursday, the day before a car bomb in Najaf killed more than 80 people. "The vast majority of our operations are enabled by Iraqis."

But Iraqis had complained that the big sweeps the military had conducted as recently as mid-July were rounding up not only Baathists and criminals, but also ordinary Iraqis. As a result, General Abizaid and his top field commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, decided that the larger operations were becoming counterproductive. General Sanchez first raised the idea of changing tactics during an interview with The New York Times last month.

"We have to be as precise in our combat operations with ground troops going into villages as we were in our combat operations in the war with our precision-guided weapons," General Abizaid said. "We can`t be indiscriminate. We can`t just round up people and then sort them out. It makes no sense to conduct a military operation that creates more enemies than friends."

General Abizaid said developing better intelligence would be discussed by top military and civilian planners in Baghdad later this week in a major strategy session to review Iraq policies. American officials are also trying to accelerate the training of an Iraqi army, police force and civil defense corps, in part so those forces can establish ties to Iraqis who can provide additional tips.

"We`ll discuss all levels of security building within Iraq," General Abizaid, said, adding that a goal of this week`s meeting would be to rethink the allies` campaign plan. "Though it`s not my mission to build intelligence forces, it is my mission to achieve intelligence breakthroughs."

He denied reports that the American military or civilian authorities were recruiting former agents of the Iraqi intelligence service. "None of us are interested in having the bad guys on our team," he said.

General Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, said American forces had to be careful that intelligence provided by Iraqis was not simply to settle old grievances. He acknowledged that in some cases, this had happened and that American forces had made mistakes.

Commanders are using the new approach toward pinpointing enemy forces in operations against suspected guerrillas across the country. Two raids last week north of Baghdad were the first large-scale missions to use the tactics, commanders said.

"What we are doing is surgical strikes on more remote areas where we have not had a very large or enduring military presence," Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the Fourth Infantry Division, told reporters in Tikrit last week.

In one raid near Baqubah, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, elements of the Fourth Division focused on a network headed by Lateef Hamed al-Kubaishata, a convicted murderer and gangster known as Lateef. He escaped, Army officers said, but 24 others were detained, including seven Iraqis wanted in connection with attacks against American forces.

His gang had claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded outside police headquarters in Baqubah on Aug. 10, killing one American military policeman, Army officers said. Lateef is also accused of selling weapons, burning down the Baqubah courthouse to destroy criminal records, and killing a prostitute whom he accused of fraternizing with United States troops.

"Their primary focus is probably criminal activity, but they have attacked coalition forces through direct and indirect means," Col. David Hogg, commander of the Fourth Division`s Second Brigade, told The Associated Press last week. "As long as he is in place, we will not be able to establish the conditions for the Iraqi police to establish law and order in the area."

Colonel Shields, the military spokesman, said troops were increasingly using "cordon and knock" operations, in which a home or building is surrounded by American troops who then seek permission to enter accompanied by an Iraqi representative, rather than just kicking down the door.

But the military will not hesitate to use major force when necessary to bring down their foes. "When we have to be hard," General Abizaid said, "we`ll be hard."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 2, 2003
BAGHDAD
Iraqi Council Picks a Cabinet to Run Key State Affairs
By DEXTER FILKINS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 1 — The Iraqi Governing Council appointed a 25-member cabinet today to begin taking over day-to-day control of the government, as tension grew between American officials and the council over steps taken to protect its members against assassination.

The formation of an Iraqi cabinet is regarded an important first step in the effort to transfer authority to the Iraqis from the Americans, who have been intimately involved in running the country since Saddam Hussein`s government collapsed in April.

The Iraqi ministers appointed today are to take over important portfolios like foreign affairs, finance, internal security and oil. The group largely reflects the ethnic and religious makeup of the country, with a majority of cabinet posts going to Shiite Muslims, the largest religious group.

"The Iraqis are going take over these ministries and run them," said Ahmad Chalabi, the council chairman. "These are very independent people, and they are going to start issuing orders and conducting the affairs of state."

Yet even as the Iraqi officials began taking over the government, they clashed with American administrators over the issue of security. In a meeting today with L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator for the occupying forces, council members complained that the Americans were failing to adequately protect them. The complaints followed three car bombings in August, which killed well over 100 people.

Some who attended the meeting said the Iraqi council members told Mr. Bremer that they had become obvious targets for assassination attempts and that some of them were not being properly protected. One council member warned that several of his colleagues could be killed.

"The Governing Council could become a morgue," the council member told Mr. Bremer, said two people with knowledge of the meeting.

The meeting of council members and senior American officials was called to discuss security issues — for Iraq`s sacred sites and for the country as a whole, as well as for the council members.

Even in the aftermath of the deadly car bombings, some council members said, they are being left to protect themselves. Officials of the occupying powers here have said they are providing security to any council member who has requested it. But some members say the Americans have ignored their requests and left them dangerously exposed.

In a recent interview, Charles Heatley, a spokesman here for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupying powers` civilian administration, said any council member who asked for security had been provided with it. Aides to Mr. Chalabi said today that they had been sending their own bodyguards to jittery council members who did not have protection.

Efforts to reach Mr. Heatley tonight were unsuccessful.

Dr. Raja Habib Khuzai, a Governing Council member, said today that she had been pleading for days with American officials to provide her with cars and bodyguards, but that so far, they had failed to respond. In an interview, Dr. Khuzai said her brother had volunteered to become her bodyguard, along with three other men who have no training. She said she was paying them out of her own pocket.

Dr. Khuzai said the Americans had provided her with bodyguards several weeks ago, but had later taken them away. Lately, she said, she has been asking the Americans to train her guards if they cannot provide her with any of their own.

"They keep telling me they will train my men, but I have given them their names on 10 occasions, and they told me they lost the list," Dr. Khuzai said. "We are targets, you know. We could be next. I told the Americans I am very scared."

In the interview, Dr. Khuzai said she was making the two-hour drive to Baghdad from her home in Diwaniya in a car borrowed from the hospital where she used to be the director. American officials said they had recently taken delivery on a number of vehicles that they intended to give to council members. But Dr. Khuzai said the cars had not yet been delivered because they did not have license plates.

She said she had jokingly told a senior American administrator to go to the "thieves market," a local bazaar known for its stolen goods, to buy a few license plates there.

Dr. Khuzai said she had been given security for her home by Iraqi security officials, four Iraqi men who had received one day each of training. Her requests for additional security, she said, have gone ignored.

"The guards sleep most of the time," she said.

Other council members have expressed concern that they could be targets of assassination. Aides to Mr. Chalabi said, for instance, that they had recently apprehended a man near Mr. Chalabi`s compound who was carrying a rocket launcher. The man, they said, turned out to be a member of the fedayeen, the militia sent by Mr. Hussein during the war to carry out guerrilla attacks against American forces.

Among the other issues discussed at the meeting today was the possible formation of a large Iraqi militia to help bring order to the country and to hunt down die-hard supporters of Mr. Hussein`s government. In addition, a committee to work on security issues was formed.

Iraqi officials said today that they would probably wait until Wednesday to make the official announcement of the formation of the cabinet, after the completion of the funeral for Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was killed in the car bombing on Friday.

In addition to the 13 Shiites, the cabinet is composed of 5 Sunni Muslims, 5 Kurds, a Turkmen and a Christian.

The most important ministries were distributed among the country`s largest ethnic and religious groups. Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, was named foreign minister; Kamel Kilani, a Sunni Muslim Arab, was appointed finance minister; Nouri Badran, a Shiite Muslim, is the new interior minister; and Dr. Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, a Shiite and the son of an influential cleric who sits on the Governing Council, was named oil minister.

The Information Ministry, famous for its distortions under Mr. Hussein`s leadership, was abolished, while the council created a new Ministry for Human Rights.

Also today, the Arabic-language television station Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape it said was from Mr. Hussein, in which he denied responsibility for the bombing in Najaf. The attack killed more than 80 people, including Ayatollah Hakim.

"Many of you may have heard the snakes hissing, the servants of the invaders, occupiers, infidels, and how they have managed to accuse the followers of Saddam Hussein of responsibility for the attack on al-Hakim without any evidence," said the voice on the tape.

"The agents who hastened to level accusations should answer the people about the details of this accusation and about the truth of what they know."

While denying a role in the Najaf bombing, the voice on the tape did not mention the other deadly car bombings last month, the attack on the Jordanian Embassy on Aug. 7 and the bombing of the United Nations headquarters on Aug. 19. Investigators here suspect that both may have been the work of supporters of Mr. Hussein.

It was impossible to verify whether the voice on the tape was Mr. Hussein`s.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Compa

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September 2, 2003
Absent From the Korea Talks: Bush`s Hard-Liner
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS


ASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — When the United States settled down to sensitive talks with North Korea last week, one senior Bush administration policy maker was thousands of miles away — to the relief of North Korean officials and not a few State Department colleagues.

John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control, who recently said North Korea was a "hellish nightmare" in the grip of a tyrant, was barred from the negotiations by the North`s government, which called him "scum."

Mr. Bolton intended all along to have lower-level officials attend, his spokeswoman said. Mr. Bolton declined to be interviewed for this article.

But the fury of that exchange lingered over the talks and highlighted Mr. Bolton`s role in his 27 months on the job as an iconoclast in the normally cautious State Department. On topics from Iran and Iraq to Syria and Cuba, he has shattered diplomatic niceties and stirred anger within the ranks.

He has visited world capitals tirelessly, trying to sew together a global defense against weapons proliferators, to exempt Americans from the newly created International Criminal Court and to persuade Russia to halt its nuclear cooperation with Iran.

To his supporters, Mr. Bolton is a truth teller, a policy innovator who is liberated enough from the department`s clubby confines to speak his mind, even at the risk of upsetting diplomatic strategies. He is also said to be a favorite of the president.

"He loves to tussle," said Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former ambassador to the United Nations and an admiring former co-worker. "He may do diplomatic jobs for the U.S. government, but John is not a diplomat."

To his detractors, Mr. Bolton is a policy zealot who runs roughshod over the rules of diplomacy and undercuts his colleagues.

"Even the most forthright of us have to have a certain reserve, a certain respect, courtesy and understanding that you`re dealing with politics and not theology," said Robert E. White, president of the Center for International Policy and a former ambassador to El Salvador. "The whole point of diplomacy is to gain your ends without giving offense."

Mr. Bolton has been an important architect of a hardening American position that refuses to offer concessions to North Korea without a complete rollback of its nuclear program, officials say.

"This will not stand," Mr. Bolton said in a speech on July 31 to the East Asia Institute in Seoul.

"Some have speculated that the U.S. is resigned to nuclear weapons on the peninsula," he said, but "nothing could be further from the truth."

Even officials who agreed with Mr. Bolton`s position winced at his delivery. Richard L. Armitage, who as deputy secretary of state is Mr. Bolton`s superior, distanced himself from the speech.

Under prodding from conservatives and news organizations, spokesmen for the White House and the State Department later backed Mr. Bolton. Jack Pritchard, the State Department`s leading expert on North Korea, who has criticized the administration for failing to lay out incentives for good behavior from North Korea, has since quit.

Mr. Bolton, 54, would be at home in Donald H. Rumsfeld`s Pentagon or in the Bush White House. But the State Department is under the command of the more moderate and circumspect Colin L. Powell.

Some friends suspect that Mr. Bolton may be there as a representative of the president`s more unilateralist impulses and perhaps as a check on Mr. Powell`s authority.

"I don`t think the president intended to turn over the State Department to the secretary of state," Dr. Kirkpatrick said.

To one House Republican aide, Mr. Bolton is a breath of fresh air. "State Department functionaries are oftentimes gripped by a fear of doing something wrong," the aide said. "John Bolton isn`t like that."

But a Senate Democratic aide views him as a subversive force against diplomacy. "It`s Orwellian to me that he`s in the position he`s in," the aide said. "He`s the antithesis of who you`d want in that job."

Mr. Bolton`s candor raises questions about the nature of diplomacy, said Robert L. Gallucci, the dean of Georgetown`s School of Foreign Service and a critic of Mr. Bolton.

"Is honesty a good thing?" Mr. Gallucci said. "When you walk into a room and see someone who is a bit overweight, you could say, `My, you are fat.` It`s not usually a good way to start a conversation."

Mr. Bolton, who has been in and out of government for two decades, most recently emerged from the ranks of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research center with ties to the White House. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he struck up a friendship with Clarence Thomas, the future Supreme Court justice.

Mr. Bolton`s induction into politics occurred when, as a teenager, he worked for Barry Goldwater`s presidential campaign in 1964. After law school, Mr. Bolton established a relationship with Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican. In the 1980`s he worked on a campaign to counter voter registration efforts that were undertaken on behalf of blacks and organized labor.

He worked for the Agency for International Development under President Reagan, then was named assistant attorney general under Edwin Meese, where he struggled to beat back inquiries into matters including the Iran-contra scandal.

Then, as the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, Mr. Bolton in 1989 blocked Palestinian admission to the World Health Organization and Unesco.

More recently he led American opposition to the International Criminal Court, saying it could become a forum for anti-American prosecutions.

Mostly he has focused on terror and developing new ways to halt the spread of forbidden weapons of mass destruction, including a Proliferation Security Initiative.

Even as some officials see American power spread too thinly across Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, Mr. Bolton has thrown down the gauntlet before Syria, Iran, Libya and Cuba, warning them to heed the lesson of Iraq.

At times his arguments run beyond his supporting evidence, critics say. His charge last year that Cuba has a program to develop biological weapons was vigorously denied by Havana and criticized as unfounded by a top analyst in the State Department`s own intelligence bureau.

On at least two other occasions, intelligence services have stepped in to quiet Mr. Bolton, in one case saying testimony he was preparing was unverifiable.

Mr. Bolton seems undeterred and appears to revel in his role as outsider on the inside.

In an interview last year with The New York Times, he was asked about conflicting signals from the administration on North Korea. He strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called "The End of North Korea," by an American Enterprise Institute colleague.

"That," he said, "is our policy."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 2, 2003
Talking Is Better Than Fighting
By JAMES LANEY and JASON T. SHAPLEN


The Bush administration was right to participate in talks in Beijing last week over how to resolve the serious threat posed by North Korea`s nuclear program. The first round of talks, last April, ended acrimoniously. This round, which was expanded to include not only China but also Japan, South Korea and Russia, ended with an agreement to hold another round of talks within two months.

It may not sound like progress — especially when one considers that the other major news from the conference was the North`s brazen threat to test a nuclear weapon unless Washington agrees to sign a nonaggression pact. But if an agreement to talk further is evidence of the Bush administration`s new willingness to engage the North, then that is good news.

As the administration prepares for the next round of negotiations, it must decide what it ultimately wants them to achieve. This will be no small challenge for an administration that, despite tough public pronouncements, continues to be badly divided between hard-liners who have pushed to isolate the North (with the eventual goal of regime change) and other officials who favor engagement because they believe isolation could lead to a catastrophe.

Hard-liners viewed last week`s talks as an unwanted but unavoidable step in a policy ultimately intended to isolate the North in the hope of forcing the collapse of Kim Jong Il`s regime. This policy calls for negotiation to fail by setting an unrealistically high bar for success — specifically that North Korea unilaterally dismantle its nuclear program completely before the United States will even consider subsequent talks about its security, a nonaggression pact or economic support.

This position is unacceptable to Pyongyang for obvious reasons. And when the North fails to capitulate, so the thinking goes, the Bush administration will be better placed to turn to its allies and demand they embrace a policy of isolation, having demonstrated the North`s intransigence. At the moment, America`s allies are against isolating Pyongyang — a position they forcefully expressed to Washington again last week.

On the other side of the spectrum is the pro-engagement camp, which believes that engagement — backed by deterrence — is the only realistic option. This includes addressing North Korea`s security concerns in a meaningful manner. As distasteful as it may be to negotiate with North Korea after it failed to abide by the terms of the first nuclear pact it signed in 1994, this camp believes that ultimately there is little choice.

This position is based on two considerations. First, a policy of isolation will put a heavy strain on Washington`s relations with Beijing, Moscow, Seoul and, to a lesser extent, Tokyo, all of which have stated at one time or another that they want to avoid a showdown with the North (although Japan has recently demonstrated more of a willingness to support Washington). Second, Mr. Kim, the North Korean leader, is unlikely to go down without a fight.

The costs of a military confrontation are unimaginable — politically and economically. In 1994, the United States military commander in South Korea estimated that a war with the North would result in one million deaths (including tens of thousands of Americans) and cost the United States at least $100 billion.

The pro-engagement camp argues that these costs are too high, particularly as the United States continues to lose troops in Iraq and to spend $4 billion to $5 billion per month for the war there (in addition to the ongoing costs of the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror). Moreover, getting rid of Mr. Kim, as the hard-line camp intends, in no way guarantees that his successor will give up the North`s nuclear weapons.

President Bush must now choose between the hard-line and the pro-engagement positions within his administration. Although the administration has agreed to further talks, the president has largely abstained from making a clear and final decision.

His hesitation is understandable: if he favors engagement, he risks upsetting conservatives as he enters the 2004 election cycle. The dangers of isolation, however, are far greater. Under such a policy, tension on the Korean Peninsula could reach a point where America is drawn into another confrontation — one with potentially more severe consequences than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Failing to make any decision at all is also dangerous. Abstaining is essentially a vote in favor of the hard-liners (which may be their goal). The clock is ticking. Delaying a decision would probably take the president past the 2004 election, but the North Koreans are unlikely to cooperate with such political concerns. They will — as one would expect — continue with their nuclear program, including not only a nuclear test but also the reprocessing of spent fuel rods capable of yielding enough plutonium for five or six nuclear weapons in addition to the one or two the C.I.A. claims they already have. If the president waits until next year`s election to make his decision, a policy of engagement may no longer be possible.

To be sure, engaging the North is not palatable. However, political cover may be found in a reality, or dynamic, that did not exist in 1994. For starters, Russia and China, Pyongyang`s two most important allies, are now sitting with the Americans at the table. Today`s negotiations could therefore result in a more comprehensive, realistic deal than the 1994 accord; one which can be carried out more fully by all sides. Washington must recognize, however, that a comprehensive deal requires putting something meaningful to the North Koreans on the table.

The United States and North Korea are now at a critical point. A policy of engagement is the only sensible approach for Washington — not only to avoid a military confrontation, but also to prevent serious and lasting damage to our relationships with our Pacific allies at a time when our Atlantic alliances are badly frayed. Even if the North refuses to respond, the United States will be better positioned to win the support of its partners for a hard-line approach.

If there is one thing all parties can agree upon it is that future talks will not be easy. The United States will demand that Pyongyang make difficult concessions. It must be willing to provide something in return.


James Laney was United States ambassador to South Korea from 1993 to 1997. Jason T. Shaplen was an adviser to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization from 1995 to 1999.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

September 2, 2003
A Grizzly`s-Eye View of a Refuge That Oil Drillers Covet
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


ARCTIC NATIONAL

WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska

As I write this, I`m huddled in a tent on the tundra of the wildest part of America, about 175 miles above the Arctic Circle in the last great wilderness virtually untouched by humans other than Eskimos and Indians.

This fate of this wildlife refuge is to be decided by politicians in Washington in perhaps the most contentious debate about the environment today. Supporters of oil drilling make much of the fact that almost none of those who insist on protecting this refuge have ever seen it or ever will, and they sometimes argue that it is a frozen wasteland — even though their own visits consist mostly of staring down through the windows of a plane.

So I decided to visit for a week — boots on the ground, or snow — and backpack and raft through this pristine land now up for grabs. Assuming that my satellite-telephone batteries hold out, I`ll write about what the land is really like — and, on the way, make up my own mind about drilling.

Most of the terrain in the Arctic refuge is not beautiful in a classical sense. The Brooks Range is spectacular, to be sure, but most of the land in the refuge is not so much pretty as awesome. It is endless stark tundra and mountains, rivers and creeks, with scarcely a tree around.

Above all, this is harsh and inhospitable country. Early yesterday, I stepped out of my tent to find that I was being welcomed into September with flurries of wet snow. The wind blows in from the Arctic Ocean, and in winter the wind-chill equivalent is often less than 100 degrees below zero, the point where the charts end. There are no hiking trails here, for only small numbers of humans ever visit, typically in June.

But caribou and bear trails are everywhere. The Arctic refuge is one of the last spots that is pretty much as it was at the time of Lewis and Clark. Still, that can be an argument for drilling. This refuge is so isolated that almost nobody will be on hand to recoil at the sight of oil wells on the tundra. In contrast with more accessible bits of America`s outdoors, like the lovely Dome Plateau in Utah, where oil and gas exploration is also proposed, almost the only people who will witness the intrusion of Big Oil will be the wealthiest of tourists, who can afford to charter bush planes.

It`s also true that most of the Eskimos who actually live in the refuge favor drilling. They want better schools, better jobs and more comfortable lives, and most believe that oil drilling is the way to achieve that. Some resent the idea that American environmentalists 5,000 miles away want to lock them forever in a quaint wilderness, just for the psychic value of knowing that it is there.

But just south of the refuge, the Gwich`in Indians want to keep the refuge as it is. "Everybody here is against drilling," said Marjorie John, the storekeeper in Arctic Village, a Gwich`in hamlet of 120 people. "We want to protect the caribou calving ground. Those caribou are part of our culture. They are our culture."

Oil drilling, if it happened, would not occur throughout the 19.5-million-acre refuge (about as big as South Carolina), but in a 1.5-million-acre coastal strip. The Gwich`in depend for sustenance on the Porcupine herd`s 120,000 caribou, which calve in the coastal area. I understand the Gwich`in fears, but my guess is that the caribou would do fine with drilling.

The caribou herd in the area around Prudhoe Bay, the center of North Slope drilling, has actually expanded, and I spotted two caribou nonchalantly grazing right by Prudhoe Bay — while I haven`t seen any caribou since a bush pilot set me down in the refuge on Saturday on a riverside bit of gravel.

And yet! It`s hailing now against the side of the tent and my fingers are freezing, but I`m thrilled to be here. This land is the last untouched bit of America, and if we develop it we will have robbed our descendants of the chance ever to see our country as it originally was. There is something deeply moving about backpacking through land where humans are interlopers and bears are kings.

One of those bears, a grizzly, approached as I was preparing lunch, then lumbered away. I`m packing bear spray, a kind of Mace used to fend off grizzlies and polar bears. Walt Audi, a legendary bush pilot here, explained how to use the spray: "If a bear attacks you, just spray yourself in the face, and you won`t see it." So it`s hard to feel that this a place where humans are in charge. And that is precisely what makes the Arctic refuge so special.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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September 2, 2003
Another Friday Outrage
By PAUL KRUGMAN


When the E.P.A. makes our air dirtier, or the Interior Department opens a wilderness to mining companies, or the Labor Department strips workers of some more rights, the announcement always comes late on Friday — when the news is most likely to be ignored on TV and nearly ignored by major newspapers.

Last Friday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, known as FERC, announced settlements with energy companies accused of manipulating markets during the California energy crisis. Why on Friday? Because the settlements were a joke: the companies got away with only token payments. It was yet another demonstration of how electricity deregulation has gone wrong.

Most independent experts now believe that during 2000-2001, price manipulation by energy companies, mainly taking the form of "economic withholding" — keeping capacity offline to drive up prices — added billions of dollars to California`s electricity bills. A March FERC report concluded that there had been extensive manipulation of prices in both the natural gas and electricity markets.

Using methods widely accepted among economists, the California Independent System Operator — which operates the power grid — estimated that withholding by electricity companies had cost the state $8.9 billion. This estimate doesn`t include the continuing cost of long-term contracts the state signed, at inflated prices, to keep the lights on during the crisis.

Yet the charges energy companies agreed to added up to only a bit more than $1 million. That is, the average Californian was bilked of more than $250, but the state will receive compensation of about 3 cents.

Was the fix in? Given the Bush administration`s record of catering to energy companies, FERC isn`t entitled to any presumption of innocence. Still, the main problem seems to be with the commission`s approach: even in the aftermath of large-scale price manipulation, it demands givebacks of excess profits only when it can prove that those profits arose from a specific prohibited action.

This leads to very low settlements, for two reasons. First, while an industrywide pattern is easy to identify, intentional withholding by an individual producer is much harder to prove. Though investigators have found a few smoking guns — control room tapes, e-mail, memos — a power shutdown designed to increase prices is usually indistinguishable from a shutdown for genuine technical reasons.

Second, since withholding drove up prices across the board, each company profited from other companies` price manipulation. So even if FERC forced each company to give back the profits from its own bad behavior, it would leave most of the industry`s excess profits untouched.

State officials wanted refunds based on estimates of the overall overcharging that resulted from price manipulation. But my expert contacts tell me that the antiquated language in the Federal Power Act, the basis of FERC`s authority, probably doesn`t give it the power to enforce such refunds.

On the other hand, FERC clearly does have the power to abrogate long-term contracts signed during the crisis. Indeed, the commission`s March report contained a strong hint: "Staff recommends using the analysis in the report to inform ongoing long-term contract proceedings and other complaints that long-term contracts are not J & R [just and reasonable]." But in June, on a 2-to-1 vote (yes, two Republicans against one Democrat), the commission upheld those contracts. So California, the victim of one of the worst abuses of market power since the robber baron era, will get no redress.

So what does this say about electricity deregulation?

There is a theoretical case for a deregulated electricity market. But making such a market work, it`s now clear, requires at least three preconditions. First, it requires a robust transmission system, yet the recent blackout made it clear that we have now created a system in which nobody has clear responsibility for the transmission network. Second, it needs a watchdog agency with adequate powers to prevent and punish price manipulation; FERC doesn`t have those powers. Third, that watchdog must not be an agent of the very companies it`s supposed to be policing. Enough said.

I admire the virtues of free markets as much as anyone. But given what we`ve seen so far, any state government that lets the federal government prod it into deregulation is just plain crazy.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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RICHFIELD, OH (IWR Satire) -- President Bush today ushered in what he called: "a New Era of Indentured Servitude" for American workers.
The president (above) was sporting a of pair horns that he grew on his vacation for the Annual Satyr Rut, which will be held at the Crawford, Texas fairgrounds in October.

Below is the president`s speech in its entirety:

"Good afternoon Buckeyes!

On this Labor Day, Americans pay tribute to the spirit of hard work and enterprise that made this nation strong before we had the complication of labor unions.

I am proud to say that worker productivity accelerated last year at the fastest rate in more than a half century.

And do you know what drove this increase?

Well let me tell you, the higher productivity was do to the Texas style sweat shop conditions that exist in this country since I took office.

That`s why!

[Applause for the White House entourage.]

Workers everywhere are in a state of panic that they might lose their job to some coolie in China or alien serf from India.

The logic of aversion is so simple even even a dimwit like myself can understand it!

[Laughter from the White House entourage.]

Since there are no employment alternatives, people these days must work their asses off to keep the stinking job that they currently have.

In Texas, this is what we call having someone buy the balls!

Sorry ladies. Yuck. Yuck.

[Diabolical Laughter from the White House entourage.]

But it`s not all gloom and doom for America`s families, tax relief has come at just the right time.

For a family of four with a household income of $40,000, tax relief passed over the last two-and-a-half years means they get to keep nearly $2,000 more of their own money.

That`s $3.65 a day! I mean, that`s like a whole small jar of Cheez Whiz for Christ Sakes!

Bone apatite!

It`s just too bad American families need to work even more overtime just to keep up, and that they will be SOL when it comes retirement time, because there will be nothing left.

But hey, that`s the way GOP hair ball bounces! We can`t help it if the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer when we`re in charge!

But please don`t fret just yet, because next year, I will be introducing a new bill to Congress that will lower the minimum wage to 75% of what it is in Sri Lanka!

That will really make our economy boom!

And then there will be jobs galore!

So don`t worry be happy!

This is a New Era of Indentured Servitude!

Thank y`all for listening," said Mr. Bush.

[Wild Applause for the White House entourage.]

[Joerver]

The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
Heute 62 Toons, frische Ware, alles was ich nicht einstellen kann, was teilweise für deutsche Verhältnisse zu hart oder zu blöd ist. Ohne Warnhinweis für die Nannsen-Schill`s.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030901__062toons.htm

Bitte beachten das Archiv für diese Seiten wird nur ~2-3 Wochen erhalten.

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
Countries Resist Aid To Iraq
Few Pledge to Help Because of Security Fears, U.S. Control

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page A01


The Bush administration`s effort to secure significant pledges of money to help rebuild Iraq is meeting stiff resistance from many foreign governments because of continued concerns over security and the predominant role played by the United States, according to diplomats and aid officials.

The concerns, which were fueled by the Aug. 19 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and continuing doubts about the politics of the U.S. occupation, have dramatically lowered expectations for a donors conference scheduled for October. Some U.N. officials are asking whether the meeting in Madrid should be postponed until the United Nations can reinforce its team in Iraq and reach a more solid understanding with the Bush administration over the world body`s role in the battered country.

The implications for U.S. taxpayers could prove significant. With postwar Iraqi revenue running lower than the administration anticipated and expenses running much higher, the administration is seeking significant help from outside. L. Paul Bremer, the coordinator of the U.S.-led occupation, said in an interview last week that "several tens of billions of dollars" will be needed in the coming year alone.

France is the most prominent country that opposes endorsing the existing occupation or substantially underwriting Iraq`s expenses. But many other countries are also showing a "reluctance that is not just unfortunate, it`s disgraceful," said a senior foreign diplomat in New York, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said potential donors were in a "wait-and-see mode."

One U.N. official cited a "level of discomfort with charging ahead." The United Nations, which is expected to help guide the donor strategy, is grieving after the Baghdad bombing that killed its widely respected chief Iraq representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and at least 15 other U.N. staff members.

"The attack understandably has triggered a reassessment of what role the U.N. should be playing," said the official, who requested anonymity. "We are in the midst of that reassessment process internally: What does it mean for us in all areas -- reconstruction, humanitarian, political?"

Despite the obstacles, the Bush administration is keen to press ahead with the Madrid conference. A planning meeting is set for Wednesday in Brussels. Among the participants is a large U.S. delegation, along with coordinators from several countries and international institutions, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and U.N. Development Program.

A central desire of some countries is greater influence over the occupation of Iraq, part of a dispute that has roots in the bitter debate over President Bush`s decision to invade the country in March without U.N. Security Council approval.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell interrupted his vacation to travel to the United Nations to show his support after the bombing and to press member governments for more money and troops. A number of diplomats and analysts have said the chances of securing such contributions would improve if the administration shared political and economic authority in Iraq more widely.

"We`re going to have to make this a genuinely multilateral enterprise where they feel they have a stake in the management as well as in the risks and the costs," said James Dobbins, a former U.S. envoy to Somalia, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Countries will need confidence that the occupation is "working for a larger coalition, not just for Washington."

To such arguments, Bremer pointed out that 45 countries have made financial pledges to Iraq`s reconstruction and 15 of them belong to a Baghdad-based coordinating council that reports to him. During an interview last week, Bremer counseled against shifting significant responsibility to the United Nations or dividing the job into too many pieces.

"What exactly is it that happens on the ground that makes things better if the U.N. is in charge of reconstruction?" Bremer asked. "How does the situation on the ground get better?"

Dobbins`s answer: "You get more resources and you get more legitimacy."

U.S. officials and international aid specialists are exploring the possibility of establishing a donor fund independent of U.S. control, Bremer and others have said.

The sheer scope of Iraq`s needs suggests that international donations will be a valuable but limited source of funds, said Johanna Mendelson Forman, an Iraq specialist for the United Nations Foundation who recently returned from the country. "The kinds of needs Bremer is describing, which is basically gutting the whole electrical system and water system and redoing it, are not the kinds of things donor conferences are about," Mendelson Forman said. "That`s not the kind of price tag you`re going to see donors running up to."

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) agreed. As chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, he said U.S. taxpayers should expect to pay dearly. While criticizing the administration as "not being very up front about how much is going to be needed," Kolbe predicted "Congress will come through."

"I have not been expecting much money to be coming in from the foreign donors who have not consistently put up much money," Kolbe said.

The administration, anxious to mobilize international lending power for the Iraqi project, is pushing the World Bank and IMF to grant official recognition to the 25-member Iraqi governing council appointed by Bremer, officials said. The idea, according to a participant in the process, is to "recognize an Iraqi government as quickly as possible so the foundation is laid for lending opportunities as quickly as possible."

A World Bank staff member said, however, that a robust lending program must await "a government we can deal with." Another official cautioned that the Iraqi authority must have a credible economic policy along with international legitimacy. He added that the bank and the IMF are unlikely to come up with big sums fast -- and certainly not the billions Bremer is seeking.

Bremer said that meeting current electrical demand will cost $2 billion, while a more substantial overhaul would cost $13 billion over five years. A national system to deliver clean water would cost an estimated $16 billion. He said a "very intense dialogue" is underway with the Iraqi authority about opening the country to foreign investment.

The World Bank is compiling an Iraqi needs assessment that is expected to become the core document at the donors conference. Bremer said he is waiting to review the preliminary appraisal before making his own firm budget estimates.

World Bank analysts are surveying 14 sectors. They intend to develop a range of cost estimates by the end of September for upgrades in services from power lines and water pipes to schools and health clinics, said Joseph Saba, the bank`s Iraq country director.

"It is very like if you have a house fire and you now have to reconstruct the house," Saba told reporters. "You might want fiber optic in every room . . . but you will sit down and do a needs assessment of what your house needs to function at a certain minimum level. You then look at your resource package to see what you can afford."

Saba said he expects the Madrid conference to draw about 50 countries likely to contribute in idiosyncratic ways, one contributing school supplies, another irrigation equipment, another police cruisers or a bridge. The overall question, he said, is how to "get this country back on its feet and through a transition to sustainable development."

Kolbe favors the goals, but considers money and contributions from other countries "gravy."

"It`s important," he said, "but we shouldn`t be counting on it."




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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[/]Clinicians for the contingency aeromedical staging facility at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington move wounded soldiers to their air transport[/I]
washingtonpost.com
Number of Wounded in Action on Rise
Iraq Toll Reflects Medical Advances, Resistance Troops Face

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page A01


U.S. battlefield casualties in Iraq are increasing dramatically in the face of continued attacks by remnants of Saddam Hussein`s military and other forces, with almost 10 American troops a day now being officially declared "wounded in action."

The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues news releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported.

The rising number and quickening pace of soldiers being wounded on the battlefield have been overshadowed by the number of troops killed since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations May 1. But alongside those Americans killed in action, an even greater toll of battlefield wounded continues unabated, with an increasing number being injured through small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, remote-controlled mines and what the Pentagon refers to as "improvised explosive devices."

Indeed, the number of troops wounded in action in Iraq is now more than twice that of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The total increased more than 35 percent in August -- with an average of almost 10 troops a day injured last month.

Fifty-five Americans were wounded in action last week alone, pushing the number of troops wounded in action since May 1 beyond the number wounded during peak fighting. From March 19 to April 30, 550 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq. Since May 1, the number totals 574. The number of troops killed in Iraq since the beginning of May already has surpassed the total killed during the height of the war.

Pentagon officials point to advances in military medicine as one of the reasons behind the large number of wounded soldiers; many lives are being saved on the battlefield that in past conflicts would have been lost. But the rising number of casualties also reflects the resistance that U.S. forces continue to meet nearly five months after Hussein was ousted from power.

Although Central Command keeps a running total of the wounded, it releases the number only when asked -- making the combat injuries of U.S. troops in Iraq one of the untold stories of the war.

With no fanfare and almost no public notice, giant C-17 transport jets arrive virtually every night at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, on medical evacuation missions. Since the war began, more than 6,000 service members have been flown back to the United States. The number includes the 1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received non-hostile injuries in vehicle accidents and other mishaps, and thousands who became physically or mentally ill.

"Our nation doesn`t know that," said Susan Brewer, president and founder of America`s Heroes of Freedom, a nonprofit organization that collects clothing and other personal items for the returning troops. "Sort of out of sight and out of mind."

On Thursday night, a C-17 arrived at Andrews with 44 patients from Iraq. Ambulances arrived to take the most seriously wounded to the nation`s two premier military hospitals, Water Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. Dozens of others stayed overnight at what the Air Force calls a contingency aeromedical staging facility, which has taken over an indoor tennis club and an adjacent community center.

On Friday morning, smaller C-130 transports began arriving to take the walking wounded and less seriously injured to their home bases, from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to Fort Lewis in Washington state. Another C-17 was due in Friday night from Germany, with 12 patients on stretchers, 24 listed on the flight manifest as ambulatory and nine other passengers, either family members or escorts.

"That`s going to fill us right back up by the end of today," said Lt. Col. Allen Delaney, who commands the staging center. Eighty-six members of his reserve unit, the 459th Aeromedical Staging Squadron, based at Andrews, were called up for a year in April to run what is essentially a medical air terminal, the nation`s hub, for war wounded from Iraq.

At Walter Reed, a half-hour drive from Andrews, Maj. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the hospital`s commanding general, said there were only two days in July and four in August that the hospital did not admit soldiers injured in Iraq.

"The orthopedic surgeons are very busy, and the nursing services are very busy, both in the intensive care units and on the wards," he said, explaining that there have been five or six instances in recent months when all of the hospital`s 40 intensive care beds have been filled -- mostly with battlefield wounded.

Kiley said rocket-propelled grenades and mines can wound multiple troops at a time and cause "the kind of amputating damage that you don`t necessarily see with a bullet wound to the arm or leg."

The result has been large numbers of troops coming back to Walter Reed and National Naval Medical with serious blast wounds and arms and legs that have been amputated, either in Iraq or at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where virtually all battlefield casualties are treated and stabilized.

"A few of us started volunteering [at Walter Reed] as amputees in 1991, and this is the most we`ve seen ever," said Jim Mayer, a double amputee from the Vietnam War who works at the Veterans Administration. "I`ve never seen anything like this. But I haven`t seen anybody not get good care."

Kiley said that Walter Reed has 600 physicians and 350 physicians in training, plus reservists and the ability to bring in more nurses if necessary. The hospital "could go on from an operational perspective indefinitely -- we have a lot of capacity," he said. The hospital has treated 1,100 patients from the war, including 228 battlefield casualties.

National Naval Medical Center was most severely stressed during the major combat phase of the war, said Capt. Michael J. Krentz, its deputy commander. During that period, 800 of the hospital`s medical professionals -- a third of its regular staff and half its military staff -- deployed overseas to the USNS Comfort, a Navy hospital ship. The hospital called up 600 reservists to replace them.

Before the fall of Baghdad in April, the hospital had 40 patients a night -- mostly Marines -- from Iraq. Now the number is down to three, since the Marines have begun departing and will soon hand peacekeeping duties in their area south of Baghdad to multinational forces.

"Taking care of returning casualties is our number one job -- that`s why we`re here," Krentz said. "That`s our sworn duty, and it`s our honor to do so."

Kiley and Krentz said high-tech body armor and state-of-the-art battlefield medical procedures are keeping more seriously wounded soldiers alive than ever before.

Krentz said advanced radiological equipment aboard the Comfort enabled doctors to spot internal injuries and operate much sooner than they might have otherwise been able to, preventing fatalities. In fact, he said, patients had been stabilized so well overseas that there were no deaths of returning service members at Bethesda.

Kiley said he had seen several cases in which soldiers had been operated on in the field so quickly that doctors managed to save limbs that might otherwise have been lost. "But it`s a long haul even when they do preserve limbs," he said.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Democracy For Arabs, Too


By Joshua Muravchik

Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page A21


George F. Will dismisses the idea that it is America`s "duty" to repair the world`s broken nations [op-ed, Aug. 17]. But this strike against a fringe position seems merely a diversionary tactic, his real targets being Tony Blair, George W. Bush and neoconservatives who hope to bring democracy to the Middle East as an antidote to terrorism.

Such an approach is folly, says Will, because the social experience of Middle Easterners is so different from that of Anglo-Americans whose "attachment to freedom is . . . the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries that prepared the social ground for seeds of democracy." To believe that democracy can be made to grow in the soil of the Middle East is to believe that "either national cultures do not significantly differ, or they do not matter or they are infinitely malleable under the touch of enlightened reformers."

Although Will strikes a pose of historicity, he ignores most relevant experience. To be sure, it was 561 years from the Magna Carta to the birth of the American republic, the first modern democracy. But over the next 200 years, democracy spread to more than one-third of the world`s nations. Then, in the past 30 years, the trend accelerated sharply. Today, according to the authoritative count of Freedom House, 121 of 192 recognized states have freely elected governments.

Granted, only 89 of these 121 meet all the criteria for what Freedom House calls a "free" country. The other 32 are rated as only "partly free." These fledgling democracies may lack a reliable judicial system or a fully free press or may be plagued by corruption or civil strife. Nonetheless, the rulers are chosen in competitive elections, and there is reason to anticipate that democracy will deepen just as it did in the United States after highly imperfect beginnings.

Whether one counts electoral democracies or the shorter list of "free" countries, one finds that democracy has spread far from its cultural origins. There are 30 electoral democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (of which 21 are rated "free"]; 24 in Asia and the Pacific (of which 18 are "free"]; and 20 in Africa (11 "free"].

As the large number of African states on these lists makes clear, poverty has not proven to be an insuperable obstacle to democratization, although wealth and its concomitants -- a large middle class, high literacy -- make it easier. What does this imply for the Middle East? While there are no meaningful current data for Iraq, such oil-poor Arab countries as Egypt, Syria and Jordan have per capita incomes in the range of $3,500 to $4,000. Is this too low to sustain democracy? Hardly. Of the 121 electoral democracies, 27 have per capita incomes below $3,500. (Eleven of these are "free."] Looking beyond gross domestic product, the U.N. Human Development Index, which factors in life expectancy, literacy, education and the like, shows that Arab states score marginally above the average of developing countries and significantly above those of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Will`s focus, however, is on "culture," not economics or social statistics. Much of what he says aims at straw men. Of course "cultures . . . differ," but so do democracies: The American, French and Japanese systems are disparate, not to mention those of the developing countries. And of course culture "matters," but it is not politically determinative: Scores of countries have gone from dictatorship to democracy or the reverse without a sudden change of culture. Gradually, cultures do change, although perhaps not "infinitely."

A grain of truth in Will`s argument: The Muslim world has been little affected by the tide of democratization. Of 22 Arab states, none has an elected government. Among the other 25 predominantly Muslim countries, however, nine are electoral democracies (although only two are "free"]. This suffices to disprove that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Might Arab culture be?

Perhaps. But the same was said once of others. The State Department warned President Truman during World War II that "experience [has] shown that democracy in Japan would never work." In the 1920s, as Latin America and southern and Eastern Europe lapsed into dictatorship, analysts pointed to the sense of obedience and hierarchy inculcated by the Catholic Church. Today more than 90 percent of predominantly Catholic countries are electoral democracies.

Until now the United States has refrained from lending its weight to democratization in the Arab world the way it did with considerable success in Eastern Europe and Latin America. We won`t know what we can achieve until we try. The reason for doing so there, as elsewhere, is not "duty" but to make the world safer -- not least for ourselves.

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism." He will answer questions about this article during a Live Online discussion at 1 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.



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washingtonpost.com
Can Clark Beat Bush?


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page A21


If Gen. Wesley Clark decides to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, he will be relying on the same sentiment that has turned Howard Dean into the insurgent front-runner.

On paper, Dean and Clark could hardly be more different. Clark is a southerner, Dean a New Englander. Clark spent his career in the military. Dean is a doctor who has spent years in state politics. Clark is presumed to be a centrist along the lines of his fellow Arkansan, Bill Clinton. Dean has a moderate history, but has used the late Paul Wellstone`s mantra -- "I`m from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- to turn himself into a hero of the party`s left.

But none of these things matters nearly as much as the single overpowering fact of Democratic presidential politics this year: the deep, gut-level dislike that so many Democrats feel for President Bush and their passionate desire to remove him from office.

Up to now that sentiment has worked in Dean`s favor. Dean caught the attention of his party by opposing Bush on Iraq while the other major Democratic presidential candidates -- Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards and Rep. Richard Gephardt -- all voted for the war. Sen. Bob Graham voted against the war but did not grab antiwar activists.

As a former governor, Dean is an outsider who doesn`t have to answer for anything Washington Democrats do (or fail to do). Even when congressional Democrats strongly criticize Bush, their words -- to their frustration -- are rarely covered in the press or on television. So Dean, fairly or unfairly, developed the reputation as "the one Democrat willing to stand up to Bush," the phrase that has become a mantra for his supporters.

But if the Democrats` dislike of Bush leads some in their ranks to support his seemingly most outspoken opponent, it leads others to a pragmatic judgment: The party`s obligation is to nominate the candidate with the best profile for taking the fight to Bush`s turf.

That has produced a longing for Clark among some Democrats and a significant outpouring of support in chat rooms and on Internet sites set up to encourage him to run. This is another parallel to the Dean campaign, which has used the Web cleverly and aggressively. If Clark does get into the race later this month, this Internet infrastructure could be key to his chances of raising enough money to be competitive.

Listen to the Clark Web-heads and you hear the longing for a winner.

"Whoever wins the Democratic primary had better be able to neutralize the defense argument quickly, or they`re toast," wrote one correspondent. "This is why, before Clark, I felt that there was no way in hell that anyone could possibly beat Bush. . . . Only Clark can change the dynamic. Only Clark can change the conversation. Only Clark can change the direction."

"He is the man that can beat Bush," wrote another. "He can repeal Bush policies, help get the economy back on track, restore our political prestige and help make our country far safer."

And some of Clark`s Web supporters explicitly contrast his chances to Dean`s. One declared that Dean was "the vehicle for those simply furious with both the Republicans and the Democratic Party" while Clark was the candidate of those with "faith in the idea of American self-renewal." This writer went on: "to heal a divided nation, we will not begin by dividing it still further."

Clark, of course, could still decide not to run, though the sounds from his camp indicate that he will. No one knows what kind of candidate he will make. Up to now he has not been challenged by any of his prospective opponents. Kerry, whose Vietnam War hero status has given him special claim to being the best candidate to challenge Bush, has a strong interest in pushing Clark back.

And unlike Dean, who had months in relative obscurity to work out kinks in his approach and his campaign, Clark will be subjected to enormous attention immediately. This late in the game, he can`t afford rookie mistakes.

But if Clark does prosper, he, like Dean, will owe a great deal to George W. Bush. Parties desperate for victory do unusual things, including turning to generals. Clark presumably is studying the success of one of the most brilliant politician-generals in American history, Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Ike could rely on party bosses to ease his way. Clark and his fans on the Web will have to do a lot of the work themselves.

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A Foreign Policy Out Of Focus


By David Ignatius

Tuesday, September 2, 2003; Page A21


As America`s troubles mount in Iraq and North Korea, it`s time to ask what`s going wrong in the Bush administration`s implementation of foreign policy.

One answer is that the National Security Council system isn`t working as it should to forge consensus in a divided administration. A range of experts I consulted over the past month agreed that an unusually weak security council process is allowing ideological disputes to fester and is hindering effective policy.

Prodding contentious foreign-policy agencies toward agreement is the responsibility of the national security adviser, who has often been a Machiavellian figure on the model of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Sometimes ruthless bureaucratic politicians, they used the security council`s system of interagency groups as a ramrod to force a coherent line.

In contrast, Bush`s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has a reputation as a solid policy analyst but a weak politician. Confronting strong personalities and sharp ideological divisions at Donald Rumsfeld`s Pentagon and Colin Powell`s State Department, Rice and her deputies have often failed to achieve consensus. Even after agreement has supposedly been reached, ideological warfare continues behind the scenes, undermining policy.

"The interagency process is completely dysfunctional," says one Republican former Cabinet secretary with decades of foreign-policy expertise. "In my experience, I`ve never seen it played out this way."

Another Republican insider recalls that early on, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admonished his deputies that he alone would speak for the Pentagon in interagency debates. Lower-level officials were not authorized to resolve disputes. That stance effectively gutted the traditional security council process.

Bush has been quick to defend Rice. In late July, after critics charged she had made misleading statements about the Iraqi nuclear threat, Bush responded sharply: "Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person, and America is lucky to have her service -- period."

Whatever Rice`s political weaknesses, several experts agreed that the current disarray is less her fault than the president`s. "In a situation where there are Cabinet-level divisions, something`s got to give. That`s where I fault the president himself," says the Republican former Cabinet secretary.

The administration`s poor planning for postwar Iraq is a case study: The effort was hobbled by sharp policy disputes between State and the Pentagon that were never resolved.

For weeks, the two agencies and the CIA quarreled about the personnel and policies that would govern postwar Iraq. The Pentagon dithered in approving State`s nominees for the civil administration, which made effective planning almost impossible during the crucial months of March and April.

Adding to the confusion was the bizarre battle over Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, who became an ideological litmus test for administration neoconservatives. Chalabi argued that his group should be designated as a provisional government as soon as the war began -- and that elements of the Iraqi army and security agencies should be quickly dismantled. CIA and State Department officials who mistrusted Chalabi countered that parts of the Iraqi military should be maintained as a foundation for security.

The actual policy was a muddle: Chalabi lost his battle to create an immediate provisional government but won his argument to dissolve the Iraqi military and security apparatus. The military was duly cashiered, then partly reconfigured. A genial but weak civil administrator, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, was replaced by the more decisive Paul Bremer, but by then critical time had been squandered. Bremer delayed in granting power to an Iraqi governing council, then demanded it take more action.

Even Chalabi`s supporters argued that the central problem was the White House`s failure to impose a single strategy. What emerged was a vacuum, with no effective Iraqi allies.

A new confusion is whether Bush wants a multinational force in Iraq under U.N. mandate, as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suggested last week. It`s unclear whether Armitage was speaking for Rice and Bush, or freelancing.

A similar lack of clarity has hobbled efforts to deal with the North Korean nuclear threat. For two years, hard-liners blocked continuation of the Clinton policy of engaging Pyongyang. When the Bush administration finally reversed itself and decided to hold direct talks, it had wasted crucial time and allowed North Korean to push toward deploying nuclear weapons.

Even on the eve of direct talks last month, the administration seemed to be going in two directions at once, with Undersecretary of State John Bolton blasting Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical rogue" just as his colleagues were about to sit down at the negotiating table with him.

To meet increasingly dangerous challenges abroad, Bush needs to use the National Security Council better to forge coherent strategy within his fractious administration. Rice can fix a broken process, but only if the president makes some hard decisions about what he wants.

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++++++++++++++++++++++++
Smoke rises above a police complex in Baghdad following a bomb attack on September 2, 2003. A car bomb ripped through a major complex for Iraq`s U.S.-backed police force in Baghdad on Tuesday, wounding 14 people, witnesses and hospitals said.
Bomb Hits Iraqi Police; Mine Kills 2 U.S. Soldiers
Tue September 2, 2003 05:58 AM ET


By Andrew Gray
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb ripped through a Baghdad police compound on Tuesday in a suspected attempt to assassinate the U.S.-appointed police chief, wounding at least 14 people, officials and witnesses said.

News of the latest violence came as tens of thousands of Iraqi Shi`ites converged on the city of Najaf for the funeral of a top Shi`ite cleric, among more than 80 people killed by a car bomb on Friday in the most deadly attack in postwar Iraq.

In the latest guerrilla attack, two U.S. soldiers were killed on Monday when their vehicle hit an explosive device on one of Baghdad`s main supply routes, a U.S. military spokeswoman said.

Tuesday`s blast hit a complex housing a training academy for a new U.S.-backed Iraqi police force in the east of Baghdad, starting a large fire and sending a cloud of black smoke into the sky.

Brigadier Saeed Muneim, a senior police officer who inspected the scene, said Baghdad police chief Hassan Ali, a key ally of the U.S.-led occupying authorities, was the probable target of the attack.

Ali`s office was damaged but he was not in the building at the time, police said.

Hospital officials said 14 people had been wounded. A U.S. soldier earlier said one Iraqi policeman had been killed.

"A car bomb blew up inside the complex," Iraqi police First Lieutenant Nihad Majeed told reporters as U.S. military police sealed off the area and a military helicopter clattered overhead.

Guerrillas in postwar Iraq attack occupying forces every day and often also target Iraqis cooperating with them.

In Monday`s attack on U.S. troops, two soldiers serving with a military police unit were killed when their Humvee all-terrain vehicle ran over a homemade land mine, a military spokeswoman said.

The deaths brought to 67 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action in Iraq since Washington declared major combat over on May 1.

U.S. officials blame attacks on occupying forces and other targets on supporters of Saddam Hussein, still on the run nearly five months after he was deposed. But they have also made increasing mention of the presence of al Qaeda and other foreign fighters.

EMOTIONAL FUNERAL

In the holy city of Najaf, some 160 km (100 miles south of Baghdad), thousands of Iraqis gathered for the funeral of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, killed in Friday`s car- bombing outside the city`s revered Imam Ali mosque.

Some of the mourners beat themselves with small metal chains in a traditional Shi`ite ritual as they set out to meet the funeral cortege, which had traveled to Shi`ite holy sites around Iraq over the past few days.

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to pack the city for Hakim`s burial later in the day.

As usual in Najaf, U.S. soldiers kept a low profile to avoid offending Shi`ites in one of their holiest sites.

An audio tape purportedly from Saddam denied he had any part in Friday`s bombing, which many Shi`ites blamed on supporters of the former president. Iraq`s Shi`ites complained of persecution under Saddam, a Sunni Muslim.

Hakim was one of the key leaders in Iraq`s majority Shi`ite community and was regarded as a moderate. He had advocated cautious cooperation with U.S.-led occupying forces.

Najaf`s governor has announced the arrests of up to five suspects he said were linked to Saddam`s government.

FBI agents are helping with the investigation in Najaf. U.S. Marines will stay longer than planned in the city before handing over to a Polish-led multinational force, a military spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by Rosalind Russell in Baghdad and Joseph Logan in Najaf)
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[/]Tens of thousands of Shi`ites attend the start of the funeral ceremony for Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, August 31, 2003 in Baghdad. The funeral of al-Hakim, who was killed in a car bomb attack along with dozens of his followers, will include stops in the Shi`ite holy sites of Kerbala and Kufa before he is buried on Tuesday in the holy city of Najaf.[/I] REUTERS/Aladin Abdel Naby

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-khouri3…
COMMENTARY


Media Blamed for the Message
Wolfowitz is wrong in saying Arab coverage of Iraq occupation incites attacks on U.S. troops.
By Rami G. Khouri

August 31, 2003

BEIRUT — Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior American officials have accused the pan-Arab media of broadcasting material that they consider "incitement" that could lead to further attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The American administration in Baghdad temporarily shut down an Iraqi newspaper for the same reason recently.

It`s not surprising that Wolfowitz and friends are seeking culprits to blame for the daily, often deadly, attacks. But from my vantage point inside the Arab media in a region plagued by occupations and ideological battlegrounds, Washington`s "incitement" charges are childishly unconvincing.

The accusations show just how different are the U.S. and Arab perceptions of the difficult situation in Iraq. But they probably reveal even more about the tortured mind-set of Wolfowitz and vintage American neocons who successfully launched America`s war against Iraq but now find themselves flailing at enemy ghosts that torment and elude them. There is something pitiful about a person of Wolfowitz`s stature, experience and power responding to the regular killings of young Americans in Iraq by lashing out against Arab satellite TV channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.

Are the charges accurate and fair? On the strength of having watched American television and these two Arab stations daily for the last year, I think not. The specific complaints against the Arab media include:

• Calling the U.S. presence in Iraq an occupation and labeling those who commit acts of violence in protest against it as the local armed resistance. (Almost all the non-Anglo-American world uses this same language because it is deemed factually accurate.)

• Airing strong anti-American sentiments on talk shows and interviews. (The Arab channels also routinely give the uncensored American official version every day and night.)

• Showing how American troops` and administrators` behavior in Iraq often humiliates and angers ordinary Iraqis. (This happens and is rarely shown on U.S. television.)

• Providing political narratives and testimonies that contradict the American portrayal of daily events in Iraq. (The Arab channels offer far more extensive and comprehensive coverage of the region and thus include a wider and more accurate range of views than do most American media.)

• Allowing many hosts and anchors to express anti-American biases. (These are regularly countered by the views of American and other guests.)

At the technical level, the Arab media do exactly what the mainstream American media have done since March: They mirror and pander to the dominant emotional and political sentiments of their own public opinion, because they seek to maximize their market share of audience and advertising. In choosing, framing and scripting their stories, Arab and American television stations alike unabashedly and unapologetically cater to their respective audiences` sentiments: The flag-adorned U.S. media emotionally support the U.S. troops, and the Arab media are equally fervent in opposing America`s occupation of Iraq.

Like it or not, the media have become part of the arsenal of the political conflicts that define many aspects of U.S.-Arab relations. This is not incitement; this is digitized combat.

But although the Arab channels clearly offer an alternative point of view, and although they — like millions throughout the world — have made it clear that they believe the U.S. occupation of Iraq is wrong and is creating a powerful, spontaneous resistance movement, they do not and have not supported the violence against Americans. The correspondents and anchors of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have not praised the attacks or called for them. They are not the enemy; they are simply the messengers.

Wolfowitz`s incitement accusation takes us back to the strange time of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell. These intellectually ignoble Americans in their criminalized White House found it easier to attack messengers bearing bad news than to try to grasp the important antiwar message being transmitted.

In today`s Iraq, the Arab media are only the latest to be blamed by an increasingly desperate Washington for attacks against U.S. forces (having already named former Baathists, Saddam Hussein loyalists, local criminals, Iranian agents, residents of the "Sunni triangle" north of Baghdad, anti-American groups from other Arab countries and Islamist terrorists from around the world).

Politically, all of these and more are probably involved in fighting the American occupation army in Iraq. But as Associated Press` Niko Price more soberly reported from Baghdad last week, Iraqis who shoot American soldiers often are motivated not by love of Saddam Hussein or Islamist fervor but by their anger at the humiliating and degrading way U.S. troops have treated their families and communities.

The very simple reality of Iraq, as old as time, is the message being sent by most of the Arab media: Occupation begets resistance.

Calling it incitement because your occupation troops are the target of both a spontaneous and an organized resistance movement is faulty media analysis, amateur politics and Agnew- and Nixon-style sour grapes taken to those frightening edges of logic and truth where only nervous neocons dare tread these days.


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Rami G. Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, which is published throughout the Middle East

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Bush Foreign Policy Made Simple � and Easy to Fix!

by Karen Kwiatkowski


To understand problems, situations and events, we start with physical observation and data gathering, then test and compare, and when we still don�t understand what is happening, we check our paradigms and our assumptions. In checking those assumptions and paradigms, it often turns out our own experience, past cases that "didn�t fit" and ideas from other disciplines may serve as guides in understanding the new problem honestly and accurately.

While this scientific process works well, we also come to grips with problems using a more mundane and efficient approach, with less analysis, but getting us to the same place. It has to do with common sense and trusting our instincts. You could call this the "Teen Living 101" approach, more like a home economics method than hard science.

Today, we have the unusual situation where both supporters of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as those in the loyal and increasingly infuriated opposition, share the same concerns. We are all trying to figure out why this project of occupation and nation building for the Iraqi people isn�t progressing better. The question used to be why followers of Osama bin Laden "hate us." Now we wonder why a lot of newly "liberated" Iraqi men, women and children seem to hate us.

Like a mother who complains that her children never call "after all she�s done for them," we as a nation need to reassess exactly what we have done and how we are behaving before we can understand the results.

In the case of the toppling of the Taliban in response to the 9-11 attacks, the war plan was actually in place months before 9-11. President Hamed Karzai, former UNOCAL employee and longtime CIA asset emplaced after the toppling, is still protected by American bodyguards from his less enthusiastic Afghan brethren. Initially the bodyguard duty fell to United States Special Forces troops, but this service was privatized last year through a contract to the American company DynCorp, managed through the U.S. State Department�s Diplomatic Security Service. Poppies are again the crop of choice in much of Afghanistan, and still we seek the evasive bin Laden brother who went bad. One sometimes wonders whether we could save a little money and blood in Afghanistan by just having the Bush family ask their friends in the bin Laden family to help them.

But Afghanistan, and the details of what happened when, doesn�t consume us � it�s a Special Forces war, a secret war, and it�s old news, just like our permanent U.S. military bases in Hungary, Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, and southeastern Kosovo.

Bush�s war in Iraq, unlike in Afghanistan, agitates. Like an unbalanced, overloaded washing machine entering the spin cycle, what started as one thump, and then another, quickly becomes an undeniable pressing thump-thump-THUMP-THUMP, telling you that something must be done NOW before the energized chunk of metal leaps its moorings in a primitive anarchic celebratory victory dance. If you�ve never experienced this, take my word for it. Or you can watch liberated Iraq unfold.

We can analyze the poor planning, the smidgeons of intelligence used out of context and with a willfulness associated only with extreme youth or extreme senility, the political and business pressures, the role of Israel�s Likud Party in pushing for the takeover of Iraq. We can look at the evidence, increasingly abundant, showing Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz all lied to Americans at home, and possibly even to the military about what this Iraq invasion was all about and what it would ultimately entail in blood and agony and tax receipts. We can look at Iraq in the context of other activities of the Bush Administration (and Clinton before him in Bosnia and Kosovo). This analysis is time-consuming, scientific, exhaustive. Political scientists and historians will be doing a lot of this over the next twenty-five years. The results will be fascinating, but ultimately after the fact and too late.

But in the case of Iraq, the rest of us do have a more satisfying alternative. Teen living courses, designed to make boisterous teenagers safe and productive in kitchen and laundry room, aim for practical problem solving as well as prevention of surprises. The Jello "rules of the kitchen" can serve us well in truly understanding the problems we face in Iraq, how Bush got us there, and how to get better. Check them out:

Wash your hands with soap and water before you begin. [Oops. Dubya�s hands have never passed inspection � dirty-looking business connections, stains of Cheney�s frustration in 1991, sticky spots of the unabashedly pro-Israel leanings of U.S. defense decision-makers Wolfowitz and Feith, and a general taint of Rumsfeld�s aggressive arrogance all present and accounted for.]
Read the whole recipe carefully before starting. If you don`t understand any part, ask an adult to help you.Read "Cooking Tips," "Equipment," and "Cooking Words To Know" so you will know the meanings of all the words in the recipe. [Indeed. The adults who could help Bushco understand the recipe and the meanings of the words were right there in CENTCOM, in the Pentagon, the CIA, DIA and State�s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Too bad they weren�t listened to!]
Collect all the ingredients and equipment you need for the recipe before you start to cook. [This is always a good idea. Too bad it was politically unpalatable at the time. Come to think of it, it still is!]
Do one step of the recipe at a time. Do not skip steps. [Amateurs, whether in cooking or politics, tend to skip steps. The pièce de résistance, if I may, is the purposed nation-building in Iraq. Steps skipped included, but were not limited to, stirring in Iraqi self-determination, adding real (not imitation) Iraqi authority and control over the Ministries of Oil and Finance, and preparing a secure environment for Iraqi daily life and trade.]
Ask an adult to help you when a recipe calls for boiling water, a microwave, stove, oven, or a sharp knife. [Again, adults were available, but you know teenagers. Or the demented elderly who need the kind of special care not currently provided in the Pentagon.]
Measure carefully, using the correct equipment. [You would think!]
Use the size of pan called for in the recipe. [Granted, when one fails to follow steps 1, 2, 3 and 6, there would be debate on the size of the pan, or army, required.]
Follow the times given in the recipe. If a recipe says chill for one hour, be sure to chill the mixture for at least one hour. [I think the operative word here is "Chill!" We could have contained Saddam comfortably, safely and effectively for several years while working for regional democracy and Israeli-Palestinian peace, but then we wouldn�t have known what owning Iraq would taste like, and we just couldn�t wait.]
Clean up when you are finished! [Goes hand in hand with "You break it, you buy it!" and it is both good manners, and entirely unlikely to happen in Iraq anytime soon.]
Share your tasty creations with family and friends. [Well, the Bush-Cheney political corporation got this one right. In case you missed it, it happened while the rest of us we were discussing Step 1.]
It isn�t that complicated, and every one of us who has ever baked a cake, made Jello, or captured and reloaded a thumping washing machine can understand exactly how we got into this mess.

Two things get to happen. Bush and his incompetent administration have failed the course, and considering the damage done, will be expelled here at home if not in Iraq itself. Then, the rest of us (every congressman and woman, every relative of a soldier in harm�s way, and every American) need to reload the machine, throw out the ungelled Jello, and start over from where we stand, wiser and more cautious, following the rules of common sense and our basic knowledge of right and wrong.

The starting point is to wash our hands of the Bush leaguers. The hot water is already running, and suds are developing. Resignations are swirling down the drain already. All that�s left is a good scrubbing. With all the hard work that lies ahead for this country, at home and abroad, we should scrub with gusto and a sense of confidence, knowing we are finally doing something that makes sense and will deliver results.



August 30, 2003

Karen Kwiatkowski [send her mail] is a recently retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She now lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley.

Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com

Karen Kwiatkowski Archives


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THE NATION


Powers of Patriot Act in Eye of the Beholder
The law, symbolic of the war on terrorism, is under fire. But some of its supposed faults and strengths are actually misconceptions.
By Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writer

September 2, 2003

WASHINGTON — The USA Patriot Act, overwhelmingly approved by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks, is going through a national checkup triggered by lawsuits, grass-roots pressure and other factors.

Civil liberties groups are decrying its operation. Members of Congress are having second thoughts. The Bush administration and the Justice Department are defending their record in enforcing it.

But despite the growing and widespread debate, there remains confusion about what the law exactly does and does not do. With the passage of time since the Sept. 11 attacks, interest groups and others are scrutinizing the law and questioning whether certain provisions are too broad or are really necessary.

In the process, the Patriot Act has become a kind of a symbol of the war on terrorism, with vices and virtues ascribed to it that, in some cases, are wrong.

Few groups have raised their voices louder in the debate than the nation`s librarians.

Across the country, library groups and booksellers have been attacking a section of the terrorism-fighting law that gives federal agents new powers to obtain patrons` reading records. Previously, they could get library records only through a grand jury as part of a criminal investigation. Under the Patriot Act, those records, and many others, may also be obtained by the government in intelligence investigations through a secret tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where the standard of proof is lower than in criminal cases.

The American Library Assn. has mounted a lobbying blitz, saying the reading habits of ordinary Americans are being threatened. Members of Congress have introduced legislation to amend the law and kill the offending provision.

"The threat of terrorism must not be used as an excuse by the government to intrude upon our basic constitutional rights," Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) said in introducing one such bill earlier this year. The legislation, he added, will "protect libraries, bookstores and their patrons from unjustified government surveillance."

But evidence seems to indicate that the problem is less dire. Librarians and their supporters point to a study that shows that law enforcement officials have visited libraries hundreds of times since the attacks. What they don`t say is that the same study shows that the number of such visits was actually higher in the year before the attacks.

In the past, the government has obtained library records in cases such as the Zodiac gunman investigation in New York in the early 1990s and the Gianni Versace murder case in Florida. Without providing details, officials say they recently obtained a subpoena targeting a bookseller to obtain records showing that a suspect in a domestic terrorism case had purchased a book giving instructions on how to build a detonator that had been used in several bombings.

The Justice Department cites these and other examples as the sorts of misperceptions that are undermining support for the 2-year-old law, and the war on terrorism, although the department appears to create some misperceptions of its own.

Kicking off a speaking tour last month to shore up support for the Patriot Act, U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft highlighted a case out of the Pacific Northwest, where a local deputy sheriff tipped off a special terrorism task force and helped crack a suspected terrorist cell in the region. What isn`t stressed is that local officials have been helping their federal counterparts for years, and the terrorism task force was created well before the Patriot Act became law.

Some of the most controversial steps the government has taken after the Sept. 11 attacks have nothing to do with the law, including its decision to round up and deport hundreds of illegal immigrants.

The case of alleged "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla — an American citizen whom federal agents arrested in Chicago and are holding in a military prison without a lawyer or formal charges — strikes many legal scholars as the most dubious of the government`s post-Sept. 11 moves.

"That is phenomenally outrageous and unprecedented — and not in the Patriot Act at all," says James X. Dempsey, the executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil liberties group.

Other provisions that are being attacked have yet to be fully deployed.

In a report last week aimed at dispelling misperceptions allegedly created by the Justice Department about the Patriot Act, the American Civil Liberties Union warned that the law`s definition of "domestic terrorism" is so broad that it covers the activities of political organizations.

The ACLU says it isn`t aware of any case in which the law has been applied that way. The provision it is concerned about applies only to people who violate state or federal criminal law and who engage in conduct that "endangers human life," among other requirements.

Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU staff attorney in New York, said that his group does not condone that sort of violence and that the provision is "not something that is an immediate concern to us as an organization." But he added that the definition is so vague that, in the hands of the wrong prosecutor, it could end up ensnaring political protesters, including those working for antiabortion groups or certain environmental organizations. Others have said that it could include people who block traffic or climb a fence at a nuclear power plant.

One reason for all the confusion is the sheer complexity of the legislation — more than 300 pages of mind-numbing amendments to various federal statutes. In reality, some experts say, much of it is decidedly un-revolutionary.

"Most people have this idea that [the Patriot Act] is a huge, monolithic charter. But you get down to brass tacks, there isn`t that much to it, really," said William C. Banks, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law and coauthor of a popular national security law text. "There are a few, maybe a half-dozen controversial provisions, some of which I think are quite problematic.

"It seems like it is a very thin debate on both sides. I have always reacted to the Patriot Act — from its name to its implementation — as something almost cartoon-like."

Another problem is that the Justice Department refuses to release basic information about how it is implementing the law, making it hard to analyze the measure`s performance.

One of the most contentious sections of the Patriot Act — known as Section 215 — makes it much easier for federal agents to obtain information about people in the course of terrorism investigations.

The department has declined to detail the number of times the provision has been used, saying the information is classified. The Patriot Act requires that Congress be given such information, although that is on a classified basis too. The lack of disclosure has critics assuming the worst.

One thing the Patriot Act does is allow for greater sharing of information between criminal investigators and those who investigate spies and other foreign threats. The functions have been separated since disclosures in the 1970s showing that the FBI and others were abusing their intelligence powers to snoop on political dissenters and other alleged undesirables.

After Sept. 11, the administration argued that the separation of powers was impeding the ability of the government to capture terrorists, and the law was changed. But how the change has worked in practice is far from clear.

In his speech that mentioned the breakup of the alleged cell in Portland, Ore., Ashcroft said that "the Patriot Act`s elimination of the wall was critical in allowing all of the dots to be connected, and the criminal charges to be fully developed." The so-called "Portland Six" case was launched after a deputy sheriff in rural Washington state called the FBI after spotting a group of men of Middle Eastern descent with a cache of automatic weapons target-shooting at a gravel pit. One of the men has pleaded guilty, one remains a fugitive, and charges are pending against the others.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to elaborate about how the intelligence and criminal investigators actually connected the dots. He acknowledged that nothing barred local officials from talking to federal investigators before the Patriot Act was enacted. He noted that Ashcroft did not say directly that the Patriot Act first permitted such cooperation or was responsible for the terrorism task force being created.

But some lawyers in the Portland case question whether the Patriot Act has been as big a help to the government as Ashcroft suggests.

Much of the government`s case, for example, is built around the testimony of a confidential government informant — "the good, old-fashioned way that law enforcement has worked for eons," said Jack Ransom, a former federal prosecutor who represents one of the Portland defendants.

The librarians, meanwhile, say their fears are justified by history, if not statistical evidence. In the 1970s, the FBI had a program of keeping tabs on readers from the former Soviet Union and other countries, pressuring major university libraries to provide information about reading habits. The concern is that history is repeating itself.

The study cited by the librarians and their boosters, which was conducted by the library research center at the University of Illinois, suggests the opposite. It found 10.7% of the libraries responding to the study had received requests for information from the FBI and other law-enforcement officials in the year after Sept. 11. That compares with about 13.8% that received requests in the year before Sept. 11.

The Patriot Act includes a provision that bars libraries from disclosing whether they have received requests from the FBI and, in the survey, some of the libraries acknowledged that they did not answer because they were legally prohibited from doing so. But the number still wasn`t high enough to reverse the trend of declining requests.

"We do not have data to show it is a big problem," the study`s author, Leigh S. Estabrook, said in an interview.

The American Library Assn. says more research is needed before it will be convinced that there is not a problem. In any event, it says that the Justice Department could easily placate librarians` fears by disclosing the number of actual visits that the FBI has made to libraries using the Patriot Act. So far, the department has declined to do so.

"If the attorney general has that information why does he not share it?" said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the library association`s Washington office.

"We want to believe that the FBI has been aboveboard, and doing all the right things, but library history teaches us that this is not necessarily so," she said. "I don`t want to say that the study is no good. It may be bang-on. We just don`t know for sure."
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-resist2…
THE WORLD

Resistance in Iraq Is Home Grown
Nationalists and Islamists are among diverse groups joining the attacks. Foreign fighters are present in moderate numbers.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer

September 2, 2003

BAGHDAD — The men attempting to recruit a former soldier in the Fedayeen Saddam militia for today`s war against the Americans took him to a bearded sheik seated in a pickup truck.

They appealed to the mortar expert`s sense of nationalism and then to his religious conviction. The Americans have done nothing for Iraqis. They defile the homeland. Attacking the American occupiers is the only way to make them leave, the recruiters argued.

In their shadowy guerrilla war to drive American forces out of Iraq, hundreds of insurgents have organized into cells, especially in Al Anbar province west of Baghdad and Diyala province to the northeast, both strongholds for Saddam Hussein, the Sunni tribes that supported him and Wahhabi and other Islamic fundamentalists.

Despite the U.S. government`s insistence that Iraq has become the new battlefield of global terrorism, most of the resistance is home grown. The guerrillas are militants from the deposed regime, but they are also ordinary Iraqis opposed to occupation. They are ex-intelligence officers and farmers, militiamen and merchants, bombers and fishermen, according to more than a dozen interviews with Americans and Iraqis.

Added to this mix of Iraqis are the Islamic fundamentalists, especially Sunnis who have stepped into the power vacuum created by the war and its aftermath to take leadership roles in the resistance. Foreign fighters from Syria, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have infiltrated in moderate numbers, working alongside some of the Iraqi groups. The first arrests in last week`s bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, for example, were said to be of two Saudi nationals allied with two Fedayeen militiamen.

The Najaf attack and the bombings in Baghdad at United Nations headquarters and the Jordanian Embassy, all within 22 days, reflect a new, higher level of coordination. For the dozen or so daily ambushes targeting American troops, however, there is little indication of an overarching coordination uniting cells.

Instead, the groups remain largely localized and their weapons of choice remain readily available from the Hussein government`s leftover arsenals, according to Iraqis familiar with the resistance as well as U.S. field commanders battling it day in, day out. Bombs are made of dynamite or plastic explosives planted in discarded canisters, bottles or, more recently, the bodies of dead dogs left on the side of the road and detonated by remote control.

A guerrilla fighter from Fallouja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, said in an interview that his cell was not working with foreign fighters but is willing to do so in the future. For now, he said, his unit is adequately equipped and trained.

"The former regime left behind a huge military arsenal, and it`s enough to fight for tens of years," he said.

Criminal gangs in many cases have entered a temporary marriage of convenience with the groups, according to Iraqi sources. Within the epidemic of kidnappings plaguing Baghdad, some are staged to earn ransoms to finance attacks on U.S. soldiers. And insurgent chieftains often hire common criminals to pull off bombing or shooting attacks.

About 145 U.S. soldiers have been killed since major combat was declared over May 1; 282 have been killed since the war began March 20.

*

Islamic Alliance

An alliance with Islamic extremists allows guerrillas to cast their fight in religious terms, which also helps to distance them from the discredited Hussein regime. The puritanical Wahhabi brand of Islam, for example, is especially anti-Western. Adherents believe that any non-Muslim who trespasses on Islamic land is an invader who must be repelled. Its members have also clashed with the Shiites for generations.

"Our religion asks of us jihad whenever we are being occupied," said the guerrilla, who insisted on responding to questions in writing and declined to describe specific operations. Contact with him was made through an imam. "America now is an occupying country, so jihad is a must for every single Muslim in the East or West."

The guerrilla also revealed his Sunni bias against Iraq`s Shiites, who have gained power in the new Iraq at Sunni expense.

"The Americans are in harmony with the Shiite, but the Shiite will not be useful to them — their loyalty is to Iran," he said. "They are mistaken to trust the Shiite. Why such wrongful thinking?"

The mortar expert being recruited by the resistance said the bearded sheik who urged him to join the movement was a Wahhabite, probably from central Iraq.

"He spoke to me like officer to soldier, master to slave," said the man, who did not want his name used because he fears for his life. "We want you to teach your brothers how to use the mortar," the man told him. "Money is no object."

The mortar expert, 26 and unmarried, said he refused to go along with his recruiters when they approached him a final time the day after Hussein`s sons, Uday and Qusai, were killed by American soldiers. Angrily, the sheik branded him a traitor who deserved to die. He has gone into hiding.

His efforts to pass information to the American military, he said, were rebuffed, mostly because he could not provide the addresses of his recruiters.

Mortars are notoriously imprecise weapons. The expert, a stocky man who chain smokes out of nervousness, said he received top honors in the Fedayeen because he could hit a tank at 400 yards. The sheik`s interest in mortars suggested that the insurgency was expanding its repertoire of targets from convoys — a moving target against which a remote-controlled bomb is more useful — to fixed installations such as military bases.

To battle the insurgents, U.S. troops have launched hundreds of raids across central Iraq, rounded up numerous suspects and confiscated tons of weaponry and ammunition.

On Aug. 1, U.S. forces acting on a tip raided a Baghdad hotel and captured two men suspected of having ties to Ansar al Islam, a radical militant organization based primarily in the north. As the soldiers searched, the hotel proprietor alerted the Americans to four additional men from the same network who had just checked in.

The military emerged with six suspects identified as part of a financing cell for Ansar. Based on information from the men, additional raids were conducted in the city of Mosul and in Saudi Arabia, said Army Col. Rob Baker, commander of the 1st Armored Division`s 2nd Brigade, which oversees a large part of central Baghdad.

The significance of the raid was the confirmation that elements of Ansar — which U.S. and Kurdish forces pounded during the war — have returned and reached the Iraqi capital, something that top Pentagon officials had recently asserted.

The arrests had the bonus of supplying intelligence that enabled U.S. forces to pursue other leads, a rare event because of the compartmentalized nature of the cells.

"You take one cell down, it doesn`t necessarily lead to a series of takedowns," Baker said.

*

Dwindling Patience

Hardly a day goes by in which U.S. soldiers don`t capture military materiel. On Aug. 15, for example, one raid turned up 123 pounds of plastic explosives, seven rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 47 warheads. Baker keeps a confiscated RPG on top of the television in his office.

Interrogations of suspected resistance fighters have further persuaded the military of the disparate nature of their attackers. "One claimed he was doing it for Allah," Baker said. "Another claimed he was doing it for money."

Army Maj. Tony Aguto, a commander at the American base at Ramadi, deep in the hostile Sunni heartland, said his forces have captured numerous foreign infiltrators who appear to be bringing money but not weapons. Aguto`s jurisdiction is an immense swath of western Iraq, including the porous borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The volume of people illegally crossing is huge, he said. The U.S. military says Iraq`s borders are being patrolled by 4,700 Iraqi guards but that 25,000 are needed.

Hostility from local townspeople has diminished in the four months his unit has been stationed in Ramadi, Aguto said, but the concentrated mortar and grenade attacks have increased. "What I`m seeing is not coordinated region to region," he said. "I see local attacks, coordinated by five or six guys with [improvised bombs] or AK-47s. We are weeding them out of our area."

Purported resistance fighters have sent videotaped messages to several Arabic-language television stations. Wearing checked kaffiyehs and brandishing rifles, they use names like Muhammad`s Second Army and vow to eject the occupier.

The insurgents are able to blend into their villages and towns, eluding capture, thanks largely to tribal networks and ancient friendships. Those connections also help pay their bills.

"It was a mistake to let Saddam sit and rule us as he did, and not resist," said the affluent manager of an import-export business from Fallouja. "We won`t make that mistake again."

The list of Iraqis` grievances against their occupiers is long and accented by unrealistic expectations and cultural xenophobia. Rather than feeling safe and free, Iraqis feel less secure than ever. They accuse soldiers of humiliating their men in raids and searches and abusing their women.

So far, most religious leaders have discouraged violence against the U.S.-led forces and have urged followers to give the Americans time. But each new disappointment and each new outrage erodes such restraint.

"After this occupation, the American government became the enemy," said Sheik Annas Mahmoud Aisawi, an imam from Fallouja who was leading prayers recently in Baghdad`s Gilani mosque.

"If the Americans do not keep their promises of allowing Iraqis to govern themselves and restoring security, then Iraqis must find a solution. They cannot be motionless and surrender.

"We tell our people they must be patient, but patience will not last."



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY


Bush Was All Too Willing to Use Émigrés` Lies
American experts urged the White House to be skeptical, but they hit a stone wall.
Robert Scheer

September 2, 2003

Oops. There are no weapons of mass destruction after all. That`s the emerging consensus of the second team of weapons sleuths commanded by the U.S. in Iraq, as reported last week in the Los Angeles Times. The 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group found what the first wave of U.S. military experts and the United Nations inspectors before them discovered — nada.

Nothing, not a vial of the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin or the 25,000 liters of anthrax or an ounce of the materials for the 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent claimed by George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech as justification for war. Nor any sign of the advanced nuclear weapons program, a claim based on a now-admitted forgery. Nor has anyone produced any evidence of ties between the deposed Hussein regime and the Al Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11.

The entire adventure was an immense fraud.

"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," a senior U.S. weapons expert who worked with the Iraq Survey Group told The Times. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn`t find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."

How distressing that it turns out to be Bush, leader of the world`s greatest democracy, who is the true master of denial and deception, rather than Hussein, who proved to be a paper tiger. Bush is such a master at deceiving the American public that even now he is not threatened with the prospect of impeachment or any serious congressional investigation into the possibility that he led this nation into war with lies.

But lie he did, at the very least in the crucial matter of pushing secret evidence that even a president of his limited experience had to know was so flimsy as to not be evidence at all. U.S. intelligence officials now say the administration was lied to by Iraqi émigrés.

That excuse for the U.S. intelligence failure in Iraq would be laughable were the circumstances not so appalling. It means Bush ignored all the cautions of career diplomats and intelligence experts in every branch of the U.S. government over the unsubstantiated word of Iraqi renegades.

Clearly, the administration, from the president on down, did not want expert advice and intelligence that would have undermined its excuse for invading Iraq. This was a shell game from beginning to end in which Americans` legitimate fear of terrorism after Sept. 11 was almost immediately and cynically exploited by the neoconservative gang that runs U.S. foreign policy.

American soldiers standing guard over the White House`s imperial ambitions — a new Middle East as linchpin to a new world order — are now being shot like fish in a barrel.

Had Congress dared question Bush`s claim of an immediate Iraqi military threat, there would have been no excuse for invasion. But Congress is kept on a tight leash by Republican leaders, subverting its basic role as a check and balance on executive power. Shame on congressional Democrats, especially those running for president, who went along with this disgusting charade.

In the disarray and dissolution of the U.S. role as leader of the free world, we sadly witness America`s pathetic and isolated effort to rule Iraq with some of the same émigrés who deceived us with the false information that led us into a war that suited their ambitions.

One of those Iraqi exile leaders who clearly misled the U.S., Ahmad Chalabi, is now a senior figure in the fig-leaf Iraqi shadow government in U.S.-colonized Baghdad. Chalabi is a fugitive from Jordan, where he was convicted of major financial fraud, and he has no real base of support in Iraq. But Bush still backs him, trafficking all too easily with a liar who tells him what he wants to hear.

The British public, raised on a higher standard of official honesty, is properly shocked. Prime Minister Tony Blair is in deep trouble as Parliament and a high judge are embarked on a truth-finding investigation into their government`s rationale regarding the reasons for war. On Friday, Blair`s media spokesman, Alistair Campbell, accused by the BBC of "sexing up" the intelligence data used to justify going to war with Iraq, suddenly resigned.

The Brits don`t like being fooled. That`s not the case in the United States, where for too many pundits and politicians, accepting official mendacity has become a mark of political sophistication.

More American soldiers have died since Bush declared the war over than during the war itself. This misadventure is costing nearly $4 billion a month just for the troops, and billions more for reconstruction by U.S. companies like Dick Cheney`s old firm Halliburton. But too many Americans betray the proud tradition of an independent citizenry by buying into the "aw shucks" irresponsibility of a president who daily does a grave injustice to the awesome obligations of the office that he has sworn — in the name of God, no less — to uphold.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/137524_labored.html

Bush`s economy is `bumping along`
Tuesday, September 2, 2003

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

President Bush`s visit to Richfield, Ohio, yesterday was the first sentence in a long conversation this country needs to have about the economy.

Labor Day is the traditional kickoff of the presidential campaign season -- a 15-month debate about the country`s direction.

Voters usually put the economy -- and especially jobs -- at the top of that list and that portends trouble for the Bush re-election effort.

Going into the campaign, the nation`s unemployment rate stands at a nine-year high of 6.2 percent with some 9 million Americans officially looking for work.

Already Team Bush says the recovery is underway -- touting tax cuts and improving data.

"Obviously, the economic recovery is not as strong as we would like, but the trend lines are positive," Labor Secretary as Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said yesterday on CBS`s "The Early Show."

We hope she and the president are right. In fact two words we`d like to see never used in tandem are "jobless recovery."

There can be no recovery for most Americans unless there`s a stronger employment base.

The president told workers in Ohio that despite of everything the "economy was still bumping along." So, the president said, "we passed tax relief and we lowered taxes once again to create jobs. When you lower taxes, people have more money ... they tell me it was a shallow recession because of the tax relief."

We disagree.

And, we think it`ll be jobs -- not tax relief -- that will be the theme of the campaign ahead.

© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Nochmals diesen Artikel vom Freitag aus der NYTimes.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/137530_krugman02.html

War is expensive, after all
Tuesday, September 2, 2003

By PAUL KRUGMAN
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

It`s all coming true. Before the war, hawks insisted that Iraq was a breeding ground for terrorism. It wasn`t then, but it is now. Meanwhile, administration apologists blamed terrorists, not tax cuts, for record budget deficits. In fact, before the war terrorism-related spending was relatively small -- less than $40 billion in fiscal 2002. But the costs of a "bring `em on" foreign policy are now looming large indeed.

The direct military cost of the occupation is $4 billion a month, and there`s no end in sight. But that`s only part of the bill.

This week Paul Bremer suddenly admitted that Iraq would need "several tens of billions" in aid next year. That remark was probably aimed not at the public but at his masters in Washington; he apparently needed to get their attention.

It`s no mystery why. The Coalition Provisional Authority, which has been operating partly on seized Iraqi assets, is about to run out of money. Initial optimism about replenishing the authority`s funds with oil revenue has vanished: Even if sabotage and looting subside, the dilapidated state of the industry means that for several years much of its earnings will have to be reinvested in repair work.

At a deeper level, the wobbling credibility of the occupation undermines that occupation`s financing. American officials still hope to raise money by selling off state-owned enterprises to foreign investors, though they have backed off on proposals to sell power plants and other utilities. But after the bombing of U.N. headquarters, who will buy? Officials have also floated the idea of pledging future oil revenues in return for loans, but it`s far from clear whether an occupying power has the right to make such deals, let alone whether they would be honored by whoever is running Iraq a few years from now.

So Bremer was telling his masters that they could no longer fake it: He needs money, now.

The biggest cost of the Iraq venture, however, may not be Bremer`s problem; it may not even come in Iraq. Our commitment of large forces there creates the need for a bigger military, even as it degrades the effectiveness of our existing forces.

These days it`s hard to find a military expert not reporting to Donald Rumsfeld who thinks we have enough soldiers in Iraq. But to those who say, "Send in more troops," the answer is, "What troops?"

Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army`s chief of staff, prophetically warned that the postwar occupation would require more soldiers than the war itself. In his farewell address he made a broader point, that if we`re going to do this sort of thing, we need a bigger military: "Beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army."

The rule of thumb, according to military experts, is that except during crises, only one brigade in three should be deployed abroad. Yet today 21 of the Army`s 33 combat brigades are deployed overseas, 16 of them in Iraq. This puts enormous stress on the troops, who find that they have only brief periods of rest and retraining between the times spent in harm`s way. For example, most of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne that is about to go to Iraq returned from Afghanistan only six months ago.

So unless we can somehow extricate ourselves from Iraq quickly, or persuade other countries to bear a lot more of the burden, we need a considerably bigger military. And that means spending a lot more money.

For now, the administration is in denial. "There will be no retreat," President Bush says -- Churchillian words, but where are the resources to back them up?

Rumsfeld won`t admit that we need more troops in Iraq or anywhere else. We could use help from other countries, but it`s doubtful whether the administration will accept the kind of meaningful power-sharing that might lead to a new Security Council resolution on Iraq, which might in turn bring in allied forces.

Still, even the government of a superpower can`t simultaneously offer tax cuts equal to 15 percent of revenue, provide all its retirees with prescription drugs and single-handedly take on the world`s evildoers -- single-handedly because we`ve alienated our allies. In fact, given the size of our budget deficit, it`s not clear that we can afford to do even one of these things. Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they`ll have quite a mess to clean up.



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Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times. Copyright 2003 New York Times News Service. E-mail: [e-mail]

© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Barnstorming for labor`s support
ANALYSIS: Widening cry against GOP election tactics
Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief
Tuesday, September 2, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/02/CONS…


Washington -- Of all the arguments advanced by Gov. Gray Davis to fight the recall, none resonates more strongly with Democrats coast-to-coast than his assertion that Republicans are engaged in a systematic effort to steal elections.

The anger that began over former President Bill Clinton`s impeachment -- and intensified after the contested 2000 presidential election -- has solidified into an unshakeable belief among the party`s faithful that the other side has abandoned rules of fair play.

The charge, which is gaining favor among some scholars and nonpartisan observers, has become a staple of Democratic speeches, opinion pieces and conversations. Strategists expect, no matter what the recall outcome, it will become a potent rallying cry heading into the 2004 presidential campaign.

"People are furious over what is going on," said Molly Beth Malcolm, chairwoman of the Texas Democratic Party. "Republicans don`t want a two-party system. This truly is an attitude of `masters of the universe. We`re in control and nobody can stop us. We`ll do whatever we want, and we don`t care what happens in the aftermath.` "

Bush`s Florida victory in 2000 "validated their tactics," said Bob Poe, who was chairman of the Florida Democratic Party at the time. "It emboldened them, and now we`re seeing more and more of it."

Democrats, whose mastery of exploiting campaign finance rules and White House fund raising prompted congressional hearings into their own tactics in the mid-1990s, acknowledge that they, too, play hardball politics. But they decry recent Republican maneuvers -- impeachment, recall, lawsuits and redrawn congressional boundaries -- as a more fundamental assault on the two-party system.

"I`m beginning to think," said comedian Bill Maher in comments being passed around by Democrats, "that Republicans will do anything to win an election -- except get the most votes."

Democrats say the recall is only the latest Republican effort to overturn the will of the voters:

-- Republicans, after losing the 1996 presidential election, defied public opinion by impeaching a president for only the second time in history.

-- With the outcome of the 2000 presidential contest in the balance, Republicans successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to stop a recount in Florida that they feared would deprive George W. Bush of the presidency.

-- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, led an effort this year to reopen the state`s congressional boundaries -- traditionally redrawn every 10 years -- to provide Republicans with as many as six more congressional seats. Democratic legislators, who fled the state to prevent the matter from coming to a vote, are now facing threats of fines of over $50,000 per senator and other reprisals from the GOP majority.

-- Colorado Republicans, concerned after GOP Rep. Bob Beauprez won election in 2002 by just 121 votes, redrew district lines to add nearly 40,000 more Republicans to his district.

"This recall is bigger than California," Davis said in his statewide address from UCLA two weeks ago. "What`s happening here is part of an ongoing national effort to steal elections Republicans cannot win."

Republicans say that there is no national effort, and that the recall would not have been possible without 1.6 million signatures from California voters of all political persuasions.

"It sounds like Gray Davis is attempting, as Hillary Clinton did, to blame his problems on some `vast right-wing conspiracy,` rather than taking responsibility," said Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.

In each instance, Republicans say they are simply reflecting the will of the voters and pursuing legal means to push their candidates. They point to the Democrats` own legal efforts to challenge Florida`s certified results in 2000, and to the party`s controversial replacement of Sen. Bob Torricelli on the New Jersey ballot last year just 36 days before the election.


A PARTISAN BATTLE
The Democratic accusations, they say, stem from a tactical decision to try to turn the California recall into a partisan battle rather than a referendum on Davis` record, and from frustration after losing the White House, and majorities in Congress and state government.

"They are in an unfamiliar situation," said Cliff May, who was the Republican National Committee`s communications director from 1997 to 2001. "They don`t like it. They are angry about it. And they are screaming bloody murder in response to it."

But some scholars and observers not affiliated with either party support the Democratic assertion that Republicans are engaged in an unprecedented push for electoral advantage.

"There has never been a use of power to this extent, in this magnitude, to change the whole structure of politics," said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University. "There is a concerted attempt to use whatever power they have to increase Republican majorities in key states as far as the eye can see."

What distinguishes the recent GOP efforts from past political plays is the focus on reshaping the playing field itself.

"They are trying to take a closely divided country and build the base for a national political majority, not so much by winning over public opinion but by maximizing the rules of the process to shore up political power," said Richard Murray, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

In a recent editorial in the stridently nonpartisan Governing Magazine, a trade journal for 66,000 elected officials, executive editor Alan Ehrenhalt said he tried hard to come up with similar Democratic "horror stories" to balance an editorial titled "Republicans behaving badly."

"The reality is that most of the serious outrages lately have come from the GOP side of the aisle," Ehrenhalt wrote. "It seems to stem from visceral resentment at the opposition party having any power."


FOSTERING DISRESPECT
Experts offer various explanations for the Republican behavior.

Ehrenhalt said that disdain toward government may foster a disrespect for institutions held more widely by Republicans than Democrats.

"When you don`t believe in government too much in the first place, you are less committed to the process of an orderly management of government," Ehrenhalt said.

Lichtman said that modern Republicans are driven by a religious-like fervor that makes them more zealous than Democrats.

"The Republican Party is on a mission and the Democratic Party isn`t. Republicans feel they are the party of morality, goodness, truth and light, and whatever means are necessary to promote morality, goodness, truth and light, they are going to adopt," Lichtman said.

Other scholars point to the Republicans` newfound position of power, and suggest that they are doing nothing different than Democrats did when they were in control.

"All politicians play hardball. Politics is a form of warfare," said John Pitney, a professor of government at the Claremont McKenna College and the author of the book, "The Art of Political Warfare."

Pitney, who rejects Davis` assertion that Republicans are trying to steal an election, said the string of Republican maneuvers is a reflection of their advance in power, which has given them the opportunity to redraw boundaries in Texas and Colorado, and embark on a more aggressive electoral campaign.

"It`s not because they`ve suddenly become more warlike. It`s because power has given them more weapons and ammunition," Pitney said.

Many Democrats accept it on faith that the Republican efforts are being centrally planned from the White House and the party`s Washington headquarters.

"I smell a national effort," said Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore`s campaign manager in the 2000 election. "There`s no question," said Texas` Malcolm.

"Absolutely," said Florida`s Poe. "This is really an effort to destabilize California politically for presidential politics."


A LOADED WORD
Neutral observers are more skeptical, though several agree that the events are not unconnected.

"Conspiracy is a loaded word," said Lichtman. "I`m not saying it`s evil. But there is a concerted effort on behalf of the conservative right to take advantage of this moment. These are definitely not random events."

By galvanizing the Democratic base, some party strategists see a silver lining in the California turmoil.

"Republicans have done for the Democratic Party what we haven`t been able to do for ourselves in a long, long time," said Malcolm.

"It is firing up the base," said Ann Lewis, who served as Clinton`s communications adviser during his impeachment and who is now the Democratic National Committee`s point person in California.

"Nationally, I think people see what (Republicans are doing) in California as dangerous political strategy, and one that must be stopped."

Republicans say such a strategy will fail.

"If Democrats persist in offering up messages of protest and pessimism, rather than offering solutions to the issues people care about . . . they will continue to see things like the recall effort in California," Iverson said.

E-mail Marc Sandalow at [e-mail].

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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The architect`s rendering of the new terminal

Transbay Terminal dream switches to a faster track
Project takes long strides, though still has far to go
Michael Cabanatuan, John King, Chronicle Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 2, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/09/02/M…


It`s hard to look at the battered, dreary Transbay Terminal on Mission Street and imagine it reborn as San Francisco`s answer to Grand Central station.

But 36 years after Bay Area politicians started talking about such a vision,

crucial pieces are snapping into place. It`s beginning to look as if the $1.7 billion project might become reality within a decade -- even to skeptics who once dismissed the idea as a pipe dream.

"Everything seems much more real than it did a year ago," said Greg Harper, vice chairman of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which oversees the transit project. "At this point, it should just be a question of timing."

The existing terminal would be replaced by what transit advocates say should be a bustling transit station rivaling those on the East Coast and in Europe -- a place where travelers would arrive by bus and commuter train from seven Bay Area counties and beyond, perhaps even aboard high-speed trains from Southern California.

Nor will transit users be the only people affected by the changes. Framing the terminal would be more than 3,200 apartments and condominiums, adding residents to an area that still feels like a backwater of the Financial District.

Even under the most ambitious time line, construction on the terminal wouldn`t start until 2006, with an opening date of 2011. But progress this summer has come on a number of fronts, suggesting that the project is far enough along to take on a life of its own:

-- The state has agreed to give San Francisco nearly 10 1/2 acres of land left vacant when freeway ramps were torn down after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The city would use it to raise a projected $500 million for the new terminal through land sales and property tax revenue.

-- The city`s Redevelopment Agency this month will release a final version of a detailed plan for 39 acres around the terminal. It includes seven residential towers ranging from 30 to 55 stories, most of them on land now devoted to parking lots.

-- San Francisco, AC Transit and the agency that runs Caltrain have formed a joint powers authority to build the project, and Maria Ayerdi, who has championed the development as a transportation analyst for Mayor Willie Brown, has been hired as executive director. Her office is funded by $9.5 million contained in a federal grant.

-- The environmental studies for the project are expected to be certified by the end of the year. The authority already is preparing to advertise for bids for engineering firms and to hold an international design competition.


HEFTY PRICE TAG
A big reason for continued skepticism is the project`s $1.7 billion price tag.

To raise the bulk of the money, backers are relying on voters to approve several large transportation measures.

A regional ballot measure to boost bridge tolls, scheduled for March, would steer $150 million toward the project. Another $270 million would come if San Franciscans renew their city`s half-cent sales tax in November. A statewide high-speed rail bond set for the November 2004 election, if successful, would contribute $127 million.

The biggest piece of the financial puzzle is the $500 million that the city hopes to steer toward the terminal through redevelopment of the blocks around it.

To raise the money, the city is crafting a plan that could allow the highest residential towers in the city: one 55-story structure at Main and Howard streets and another at First and Folsom. There would be four other residential towers at least 300 feet tall along Main and Folsom.

The draft version of the plan released last month also includes a 55-story tower at First and Mission streets that could incorporate offices and a hotel as well as housing.

Open space would be peppered throughout the area, from landscaped sidewalks to formal parks, and the towers would alternate with much lower structures to preserve views and sunlight. Thirty-five percent of the new housing units are intended for lower-income residents.

"We`re trying to create a neighborhood that represents all types of San Franciscans, different incomes and different types of households," said Jose Campos-Esparsa, who manages planning for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.


HIGH HOPES
The Transbay Terminal plan would create a model neighborhood, said Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition, which backs transit expansion and transit-focused development.

"It will put high-density, transit-oriented housing right where it should be, next to a bustling downtown transit hub," Cohen said. "It will make San Francisco a more accessible and vibrant place."

The plan is, in reality, a combination of three projects -- a new Transbay Terminal, a downtown Caltrain extension and a new high-density neighborhood.

Plans for the terminal are modeled on what the authority now calls a "conceptual design" released in July 2000. That design called for the faded terminal, built in the 1930s as part of the Bay Bridge project, to be replaced with a landmark crystalline station with glass and steel walls and a flowing glass roof.

Whatever the fate of that initial design, the working plan still calls for a six-level building with two underground levels accommodating a downtown Caltrain extension and, perhaps, high-speed rail. The street level would handle Municipal Railway and Golden Gate Transit buses. Above it would be a concourse filled with shops and restaurants, then two levels reserved for AC Transit, SamTrans and other bus lines.

The terminal alone would cost about $1 billion. Another $713 million is budgeted for construction of the Caltrain extension -- a long-awaited and much- debated project in its own right.

The extension would take the Peninsula commuter railroad underground 1.3 miles north to the new terminal from its current terminus at Fourth and King streets.

Plans also call for a pedestrian tunnel connecting the new terminal with the Embarcadero BART/Muni Metro station.

"This is huge, because it`s in downtown San Francisco, at the financial center of San Francisco, and it connects Muni, BART, AC Transit, Golden Gate Transit, SamTrans and Caltrain -- all of it," said Mike Nevin, a San Mateo County supervisor and chairman of the Transbay Terminal Authority.


SOME SKEPTICS
None of this means that momentum is irreversible.

Even some boosters voice skepticism in private about the funding. One example: By earmarking 35 percent of the housing units for low-income residents -- a requirement of state officials -- the city might not be able to raise the expected $500 million.

Another wrinkle is that the funding package is so intricate, with much of it relying on funds that appear in small doses rather than all at once.

"Like any big transportation project, getting all that money to come in at the right time is the big challenge," said Randy Rentschler, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the region`s transportation planning and financing agency.

And some critics continue to insist that the plan is too grandiose.

"The cost-benefit ratio is really absurd," said Bill Blackwell, a retired Bechtel architect, who contends that the new terminal costs aren`t justified by the improvements for transit riders.

"People seem to think we need a new monument," Blackwell said. "We don`t need a fancy new terminal. It doesn`t do anything to enhance transit use."



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Proposed changes to Transbay Terminal area
-- Proposed expanded Transbay Terminal

-- Proposed park

-- Proposed residential site

-- Caltrain extension via tunnel.

Chronicle Graphic

E-mail the writers at [e-mail] and [e-mail].

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archi…

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Bush`s empty promise

Monday, September 1, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archiv…


THE NUMBERS ARE so staggering they`re almost incomprehensible: AIDS/HIV has infected 42 million, killed 25 million and orphaned 14 million children, whose numbers increase by two every 30 seconds. If left unchecked, there will be 70 million AIDS cases in China and 110 million in India by 2025.

So, why is President Bush reneging on his promise to fund efforts to curb this dreaded disease?

With seemingly stern resolve, in January, Bush announced a 5-year, $15 billion AIDS plan, committing $3 billion in 2004 -- $1 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Bush, rightly noting that "time is not on our side," pushed his plan through Congress in May. In June, he prodded a similar commitment from the G-8 nations in France. In July, he trumpeted his pledge during a five-day trek through Africa.

While critics said Bush`s plan fell short of the pressing need, we commended him, nonetheless, for increasing U.S. AIDS funding by 300 percent.

Then he suddenly changed his mind, opting for about $2 billion for next year -- a mere $200 million for the Global Fund -- claiming more money couldn`t be effectively spent.

It`s a curious claim in light of United Nations reports that $8.2 billion for AIDS could be absorbed in 2004, $3.1 billion in Africa alone. What`s more, now Europe may cut its $1 billion Global Fund grant, which was offered as match to the United States.

With $1 billion the Global Fund could prevent 1.6 million new cases of AIDS and 400,000 deaths of those already infected. It could treat more than a million cases of TB, more than 10 million cases of malaria and prevent unimaginable suffering.

Mr. President, we implore you to keep this promise.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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Facing the truth about Iraq
By James Carroll, 9/2/2003

THE WAR IS LOST. By most measures of what the Bush administration forecast for its adventure in Iraq, it is already a failure. The war was going to make the Middle East a more peaceful place. It was going to undercut terrorism. It was going to show the evil dictators of the world that American power is not to be resisted. It was going to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis. It was going to stabilize oil markets. The American army was going to be greeted with flowers. None of that happened. The most radical elements of various fascist movements in the Arab world have been energized by the invasion of Iraq. The American occupation is a rallying point for terrorists. Instead of undermining extremism, Washington has sponsored its next phase, and now moderates in every Arab society are more on the defensive than ever.

Before the war, the threat of America`s overwhelming military dominance could intimidate, but now such force has been shown to be extremely limited in what it can actually accomplish. For the sake of "regime change," the United States brought a sledge hammer down on Iraq, only to profess surprise that, even as Saddam Hussein remains at large, the structures of the nation`s civil society are in ruins. The humanitarian agencies necessary to the rebuilding of those structures are fleeing Iraq.

The question for Americans is, Now what? Democrats and Republicans alike want to send in more US soldiers. Some voices are raised in the hope that the occupation can be more fully "internationalized," which remains unlikely while Washington retains absolute control. But those who would rush belligerent reinforcements to Iraq are making the age-old mistake.

When brutal force generates resistance, the first impulse is to increase force levels. But, as the history of conflicts like this shows, that will result only in increased resistance. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has rejected the option of more troops for now, but, in the name of force-protection, the pressures for escalation will build as US casualties mount. The present heartbreak of one or two GI deaths a day will seem benign when suicide bombers, mortar shells, or even heavier missile fire find their ways into barracks and mess halls.

Either reinforcements will be sent to the occupation, or present forces will loosen the restraints with which they reply to provocation. Both responses will generate more bloodshed and only postpone the day when the United States must face the truth of its situation.

The Bush administration`s hubristic foreign policy has been efficiently exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination. High-tech weaponry can kill unwilling human beings, but it cannot force them to embrace an unwanted idea. As rekindled North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs prove, Washington`s rhetoric of "evil" is as self-defeating as it is self-delusional. No one could have predicted a year ago that the fall from the Bush high horse of American Empire would come so hard and so quickly. Where are the comparisons with Rome now? The rise and fall of imperial Washington took not hundreds of years, but a few hundred days.

Sooner or later, the United States must admit that it has made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it. That means the United States must yield not only command of the occupation force, but participation in it. The United States must renounce any claim to power or even influence over Iraq, including Iraqi oil. The United States must accept the humiliation that would surely accompany its being replaced in Iraq by the very nations it denigrated in the build-up to the war.

With the United States thus removed from the Iraqi crucible, those who have rallied to oppose the great Satan will loose their raison d`etre, and the Iraqi people themselves can take responsibility for rebuilding their wrecked nation.

All of this might seem terribly unlikely today, but something like it is inevitable. The only question is whether it happens over the short term, as the result of responsible decision-making by politicians in Washington, or over the long term, as the result of a bloody and unending horror.

The so-called "lessons" of Vietnam are often invoked by hawks and doves alike, but here is one that applies across the political spectrum. The American people saw that that war was lost in January 1968, even as the Tet Offensive was heralded as a victory by the Pentagon and the White House. But for five more years, Washington refused to face the truth of its situation, until at last it had no choice.

Because American leaders could not admit the nation`s mistake, and move to undo it, hundreds of thousands of people died, or was it millions? The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time? James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

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EPA lifts ban on selling PCB sites
By Peter Eisler, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has ended a 25-year-old ban on the sale of land polluted with PCBs. The ban was intended to prevent hundreds of polluted sites from being redeveloped in ways that spread the toxin or raise public health risks.
The Environmental Protection Agency decided the ban was "an unnecessary barrier to redevelopment (and) may actually delay the clean-up of contaminated properties," according to an internal memo issued last month to advise agency staff of the change.

About PCBs

PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are an oily compound that was used widely until 1978 as a coolant and lubricant in electrical equipment because it had insulating qualities and was not flammable.

PCBs are considered a probable cause of cancer in people and have been implicated in liver damage. They accumulate in fish and game that feed in contaminated areas and are passed on to people by eating the animals.

It was PCB pollution that forced the abandonment 25 years ago of the Love Canal community in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

The decision, already in effect, has not been made public. It is being treated as a "new interpretation" of existing law, according to the memo, which was obtained by USA TODAY. As such, no public comment was required.

Some EPA staffers have raised concerns that the change could make it hard to track the sale of PCB sites and ensure that buyers don`t spread contamination by developing property before it`s cleaned up, EPA officials say. The decision also is likely to upset environmentalists and their congressional allies who contend that the administration is easing environmental rules to promote development.

The policy change opens a door for sales of property fouled with one of the most widespread pollutants of the post-World War II era. EPA officials and other experts estimate that more than 1,000 pieces of land nationwide are contaminated. PCBs are present at about 500 of the 1,598 pollution sites listed by the EPA as national cleanup priorities under its Superfund restoration program.

"I see real problems with the EPA and state agencies not having resources, especially in today`s budget climate, to monitor these properties if they start getting transferred," says Sean Hecht, who runs UCLA`s Environmental Law Center. The ban on sales "provided leverage to force people to clean up these sites."

The government believes that PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, probably cause cancer. Congress banned their sale and use beginning in 1978. The law has long been interpreted as prohibiting the sale of polluted property unless PCBs had been cleaned up.

The new interpretation was developed under EPA general counsel Robert Fabricant, who issued the Aug. 14 memo informing EPA staff.

The policy shift does not affect cleanup standards and liability rules for PCB sites. The memo says the change is needed to resolve cases in which buyers want to clean up PCB-fouled sites that are owned by people who lack the money or ability to do it.

"The new owner inherits responsibility for cleanup," EPA lawyer Bob Perlis says.

But the EPA already allowed its regional offices to waive the ban on selling PCB-contaminated land when a buyer is willing to clean it up. Regional officials say that process slowed the transfer of a few properties but generally worked.

"I didn`t see a problem with the rules as they were," says Peter deFur, a PCB expert who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and consults on PCB studies and cleanups. "The question now is whether some smaller (PCB) sites will fall through the cracks."



Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-01-epa-usat_…

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US abandons African AIDS programme

uploaded 30 Aug 2003


WASHINGTON: The United States government has cut off funds to an Aids programme for refugees in Africa - six weeks after President George Bush toured the continent promising to fight the disease - because it objects to the activities of one of the aid agencies involved, Marie Stopes International.

A State Department official said that US law prohibited the funding of organizations that support China`s repressive population policy - a definition sufficiently elastic to include Marie Stopes, which runs family planning programmes there.

However, organizations that work on reproductive health and Aids argue that the decision betrays the Bush administration`s wider hostility to abortion. Its commitment to a rightwing Christian agenda has led it to promote abstinence as a strategy against HIV-Aids in preference to condoms, they say.

The present funding cut is curious because Marie Stopes is just one of seven agencies involved in a project to promote HIV- Aids prevention and awareness in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, as well as in Sri Lanka, Asia. The other partners are the International Rescue Committee, Care, the American Refugee Committee, the Women`s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, John Snow International and Columbia University`s department of population and family health.

News of the cuts emerged barely six weeks after Mr Bush toured five African states to launch a $15bn Aids initiative. It was later cut back drastically, with Congress approving just $2bn of the $3bn sought in the first year.

A State Department official conceded that the consortium was doing good work. Last year, the state department gave $1m to the consortium, formed eight years ago, but it decided to end aid this year.

"The nature of the decision was a legal one, and it is based on the relationship Marie Stopes enjoys with the Chinese government," a State Department official said.

At no point has the State Department accused Marie Stopes of abetting forced abortions and sterilizations. It appears to be implicated by its association. "Marie Stopes has a relationship with the Chinese government and its birth limitation programmes that has caused a legal impediment," the official added.

Marie Stopes argues that its work on contraception in China is intended to halt the need for abortion. "We are working for the opposite of that - to reduce abortion and increase choices," Samantha Guy, a Marie Stopes spokeswoman, said.

She said the aid cut would force the organization to cancel a new project in Angola.

Marie Stopes is the second agency targeted by the Bush administration, which is rigorously enforcing a 1985 law that bans US federal funding for groups that assist in enforced sterilization or abortion.

In July 2002, the White House overrode Congress to block a $34m award to the UN Population Fund for its work. UNFPA works with Marie Stopes and other agencies in China.

It did so despite compelling evidence. UNFPA confines its activities to 32 counties in China, selected because they agreed in 1998 to abandon targets and quotas for abortion, according to a spokeswoman for the agency, Kristin Hetle.

Organizations working on reproductive health argue that the law is being used to mask a wider agenda of the Bush administration, which has poured funding into programmes preaching sexual abstinence as a strategy against teenage pregnancy and Aids. It has also promoted such tactics in foreign aid programmes, favouring Christian organizations over other, more established agencies.

Source: The Guardian

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Inside Karl Rove`s Diary:
"Things Aren`t Going So Well"

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, "The Crisis Papers."
September 2, 2003
Dear Diary:

Things aren`t going so well. We were on a good two-year roll there after 9/11. Our in-your-face hardball politics had so frightened and flummoxed the opposition that it looked like we were going to get everything we wanted, not the least another term in the White House.

Now there`s: Iraq imploding on us; the economy still in the tank, with 2,500,000 who`ve lost their jobs since we took over; investigations proceeding on the 9/11 cover-up, and maybe also on our outing of Wilson`s wife as a CIA agent and our lying about the air-quality in Lower Manhattan for nine months after the WTC collapsed; and a pack of mean Democrat dogs out there yapping away at our domestic and war policies.

The total control we`ve exercised over the mass media -- conglomerate ownership sure has paid off for our side -- is beginning to crack. We hear that even some conservative GOP stalwarts are beginning to see vulnerabilities in our approach and are wondering whether to hedge their bets and start looking for others to lead the fight.

Granted, President Dim Bulb isn`t what we would have wished for -- someone with some brights who can articulate our vision and not mess up all that often -- but he`s a nice enough guy who still thinks Cheney and I are geniuses, so he does what Dick and I tell him.

The problem is that Rummy`s nice, tidy Iraq scenario that the neo-cons had worked out (in their heads!) isn`t playing out that way on the ground. They told us what the Iraqi exiles told them: that the U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators and that the Iraqis would cooperate with us in getting Iraq back on its feet in joint projects with our American corporate friends.

But Rummy and the boys made a few miscalculations: They thought we could win the war and the peace with the small army we sent in -- but, since they anticipated an easy post-war period, they didn`t plan for an alternative transition. For chrissakes, we`ve got 150,000 combat troops over there trying to nation-build while riding around in heavily armored vehicles. And the natives are restless, with nightly guerrilla attacks and sabotage and mass-bombings. The press-sharks are starting to smell the blood of Vietnam in the Persian Gulf waters.

I`d never admit this out loud, but, diary, I guess we should have listened more to Powell and the diplomat boys, who said we shouldn`t do this all on our own. Instead, we took all our cues from the PNAC playbook, which said that in order to maintain our superpower dominance and total control, we had to keep everyone else out of our way. The result was that we so humiliated and insulted our would-be allies before the war that now, when we need them, they don`t want to come in and help us run the place. Or, more importantly, help pay the cleanup bill.

Neo-con strategy works in theory -- "we big superpower, you no stop us, get out of way" -- but apparently not always in practice. Now the U.N. won`t go in without a new Security Council resolution and without the U.S. agreeing to share some of the authority. The allies won`t cough up the bucks needed to reconstruct Iraq, and are delighting in reminding us that we shouldn`t have deconstructed it in the first place.

If we don`t get the troops and money we need, it means we have to do it all alone, everything. Well, the Brits will help a bit, but that assumes Tony Blair keeps his job and moral authority in England -- ha! good joke, that -- and that`s no sure thing. He ate all the bullshit pie we served him on his WMD plate -- just like our gullible Americans -- and it`s no wonder he`s suffering from political indigestion.

Now, granted, we want to bankrupt the social programs the Democrats have established for decades, and we have a good excuse that permits us to do that: "The Treasury has no extra money because we`re fighting a war on terrorism and reconstructing Iraq; protecting the homeland is expensive." But jeezus, we`re going into a half-trillion-dollar deficit next year and, while it`ll be great fun slashing-and-burning Head Start and privatizing Social Security and Medicare, we won`t be able to pay for any of the programs WE want, and the economy will keep going further into the toilet.

There`s even serious re-thinking among some conservatives about the huge tax cuts we gave ourselves and our friends. I couldn`t believe our luck when the Democrats didn`t stop us; thank God the populace is scared silly and doesn`t care what we do as long as there are no al-Qaida attacks inside our borders. But that acceptance can`t cancel the criticism about us being incompetent bunglers, with the economy, the war, the veterans, whatever.

The scary thing is that it`s not just the Democrats making those charges; a lot of Republicans are starting to voice doubts about how we`re handling the war and the economy -- and even some traditional, small-government conservatives are looking at Ashcroft`s Patriot Act with amazement and anger.

A lot of GOP politicos look at Bush`s re-elect numbers, around 40% now, and the likelihood that Wesley Clark will jump into the race, and they`re scared they`ll lose their own re-election bids in 2004. Hell, even the new Clinton, Dean, might be able to beat Bush. (Oh, diary, this is good! I`m salivating at the idea of secretly helping Kucinich get the nomination!)

I keep trying to tell our GOP scaredy-cats that we`ve covered all the bases. We`ll take care of the Democrats in California and Texas and Florida and Colorado and elsewhere. There still isn`t a lot of mainstream agitation about our friends in the computer-voting industry -- but why in hell did that Ohio computer-voting executive get caught promising to deliver the vote to the GOP in that state? And we can arrange for a good ol` patriotic surprise that will reinforce the support-the-president-during-wartime mood before the 2004 election.

The problem is that even though the Cheney-Rummy-Wolfy agenda calls for another big move in the Middle East -- using our leverage in Iraq to get the other Arab leaders to do what we want or there may have to be another "regime change" scenario -- we may be so bogged down in Iraq that we won`t be able to initiate it with the required force behind our threats. And then there`s that crazy midget in North Korea that could upset all our apple carts with his nuclear chess game.

The result of all these things going wrong is that I`m having to use up a lot of my political ammunition and threats way too early. But The Genius will just have to do what I know works: When on the defensive, get on the offensive as quickly as possible, by hook or by crook. Take the heat and attention off the scandals. Get Schwarzenegger into the race. Report some more terror alerts. Trot out some heart-tugging 9/11 stories. Have Bush visit a few more national parks to counter his environmental record. Denounce gay marriage and cry over the Ten Commandments case to lock up the South. Whatever it takes.

And I mean that "whatever." We`ve got to get the Man-Child re-elected, and I don`t much care what we have to do to accomplish that end. If we don`t get the next four years, we can`t fulfill our domestic or foreign goals -- and set it up for Jeb -- and we`d open the door for the liberals and pinkos to re-enter and ruin things. If we truly want to destroy the Democrats and prepare the way for the one-party rule that will make our program fully possible, we can`t afford to lose any of the big electoral-vote states in 2004.

Given Bush`s, how shall we say, intellectual limitations when dealing with the fibs that he`s told, and the scandals that cling to our administration -- and to such vote-magnets as Schwarzenegger -- it might not be as easy as it seemed some months back.

But, as I say, we`ll do what we have to do to win (for sure keeping those voting-machine software codes secure in the corporate vaults). And if the voters don`t like our victory results, then they`d better get used to the New World Order -- or hasta la vista, baby.



Bernard Weiner, a playwright and poet, has peeked into numerous other diaries -- including those of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and others -- which are also available at this site.



Copyright 2003, by Bernard Weiner

http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/rove-notwell.htm

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Ochenski: Glimmers of hope
by George Ochenski
Time to wake up from the Bush nightmare?

There is now more cause to realistically hope for a better future than we’ve seen in a long time. When George W. Bush returns from his month-long ranch vacation, he might wonder what happened to his presidency while he was gone. Recent national polls show large majorities of Americans are increasingly wary of a protracted, expensive and deadly involvement in Iraq, not to mention the record deficits required to pay for Bush’s global militarism. As a result, fewer than half say they would support a second term for Bush. Like rains damping down fires and cleaning the air we breathe, this is definitely good news.

Perhaps it was predictable that the Bush-Cheney regime, initiated in political controversy and conducted in absolute secrecy behind closed doors, should one day collapse of its own weight. What wasn’t predictable, however, was how Bush’s unscrupulous political machine would manipulate a terror attack to benefit its visions of global empire. Yet, as we are finding out every day, facts and fears both were manipulated, throwing Americans into a paroxysm of fear and suspicion.

In the land of the free, a rough burlap sack was pulled over the light of liberty while the dark work of Bush, Cheney, and Ashcroft got done in the shadows. Too many heads in Washington’s Congressional chambers nodded far too quickly—and much too quietly. Perhaps their paranoia was understandable, for even the nation’s top decision-makers had been forced from their offices by thin envelopes filled with white powder. In their fear, they traded liberty for security—or so they thought.

But now that some members of Congress have actually read the massive and grossly mis-named Patriot Act, they are finding out just what they gave away in their fear. Conservatives—at least those who still hold true to the conservative view of government they held before they “owned” it—are finding the loss of personal freedoms incompatible with their core beliefs.

It’s so bad that Attorney General Ashcroft has launched a national road show to defend the Act, but the reality is that if true conservatives are joining already-concerned progressives, the Patriot Act is going to see some serious revision. It is very good news for the nation that those revisions will likely restore some of our lost rights to privacy from being spied on by our own government.

The foundations of this dark presidency are crumbling as the web of lies on which it was built comes to light. The Iraqi “drone” plane that the Bush administration told us was ready to fly over America spreading toxins and biological warfare agents has been debunked by international experts, who say the plane was incapable of performing any such feats and was just another false threat in Bush’s rush to war.

Despite reams of slick, desperate political rhetoric, the mayhem Bush loosed upon the world is getting worse, not better, as time goes by. Every day it gets harder to justify the record national debt, the obvious neglect of urgent domestic needs, or the sending of troops to die on the other side of the globe.

That President Bush continues to use the military for “nation building” is undeniable, despite his campaign promise never to engage in such activities. Instead of taking care of our schools, hospitals, social programs and infrastructure needs, he wants to spend billions rebuilding Afghanistan from top to bottom. The Taliban, however, now appear to have taken back control of just about everything except the American outpost and our puppet government in Kabul. So for whom, exactly, are we rebuilding this nation?

It’s much the same story in Iraq—only maybe worse, since we dumped much more money and many more troops into Iraq. At the enormous expense of more than a billion dollars a week, we nonetheless continue to suffer daily casualties on the streets of Baghdad as the people who were supposed to welcome us as liberators fight us as occupiers. When the tank pulled down the statue of Saddam months ago, it was a “big moment” in the war. But now television stations have returned to their mind-numbing, commercial programming; America, it would seem, has grown tired of deadly conflicts that go nowhere and cost so much in dollars, troops and material.

If the polls are accurate, Americans strapped with their own skyrocketing gas, utility, and college costs are wondering where the hell all the money Bush is spending is coming from. The answer, which becomes more obvious every day, is that everything else is suffering to pay for the Bush war machine. But as the impacts of Bush’s crazy foreign policy and domestic neglect grow, so do the hordes of those critical of his destructive administration. Slowly but surely, we are returning to a semblance of sanity, confronting the reality of what Bush is doing to our country and questioning the acts of this out-of-control administration.

As Bush’s outmoded colonial ambitions crumble abroad, the widespread rejection of his aimless and brutal policies are likely to grow. Perhaps Bush, like Gov. Judy Martz, will eventually realize that he no longer has a political future either. That, like Martz, he had his chance to lead and he blew it. Instead of developing stable long-term policies to benefit our people, he marched roughly across the globe while neglecting conditions at home.

When Bush called the recent East Coast blackout a “wake-up call,” he may have been right. Only it might be a different kind of “wake-up” than Bush envisioned. America, it appears, is waking up to the paranoid hypnosis to which the Bush administration has subjected us. We are “waking up” to the mounting failures of Bush’s social, health, education, environmental, economic and foreign policies—and their long-term costs to our country.

Make no mistake, Bush continues to push his plans to ravage our country, our environment, and the globe. But he is faltering, failing, losing credibility at home and abroad—and that brings glimmers of hope for a better future.

When not lobbying the Montana Legislature, George Ochenski is rattling the cage of the political establishment as a political analyst for the Missoula Independent.
http://www.everyweek.com/News/News.asp?no=3477

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Burning money in Iraq
David Lazarus
Friday, August 29, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/08/29/BU27…


A mid all the recall-related fretting over California`s budget, it`s been hard to keep up with the money mess at the federal level. Let`s refresh ourselves.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office revised its estimates yet again this week and announced that the federal budget deficit will soar to a record $480 billion next year, reaching $1.4 trillion over the coming decade.

That alone is very bad news. Many economists, including Fed chief Alan Greenspan, have warned that chronic deficits of this magnitude can cause interest rates to rise and the economy to sputter.

But things are worse than the budget office lets on. These new estimates don`t include the rising cost of the war in Iraq, which, if factored into the mix, would push the 2004 deficit well beyond $500 billion.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has estimated that the "burn rate" -- his words -- for our little exercise in Mideast nation-building is currently running $3.9 billion a month, or nearly $48 billion a year.

That`s a highly conservative figure. It doesn`t include the cost of replacing damaged vehicles and equipment, or the cost of munitions used in daily skirmishes. Some experts say the annual war cost is actually closer to $60 billion.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let`s take Rumsfeld at his word.

At $3.9 billion a month, that means the nation`s 105 million households are each ponying up $37 every four weeks to cover the cost of the war.

That doesn`t sound so bad, does it? OK, let`s look at this another way.

The average middle school teacher in the United States earns $43,570 a year,

according to the Department of Labor. If all households coughed up an extra $37 a month, we could have 1.1 million more teachers.

Or we could have:


-- 1.3 million more firefighters.

-- 1.2 million more police officers.

-- 995,000 more registered nurses.

-- 2.8 million more child care workers.

But we don`t pay more for such things because most Americans believe they`re taxed heavily enough already. We aren`t being asked to pay an additional war-in-Iraq tax for just that reason.

Instead, we expect the government to do the best it can with what we give it.

That`s the idea, anyway.

The Bush administration, which has cut taxes three times in the past three years, is determined to spend whatever it deems necessary in the "war on terrorism" even as it systematically slashes the government`s revenue.

"In the last two and half years, this nation has acted decisively to confront great challenges," President Bush said the other day while raising money for his re-election. "I came to the office of president of the United States to solve problems, instead of passing them on to future presidents and future generations."

He was referring to problems like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, wherever they are. Bush apparently doesn`t see a budget deficit lasting until at least 2012 as a problem for future presidents and future generations.

Moreover, he seems blissfully unaware that if his tax cuts are made permanent -- a goal he has sworn to achieve -- the cumulative deficit over the next decade will balloon to almost $3 trillion.

The $400 billion Congress plans to spend overhauling Medicare over the same period would push the total even higher.

"It`s like living off your credit card," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization advocating fiscal responsibility. "Eventually, taxes will have to go up to pay the bill."

He added: "Things aren`t going to get any better as we go on. The retirement of the Baby Boomers is looming right at the end of the next 10 years."

Indeed, and current projections don`t begin to estimate the strain on federal coffers as 77 million Boomers start cashing in on Social Security and Medicare benefits.

I`ve noted before that the next five years represent our best chance to get the nation`s finances in order. Until 2008, Baby Boomers will be at their peak earning power. They`ll never be pulling down more money on an aggregate basis than right now.

Yet the Bush administration is determined to forgo as much of that money as it can, thus missing a golden opportunity to prepare for the coming fiscal storm.

At the same time, though, the White House is spending like a sailor on shore leave. Paul Bremer, the administration`s man in occupied Iraq, was asked in a recent interview how much it will cost to rebuild the country.

"It`s probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion," he answered. Then, as if that didn`t sound wishy-washy enough, he added, "It`s a lot of money."

Bremer flew back to Washington this week to ask the White House for a few billion more to tide him over until a larger budget bill can be introduced this fall.

For his part, Bush said he`d help out by cutting annual raises for more than 1 million federal employees -- a move that will free up billions for Iraq but impact the spending power of Americans on the home front.

We could have more teachers, or firefighters, or police officers or nurses. Instead we have an open-ended commitment to policing and reconstructing a Mideast nation that may or may not have posed a threat down the road.

And we`ll put off paying the cost for many years, leaving a mountain of debt and obligations for our children to somehow tackle -- the president`s self-congratulatory remarks notwithstanding.

Kind of makes California`s troubles seem quaint by comparison.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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On Tactics and Strategy:

How Bush has Misunderstood Military Strategic Doctrine and Constraints on Political Objectives -- Had Bush and his academicians posing as military advisors read Clausewitz’s On War America would have been better served.

"I recognized that it was not the job of the military to defend American commitment and policy. Yet it was difficult to differentiate between pursuit of a military task and such related matters as public and congressional support and the morale of the fighting man, who must be convinced that he is risking death for a worthy cause. The military thus was caught in between." --General William Westmoreland,
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article4590.htm
By Craig B Hulet?

09/02/03: The wars fought during the second half of the 20th century were lost or at best some half-way measures taken to be stalemates or wins by lowering the threshold of what constitutes victory. According to certain respected military experts, we lost in Vietnam, achieved nothing but the status quo ante in Korea, 1 a divided nation-state today, August 2003, and on the brink of an even worse catastrophe than the 1950s. We have not won in Afghanistan nor Iraq as the world now knows; Mr. Bush declared we won, an end to hostilities during November 2001 and May of 2003 respectively. Some analysts argued we wouldn’t win easily early on in the immediate aftermath of invading Afghanistan.

Northern Alliance troops moved into Kabul on Nov. 13, less than a week after launching an offensive that has swept the Taliban from most of northern Afghanistan....On the surface it appears a lightning offensive by the Northern Alliance -- supported by U.S. aerial bombardment. -- has shattered the Taliban army in a matter of days. But have the Talban been defeated? An examination of the Taliban withdrawal suggests the group intentionally surrendered territory in the interests of adopting tactics more amenable to its strength."2

Added were these comments as well: "The towns abandoned have no strategic importance to the Taliban, nor anybody else; they cannot even be called pre-industrial towns. Abandoning these primitive bombed-out facilities had only propaganda value to the western forces; virtually only Americans in the world will believe this matters one whit. The war was always destined to be fought as a guerrilla war within the territories and mountains, arid wastelands and urban centers of far more developed nations as the war’s zones of attack." (Ibid.) It is now evident that the above argument, while by some was seen as premature given Mr. Bush’s declarations of an early victory during November of 2001, was correct. The Taliban wisely withdrew their forces in a strategic retreat, we did not defeat them, we did not rout them at all, only to return today stronger than ever. In the past few months of mid-2003 the Taliban and al Qaida have all returned to Afghanistan to re-engage their enemies who are weaker now than during the initial phases of assault; weaker as well from the growing guerrilla resistance in Iraq taking American lives daily, post-May 1, 2003, when Mr. Bush again declared victory only this time in Iraq; the attacks numbering 30 to 50 every day throughout the region (only when there are American deaths do these attacks [harassing tactics all guerrilla armies use] get well-reported). Indeed the growing level of assaults is increasing daily as the warmer Spring weather set in.



Interviewed by the English-language daily The News, Mohammad Amin and Mohammad Mukhtar Mujahid, two Taliban spokesmen, said their fighters had already begun striking targets in the north, and would intensify the northern campaign in the coming weeks.

Taliban fighters have been waging a campaign of grenade and rocket attacks against foreign troops, and the U.S.-installed government of Hamid Karzai for months.

Amin named three former Taliban commanders have been positioned in northern Faryab province to undermine the power of northern strongman and deputy defense minister Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam. (Sources: Islam Online.News and Information Clearing House August 10, 2003)

The story is finally beginning to receive some serious attention even if only and primarily in the foreign press: "The leader of the ousted Taliban regime, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has urged his followers to step up ‘jihad’ against the U.S. and other foreign occupation forces in Afghanistan," (Source: ISLAMABAD, June 24 IslamOnline.net & News Agencies)

And so it begins, the real wars America has gotten itself into in the Middle East proper, and in Afghanistan of all places! That the Pentagon knew well this would be the outcome in both locales is known and should be understood, it isn‘t that Mr. Bush and the self-proclaimed Cabal (Paul Wolfowitz‘s term not mine) of civilians did not receive proper intelligence, they simply rejected it if it didn’t fit their agenda according to intelligence officials who quit rather than "go along‘ with this abuse of proper intel. channels. 3

Once again, as in the not-so-recent past with Vietnam, the military professionals, their intelligence analysts and counterparts at CIA and NSA, Defense Intelligence and too many military affairs experts to count, were ignored by the seemingly arrogant civilian academicians appointed (sometimes self-appointed to even higher importance in decision making as has been so eloquently reported by Seymour M. Hersh 4 ) to run these wars. Men with no active duty combat experience at all, few with military experience of any nature, most never even a National Guardsman, these men have taken unprecedented control of the American war-making capability; in short, men which do not know what it takes to meet the enemy and find victory conduct the wars. Mr. Bush, the most embarrassing of all the noncombatant civilians, could not discipline himself enough to simply not declare that hostilities were over, that we won, only to find America enmeshed in full blown guerrilla wars! And in both Areas of Operation (AO): Iraq and Afghanistan.

Seemingly bereft of the needed intelligence, both kinds, some of these academics have prosecuted these wars in a way they think, especially Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, is all-so-new, with new names attached to every phrase, as if by "saying" these words they are akin to some magical talisman: here are the terms of endearment to some of these non-warrior elite -- Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and Shock & Awe. With its mantra-like quality, its subtext repeated on CNN by aging retired generals obedient to Mr. Bush’s propaganda machinery (most retired for good reason): Achieving Rapid Dominance. That we did not achieve any such thing cannot today be admitted; but it will, upon reflection, be admitted one day when the history and analysis of these wars is written. Which has already begun as we shall see below.

What is Rapid Dominance?

Shock & Awe is the title of the book which outlined the doctrine itself. 5 According to the text "Rapid Dominance is the full use of capabilities within a system of systems that can decisively impact events requiring the application of military/defense resources through affecting the adversary’s will. Rapid Dominance envisions execution in real or near real time to counter actions or intentions deemed detrimental to U.S. interests. On one end of the spectrum, Rapid Dominance would introduce a regime of Shock and Awe in areas of high value to the threatening individual, group, or state. In many cases the prior knowledge of credible U.S. Rapid Dominance capabilities would act as a deterrent."

More on this factor below, but most important is the concept that rapid dominance would achieve a quick end to hostilities, something Mr. Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld never entertained, admitting that the War on Terrorism might last anywhere from six to ten years. But the original conceptual integration of this doctrine was to assure the opposite. "Rapid Dominance would ensure favorable early resolution of issues at minimal loss of lives and collateral damage. The concept ideally should be able to impact adversarial situations that apply across the board, addressing high-, mid-, low-, and no-technology threats. Some of these aims may not be achievable given the political and technology constraints, but need to be explored. (Appendices, Reflections of Three Former Commanders: "Thoughts on Rapid Dominance" Admiral Bud Edney, Shock & Awe, 1996, p.149)

The authors, primarily active duty or recently retired high-ranking officers from all the major branches, seemed to grasp the problems facing any future wars in their specificity: "The reality of current politics is that the trauma of Vietnam, the results of the Gulf War, and our status as the only remaining superpower after the Cold War equate to some new constraints (real or perceived) on the application of military force to support our foreign policy." Constraint was the watchword of these newest concepts for the future use of military force in dispute resolution. They argued that "These political sensitivities need to be understood up front and include the following": (Ibid. p. 147)

· The U.S. is not the world’s policeman

· Involvement of U.S. Forces must be justified as essential to vital U.S. security interests

· Support of Congress and People is a necessary prerequisite

· Avoid commitment of ground forces

· Offer instead U.S. intelligence, air lift, sea lift, logistics support, etc.

· Avoid risk of loss of U.S. lives at almost all costs

· Ensure decisive force applied for mission assigned

· Rules of Engagement allow U.S. forces to defend themselves aggressively

· Minimize civilian casualties, loss of life, and collateral damage

· Specify achievable mission objectives up front with an end in the not-too-distant future sight before committing

· U.S. led coalition force preferred-U.S. Forces remain under U.S. Command. These political restraints may limit the application of Rapid Dominance to Major and Minor Regional Conflicts. This is an issue that needs further exploration and analysis." (Ibid. pp. 147-148)

Given the above constraints envisioned by the team and noted in their specificity by L.A. "Bud" Edney, coupled with the specific constraint in the previous section above, whereby the, "Rapid Dominance capabilities would act as a deterrent. Rapid Dominance would ensure favorable early resolution of issues at minimal loss of lives and collateral damage," it would seem the Bush Administration, while pronouncing upon the language of Shock and Awe, with its rapid dominance of the given situations in both Afghanistan and Iraq, failed to take cognizance of the advice. Mr. Bush prosecuted both actions, ignoring sound advice from these and other military professionals. Instead, much like our previous wars noted by Admiral Edney, specifically Vietnam, relying upon non-military "experts" within the civilian command (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Perle and Feith, to name a few) and upon the language, without the constraints, both wars were "sold" to the public (which bought it initially due to the incredibly pro-war bias reporting of major news outlets). But history, as in wars in the past, creeps up upon the reality.

While the concept might have been used as deterrent, which the team highly valued, it would seem, and cannot really be argued any other way, the Bush Administration’s elite civilian experts, never seriously considered this in either case. That is to say, it is now obvious, deterrence was never tabled, never seriously entertained. Admiral Ednay felt this area was of signal importance stating he felt that "Rapid Dominance cannot solve all or even most of the world’s problems. It initially appears that Rapid Dominance should be applied sparingly for egregious threats or violations of international law, such as:



· Blatant aggression involving a large state crushing a small state

· Rogue leader/state sponsored terrorism/use of WMD

· Egregious violations of human rights on a large scale

· Threat to essential world markets." (Ibid, pp. 151-152)

None of the above violations were present in Afghanistan though Mr. Bush certainly tried to make it seem so. Not even 9/11 was known with any certainty the sole, nor even primary responsibility of al-Qaida and Usamah bin Laden as late as March 11, 2002. 6 The case to remove the Taliban from power was held with even less credibility. In Iraq there was no "threatened use" let alone "use" at all of WMD on the part of Saddam Hussein; even less of a threat now that the so-called intelligence culled and selected that was utilized to sell the war has fallen entirely out of favor. I am not going to rehash the partisan politics of these issues as we have more important issues at stake, in my humble opinion. We are in these two wars now, wars which have predictably escalated to a higher level of urban guerrilla warfare in both Areas of Operation (AO).

All the authors and analysts which outlined the new doctrine of Shock and Awe agreed on something which I shall address in much greater detail below, that is the following:

We note for the record that should a Rapid Dominance force actually be fielded with the requisite operational capabilities, this force would be neither a silver bullet nor a panacea and certainly not an antidote or preventative for a major policy blunder, miscalculation, or mistake. It should also be fully appreciated that situations will exist in which Rapid Dominance (or any other doctrine) may not work or apply because of political, strategic, or other limiting factors. (Ibid. Prologue, p. xix, emphasis in original)

It is here that we must begin to assess what we are "in" and if there is any way "out." America’s policy blunders has us in two guerrilla wars in AOs that have always been considered not amenable to control, let alone "winning." Shock and Awe and its attendant Rapid Dominance has in fact failed to achieve its main objective. An objective that has always been the primary objective of military victory, if it is victory we are after that is. That signal concept of war is to end the adversaries "will to fight." In this we have failed. Their will in both countries (arguably the entire region) has instead been aroused to a fever pitch and promises to grow for as long as we occupy their territories, place puppet regimes in power, and maintain control over their natural resources. It matters little, no, not at all, whether you or I, Mr. Bush and his coterie of civilians, the media and our public polls, believe we have broken their will, or the regimes in place are not puppet regimes, that we are administering "their natural resources," primarily oil and gas, and the attendant pipelines in both nations to the benefit of their people, rather than "controlling them." All that matters is that this "is their perception" that it is so.

Tactics and Strategy: The Objective

We must not hide behind fate’s petticoats.

--Alexander Solzenitsyn



When one looks at the two wars being fought in our name we ought to look it all in the face; there is never a better time to do so than while the wars are escalating. We might wait until it is all over, as we did with the Vietnam war, to look at what we had been doing all along. We might look at it the way George Santayana suggested when he stated "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Or we might choose to ignore this advice with the axiom, "One of the most somber aspects of the study of history is that it suggests no obvious ways by which mankind could have avoided folly."7

Things change. We all know this. Even military doctrine changes with the times. But do we ignore the basic truths of war that endure for the fancy of the moment. There really are not any books that can address, as yet, the tactics we are presently utilizing in either Afghanistan nor Iraq. For some time there were no books about Vietnam either. Not until around 1982 when On Strategy was first published. I have drawn upon the works of this author and upon my own reading of Clausewitz’s On War (as he did) because I fear, we may have set course on a war-footing we shall ultimately lose. I am no progressive Leftist as those who know me would readily attest. My meager contribution to the Vietnam war was during 1969/1970 with the 101st Airborne Division, C Troop/ 2/17 Air Cavalry. That we did lose the war, though we could have won the war had we, that is to say, had our [then] crop of civilian masters, wanted to win the war, is not a moot point. But they did not want victory; they fought what was then called a "limited war." That the two terms joined into a doctrinal phrase are themselves then contradictory in the history of warfare will become understood later in this piece.

We must, in my opinion look to the errors of the Vietnam war to discover, in part, why we lost that war; why, or better, how we could have won that war. Now that we are "in" the Middle East, Afghanistan, maybe North/South Korea (again) and threatening Iran and Syria, should give one pause. Vietnam is the only past war we can realistically look to as all else that has followed were not only limited wars in character even further, some are now seen as downright foolishness (Somalia readily comes to mind). With the new strategic doctrines bandied about, like the above Shock and Awe, we need to look closely at what works in war-making capability. What works means, victory, what brings peace.

Some will say I write this because I think we (our military forces, the troops in particular) "ought to win" if we are already there fighting. I do not have to make that distinction. As in the Vietnam war, since we did lose the war (what I mean by "lose" the war follows below), and that it was to some analysts apparent at the time we would lose, we, therefore, could have pulled out much earlier, or not escalated as we did, when we did; in short, we could have saved lives on both sides by not doing what we did for the reasons we did it. True hindsight about Vietnam is 20/20. But there is no reason we can’t achieve 20/15 by using what we learned then and since. Maybe this is futile on my part. The troops on the ground will certainly not think so.

When looking into the history of the Vietnam war Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. noted this important doctrinal change during the period in question:

It is revealing that during the course of the Vietnam war there were changes in both the strategic and tactical definitions of The Objective. What had been a clear relationship between military strategy and political objectives was lost in an abstruse discussion of national objectives, rejection of aggression, deterrence and the whole concept of a spectrum of war. 8



The new definition is similar in respect to where we are at today. We may ask what are the objectives in Iraq, in Afghanistan, elsewhere Mr. Bush and his civilian commanders (if I may use the term very loosely) intend to go next? Karl von Clausewitz had argued that "the political object--the original motive for the war--will determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires." While the 1962 edition of FM 100-5 still discussed The Objective as requiring "the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight," the 1968 edition reduced this to, "defeat the enemy’s armed forces." 9 As Summers pointed out then (1982) and one might point out today (08/2003) "we had eliminated the very factor that was to cause us the greatest difficulty--the psychological objective of destruction of the enemy’s will to fight." As Summers further notes and it seems more convoluted today: "This was especially paradoxical since this was ostensibly what we were trying to do in Vietnam, having been denied the objective of destruction of the enemy’s armed forces." Which was why we did not entertain the invasion of North Vietnam, thinking instead, we could win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese that we believed was more important and made up the better part of the Viet Cong. The idea was built upon the doctrine of "counterinsurgency" as our main tactic. That we seemingly misjudged the war in this way, seeing as we were fighting actually two distinct enemies, the one, the Viet Cong, which was a guerrilla war orchestrated by the North, and a conventional war with the Army of North Vietnam was the whole point. It wasn’t the Viet Cong that took the South, they just kept us occupied in all corners while we fought our limited objective of fighting them specifically, while the real war was mounted from the North in conventional fashion, eventually overrunning Saigon with 17 Northern Regular (NVA) Army Divisions and armored columns. It was the doctrine of counterinsurgency, according to Summers and his sources which contributed greatly to the doctrinal flaws.

Afghanistan and Iraq:

It was claimed that our objective in Afghanistan was to remove the Taliban from power and "get Usamah bin Laden" as "all roads lead to bin Laden," so we were told. Then after the Taliban moved out of their strongholds "to fight another day," with the only tactics available to them, tactics well-earned one must add, without their forces being "decisively defeated," one wonders what we have won? What are the real political objectives in Afghanistan? Now that we are embroiled in yet another guerrilla war, no differently than the Soviets, who it was never necessary for the guerrillas to decisively defeat either, we are fighting the very same guerrillas by name in many cases; what are we going to do?

"The political objective is a goal, war is a means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose....It is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy."10 It is not at all clear that Mr. Bush and specifically Mr. Rumsfeld understand what this means. The objective of simply removing the Taliban from power, removing the regime from power in Iraq but not decisively defeating either of them, not using enough force, enough ground forces in both cases to cause the overwhelming defeat of their armies, crush their "will to fight," I fear will be the cause of our defeat in both regions. No one in their right mind should start a war without the planning for peace in place. And nation-building is not a plan and not something an army can do, let alone ought to be doing. "There was a brief period in the late 1960s when military intellectuals were advancing the notion that the U.S. Army was the arm of the government best equipped to carry out in the field the entire range of activities associated with ‘nation-building.’" (Summers, p.71) We failed in Vietnam, but the doctrine holds today, whereby "the fundamental purpose of the U.S. military forces is to preserve, restore, or create an environment of order or stability within which the instrumentalities of government can function effectively under a code of laws." (1968 successor to Field Service Regulations quoted, Ibid., On Strategy). Clausewitz argued:

War plans cover every aspect of a war, and weave them all into a single operation that must have a single, ultimate objective in which all particular aims are reconciled. No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter is operational objective. This is the governing principle which will set its course, prescribe the scale of means and effort required, and make its influence felt throughout down to the smallest operational detail. 11



It is clear Mr. Bush did not plan for the peace, the immediate aftermath of the invasion (the looting and arson), the resistance which we can now see clearly was planned all along as a guerrilla war. (Saddam knew he could not defeat American forces in a conventional war--did anyone believe he would try?) I do not think one professional soldier advised that Saddam Hussein would fight in any manner than what we are seeing now, post-May 1, 2003, i.e., an urban guerrilla war. "The original means of strategy is victory--that is, tactical success; its ends, in the final analysis, are those objects which will lead directly to peace." (Clausewitz, On War, II:2, p.143)

That there have been claims within the military and civilian policy-maker’s ranks of surprise by the level of resistance in both countries only strengthens my argument that the civilians, as S. Hersh’s sources argued over pre-war intelligence assessments, received proper advice, but the professional soldiers were arrogantly ignored. Mr. Rumsfeld in particular, as a true believer in the Revolution in Military Affairs and its doctrine of Shock and Awe, believed it would, in and of itself, bring unqualified victory. But like Clinton’s, "it depends...what is the definition of is"... what is Rumsfeld’s definition of victory? I must point out that, as meager as my personal contribution is here, I stated on September 20th, 2001, live in Washington D.C. on the Jim Bohannon Show immediately five minutes after Mr. Bush’s Terrorism Speech, that we would have to occupy the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, and this would entail ground troops in the tens of thousands and we would be there for years. If I knew, Bush knew.

One nation may support another’s cause,

but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own.

A moderately-sized force will be sent to its help;

but if things go wrong the operation is pretty well written off,

and one tries to withdraw at the smallest possible cost.

Clausewitz, On War, VIII:6, p. 603



And seriously, things are going wrong! The confusion over objectives detailed in Summers’ volume about Vietnam reflects our present situation more than anyone wants to admit. In Vietnam this "had a devastating effect on our ability to conduct the war," according to Summers. "As Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard found in a 1974 survey of Army generals who had commanded in Vietnam, "almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives." Kinnard goes on to say that this "mirrors a deep-seated strategic failure: the inability of policy-makers to frame tangible, obtainable goals."12

I think this is the most important aspect of Summers detailed study of Vietnam and to some extent his historical take on the Korean War. It is not the duty of the military to judge the policy-maker’s goals and objectives but it is his duty to give his full and unqualified brief. I believe, given what we already know about the current crop of neo-conservatives, who dominate this administration and their inability to entertain advice that doesn’t fit their already conceived notions, we have been misled by these policy-makers. In an interesting quote by Summers, this very thing was addressed early on in the Spring of 1954 regarding whether American ground forces should be brought into the Vietnam war the French were then fighting. On the relationship between the Army leadership and its civilian decision makers:

The statesman, the civilian authority, says to the soldier (and by "soldier" I mean the professional military man - the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force as represented in the persons of the Chiefs of Staff): "This is our national policy. This is what we wish to accomplish, or would like to do. What military means are required to support it?"

The soldier studies this problem in detail. "very well," he says to the statesman. "Here is what your policy will require in men and guns, in ships and planes."...

If the civilian authority finds the cost to be greater than the country can bear, then either the objectives themselves should be modified, or the responsibility for the risks involved should be forthrightly accepted. Under no circumstances, regardless of pressures from whatever source or motive, should the professional military man yield, or compromise his judgment for other than convincing military reasons. To do otherwise would be to destroy his usefulness."13

The Offensive War:

In our Shock and Awe bombing of, first Afghanistan, then Iraq, we have been treated to articles in the prestigious journals like Foreign Affairs by too many authors with a certain bias in presenting the wars, the actual combat itself, as unmitigated successes. Mr. Rumsfeld was the most obvious and all the more unseemly because of its obviousness. The swagger in Rumsfeld’s ruminations cannot be stated any other way. 14 Yet the bombing, the overwhelming devastation brought upon both these countries did not achieve its central war objectives. We neither decisively defeated the armies, nor broke their "will to fight." We have not brought victory, period.

At about the time Mr. Bush declared an end to hostilities in Iraq on May 1, 2003, and that we had won the war, a close associate of Donald Rumsfeld’s at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Max Boot, wrote these words:

Coalition forces in the second Gulf War were less than half the size of those deployed in the first one. Yet they achieved a much more ambitious goal--occupying all of Iraq, rather than just kicking the Iraqi army out of Kuwait--in almost half the time, with one third the casualties, and at one fourth the cost of the first war....Although the Iraqi army was much degraded from its pre-1991 heyday, it still deployed more than 450,000 troops, including paramilitary units, the Republican Guard, and the Special Republican Guard, whose loyalties had been repeatedly demonstrated. Traditionally, war colleges have taught that to be sure of success, an attacking force must have a 3 to 1 advantage--a ratio that goes up to 6 to 1 in difficult terrain such as urban areas. Far from having a 3 to 1 advantage in Iraq, coalition ground forces (which never numbered more than 100,000) faced a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 disadvantage....That the United States and its allies won anyway--and won so quickly--must rank as one of the signal achievements in military history. (Foreign Affairs Vol. 82 No. 4, July /August. p.44)

It is not like a neo-conservative to ever admit of error, so one does not expect Mr. Boot to write another article clearing it all up and admitting that not only was he naive, immature in the greatest degree or maybe just an overzealous apologist for this war. Nevertheless by the time the article hit the newsstands every point he made was either entirely erroneous or must be read with a completely different understanding. Point of fact, Saddam Hussein’s army never intended to defend Baghdad 15 but acting in the same fashion as the Taliban, their strategic retreat was "to fight another day" towards using tactics more suitable to success against a superior conventional force: i.e., urban guerrilla warfare. Having done so, Mr. Bush and Max Boot (as but one of many examples of the war’s apologists) now find every point Mr. Boot made to have the reverse applicable. The war will cost America many times that of Gulf War 1 (running approximately 1.2 billion dollars a week); the casualties have already surpassed the first Gulf War and are mounting weekly; and, as far as accomplishing anything in half the time, we now find ourselves mired in an urban guerrilla war that could last a decade, if not twice that. Not only have we not occupied "all of Iraq," we don’t control all of Baghdad, nor the Shi‘ite South which is rising-up in anger as each day passes. Thus we have (or he ought to be) a fully embarrassed Mr. Boot. But the admittance that not only are our troops outnumbered by a guerrilla force possibly numbering 400,000, or a 4 to 1 ratio, we must leave the existing troops in place with one year rotations, 16 activate the Army Reserves to full status along with much of our National Guard, and we will still need to fix the proper ratio for the attacking American forces as specified in military doctrine at 6 to 1 (properly 10 to 1 in an urban guerrilla war) to attempt to reverse the situation. This will, if we intend to stay any longer than two years, require the reinstitution of the draft (Selective Service) in the very near future, likely after the next election. or we could withdraw.

Another rarely discussed problematic in the entire region is demographics. The United States has, just as most fully developed nations, an aging population. In Iraq and throughout the Gulf region their population has doubled in twelve years, with 60 percent under 21 years of age.17 Thus we mirror again our Vietnam experience. A rather young population fighting a guerrilla war against our conventional forces. Hanoi more than once proclaimed their willingness to expend enormous human losses and draw upon an endless supply of their youth to see America leave their country. One author, Mr. Leonardo Maugeri, also pointed out this important factor: "This demographic explosion has created expectations and frustrations to which stagnant, single-industry economics cannot give a credible answer. Only sustained oil revenues allow these countries to temper social unrest by preserving huge assistance programs. Gulf countries’ oil revenues are already much lower than they were 20 years ago, and cheap oil prices mean a dramatic dip in per capita oil income. Therefore, frustration and violent revolt may erupt whenever the minimum living standards are endangered by decreasing oil prices. Today’s Islamic fundamentalism, like yesterday’s pan-Arab socialism, finds fertile ground among hopeless people."18

Recall that our Rolling Thunder bombing of North Vietnam was supposed to bring about just such a success as our current doctrine of Shock and Awe: "Bring them to the negotiating table." But even then we neither shocked the Vietnamese into submission, nor were they in awe of our unsurpassed air supremacy; they, like both Iraq and Afghanistan, had no airpower to speak of, what was to awe them exactly? The failure to achieve the objectives through the carpet bombing of Hanoi and it was the on again/off again nature of the bombings that one Admiral Sharp argued caused us "temporary military disadvantages" and that Summers argued were "fatal flaws."

If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of the situation must not of course be transient--at least not in appearance. Otherwise the enemy would not give in but would wait for things to change."19

The Iraqi and Afghan guerrillas have all the time in the world. Al Qaida even more time.

They can always wait for things to change, change in America, change in Iraq, change!

A brief look at the war in Afghanistan:

In a ground-breaking article in Foreign Affairs Stephen Biddle 20 took a close look at this war that Mr. Bush has already declared over and the U.S. media underreports. We shall not belabor the point that the guerrilla warfare with a combination of original Taliban commanders (who fought the Soviets) and a newly reconstituted al Qaida are back with a vengeance and intend to "fight forever" the American and foreign occupation and Harmid Karzai’s U.S. backed regime. (The idea there were anything like elections in Afghanistan is as fraudulent as one can get). What needs to be explored and what Biddle discovered about our initial defeating of whatever Taliban and al Qaida fighters did stay and fight a tactical defensive withdrawal (this defeat was a given) was that the doctrine of Shock and Awe, the transformation of our U.S. military in some revolutionary fashion, (RMA) just simply did not happen. Biddle suggests this will remain untrue for some time to come. It was this belief put forward mainly in the media by Donald Rumsfeld that in the so-called defeat of the Taliban there was created what he termed "The Afghan Model." A model purportedly so successful it would set the stage, transform, all wars of the future. It was the use of Special Forces Operation’s teams directing overwhelming airpower with the ground fighting primarily done by the indigenous people themselves. (In Afghanistan it was the ruthless Northern Alliance whose true allegiance is with Russia not the West) The new Model was supposedly that U.S. ground forces didn’t have to engage the enemy at all and the Northern Alliance only sporadically and not in close combat. As though the entire war was fought from a distance and what came to be called a "standoff affair." I’ll let Biddle speak for himself.

[Yet] the war was not purely a standoff affair. Contrary to popular belief, there was plenty of close combat in Afghanistan. Although they were initially taken by surprise, Taliban fighters quickly adapted to American methods and adopted countermeasures that allowed many of them to elude American surveillance and survive U.S. air strikes. 21

The Taliban and al Qaida fighters withstood the devastating bombing and the "actively resisting Taliban had to be overcome by surprisingly close-quarters fighting." (Ibid.) Nobody, and certainly not this analyst, is suggesting that the Taliban could have defeated U.S. ground forces in a straight-up contest. That they didn’t attempt to is clear in Biddle’s report. The problem as I see it, from what I still hear, is that they didn’t put up any fight at all except a tactical (fighting) withdrawal; according to Rumsfeld and his Cabal of Wolfowitz, Fieth and Perle, and others, they were slaughtered like lambs and were awed and in shock over our superior firepower. They couldn’t even put up a fight, so it was reported. America rushed out to buy yellow ribbons and flags. All this we heard. But, what actually happened was somewhat different and does not bode well for the future wars we intend to fight in the Middle East. Biddle reports that,

...within days of the first SOF-directed air strikes, American commandos were already reporting that Taliban vehicles in their sectors had been smeared with mud to camouflage them. By November 5, the Taliban were making aggressive use of overhead cover and concealment. In the fighting north of Kandahar and along Highway 4 south of the city in December, al Qaida defenses were well camouflaged, dispersed, and making use of natural terrain for expedient cover. This pattern continued through Operation Anaconda in March, by which time al Qaida forces were practicing systematic communications security, dispersal, camouflage discipline, use of cover and concealment, and exploitation of dummy fighting positions to draw fire and attention from their real positions. 22

"The Taliban," Biddle notes, "did not just passively suffer under American attack; they adapted their methods to try to reduce their vulnerability. And as they did, the war changed character." (Ibid.) Among the more important changes Biddle reports, was the increasing difficulty U.S. forces experienced in finding targets for precision attack. They hid in old Soviet entrenchments and used the natural terrain for concealment.

By the time of the December fighting along Highway 4, even less information was available. In fact, concealed al Qaida defenses among a series of culverts and in burned-out vehicles along the roadside remained wholly undetected until their forces drove back an allied advance. An al Qaida counterattack in the same sector using a system of wadis, or dry valleys, for cover approached undetected to within 100-200 meters of allied and American SOF positions along the highway before opening fire. 23

When we did encounter the Taliban fighters through our enormous high technology capabilities, drones and satellites, something else of note occurred. "Just as enemy targets became harder to find once the Taliban adapted to the new model, the ones that were found also became tougher to kill." (Ibid., p. 39) At one location, Bai Beche, all the defenders could not be located easily so American commandos called in two days of heavy bombing across the entire position. "Yet even after this extensive effort, enough defenders survived to thwart the initial attack...(by allied forces). (Ibid.)

We heard nothing of these things, and more and worse scenarios during the actual time period of the combat mission. All we were treated to was how Shock and Awe was wiping out all resistance. That the Taliban were routed, al Qaida but a memory. We were lied to, as simple as that. And there is no point to this. The nation’s people, who must be fervently behind the deployment of U.S. military force, so as to not lose public support as happened during the Vietnam war, have been, instead treated as stupid little children who must be told "we are winning,"-- "now go shopping," as Mr. Bush actually proclaimed on more than one occasion. This was supposed to be reassuring? The American people could not be told how very ineffective our high technology revolution in military affairs was at the time which included massive amounts of munitions used in often just one skirmish; how ineffective against a dug-in enemy. Here was another battle reported by Biddle:

During Operation Anaconda, well-prepared al Qaida positions survived repeated aerial attack by U.S. precision munitions On Objective Ginger on march 4, for example American troops inadvertently disembarked from their assault helicopters almost on top of an unseen al Qaida position; after being pinned down for much of the day, they were extracted that night. They then spent much of the next ten days fighting their way back toward the Ginger hilltop from more secure landing zones well to the north. In the meantime, American aircraft pounded the hill. Yet in spite of more than a week of sustained heavy bombing, al Qaida positions on Ginger survived to fire on U.S. infantry when the latter finally reached and overran the objective. One dug-in al Qaida command post was found surrounded by no fewer than five 2,000 -pound bomb craters. Still, its garrison survived and resisted until overrun. 24

Throughout every war in the past, with the exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not even the fire-bombing of Dresden during the latter half of World War Two brought an abrupt end to resistance, even if it proved effective ultimately. As Biddle pointed out in his article, "In the past, firepower has been critical, but against resolute, well-prepared defenders, it has rarely been sufficient; taken together, Bai Beche, Qala-e-Gangi. and Operation Anaconda, (each proclaimed at the time easy victories in the press) suggest that it is not now, either." 25 In fact the Taliban and alQaida have predictably returned in force.

By August 13, 2003, the Taliban had wrested control of most of Zabul province in southeastern Afghanistan - for the first time recapturing a province since being ousted from power by the US military in November 2001 - geopolitical analytical firm Stratfor reported. The advance also underscores the stalemate between the United States and its Afghan allies against the Taliban. It indicates that the alliance formed in early 2002 between the Taliban, al Qaeda and Hizb-i-Islami - the party led by Afghan war lord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - is paying off for the militants. It said Zabul is of strategic and military importance for a number of reasons. Taking Zabul cuts off US troops stationed to the south in Kandahar from the bulk of US troops located to the north toward Kabul, and given that Helmand and Oruzgan provinces to the north of Zabul already are Taliban strongholds, the group can better try to isolate U.S. and local provincial troops in Kandahar and eventually attempt to retake Kandahar as well. 26

Reported in the New York Times but rarely re-reported anywhere else are stories like this one: "In the most violent day in Afghanistan in nearly a year, 15 people, including six children, were killed when a bomb exploded on their bus in southern Afghanistan, and another 20 people were killed in fighting in the country’s east....The bomb exploded in Helmand province aboard a bus en route to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, according to news agency reports. It was the deadliest such attack since a bomb exploded in Kabul last September, killing 35 people. In the east, suspected Taliban fighters attacked government soldiers in the province of Khost, about four miles from the border with Pakistan. Fifteen attackers were killed, as were five government soldiers, according to a spokesman for the provincial governor quoted by The Associated Press. 27

The attacks come two days after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a historic departure from its European theater of operation, assumed control of the International Security and Assistance Force, the multinational peacekeeping force that patrols Kabul and its surrounds. Clearly the war in Afghanistan is escalating, not over.



The attacks also come as the United States was preparing to invest another $1 billion in Afghanistan in an attempt to accelerate the pace of reconstruction. A significant amount of the aid, according to Afghan officials, will be devoted to expanding and strengthening national institutions - namely the national army and the police - that could help provide security outside Kabul. Stepped-up attacks in the southeast, including some on aid workers, have prompted aid groups to restrict their movements and work in a region already deeply underdeveloped.

Apparently the Taliban and al Qaeda are now strong enough to retake an entire province, and it’s a province that’s strategically located on the main road between Kandahar and Kabul. 28

What might this have told us about the excursion into Iraq?

There are some who feel like, that conditions are such

that they can attack us there,..

My answer is bring them on.

--President George Bush Jr. 7/2/03

Biddle early on had this to say about our upcoming invasion of Iraq; he didn’t believe the "Afghan Model" much talked about by Cheney and Rumsfeld in press conferences, would work well at all, arguing instead "In Iraq, for example, the lack of a credible, trained opposition bodes ill for an Afghan style campaign without major American ground forces."29 This didn’t stop Mr. Rumsfeld from advancing the theory that Iraq would be a cake-walk and American troops would be, "met with flowers pushed down the barrels of their guns," and "treated as liberators." Biddle understood what we would be up against, but the civilian managers are today those neo-conservatives who do not seek advice from those whose advice contradicts their preconceived point of view.

In most countries the central geo-strategic objectives are urban areas. Even where the bulk of the national land area is open desert (as in Iraq), the cities are both the key terrain and an ample source of cover (Baghdad alone covers more than 300 square kilometers). The natural complexity of such surfaces offers any opponent with the necessary skills, training, and adaptability a multitude of opportunities to thwart even modern remote surveillance systems. 30



Even with such a powerful caveat already written before March 2003, and at the newsstands by late February, the Administration refused to acknowledge just how wrong they were about the RMA and the effect shock and awe would (not) have, as opposed to what they still remained committed to. Biddle made it clear even if the administration wasn’t listening: "Even more broadly, we should be wary of suggestions that precision weapons have so revolutionized warfare that either the American military or American foreign policy can now be radically restructured . Some now argue that the revolutionary potential of precision weapons teamed with SOF and indigenous allies, can underwrite a neo-imperial American foreign policy in which the Afghan model enables cheap but effective military intervention on a potentially global scale. 31

The Afghan Model was no model at all, as Biddle made this as clear as could be when he stated, "So what does this analysis tell us about the future of warfare? The answer is that Afghanistan, at least, suggests a future more like the past than most now believe. Precision firepower did not simply annihilate well-prepared opponents at stand-off range in Afghanistan. To overcome skilled, resolute opposition required both precision firepower and skilled ground maneuver; neither alone was sufficient." 32

We instead went into Iraq with our troops believing there would be little resistance; in the south they were met with a Shi‘ite population that hated Saddam Hussein, which the administration thought meant they would automatically support our invasion of their land. But instead they hate us even more than Saddam Hussien. The resistance shocked some of the ground commanders and certainly the troops which met fierce resistance. Hussein and his transformed army, including the Republican Guard, never intended to hold the ground, cities, territory at any point. Putting up a mock and deceptive defense was planned all along, retreating into the urban centers "to fight another day." Hussein transformed his military into an urban guerrilla army and sucked-us into its vortex. In other words, "What the Afghan war ultimately shows is that even today, continuity in the nature of war is at least as important as change. To ignore the continuity and focus exclusively on the change risks serious error and fundamental misunderstanding of this war’s true meaning for the future--which is neither as transformational (Rumsfeld’s favorite term) nor as idiosyncratic as many have asserted." 33

Commitment and Interests:

"We have a soldier wounded or killed every other day" in the Baghdad area.

"Is it slowing us down? Yes, because some soldiers who would otherwise be doing reconstruction, we have to use for security.

Every attack means we`re going to have to be here a little longer."

-- Maj. Scott Slaten



In a most audacious attack on American troops, an Iraqi fired a rocket-propelled grenade from the sunroof of a Chevrolet car at a passing patrol yesterday, incinerating one of the army vehicles and seriously wounding four of those traveling in the convoy. 34

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary, insisted "that Iraq was not a new Vietnam," there are no jungles there! 35

07/01/03: BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day - while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home. Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped. Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt. And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war - albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement. 36

It was finally admitted by at least one on-the-ground general that America is in a full-on professionally organized guerrilla war; we are not fighting disgruntled homeowners who are angry with the lack of electricity; we are not facing foreigners paid by wealthy Hussein "loyalists," nor are we facing (only or primarily) classical terrorists of the Al Qaida "ilk." As this analyst had stated in interviews and articles for almost two years since 9/11 and at the time, we will be facing an international urban guerrilla war which began on 9/11 on our own soil. Our involvement in the Caspian region, Afghanistan and now Iraq, now possibly Iran, less likely but certainly on the Bush banquet platter, North Korea and Syria, will bring more American deaths abroad, a growing guerrilla resistance wherever we have troops on the ground, and further attacks here at home. Here is what one General stated during late July 2003:

"It think describing it as guerrilla tactics being employed against us is, you know, a proper thing to describe in strictly military terms..." 37

Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid, who commands U.S. forces in Iraq, said a "guerrilla war is exactly what U.S. troops are confronting," not what Mr. Rumsfeld claimed himself on June 30th, that it was not "anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." 38 Ground commanders are contradicting the civilian managers and given Summer’s analysis above, we need to take note of this.

Abizaid said U.S. forces are fighting remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party throughout Iraq. He said mid-level officials of Saddam’s government, including from the old intelligence and security agencies and the Special Republican Guard, "have organized at the regional
level in cellular structure." Abizaid said they "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It’s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it’s war however you describe it."39

Will this escalate into a furtherance of conflict here at home? Will, given the protracted nature of every guerrilla war, they can only hope to win if it is in fact protracted, will more Americans die here at home and abroad in classical terrorist attacks? U.S. Military intervention has been identified as the major cause for terrorist acts against Americans and American facilities, corporate, military and governmental by none other than the United States Pentagon’s Defense Science Board:



As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America’s position in the world invited attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.40

"The level of resistance, I’m not so sure I would characterize it as escalating in terms of number of incidents. But it is getting more organized and it is learning. It is adapting -- it is adapting to our tactics, techniques and procedures. And we’ve got to adapt to their tactics, techniques and procedures," Abizaid said. Does this sound at all familiar or must we wait until Harry Summers or Stephen Biddle writes another volume as they did on Afghanistan and Vietnam? To face this growing threat without alarming the American people the Pentagon will have to send more troops and keep those already there maybe indefinitely.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Pentagon could start a call-up of as many as 10,000 U.S. National Guard soldiers by this winter to bolster forces in Iraq and offset a lack of troops from allies, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the U.S. military thin, the report said, and soldiers there still face danger every day. One senior U.S. defense official, asked by the Journal if he had ever seen the Army stretched so thin, said: "Not in my 31 years" of military service.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is expected to sign off later this week on a plan that would set up rotations to relieve Marine and U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Iraq, the newspaper said, citing a Pentagon official. 41

The American people have gone to war often in the interests of America’s interests; Vietnam was one; Somalia was different, Afghanistan different still, Iraq differs even more. The war on terrorism holds that we must make "pre-emptive war" world-wide against those who may "harbor or support terrorism anywhere they are found." Interests are not a very good argument most of the time. Colonel Harry G. Summers hits the mark in his chapter To Provide for the Common Defense. We are almost always told that if we do not deal with our enemies here or there we will be fighting them in the streets of America.

Although our military policies are often justified in terms of the first mission--protection of the Homeland--it is the third mission--protection of American worldwide interests--that has most often led to the commitment of American armed forces. It was easier to say "fight them in Vietnam or fight them in the streets of San Francisco" than it was to attempt to explain the complex network of interests behind our Vietnam policy, and "protection" is much less open to argument than "interests" over which one may or may not agree. 42



As Vietnam illustrated, and I can recall quite vividly from personal recollection, and as Summers pointed out "the divergence between what we were doing and what we said we were doing led to such serious problems as the ‘credibility gap’ and the loss of public support." (Ibid.) These wars over interests always escalate, more troops are sent, reserves called-up. The tactics the enemy employs is as old as wars themselves. Our shock and awe revolution in warfare is not new to the guerrilla and the past practitioners of this ancient art of war.

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it, and does not posses, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war....43

Mr. Bush is about to discover that the inevitable escalation of the war in Central Asia’s Caspian region centered in Afghanistan cannot be so easily won. (Arguably the war is, in part, over the pipelines today being presently funded by the Asian Development Bank and under construction and viable control of the region’s vast oil and gas reserves, although not as the sole or maybe even one of more important political/economic objectives, it cannot any longer be denied. 44 And in the overall Middle East (whereby Iraq is seen as but the beginning) oil reserves cannot be ruled out as at least one of the primary objectives for our pre-emptive attack on that country. This is going to return with a vengeance on this Administration. These objectives cannot be dismissed, should have been spoken to from the beginning, rather than the worn out song of Homeland Security and WMD neither of which will hold weight in the years to come. Summers’ reasoning bears repeating here, "the divergence between what we were doing and what we said we were doing led to such serious problems as the ‘credibility gap’ and the loss of public support." It is here that the troops suffer the most. They are the least informed as to what the real objectives are in every war; they are the last to understand the constraints or limits place upon their commanders; they are the last to find out, many much too late, that they were sent to war over reasons, resources and for a reality never explained.

The first the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.45

There is no longer any lingering doubt that Mr. Bush and his Cabal have, to the point, misled the world, the UN, the United States Congress and the American people as what our true objectives were in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This alone is being argued whether this is an impeachable offense. Misleading Congress is a felony. This first failing might be overlooked by the cynical and unwise, by the people so easily occupied with the latest T.V programs. But the strategic necessity of getting it right regarding "the kind of war" we are to fight, not trying to "turn it into something alien to its nature," is, to my way of thinking the more impeachable offense than the former. It is this, this not reckoning that we would be facing a protracted urban guerrilla war in Iraq, a classical guerrilla war in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan, one we at one time funded and aided the same Mujahadeen against the old Soviet Union, that bears the brunt of history. It is the failure to fight the proper "kind of war" to achieve achievable objectives necessary to the first mission, "protecting the American homeland," that cost American (and the rest) lives, and is unforgivable. The language Mr. Bush himself has used to garner public support has been downright un-statesman-like in every sense. Good versus evil, them or us, is the language of demagogues not republicans.

"We have failed to perceive that people will probably respond to arguments made on the basis of enlightened self-interest....The apocalyptic language of the past has tended to deceive those who used it as well as those who got the message." --Senator Jacob Javits, 1973



As Summers pointed out regarding the American war manager’s deceptions of the past wars, "In the future we must take care to avoid jeopardizing American public support for their military with misstatements -- either intentional or unintentional -- of what we are about."46 The American people are still grappling with what we are about. I have argued that what we are...is an empire of sorts, not a Roman style empire as in Rome’s day as the Roman people benefited by Rome’s imperial policies, her wars, her objectives. Even Roman legions stood to gain. Everyone understood just what they were about. But this new empire, the new imperial project here in America if masked and veiled (if not to the rest of the world which tends to see us in our historical light). It is a corporate empire whose interests we are at war over. it is the giant monopoly multinational corporations whose interests we fight to defend, acquire, dominate and rule in behalf of. But misleading the American people over this aspect is nothing compared to misleading our youth into what kind of war they are to fight in whose interests.

Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumseld and Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and Ms Rice, Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Armitage, and even Mr. Powell, have to one degree or another misled the American people; worse, they have misled the troops themselves if not the commanders in the field. Have these followed the past thinking regarding making war? Thinking, like that of Robert S. McNamara:

The greatest contribution Vietnam is making--right or wrong is beside the point--is that it is developing an ability in the United states to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing public ire.47

"Right or Wrong" was not beside the point, as Summers pointed out, and neither was the intangible of "public ire." The failure to invoke the national will of the American people was one of the major strategic failures of the Vietnam war. It produced a strategic vulnerability that our enemy was able to exploit. The troops rebelled, morale was horrendous, the youth protested and parents were outraged. (Ibid.,pp.7-18) It is the belief our leaders today hold that the, primarily Muslim populations, in the regions we are fighting, have got to lose; we are simply too powerful; they will be shocked and in awe. As doctrine Shock and Awe has only deluded our leaders, not convinced our enemies; we have not broken their will to fight, their will to resist. We have guaranteed the opposite. As Clausewitz wrote almost 200 years ago:

Not every war need be fought until one side collapses. When the motives and tensions of war are slight we can imagine that the faintest prospect of defeat might be enough to cause one side to yield. If from the very start the other side feels that this is probable, it will obviously concentrate on bringing about this probability rather than take the long way round and totally defeat the enemy. 48

Nobody believes Saddam Hussein and his (now transformed 49) guerrilla army of maybe 400,000 fighters believes they can totally defeat the American conventional war machine in all-out-war; nobody believes Mullah Omar believes his Taliban and friends like Usamah bin Laden 50 and al Qaida can totally defeat the American conventional war machine in all-out-war; they do not.

We believe they cannot wear us down with years of protracted guerrilla warfare, the only kind of warfare, protracted, guerrillas can and will fight, as it is the only chance they have of "winning without defeating" American forces. Without defeating American forces they can win. Americans today view war as a sporting event, one side is better and therefore wins the game. This thing called war is no game, those of us who have seen it close up understand this. Those, like almost every single member of the President’s team, inclusive of himself, George W. Bush Junior, have never seen war except on T.V.; trust me not, though I have seen war close-up; but do trust those men like Col. David Hackworth (ret.) Col. Robert K. Brown (ret.), and so many others like them, we can lose both these wars and defeat the enemy tactically at every turn, if they stand and fight. That was always the question: would the Taliban, al Qaida, the Special Republican Guard and Saddam Hussein’s 450,000 soldiers stand and fight us? No intelligent military professional thought so, none do today. Mr. Bush has set course not knowing what kind of war we were to fight, not knowing how many troops we needed, therefore what kind of public support would be needed in the long-haul wars inevitably turn out to be. Worse, as al

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Issue Date: September 01, 2003

Families seek answers about soldiers’ deaths

By Deborah Funk
Times staff writer

At least one family, and possibly two, want independent opinions on what caused the deaths of their loved ones after they became ill in Iraq.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Bellville, Texas, family of Army Spc. Zeferino Colunga requested medical records, personal effects and blood and tissue samples of the 20-year-old soldier.

Colunga, of the 4th Squadron, 2nd Armored Calvary Regiment, died Aug. 6 at Homburg Hospital in Germany, after he fell ill in Iraq. The family was told he had pneumonia and acute leukemia, his 19-year-old sister, Teresa Colunga, said.

“We gave the military my brother alive,” she said. “They gave him back to us dead. I want to find out what happened.”

The family is concerned that the Defense Department lacks the expertise of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is not providing them with information they request, according to the letter.

“We as a family are concerned that we are not being told the truth,” the letter states. The family wants “immediate access” to all personal effects and property, medical records, medical evacuation reports, staff journal reports, disease and nonbattle injury reports, pre-deployment screening reports, predeployment serum and blood, postmortem tissue and blood samples, postmortem medical reports, cause-of-death reports, epidemiological survey reports, endemic disease reports, vaccine injury reports and any other similar reports “that will assist us in understanding the cause of death.”

The letter was drafted on the family’s behalf by the National Gulf War Resource Center. The group sent a virtually identical letter to Rumsfeld in the name of the family of Spc. Joshua Neusche, 20, of Montreal, Mo., who died in Germany on July 12 of pneumonia. Neusche was with the 203rd Engineer Battalion. His family could not be reached for comment.

Since March, 18 U.S. service members in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom have suffered severe cases of pneumonia and needed ventilation. Two have died, although defense officials said Colunga’s case was not related to the recent pneumonia cases in Southwest Asia.

In all, defense officials say roughly 100 service members in U.S. Central Command have been diagnosed with pneumonia. The Army sent two teams, one to Germany and the other to Iraq, to investigate the causes.

“Currently, we have identified no infectious agent common to all the cases,” the Army surgeon general’s office said in a statement. “Additionally, there is no evidence that any of the 18 serious pneumonia cases under review have been caused by exposure to chemical or biological weapons, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or environmental toxins. The review of the cases is being done in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Defense health officials can’t release data on the deaths without the next of kin’s written permission. Officials say they have one unsigned letter that seems to be from the Neusche family but have not seen the letter from the Colungas. Copies provided by the National Gulf War Resource Center show both lack a signature and list the center as the point of contact.

Each family has been contacted by a doctor “to give them a conduit to ask medical questions,” said Lyn Kukral, spokeswoman for the Army surgeon general. One family had been contacted before the letters were sent; the other had not.

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-2152000.php

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 8:59 a.m. EDT September 2, 2003

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
Crowds in Iraq`s holy city of Najaf have mobbed the ceremonial coffin of a slain spiritual leader. Hundreds of thousands of mourners filled the city for the funeral of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric killed in a car bombing at a mosque last week.
The Polish military says international troops have delayed taking over from U.S. Marines in the Iraqi city of Najaf for nearly three weeks until September 21st. The Marines have said they want to retain control after last week`s bombing that killed a moderate Shiite cleric and scores of worshippers.
A U.S. soldier has been killed and another hurt in a helicopter crash south of Baghdad. A U.S. military spokesman says the crash was not the result of hostile fire. The helicopter was a Delta U-H-60.
The military says two more American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. They were killed in a roadside bomb attack on their convoy in southern Baghdad yesterday. One other soldier was wounded. The military says the soldiers were from the Second Battalion of the 20th Military Police Brigade.
There`s been an explosion in Baghdad. A car bomb went off today near the police headquarters in the Iraqi capital, wounding bystanders. Witnesses say many people were hurt. But an Iraqi police official says there were no deaths. There isn`t much damage to the police building.
Once wary of criticizing a popular wartime president`s handling of Iraq, members of Congress are shedding their inhibitions. Returning to Washington this week after a summer break, some are questioning whether President Bush could do more to get help from other countries to secure and rebuild Iraq, whether he has enough U.S. troops there and how much the war will cost in U.S. lives and taxpayer dollars.

CASUALTIES
A total of 282 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the war began in Iraq. Of those, 70 have died in combat since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Car Bomb Kills Iraqi Policeman; Top Shi`ite Buried
Tue September 2, 2003 11:35 AM ET
By Andrew Gray
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb at Baghdad`s police headquarters killed an Iraqi police officer and wounded about 15 others Tuesday in a suspected attempt to assassinate the police chief, a key ally of the U.S.-led occupying authorities.

The blast, which sent thick black smoke into the sky, went off as more than 100,000 mourners packed into the holy city of Najaf for the funeral of a top Shi`ite cleric slain in the deadliest attack in postwar Iraq.

Mourners in Najaf, about 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, slapped their chests and heads in traditional Shi`ite rituals at the funeral of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim.

Some mourners who trailed Hakim`s coffin lashed themselves with small chains, while others paused to drink from bathtubs filled with icy water along the roadside as temperatures rose to around 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit).

Much of the violence plaguing Iraq has targeted U.S. forces, who lost two soldiers in a land mine blast Monday to take the total killed in action since the official end of major combat on May 1 to 67.

But Iraqis working with the occupiers are also increasingly at risk.

"What we need at this point is better intelligence to find out where the terrorists are who are killing Iraqis," said Paul Bremer, head of Iraq`s U.S.-led interim administration.

"I think it is true that Iraq now faces an important terrorist threat," he told a news conference.

Explosives rigged to a car in a garage next to city police chief Hassan Ali`s office caused Tuesday`s blast, police said. One police officer was killed, the U.S. military said, and hospitals reported 15 people had been injured.

Ali is a high-profile figure in U.S.-led efforts to bring security to Iraq, and members of the new Iraqi police force are often branded collaborators by opponents of the occupation.

Iraqi police Brigadier Saeed Muneim said Ali had probably been the target of the blast.

"We were sitting inside, doing paperwork when it went off," said Lieutenant Colonel Yahya Ibrahim, bloodstains on his pale blue police shirt and a bandage over a head wound.

"We did not come here to serve any party of person. We are here to serve Iraq."

ISLAMIC MILITANTS INCREASINGLY SUSPECTED

Washington has blamed diehard supporters of Saddam Hussein, ousted in April in the U.S.-led war on Iraq, for most of the postwar violence but also says foreign Islamic militants have come into the country in greater numbers in recent months.

The latest U.S. soldiers to die were with a military police unit. They were killed and a comrade was wounded when their Humvee vehicle ran over a homemade land mine on a Baghdad supply route Monday afternoon, the military said.

"No, no to America," the throng trailing Hakim`s coffin chanted Tuesday as it entered the Imam Ali shrine, one of the holiest sites for Shi`ite Muslims.

Hakim was a key leader of Iraq`s Shi`ite majority who had advocated cautious cooperation with the occupiers.

He died with more than 80 of his followers outside the Imam Ali shrine in the most lethal of a string of bombings, increasingly frequent in recent weeks after months of lower-level guerrilla violence.

"Why didn`t you do this on Friday?" screamed one man pulled aside and searched by the Iraqi police who surrounded the Imam Ali shrine and kept cars from approaching it.

"The sayyid (Hakim) and all the Muslims who died would still be alive."

SHI`ITES BLAME SADDAM

Many Shi`ites believe supporters of Saddam, a Sunni Muslim who repressed them, carried out the attack. But they also blame U.S. forces for postwar insecurity.

While Hakim`s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq is not friendly toward Washington, it has so far worked with the occupiers in the hope they will install democracy -- giving Shi`ites much more power than they had under Saddam.

Iraq`s U.S.-backed Governing Council, which includes Hakim`s brother, named a cabinet of 25 ministers Monday and they are due to be sworn in Wednesday.

The ministers will formulate policy with the Governing Council and the occupying authorities. Ultimate power remains with Bremer`s administration until a general election, which could be held sometime next year.
Pvt. Lynch to Tell Story in $1 Million Book Deal
Tue September 2, 2003 12:09 PM ET




By Mark Egan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch has signed a $1 million agreement with Alfred A. Knopf, giving the injured former U.S. Army private the chance to tell her own story, the publisher said on Tuesday.

The publisher said the book, "I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," will be written by former New York Times reporter Rick Bragg.

Sources familiar with the book said it will tell the tale of a small town girl who goes to war and becomes a national hero, recognition she does not feel she deserves.

Sources at Knopf said the publisher will pay $1 million to Bragg and the Lynch family. Bragg will be paid a flat fee for producing the book while the Lynch family will receive part of the advance and all of the royalties.

"I have been heartened by the hope and faith of the American people and by the tireless effort of the U.S. Armed Forces," Lynch said in a statement issued by the publisher.

Lynch said many Americans had written offering their support to her. "I feel I owe them all this story, which will be about more than a girl going off to war and fighting alongside her fellow soldiers.

Lynch was granted an honorable military discharge last week due to her injuries. An army private, she became a symbol of American patriotism during the war, which generated controversy as accounts of her rescue in Iraq varied.

A source familiar with the book said it will tell, "what she saw and what she remembers" of the Iraq ordeal. The source said the book would tell the story of, "a kid from the back woods who goes to war and becomes this national hero who doesn`t really feel as though she is a hero."

The 20-year-old supply clerk was captured by Iraqi forces on March 23 near the city of Nassiriya. Eleven other U.S. soldiers were killed and nine wounded in the incident.

U.S. commandos rescued Lynch from an Iraqi hospital on April 1. An early media report quoted unnamed U.S. officials saying she fought fiercely before being captured. But the Army later concluded she was injured when her Humvee crashed into another vehicle in the convoy after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Their report said a tired company commander misread his map and took a wrong turn.

Lynch was given a hero`s welcome when she returned to her hometown of Palestine, West Virginia, on July 22. But the full details of her story have yet to be told since Lynch said she suffered a loss of memory after her capture.

She was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart and the Prisoner of War medal.

Pulitzer-Prize winner Bragg resigned from The New York Times earlier this year after allegations that he relied too heavily on the work of a freelancer.

Knopf is a unit of Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann AG.

Summary
++++US++++UK++++Other+++++Total++++Avg++++Days
++++286++++50+++++2++++++++338+++++2.04++++166

Latest Fatality Date: 9/2/2003
Estimated Wounded: 1444
09/02/03 CENTCOM confirms fatatilty
One 1st Armored Division soldier was killed and another was injured in a helicopter accident early Tuesday morning.
09/02/03 News Interactive
An American soldier was killed and another injured today in a helicopter accident near Baghdad, the army said
09/02/03 MANDATORY READING: The Washington Post
Number of Wounded in Action on Rise
09/02/03 Centcom
2 Military Police Brigade soldiers were killed and one was wounded approximately 3:19 p.m. Sept. 1 when their High-Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device along a main supply route south of Baghdad.
09/01/03 SpaceWar
14 US soldiers wounded in Iraq over weekend
08/31/03 CENTCOM
ONE U.S. SOLDIER DROWNED WHEN VEHICLE FELL INTO CANAL NEAR TIKRIT ON AUG. 29TH
08/31/03 CENTCOM
TWO U.S. SOLDIERS DIE OF WOUNDS SUFFERED DURING ACTION NEAR SHKIN, AFGHANISTAN

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Monday, September 01, 2003

Puppet of the Month
Today, September 1, 2003, is an important day. Ahmad Al-Chalabi has finally achieved the epitome of his political aspirations. All the years of embezzlement, conniving, and scheming have paid off: he is the current rotating president. He has officially begun his ‘presidential term’.

To be quite honest, I’ve been waiting for this. I watch all his interviews and read any article I can get, in an attempt to comprehend what hidden charms, or buried astuteness, made the Pentagon decide to so diligently push him forth as a potential leader. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was some sort of elaborate, inside joke in Washington: “We’re blighted with Bush- you deserve no better.”

So I sat around waiting for an interview on Al-Jazeera. They said it would be on at 6:05 Baghdad time- I began watching at 6:00. I had to wait, impatiently, a full 20 minutes before he made his appearance, but it was worth it. He sat, wearing a black suit, striped shirt and black tie. He was polished, and smug.

The interview, like most of his interviews, began well. He showed appropriate solemnity when asked about his views on the assassination of Al-Hakim. The smug look vanished from his face momentarily. When the reporter asked him who he thought was behind the assassination, he shrewdly narrowed it down to: extremists, loyalists, terrorists, Ba’athists and people from neighboring countries.

The Governing Council, though, was a touchy subject. When asked about just how much power the Governing Council actually had, he immediately began foaming and spluttering- claiming they had all the power to govern Iraq. So the wily reporter asked about the American presence in Iraq- how long would it take for them to leave? Al-Chalabi instantaneously stated that the American presence in Iraq was completely in the hands of the Iraqis, like himself, and that Bremer had told them that if they wanted the Americans out, they would be out tomorrow!

When asked if he would nominate himself for “president” come elections, he denied having any political ambition and claimed he was there “to help the Iraqi people” (like he helped the Jordanian people?!).

He blamed the neighboring countries for any terrorism going on in Iraq. He said they should ‘close all the borders’ because the Iraqi army couldn’t currently secure its own border (apparently someone forgot to send him the memo about dissolving the army). I wish the reporter had posed the following question: Mr. Chalabi, if the neighboring countries close their borders, how will you make your stunning, historical flight in the trunk of a car when it becomes necessary?

I was a bit disappointed with it all. For the last week, I was anticipating some sort of… I don’t know- elaborate inauguration ceremony? No, not really… maybe more of a festivity, worthy of the solemn occasion, marking his ascent to power. A circus-themed gala, perhaps, where Bremer can play the ring-master and Chalabi can jump through red, white and blue hoops to mark this historical day. Qambar can serve the cocktails…

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

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Iraq War Erodes World`s Post-9/11 Sympathy for US
Tue September 02, 2003 11:00 AM ET


By Alistair Lyon, Middle East Diplomatic Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Victim turned bully?

Changed views of the United States two years after the September 11 horrors may haunt Washington`s quest for help in grappling with the bloody aftermath of the Iraq invasion.

The suicide hijack attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 produced a remarkable outpouring of sympathy for America.

Nations briefly set aside their quarrels with U.S. foreign policy and President Bush`s go-it-alone approach, but sympathy soured as Bush declared a vague "war on terror" that he took to Afghanistan and then, far more controversially, to Iraq.

Emad Shahin, a political science professor in Cairo, said Egyptians questioned whether the human suffering of September 11 justified the deaths of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis.

"After the war in Iraq, the United States looks to many like an occupying power in the region, which revives memories of European occupation in the early 20th century and further erodes any sympathy among people in the region," he said.

Disquiet among U.S. allies in Europe centers on Washington`s preference for pre-emptive action, its claim to military and economic primacy and its scorn for multilateral initiatives in areas including global warming and international justice.

Britain and some other countries backed the Iraq war despite domestic critics who doubted the gravity of the threat from Saddam Hussein`s still-unfound weapons of mass destruction.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi may give Bush unstinting support, but American use of force has dissipated the post-September 11 solidarity felt by almost all Italians.

"Today every war is possible, at a moment`s notice and everywhere, and the political objectives behind the wars are getting more and more confused and difficult to grasp," said a recent editorial in Rome`s independent La Stampa daily.

TOOL OR PARTNER? The United States had made clear it would act alone on Iraq if need be, putting the onus on the U.N. Security Council to "prove its relevance" by endorsing war. The council declined.

Iraq`s postwar travail has refocused debate on the limits of U.S. solo power, especially after last month`s bombings of the Jordanian embassy, U.N. headquarters and a Shiite shrine. The Bush administration has now for the first time signaled interest in a U.N.-mandated multinational force.

But it will be loath to let despised opponents of the Iraq war, notably France, claim vindication for their views. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Paris wanted a genuine change of policy in Iraq before the U.S. "logic of force" triggered a spiral of confrontation and collapse.

"We must end the ambiguity, transfer responsibilities and allow the Iraqis to play the role they deserve as soon as possible," he said last week.

Bush may win public approval at home by painting the fight with Iraqi insurgents, now said to include foreign militants, as part of the "war on terror," but many in the Middle East see the U.S.-led occupation itself as the problem.

"There are grave concerns it will encourage the activities of fundamentalists in the region who blame Gulf countries for supporting the invasion," said a government official in Oman.

ROOTS OF TERROR

Long before the war, many Arabs and Muslims viewed U.S. foreign policy as an extension of Israel`s. Even pro-Western Arab leaders such as Egypt`s Hosni Mubarak have argued that the U.S. role in Iraq will fuel terrorism, not dampen it.

Arabs fume at what they see as America`s unstinting support for Israel, even as it occupies and settles Palestinian land. They resent U.S. attitudes that conflate the Palestinian struggle against occupation with global terrorism and perceived double standards toward Israeli and Palestinian violence.

"It is not Osama bin Laden, but America`s arrogance and anti-Muslim policy which have given birth to terrorism," said Ahmed Suleiti, a civil engineer in Qatar, in remarks echoed widely in the region.

Yemeni political analyst Sami Ghaleb said the United States was "threatening the collective security of the world" with its support for Israeli policies and its threats to Syria and Iran. "Generally, there`s admiration for the American people and the country`s technological edge," said Ahmad Baghdadi, a political science professor in pro-U.S. Kuwait.

"The problem lies in U.S. policy in the Middle East and its role in the war on terrorism, which started militarily and is ending ideologically," he said, referring to U.S. pressure for political and social change in countries such as Saudi Arabia where Washington had long backed the autocratic status quo.

The United States also wins scant support in countries like Kenya and Indonesia, both targeted by terror attacks blamed on bin Laden`s al Qaeda network, but which feel doubly penalized by U.S. and British advice to tourists to stay away.

"They (Americans) have to be a little more humble and realize that the world doesn`t revolve around Washington D.C.," said Macharia Gaitho, an editor at Kenya`s Daily Nation.

Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had backed the U.S. "war on terror," condemned the Iraq invasion, as did many in an 85 percent Muslim country where militant Islam and anger at U.S. policies in the Middle East are on the rise.

The September 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, created havoc in once-cozy ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia, inflaming feelings on both sides.

"I don`t like America because America doesn`t like the world," said Ahmed Sultan Ghanem, a 25-year-old Saudi student.

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Rusting, toxic `ghost fleet` on way to UK
John Vidal, environment editor
Wednesday September 3, 2003
The Guardian

A fleet of 13 dilapidated US ships, heavily polluted with asbestos, oil and deadly PCBs, will embark on the 4,500-mile journey from America`s east coast to Teesside in the next month amid warnings from salvage experts that they risk bringing an environmental disaster in their wake.

Seven years ago Bill Clinton ruled that the US navy`s "ghost fleet" of 120 decomposing hulks could not be scrapped in developing countries because their pollution and toxic loads risked the lives of shipyard workers.

But a British company has signed a $17m (£10.8m) contract to dismantle the most fragile vessels at a dockyard near Hartlepool.

AbleUK, which also stands to get two almost-complete oil tankers from the US government as part of the deal, is expected to submit detailed plans of the proposed voyage in the next few days.

Under the contract, a copy of which has been seen by the Guardian, the company is obliged to remove all 13 ships from the James river in Virginia, where they have been slowly rusting for the past 15 years, by the end of November or face a $1,350 daily fine for each vessel.

They are in such poor condition that to stand any chance of surviving the crossing, they will have to leave by the end of this month, before the onset of autumn storms in the Atlantic.

A leading US salvage expert, who has surveyed most of the ships involved in the contract, has told the Guardian that there is a risk that some of the ships will be breaking up by the time they reach Teesside.

Tim Mullane, of Virginia-based company Dominion Maritime, said: "They`re leaking, and listing, and that`s just sitting at anchor in a river. If they get to sea, some will definitely start to break up.

"A pollution slick will follow them all the way across the Atlantic. When they get to Teesside they will be leaking even more and be more liable to break up. Their bottoms are rotting out and they will leak at anchor.

"Some of them have hundreds of tonnes of heavy oil aboard which will leak out and pollute the river there."

At least two ships would struggle to make it 15 miles into the Atlantic, he added.

Some of the vessels are almost 60 years old. The 12,000-tonne supply ship Canisteo was launched in July 1945. Over the next 50 years the Can-o-shit, as she was known to her crew, was involved in the Cuban missile crisis and the Korean war.

Last night environmental campaigners condemned the deal. Friends of the Earth claimed that the AbleUK dockyard would not be fully operational and that no planning permission had been granted by the local authority. "The fear is that the boats will come over and have to wait in the river Tees in an even more dangerous state," a spokesman said.

The Irish government and the Scottish executive have also voiced concern about the pollution threat posed by the fleet as it passes through their coastal waters. The safety risks means they will not be allowed to go through the English Channel, one of the world`s busiest shipping lanes, and will instead go around the northern tip of Scotland and down the North sea.

The deal may yet be scuppered. The Department of Transport`s maritime and coastguard agency said it had asked for a full pollution risk assessments of these ships, a detailed passage plan showing exactly where they would go and what they would do in bad weather, and what alternatives they have in an emergency.

"We have the power to refuse them on safety grounds," a spokeswoman said.

But AbleUK moved to calm fears that the ships would pollute Teesside, insisting that it would be able to handle all 13 vessels at the same time.

"Once within the facility the basin will be drained and sealed - allowing `dry` dismantling which, as well as being much safer for those undertaking the work, will prevent any risk of wastes from the vessels entering surrounding waters," it said on its website.

The environment agency also defended its decision to approve the deal.

"There is free trade in waste for recovery under international and EU law," a spokesman said. "To obstruct it without valid reason would put the UK in breach of that law."

In a letter to FoE`s lawyer, the health and safety executive said it was legal and acceptable for asbestos to be imported into the country because of the high standards expected of AbleUK.

It also said there was no capacity in US shipyards to dispose of such polluting materials.

Robyn Boerstling, of the US maritime administration, said: "These ships are desperately in need of disposal, and a commercial decision has been made that AbleUK on Teesside offers the best option. They have to be removed due to the toxic substances control legalisation."

On Teesside, reaction to the fleet`s imminent arrival was mixed. "Most people are delighted that much-needed work is coming but they do not necessarily like the idea of taking US waste," said Carol Zagrovic, a local community worker.

"When locals ask for information they`re only told that it is an opportunity, or that it means work. But a lot of people are horrified, too."


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The blind prophet
Before the war, President Bush told us Iraq was a throbbing hub of terror. It wasn`t, of course. But it is now

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday September 3, 2003
The Guardian

The warning was plain. Iraq was a breeding ground of terror, an incubator for al-Qaida and a clear and present danger to "the civilised world". Tony Blair was wary of that argument, but George Bush made it the heart of his case. At his eve-of-war press conference back in March, the president cast the coming attack as the next step in a story that had begun on September 11 2001. Iraq was providing "training and safe haven to terrorists, terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries". The irony is that, at the time, this was not true. But it is now.

With astonishing speed, the United States and Britain are making their nightmares come true. Iraq is fast becoming the land that they warned about: a throbbing hub of terror. Islamists bent on murder, all but non-existent in Saddam`s Iraq, are now flocking to the country, from Syria, Iran and across the Arab world. In the way that hippies used to head for San Francisco, jihadists are surging towards Baghdad. For those eager to strike at the US infidel, Iraq is the place to be: a shooting gallery, with Americans in easy firing range. Afghanistan is perilous terrain, but Iraq is open country. For the Islamist hungry for action, there are rich pickings.

Bush insisted that Saddam`s Iraq was packed with these people, ready to be deployed at a moment`s notice. Proof was always thin, thinner even than the evidence of weapons of mass destruction - which is why Blair, to his credit, never mentioned it. But never mind; events have taken care of that little lacuna in the US argument. Iraq may not have been a terrorists` paradise at the start of the year - a retirement home for a few has-beens, perhaps - but it is now. Operation Iraqi Freedom blew off the gates, and Islam`s holy warriors have rushed in. Like the blind protagonist of a Greek drama, Bush, in seeking to avert a prophecy, has ended up fulfilling it.

Confirmation comes in the daily drip-drip-drip of the death toll, with one or two Americans (and now Britons) dying every 24 hours. It is a wonder the figure is not higher, with coalition forces now facing up to 20 attacks a day. There were more deaths yesterday, along with a car bomb at the Baghdad police academy.

Not that the victims have been chiefly Americans. Instead, the biggest strikes have been against those seen to be their partners: the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations and, in Najaf last week, Iraq`s most powerful Shia leader. That bomb served as a warning to all Iraqis not to get too cosy with the country`s new rulers - if the US cannot protect a first-rank, sympathetic cleric, how safe is everyone else?

The result is that no one wants to stand too close to the occupiers. One member of the new governing council resigned at the weekend; another warned the US viceroy, Paul Bremer, that the council "could become a morgue" if the Americans did not do more to protect its members. Others are taking the law into their own hands, hiring private bodyguards. Shias, angry at their vulnerability at Najaf, are taking similar steps, looking to groups such as the Badr Brigades to provide security. This takes Iraq one step closer to a Somalia or Afghanistan scenario: a lawless, failed state, where the only authority is the local warlord. With a murder rate approaching 5,000 a year, that kind of anarchy is not far off. Make no mistake, Saddam`s Iraq was an evil tyranny. But it was not a failed state, the ideal climate for nurturing terror. With power and water still not working, thanks to constant sabotage, and thieves stripping vital cables for their copper, it could be soon.

Why is the occupation going so badly wrong? Hubris and incompetence played their part. The Pentagon`s civilian planners put plenty of thought into the war, but almost none into the peace. They had a hyperpower`s supreme confidence in their own abilities.

But ideology is surely the chief culprit. Republicans can barely spit the words "nation building", so it was a task they preferred not to think about. The Pentagon suits, led by Donald Rumsfeld, are hardcore unilateralists, determined to run the show alone, unencumbered by allies. They were also desperate to prove that new, 21st-century, pre-emptive wars could be light, nimble affairs conducted with minimal personnel and low budgets. From the outset, this wing of the administration has been determined to run Iraq on the cheap. Even now, they have not `fessed up about the tens of billions of dollars that Bremer admits will be needed to rebuild a shattered country.

Instead, Team Bush seems to be paralysed, uncertain what to do with an Iraq adventure that refuses to follow the action-movie script they had written for it. By now they were expecting the credits to roll, with cheers for the US performance. What they have got is a situation trickier than any the US military has faced since Vietnam.

Only the most fervent anti-war voices are calling for a complete and immediate withdrawal; such a sudden vacuum would surely guarantee anarchy. On the contrary, providing basic security and services to Iraq will probably take many more, not fewer, people. There are now 140,000 American troops in the country; those who know say that it will take a force of 500,000.

The extra men cannot come from the US. American public opinion would hear too many echoes of LBJ`s Vietnam escalation. Besides, the US military is already overstretched; short of reviving the draft, it just doesn`t have the troops (and conscription is not much of a policy for an election year.) Above all, more Americans in Iraq just means more targets for the jihadists to aim at.

Some in the American press have wondered about Iraqification - training the Iraqis to look after their own, starting with the military now twiddling their thumbs. But that would mean reinstalling a whole lot of Ba`athists: not much of a regime change.

The only solution is, surely, allies. When you look at the zero-casualty rate the genuine coalition governing the Balkans has sustained, this sounds a smart idea. But it, too, is fraught with problems. It will be hard to win over the likes of France and Germany without offering them a degree of political control over the country; Bremer would have to share power. That would be a huge loss of face for the Washington hardliners for whom the UN is an expletive. Besides, how many nations will be eager to expose their young men to harm, now that they know a UN flag attracts rather than deters terrorists?

None of these problems is a surprise. An enterprise that was misconceived from the beginning was hardly going to reach a smooth end. Now that it has started, it has to be run differently - with more money, more personnel, more allies and a timetable for free elections. To get all that may require one more thing, which only the American people can provide, 14 months from now: new leadership.

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Iraq in the balance
Lessons must be learned quickly

Leader
Wednesday September 3, 2003
The Guardian

Iraq`s stability and its hopes of future prosperity hang in the balance. A string of recent attacks on the UN, on the Shia leadership, and on coalition forces and their Iraqi allies has given the impression of a country spinning into chaos. But at the same time, the appointment of a governing council and a cabinet of ministers, the steady progress in catching Saddam`s henchmen, and the dogged successes achieved by the UN`s food and other humanitarian relief efforts give the lie to claims that all is lost.

A more forensic reckoning might suggest that while the state of the nation remains in many respects desperate, it is not yet beyond repair. But many mistakes have been made since the US and Britain invaded and time is running short. Continuing miscalculations, further dissipating indigenous support and discouraging enhanced international assistance, could definitively tip the balance. If they are to be corrected, these mistakes must first be acknowledged and understood.

At the policy-making level in Washington, there are signs of reappraisal but not of the fresh approach that Iraq needs. Despite promptings by state department officials like Richard Armitage, President George Bush appears disinclined to accept a central political and security role for a UN security council that he arrogantly bypassed last spring. Having claimed, absurdly, that the UN was given a "vital role" in postwar Iraq, Britain now belatedly accepts that much more is needed, as France and others demand.

This argument is far from over. Meanwhile, ideologues like Paul Wolfowitz continue to insist, against all evidence to date, that Iraq "will be an example to all in the Muslim world" and is the "central battle in the war on terror". Two mistakes here: so far, Iraq`s experience has by turns outraged, appalled and terrified the Muslim world; and as Tony Blair might be frank enough to acknowledge, the promised, positive spin-off in Palestine has failed miserably to materialise. Second, Iraq is not about fighting terrorism in the al-Qaida/September 11 sense. Iraq is about the consequences, now increasingly violent and uncontrollable, of occupying somebody else`s country without sound legal reasons, without international backing and without a workable military and political strategy.

In holding a strategy review this week, Iraq`s American administrator, Paul Bremer, seems to accept that much needs to be done much better, and quickly. Security is the key issue. Without security, even repairing and maintaining basic infrastructure becomes a daily nightmare while longer-term reconstruction projects become an impossibility. Without security, oil revenues that will finance Iraq`s future remain a mere mirage amid the wreckage of sabotaged pipelines. Simply blaming foreign "jihadists" or changing military patrol tactics will not be of much help; neither will waiting for troop reinforcements from India, Russia or western Europe that may never come. Instead of the piecemeal, failing efforts so far, Mr Bremer needs to implement a single, integrated plan to rebuild an autonomous Iraqi army, national guard and national police force.

Except that it is not Mr Bremer who should be doing this, nor the UN either, but primarily, Iraq`s governing council or a future provisional government. That it has no power and no budget to do so is another fundamental mistake that must be acknowledged and corrected. Slowly and bloodily, Iraq is showing America, once again, that it cannot run other peoples` countries for them. For Iraq`s sake and its own, the US must re-learn this lesson before the scales fatefully tip.


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Judge may block new US media rules
David Teather in New York
Wednesday September 3, 2003
The Guardian

A federal judge in Philadelphia will today hear a request for an emergency stay of plans to allow further consolidation in the US media industry.

The petition has been signed by a group of consumer advocacy groups alarmed at the prospect of the biggest media conglomerates being allowed to own more television stations and newspapers.

The hearing will take place as the main beneficiaries of the plans to lift existing ownership limits - the television networks - intensify their efforts to woo politicians in Washington.

The proposals, announced by the federal communications commission in June, have provoked a bitter fight. In July, the house of representatives included an amendment in a spending bill to keep existing limits in place and the issue is likely to end in court.

A backlash against the proposals this week prompted Viacom, which owns CBS, News Corporation, the parent of the Fox Network and General Electric`s NBC to launch an advertising campaign that targeted politicians.

The campaign, placed in magazines circulating on Capitol Hill, uses a poll conducted by Luntz Research which claims that "special interest static" has clouded the views of ordinary Americans. The poll suggests that 69% of Americans do not believe the government should limit the ability of the networks to buy up local TV stations.

Asked specifically if Congress should roll back the FCC plan to increase the potential audience reach of network TV stations from 35% to 45%, Americans responded No by a two to one margin, the research says. The advertising runs under the slogan "America says: don`t get between me and my TV".

As well as increasing the number of local TV stations that a broadcast network can own, the proposals allow a single company to own a larger number of stations in one market. Potentially the most controversial element is making it easier to own TV stations and newspapers in the same geographical area.


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September 3, 2003
Bush Looks to U.N. to Share Burden on Troops in Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER


WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 — President Bush agreed today to begin negotiations in the United Nations Security Council to authorize a multinational force for Iraq but insisted that the troops be placed under American command, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush`s decision came in a meeting this afternoon with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. While not unexpected, it was a tacit admission that the current American-dominated force is stretched too thin. It also amounts to one of the most significant changes in strategy since the end of major combat in Iraq.

The White House acted just as a new Congressional study showed that the Army lacked the active-duty troops to keep the current occupation force in Iraq past March, without getting extra help from either other services and reserves or from other nations, or without spending tens of billions to vastly expand its size.

One senior official said that Mr. Bush`s national security team envisions withdrawing the majority of American forces now in Iraq within 18 months to two years, and "making this peacekeeping operation look like the kind that are familiar to us," in Kosovo, Bosnia and other places where the United Nations has taken the major role.

But it is far from clear that France and Germany, which led the opposition to a Security Council resolution authorizing the war, will agree to the terms or the language that Mr. Powell plans to circulate, perhaps as early as late this week. India, Turkey and Pakistan have indicated they might contribute troops to a multi-national force, but only if it is authorized by a new United Nations resolution.

Another senior administration official said tonight that Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell discussed ways to persuade the Security Council members to create such a force, and added that Mr. Powell "is going to be working with our colleagues and allies to talk about language that can bring maximum, effective resources to bear" in Iraq.

The study, released today by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, was requested by Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, a critic of the Iraq war and the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, who was frustrated by the Bush administration`s reluctance to discuss its personnel options in Iraq or the long-term cost of a sustained occupation force. The report said that if the Pentagon stuck to its plan of rotating active-duty Army troops out of Iraq after a year, it would be able to sustain a force of only 67,000 to 106,000 active duty and reserve Army and Marine forces. A larger force would put at risk the military`s operations elsewhere around the globe, the study said.

With Mr. Bush concerned about the ramifications of continued daily casualties in Iraq and the possibility that he may need forces elsewhere, perhaps including the Korean Peninsula if the nuclear crisis there worsens, the need to draw more international forces became "very clear in the past few weeks," a senior State Department official said today.

Last week, floating what appeared to be a trial balloon, the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, said the United States was considering a multinational force that would be under the United Nations flag but, he added, an "American would be the U.N. commander." That was essentially the model for American forces stationed in South Korea after the end of the Korean War, 50 years ago, and it has been repeated elsewhere in the world. Currently, there are about 180,000 American troops in Iraq and Kuwait and 21,000 non-American troops, about half of them from Britain.

Military planners have long said the United States will require substantial assistance from other countries and from Iraqis to remain in the country over the long term, and today`s study underscored that need. It is also the first time a government agency has placed a date on the point when the American military may buckle under the strain of the Iraqi deployment unless it gets significantly more help from other countries.

"When you connect the dots, this report shows we cannot possibly sustain the mission in Iraq at current U.S. active-duty troop strength, even if we do get modestly more allied help," said Michael O`Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "The only hope otherwise is to turn the security mission entirely back to the Iraqis within one to two years, which is unlikely."

The limiting factor for the Pentagon is not necessarily money. Rather, the problem is the Army`s need to keep occupying troops fresh using a unit rotation system, where a unit serves in Iraq for 6 to 12 months and then comes home for rest and training, replaced by another unit. The report says the Pentagon does not have enough personnel to keep the troops fresh and still conduct operations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Korea.

"The need to maintain levels of training and readiness, limit family separation and involuntary mobilization and retain high-quality personnel would most likely constrain the U.S. occupation force to be smaller than its current size," the report said.

There was one bit of good news for the administration in the report: The budget office said the Pentagon`s recent estimate that it was spending about $3.9 billion a month in Iraq might be overstated. That figure may include some one-time costs that would not be necessary in a longer occupation, the report said.

The report`s authors acknowledged that they did not evaluate the potential for allies to contribute to the occupation force. The report also did not comment on the impact of Iraqi security forces on the calculation.

The American military could field a force of up to 106,000 if it breaks with the past and uses Marine Corps units, Army Special Forces groups and National Guard combat units in Iraq, the report says. Such units have generally not been used for peacekeeping, and the budget office said using them would bring the cost of the occupation to $19 billion a year.

Alternatively, the Pentagon could increase the size of the Army to meet its new demands. Recruiting, training and equipping two new Army divisions would require an up-front cost of up to $19 billion and take five years, the report said, and it would cost an extra $9 billion to $10 billion a year to put in place in Iraq. That would bring the total cost of the occupation force up to 129,000 troops and cost up to $29 billion a year, the report said.

Senator Byrd said the report proved the Bush administration failed to inform the nation of the true costs of invading Iraq, and said the United States must now get support from NATO and the United Nations to sustain the occupation.

Col. Jay DeFrank, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the Defense Department had not had a chance to review and analyze today`s report, but that it would make sure that commanders get the force they need.



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September 3, 2003
Blaming Beijing

nemployment in America is high, and elections are on the horizon. It must be time to look east again for scapegoats. Japan is only starting to recover from its protracted recession, so China will be handed the role of economic villain in the coming election cycle. Expect to hear a chorus of presidential candidates blame unfair Chinese competition for the nation`s manufacturing woes.

China`s trading partners do have legitimate grievances, but it would be irresponsible and inaccurate for American politicians to pin our economic sluggishness on scheming culprits in Beijing.

Exhibit A of what is alleged to be the perfidy of Beijing`s communist rulers is China`s $100 billion trade surplus with the United States. Exhibit B in the evolving politicized debate, if not the smoking gun proving Beijing`s unfairness, is China`s undervalued currency, the yuan, because an undervalued currency makes a nation`s exports more competitive. The yuan has been pegged at about 8.3 to the dollar for some time. But most economists say China`s currency would appreciate by as much as a third if allowed to float freely.

Traveling in Asia yesterday, Treasury Secretary John Snow heeded political pressures back home in exhorting Chinese leaders to let the market price their currency. This is a desirable outcome in the long run, but a raft of immediate caveats come to mind.

China`s financial system remains fragile, and sudden currency volatility could lead to a banking crisis that could spell disaster for the world economy. Washington would do better to urge China`s leaders to focus on their lack of preparation to assume their proper role in the world`s financial order, rather than to demand any supposedly quick fix. Moreover, China`s refusal to devalue its currency in the aftermath of the late 1990`s crises in East Asia (much appreciated by its neighbors and Washington at a time when the yuan seemed overvalued) adds credence to its leadership`s insistence that it prizes stability when it comes to exchange rates, not short-term advantage. With most economists concerned that China`s robust growth could fuel inflation and a speculative bubble, there are valid reasons for Beijing to fear a surging currency.

It would also be silly to argue that exchange rates, as opposed to cheap labor and other factors, are the primary reason Americans buy three-quarters of their toys from China. Nor does a prospering China, by definition, cost America jobs, as the experience of the late 1990`s proved. American politicians should resist dusting off old complaints about Japan and redirecting them at China. This is hardly a case of an exporting nation that is unfairly protecting its own market. China`s imports are growing at a faster clip than its exports, and the bulk of the exports registering in those eye-popping trade figures are goods built in China by the likes of Intel and America`s automakers.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 3, 2003
Endangered Peace in Afghanistan

fghanistan is paying a heavy price for the Bush administration`s reluctant and miserly approach to nation-building. The central government is bankrupt and powerless. The economy remains inert. And now the Taliban appears to be making a deadly and alarming comeback, just 21 months after American-backed forces drove it from power. For weeks the White House has been hinting that more coherent, better-financed policies are on the way. They are badly needed.

By the time the Taliban left power, most Afghans reviled it. It could not have come back this far if postwar governance had been wiser. Despite the presence of thousands of American troops and vows of Pakistani military cooperation, the Taliban`s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and many of its fighters managed to escape into the mountains or across the porous Pakistani border. Taliban fighters have now re-entered largely Pashtun areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Tajik-dominated national government is weak and resented, and have rebuilt a guerrilla army that is wreaking havoc. Afghans who cooperate with the Kabul government are targeted for assassination. International aid workers have been told to stay away for their own safety. America fought in Afghanistan because the Taliban let Al Qaeda operate and train there. Allowing the Taliban to rebuild a territorial base would negate Washington`s military victory.

Kabul`s estrangement from the southeast is compounded by the extreme disrepair of the war-devastated Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, the main road in a nation with few railroads. Despite substantial commitments of aid from America, Japan and Saudi Arabia, only about a tenth of the 300-mile highway has so far been repaved. The rest is ruts and dust, crippling commerce and leaving truckers vulnerable to bandits and Taliban guerrillas. The repair work needs to be substantially accelerated.

Other regions are not faring much better. Most of the north and west is run by warlords loyal only to themselves. Many are better armed than President Hamid Karzai`s government and pass on to Kabul only those tax revenues they choose to. Sending international security forces to provincial cities, as Germany now proposes, would help some. So would a clearer American policy of not making local military deals with warlords, arrangements that weaken the central government.

The White House soon plans to announce that American reconstruction aid will be doubled, to $1.8 billion a year, and a dozen senior American advisers will be sent to reinforce government ministries. That will be welcome, but probably not enough.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 3, 2003
Nice War. Here`s the Bill.
By DONALD HEPBURN


TAPPAN, N.Y. — In 1991, America`s so-called Operation Tin Cup got enough money from its allies to cover the costs of the first Persian Gulf war. In contrast, what could be called "Operation Begging Bowl" after the latest war in Iraq has come up empty, leaving us stuck with the bill for the invasion and occupation — the full extent of which is only now becoming apparent.

The Bush administration`s recent willingness to consider a greater United Nations role on the ground is the first sign that it is aware of how vastly mistaken its assertions about the occupation were. Contrary to the prewar view that Iraq`s oil revenues would greatly offset American costs, we now know that Iraq — with its shattered economy, devastated oil industry and plundered national wealth — is incapable of making any significant reimbursement of the invasion and occupation costs. And the military expense is only a fraction of the total expense of making Iraq into a functioning country.

So, how much is this experiment in nation-building going to cost the American taxpayer? First, let`s consider what has already been spent. According to the Pentagon, the cost of preparation, aid to noncombatant allies and the invasion itself amounted to $45 billion. Then there is the much-bandied "billion dollars a week" phrase, which seems an accurate estimate of military expenses since the end of serious fighting in May. Assuming a five-year occupation, that`s some $300 billion.

But these familiar figures are only part of the story. First, as these are borrowed funds, they are already incurring interest charges. More important, according to material released by American officials, the United States must meet an estimated $5 billion in initial humanitarian aid and $8 billion in Iraqi government salaries, as well as about $7 billion for repairs to public utilities and to restore vital services over the next two years.

In addition, Iraq is buried under a mountain of foreign debt — roughly $350 billion. This consists of $90 billion in conventional foreign debt (mostly for arms purchases from Russia, China, France and Germany), $60 billion in pending contracts, and war reparations of $200 billion for Iraq`s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It is anticipated that, through the Paris Club system, the commercial debt may be reduced and repayment will be deferred until Iraq`s economy can get back on its feet. It is also possible that the United Nations` Kuwait claims commission will find a way to reduce the war reparations burden. But even so, these debts will have to be paid off eventually.

It will also most likely cost $3 billion to re-settle nearly one million Iraqi refugees who are returning from exile (there are also an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who were displaced within the country and will need aid to rebuild their communities). Ordinarily, assistance could be expected to come through United Nations and nongovernmental groups, but in this case the diplomatic difficulties surrounding the invasion leave the situation unsettled.

Still, the biggest problem facing Iraq is that after decades of corruption, economic stagnation and declining productivity, it faces at least a decade`s worth of reconstruction and improvements. This will include rebuilding ports, farms, roads, telecommunications systems, power plants, hospitals and water systems, as well as introducing a medical benefit plan, a national pension scheme, and new laws for foreign investment and intellectual property rights. The country needs a revised criminal code and judiciary system, a new tax code and collection system, and an electoral voting system with appropriate technology. Using postwar American and United Nations estimates for these and many other tasks, the total bill is likely to be at least $200 billion over a decade.

Clearly, such a program cannot be financed entirely by Iraq`s oil reserves. Those who accused the Bush administration of instigating a "war for oil" certainly hadn`t done the math. Before the war the hope was that Iraq`s annual production could relatively quickly rise to $15 billion to $20 billion per year. However, the system is far more decrepit than such estimates assumed, and combined with the near-daily sabotage of facilities and pipelines, it appears that oil revenues will rise only slowly over the next three years, from approximately $10 billion in 2004 to $20 billion in 2006.

Major international oil companies are expected to invest $40 billion in joint ventures with Iraq`s state oil company, but this will be for exploration and new development, not to rehabilitate the existing facilities. By 2010, even in the best case, production would increase at most to six million barrels a day, bringing total revenues to about $40 billion a year.

Obviously, America cannot make up the difference on its own. Iraq will need long-term loans from the World Bank, the United Nations Iraq Development Fund, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Arab Development Fund, the European Union Aid Program and others. Yet few of these organizations will be keen to make loans until Iraq has a new constitution and an elected government that has put in place effective legal, arbitration, banking and fiscal systems.

Let`s face it, rebuilding Iraq is going to be far more expensive than Americans have been led to believe. Just as it seems inevitable that concessions must be made to get other countries to relieve the burden on American troops, now is the time to mend fences with the United Nations and our allies to relieve the burden on American taxpayers as well.


Donald Hepburn, former chief executive of the Bahrain Petroleum Company, is an adviser to the Middle East Policy Council.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 3, 2003
52 to 48
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


If you listen closely to the emerging debate about Iraq, one of the themes you can start to hear is that culture matters — and therefore this whole Iraq adventure may be a fool`s errand. Because the political culture in the Arab world — where family and tribal identities have always trumped the notion of the citizen — is resistant to democracy.

I believe culture does matter, although I have no idea how much it explains the absence of Arab democracies. But I also believe cultures can change under the weight of history, economic reform and technological progress, and my own encounters with young people in the Arab world since 9/11 tell me that is happening. Consider what was the most talked-about story in the Arab world in recent weeks. Iraq? No. Palestine? No.

It was the Arab version of "American Idol"!

The Arab look-alike, called "Superstar," was aired on the satellite channel of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC). Over 21 weeks, viewers got to vote by fax, Internet or cellphone for their favorite singers. Thousands of singers from across the Arab world were narrowed down to 12 finalists from seven different countries, then two. Millions of Arab viewers voted in the finals.

On Aug. 18, the A.P. reported from Beirut: "Competition went smoothly until last week, when front-runner Melhem Zein, of Lebanon, was eliminated in the semifinals. Angry fans [in the studio] pelted each other with chairs and anything they could find, and the two remaining contestants fainted. . . . Both Jordan and Syria have launched campaigns urging people to vote for their candidates" — who were the two finalists.

Naturally, the fundamentalist Islamic Action Front condemned it all: "We urge official and popular parties to put an end to this sad comedy," it said, because this show "facilitates the culture of globalization led by America to change the cultural identity of the people."

I found out about all this when a Jordanian friend e-mailed me after the finals, saying: "Yesterday the Jordanian singer won through a vote over the Internet. 4.5 million people voted. People went wild in the streets till the early hours of the morning. . . . The Arab basement can change!"

Rami Khouri, editor of The Beirut Daily Star, echoed that theme: "This was a fascinating example of how the power of technology — in this case satellite television, Internet and cellphones — can tap sentiments and prompt people to action." But what was even more striking, Mr. Khouri said, was the Jordanian singer`s victory margin. She won by only 52 to 48 percent in a region where presidents always win by "99 percent."

"I do not recall in my happy adult life a national vote that resulted in a 52 to 48 percent victory," Mr. Khouri added. "Most of the `referenda` or `elections` that take place in our region usually result in fantastic pre-fixed victories. . . . So a 52 to 48 percent outcome — even for just a song contest — is a breath of fresh air. . . . Thank you, LBC, for allowing ordinary Arabs to show that they are not always willing participants in the political freak shows that are the `official elections` for president and other forms of Great Leader."

In the Arab world, where few can speak freely, let alone vote, satellite TV is becoming a virtual Democracy Wall. "They`re the only opening, so people try to push as much through them as they can," said Marwan Bishara, a politics lecturer at the American University of Paris.

Technology, though, still can`t trump two huge impedients to Arab democracy. One is the lack of institutions to ensure a peaceful rotation of power. "In too many countries there is still a tradition of rule or die — either my group or tribe is in power or it`s exposed to great danger, so you must never give up power," noted Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World."

The other is that so many Arab economies are dominated by state oil revenues and state companies, with private enterprise very weak. Therefore, holding onto or being close to power are the only pathways to wealth. Control power, control wealth. "It will be very hard to install lasting democracy in this region," Mr. Mandelbaum added, "without institutions and economic reforms that guarantee that there is life after power and wealth without power."

So yes, culture and historical legacies matter, but so, too, do new ideas and technologies. All of which means America`s attempt to bring democracy to Iraq isn`t crazy — just something that will be very hard.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 3, 2003
Empire of Novices
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

The Bush foreign policy team always had contempt for Bill Clinton`s herky-jerky, improvised interventions around the world. When it took control, it promised a global stewardship purring with gravity, finesse and farsightedness.

But now the Bush "dream team" is making the impetuous Clinton look like Rommel.

When your aim is remaking the Middle East, you don`t want to get stuck making it up as you go along.

Even officials with a combined century of international experience can behave with jejeunosity — if they start believing their own spin.

The group that started out presuming it could shape the world is now getting shoved by the world.

Our unseen tormentors are the ones who seem canny and organized, not us. As they move from killing individual U.S. soldiers and Iraqis to sabotaging power plants, burning oil pipelines, blowing up mosques, demolishing the U.N. headquarters and now hitting the Baghdad police headquarters, our enemies seem better prepared and more committed to creating chaos in Iraq — and Afghanistan — than we are to creating order.

They`ve also proved more adept at putting together an effective coalition than the Bush team: a terrifying blend of terrorists from other countries, Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam fighters, radical Shiites and Saddam remnants, all pouring into Iraq and united by their hatred of America.

If we review the Bush war council`s motives for conquering Iraq, the scorecard looks grim:

• We wanted to get rid of Osama and Saddam and the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We didn`t. They`re replicating and coming at us like cockroaches. According to Newsweek, Osama is in the mountains of Afghanistan, plotting to use biological weapons against America. If all those yuppies can climb Mount Everest, at 29,000 feet, can`t we pay some locals to nab Osama at 14,000 feet?

• Bushies thought freeing Iraq from Saddam would be the first step toward the Middle East road map for peace, as well as a guarantee of greater security for Israel. But the road map blew up, and Israel seems farther away from making peace with the Arabs than ever. The U.S. has now pathetically called on Yasir Arafat to use his power to help after pretending for more than a year that he didn`t exist.

• Rummy wanted to exorcise the stigma of Vietnam and prove you could use a lighter, faster force. But our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan may not banish our fears of being mired in a place halfway around the world where we don`t understand the language or culture, and where our stretched-thin soldiers are picked off, guerrilla-style.

• The neocons wanted to marginalize the wimpy U.N. by barreling past it into Iraq. Now the Bush administration is crawling back to the U.N., but other nations are suspicious of U.S. security and politics in Iraq.

• Dick Cheney and Rummy wanted to blow off multilateralism and snub what Bushies call "the chocolate-making countries": France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. But faced with untold billions in costs and mounting casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are beginning to see the advantages of sidekicks that know the perils of empire.

• The Pentagon wanted to sideline the C.I.A. and State and run the war and reconstruction itself. Now, overwhelmed, the Pentagon`s special operations chiefs were reduced to screening a 1965 movie, "The Battle of Algiers," last week, as David Ignatius reported in The Washington Post, to try to learn why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers.

• The neocons hoped democracy in Iraq would spread like a fever in the Mideast, even among our double-dealing friends like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But after the majestic handoff of democracy to the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, it seems the puppets (now nervous about bodyguards) don`t even want to work late, much less govern. As one aide told The Times, "On the Council, someone makes a suggestion, then it goes around the room, with everyone talking about it, and then by that time, it`s late afternoon and time to go home."

• The vice president wanted to banish that old 60`s feeling of moral ambivalence, of America in the wrong. Our unilateral move in Iraq, with the justifications on W.M.D. and Qaeda links to Saddam getting shakier each month, has made us more hated around the world than ever.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Wants Larger U.N. Role in Iraq
More Peacekeeping Forces to Be Sought

By Mike Allen and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 3, 2003; Page A01


In an effort to win broader international support for U.S. policies in Iraq, President Bush decided yesterday to seek U.N. Security Council approval of a resolution granting the world body greater control over multinational peacekeeping forces and a role in forming a new Iraqi government, administration officials said.

The decision marks a major shift for Bush after months in which the administration had strongly resisted granting any significant military or political authority to the United Nations. It reflects a recognition within the administration that a stronger U.N. mandate is essential to winning greater foreign military and economic help in stabilizing Iraq.

Central to that effort is winning more pledges from other governments to send troops to Iraq to ease the burden on U.S. forces, who have come under daily attacks for weeks and are struggling to contain a recent outbreak of bombings against institutions supporting the U.S. effort. "We need the forces," a senior administration official said.

Turkey, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are among the countries that could supply substantial peacekeeping forces, but have held back because of the absence of a resolution conferring greater U.N. legitimacy on the U.S.-led occupation.

It remains unclear how much authority the administration is willing to cede to the United Nations. The Pentagon insists that U.S. generals remain in command of the nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and the administration has been reluctant to grant much control to the world body over the shaping of Iraq`s political system and economy.

The president`s decision came in the face of mounting congressional calls for allowing the United Nations to play a greater role, and marked an opening gambit in what should prove to be prolonged and difficult negotiations with Security Council members in the run-up to an address by Bush to the opening of the U.N. General Assembly later this month. The speech will come one year after the president went to the world body to outline his case for war against Iraq.

Several council members, led by France, have refused to back any measure that would endorse a U.S.-dominated occupation. The differences have largely mirrored the disputes within the Security Council before the war, which Bush decided to launch without specific backing from the 15-nation chamber.

Aides said that a draft resolution is circulating within the administration, and that Bush authorized Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during a meeting yesterday to begin negotiations with Security Council members to see what they would support. One official said that the resolution is still "in the consultative phase" and that the response of Security Council members would determine what the United States does next.

The idea of seeking a U.N. mandate was first broached publicly last week by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who told reporters the United States would consider supporting a multinational military force under U.N. mandate, but still subordinate to U.S. commanders. One official said the idea was "a multinational force under a unified command," with a role for the United Nations in Iraq`s political, economic and security operations.

"What remains key is that the U.S. remain in charge of the operation," a senior defense official said.

Security Council members reacted coolly to Armitage`s proposal last week, saying it did not grant the United Nations a big enough say.

The officials would not spell out what role the United Nations might play in forming an Iraqi government. But they said they will continue to keep the process in the hands of Iraqi citizens, first through a constitutional convention and later through elections.

State Department officials have long favored a resolution that would give some U.N. legitimacy to the occupation. But it appeared yesterday that the Pentagon is also coming around to this position. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon civilian leaders have adamantly opposed granting the United Nations a greater role in Iraq.

A senior administration official said that Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had recently begun lobbying key members of the administration to support a U.N. resolution. The official added that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have become "much more interested in this than before," because they know a new resolution is necessary for them to attract new peacekeeping forces to Iraq.

The defense official said Gen. John Abizaid, the new head of the U.S. Central Command and the top commander in Iraq, and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been "strongly engaged in the internationalization effort, to include a new U.N. resolution."

"The military is focused on finding a way to internationalize the effort, and if a new U.N. Security Council resolution would help, then the military is all for it," the official said.

The officials said several means for "internationalizing" postwar peacekeeping operations are being discussed, "all of which really are focused on just that -- keeping the U.S. in charge of the operation."

A senior administration official said recent assurances given by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others played a major role in the shift in the administration`s thinking. Annan told the envoy that "there would have to be a unified command of any international participation, and that that command would be the United States," the official said.

Administration officials compared the idea to a U.N.-mandated force, under Australian leadership, that quelled a violent uprising in East Timor in the late 1990s. After peace was achieved and East Timor moved toward independence and elections, that force was replaced by a traditional U.N. peacekeeping force.

Staff writers Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Nihad Mahmoud Abdul Hussein, 38, who lost his hand during the Iran-Iraq war, flogs himself with chains during Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim`s funeral
washingtonpost.com
Slain Ayatollah`s Brother Assumes New Role
As Funeral Ends, Many Shiites See A Power Vacuum

By Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 3, 2003; Page A09


NAJAF, Iraq, Sept. 2 -- With a river of mourners stretching more than a mile, the three-day funeral for Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim ended in his home town today in a ceremony steeped in the symbolism of 13 centuries of Shiite Muslim martyrdom and marking the passing of power to his younger brother.

The ascent of Abdul Aziz Hakim, a lesser religious figure best known as his brother`s lieutenant, underscored the difficulties ahead as Iraq`s majority Shiites struggle to assume power in a country where they were long brutally oppressed. Despite a show of strength here today, they face a vacuum of authority, with political leaders who lack religious standing and religious leaders who eschew politics. Caught in between are U.S. officials directing the five-month occupation who acknowledge Shiites as the key to the country`s stability.

"As a religious man, Najaf will produce another person of the stature of the martyred sayyid," said Sheik Abu Ali Mansouri, a cleric in a white turban looking out at the tumultuous scenes of grief, complaint and rage under a relentless sun. "As a political man, no one can compete with him. He represented both political and religious authority."

The 64-year-old Hakim, killed with scores of others after Friday prayers at the Imam Ali mosque, was a crucial interlocutor between Shiites and U.S. officials. Recognized as an ayatollah and an opposition leader, he spent more than two decades in exile, then returned to Najaf in May at the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. With his blessing, the group -- the best-organized Shiite party -- entered the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, with his brother serving as its representative.

In words and symbols, the march of tens of thousands of mourners that began in Baghdad was as much political rally as funeral procession. In a eulogy, the younger Hakim blamed U.S.-led forces in Iraq for his brother`s assassination, as he did in Baghdad on Sunday.

"The occupation force is responsible, in essence, for the sacred blood that was shed in Najaf -- that of Hakim, and the fine group of people who were near him, and these lives and the lives that are lost every day in various parts of Iraq," he said.

Echoing the sentiments of banners along the march, he vowed the group would follow his brother`s lead.

"You defended the rights of all groups and you succeeded to a large extent in achieving the unity of Iraq`s people. You strove for a free, stable Iraq. You were adamant in your efforts that Iraq should be free, that the occupation should leave, that Iraq shall be as God wishes it to be," he told thousands of mourners. "This was your path and we shall continue on it."

Mourners eager to bless his brother`s ascension shouted, "Yes, Hakim!"

Today`s march begin in Kufa and ended a few miles away in Najaf, both cities resonant in Shiite history. Ali, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad who Shiites believe was his rightful heir, was killed in Kufa in 661 by an assassin wielding a poisoned sword. Following his wishes, his supporters tied his body on a camel and buried him where it stopped. That site was Najaf, where the gold-domed shrine said to house his body remains one of the holiest sites to the world`s 120 million Shiites.

In Kufa, under temperatures that hit about 105 degrees by mid-morning, teams of mourners prayed and chanted, beating their chests in ritual mourning and then pointing at another group to take up the song. Men whipped themselves with chains, the metal catching the sun`s glint. Some broke into tears, driving women on the sidelines to wail and ululate.

"This is a day of grief, tragedy and catastrophe for all Islam," said another cleric, Sheik Abbas Kinani.

Hakim`s coffin, draped in black and green banners and oversize portraits of him, was carried in a yellow flatbed truck that crawled miles through a street thronged with mourners. But the coffin was symbolic, as Hakim`s body was never found. A black turban, the only distinguishable relic of clothing found near the shrine where he was killed, was placed on the coffin, which was flanked by police and armed militiamen of the Badr Brigade. The brigade, the military wing of Hakim`s group, provided heavy security along the route.

By early afternoon, the coffin arrived at the shrine of Ali, whose tan brick wall was blackened in the attack. A loudspeaker atop the mosque broadcast a refrain: "There is no power and no strength except in God."

The truck stopped at the shrine`s turquoise-tiled portico. Surging crowds were beseeched by loudspeaker to make way so the coffin could enter, to no avail. "There is no god but God," men shouted, as they broke through rickety police barricades. Others surged toward the mosque`s two-story-high varnished doors, closed since the attack. The truck soon departed, and the coffin was quietly buried in 1920 Revolution Square, in a cemetery containing Shiite martyrs of an uprising against British rule.

In religious Shiite politics, symbolism remains paramount, much of it revolving around Ali`s son Hussein, who was killed with his outnumbered followers, many dying of thirst, on a battlefield in 680 near the southern city of Karbala. In postwar Iraq, that symbolism resonates deeply. Moqtada Sadr, a junior cleric and one of Hakim`s rivals, draws much of his street support from the memory of his father, a beloved grand ayatollah who was assassinated in 1999.

Today, Hakim`s martyrdom was made even more visceral by his death next to the shrine of Ali. In life, he was an ayatollah. In death, some bestowed on him the highest rank possible -- a grand ayatollah known as a marja.

"He represents a symbol of the murder of Hussein," said Kinani, the sheik, as recitations of the Koran spilled over streets.

Talk of who might be responsible for the bomb blast on Friday coursed through the crowds that arrived at the funeral today. Many have accused loyalists of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Muslim militants from abroad or a combination of both. Vows of vengeance mixed with messages of suffering. "All the Baathists must know we will take revenge," mourners chanted. "They must know we are all Hakim."

An unsigned leaflet on columns swathed in black warned of "vile plans" to inflame Shiite divisions and kill influential clerics. It urged Shiites to kill Sunni extremists and "all members of the previous regime and those who cooperated with them." A nearby poster said the "Iraqi faithful await for a signal" from the most senior religious leaders.

Abdul Aziz Hakim will face demands for a more assertive Shiite leadership. In towns along his brother`s funeral route, some spoke of a sense of siege and even frustration with the clergy, whose most senior leaders have eschewed politics as beneath their spiritual calling.

Hakim was an exception, but his brother, as a junior cleric, lacks his standing as a religious leader. In the turbulent and emotional fervor at today`s funeral, many were willing to give the younger Hakim a chance.

But others looked at a landscape riven over the role of religion in political life and the degree to which Iraqis should engage the U.S. occupation. Frustration appears to be rising and, in his eulogy, Hakim staked out opposition to U.S. policies, a position claimed earlier by Sadr and other lesser-known but sometimes more virulent clerics.

"As a political leader, he is qualified, but as a religious leader, people must to go to other ayatollahs," said Abdel-Ridd Mukarram, a 43-year-old cleric passing the shrine as people kissed and glided their hands over its walls for blessing.

He looked out at the street, its banners of Imam Hussein and the slain Hakim stitching together a centuries-long narrative of sacrifice. A poster behind him read, "Vengeance for the clergy."

"Today there`s freedom and at the same time, there`s chaos," he said, his white turban framing a salt-and-pepper beard. "It`s a miracle that Iraqi people can exist in the middle of chaos and still live their lives."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
For the President, the Least Painful Alternative


By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 3, 2003; Page A10


President Bush, in his decision to seek broader help in Iraq from the United Nations, has concluded that blue helmets are better than a black eye.

For months, the president and his administration have resisted the notion of sharing power in Iraq with the U.N. "blue helmets" -- part of officials` longstanding suspicion of the international body and particularly the notion that U.S. troops might answer to foreign generals.

But as more and more U.S. troops are killed in Iraq, and the number of car bombings and anti-America demonstrations there grow, the Bush administration concluded that principle alone will not suffice: The United States needs more help in Iraq.

With too few U.S. troops available to serve in Iraq, and too few nations volunteering troops in the absence of a U.N. imprimatur, the administration decided to do what the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) suggested recently: "swallow our pride and do what`s supposed to be done: go back to the international community."

In the end, it was the least painful alternative. "In the long term, they don`t have to eat too much crow," Michael O`Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said last night. "They can keep the military influence, and it`s a smart way to get international help." But, he added, there will be an immediate cost: "In the short term, everybody like John Kerry can say, `We pushed them into it,` and there will be some truth to that."

Indeed, Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate, has been pounding away at the administration to do essentially what it decided to do yesterday. "I think this administration has made an extraordinary, disastrous decision not to bring the United Nations in in a significant way," he said on NBC`s "Meet the Press" on Sunday, adding that "tomorrow morning is not too early" to ask for U.N. help.

In reaching a decision to return to the United Nations for a resolution of support, the administration overcame a number of deeply held internal objections to such an action. The Bush White House has taken pains to avoid what many there perceive as misguided adventures taken with the United Nations by the Clinton administration in Africa and the Balkans. And, burned by France, Germany and Russia during the failed effort to win U.N. backing for the invasion of Iraq last winter, Bush officials are loath to be seen as pleading for their support now.

Ultimately, though, Bush concluded that it was possible to get U.N. help largely on U.S. terms. "They had it in their heads that the U.N. would take over and run the whole thing," said Kenneth Adelman, a security expert close to several top Bush officials. "But we can have it both ways. We can have a U.N. mandate, and American and British military control."

That said, Adelman, like many foreign-policy hard-liners, has doubts about how much good it will do to seek help from the United Nations. "I don`t have much faith that a U.N. mandate will bring more boots on the ground or money in the pocket," he said, arguing that many countries used the lack of a U.N. mandate as an excuse to resist contributing.

Bush is likely to get complaints from some in his own party who oppose a U.N. role. "The legitimacy of an American foreign policy initiative derives from its justness, wisdom and congressional approval, not from the vagaries of U.N. Security Council resolutions," former Reagan Pentagon official Frank J. Gaffney Jr. wrote last week in the Washington Times. "Now is no time to go wobbly on that principle."

The U.N. resolution, though its contents and its prospects are not yet fixed, will be certain to have one key, face-saving component for the Bush administration: The military occupation of Iraq will not be run by the United Nations. Indeed, the task in Iraq is far beyond the United Nations` military capabilities. The organization`s military command is only about the size of the Pentagon. Rather, Security Council approval of the operation would allow nations to contribute troops under U.S., British or NATO command.

Until now, the administration had sought to assemble a patchwork of international troops, mostly from smaller countries. Bush said last week that 31 countries had contributed 21,000 troops to the effort. But this was a cumbersome way to build a fighting force. The Poles committed to send 2,400; Ukraine offered 1,640; Spain volunteered 1,300, and countries such as Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mongolia and the Philippines offered smaller contingents.

But with much larger numbers of troops needed -- Biden put the number at 40,000 to 60,000 -- it became clear there were too few U.S. troops not already committed elsewhere to supplement the current presence of nearly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The administration needed a way to bring in a larger number of troops from other countries. In addition to Western European nations, countries such as Turkey, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have indicated they would look more favorably on supplying troops with U.N. support.

In exchange for this infusion, the administration must give up some of the control it prizes. In its Iraq policy, as elsewhere, Bush has limited control to just a few top officials, such as Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer.

Rumsfeld, in particular, has sounded contemptuous of the world body. "We do need international support and assistance. It`s a big help," he said last week. "Second question: What is the likelihood of our forces serving under a blue-hatted United Nations leadership? And I think that`s not going to happen."

Under yesterday`s decision to seek a U.N. mandate in Iraq, Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration have concluded that, even if the military command is American, they must give some control in Iraq to the blue hats.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Conan the Wimp


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, September 3, 2003; Page A17


At summer`s end, after Conan the Conqueror had confounded all his foes and slain them on Leno, he came back to his fortress and was told he would have to debate.

"I crush my tormentors," snarled Conan the Victorious. "I psych them, I smash their bones. When my own people are jaded and bored, I journey to distant lands and new markets and sell my product to all who wish to feel my power."

But the people, he was told, were not bored. They wanted to know what Conan would do to restore their dream of a golden state.

"Do they not know that I will dash the bad king to the ground?" asked Conan the Taken Aback. "That I will rule with cunning and strength? That Pete Wilson has given me his staff, and I shall use it wisely? Even those who raised his treasure, though I have treasure aplenty, yet I shall use them, for who hath treasure enough? Is this not enough for the people to know?"

But it was not. Thrice had the people invited him to meet his rivals on the field of battle and answer their questions and those of the scribes.

"I have heard their questions on `Entertainment Tonight` and `What`s-His-Name Hannity,` " said Conan the Softball-Accustomed, "and answered them so well that they anointed my brow. I spake of carousing in Oui Magazine, yet all the right forgave me," Conan continued, waving a copy of the Weekly Double Standard.

But yet the people persisted, and wanted to know what Conan would cut and what Conan would tax.

"I have 23 wise men who counsel me on balancing the budget," humphed Conan the Delegater. "Eight for eliminating waste, eight for fraud, eight -- uh, seven? -- for abuse. They will shield me from details that none but scribes care about."

But still the people wanted to know what Conan himself thought.

"That Gray Davis destroys jobs," said Conan the Sound-Bite. "That we are overtaxed from the moment we awaken and ring for our orange juice."

But why was Davis a job-killer, the people wondered, and yet not a word did Conan utter on George W. Bush? Had Bush not slain more jobs than Gray? And did his deficit not dwarf Davis`s by more than tenfold?

"That is a multiplication question," snapped Conan the Gotcha-Fearful. "Or division. I have 23 wise men who can do fractions."

But the people and the scribes had more questions they wished to pose. Did the staff that Pete Wilson had vouchsafed Conan still include that dunderhead Wizard who had lifted the rules on all the energy in the realm?

And how was it that the very same rich men who had given treasure to Pete Wilson and, yea, even to Gray Davis, but who were now giving treasure to Conan were no longer special interests but disinterested do-gooders?

"These are trick questions!" squealed Conan the Abruptly Apprehensive. "I have my man for trick questions, David Dreier, a public man with smooth speech and uncommonly good hair. We can send him to the debates, no?"

No, Conan was told, the hosts had demanded the Conqueror himself.

"But I have 31 fundraisers scheduled before the day the people choose," said Conan the Collection Plate. "It takes much treasure to defeat the special interests, so that I can rule beholden to no man. Yet I have been asked to set aside these labors to meet my opponents in the public square. And if I partake in these debates, I shall be interrupted and questioned. And should someone pop a question between my Hasta and my vista, I do not know but what I will do."

"I will be swiveling so, my head will be dizzy," said Conan the Strategically Vague. "I must be for gun controls and gun-owners` rights, for gays and against gay marriages, for cutting waste in general and nothing in particular. McClintock the Caveman will hit me from the right, and Arianna, who has the smoothest tongue of all the babes in Brentwood, will hit me from the left. This is why I have my David Dreier. Can he not answer these meddlesome pests?"

So Conan`s counselors sent Dreier out to the political talk shows, but told Conan that if he did not appear for at least one debate in September, the people might question his fitness to govern the realm in October.

"But I am fated to rule," peeped Conan the Titmouse, and scurried down his hole.

The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect and political editor of the L.A. Weekly.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
Heute gibt es 78 mal frische Toon-Ware. Heute auch wieder mit Nannsen-Schill IQ-Warnung:

IQ Warning: Each issue contains ALL of the day`s cartoons on a single printer-friendly page. If you have a slow mind i.e. regularly watch Fox News it may take several minutes to get the jokes. Please be patient - its worth the wait.

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030902__078toons.htm

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The Devil And Georgie Bush

The Real Story behind a Possible Second Term
Satire by John Chuckman
George Bush sits quietly at his desk in the Oval Office. Suddenly, with a puff of acrid, yellow smoke, a dark figure appears at his shoulder, arrogantly leaning an elbow against the back corner of the big leather chair. He wears a soot-stained stovepipe hat, a rumpled, dusty suit, and his whiskered, rather cherubic face has an almost benign smile as he gazes down.

"Ahem, ah, Mr. President, I do believe we have some business?"

Although he immediately recognizes the figure, the President is astonished at this sudden appearance. With his face drained of color, he reaches instinctively for the hidden buzzer to the Secret Service at the edge of his desk.

"Mr. President, all those gadgets have been disabled. Surely, by now, you have more respect for my powers than that?

"Oh," with a rude little chuckle, "and until we`ve transacted our business, no one will be able to come through the door."

"Mr. Scratch, I meant no disrespec`."

"I`m sure, Mr. President."

"It`s what they all taught me to do if anyone`s here, ya know, without an appointment an` all."

"Yes, quite, Mr. President. Now, about our business."

"But ain`t there more`an two years left on ma contract?"

"Ah, indeed, two years, one month, eleven days, and fifty-four minutes, to be exact." The dark figure reaches out, and, again with a sulphurous little puff of smoke, a sheet of paper appears in his hand. He reaches down and waves it in front of the President`s face.

"Perhaps, you would care to review the terms, Mr. President?"

"I`m sure you`re right, Mr. Scratch, you`re mighty careful `bout these things."

"Careful, indeed, Mr. President, which brings me to the point of my little visit.

As you know, the original contract was for seven years."

The President, his face withered and frightened, mechanically shakes his head in agreement.

"And then there was the matter of an extension we negotiated?"

The President again shakes his head.

"And I trust there`s no disagreement about the party of the second part," with another gruff chuckle, "that`s me, having met fully all terms agreed?"

Still another doleful shake of the head.

"It says here, `One George W. Bush, having succeeded at virtually nothing in his adult lifetime, except getting into a whole lot of embarrassing trouble, fighting with his family, and consuming inordinate amounts of alcohol, in return for certain services, specified below, promises his immortal soul to the said Mr. Scratch,` that is," chuckle, chuckle, "yours truly."

Here the figure makes a slight flourish, briefly doffing his hat and creating a small cloud of soot.

"Services rendered in return," clearing his throat, "Ah, just summarizing here, Mr. President, include making a killing on a baseball team, becoming governor of Texas, and in general having gained recognition for turning around a worthless life."

The figure looks down at the President with a somewhat twisted smile.

"Yielding you, I might add, boundless goodwill from legions of pious-fraud fundamentalists. Is that not right, Mr. President?"

Again, almost like a sleepwalker responding to unseen voices, the President shakes his head.

"The extension to the contract assured your becoming - you`ll note, Mr. President, the very careful language about `becoming,` with nothing said about `being elected` - President of the United States."

Another dull shake of the head.

"Well, it doesn`t allow for a second term, now does it, Mr. President?"

"Mr. Scratch, I jus` reckoned when ya consider the kinda president I been."

"You mean loosing the forces of war, ignorance, and misery upon the world?"

"Why, sure, ain`t I done a good job on that?"

"Agreed, Mr. President, but I wouldn`t expect anything else of a man who`s made the kind of bargain you have.

"You`ll recall, when we negotiated the extension, that you wanted credit for all the prisoners executed in Texas. And all the slimy business deals you winked at, defrauding all kinds of decent folks. I admit such activity keeps good trade coming my way, but, strictly speaking, Mr. President, they just aren`t part of our terms."

"But look`it the stuff we`re doin`. We`re redesignin` the country. Givin` it back to the folks what owns it, an` armin` `em to the teeth so`s they kin keep it. Ya can`t go makin` omelets like that without breakin` a mighty heap of eggs. Why, I kin guarantee it`ll mean years of misery for all them losers out there."

"Again, Mr. President, I hate to be like one of your heartless corporate contributors, but that`s just not part of our deal. No, No, what you do with the office I gave you is up to you."

"But surely, Mr. Scratch, recognizin` what a great job I`m doin` here for you, we could come to some understandin` `bout another li`le extension?"

"Well, I see what it is you want from me, Mr. President, but it just fails me what you`re offering that I don`t already have. The contract states clearly that the immortal soul of one George W. Bush is to be delivered up promptly at expiration.."

"Ain`t there nothin` I kin do for an extension, Mr. Scratch?

"Ah, that desperate, pleading tone does appeal to my better side. Come to think of it, there just may be, Mr. President."

The President regains some color, and, for the first time, there`s some animation in his manner, "Yes, yes, what is it?"

"Well, I`m not so sure you`ll share my enthusiasm for the idea."

Looking like a puppy about to be handed a treat, "Mr. Scratch, I`ll do jus` `bout anythin`, honest to God!

A severe, disapproving look flashes across the dusty figure`s face.

"Oh, I`m mighty sorry `bout that, but like I said, I`ll do jus` `bout anythin`."

"I do like your attitude, and I`ll note it in my little book.

"Mr. President, it does bother me considerably that a mob of evangelical frauds in silk suits - you know the ones I mean, there isn`t one of them not headed my way when their days of fleecing lonely folks watching television are ended - get all the credit for your conversion. You and I both know the truth of the matter. I would be strongly tempted," ha, ha, "to further extend your contract in return for a promise to tell people the truth."

The President again turns ashen, "I jus` don`t see how that`s possible, Mr. Scratch?"

"Oh, I don`t insist you just go and blurt it out. You may do it slowly over a period of time. You may use all the arts of twisting the truth, so long as in the end this one truth comes out. That doesn`t seem like too great a task for the caliber of people you`ve surrounded yourself with."

"But, Mr. Scratch, how kin I tell folks I made a deal with the devil?"

"Well, given your resources and past record of achievement, I do not see an insurmountable barrier. A lot of folks will have already guessed the truth. It`s the ones that roll around in church aisles babbling incoherently or go to meetings to get slapped in the head to heal cancer that are going to be a might difficult to reach. But these are your people, and you are, after all, asking a great service of me. I rarely extend contracts. Two extensions is almost unheard of."

"But suit yourself, Mr. President. Right now it`s the only offer that would entice me," chuckle, chuckle, "into so extraordinary an act."

"I, I jus` don`t see."

"As you please, Mr. President. I will claim what`s mine on the stroke of midnight two years, one month, eleven days, and forty nine minutes, hence, unless, of course, you see your way to improving my image with the public. After all, it`s no small miracle I`ve worked in your case. People just might look at me in a whole new light if they only knew the truth."

"But.but."

"I`ll leave it at that, Mr. President. You can let me know anytime right up until expiration. Just snap your fingers twice and consider it done for a second term."

The dark figure instantly disappears in another puff of acrid smoke.

ENDS

[Joerver]

British spooks regain a `Licence to kill`

Richard Bennett: AFI Research

~

09/02/03: The world of counter-terrorism is certain to take a further step into the downward spiral of hit-teams and assassination as the Western Intelligence services try to find the means to defeat Al Qa`ida and its myriad of extremist offshoots. The CIA and MI6 freed of many of the political and legal shackles imposed in the latter years of the Cold War are expanding their covert capability and the means to use `executive action`, a euphemism for assassination, to defeat the greatest threat to democracy since the collapse of Communism. The main source of the experience and influence on operational tactics is perhaps one of the more surprising aspects of these developments.

~

Israel has played a significant and largely secret role within the dark world of Britain`s covert operations against terrorist groups. As long ago as the very early 1970`s Rafael Eitan, the then head of the Israeli hit-squad known as the `Kidon` toured Northern Ireland and later the SAS base in Hereford. Rumour has it that Eitan was less than impressed with British training, tactics or their `kill` rate. Within months of his visit there began a number of fundamental changes in security policy and operations in the province. More SAS were to be posted to the province and a number of specialized anti-terrorist groups would eventually be formed ranging from the 14th intelligence and Security company, once described as the `Thinking Mans SAS` to the Mobile Reconnaissance Force or MRF which would later become the Force Reconnaissance Unit . The FRU were to be later involved in the targeting of suspected Republicans for assassination by the infamous Loyalist Death Squads.

~

Indeed Britain`s overall counter-terror organization was held in such poor esteem by the experienced Israeli`s that Mossad`s Kidon hit-team took the law into their own hands by assassinating two of the Palestinian terrorists suspected of involvement in the Black September Massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics. One was found dead in his London hotel room, while the second fell under the wheels of a car in High Holborn, much to the annoyance of MI5 and the fury of Whitehall. The 1988 killing of three IRA members in Gibraltar by the SAS was reportedly viewed as a bungled operation by Mossad who had originally tracked the Irish terrorists who they suspected of running guns from the Lebanon. Wishing to avoid further problems with London by not attempting to kill or capture them on British soil, the surveillance operation was handed over to MI5 and of course later to the SAS whose heavy handed approach finally prevented the interrogation of the suspects.

~

Under Tony Blair, Britain`s official approach is far more co-operative and Mossad have apparently met with little opposition to their clandestine centre operating in London with some 15 intelligence officers and 2 or 3 members of the Kidon. The Israeli`s are thought to have a hit-list of around50 Islamic and Palestinian terrorists believed to be currently living in Britain. Most of these radical`s are, to use Israeli parlance, to be `disposed of` and it is believed that a number have either fled the country or gone under deep cover in consequence. According to Gordon Thomas, one of the world`s leading experts on Israeli and British intelligence in particular, the highly effective Kidon is directly controlled by the Israeli Intelligence Service, Mossad. It has some 38-40 highly trained assassins and includes at least four women. They operate throughout the world and where-ever a potential or actual threat exists to the interests of Israel or its people. David Kimche, a 30-year veteran of Mossad and its Deputy until his resignation in 1980 was largely responsible for the formulation of the Kidon philosophy that it must be `Israel first, last and always`

~

It is this deadly capability that both the CIA and now MI6 are apparently seeking to emulate as they face the growing menace of Islamic terrorism. Though the CIA had a long track record of assassinations its claws were drawn by successive US administrations with their fear of damaging publicity and international anger, ending with a legal ban on such action which has only recently been lifted. Britain on the other hand has no such legal complications, as long as the killing takes place on foreign soil. Under the Intelligence Services Act of 1994, MI6 officers have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed outside Great Britain. Although The Criminal Justice Bill of 1998 makes it illegal for any organization in Great Britain to conspire to commit offenses abroad, Crown agents still have immunity. With the end of World War Two the SOE (Special Operations Executive) undoubted ability in both subversion and assassination was absorbed into the Secret Intelligence Service and for many years afterwards Britain is believed to have made regular, if sparing use of assassination to further its foreign policy aims.

~

George Young in 1956, at the time Deputy Chief of MI6, quite openly advocated the killing of the Egyptian leader Colonel Nasser and in September 1960 the senior foreign office official, Howard Smith who was later to become the Director General of MI5 argued in an official documentfor the assassination of the young Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba "I see only two possible solutions to the [Lumumba] problem. The first is the simple one of ensuring [his] removal from the scene by killing him.". Closer to home the Littlejohn Brothers were recruited in 1972 by John Wyman of MI6 who handled a number of agents in Northern Ireland and paid them substantial sums of tax payers money to infiltrate the IRA and to act as agent provocateurs, organising and conducting bank robberies and bomb attacks in the Republic of Ireland. Wyman told them that there was "going to be a policy of political assassination" for which they were to make themselves available. "If I was told about any illegal act before it happened, I would always discuss it with London. I was always told to go ahead" said Kenneth Littlejohn who went on to claim that the MI6 Officer told him `If there is any shooting, do what you`ve got to do`." Wyman indeed gave the Littlejohn`s a list of IRA leaders to assassinate; these included Seamus Costello, Sean Qarland and Sean McStiofain. After Littlejohn passed on the name of Joe McCann, a leading Republican, to his MI6 handler, McCann was shot dead by British paratroopers a few days later as he walked, apparently unarmed, through the Belfast market area.
~

In more recent times the maverick former MI5 Officer David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson of MI6 have both vigorously argued that Britain`s Intelligence Services had attempted to assassinate Libya`s Colonel Gadaffi in February 1996 in a plot organized by MI6 officers DAVID WATSON and RICHARD BARTLITT and had planned a similar fate for both the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1991 and Serbia`s Slobodan Milosovic in 1992. Whatever one may think of such claims, there is now at least official confirmation from the Steven`s Inquiry into the `Shoot to Kill` policy in Northern Ireland that British security officials were indeed deeply involved in the assassination of a number of Catholics in the province. The Guardian in April 28th 2001, headlined its article Sinister role of secret army unit: Police investigate claims of collusion with paramilitaries describes the organisations involved in covert British operations in Ireland “The FRU was one of three army-sponsored undercover intelligence squads in Northern Ireland. The others were 22 Squadron(sic) SAS, and 14 Company. The FRU, which was set up in Northern Ireland in 1980, dealt with recruiting and handling agents in paramilitary organisations.“14 Company specialised in surveillance while 22 SAS undertook `executive actions`. `That means they killed people,` said an army source. Many outside observers remain convinced that this is merely the tip of an iceberg and much is still being hidden by an ongoing official cover-up.

~

Another advantage for SIS is that they have a number of SAS personnel trained to work with the intelligence service and always available for any its needs. This group known as `The Increment` and is used for assassinations, sabotage or other dangerous jobs, such as arresting war criminals in the Balkans said James Dunnigan, the renowned author of `How to Make War` (now in its Fourth Edition), adding that every SIS Station chief has a direct line to the SAS headquarters at the Duke of Yorks Barracks in West London and a good working relationship with these covert action experts. Ex-SAS mercenaries have also been blamed for several assassinations on the African continent and a purported former member of the Regiment, Tyrone Chadwick, was imprisoned in South Africa after admitting to a London-based journalist his and other former SAS mercenaries’ leading role in several murders during the apartheid era according to a commentary on the Strategy Pagein June 2003. SIS has developed a reputation for going outside the agency and its military executive arm to hit some targets. Friendly foreign intelligence agencies have been used on a number of occasions and MI6 has shown a willingness to `sub-contract it to Mossad` according to a former British agent quoted by Peter Hillmore and Ed Vulliamy in `Spies: the Beautiful and the damned` (The Observer 12th October 1997), adding that the assassination in Belgium of the British inventor of the Iraqi `Supergun`, Gerald Bull, is widely believed to have been just such an act. While yet further speculation still surrounds the `suicide` of Jonathan Moyle, the twenty-eight-year-old editor of the British trade journal Defence Helicopter World. In March 1990, he was found hanging in a closet in a hotel room in Santiago, Chile. Intelligence sources have long suggested that there was an SIS involvement in Moyle`s death as his `Iraqgate` investigations were believed to be uncovering highly embarrassing facts for the senior management at Century House, then the headquarters for MI6 and the Conservative Government of Magaret Thatcher.

~

There is in fact a long list of suspicious deaths linked to British Government or Defence Industry since 1970 including



A) Defence, Computers and Electronics (Scientists, Technicians and Administrators)
Robert Wilsort 1973,Gerard Darlow 1973,Prof Keith Bowden 1982,Lt Col Anthony Godley 1983
Dennis Skinner 1983,Jonathan Wash 1985,Vimal Bhagvangi Dajibhai 1986,Arshad Sharif 1986
Dr John Brittan 1986,Mark Wisner 1987,David Sands 1987,Peter Peapell 1987,David Greenhalgh 1987
Michael Baker 1987,Richard Pugh 1987,Shani Warren 1987,Victor Moore 1987,Trevor Knight 1988,

Brigadier Peter Ferry 1988,Alistair Beckham 1988,Dr Gerard Bull 1989,Jonathon Moyle 1990
Dr David Kelly 2003



B) SIGINT(GCHQ-Computers)
Jack Wolfenden 1982,Ernest Brockway 1982,Stephen Drinkwater 1983,George Franks 1984,Stephen Oke 1985



C) Protesters/Lawyers/Politicians
Airey Neave MP 1979 (purported to be the victim of a highly sophisticated INLA bombing),Hilda Murrell 1984,

Willie McRae 1985,Pat Finucane 1989 (one of perhaps a hundred or so `suspicious` deaths linked to

British Special Forces Hit Squads or based on information illegally supplied to Ulster murder gangs by MI5,

FRU, SAS or RUC E4 SB)



D) Foreign targets.
Assassinations of major foreign political leaders (such as President Nasser 1950`s, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and President Milton Obote 1960`s, Prime Minister Ghaddafi and President Slobodan Milosevic 1990`s) and political opponents or extremists have been planned or carried out on numerous occasions over the last fifty years in Iran, Egypt, Congo, Libya, Uganda, Serbia and Ireland among others

~

Last year Israel`s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appointed General Meir Dagan, his friend and close colleague to head the Mossad. Security sources confirm that Dagan, a noted hawk, had served in the 1970`s as head of the `Rimon`undercover anti-terrorist unit which is widely suspected of killing militants wanted by Israel. Following his retirement from the Army in 1995 Dagan became Mossad`s deputy Chief. His appointment and past track record suggest that while the Sharon Government may be publicly willing to sign up to President Bush`s `road-map` for a Middle East peace it will be allied to a deadly new secret campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure and eliminate its leadership. Leading Israeli politician Moshe Arens said.“Dagan is one of the old Sharon’s assets. They got to know each other 33 years ago when Sharon, then head of Southern Command, cleared Gaza of ‘terrorists.’ Dagan led a commando unit called ‘Rimon’ which was known, how shall I put it, for its unconventional methods.” General Dagan is known to be keen to promote the Israeli-way of dealing with terrorism and quicklypaid an official visit to the CIA Director George Tenet in September last year and before his promotion had even been confirmed. According to usually reliable intelligence sources, it can be taken as highly significant that the CIA formally established an assassination team in November, less than two months later. This may be seen as not only a positive US response to the sharing of Israeli experience and expertise, but also as a direct result of the recent lifting of the US Presidential ban on `executive action` following the Al Qa`ida attacks of 9-11.

~

General Dagan and Mossad`s growing influence on the Western Intelligence Community was further strengthened by meetings held in Britain in January of this year with Eliza Manningham Buller, the Director General of MI5 and more importantly with Richard Dearlove, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. It now seems likely that in the wake of these discussions Britain`s MI6 was further encouraged to rebuild its muscle power through the expansion of its Special Operations Directorate to include a genuine anti-terrorist `Hunter-Killer` capability. Though `C` has been traditionally able to call upon the services of the SAS and `The Increment`, a small Special Forces unit dedicated to secret intelligence, an ever increasing number of covert and potentially politically explosive operations required the use of contracted `retired` officers operating within commercial paramilitary companies; organized crime assets or even `friendly` foreign intelligence agencies. The SIS has apparently decided that it must have its own operatives to do much of the `dirty work` . In common with their colleagues at the CIA, the senior management at Vauxhall Cross are now busily returning the service to the bad old days of `Political Action` and assassination as the official, though of course deniable, policy for dealing with external threats. It now seems certain that a limited number of selected and highly trained MI6 officers once again have a `licence to kill` and perhaps courtesy of the Israeli Secret Service.



THIS ARTICLE TO BE GREATLY EXPANDED LATER IN SEPTEMBER 2003 WITH A LARGE AMOUNT OF NEW INFORMATION RECENTLY OBTAINED FROM BRITISH AND US SOURCES ON ACTUAL OR RUMOURED ASSASSINATIONS BY THE SAS OR SIS - Dr James Hawker for AFI Research



A leading source of specialist Intelligence, Defence, Terrorism, Conflict and Political analysis,

expert information, research, consultancy and risk forecasting for the Worlds News Media

~
Contact Richard Bennett Media Tel/Fax: [phone]



~

(C) Richard Bennett Media 2003

[Joerver]

by Jim Cornehls

September 11, 2001, marked a momentous and tragic event in U.S. history. It also evoked a flood of patriotic fervor and an instant fear that Americans now were vulnerable to international terrorism. Capitalizing on these fears, the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government quickly enacted measures purported to counteract terrorism or terrorist threats. One of the principal results of this activity was an act titled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” or, the USA PATRIOT Act, passed and signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act is one of the most sweeping acts in modern American history because of its potential impact on the civil liberties of U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens residing in the United States

It is hard to believe the Act could have been drafted, debated, and passed in only 45 days. It is over 342 pages long and extremely complicated. Given its complexity, and the fact the legislation represented a wish list of new investigative and detention powers long sought by law enforcement officials, it is more likely the pro-law enforcement Administration had been drafting such provisions for many months. Post-September 11 provided the perfect opportunity to introduce them, with very little Congressional or public opposition. The Senate voted for the Act 98 to 1 and the House 356 to 66. The vast majority of Americans never even heard of it at the time.

The Act is complex and difficult to grasp because of its multiple references to and incorporation of other foreign intelligence acts, principally the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Congressional hearings were minimal and the legislation was not accompanied by either a committee or conference report. Nonetheless, in the meager hearings that took place, the Act was vigorously opposed by numerous civil rights groups, especially the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who warned that the Act was constitutionally defective and represented a broad attack on many of the traditional civil liberties enjoyed in the U.S.

One of the most significant features of the Act is a new, broader definition given to terrorism. The definition now also includes “domestic,” as contrasted with international terrorism. Section 802 states that a person engages in domestic terrorism if they do any act “dangerous to human life” that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if that action appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. Further, the act or acts must take place primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

This definition is broad enough to encompass the activities of such organizations as Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, Environmental Liberation Front, protests about Vieques Island, and protests at the meeting of the World Trade Organization. Civil disobedience, such as entering on the premises of a U.S. military base, which is a violation of federal law, would now be included within the definition of an act of domestic terrorism. Disrupting a meeting or procession of vehicles as a means of drawing attention to or attempting to influence an unwanted governmental policy all could be considered acts of domestic terrorism. The implications are huge and the Act can be used to prosecute political dissidents of many stripes.The Act potentially violates at least six of the ten original Bill of Rights: the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 13th Amendment. It grants broad new powers to law enforcement and permits law enforcement officials to side-step or avoid entirely many traditional controls on the surveillance, investigation, arrest, and prosecution of civilians residing in the United States.

The first effects of the Act were soon felt when the government secretly arrested and jailed more than 1,200 people in connection with its investigation of the events of September 11. “Despite demands from members of Congress, numerous civil liberties and human rights organizations, and the media, the Government refused to make public the number of people arrested, their names, their lawyers, the reasons for their arrest, and other information related to their whereabouts and circumstances.”

After first failing, by means of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to obtain information about those arrested and held, multiple organizations joined to file suit in federal district court in Washington, DC (Center for National Security Studies, et al. v. U.S. Department of Justice). The government still refused to provide the requested information, citing several exemptions under FOIA. A final order in the case was not entered until August 2, 2002, which required the government to divulge the names of almost all those arrested. By that time most of those arrested had been either released or deported.

Many of those arrested and jailed were Arabs and Muslims, who were cab drivers, construction workers, and other laborers, with no more than ordinary visa violations. Many of them were caught up in routine traffic stops and other incidental contacts with law enforcement officials. Some were incarcerated for up to seven months without being charged or permitted to see their families. Despite the lower court’s ruling, the government still refused to divulge the names of those arrested and is appealing the decision.

In a related secrecy issue, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and others sought to have the Supreme Court review a secret appeals court decision that broadly expanded the government’s power to spy on U.S. citizens. The special, secret court was created in 1978 with the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Its purpose was to review and approve government wiretaps in foreign intelligence investigations. All hearings and decisions of the court are conducted in secret. Now, under the PATRIOT Act’s new definition of foreign intelligence investigations, its role is being expanded to include domestic investigations that the government claims are related to foreign intelligence. The Supreme Court, in its first decision on an issue related to the PATRIOT Act, refused the request to review the secret decision of this special court.

In subsequent months, the PATRIOT Act was challenged on other grounds. The Justice Department used the Act to declare two American citizens enemy combatants. They then were held as military prisoners, denied the right to an attorney or access to civilian courts, and left without a roadmap as to how they could challenge their imprisonment. One was arrested in Afghanistan, the other in Chicago. The Justice Department took the position that it was improper for courts to inquire too deeply into the government’s classification of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant. The District Court in Norfolk, Virginia ruled that the two-page memo provided by the government to explain its decision in one of these instances was inadequate. However, that ruling was overturned by a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit in Richmond in January 2003.On March 11, Manhattan U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey stood by his earlier, December ruling to allow one of the U.S. citizens, Jose Padilla, who was arrested in Chicago, to meet with defense lawyers. The Justice Department announced it would study the opinion before deciding whether to appeal.

Another area in which the Act has been challenged concerns the Administration’s decision to hold as many as 600 deportation hearings in secret. It did this based on the Attorney General’s assertion that those detained for deportation were suspected of having links to terrorism. A federal district judge in New Jersey ordered that all such deportation hearings be opened to the public unless the government could show, on a case-by-case basis, there was a need for secrecy. That decision also was overturned, by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which held that secrecy was warranted by the grave threats to the nation.

Meanwhile, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court decision that such deportation hearings must be open, unless good cause is shown for secrecy. That is now the law in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee and makes it likely the Supreme Court will consider at least one of these cases to resolve the conflict. However, since most deportation hearings are heard in New Jersey, the Cincinnati court’s ruling may be little more than a gesture.

All told, through mid-March, 2003, the ACLU had filed or participated as a plaintiff in 31 lawsuits and friend of the court briefs in connection with government activities involving arrest, detention, surveillance, and First Amendment violations, in which countering possible terrorist acts was the ostensible reason for the actions. The number of other government violations of civil liberties that have gone unchallenged is inestimable.

Aside from these court challenges, the PATRIOT Act insinuated itself into the everyday lives of ordinary Americans in a variety of ways. While the PATRIOT Act granted extensive new powers to law enforcement, the Bush administration augmented and extended these powers through the issuance of 11 new executive orders, 10 new interim agency regulations, and 2 final regulations implemented by the Justice Department. In this way the Administration sidestepped both the legislative and judicial branches. Government investigations pursuant to the Act are shrouded in secrecy, such as the closed deportation hearings, the secret arrests, and the new power of the government to enter and search the homes of private citizens without notifying them.

Yet another government power under the Act requires courts to issue warrants and orders based on the mere government assertion that the order is sought in connection with a terrorism investigation. These warrants and orders permit the FBI to question any person about co-workers and other persons and to demand access to records about such individuals. The Court order also warns the person questioned not to reveal anything about the contact to anyone else, under threat of criminal sanctions. As a result, it is difficult to determine just what law enforcement officials using the Act are actually doing.The chilling effect of the Act on free speech and political dissent has been felt already. Individuals have been questioned by the FBI about their political beliefs for being openly critical of a possible war against Iraq. In San Francisco, a 60-year-old retiree remarked at his local gym that he thought any war with Iraq was not just about fighting terrorists, but about corporate profits and oil. He promptly received a visit at home from the FBI with questions about his political beliefs.

The FBI paid a call on a North Carolina college student for displaying an “un-American poster” in her own home. The poster in question was critical of President Bush’s stand on capital punishment while serving as governor of Texas. While there the FBI agents asked the student if she had any pro-Taliban materials.

Federal agents spent an hour or more inspecting a car museum in Houston, Texas based on a tip that artwork on display at the museum was “of a nature threatening to the president.” There were no such art works, but the agents questioned a museum docent about the artists, who funded the museum, and who had visited the exhibit.

Other low ranking quasi-law enforcement officials have eagerly joined in the suppression of individual First Amendment rights since the passage of the Act. Recently, in a shopping mall in Guilderland, New York, a 61-year-old lawyer and his son were wearing T-shirts that read “Peace On Earth” and “Give Peace A Chance.” They were ordered by mall security guards to remove the offending shirts or leave the mall. The lawyer refused and was charged with trespassing. Recently, Natalie Maines, the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, an all female country and western group, spoke out in opposition to the Administration’s war policies in Iraq and criticized President Bush. Subsequently, at a pro-war rally organized by radio station KRMD, part of a radio chain, which banned the Dixie Chicks from its play lists, a tractor was used to smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes, and other paraphernalia, while a supportive crowd looked on.

Other, pro-war Bush rallies were sponsored around the nation by radio stations. Called Rally for America, Clear Channel Communications organized them. Clear Channel is a San Antonio-based organization that controls more than 1,200 radio stations and whose vice chairperson, Tom Hicks, is a close friend and political supporter of President Bush.

Since September 11, there have been innumerable instances of public officials, quasi-public officials, and private citizens attempting to control political speech. These range from banning public rallies and peaceful marches to the cancellation of a Baseball Hall of Fame appearance by Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Dale Petroskey, the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

There were other instances in American history when the government adopted extraordinary measures to suppress unpopular political views or arrest those suspected of being disloyal to the United States. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. As a result tens of thousands of Americans suspected of being disloyal to the Union were arrested and held without charges by the military. During World War I, and the Red Scare, as many as 10,000 resident aliens, targeted because of their political views, were arrested, interrogated, jailed, and beaten to force them to sign confessions. Raids were carried out in over 30 cities and some 500 “aliens” were deported.During World War II, President Roosevelt issued an executive order for the forced internment of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the U.S. West Coast. Two-thirds of those placed in so-called preventive detention, under harsh conditions, were U.S. citizens against whom there was no evidence of collaboration with the Japanese.

During the Cold War, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when fears of communism were fueled by certain U.S. political leaders and anti-Communist hysteria was rampant, leaders of the American Communist Party were criminally prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act for their political beliefs. The House Un-American Activities Committee carried out a witch hunt of suspected Communists and so-called “fellow travelers.” Thousands of Americans were subpoenaed and called to testify about their own and other Americans’ political affiliations and activities. Those who refused to testify were held in contempt and imprisoned. In other instances, college professors and other employees were forced to sign so-called loyalty oaths or lose their jobs.

Richard Posner, a conservative federal jurist in Chicago, uses the above instances to argue that the current measures taken under the PATRIOT Act are not that worrisome. He urges the use of cost/benefit analysis to weigh the relative importance of liberty vs. security at a time of perceived threats to security. He believes that in time, when the threats to security have waned, a balance between liberty and security interests will be restored.

This sanguine view overlooks the fact that the earlier restrictions on civil rights were one-time phenomena, more specifically targeted, and narrow in scope. In the case of the PATRIOT Act, the restrictions are broad, indefinite, and far-reaching. The Administration insists the war on terrorism is open-ended and will continue for many years, if not indefinitely. Many of the emergency measures to combat the threat of terrorism will likely become permanent and even more comprehensive. Senator Orrin Hatch, a leading congressional supporter of the PATRIOT Act, recently tried quietly to introduce amendments to strengthen the Act and make it permanent.

Already, there is a new bill, prepared by the Justice Department, entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Dubbed PATRIOT II, the new act seeks to further expand the government’s powers to combat suspected terrorism and further encroaches on civil liberties. According to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, the proposed new act will expand the authority of law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies; reduce or eliminate entirely judicial oversight of surveillance; permit wiretapping of Americans—without any court order—for 15 days if the executive branch decides there is a national emergency; authorize secret arrests; create a DNA data bank based solely on unconfirmed executive suspicion; create new offenses punishable with the death penalty; and seek to strip Americans of their citizenship if they belong to or support disfavored political groups. Perhaps as importantly, the draft bill was produced in secret, without consultation with Congress. Senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee minority staff, who inquired of the Justice Department about any such proposed legislation, were informed that no such legislation was being planned only a few days before the proposed bill was publicly revealed on PBS’s “Frontline NOW.”The U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has swept aside all criticism of the Administration’s current disregard for traditional civil liberties by publicly proclaiming that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Ashcroft’s views are so extreme that he has alarmed even the conservative right wing of the Republican Party. While agreeing with his position on abortion and child pornography, they are asking how they and their own organizations might fare under the new rules affecting civil liberties. If another power were to occupy the United States and institute the policies provided for in the USA PATRIOT Act—secret arrests, secret trials, secret investigations, secret depor- tations—the United States would be considered a police state.

The federal government is also enlisting American universities to assist in maintaining surveillance of foreign students residing in the United States. The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS), launched February 15, 2003, will involve almost 6,000 U.S. colleges and universities in gathering and forwarding information about foreign students to a national computer data bank. Along with other information gathered, the schools must notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) if a foreign student fails to enroll or is arrested. Institutions that do not have INS approval to participate in the data gathering system will be prohibited from enrolling new foreign students. (On March 1, 2003, the INS was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security and is now the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.)

This past February, a Jordanian foreign exchange student, who confessed to once having had thoughts of being a terrorist martyr, but subsequently renounced those ideas, was summarily ordered deported within five days by a U.S. immigration judge in Dallas. The student, three months shy of earning a master’s degree in software engineering at a Texas university, was under investigation by the FBI for undisclosed reasons.

Currently being put into effect is another new plan, dubbed CAPPS II, in cooperation with U.S. airlines. It will check the backgrounds of all commercial passengers and assign them a threat level of red, yellow, or green. Information about the passengers’ credit reports, bank account activity, and cross checks with the names of persons on a government watch list were to be instituted by Delta airlines about April 1, 2003. A comprehensive system that includes all airlines should be in place by the end of the year.

Creating comprehensive homeland security would cost trillions of dollars and completely change the way Americans lead their lives. It would include national identity cards, surveillance, and subject to search rules in all public places, random searches of vehicles entering airports and parking garages, compiling dossiers on all persons who take scuba diving lessons, tracking the comings and goings of subway riders electronically, and the list goes on and on. Virtually everything anyone does, 24 hours a day, would be subject to constant surveillance.

Already, the security measures put in place in New York City are a portent of things to come throughout the nation. There is a proliferation of armed security guards, surveillance cameras, handbag searches, metal detectors, electronic access cards, and bomb sniffing dogs from the railroad terminals to the art museums. Heavily-armed police officers, dressed like assault troops, patrol landmark buildings such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown Manhattan. The costs of these measures—and these are just the tip of the iceberg—are potentially astronomical. The costs in terms of the loss of civil liberties are incalculable.

As the scope of the Act and the threats it represents to all U.S. residents became more apparent, more than 100 municipalities and Hawaii, passed resolutions in opposition to the Act. Some encouraged public employees not to comply with the Act’s most invasive and civil rights threatening features. One, Arcata, California, criminalized compliance with the Act. But the main features of a U.S. police state are already in place and it will take a major groundswell of public opposition to undo them.




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Jim Cornehls has practiced law and is currently professor and director of the Law and Public Policy Graduate Certificate Program in the School of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Texas at Arlington.

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THE WORLD



Routed During the War, Ansar Returns to Join in Iraq Attacks
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

September 3, 2003

QALAT DIZAH, Iraq — The men carried dollars, euros, a flashlight and five fake Italian passports. They descended the dry, brown mountains, following twisted paths past campfires of nomads and shepherds, and slipped into town in July. People in this part of northern Iraq are especially wary of strangers; the police were summoned and the four men surrendered in the marketplace.

The men — two Kurds, a Palestinian and a Tunisian — are guerrillas in Ansar al Islam, according to local security officials. Blending in with religious pilgrims and traveling on smuggling routes, the men were bound for central and southern Iraq, where the U.S. says Islamic militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists are staging attacks on civilians and killing American soldiers.

U.S. officials say that Ansar, the Al Qaeda-linked militant group that was chased from its bases in the north in the first weeks of the Iraq war, is regrouping and spreading across the nation, becoming one of the parties responsible for the wave of terror against Americans and their allies. The violence is believed to be the work of insurgent cells that include former members of the Baathist regime and nationalists resisting occupation.

"A lot of [Ansar guerrillas] are in Baghdad," U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III recently told reporters. "If Ansar decides to move, they`ll move big."

Some local authorities dispute the belief that Ansar has the sophistication, tactics and manpower to orchestrate a countrywide terrorist campaign. About 250 of Ansar`s estimated 700 fighters were killed in attacks by U.S. and Kurdish forces in the spring, officials said. Its mountain strongholds were destroyed and its weapons caches, manuals and bombs seized. Hundreds of its members escaped into Iran or hid along the Iraqi-Iranian border. Its leaders, some of them wounded, vanished.

But there is little doubt that Ansar has recalibrated its mission since March and is now a small but lethal threat to Western targets. American officials often make little distinction between Ansar and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The groups have similar goals and a history of cooperation, and the characterization fits U.S. thinking about the increasing influence of foreign extremists in Iraq.

Some Ansar guerrillas, including three killed by police last week in northern Iraq, are attempting to join other Muslim extremists in operations against the U.S.-led coalition forces, according to Kurdish intelligence.

"There is a link between Ansar and some of what`s happening in the south of Iraq," said Mohammed Haji Mahmud, the chief of a northern Iraqi socialist party that earlier this year negotiated the surrender of 26 Ansar fighters. "But not to the level being reported in the international media. Ansar cannot operate to that extent. They don`t know the terrain in the south."

The Bush administration had alleged that Ansar was running a "poison factory" capable of producing chemicals for terrorist attacks throughout the region and in Europe. Washington also asserted that Ansar provided a link between Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime.

Those characterizations, which helped make Washington`s case for war, were disputed by some European intelligence agencies.

The "poison factory" lacked sophistication and was housed in a small cinderblock building bearing brown granules and ammonia-like scents. Tests by U.S. laboratories revealed traces of chemicals including hydrogen cyanide and potassium cyanide, substances usually used to kill rodents.

So far, no significant evidence has emerged that Ansar and Al Qaeda cooperated with the Hussein regime to launch terrorist attacks against Western targets.

Deciphering the extent of Ansar`s role in terrorism in Iraq is tricky in a region infused with rumors, murky intelligence, hidden agendas and overlapping political interests.

The case of one spy in northern Iraq illustrates the problem. He worked for the local socialist party and was passing on intelligence to Iran and indirectly to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, which controls the eastern portion of northern Iraq. The PUK in turn supplied intelligence to the United States. The Socialist Party recently discovered that the spy also worked for Hussein`s Baath Party.

Ansar was formed from the merger of several Kurdish militant sects operating in the mountains along the Iraqi-Iranian border. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan in 2001, between 50 and 100 mostly Arab Al Qaeda fighters fled to Ansar camps for sanctuary.

Ansar quickly became an Osama bin Laden surrogate as its leaders modeled the group`s training and tactics, religious philosophy and instruction for potential suicide bombers after Al Qaeda. Ansar grew more rigid, and its Kurdish members were influenced by the Arab contingents arriving from Afghanistan.



After scattering during the U.S.-led attack against them this spring, as many as 400 Ansar fighters fled to caves and villages in a 50-mile stretch of highlands along the border and inside Iran. The group has apparently transformed itself from a guerrilla army to a band of terrorist operatives. Many members are in Kurdish-controlled Iranian towns such as Mariwan, Pawa and Sina. The fighters, according to Kurdish officials, travel in cells of no more than four and receive instructions from a fighter known as Dr. Omar. The strength of their leadership is uncertain.

Two of their principal leaders — Ayub Afghani, a bomb maker, and Abdullah Shafi, a strategist — are believed to be in Iran. A third leader, Abu Wael, left northern Iraq with a small contingent of fighters shortly before the U.S. invasion and is said to be in Baghdad, according to a senior Kurdish intelligence officer. U.S. forces in Baghdad recently captured six men described as "Ansar financiers."

"This is not only the work of Ansar," said Haji Mahmud, the socialist party chief. "Ansar is masterminded by the global mission of Al Qaeda."

Al Qaeda`s influence on Ansar became apparent this year. After several failed bombings and assassination attempts, Ansar`s terrorist wing succeeded in February and March with two suicide bombings that killed seven people and wounded 24. Bomb vests and four cars laden with explosives and rigged for suicide attacks were discovered in Ansar strongholds after the group fled advancing U.S. and Kurdish forces.

According to phone intercepts by Italian investigators, Ansar was receiving assistance from Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Bin Laden ally who specialized in biological and chemical weapons.

The recent arrest of the four men here in Qalat Dizah is another indication, according to Kurdish intelligence, that the predominantly Kurdish members of Ansar are assisting Arabs sneaking into Iraq from Iran and Syria. On Aug. 20, U.S. troops arrested an alleged Al Qaeda operative in Iraq who possessed 11 surface-to-air missiles and acknowledged that he had trained with Ansar guerrillas.

Muslims in northern Iraq say the U.S. and the PUK are exaggerating the strength of Ansar to keep pressure on Islamic groups.

"Ansar received a very big defeat this year," said Mohammed Hakim, an official with Komaly Islami, which calls itself a moderate Islamic organization.

"It`s not likely they are carrying out the attacks they are being blamed for. It is in the interest of some to amplify the size of Ansar. The U.S. sees Ansar as Al Qaeda in Iraq and the U.S. is relying heavily on the PUK, which has a vested interest against political Islam."

From his hilltop bunker above the town of Biyara, Ali Sofi Hama Amin doesn`t consider Ansar to be much of a danger these days.

Biyara was Ansar`s headquarters, and villagers are still clearing away debris from the U.S. cruise missile strikes. Hama Amin and his seven Kurdish soldiers scan the mountains daily for Ansar patrols that once moved freely beyond the town`s blue-domed mosque. The mountain border with Iran rises in the blue haze. Below, the valley is rocky and brown.

"We`re told Ansar exists in parties of twos and threes, but we haven`t seen any," said Hama Amin, a thin man with gray in his mustache. "I don`t think they exist in larger numbers. They`re small groups out to do sabotage. I don`t think they`ll last for long."

Hama Amin and his men battled Ansar for months. They said the group made flamethrowers that could shoot fire up to 50 yards and rigged electrical poles with bombs. Many Ansar fighters, rather than give up during battle, killed themselves, he said.

That fervor emerged last Wednesday in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah when an Ansar fighter, known as Mullah Namo, and two other Islamic militants jumped on a roof and battled more than 100 Kurdish police and security forces. Kurdish intelligence officials said they had been tracking Namo — who trained in Afghanistan — and suspected that he was planning to attack an Internet cafe frequented by U.S. soldiers.

After several hours of negotiations, Namo agreed to surrender. As police approached the house, Namo and the two militants opened fire, killing a young girl and a colonel in the security department. Namo and his accomplices were killed in the ensuing battle. Before the shooting started, Namo yelled:

"I don`t believe you or your religion I know at the end of the day I will die and two virgins will lift me by the arms into heaven!"

*

Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin and Tracy Wilkinson in Baghdad and Bob Drogin in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD



U.S. and Afghan Troops Corner Taliban in Cave
From Times Wire Services

September 3, 2003

QALAT, Afghanistan — Afghan and U.S. troops overran three suspected Taliban positions and pinned down fighters in a cave Tuesday as fighting raged in the remote southern mountains, the U.S. military and an Afghan commander said.

U.S. bombing echoed through the mountains as the troops tried to root out hundreds of Taliban holdouts who have put up fierce resistance for a week.

Coalition forces clashed with groups of five to 10 fighters firing small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, U.S. military spokesman Col. Rodney Davis said.

The troops had cornered a group of insurgents in a cave and were attacking them Tuesday afternoon using small-arms fire, artillery and air support.

There were no reported coalition casualties in the latest fighting in Zabol province`s Dai Chupan district, Davis said. He had no details on Taliban casualties.

U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships hammered Taliban positions before dawn. When Afghan troops moved in later, they found the Taliban had abandoned three positions, leaving behind bedding and turbans, said Gen. Haji Saifullah Khan, the main Afghan commander in the battle area.

Taliban fighters were hunkering down elsewhere in the area`s many gorges, and Maulvi Faizullah, a senior Taliban commander involved in the fighting in Zabol, said 300 reinforcements had been sent in from Khowst province.

The reinforcements were being led by former Taliban Education Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, Faizullah said.

The military said U.S. special operations forces and troops from the Army`s 10th Mountain Division were involved in the battle, dubbed Operation Mountain Viper, along with close air support. The military would not say how many U.S. troops were involved in the fighting, though Afghan officials have put the number at several hundred.

One U.S. soldier died Friday when he fell during a night combat mission. Two other U.S. soldiers died Sunday in a gun battle in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. Four suspected Taliban fighters were killed in that battle.

Those deaths brought to 35 the number of U.S. troops killed in action in Afghanistan, in addition to 162 wounded, the U.S. military said.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL



EPA Rulings Choke States

September 3, 2003

To counter the damage that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is doing to air quality regulation, states need to fight furiously to retain their own authority over clean air. That goes double for California.

The rule-burning in Washington doesn`t even have internal logic. During the 2000 presidential campaign, President Bush specifically promised to regulate greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, which are blamed for global warming. He didn`t do it, and last week the EPA gave him an excuse, declaring that Congress never gave it specific authority to regulate such gases.

On the other hand, just one day earlier, the EPA, without consulting Congress, radically changed one of the key rules of the federal Clean Air Act, known as "new source review." That means power companies and others in big industries will no longer have to reduce emissions when they upgrade their plants. Power companies had identified the regulation as one of their chief gripes.

The Bush administration boasts that it makes decisions on the basis of "sound science," but these EPA rulings are not reasonable except in the context of pleasing the energy industry.

Just as backward-looking is the administration`s decision last week to support a lawsuit aimed at killing local rules that have cut toxic diesel pollution and fostered improved natural-gas-engine technology. The South Coast Air Quality Management District`s rules, passed in 2000 and 2001, require local governments and private operators in four Southern California counties to replace their soot-belching diesel trash trucks, street sweepers, transit buses and school buses with clean-burning models when the old ones wear out. Diesel exhaust is a known carcinogen. The rules — and a state subsidy that helps to defray the cost of natural gas vehicles — have put nearly 7,000 cleaner new vehicles on the road.

To counter this clean-air backsliding, California will have to fight for its own standards, starting with a bill to maintain the state`s stricter new source review. The measure, SB 288 by Sen. Byron Sher (D-Stanford), is expected to come up for a vote on the Senate floor this week. Gov. Gray Davis has endorsed it.

The EPA ruling that only Congress can authorize regulation of greenhouse gases may threaten California`s first-in-the-nation program to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions by cars and trucks beginning with the 2009 model year. The state environmental agency says it will sue to demand that the EPA regulate carbon dioxide as a contributor to global warming.

California has long had the right to maintain air pollution control rules that are stronger than the national ones because the state had uniquely bad air problems.

Far from harming the state`s business climate, better air quality is a requirement for any business hoping to compete for quality employees. The administration`s favors to the energy industry do the overall economy no good at all. Whatever California`s elected officials can do to keep the state from backsliding is a favor to both families and most businesses.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY



Forests May Not Get Thin but Bureaucrats Will Get Fat
Bush`s endless program aims to return agency to timber business.
By Douglas Gantenbein
Douglas Gantenbein is the author of "A Season of Fire: Four Months on the Firelines of America`s Forests" (Putnam/Tarcher, 2003).

September 3, 2003

George W. Bush can surely pick a backdrop. A year ago, when he unveiled his Healthy Forests Initiative, aimed at curtailing Western forest fires, his handlers arranged behind him a phalanx of Nomex-clad firefighters, not to mention a smoke plume from the 485,000-acre Biscuit Fire, the biggest blaze in Oregon history.

Last month, in Oregon again to stump for his plan, he topped even that: The original site for his planned speech on fires was on fire!

That allowed him to do a flyover instead — it was quicker, and more ruggedly presidential. Upon landing in Oregon, he described the two fairly small forest fires as "a holocaust" and called them "devastating." And he again outlined his solution: Cut down trees. OK, he calls it "thinning," which sounds pretty benign, and he also wants to whack some of the brush and smaller "fine fuels" that have stacked up in forests after years of fire suppression. But Bush is basically borrowing a riff from Ronald Reagan, who once blamed trees for causing pollution. In this case, Bush is blaming them for causing fires.

I have met a number of people in the Forest Service, and I believe many of them are knowledgeable about fire and want to do the right thing. But in Bush`s circle of Forest Service types — hunkered in their brick building just across the Mall from the White House — the Healthy Forests Initiative probably has another name: the Forest Service Bureaucrat Lifetime Employment Act.

Bush`s plan would be budgetary magic for the Forest Service. In addition to each summer`s damn-the-cost orgy of firefighting (many forest fires cost $1 million a day to fight, with no limits on the checkbook), the agency would be back in the timber business: planning thinning projects, managing same, probably building or rebuilding roads to access them.

The reality is that the Forest Service "experts" did much to create the present-day problem, first by stamping out many fires that would have naturally thinned out forests and by creating the impression that fires are a problem that can be "solved." As icing, the agency gave fires a moral dimension through its famous Smokey Bear campaign. Its message: Fires are bad. And a corollary: People cause fires.

The former notion is highly debatable; fires are a natural event, not necessarily good or bad, but simply part of any forest`s life. And though people do cause fires, lightning is the main culprit, in the West, at least.

But no matter. Bush is building on an existing foundation, trumpeting the idea that we can do something about fires and insisting they`re terrible, unnatural things.

It`s true that in some forests, such as those dominated by Ponderosa pine, it may well be possible to thin out enough excess trees and brush to allow fires to resume their natural pattern of burning through every 10 years or so, cleaning up dying trees and brush or saplings that compete for scarce water. But that`s only one of many forest types in the West.

Lodgepole pine trees, which burned so spectacularly in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, aren`t designed to survive fire. They`re designed to burn to the ground every hundred years or so, to the extent that their cones often won`t release seeds unless they feel a hot blast of flame.

Also, there are two points Bush neglects to mention. First, thinning is not conducted by forest rangers with hedge trimmers. It`s done by loggers with chainsaws, and if not performed properly can damage soil and streams as well as leave behind a carpet of flammable debris. Some studies show that in certain forest types thinning may make fires worse. Second, thinning is not a one-shot deal. That`s because the very trees and brush that are thinned immediately begin growing back, necessitating a repeat treatment every five years or so.

Now, given the Forest Service`s estimates — 190 million acres that need thinning, maybe 2.8 million a year now getting thinned — it will take more than 50 years to get the job done. And by then, four-fifths of what has been thinned will need thinning again. Meanwhile, fires will not have stopped. Drought, lightning, the natural state of forests — all of that will ensure that plenty of fires still will burn.

There`s much to discuss in the realm of fire, forestry and humans. But it needs to be an honest discussion, one that takes into account the complexity of both forests and fire`s role on the landscape. Apparently, Bush simply isn`t interested in having that sort of discussion.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Hillary better off with her books
Wednesday, September 3, 2003

By RUPERT CORNWALL
BRITISH COLUMNIST

WASHINGTON -- Will she or won`t she?

Hillary Clinton swears she has no plans to challenge George Bush in 2004, and almost every pundit in the land believes her. But that hasn`t stopped a meeting next weekend with her top strategists being taken by some as a planning session for a White House run. Hillary rumors fluctuate in inverse proportion to the incumbent`s poll ratings.

Until lately, Dubya had seemed invincible, but a Newsweek survey last month, showing a majority didn`t want him to win a second term, has galvanized Democrats. And if one of the 2004 field did win, that would rule out a Hillary bid until 2012 -- when she`ll be a distinctly ancient 65. Pandora`s advice to the former first lady is simple: Stick to being an author. Though it`s the most tedious chunk of political boilerplate imaginable, her autobiography "Living History" has sold well over 1 million copies and is in the bestseller lists everywhere from France to India to Brazil. It`s netted her more than $8 million.

What more does the woman need?

It may not have caught Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein but when it comes to attracting new agents you can`t beat the dear old CIA. Super-glam Jennifer Garner, who plays secret agent Sydney Bristow in ABC`s hit TV series "Alias," will star in an agency recruitment video aimed at college students. A cheap stunt? Not at all, assures a CIA spokesman. "Jennifer and Sydney Bristow both reflect a lot of the qualities we look for in new career field officers -- honesty, integrity, intelligence, creativity, energy and the ability to think outside the box, and an inherent willingness to take risks." Gracious, if Jennifer had been on the case, they might even have found some Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Will they never learn? Americans still try to take an amazing array of weaponry and other gear with them aboard domestic commercial fights --7.5 million prohibited items in the last 18 months alone, according to the government. These include 50,000 box cutters (used by the Sept. 11 hijackers), 2.3 million knives and almost 1,500 firearms, not to mention chainsaws, machetes, razor blades inside tennis shoes and a bayonet concealed in a hollowed-out artificial leg. And that`s just the stuff they caught. No wonder the pilots are so keen to have guns in the cockpit.

California is setting trends again, this time with its gubernatorial recall election to oust the Democrat Gray Davis. Now Nevada wants to get in on the act -- or at least some red-blooded Nevada conservatives do, fed up with the latest tax increases proposed by Gov. Kenny Guinn, a moderate Republican. Guinn`s opponents have until late November to collect the 128,000 signatures needed, 25 percent of those who voted 2002`s election. "It`s gonna be tough," says Tony Dane, leader of the campaign, "but if people are motivated, it`s possible."

Who says that Crawford, Texas -- base camp for the hacks covering Dubya`s summer holes -- is the toughest hangout on the presidential press beat? Yes, the president`s preferred August relaxation is clearing brush in the 100-degree plus days of the Lone Star state`s summer. But the other day Dubya relented and invited the 50-strong retinue of White House reporters to a cookout at Prairie Chapel (as his ranch is fetchingly named). On the menu were such delicacies as fried chicken, potato salad, jalapeno biscuits and peach cobbler. The teetotal commander-in-chief even laid on red wine for the thirsty hacks (Australian, naturally, not French).

Your diarist, however, wants another favor from the president, former managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. Since the Washington Senators left town in 1971, the capital has been without a team. We thought it might happen for 2004, but now it seems not.

So please, Mr. President, use your clout and get that old joke about Washington started again: "First in war, first in peace, but last in the American League."



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Rupert Cornwall writes for The Independent of Great Britain.

© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Polish (front row)) and American soldiers hold flags during a handover ceremony in the old amphitheater in Babylon, Iraq September 3, 2003. A Polish-led force took over a chunk of central Iraq from U.S. Marines as Washington sought to relieve the burden on its troops by widening international participation in Iraq`s security.
Auch eine Möglichkeit Polen in die Schlagzeilen zu bekommen.
U.S. Forces Hand Over Parts of Central Iraq
Wed September 03, 2003 06:00 AM ET


By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A Polish-led force took over a chunk of central Iraq from U.S. Marines on Wednesday as Washington sought to relieve the burden on its troops by widening international participation in Iraq`s security.

The Marines, in charge of the area for several months, handed over control of a South-Central zone of Iraq to the Polish-led multinational force.

"I have absolute faith and confidence in the 21 nations that will assume their responsibilities today," Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told a ceremony in an open air amphitheater in ancient Babylon.

With security deteriorating in the occupied country and U.S. soldiers dying nearly every day, President Bush took steps to bring in the United Nations to share the burden of stabilizing and running Iraq.

In Baghdad, 25 ministers were sworn in and were set to get down to work in what the U.S.-led administration says is another step toward handing the reins of power back to Iraqis.

A senior U.S. official said in Washington on Tuesday night that Bush had directed Secretary of State Colin Powell to open negotiations at the U.N. Security Council on a resolution aimed at building a wider multinational force and getting U.N. help to build political stability.

"We`ve got language (of a draft U.N. resolution). It enhances, it elaborates, it talks about how countries can contribute," a State Department official said.

"It`s on how to define further the vital role of the U.N. in political, military and economic areas and how to provide ways for the U.N. members to support efforts by the Iraqi people."

U.N. envoys said the draft might include a role for the United Nations in helping to prepare elections in Iraq.

U.S. AUTHORITY

The United States, whose forces have occupied Iraq since invading in March and toppling President Saddam Hussein, has insisted it retain authority over Iraq operations.

Washington has about 150,000 troops in Iraq and is supported by about 21,000 others, 11,000 of them British.

A wider U.N. role would also make it easier to gain reconstruction funds during a forthcoming donors conference, with many contributors uneasy at the occupation.

The deteriorating security has put the brakes on any prospects of foreign investment leading to a quick recovery of the Iraqi economy.

Iraq has the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia, but efforts to get the industry powering an economic recovery have been plagued by looting and sabotage.

A car bombing in Iraq on Tuesday, the fourth in under a month, targeted Baghdad`s police headquarters killing one policeman and wounding 15.

Similar bombings have shattered the Jordanian embassy and the U.N. headquarters and claimed the life of a top Shi`ite Muslim cleric and scores of his followers.

Before the four bombings, violence had been largely grenade and gun attacks that Washington blamed on die-hard Saddam supporters. Since then U.S. officials have made increasing mention of al Qaeda and other foreign fighters.

"I think it is true that Iraq now faces an important terrorist threat," Iraq`s U.S. governor Paul Bremer, a counter-terrorism expert, told a news conference in Baghdad.

Sixty-seven U.S. and 11 British soldiers have been killed in attacks since Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

Five U.S. soldiers were wounded on Tuesday in two separate attacks with explosives in the area of Tikrit north of Baghdad, a U.S. military spokesman.

Iraq`s U.S.-backed Governing Council appointed the cabinet of 25 ministers on Monday. The ministers will formulate policy with the Governing Council and the occupying authorities and will be responsible for the day-to-day running of their departments.

Ultimate power remains with Bremer until general elections.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray in Babylon)

[Joerver]

IRAQ: WHAT WENT WRONG

By Ted Rall

A Fair and Balanced Look at America`s New Vietnam

ted Rall



KIRKSVILLE, MISSOURI--In my March 25th column, I wrote that Bush could salvage a war based on lies only if he played the earnest liberator rather than the crusading colonizer. He had already abandoned Afghanistan; few cared or noticed. But Iraq (news - web sites) wasn`t nearly as remote. The world would be watching, and we would only have one chance to make a good first impression.


I wish I could pick stocks as accurately.


The bombing of Najaf`s Imam Ali mosque, killing pro-U.S. Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al Hakim and at least 90 Shiite faithful, marks the start of full-fledged religious warfare in the U.S.-occupied central and southern sectors. (Our de facto recognition of a future Kurdistan has effectively ended the prospect of a unified Iraq.) Possible suspects include fellow Shiite cleric Mukhtader al Sadr, an Iraqi nationalist opposed to the U.S. occupation, Iranian intelligence agents and Sunnis affiliated with Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)`s deposed government.


Iraqi complaints that U.S. forces failed to provide adequate security only tell part of the story. Hoping that Iraq`s next leaders would organically emerge from the mish-mash of former exile groups, Administrator Paul Bremer refused to create a new U.S. puppet regime or to allow Iraqis to hold elections. This faith-based occupation policy has sparked a violent struggle among the opposition parties. DeBaathification and random sweeps of homes in Sunni-dominated regions are alienating the Sunni minority while emboldening insurgent Shiite militants. And the Iranians, worried that Bush will invade them after next year`s presidential election, are funding radical Shiites to keep us tied up.


Saddam kept Iraq`s federation of conflicting tribes and religions together through intimidation and bribery. The Pentagon (news - web sites) has doesn`t have enough troops to accomplish the former and none of the cash needed for the latter, making the old tyrant look great by comparison--and sparking paranoia in the Muslim media. "The Zionists want to divide Iraq into three separate states, a Shiite, a Sunni and a Kurdish state," posits Charles Ayoub in Beirut`s Ad-Diyar newspaper. "The United States is ruled by the Zionists. The...announcement by U.S. authorities in Iraq that the perpetrators of the [Najaf bombing] belonged to the Sunni Muslim community and to the Al Qaeda organization was aimed at triggering such strife between the Sunnis and Shiites."


Even if we had proved ourselves to be the most benevolent occupiers to ever march through their streets, Iraqis would still have yearned to have their nation back to themselves. We`ve been anything but.


Our early emphasis on seizing oil fields, and schemes to funnel revenue from the U.N. oil-for-food program into lucrative contracts with Halliburton (which still pays Dick Cheney (news - web sites) a huge salary) and MCI-WorldCom (a major Bush-Cheney campaign donor) belie our stated commitment to liberation and spreading democracy. We`re more Genghis Khan than Dwight Eisenhower.


Bush, a former businessman, is treating "liberated" Iraq like the victim of a hostile leveraged buy-out. In an LBO, you borrow a target company`s purchase price and saddle its balance sheet with the resulting debt, layoffs and possible bankruptcy. In Iraq Bush hopes to defray rising costs of occupation--$1 billion a week for the Pentagon, plus $30 billion to fix water, electricity and oil production facilities--by selling Iraq`s oil.


But it`s Iraq`s oil, not ours.


Our soldiers disposed of Saddam`s army, but they haven`t been nearly as effective as good will ambassadors. Partly because they don`t speak Arabic or understand Islamic culture, jumpy U.S. soldiers are killing so many Iraqi civilians that the Pentagon is deliberately not keeping a count of accidental casualties. Our troops are swaggering about the desert like Gestapo thugs, robbing locals of their cash, kicking down doors, roughing up women (a no-no under Islam) and brown-bagging innocent men`s heads before dragging them off screaming into the night.


The good news, such as it is, is that Bush`s neo-con wolf pack is finally beginning to admit that the facts didn`t fit with all their bluster. "Some conditions were worse than we anticipated, particularly in the security area," acknowledges Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Armitage, the radical right`s number two at State, now wants the U.N. to get involved. The Defense Policy Board`s Richard Perle, newly concedes that we should have prepared a postwar Iraqi government. "The answer is to hand over power to Iraqis as soon as possible," says Perle.


Getting warmer...but still wrong.


The real answer is to get the hell out before one more American or Iraqi gets killed in a lost cause. "Leaving now would place Iraqis under violent usurpers and set a precedent that could haunt the U.S. government for years," argues The New York Times` Christopher Marquis, but we`ve already blown our chance to make a good first impression. More money, more men, more international involvement--those were good ideas back in March. Now it`s too late to avoid the ostracizing of the United States or the Afghanistanization of Iraq.


For God`s sake, cut our losses--and Iraq`s--and bring our troops home.


(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=127&u=/030903/7/5…

[Joerver]

Wed 3 Sep 2003

Bin Laden family`s US exit `approved`

BILL ANDREWS


THE United States allowed members of Osama bin Laden’s family to jet out of the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, even as American airspace was closed.

Former White House counter-terrorism tsar Richard Clarke said the Bush administration sanctioned the repatriation of about 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including relatives of the al-Qaida chief.

"Somebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an aeroplane filled with Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, leave the country," he said.

Mr Clarke said he checked with FBI officials, who gave the go ahead. "So I said: ‘Fine, let it happen.’"

He first asked the bureau to check that no-one "inappropriate" was leaving.

"I have no idea if they did a good job," he added.

Dale Watson, the FBI’s former head of counter-terrorism, said that, while the bureau identified the Saudis who were on the plane, "they were not subject to serious interrogations".

The plane is believed to have landed in ten US cities picking up passengers, including Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston and Houston. At the time, access to US airspace was restricted and required special government approval.

Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Boston’s Logan Airport, said: "We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history and here we were seeing an evacuation of the Bin Ladens."

But he said it was clear the flight had been sanctioned by federal authorities.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the US who is said to have organised the exodus, met President George Bush on September 13, 2001, two days after the terror attacks. It is not known if they discussed the repatriation plan.

The White House has declined to comment on the claims, but sources said the Bush administration was confident no secret flights took place.

Mr Clarke said he did not recall who requested approval for the flights, but believes it was either the FBI or the State Department.

But FBI spokesman John Iannarelli said: "I can say unequivocally that the FBI had no role in facilitating these flights."


This article:

http://www.edinburghnews.com/index.cfm?id=971322003

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Published on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Business of E-Voting and How it Can Put the Wrong Candidate in Office
by Jason Leopold

It seems fitting that a president who was brought into office because of a scandalous election would enact a law to overhaul the electoral process to make it easier for people to choose their leaders the second time around.

But that’s not what the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, signed into law by President Bush in October 2002, will do. Instead, the law will force most states to switch from paper balloting to a fully computerized system---one that is currently rife with programming flaws and is incapable of being audited—that could call into question the legitimacy of future local and national elections and put the wrong candidates into office.

The bill contains $1.515 billion to fund activities related to the Help America Vote Act, a federal election reform bill that provides money to states for the improvement of elections; including $15 million to the General Services Administration to reimburse states that purchased optical scan or electronic voting equipment prior to the November 2000 election.

Bev Harris, a Seattle resident who runs a small public relations business, is credited with uncovering the flaws in electronic voting machines and has recently written a book on the subject called “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century.”

Harris’ muckraking on electronic voting have been featured on Scoop, an award-winning Internet news site based in New Zealand, (full disclosure: I am a regular contributor to Scoop) that is quickly developing a reputation in the United States for its groundbreaking investigative news stories.

Harris recently uncovered “some 40,000 files that included user manuals, source code and executable files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton, Ohio,” according to an Aug. 21 feature story on Harris in the Seattle Times, and exposed the massive flaws in Diebold’s software that can easily be manipulated. An in-depth report on Diebold’s electronic voting machines can be found at www.scoop.co.nz

Diebold`s chief executive, Walden O`Dell, in a fundraiser his company sponsored for President Bush last week promised the president that his company would "deliver" the necessary votes needed to keep Bush in the White House for a second term, prompting Democrats in Congress to call for Diebold to remove its machines from being used during next year`s primary election.

Michelle Griggy, a Diebold spokeswoman, dismissed any appearance of a conflict-of-interest saying the company routinely holds fundraisers for other political causes absent of any bias.

While much ink has been spilled in the mainstream media on the so-called benefits of computerized voting (cheaper, faster, more reliable), you would be hard-pressed to find an equal number of stories highlighting the side effects that comes from computerized voting.

The disastrous 2000 presidential election and the subsequent ballot recount in Florida, in which hanging chads made it nearly impossible to figure out whether people in the Sunshine State voted for Al Gore or George Bush, led to a full-scale campaign by lawmakers to outlaw paper balloting in favor of user-friendly computerized voting machines.

The problem with the Omnibus bill, according to Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and one of the most vocal opponents of paperless balloting, is that it leaves no paper trail, making it ripe for manipulation.

“Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result,” Mercuri told a reporter for CommonDreams.org. “There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system. No electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards..." The Federal Election Commission provides only voluntary standards, and even those don`t ensure election "integrity," she says.

That’s exactly what happened in Cleveland on May 7, 2003. Election officials said they ran into problems with the electronic voting machines when they tried to merge the numbers from their Lorain and Elyria offices.

The elections board used two different kinds of ``touch-screen`` voting machines in two Cleveland counties and the results couldn`t be merged with totals from another county, which came from more familiar punch cards.

``I don`t know exactly what happened ... we`re having software people look into that now,`` said Marilyn Jacobcik, the board of elections executive director. ``But we are assured that all the numbers are accurate.``

One of the biggest problems, according to one election worker, was that the office wasn`t prepared to compile data from three different computer systems.

John Blevins, a member of the board of elections, attributed the breakdown to ``growing pains.``

Because of the Help America Vote Act passed last year, he said, elections boards are required to install electronic voting machines by the 2004 election.

``We were basically trying two different computer systems,`` Blevins said, noting the county used machines provided by Diebold in North Ridgeville and MicroVote in the Amherst race. ``I realize maybe things move a little slower but in the end it will be a much smoother operation. We have to do this by November 2004.``

Computerized voting and the technological problems related to the system had already been realized before hanging chads became a household phrase. In November 1998, an election in Hawaii was held using state-of-the-art computers designed by Electronic Systems & Software, a company with close ties to Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

One such lawmaker, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb, was part owner and former chairman and chief executive of ES&S, a company that made all the equipment that counted the votes during his last two runs for office, yet he failed to list his ties to the company on federal disclosure forms.

Seven of ES&S’ 361 voting machines used in Hawaii on Election Day in November 1998 malfunctioned (five units had lens occlusion, one unit had a defective cable and one unit had a defective "read head"), which led to Hawaii’s first ever statewide election review and a first in the history of the United States. Hundreds of people who used the machines complained mightily to local election officials that the candidates they picked did not register in the computerized system.

Mercuri said in an interview with Common Dreams last year that in order for an electronic voting system to be foolproof, five components must be present - a voter, a ballot, a computerized voting machine, a printer, and an optical scanner - and three basic steps must be taken.

“First, the voting machine registers a voter`s selection both electronically and on a paper ballot. Second, the machine then displays the paper ballot behind clear glass or plastic so that the voter can review their selection, but not take the ballot home by mistake. If the voter`s selection doesn`t agree with the ballot or the voter makes a mistake, the voter can call a poll worker to void the ballot, and then re-vote. And third, the paper ballot is optically scanned (most likely at the county administration building), providing a second electronic tally. If anything goes wrong with either the voting machines or the optical scanner, the paper ballots can be hand-counted as a last resort or as part of an audit. And voila! We have a fully auditable voting system with checks and balances, review and redundancy.”

There are dozens of other horror stories that spawned from the signing of the Omnibus bill by President Bush and these too involve Florida and a Bush.

The new touch-screen equipment used during the September 2002 Florida elections wrongfully credited GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeb Bush in one precinct when votes were cast for the Democratic candidate for governor because of a "misaligned" touch screen. No one knows how many votes were misrecorded. Miami-Dade was still licking its wounds over the 2000 presidential election that helped put George Bush in office. For the primary election, the county spent $24.5 million for 7,200 voting machines, but many polling places opened late or did not have enough machines up and running. Many poll workers had problems collecting votes from the machines, delaying the final results of the election for a week.

The November general election was relatively glitch-free, but the county had to turn the logistics of the election over to the Miami-Dade police department and dedicate at least three county employees to each polling place.

In May, a Miami-Dade Inspector General released the results of a seven-month investigation into the use of the electronic voting machine that were credited with helping Bush secure a second term in office. The results of the probe are damning.

For one, the company that sold the touch-screen voting machines, ES&S, to Miami-Dade county misled county officials about the “about the equipment and delivered goods that were ``hardly state-of-the-art technology,`` according to the Miami Herald, which obtained a copy of the inspector general’s report.

“The draft report by the county inspector general`s office following a seven-month investigation provides a critical account of the process leading to the $25 million purchase of a voting system that was expected to lead to trouble-free elections. Instead, the Sept. 10, 2002, election -- a national black eye for Miami-Dade -- was plagued with problems caused in part by the lengthy start-up time for the machines,” the Herald reported.

Moreover, the report found that ES&S told county officials that its electronic voting machines would provide voters with a system that could run a trilingual ballot, in English, Spanish and Creole. Although state certification was pending for the trilingual ballot software, the county only considered the possibility of having separate English/Spanish and English/Creole machines as a backup plan.

In its oral sales presentation, ES&S told the county that having a trilingual system would not require additional data capacity. Yet, the company`s own documentation from 2001 indicated that the type of files that would be required for such a system would require an additional storage device.

The report questions why the boot-up time for each machine under the software used in the primary election was so lengthy, noting that the processor for each machine is an Intel 386 EX processor, technology that is more than a decade old.

Testing by the State of Florida found numerous "anomalies and deficiencies" in newer versions of voting machine software that would have sped up the boot-up process. The report also cautions the county not to be "overly reliant" on representations made by ES&S about what a highly touted upcoming version of the software will do.

Still, because Miami-Dade invested more than $25 million into the technology, the inspector general did not recommend scrapping the electronic voting machines, but rather work within the limitations of the system and “hope” that it will pull off a successful general election come 2004.

Linda Rodriguez-Taseff, president of the South Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a leading advocate of voting reform in Miami-Dade, said the report was not surprising.

"It`s everything we said it would be," she said. "The time to act is now. Let`s scrap this system and get a new system in place."

Despite the malfeasance, it’s become difficult for county officials to challenge the results of tainted elections.

In city council elections in Palm Beach last March, when a losing candidate challenged the results, a local judge denied the challenger and his consultant the opportunity to inspect the machines, citing the rights of the manufacturer, Sequoia, to protect its trade secrets.

In February 2003, Daniel Spillane blew the whistle on his former employer, VoteHere, a privately held electronic voting machine company in Washington, D.C., run by a former senior military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and whose board includes former CIA Director Robert Gates, claiming the company’s patented digital balloting software contained severe programming errors, which could lead to, among other disasters, the massive deletion of ballots.

Spillane, who was fired from VoteHere in 2001, alleged in a wrongful termination lawsuit against his former employer, that VoteHere’s undertook measures to thwart an independent review of its software. He said he voiced his concerns with company executives and that he was fired hours before VoteHere was scheduled to meet with representatives from the Independent Test Authority, an auditing group that scrutinizes electronic voting equipment and software, and the U.S. General Accounting Office.

Spillane is one of a half-dozen experts to question the wisdom behind the Omnibus bill and warns that the law’s true goal is to facilitate the sale of electronic voting machines.

He and Mercuri wrote in November about Sequoia Voting Systems, an outfit seeking to install electronic voting booths in Santa Clara County, California. Most of Sequoia`s machines provide nothing in the way of receipts or physical audit trails, which would facilitate a recount, ripening the prospects for electronic election fraud. She and other experts have also been barred from examining Sequoia`s product, because it is sold under restrictive trade-secret agreements.

Spillane, Mercuri, and 453 other technologists have endorsed a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" which warns of the dangers inherent in electronic voting systems that keep only digital records of ballots cast. The resolution states that programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering are serious risks which call for a voter-verifiable audit trail -- a permanent, physical, tamper-resistant record of each vote which can be checked by the voter before casting their ballot, and retained afterward.

Despite the resolution, Santa Clara County made its final decision on Tuesday to spend $20 million on 5,000 touch-screen voting booths made by Sequoia, most of which will not include a printed audit trail. Sequoia has a history of involvement with government corruption, including the pay-off of Louisiana election official Jerry Fowler.

The San Francisco Chronicle is one of only a handful of news organizations that called into question the veracity of electronic voting when it became clear that the new technology could lead to voter fraud in Santa Clara County.

David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford University and leader of an anti-electronic voting campaign told the Chronicle that the electronic voting machines Santa Clara planned to purchase “pose an unacceptable risk that errors or deliberate election-rigging will go undetected, since they do not provide a way for the voters to verify independently that the machine correctly records and counts the votes they have cast.”

Dill, in consultation with other experts and his Stanford colleagues, had voiced their concern via a petition urging that voting machines not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, according to the Chronicle.

When such machines are already in use, the petition stated, they should be replaced or modified to provide such a record. And Dill had collected the signatures of hundreds of technologists, including many of the best-known names in computer science, security and election technology.

The opposition movement caught the eye of Kevin Shelley, California`s new secretary of state. In January 2003, Shelley appointed a task force to advise him and the board charged with certifying voting equipment in the state on security and audit ability issues raised by touch-screen voting.

Peter Coyote, who narrated a documentary film last year on the disasters surrounding the 2000 presidential election, has launched a grassroots letter writing campaign urging federal lawmakers to take a second look at how the Help America Vote Act can put the wrong candidates in office.

In his letter to California’s Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, Coyote writes: “Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist Greg Palast. This film documents the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now been revised to 91,000. Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential election and Democrats need to be prepared.”

”Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of national importance, not only is it highly probable that Democrats will lose again and again, but eventually voters will "sense" even if they cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this issue.”

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0902-01.htm

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

from the September 03, 2003 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0903/p02s01-woiq.html

What lessons postwar Germany holds for Iraq
Bush aides see parallels, urging patience, but others note a difference: more fighting.
By Faye Bowers | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - At the end of the war, the conquered nation was ruined. Power was sporadic, much water undrinkable. A once-vital economy was moribund, while in the shadows enemies of the US occupation still lurked.

Does that sound like Iraq? Such was the situation in Germany in 1945. Increasingly, administration officials are drawing parallels between the two situations, saying that the successful rebuilding of a former Axis foe also began amid chaos and recriminations.

Historians and experts say the situations are similar in several ways, and lessons can be drawn from the earlier experience of rebuilding West Germany. But there are also distinct differences.

Most important, the level of violence in Iraq is far higher.

"Fixing both countries was very important for US interests; both were likely to be long, difficult, and expensive jobs, and the physical conditions of the infrastructure in both countries was bad," says Francis Bator, professor of political economy at Harvard University.

"But the biggest difference," he adds, "is that Germany in 1945 was fully defeated. There was no internal enemy left."

There is almost a daily reminder that there is in fact an enemy left in Iraq.

Tuesday, a car bomb exploded outside police headquarters in Baghdad, killing at least one and wounding some 20 others. At the same time, a funeral was held for the top Shiite leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, who was killed Friday in a suicide car bombing outside a mosque, along with 80 others. Many Iraqis charge that the US is not providing adequate security.

The situation for US soldiers is fraught with peril. As of Tuesday, some 286 US soldiers have died in Iraq, 148 since the president declared the end of major hostilities on May 1. Another 1,125 or so have been injured; some 575 since May 1.

Looking to past examples
But administration officials - from the president to his advisers - have begun pointing to the parallels between Iraq and Germany. "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America`s experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 25.

"The road we traveled was very difficult.... Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers - called Werewolves - engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today`s Baathist and Feda-yeen remnants."

That`s only partly true, according to historians. True, they say, the similarity between the two examples are the challenges in each case. Germany was laid flat by long-term bombing and land campaigns; Iraq`s infrastructure was destroyed mainly because of Saddam Hussein`s neglect. Massive infusions of cash will be needed in Iraq, just as they were in the Europe.

Reconstruction time again
Moreover, rebuilding Germany was a long, difficult, and expensive process. It was four years after the war that the Federal Republic of Germany was created. Similarly, although the process of building democratic institutions has begun in Iraq - with the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council and the naming of its cabinet Tuesday - it`s likely to be years before the US is able to turn over full responsibility for governing to Iraqis.

"It took several years to construct those democratic systems in Germany," says Robert Pfaltzgraf, an expert on international security at Tufts University`s Fletcher School. "We even used the term de-Nazification as we use the term de-Baathification today," referring to the processes of removing Nazi officials from positions of power in Germany and Baath Party officials in Iraq.

Iraq`s violent opposition
But the analogy ends there. In Germany, there weren`t terrorists crossing borders to fight the US. And internal opposition was nearly nonexistent.

In "Total War," Peter Calvocoressi writes that the werewolves were created in 1944, as a "last resort under Himmler`s command." But the only death credited them is that of the mayor of Aachen, on March 25, 1945, before the Nazis surrendered on May 7 that same year.

"I couldn`t find any mention in the US Army`s official history of the German occupation of any American combat deaths," says Daniel Benjamin, coauthor of "The Age of Sacred Terror." "I think all the respected histories agree on this point - the occupation`s problems had nothing to do with resistance."

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Mourners follow the funeral procession for assassinated Iraqi Shia cleric Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim through the streets of Najaf, Iraq, on Tuesday. He was laid to rest in his birthplace after a three-day procession through Baghdad, Karbala, Hilla, Kufa and Najaf.

Najaf, Iraq — A member of the U.S.-picked governing council angrily denounced the occupation in a eulogy for his slain brother before 400,000 Shia mourners on Tuesday, demanding that U.S. troops leave Iraq and blaming them for lax security that led to the cleric`s assassination.

Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim spoke in the holy city of Najaf at the funeral of his brother, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, as men brandishing Kalashnikov rifles stood guard every five metres along the roof of Najaf`s gold-domed Imam Ali mosque.

Black mourning banners were draped across the shrine, which on Friday became the site of Iraq`s bloodiest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein, killing the moderate cleric. There are varying accounts of how many other people died, ranging from more than 80 to more than 120.

"The occupation force is primarily responsible for the pure blood that was spilled in holy Najaf, the blood of al-Hakim and the faithful group that was present near the mosque," Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim said in his eulogy. "This force is primarily responsible for all this blood and the blood that is shed all over Iraq every day.

"Iraq must not remain occupied and the occupation must leave so that we can build Iraq as God wants us to do," he said.

Unable to recover Ayatollah al-Hakim`s body after the blast, the family buried a coffin containing his watch, his pen and wedding ring in the 1920 Revolution Square, a cemetery set aside for martyrs in the Shiite uprising against British occupation. Ayatollah al-Hakim`s 15 bodyguards, who died with him in the car bombing, were buried in neighbouring plots.

Mourners scooped up sand from the ground in the cemetery to take home as a souvenir.

Earlier, police on loudspeakers implored the crowds jammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the streets surrounding the shrine to allow the truck carrying the ceremonial coffin to pass. Despite their efforts, the truck, was unable to make it to the entrance of the mosque in Najaf, 175 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Police stood with their weapons ready as pumps sprayed water on the mourners after some fainted from the heat.

As the funeral was about to begin, another car bomb exploded in central Baghdad outside police headquarters, wounding an unknown number of bystanders. Huge plumes of black smoke rose above the blast scene, where debris lay scattered around the headquarters. There were no fatalities.

Acting police chief Hassan al-Obeidi has offices in the headquarters building and is closely associated with the U.S.-led occupation authority.

Early Tuesday morning, a U.S. helicopter crashed south of Baghdad, killing one soldier and injuring another in a "non-hostile" incident.

On Monday, two U.S. soldiers were killed and another wounded when a bomb went off beside their convoy in southern Iraq, the military said.

The deaths raised to 286 the number of American forces killed in the Iraq war. Of those 148 died since May 1 when U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to major fighting. Seventy soldiers have died in combat since Mr. Bush`s declaration.

The spiritual leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Islam terrorist group, Mullah Krekar, denied that his organization played any role in the Najaf bombing, or the attacks on the Jordanian embassy on Aug. 7 and the UN headquarters on Aug. 19.

"I consider it very unlikely that members of Ansar al-Islam committed such big and grave acts," Mullah Krekar said in a statement broadcast on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV station, adding that his group`s Islamic convictions prevent them from striking such targets.

Ayatollah al-Hakim spent more than two decades in exile in Iran, returning only in May.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3101556,00.…
Highlights From the Census on Poverty
Wednesday September 3, 2003 8:59 AM
By The Associated Press
Some highlights from the Census Bureau`s release Wednesday of estimates from the American Community Survey. The survey does not cover people in dormitories, prisons or other group quarters.
2001+++++++++++++++++++++++ 2002
Total pop. 277,017,622+++280,540,330
In Poverty 33,419,993 ++++++ 34,763,085
Pct in Poverty 12.1+++++++++++ 12.4
Percentage of people in following categories living in poverty:
++++++++++2001+++++++++++++++++2002
18 and over 10.5 ++++++++++++++10.7
65 and over 10.2 ++++++++++++++++ 9.6
Children under 18 16.4 +++++++++++17.2+
Med. household income +
(figs. adjusted for +
inflation) $43,006+++++++++++++++++$43,057

Source: U.S. Census Bureau.

Most Often Asked Questions Concerning Homeless Veterans
Who are homeless veterans?
The U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says homeless veterans are mostly males (2 % are females). The vast majority are single, most come from poor, disadvantaged communities, 45% suffer from mental illness, and half have substance abuse problems. America’s homeless veterans have served in World War II, Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, or the military’s anti-drug cultivation efforts in South America. Forty-seven percent of homeless veterans served during the Vietnam Era. More than 67% served our country for at least three years and 33% were stationed in a war zone.
How many homeless veterans are there?
http://www.nchv.org/background.cfm

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Man beachte das Datum des Artikels. Jay Bookmann schreibt für das Atlanta Journal.http://www.ajc.com/Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Mondays and Thursdays.

The president`s real goal in Iraq

JAY BOOKMAN; Staff Date: September 29, 2002 Publication: Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article2319.htm
Follow links for greater depth.

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.
The pieces just didn`t fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won`t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

In an interview Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed aside that suggestion, noting that the United States does not covet other nations` territory. That may be true, but 57 years after World War II ended, we still have major bases in Germany and Japan. We will do the same in Iraq.

And why has the administration dismissed the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. Besides, they are beneath us as an empire. Rome did not stoop to containment; it conquered. And so should we.

Among the architects of this would-be American Empire are a group of brilliant and powerful people who now hold key positions in the Bush administration: They envision the creation and enforcement of what they call a worldwide "Pax Americana," or American peace. But so far, the American people have not appreciated the true extent of that ambition.

Part of it`s laid out in the National Security Strategy, a document in which each administration outlines its approach to defending the country. The Bush administration plan, released Sept. 20, marks a significant departure from previous approaches, a change that it attributes largely to the attacks of Sept. 11.

To address the terrorism threat, the president`s report lays out a newly aggressive military and foreign policy, embracing pre-emptive attack against perceived enemies. It speaks in blunt terms of what it calls "American internationalism," of ignoring international opinion if that suits U.S. interests. "The best defense is a good offense," the document asserts.

It dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of "convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities."

In essence, it lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.

"The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia," the document warns, "as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops."

The report`s repeated references to terrorism are misleading, however, because the approach of the new National Security Strategy was clearly not inspired by the events of Sept. 11. They can be found in much the same language in a report issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a group of conservative interventionists outraged by the thought that the United States might be forfeiting its chance at a global empire.

"At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals," the report said. stated two years ago. "The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this `American peace.` "

Familiar themes

Overall, that 2000 report reads like a blueprint for current Bush defense policy. Most of what it advocates, the Bush administration has tried to accomplish. For example, the project report urged the repudiation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and a commitment to a global missile defense system. The administration has taken that course.

It recommended that to project sufficient power worldwide to enforce Pax Americana, the United States would have to increase defense spending from 3 percent of gross domestic product to as much as 3.8 percent. For next year, the Bush administration has requested a defense budget of $379 billion, almost exactly 3.8 percent of GDP.

It advocates the "transformation" of the U.S. military to meet its expanded obligations, including the cancellation of such outmoded defense programs as the Crusader artillery system. That`s exactly the message being preached by Rumsfeld and others.

It urges the development of small nuclear warheads "required in targeting the very deep, underground hardened bunkers that are being built by many of our potential adversaries." This year the GOP-led U.S. House gave the Pentagon the green light to develop such a weapon, called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, while the Senate has so far balked.

That close tracking of recommendation with current policy is hardly surprising, given the current positions of the people who contributed to the 2000 report.

Paul Wolfowitz is now deputy defense secretary. John Bolton is undersecretary of state. Stephen Cambone is head of the Pentagon`s Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation. Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross are members of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Rumsfeld. I. Lewis Libby is chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department.

`Constabulary duties`

Because they were still just private citizens in 2000, the authors of the project report could be more frank and less diplomatic than they were in drafting the National Security Strategy. Back in 2000, they clearly identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as primary short-term targets, well before President Bush tagged them as the Axis of Evil. In their report, they criticize the fact that in war planning against North Korea and Iraq, "past Pentagon wargames have given little or no consideration to the force requirements necessary not only to defeat an attack but to remove these regimes from power."

To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says U.S. forces will be required to perform "constabulary duties" -- the United States acting as policeman of the world -- and says that such actions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations."

To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which U.S. troops are already deployed.

More specifically, they argue that we need permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, where no such bases now exist. That helps to explain another of the mysteries of our post-Sept. 11 reaction, in which the Bush administration rushed to install U.S. troops in Georgia and the Philippines, as well as our eagerness to send military advisers to assist in the civil war in Colombia.

The 2000 report directly acknowledges its debt to a still earlier document, drafted in 1992 by the Defense Department. That document had also envisioned the United States as a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power. When leaked in final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by the first President Bush.

Effect on allies

The defense secretary in 1992 was Richard Cheney; the document was drafted by Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense undersecretary for policy.

The potential implications of a Pax Americana are immense.

One is the effect on our allies. Once we assert the unilateral right to act as the world`s policeman, our allies will quickly recede into the background. Eventually, we will be forced to spend American wealth and American blood protecting the peace while other nations redirect their wealth to such things as health care for their citizenry.

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy -- he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project -- acknowledges that likelihood.

"If [our allies] want a free ride, and they probably will, we can`t stop that," he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway.

"You saw the movie `High Noon`? he asks. "We`re Gary Cooper."

Accepting the Cooper role would be an historic change in who we are as a nation, and in how we operate in the international arena. Candidate Bush certainly did not campaign on such a change. It is not something that he or others have dared to discuss honestly with the American people. To the contrary, in his foreign policy debate with Al Gore, Bush pointedly advocated a more humble foreign policy, a position calculated to appeal to voters leery of military intervention.

For the same reason, Kagan and others shy away from terms such as empire, understanding its connotations. But they also argue that it would be naive and dangerous to reject the role that history has thrust upon us. Kagan, for example, willingly embraces the idea that the United States would establish permanent military bases in a post-war Iraq.

"I think that`s highly possible," he says. "We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. That will come at a price, but think of the price of not having it. When we have economic problems, it`s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies."

Costly global commitment

Rumsfeld and Kagan believe that a successful war against Iraq will produce other benefits, such as serving an object lesson for nations such as Iran and Syria. Rumsfeld, as befits his sensitive position, puts it rather gently. If a regime change were to take place in Iraq, other nations pursuing weapons of mass destruction "would get the message that having them . . . is attracting attention that is not favorable and is not helpful," he says.

Kagan is more blunt.

"People worry a lot about how the Arab street is going to react," he notes. "Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since we started blowing things up."

The cost of such a global commitment would be enormous. In 2000, we spent $281 billion on our military, which was more than the next 11 nations combined. By 2003, our expenditures will have risen to $378 billion. In other words, the increase in our defense budget from 1999-2003 will be more than the total amount spent annually by China, our next largest competitor.

The lure of empire is ancient and powerful, and over the millennia it has driven men to commit terrible crimes on its behalf. But with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, a global empire was essentially laid at the feet of the United States. To the chagrin of some, we did not seize it at the time, in large part because the American people have never been comfortable with themselves as a New Rome.

Now, more than a decade later, the events of Sept. 11 have given those advocates of empire a new opportunity to press their case with a new president. So in debating whether to invade Iraq, we are really debating the role that the United States will play in the years and decades to come.

Are peace and security best achieved by seeking strong alliances and international consensus, led by the United States? Or is it necessary to take a more unilateral approach, accepting and enhancing the global dominance that, according to some, history has thrust upon us?

If we do decide to seize empire, we should make that decision knowingly, as a democracy. The price of maintaining an empire is always high. Kagan and others argue that the price of rejecting it would be higher still.

That`s what this is about.

"Rebuilding America`s Defenses," a 2000 report by the Project for the New American Century, listed 27 people as having attended meetings or contributed papers in preparation of the report. Among them are six who have since assumed key defense and foreign policy positions in the Bush administration. And the report seems to have become a blueprint for Bush`s foreign and defense policy.


Paul Wolfowitz
Political science doctorate from University of Chicago and dean of the international relations program at Johns Hopkins University during the 1990s. Served in the Reagan State Department, moved to the Pentagon during the first Bush administration as undersecretary of defense for policy. Sworn in as deputy defense secretary in March 2001.

John Bolton
Yale Law grad who worked in the Reagan administration as an assistant attorney general. Switched to the State Department in the first Bush administration as assistant secretary for international organization affairs. Sworn in as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, May 2001.

Eliot Cohen
Harvard doctorate in government who taught at Harvard and at the Naval War College. Now directs strategic studies at Johns Hopkins and is the author of several books on military strategy. Was on the Defense Department`s policy planning staff in the first Bush administration and is now on Donald Rumsfeld`s Defense Policy Board.

I. Lewis Libby
Law degree from Columbia (Yale undergrad). Held advisory positions in the Reagan State Department. Was a partner in a Washington law firm in the late `80s before becoming deputy undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Bush administration (under Dick Cheney). Now is the vice president`s chief of staff.

Dov Zakheim
Doctorate in economics and politics from Oxford University. Worked on policy issues in the Reagan Defense Department and went into private defense consulting during the 1990s. Was foreign policy adviser to the 2000 Bush campaign. Sworn in as undersecretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Pentagon, May 2001.

Stephen Cambone
Political science doctorate from Claremont Graduate School. Was in charge of strategic defense policy at the Defense Department in the first Bush administration. Now heads the Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation at the Defense Department.

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 12:56 p.m. EDT September 3, 2003

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
Secretary of State Powell has been on the phone today with officials from Britain, France, Germany and Russia. He`s seeking support for a proposed U.N. resolution that would give the United Nations a larger role in postwar Iraq. In New York, meantime, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte is starting two days of talks on the outline of the resolution.
International donors agree on the need for an international trust fund to funnel billions of dollars in reconstruction to Iraq -- independently of the U.S.-led administration in Baghdad. Aid donors met in a closed-door session Wednesday in Belgium.
President Bush has assured the prime minister of the Netherlands that he`ll seek a larger role for the United Nations in Iraq -- to encourage other nations to contribute peacekeeping troops. Bush met with the Dutch leader at the White House today. The Netherlands has more than 1,100 troops in Iraq.
U.S. Marines have handed over control of parts of south-central Iraq to an international force led by Poland. The U.S. civilian administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, was present for the handover ceremony, but made no remarks.
American Marines have delayed the handover of the city of Najaf for at least two weeks, in an attempt to maintain stability after last week`s deadly car bombing at a Shiite shrine.
Kuwait has asked the Arab League to allow Iraq to take part in all the league`s future meetings. The Arab League has refused to recognize Iraq`s U.S.-appointed Governing Council as a legitimate representative of the Iraqi people, and Iraq`s seat on the 22-member council remains empty.
President Bush is beginning his day by meeting a U.S. ally with forces on the ground in Iraq. He`s having breakfast with the Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands. It gives Bush a chance to praise those nations who are sending ground troops
as well as urge other nations to make pledges of money to help rebuild Iraq.
International donors are meeting today to discuss Iraq`s reconstruction needs. But officials say the closed-door session in Belgium is unlikely to produce any firm decisions on how to foot the bill.
The Congressional Budget Office says the U.S. military occupation of Iraq could cost from $8 billion to $29 billion a year. However, according to scenarios analyzed by the nonpartisan budget office, the least expensive option would dramatically reduce the force.
Thomas White, who was forced to resign as Army secretary in May, has fired back in a book that describes the Bush administration`s postwar effort in Iraq as "anemic" and "totally inadequate." The book asserts that the administration underestimated the difficulty of putting that country back on its feet after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Responding to a demand by U.N. staff, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has ordered an independent investigation of security at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad before the Aug. 19 bombing that killed 22 and injured 164.
The top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq vows those responsible for the recent terror bombings will be stopped. Paul Bremer adds that the terrorism won`t derail Iraq`s movement toward democracy. He notes Iraqi ministers now have assumed responsibility for their own departments.
A senior police official says nine of 25 people arrested in the deadly car-bombing that killed a prominent Shiite (SHEE`-eyet) cleric in Najaf, Iraq, have links to al-Qaida. The official says one of the nine was arrested while carrying a message that read, "The pig has been killed" -- an apparent reference to the beloved cleric who died in Friday`s attack.
A member of the U.S.-picked Governing Council is calling on American-led occupation forces to leave Iraq. The demand came in the council member`s eulogy to his brother, the prominent Shiite Muslim cleric who was killed in a car-bombing last week. He also told 400-thousand mourners that he blames the U.S. occupation forces for the lax security that led to the attack at Iraq`s most sacred Shiite mosque.
The U.S. military has reported the deaths of three more American soldiers on Tuesday -- two of them in the bombing of a convoy south of Baghdad. One when a helicopter made a hard landing and rolled over. A military spokesman says the crash was not the result of hostile fire.
Near Tikrit, U.S. military police, working with Iraqi police, raided three farm houses in a search for weapons and opposition suspects. A U.S. commander says the idea behind the raid is to get Iraqi police "up front and get them to handle the raids."

CASUALTIES
A total of 286 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began. Of those, 70 have died in combat since May first, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Keine Aktualisierung

09/02/03 CENTCOM confirms fatatilty
One 1st Armored Division soldier was killed and another was injured in a helicopter accident early Tuesday morning.
09/02/03 News Interactive
An American soldier was killed and another injured today in a helicopter accident near Baghdad, the army said
09/02/03 MANDATORY READING: The Washington Post
Number of Wounded in Action on Rise
09/02/03 Centcom
2 Military Police Brigade soldiers were killed and one was wounded approximately 3:19 p.m. Sept. 1 when their High-Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device along a main supply route south of Baghdad.
09/01/03 SpaceWar
14 US soldiers wounded in Iraq over weekend
08/31/03 CENTCOM
ONE U.S. SOLDIER DROWNED WHEN VEHICLE FELL INTO CANAL NEAR TIKRIT ON AUG. 29TH
08/31/03 CENTCOM
TWO U.S. SOLDIERS DIE OF WOUNDS SUFFERED DURING ACTION NEAR SHKIN, AFGHANISTAN

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September 3, 2003
Powell Begins Push for Increasing U.N. Security Role in Iraq
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune


WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today that the United States was introducing a draft resolution to seek United Nations Security Council support for a multinational force for Iraq, in a step widely viewed as a significant change in United States strategy.

But the draft, being distributed to Security Council members today and tomorrow, would keep such a United Nations force under American command, and the United States would continue to play a "dominant role" in the country, Mr. Powell said.

The White House, under intense pressure to defray the mounting human and financial costs of the Iraq occupation, nevertheless insisted today that it had not reversed course. "I disagree with that characterization," said Scott McClellan, the presidential spokesman.

Mr. Powell portrayed the call for new United Nations authority in Iraq as part of a continuing United States push for more international involvement there. It clearly departed, however, from the administration`s insistence that the "vital role" it saw for the world body there was purely humanitarian.

The draft language was being sent to other Security Council members later in the day and on Thursday. Mr. Powell said, however, that preliminary talks with key members his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and Russia — had produced an initially positive reaction.

Whether countries such as France, Germany and Russia, all of which opposed the war in Iraq, would now be willing to drop their objections remained uncertain, however, and even Mr. Powell acknowledged as much.

Mr. Powell said that the draft would call on the nascent Iraqi governing council to propose a schedule for producing a constitution, establishing necessary institutions and conducting free elections. This would be done in conjunction with the Coalition Provisional Authority that is headed by the United States.

After those elections, the secretary suggested, the country would be controlled by a new Iraqi government "and whatever partners they wish to continue to help them in that process."

Mr. Powell did not in any way hedge the United States insistence on commanding a United Nations-sanctioned force, except to say that as leader of the military coalition, United States commanders would "report on a regular basis to the United Nations."

The United States would "continue to play a dominant role," Mr. Powell said, both because of its control of the civilian administration, under L. Paul Bremer, the chief civilian administrator, and "because of the size of the U.S. force presence that is there."

But, Mr. Powell added, "a dominant role doesn`t mean the only role. There are many roles to be played."

President Bush had agreed on Tuesday after meeting with Mr. Powell to seek Security Council authority for an expanded, but American-led force for Iraq, senior administration officials had said. The move was foreshadowed last week by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

At a White House news briefing, Mr. McClellan repeatedly declined to say what authority, if any, the United States would cede to the United Nations to entice other members to support a new resolution. He did note, more than once, that countries such as India had said they needed United Nations authority before sending troops to Iraq.

The Bush administration has found itself stuck at the junction of converging pressures in Iraq: Spectacular attacks, including the bombings at the United Nations headquarters and at a Shiite mosque in Najaf, have underscored continuing insecurity; United States troops are is stretched thin, and other countries have been hesitant to provide troops without United Nations political cover, particularly after the recent violence.

The draft resolution is intended to ease the way for those countries particularly countries such as India and Turkey to make significant troop contributions.

"It will encourage more countries, or make it easier for some countries who are looking at the prospects now, to make such a contribution," Mr. Powell said.

He welcomed the fact that a Polish division assumed responsibility for much of a south-central region of Iraq, which the United States considers a positive step in the effort to share the Iraq burden.

India, however, has turned down a request to send a division.

While 30 countries, by Mr. Powell`s count, now have troops in Iraq, many have sent only a few hundred, and more meaningful contributions have been slow in coming.

The draft resolution would also expand the United Nations role in other areas, Mr. Powell indicated. These would include generating reconstruction funds and helping create, and implement, an electoral system.

This, he said, "will give greater sense of purpose to the U.N. and give the U.N. more to work with."

Further draft language would encourage member countries to donate more toward Iraqi reconstruction and encourage international financial institutions to do more as well.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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An Unlikely Alliance

Sep 02, 2003: (Stratfor Report)
Summary

Though the recent death of SCIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim would appear to be raising the level of turmoil within Iraq, it might in fact help to push the United States and Iran toward a powerful -- if seemingly unlikely -- alignment.

Analysis

The death of Shiite Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), appears to have exacerbated the turmoil in Iraq. In fact, it opens the door to some dramatic shifts that might help stabilize the U.S. position in Iran. Indeed, it might even lead to a fundamental redrawing of the geopolitical maps of the region -- as dramatic as the U.S.-Chinese alignment against the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

To understand what is happening, we must note two important aspects of the al-Hakim affair. First, though far from being pro-American, al-Hakim was engaged in limited cooperation with the United States, including -- through SCIRI -- participating in the U.S.-sponsored Iraq Governing Council. Second, upon his death, Iran announced a three-day mourning period in his honor. Al-Hakim, who had lived in exile in Iran during much of Saddam Hussein`s rule in Baghdad, was an integral part of the Shiite governing apparatus -- admired and loved in Iran.

We therefore have two facts. First, al-Hakim was engaged in limited but meaningful collaboration with the United States, which appears to be why he was killed. Second, he was intimately connected to Iranian ruling circles, and not just to those circles that Americans like to call "reformers." If we stop and think about it, these two facts would appear incompatible, but in reality they reveal a growing movement toward alignment between the United States and Iran.

The United States has realized that it cannot pacify Iraq on its own. One proposal, floated by the State Department, calls for a United Nations force -- under U.S. command -- to take control of Iraq. This raises three questions. First, why would any sane country put its forces at risk -- under U.S. command, no less -- to solve America`s problems if it doesn`t have to? Second, what would additional outside forces, as unfamiliar with Iraq as U.S. forces are, add to the mix, save more confusion? Finally, what price would the United States have to pay for U.N. cooperation; for instance, would the U.N. presence place restrictions on U.S. operations against al Qaeda?

Another proposal, floated by Defense Advisory Board Chairman Richard Perle, suggests that the way out is to turn Iraq over to Iraqis as quickly as possible rather than prolonging a U.S. occupation. The problem with Perle`s proposal is that it assumes a generic Iraq, unattached to any subgrouping -- religious, ethnic or ideological -- that not only is ready to take the reins, but is capable of governing. In other words, Perle`s proposal would turn Iraq over to whom?

Putting the Kurdish issue aside, the fundamental fault line running through Iraqi society is the division between Sunni and Shiite. The Shiite majority dominates the area south of Baghdad. The Sunni minority, which very much includes Hussein and most of the Baath Party`s national apparatus, spent the past generation brutalizing the Shiites, and Hussein`s group also spent that time making certain that Sunnis who were not part of their tribe were marginalized. Today, Iraq is a fragmented entity where the center of gravity, the Baath Party, has been shattered and there is no substitute for it.

However, embedded in Perle`s proposal is a simple fact. If there is a cohesive group in Iraq -- indeed a majority group -- it is the Shiites. Although ideologically and tribally fragmented, the Shiites of Iraq are far better organized than U.S. intelligence reports estimated before the war. This is due to the creation of a clandestine infrastructure, sponsored by Iranian intelligence, following the failure of U.S.-encouraged Shiite uprisings in the 1990s. While Washington was worried about the disintegration of Iraq and the growth of Iranian power, Tehran was preparing for the day that Hussein`s regime would either collapse or be destroyed by the United States.

As a result, and somewhat to the surprise of U.S. intelligence, organizations were in place in Iraq`s Shiite regions that were able to maintain order and exercise control after the war. British authorities realized this early on and tried to transfer power from British forces in Basra to local control, much to U.S. displeasure.

Initially, Washington viewed the Iranian-sponsored organization of the Shiite regions as a threat to its control of Iraq. The initial U.S. perception was that the Shiites, being bitterly anti-Hussein, would respond enthusiastically to their liberation by U.S. forces. In fact, the response was cautious and sullen. Officials in Washington also assumed that the collapse of the Iraqi army would mean the collapse of Sunni resistance. Under this theory, the United States would have an easy time in the Sunni regions -- it already had excellent relations in the Kurdish regions -- but would face a challenge from Iran in the south.

The game actually played out very differently. The United States did not have an easy time in the Sunni triangle. To the contrary: A clearly planned guerrilla war kicked off weeks after the conquest of Baghdad and has continued since. Had the rising spread to the Sunni regions, or had the Sunnis launched an intifada with massed demonstrations, the U.S. position in Iraq would have become enormously more difficult, if not untenable.

The Sunnis staged some protests to demonstrate their capabilities to the United States, but they did not rise en masse. In general, they have contented themselves with playing a waiting game -- intensifying their organization in the region, carrying out some internal factional struggles, but watching and waiting. Most interesting, rather than simply rejecting the U.S. occupation, they simultaneously called for its end while participating in it.

The key goes back to Iran and to the Sunni-Shiite split within the Islamic world. Iran has a geopolitical problem, one it has had for centuries: It faces a threat from the north, through the Caucasus, and a threat from the west, from whatever entity occupies the Tigris and Euphrates basin. When both threats are active, as they were for much of the Cold War, Iran must have outside support, and that support frequently turns into domination. Iran`s dream is that it might be secure on both fronts. That rarely happens.

The end of the Cold War has created an unstable area in the Caucasus that actually helps secure Iran`s interests. The Caucasus might be in chaos, but there is no great imperial power about to push down into Iran. Moreover, at about the same time, the threat posed by Iraq abated after the United States defeated it and neutralized its armed forces during Desert Storm. This created a period of unprecedented security for Iran that Tehran exploited by working to reconstruct its military and moving forward on nuclear weapons.

However, Iran`s real interest is not simply Iraq`s neutralization; that could easily change. Its real interest is in dominating Iraq. An Iranian-dominated Iraq would mean two things: First, the only threat to Iran would come from the north and Iran could concentrate on blocking that threat; second, it would make Iran the major native regional power in the Persian Gulf. Therefore, were Iranian-sponsored and sympathetic Shiite groups to come to power in Iraq, it would represent a massive geopolitical coup for the United States.

Initially, this was the opposite of anything the United States wanted. One of the reasons for invading Iraq was to be able to control Iran and its nuclear capability. But the guerrilla war in the north has created a new strategic reality for Washington. The issue at the moment is not how to project power throughout the region, but how to simply pacify Iraq. The ambitions of April have given way to the realities of September.

The United States needs a native force in Iraq to carry the brunt of the pacification program. The Shiites, unlike the United Nations, already would deliver a fairly pacified south and probably would enjoy giving some payback to the Sunnis in the north. Certainly, they are both more likely to achieve success and more willing to bear the burden of pacification than is the United States, let alone any U.N. member willing to send troops. It is not, at the moment, a question of what the United States wants; it is a question of what it can have.

The initial idea was that the United States would sponsor a massive rising of disaffected youth in Iran. In fact, U.S. intelligence supported dissident university students in a plan to do just that. However, Iranian security forces crushed the rebellion effortlessly -- and with it any U.S. hopes of forcing regime change in Iran through internal means. If this were to happen, it would not happen in a time frame relative to Washington`s problems in Iraq or problems with al Qaeda. Therefore, the Iranian regime, such as it is, is the regime the United States must deal with. And that regime holds the key to the Iraqi Shiites.

The United States has been negotiating both overtly and covertly with Iran on a range of issues. There has been enough progress to keep southern Iraq quiet, but not enough to reach a definitive breakthrough. The issue has not been Iranian nuclear power. Certainly, the Iranians have been producing a nuclear weapon. They made certain that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency saw weapons-grade uranium during an inspection in recent days. It is an important bargaining chip.

But as with North Korea, Iranian leaders know that nuclear weapons are more valuable as a bargaining chip than as a reality. Asymmetry leads to eradication of nuclear threats. Put less pretentiously, Tehran must assume that the United States -- or Israel -- will destroy any nuclear capability before it becomes a threat. Moreover, if it has nuclear capability, what would it do with it? Even as a deterrent, retaliation would lead to national annihilation. The value of nuclear weapons in this context is less real than apparent -- and therefore more valuable in negotiations than deployment.

Tehran has hinted several times that its nuclear program is negotiable regarding weapons. Officials also have indicated by word and deed to the United States that they are prepared to encourage Iraqi Shiites to cooperate with the U.S. occupation. The issue on the table now is whether the Shiites will raise the level of cooperation from passive to active -- whether they will move from not doing harm to actively helping to suppress the Sunni rising.

This is the line that they are considering crossing -- and the issue is not only whether they cross, but whether the United States wants them to cross. Obviously, the United States needs help. On the other hand, the Iranian price is enormous. Domination of Iraq means enormous power in the Gulf region. In the past, Saudi Arabia`s sensibilities would have mattered; today, the Saudis matter less.

U.S. leaders understand that making such an agreement means problems down the road. On the other hand, the United States has some pretty major problems right now anyway. Moreover -- and this is critical -- the Sunni-Shiite fault line defines the Islamic world. Splitting Islam along those lines, fomenting conflict within that world, certainly would divert attention from the United States: Iran working against al Qaeda would have more than marginal value, but not, however, as much as Saudi Arabia pulling out the stops.

Against the background of the U.S.-Iranian negotiation is the idea that the Saudis, terrified of a triumphant Iran, will panic and begin crushing the extreme Wahhabis in the kingdom. This has delayed a U.S. decision, as has the legitimate fear that a deal with Iran would unleash the genie. But of course, the other fear is that if Iran loses patience, it will call the Shiite masses into the streets and there will be hell to pay in Iraq.

The death of SCIRI leader al-Hakim, therefore, represents a break point. Whether it was Shiite dissidents or Sunnis that killed him, his death costs the Iranians a key ally and drives home the risks they are running with delay. They are vulnerable in Iraq. This opens the door for Tehran to move forward in a deal with the United States. Washington needs to make something happen soon.

This deal might never be formalized. Neither Iranian nor American politics would easily swallow an overt alliance. On the other hand, there is plenty of precedent for U.S.-Iranian cooperation on a covert level. Of course, this would be fairly open and obvious cooperation -- a major mobilization of Shiite strength in Iraq on behalf of the United States -- regardless of the rhetoric.

Currently, this seems to be the most likely evolution of events: Washington gets Tehran`s help in putting down the Sunnis. The United States gets a civil war in the Muslim world. The United States gets Iran to dial back its nuclear program. Iran gets to dominate Iraq. The United States gets all the benefits in the near term. Iran gets its historical dream. If Roosevelt could side with Stalin against Hitler, and Nixon with Mao against Brezhnev, this collaboration certainly is not without precedence in U.S. history. But boy, would it be a campaign issue -- in both countries.

Copyright 2003 Strategic Forecasting Inc.

http://www.stratfor.com/corporate/index.neo?page=center&stor…

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The whistleblower
Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian

A senior government intelligence official who was deeply involved in the production of the dossier on Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction yesterday accused the government of "over-egging" the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and of ignoring concerns about central claims made in the document.

Brian Jones, a top analyst in the defence intelligence staff, described how the "shutters came down", preventing experts on chemical and biological weapons from expressing widespread disquiet about the language and assumptions in the dossier.

He told the Hutton inquiry that he and fellow intelligence officials regarded as "nebulous" the hotly disputed claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes - the assertion at the centre of the row between Downing Street and the BBC.

The claim, he said, came from a single but "secondary" source whose purpose might have been to "influence rather than inform" British intelligence agencies.

Dr Jones, who is now retired, was at the time the dossier was published the head of a scientific section in the defence intelligence analysis staff responsible for chemical and biological weapons.

Pressed by Lord Hutton to explain his worries, he told the inquiry: "My concerns were that Iraq`s chemical weapons and biological weapons capabilities were not being accurately represented in all regards in relation to the available evidence. "In particular ... on the advice of my staff, I was told that there was no evidence that significant production had taken place either of chemical warfare agent or chemical weapons."

Some intelligence analysts complained that they were unhappy with "all the detail that was in the dossier", he said.

Dr Jones went as far as to suggest that Iraq possessed few, if any, weapons of mass destruction in the proper meaning of the term. He said he would struggle to place chemical weapons, and many biological weapons, in the category of "weapons of mass destruction", he added.

He described how his top chemical warfare expert had expressed concern about the tendency "to over-egg certain assessments in relation particularly to the production of CW [chemical warfare] agents and weapons since 1998". He "could not point to any solid evidence of such production".

Dr Jones chaired a meeting of senior defence intelligence officials on September 19, five days before the dossier was published. David Kelly, the government`s expert on Iraq`s banned weapons programme whose suicide led to the Hutton inquiry, was present.

The officials, including Dr Kelly, raised a number of specific concerns about the dossier. None was accepted by Whitehall`s joint intelligence committee.

One of those present at the meeting, invited there by Dr Kelly, gave evidence yesterday. A government adviser on Iraq`s weapons programme, known only as Mr A, he testified by audio link from the Ministry of Defence.

Though he said "as a whole" he and Dr Kelly had thought the dossier was a reasonable and accurate reflection of available intelligence, there were serious problems with it, including the 45 minute claim. "What does the 45 minutes refer to?" he said "Are you referring to a technical process? Are you referring to a commander control process?"

Prompted by an article in the Guardian, Mr A emailed Dr Kelly about their mutual scepticism over an Iraqi factory at al-Qa` Qa` producing phosgene - used for explosives but also a component suitable for chemical weapons - highlighted in the government`s dossier.

"You will recall [name blanked out] admitted they were grasping at straws," Mr A told Dr Kelly. It was another example, he said, "supporting our view that you and I should have been more involved in this than the spin merchants of this administration".

Mr A told Lord Hutton: "The perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to try to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives."

Asked about the references to "spin merchants" Dr Jones told the inquiry: "I think there was an impression that there was an influence from outside the intelligence community", taken to mean Downing Street.

Yesterday`s evidence goes to the heart of the claims by the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, who alleged Downing Street "sexed up" the dossier against the wishes of the intelligence agencies, though he originally said the government also knew the 45 minute claim to be wrong.

Dr Jones`s evidence raises questions about evidence given by the prime minister and the JIC chairman, John Scarlett.

The analyst told the inquiry he believed the full committee had not met to discuss the final version of the dossier - a suspicion confirmed to the Guardian last night by Whitehall sources.

Tony Blair said of the dossier in evidence: "We could hand on heart say: this is the assessment of the joint intelligence committee."

Dr Jones said yesterday: "The impression I had was ... the shutters were coming down on this particular paper, that the discussion and the argument had been concluded. And it was the impression that I had, at that time, that our reservations about the dossier were not going to be reflected in the final version."


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Sceptic cited Guardian story
Kelly colleague tells hearing that article backed his view that dossier assertion was `stupid`

Vikram Dodd
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian

A Guardian article triggered a British weapons expert to email David Kelly to mock a claim about the danger Iraq posed in the government`s September 2002 dossier, the Hutton inquiry heard yesterday.

A chemical weapons specialist, known only as "Mr A", rubbished as "a stupid mistake" the dossier`s assertion that a plant at al-Qa`qa` in Iraq could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Mr A is a former United Nations weapons inspector and is part of the current Iraqi survey group, hunting for evidence Iraq had WMD. He told Lord Hutton that he had raised concerns over a draft of the dossier at a September 19 meeting held by members of the defence intelligence staff. Mr A said David Kelly had taken him there.

The dossier when published on September 24 said that "parts of al-Qa`qa` chemical complex damaged in the [first] Gulf war have also been repaired and are operational. Of particular concern are elements of the phosgene production plant at al-Qa`qa` ... While phosgene does have industrial uses it can also be used by itself as a chemical agent or as a precursor for nerve agent."

Mr A told the inquiry why he thought the British government claim was nonsense: "My concerns were that it really was a non-issue, and it was wrong for the government to make such a fuss about the phosgene production plant at al-Qa`qa`. I had visited there as part of a UN inspection team ... It is true that phosgene was used as a toxication [sic] during the first world war, but some 6m tonnes or so, I believe, are manufactured worldwide every year, and this was a small, expensive way of producing phosgene dedicated to a particular process, a legitimate process within the al-Qa`qa` plant. Therefore to state it was of particular concern against a background in which the Iraqi armed forces had never weaponised phosgene nor shown any intention of doing so was, for me, the wrong emphasis. My quarrel was with the phrase `of particular concern`."

Mr A`s concern went unheeded by those producing the dossier. Then on September 25 the Guardian reported from al-Qa`qa`. Iraq invited journalists, including the Guardian`s reporter Ewen MacAskill, to the site within hours of the claim being published. The plant manager, Sinan Rasim Said, told the Guardian that the dossier`s allegations were easily refutable and concluded: "It is a pretty stupid mistake for the British to make."

That day Mr A decided to email Dr Kelly after reading the Guardian report. He wrote: "So all in all - having read page 2 of the Guardian - I`m with the manager of al-Qa`qa`: `it is a pretty stupid mistake for the British to make.`" Mr A said that he had predicted at the September 19 meeting that Iraq would take journalists into the plant to demonstrate the falsity of the British government`s claim: "As I sadly predicted, the Iraqis had immediately invited journalists to go to the al-Qa`qa` plant and see for themselves no proscribed activities were taking place." Mr A now works for the Ministry of Defence`s counter-proliferation arms control department, and testified to the inquiry by audio link.

Also in that email, Mr A blamed the "spin merchants of this administration" for the blunder. He said DIS staff perceived there had been interference from outside the intelligence community in the dossier. Mr A said the dossier`s language was being hardened for political ends: "The perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to try to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives." The email ended by saying about the row over al-Qa`qa`: "Let`s hope it turns into tomorrow`s chip wrappers."

Asked by senior inquiry counsel James Dingemans QC to explain this, Mr A said: "Well, news is often unimportant two or three days after it has been published and that was the sentiment I was seeking to express, that really we could move past this little difficulty of a dossier which had one or two errors in it."

In the email Mr A said one person at the September 19 meeting admitted they were "grasping at straws" in the days before the dossier was produced. Mr A also revealed that Dr Kelly had suggested the majority of changes to the dossier put forward by DIS staff after their meeting. He said when he saw the dossier his view was: "There were errors of detail and there were errors of emphasis."

Mr A says he suggested making four changes while Dr Kelly recommended 12 alterations, mostly for reasons of "language". Mr A said all the 10 people at the meeting were worried by the 45-minute claim. Asked by Lord Hutton what Dr Kelly`s view of the claim was, Mr A said: "All those of us without access to that intelligence immediately asked the question: well, what does the 45 minutes refer to? Are you referring to a technical process? Are you referring to a commander control process? And if your assessment causes you to immediately ask questions, then we felt that it was not perhaps a statement that ought to be included."

Mr A said he and Dr Kelly were generally supportive of the dossier: "Both of us believed that if you took the dossier as a whole it was a reasonable and accurate reflection of the intelligence that we had available to us at that time."

Mr A told that both men had been training together at an RAF base on July 7 in preparation to fly out to be part of the Iraq survey group scouring the desert country for WMD. "He seemed his normal self, chatty, friendly, gregarious," Mr A said. That day Dr Kelly was pulled out of training for a second interview by MoD bosses.

Mr A ended his evidence by telling Lord Hutton how after Dr Kelly`s death, weapons inspectors stopped their work and gathered in the Iraqi capital to pay tribute: "Some 30 former colleagues of David actually gathered, which in a sense was fairly impressive, to remember the man and his achievements. And we felt that his loss is actually a sorry loss for the Iraq survey group and we miss his expertise and his friendship greatly."


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UK must pay billions of pounds more
Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair has agreed in principle to a significant increase in British spending on Iraq as the costs of occupation and reconstruction spiral out of control.

The US envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, last week increased estimates for Iraq spending, saying that several tens of billions of dollars more will be required to get the country functioning again.

The rethink has been forced on the US and Britain because Iraqi oil production, intended to pay for reconstruction, has been sabotaged.

Mr Blair, in meetings with officials this week, pledged to respond to Mr Bremer`s plea. He promised that Britain`s payments will be proportionate to the US, which could mean billions of pounds.

It is not known yet if the Treasury has budgeted for the extra costs. The chancellor, Gordon Brown, apparently gave Mr Blair a free hand over the cost of the war and left aside a "war chest". That now looks as if it will be far from sufficient to cover post-war costs.

There is an acceptance that US-British policy is not working and that substantial mistakes have been made.

Also being planned is using British soldiers in different roles, including providing protection for aid workers.

No British estimates of the cost of keeping British soldiers in Iraq exist but one unofficial assessment puts the absolute minimum at £3.6bn over the next two years. Mr Blair`s pledge will mean a substantial revision upwards of that figure.

In a separate development, the Ministry of Defence is to pay compensation of several hundred pounds each to 11 Iraqis allegedly beaten by British soldiers during a raid. The MoD said the amounts would be in the region of a few hundred pounds each.

The raid, in the southern town of al Majar al-Kabir, was to track down the killers of six Royal Military police officers.


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Blair`s bridge
A strategic choice to stay close to the United States led us to Iraq. Was it worth it?

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian

A year ago today, the Guardian reported that Tony Blair "yesterday prepared Britain for a war to remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming `Iraq poses a real and unique threat to the security of the region and the rest of the world` ... the prime minister also said he would publish a dossier in the next few weeks to spell out to the British people the scale of the threat posed by Iraq."

A year in history is a short time. History`s jury will still be sitting long after Blair has followed Alastair Campbell out through that famous black front door of No 10. Yet these days we know more and more, sooner and sooner, about what really happened behind the black doors of power.

Helped by the amazing public rifling of the Downing Street files at the Hutton inquiry; by a fine harvest of "first draft of history" books by journalists; and by what we hear every day from Baghdad, we don`t need to wait for Lord Hutton`s report to pass our interim judgment on Blair`s year of Iraq.

The year of Iraq followed the year of 9/11, and the wholly justified response to it in Afghanistan. Blair exploded into the new political season with Saddam in his sights for two main reasons. First, he thought the combination of weapons of mass destruction, rogue states and terrorism constitute one of the great new security threats of our time. On this, he`s right. Anyone who disputes it is either foolish or dishonest.

Saddam`s Iraq would not have been top of any objective shortlist of danger points: North Korea was (and is) more advanced in developing nuclear weapons; our traditional ally Saudi Arabia had a lot more to do with al-Qaida than Iraq did. But no other serving leader had used chemical weapons against his neighbours and his own people, and no one else had violated so many UN disarmament resolutions. Second, Saddam ran a brutal dictatorship - and Blair has strong Gladstonian instincts for humanitarian intervention.

For all that, if you ask "would Britain, of its own initiative, have brought Iraq to the top of the international agenda?" the answer is "no". America did that. And if you ask "had it been anyone but America, would we have joined so vigorously?" the answer is, again, "no". So the second, deciding reason for Blair`s up-front advocacy on Iraq was his conscious strategic choice to remain close to the United States, wherever it chose to take the "war against terrorism". In Blair`s view, this was not an alternative to Britain`s ties with Europe but the precondition for Britain being a "bridge" between Europe and the US. That strategy had developed during the Clinton years; it informed his unexpected embrace of George Bush in 2001; it was greatly reinforced by the 9/11 attacks; now it would face its hardest test.

Numerous conversations with the people involved on both sides of the Atlantic have convinced me that this was the premise from which all else flowed. We saw at the time that British and American initiatives were intimately coordinated. Now we know exactly how: Blair`s summer telephone call to Bush when, as he told the Hutton inquiry, they agreed to get on "with confronting the problem of Saddam Hussein"; Alastair Campbell`s internal email of a year ago tomorrow, now downloadable from the Hutton inquiry website - "Re dossier, substantial rewrite, with JS [John Scarlett] and Julian M in charge, which JS will take to US next Friday, and be in shape Monday thereafter." In shape, that is, after the weekend in America.

This very traditional British choice meant, however, that you hitched yourself to someone else`s chariot. You could not determine its course, only - sometimes, perhaps - adjust the direction a little by whispering in the chariot-driver`s ear. But George Bush "did" Iraq for very mixed reasons of his own, and with many others closer to his ear.

Most Guardian readers will probably regard Blair`s conscious strategic choice as fundamentally wrong. I don`t. There are long-term benefits for Britain in staying close to the US; and there are long-term benefits for Europe and the world in having this English-speaking liberal internationalist, now immensely popular in the US ("Blair for president"), make the case for Atlanticist multilateralism in a Washington which is much, much more than just a cabal of unilateralist neo-cons. Europe can never build a liberal international order against the US. So it`s a defensible strategic choice.

Yet the cost has been so huge that it risks undermining the very purpose it was intended to serve. Some of this cost cannot be laid directly at Blair`s door. Suppose the Americans in Iraq had found both significant weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein. Suppose that Rumsfeld had listened to his generals on the troop levels needed for the occupation, and the state department had been allowed to run the protectorate in the more sensitive way that it was actively preparing. Big "ifs", I agree. But on the evidence apparently available to him a year ago, Blair could not expect that no significant weapons of mass destruction would be found five months after the toppling of Saddam. Nor could he anticipate that the United States would make such an unholy mess of the postwar occupation, thus turning Iraq, once again, into "a real and unique threat to the security of the region and the rest of the world".

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can see that the prime minister contributed two major tactical mistakes. First, there was his overeagerness to get out and make the case on weapons of mass destruction, using intelligence sources as his political trump card. This has obviously mis fired, even in relations with Washington - since the Bush administration has been hammered for a dubious claim in the state of the union address which came from British intelligence. Less would have been more. Second, there was his failure either to bring along Germany or France in his transatlantic strategy or to convince the Bush administration that they must be brought along. Future historians may compare the amount of time the prime minister and his closest advisers spent on that task last autumn, compared to the time they spent on the intelligence dossier and intricate lobbying in Washington. My guess would be a proportion of 20:80.

The result is that Blair has ended up with terrific ties to America and frayed ones to Europe. This from the prime minister who came to power deter mined, above all, to lead Britain to its proper place in Europe. Moreover, because he is so much weakened at home by the year of Iraq, it`s now very hard to imagine that, before the next election, he can do the one thing that would cement our ties with Europe - take us into the euro. But what use is a bridge attached only to one bank?

One possible conclusion from all this is that the Blair strategy is just wrong: Britain must choose between Europe and America. The other is that the basic strategy is right, but much more difficult to realise than he had hoped. Those of us who believe this now have to show why - and how it may still be done.

· Timothy Garton Ash will be away for the next four months, writing a book. His column will resume in January.

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Intelligence chief: Dossier exaggerated the case for war
Iraqi weapons capability `was not accurately represented`; concerns over both content and source of key 45-minute claim
By Kim Sengupta, Paul Waugh and Ben Russell
04 September 2003


Tony Blair`s case for invading Iraq was in tatters last night after damning public criticism by two senior intelligence officials of the way the September weapons dossier was manipulated by government "spin merchants".

Brian Jones, who headed the intelligence department dedicated to investigating Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction programme, told the Hutton inquiry there was deep disquiet among his colleagues about the way significant evidence they had supplied for the dossier was altered. He said evidence in the dossier was "over-egged", the language was too strong and there were misgivings over the now-infamous claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.

The other official, identified to the Hutton inquiry as "Mr A" and described as the country`s foremost authority on chemical warfare, disclosed how a claim in the dossier about chemical weapons was inserted despite protests from him and other experts. He wrote in an e-mail to David Kelly, whose apparent suicide is being examined at the inquiry, that the dossier would become "tomorrow`s chip wrappers``. Mr A told the inquiry: "The perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to find a form of words that would strengthen certain political objectives.``

The inquiry was told that the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which compiled the dossier, did not even meet to discuss the final draft of the document before John Scarlett, the committee`s chairman, signed it off. Such was the level of unhappiness about alleged political interference that Dr Jones wrote a memo to his superiors in the Defence Intelligence Staff listing his concerns a few days before the dossier was published on 24 September.

Dr Jones, who recently retired, told the inquiry: "The impression I had was that on 19 September the shutters were coming down on this particular paper. The discussion and argument had been concluded. It was an impression I had at the time that our reservations about the dossier were not being reflected in the final version."

Some of his staff were "concerned and unhappy`` about "all aspects" of the dossier, Dr Jones said. The chief chemical authority on the team - not Mr A - had particularly strong reservations. "They were really about the tendency in certain areas, from his point of view, to, shall we say, over-egg certain assessments, particularly in relation to the production of chemical weapons," he said.Describing himself as "probably the most senior and experienced intelligence official working on WMD" - a claim not challenged by the Ministry of Defence - he stressed the disquiet felt about the way information supplied by his department had been used for the sake of political expediency.

Dr Jones`s use of the phrase "over-egg" was yet another addition to the ever-growing lexicon of the inquiry, prompting comparisons with the expression that has dominated proceedings so far: "sexed-up".

Yesterday`s criticism from the intelligence community reinforced the impression that the Hutton inquiry has turned into quicksand for Downing Street. It also backed the BBC`s original story about disquiet in the intelligence community about the dossier.

Dr Jones maintained that important claims made in the document, and repeated by Mr Blair and his ministers, were fundamentally flawed.

He pointed out the weaknesses in the claim that Saddam Hussein could launch chemical and biological attacks within 45 minutes. He said that while the JIC insisted that the 45-minutes claim came from a reliable agent, he had only obtained the information from a second-hand source in Iraq. He said the source did not appear to "know very much about it" and may have been "trying to influence and not inform" the British officials.

Reservations and proposed amendments were discussed at a meeting in the department on 19 September, which Dr Kelly had attended along with Mr A.

Giving evidence by audiolink, Mr A, who is attached to the counter-proliferation and arms control department at the MoD, said there had been unhappiness at the meeting that the Government had claimed in a draft of the dossier that there was great concern that Iraq was manufacturing phosgene for chemical weapons at a compound. The allegation was false and he advised that it should be changed. But his recommendation was ignored and he said that he was not surprised when Iraqi authorities took journalists to visit the compound after the dossier`s publication.

That day, Mr A sent an e-mail to Dr Kelly saying he agreed with the plant manager, who was reported as saying it was "a pretty stupid mistake by the British". He added: "They [the Government] were grasping at straws ... Another example ... that you and I should have been more involved in this than the spin merchants ... Let`s hope it turns into tomorrow`s chip wrappers."
4 September 2003 09:16



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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September 4, 2003
U.S. Drafts Plan for U.N. to Back a Force for Iraq
By FELICITY BARRINGER with DAVID E. SANGER


NITED NATIONS, Sept. 3 — The Bush administration, seeking new avenues to induce skeptical countries to contribute troops and money in Iraq, circulated a draft Security Council resolution today that would create a multinational force led by the United States and authorized by the United Nations.

The proposed draft would also invite the Iraqi Governing Council to develop a timetable for drafting a constitution and holding elections, ideally leading to the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and the withdrawal of all American and other foreign forces.

Even as the draft was circulated, both the White House and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell stressed that the United States Central Command would maintain full military authority. Mr. Powell and President Bush`s spokesman, Scott McClellan, said they expected that Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the senior American administrator for Iraq, would continue to play the "dominant role" in the country`s reconstruction.

But several Security Council members, like France and Russia, have said repeatedly that they would not support a measure that allowed the United States to maintain full military and political control.

Administration officials have also said over the last few days that they expected to ask Congress for an additional spending request of between $60 billion and $80 billion in the next fiscal year to pay for the reconstruction and some of the military occupation of Iraq.

The White House denied today that Mr. Bush had shifted strategies by seeking a new resolution and greater contributions to the military force, though other Republican leaders described the action as a significant shift. Mr. McClellan said it represented merely an expansion of the role Mr. Bush has always envisioned for the United Nations, though it comes at a time of increased domestic pressure to spread the burden of controlling a country where terrorism and lawlessness seem to be increasing.

Democratic presidential candidates were quick to seize on the new tactics as validation of their criticisms of the war or its aftermath and even Mr. Bush`s Republican allies agreed that a change was welcome. "It`s a sound move, what I`d call a mid-course correction," said Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee.

"These casualties are beginning to unnerve Americans, and it concerns me," he added. "As I traveled through my state last month, people in very respectful tones came up to me and said, `John, we have to do something.` "

The working language was circulated just three weeks before the opening of the General Assembly, when Mr. Bush is scheduled to address the United Nations. The administration apparently accelerated its timetable to try to win Security Council consensus on the resolution before the president`s arrival.

Few diplomats here were willing to comment in anything but general terms on the specifics of the draft. Some were guardedly optimistic. "We feel it is a good basis of discussion," one said, but others wondered whether — in the give-and-take of diplomacy — Washington was not doing more taking than giving.

"We are concerned," one European diplomat said.

A diplomat at the Indian mission, briefed on the broad outlines of the proposal, said, "We`ll need to look at it, but the impression I get is that they have been carefully listening to the debate that has been taking place here."

Washington had asked India to provide 15,000 to 18,000 troops but Indian officials — like those from Pakistan and Turkey — declined to do so unless the mission was approved by the United Nations.

The draft resolution significantly raises the profile and authority of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, which was created under the aegis of Mr. Bremer. The draft endorses the group as "the principal body of the Iraqi interim administration," according to a text given to several Security Council missions. Last month, the Security Council declined to issue a similar endorsement, choosing instead to "welcome" the Governing Council.

At the United Nations, the United States envoy, John D. Negroponte, briefed Secretary General Kofi Annan today on the draft resolution, officials here said. Two weeks ago, Mr. Annan had suggested that creating a United Nations force under United States command — effectively incorporating many of the troops already in Iraq — might bridge the gap between the occupying forces and the European and Arab nations that had opposed the war and remain wary of endorsing its results.

The proposed timetable for a new constitutional and electoral process seems to answer a widespread call, here and in foreign capitals, for a clear timeline that would end with Iraq in Iraqi control.

It is less clear if the Iraqi Governing Council, which one diplomat here said was "handpicked" by the American authority would be widely acceptable to the Security Council members as the midwife of a new, independent government.

Council diplomats and United Nations officials were asking today whether Arab nations in particular would accept the proposed draft.

Democratic leaders and candidates for president seized on today`s announcement as evidence that Mr. Bush was belatedly changing strategy and seeking help from Security Council members he had until now held at arm`s length. "It`s been a long time in coming," said Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader in the Senate.



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Deshalb ist es verständlich, dass Bush versucht alle freien hohen Richterstellen gegen den starken Widerstand der Dems mit Hardlinern zu besetzen.
Auch ein Grund das er nicht wiedergewählt werden darf. Bis jetzt waren die Bundesgerichte die einzigen Institutionen, die sich der Entdemokratisierung der USA entgegengesetzt haben.

September 4, 2003
U.S. Court Blocks Plan to Ease Rule on Media Owners
By STEPHEN LABATON


WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — A federal appeals court issued a surprise order today blocking the Federal Communications Commission from imposing new rules that would make it easier for the nation`s largest media conglomerates to add new markets and areas of business.

The decision came a day before the new rules, considered among the most significant efforts at deregulation adopted during the Bush administration, were scheduled to take effect. It followed two hours of oral arguments at an emergency hearing this morning by a three-judge panel in Philadelphia and was a sharp setback for the largest media companies and for the commission`s chairman, Michael K. Powell.

Mr. Powell, the architect of the new rules, has emphasized that the commission was compelled to rewrite the old regulations because of a string of federal court decisions in cases brought in Washington by the media companies. Those decisions ordered the agency to reconsider some of the rules.

But today the appeals court voted unamimously to prevent media companies from moving forward with plans to take advantage of the new rules. The court also raised tough questions for the commission and its industry supporters about their efforts to reshape the regulatory landscape. The new regulations are already facing a challenge in Congress, where legislators have taken steps to repeal some of them.

The new rules have been opposed by a broad coalition of groups, ranging from Consumers Union and the National Organization for Women to the National Rifle Association and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Both the House and the Senate have begun the process to repeal at least one of the new rules, the one that makes it possible for the largest television networks to buy enough stations to reach 45 percent of the nation`s viewers, up from 35 percent.

The court`s order, however, blocks all of the new rules from taking effect, at least until the outcome of the litigation, which could be many months away. The order also raises questions about whether the rules will ever be allowed to take effect.

The rules that were blocked by the court include one that would permit the same company to own newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city and another that would allow a company to own as many as three television stations and eight radio stations in the same market.

In the meantime, the commission must use the older more restrictive rules, even though a different federal appeals court, in Washington, ordered the commission to reconsider those earlier rules after a challenge from the television networks.

Officials at the commission said they were surprised by the order.

"While we are disappointed by the decision by the court to stay the new rules, we will continue to vigorously defend them and look forward to a decision by the court on the merits," said David Fiske, the agency`s top spokesman.

The order also came as a surprise to the critics of the new rules, including the plaintiffs in the case, who said before this morning`s hearing that their motion to stay the rules was a long shot. They said courts typically do not issue such injunctions without a finding that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the overall merits of a case.

The chief lawyer for the critics who brought the case said after the order that he hoped Congress would act before the court reached a decision on the merits of the rules.

"This action gives us the opportunity to convince Congress and, if necessary, the courts, that the F.C.C.`s decision is bad for democracy, and bad for broadcast localism," said the lawyer, Andrew Jay Schwartzman, who persuaded the court to issue the order. "Perhaps it will embolden Congress to overturn the new rules in their entirety. That would save everyone a lot of time and effort fighting it out in the court to obtain the same result."

The court today hedged on the overall merits of the case but strongly suggested through its actions that the critics had a good chance of succeeding.

"I think this is great news," said Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, who is helping to lead an effort to repeal the rules in Congress. "It stops the process dead in its tracks for now. I think the court must have understood what we know: the F.C.C. embarked on these dramatic rule changes without the benefit of national hearings and thoughtful analysis."

In a three-page order, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit initially said that it was legally obliged to consider the likelihood of success by the plaintiffs, a group of small radio stations, journalist organizations and the National Council of Churches. The group filed its lawsuit against the F.C.C. and four television networks joined the case in support of the new rules.

The judges refused to handicap the outcome of the case, but reasoned that preserving the old rules, at least for the time being, would give the judges time to consider the arguments before the industry landscape had been changed. "While it is difficult to predict the likelihood of success on the merits at this stage of the proceedings, these harms could outweigh the effect of a stay on respondent and relevant third parties," said the panel, which consisted of Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and Judges Thomas L. Ambro and Julio M. Fuentes, who were appointed by President Bill Clinton.

"Given the magnitude of this matter and the public`s interest in reaching the proper resolution, a stay is warranted pending thorough and efficient judicial review," the court concluded in the case, Prometheus Radio Project v. Federal Communications Commission.

The groups that brought the case argued that they were likely to prevail in the end because Congress would probably overturn some of the new rules, and because the rules themselves are "arbitrary and capricious."

For Mr. Powell, the decision could hardly come at a worse time. On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to approve legislation that Congressional officials said today would include provisions to roll back some of the new rules already stayed by the court. The Senate Commerce Committee has adopted a similar measure.

And six weeks ago the House, by a vote of 400 to 21, approved a spending measure that would block one of the more important new rules that would permit the nation`s largest television networks to own more stations. The White House has threatened to veto that measure, prompting the prospect of a highly unusual showdown between the president and the Republican-controlled Congress.

The new rules were adopted in June by a bitterly divided commission on a party-line vote. The Republican-controlled agency relaxed many of the most significant restrictions on the ability of broadcast and newspaper conglomerates to both expand into new markets and to extend their reach in the cities where they already have a presence.

The rules would have made it easier for the nation`s largest television networks to buy enough stations to reach up to 45 percent of the nation`s viewers. Two networks, Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, and CBS, a unit of Viacom, are already above the old 35 percent limit.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Im Spiegel gibst den Artikel nur gegen Geld.

September 1, 2003
The Scourges of God
By DER SPIEGEL


By DIETER BEDNARZ, ERICH FOLLATH CLAUS CHRISTIAN MALZAHN, VOLKHARD WINDFUHR and BERNHARD ZAND

The Muslim cleric Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim has been the most prominent victim to date of the bloody power struggle among religious leaders in the holy city of Najaf. As Iraq descends into chaos, young extremists are attempting to transform the country into a Shiite theocracy modeled after Iran.

If it weren`t for the shining, centuries-old dome on the mosque marking the grave of the Imam Ali, the faithful would have perceived the destruction visited upon the holy city of Najaf by dictator Saddam Hussein as a deep disgrace. It seemed as if the brilliance of the mosque`s golden roof could offset all the suffering inflicted upon Iraq`s Shiite population by its former president. Saddam brutally oppressed the Shiite clergy and turned their holy city into a miserable place. Najaf`s religious district was left marred by the ruins of destroyed caravans and the gaping pits of construction projects left unfinished for years.

But the goal of all pilgrims to Najaf, the mosque of the revered Imam Ali rising high above this city on the Euphrates, is a symbol of both Najaf`s glorious history and its bloody past. It was 1342 years ago that Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and founder of the Shiite branch of Islam, was stabbed to death while praying in nearby Kufa and was then buried on the site where the mosque stands today.

His martyrdom has hovered over Najaf like a curse ever since. Dozens of Shiite clerics have been murdered here. In fact, entire dynasties of religious men have been extinguished - both by religious adversaries and malevolent tyrants.

The bloodiest massacre by far occurred just after prayers last Friday, as thousands of worshippers flooded onto the square in front of the mosque and the silence was suddenly broken by a powerful explosion. A car bomb killed up to a hundred people, including 64-year-old Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of Iraq`s three most important Shiite leaders.

The country that the Americans and British believe to have liberated from terror by deposing its tyrant is drifting more and more deeply into chaos. Iraq after Saddam has become a powder keg in which nothing and no one seems to be sacred anymore; not the UN, not the embassies of friendly Arab states, and not the clerics. At the same time, the attacks on American soldiers are continuing unabated. 144 GIs have lost their lives since the official end of the war, more than died during the war itself.

Ever since Saddam Hussein and his cronies were removed from power four months ago, the rule of anarchy has prevailed in large parts of the country. Under the protectorate of superpower USA, the capital, Baghdad, feels like a city under siege. Power and water are in short supply, while looters and criminals terrorize the city`s people. US civil administrator Paul Bremer says he is proud of the fact that "no one is getting his tongue cut out any more." Superpower America has lowered its profile on the banks of the Tigris, doing its best to minimize its own losses. No one in Washington ever thought about protecting Shiite clerics.

Ayatollah Hakim also felt reasonably safe among his own people, even though he was aware of the dangers he faced. Hakim, the leader of the "Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq" (Sciri), had spent the past few months living in seclusion at his headquarters a few minutes from the center of Najaf, barricaded behind walls and thick steel doors, and protected by a small army of bodyguards. Anyone given an audience with the Ayatollah was required to undergo extensive security checks. Hakim had many enemies. But, as Hakim said after the ouster of Saddam, his principal opponents were the occupiers, whom he wanted to drive out of Iraq as quickly as possible.

In an interview with Der Spiegel in early June, Hakim said that "the history of the Iraqi people is a history of our struggle against invaders. We may not shy away from whatever is required to bring about an end to the presence of occupying forces in Iraq as quickly as possible."

At least the combative mullah got to experience the Americans` withdrawal from Najaf. The Americans, advancing toward Baghdad, had originally set up their base at a point 20 kilometers outside the city.

They called it "Bushmaster" and protected it with sandbag walls and barbed wire. The soldiers lived there for two months, but in late May they withdrew, taking their tanks, field kitchens and tents with them. Their withdrawal was not as much in response to the terrorism that has plagued the Sunni belt surrounding Baghdad. Instead, the US army`s principal motivation for reducing its presence in the holy city of Najaf was to avoid openly provoking the Shiite faithful. Only the barbed wire in front of "Bushmaster" has remained.

"We don`t need the Americans. We can bring about order ourselves," said construction foreman Ali early last week as he drove a team of construction workers across the grounds. Ali and his men are rebuilding an industrial building. It is intended to serve as the regional headquarters for the recently established "oil police," which guards Iraq`s pipelines and refineries.

"We obey our imams. If they lead us into jihad, we will heed the call," says Ali. He is a follower of Muktada al-Sadr, a young theocrat from a prominent family who is making a name for himself in Najaf with his radical sermons. But his followers also believe that he could be responsible for ordering assassinations like the one that has now claimed the life of Hakim. Muktada`s men are feared because of their fanaticism.

"Muktada is our leader," says the 30-year-old Ali, holding up his shovel like a rifle. His military gesture seems ridiculous on this construction site in the middle of a salt desert. But in the downtown area of the nearby city, people have been taking the martial appearance of Sadr`s fanatics seriously for some time. It is precisely because of his radical politics that Sadr is gaining more and more followers. In Baghdad in August, 30,000 of the young cleric`s sympathizers demonstrated against the Americans because they had removed religious posters from a tower. Sadr refuses to recognize the governing council installed by Bremer and agitates against the 25-member body at every opportunity.

Most Iraqi Shiites will not be satisfied with control over their holy cities alone. The bomb attack on Hakim only scratches the surface of the bitter factional dispute within the Shiite clergy for dominance over Iraq. It certainly cannot be ruled out that the "army of the Madhi" created by Sadr in July is already poised to become the most powerful party in this conflict.

Most of his followers are people of modest means. Young men from Kerbela, Basra and Baghdad are now converging on Najaf to join the holy militia, the formation of which Sadr announced to his cheering followers during Friday prayers.

The force is intended to protect the city`s holy sites, claims Sadr. In truth, however, it represents the germ of his vision of establishing an Iranian-style religious dictatorship in Iraq. Not all of the 3,000 Shiite clerics living in Najaf agree with this objective, and it remains a matter of great dispute among them as to whether they should collaborate with or fight against the Americans. And it is a dispute that is increasingly being played out with bombs.

Sadr`s fighters` most prominent targets are the hated American occupiers. However, they also oppose those of their fellow Shiites whom they consider "too moderate." Moreover, the young fanatic Sadr must have been particularly irked by the obvious success with which his adversary Hakim was able to mobilize the faithful so soon after his return from exile in Iran.

On May 18th, more than 10,000 people in Baghdad celebrated the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, in what was then the biggest post-war demonstration in Iraq. Their posters and banners read "American occupiers, leave our country immediately!" or, simply, "USA, no, no, no!" Some posters showed another face next to Hakim`s - that of Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was the manifestation of a theocracy, done deliberately to impress the cameras. But Hakim knew that the future struggle for power in Iraq will not take place on the streets of Baghdad, but in the Shiite Vatican - in and around the shrine of Najaf. In the spring, however, Najaf was precisely where things were not progressing as the Iranian clerics had hoped.

Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim`s most devoted followers were in rural southern Iraq. Although he was also celebrated in Najaf, his reception there was not quite as overwhelming. Many did not support the Ayatollah, who had not been living in Iraq for more than twenty years and was at least considered to be "under Iranian influence."

Iraqi`s feelings about their neighboring country are divided. There have always been historical differences between Arabs and Persians. The heavy casualties inflicted by the eight-year war, which was begun by Saddam but prolonged by Khomeini, have not been forgotten. And during the 1991 Shiite uprising against Saddam, Iran failed to come to the aid of its fellow Shiites (just like the Americans, who had helped initiate the revolt). "Many Shiites in Iraq are Iraqis first and Shiites second," says Baghdad political scientist Wamid Nadhmi, who was imprisoned several times for voicing his independent opinion of Saddam.

Religious adversaries have always spied on each other in the holy city of Najaf. New arrivals have never fared particularly well. A clear case in point was that of Shiite leader Abd al-Majid al-Khoei - a drama involving millions of dollars, CIA intrigues, and clerical murder.

According to a report in Newsweek, the CIA had secretly flown the cleric, who was a member of a renowned family of scholars and fled Najaf in 1991, into Iraq from exile in Great Britain, via Bahrain, and "outfitted him with 13 million dollars" in seed money. Al-Khoei, a moderate, pro-Western Shiite, was one of the key figures in Washington`s post-war plans. However, the 41-year-old al-Khoei also made some powerful enemies. He obtained the keys to the golden shrine of Najaf and, with them, access to millions in donations that were being kept there. He subsequently refused to even discuss the key issue with Sadr, who was jealous of al-Khoei`s position.

The young radical`s fanaticism more than makes up for his lack of religious training, as do his excellent ties to radical Shiites in neighboring Iran. Iran`s pronouncements are clearly addressed to Sadr, whom they have called up to "kill Saddam loyalists and work to oppose the Great Satan."

It was probably the followers of this fiery young leader who murdered his religious adversary, who arrived in Iraq from London on April 10th. Al-Khoei, a friend of America, was ambushed at the golden mosque and hacked to death with knives. Muktada al-Sadr denies having ordered the murder, claiming that an "agitated mob" was responsible. From his headquarters on the street leading to the market, al-Sadr constantly watches the shrine, waiting, drinking tea, scheming.

By now people whisper when his name is mentioned in tea rooms and in the market.

Only a few days before last week`s bloody Friday, an uncle of Hakim, also a Shiite leader, barely escaped a bomb attack. Three of his bodyguards were killed in the attack.

Many in Najaf are convinced that they know who is behind the attacks, for which no one has yet claimed responsibility. During the funeral of the bodyguards of Hakim`s uncle, many mourners were already cursing the name Muktada. Black banners fluttering in the wind on the walls of Najaf`s enormous cemetery also name Sadr as being responsible for the attack.

Does this young radical truly intend to use force to expel the Americans from the country and eliminate the clerical competition to bolster his own position?

Although his rhetorical abilities are considered unlimited, his theological training is viewed as inadequate. Sadr is undoubtedly a gifted speaker. However, the man in the black turban coolly denies any involvement in the murders, claiming "I do not issue orders to shoot."

The elder statesmen among the ayatollahs of Najaf never leaves his house these days, and is guarded around the clock by armed bodyguards. He is the Persian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. As the director of Najaf`s theological seminary, the Hausa, he is considered the highest religious authority. So far he has managed to stay out of the fray, and he is considered a moderate. Thus, it is all the more alarming to the occupying power that al-Sistani issued a fatwa two months ago expressly forbidding collaboration with the country`s foreign masters. As a religious scholar, he enjoys great respect among all factions, and has maintained contact with moderate forces in Iran through middlemen. The question now is whether the 73-year-old al-Sistani possesses the power and the determination to play a key role in shaping the future of Iraq. Al-Sistani is not believed to be particularly interested in politics. Or could it be that he is simply practicing "Takiya," the art of disguise and deception permitted in the Shiite faith?

In any case, the Grand Ayatollah appears to have the last word in day-to-day political matters. He sends his deputy, Mohammed al-Haqqani, to attend regular meetings with the other clerics. An elegant coolness prevails in his prayer, reading and work room. This man of the cloth, seated modestly on a mat, is surrounded by three telephones, half a dozen pairs of glasses, countless bottles of German vitamins, and a stack of religious documents. Whenever he shifts his position, he takes pains to avoid allowing the soles of his bare feet to face his visitors, a gesture that is considered impolite.

Al-Haqqani speaks of the country`s future, vaguely referring to an "Islamically characterized state," one that must orient itself toward the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. But Iraq, says al-Haqqani, is a difficult country, far more complex that its almost entirely Shiite neighbor Iran. Whoever rules the country one day, he says, must make allowances for its other religious groups, the urban Sunnis, the Christians, the Kurds.

A theology student asks what should be done with the wives of Christians, those who refuse to wear a veil. Another students asks how the state will deal with thieves, those who were able to buy their way out of any criminal penalty by bribing Saddam`s corrupt judges: "Doesn`t the Koran require that their hands be cut off?"

The Grand Ayatollah`s deputy smiles and advises the students "not to take all rules so literally." It`s obvious that al-Sistani`s deputy is fully aware of the implications of each of his statements. At times he presses ahead, sounding as socially-minded and worldly as a Catholic liberation theologian, only to retreat back into ideologically conservative territory. "We will not tolerate bars and pornographic films in Iraq," he says in closing. "However, just as we Shiites demand respect for our faith, we too must tolerate the practices of others. Otherwise, this country could break apart." His audience listens attentively. Some take notes. Not everyone seems convinced. Can a Gandhian policy of non-violence prevail if the religious competition commits murder, if militant Saddam loyalists provoke the Shiites to revolt, if the Americans continue their occupation?

In its day-to-day life, Iraq already exhibits some of the characteristics of an Islamic state today. In recent years, even Saddam`s regime limited itself to the use of police and secret service forces to govern the Shiite southern portion of the country. Civil administration was left largely to the mullahs, provided it remained "non-political" and did not oppose the dictator. Nowadays, the well-organized religious elite are in charge of the entire health and education system in cities such as Najaf, Kerbela, Kut, and Nassiriya. They also control the legal system. Anyone south of Baghdad who has matters of inheritance to settle will heed the ruling of his local cleric. Merely the thought of submitting to a worldly jurisdiction is considered perverse by the more than 14 million Shiites in Iraq.

Whether this religiously shaped and organized society develops into a theocracy depends on the Shiite power struggle, and on the Americans` willingness to respect majority decisions. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has already announced that "under no circumstances will we allow a regime based on the Iranian model to come to power in Baghdad." He has neglected to mention how he intends to do this once US forces have pulled out of the country.

In any case, Shiites of all political persuasions in Najaf have come to one conclusion: In the future, Iraq will not be governed without the Shiites, a group that makes up more than 60 percent of the country`s total population. A leader will emerge from within the Shiite spectrum. Since Friday, many Shiites have been praying that it will be not the power-hungry Sadr, who is clearly doing his utmost to reach the top.

Apparently young Lebanese men who receive their orders from Iran and are prepared to engage in violent acts have already been seeping into Iraq for some time. They were trained in camps of the Lebanese Hezbollah (Party of God) to launch attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon. "Now we are getting what we never had under Saddam: a close connection between Shiite terrorists and Al Qaeda, an Iran-Iraq-Lebanon triangle, a Shiite belt in the Middle East," says a worried Western intelligence expert. And then he adds, sarcastically: "Thanks, Mister Bush."

The Shiites represent a branch of Islam that encompasses more than ten percent of all Muslims, or 150 million people out of a total of about 1.3 billion Muslims. However, they are disproportionately feared in the West. According to the New York Times, "in American eyes the Shiites are a symbol of terrorism," a scourge of God.

This is why images from the past are now reappearing, images from 1979, when Iranian students incited by Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini occupied the US embassy in Tehran, paraded blindfolded diplomats in front of the world`s eyes, and kept them captive for 444 days; or from 1983, when Shiite terrorists attacked the US embassy and the headquarters of the US Marines in Beirut, forcing the superpower, after it had lost just under 300 lives, to withdraw from Lebanon in disgrace. These images from the past are mixed with the bloody flagellation scenes, reminiscent of medieval times, witnessed in Iraq in April of this year: scenes of people who, out of sheer religious fervor, seemed to almost take pleasure in torturing themselves, while at the same time appearing to be well-organized, bearing signs calling for a theocracy and condemning the "American occupiers."

For theologians like Tübingen-based orientalist Heinz Halm or the Parisian Arabic studies expert Gilles Kepel, the Shiites are by no means fanatical religious warriors across the board, but for the most part members of a faith that preaches respect and is to some extent even socially progressive, such as the tiny minority of two million Ismailites under the leadership of Karim Aga Khan IV. Although there are Shiite minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and East Africa, the center of this religious group is in the Middle East. It constitutes a majority in the Iranian theocracy (90 percent), in Azerbaijan (70 percent), and in Bahrain (65 percent), while playing an important role in Lebanon (19 percent)

However, it was only after the removal of Saddam Hussein, who was especially vehement in his repression of Iraq`s Shiite majority, that a continuous geographic belt of Shiitism in the region was formed. The religious leaders of the individual countries, who had been forced to communicate in secrecy in the past, can now join forces in making pilgrimages, praying, and exchanging thoughts (and weapons), and can do so without obstruction. Moreover, the focus of their world is beginning to shift from Iran to Iraq, as the Shiites` two most important holy sites, Najaf and Kerbela in Iraq, have once again become generally accessible to all.

Far more important than the sheer number of Shiites is their religious fervor and their cohesion, as well as their concentration in regions that contain the world`s richest reserves of raw materials. The majority of workers in the oil fields of Iran and southern Iraq, but also in those of Kuwait and the especially high-yielding eastern Saudi Arabian province of Hassa, are Shiites, and they are literally "sitting" on these important petroleum reserves. If they were to engage in an organized work stoppage effort from one day to the next, the global market would quickly collapse.

But do the Shiites even exist? Is this denomination a monolith or a mosaic, a single force or a thousand-and-one forces? And does this religious group truly preach hatred of the West, and to such an extent that the West must fear this renaissance of the Shiites as the devil would fear holy water?

To comprehend the world of the Shiites, their willingness to engage in martyrdom, their feeling of being chosen, one would have to be transported back to a point in history at least 1300 years ago. For many Shiites, this is not a step backwards into a remote and mysterious past, but rather a part of a constantly recurring religious experience, one that is both celebrated and suffered.

Mohammed claimed to be a herald of the word of Allah, even the last and final prophet of all prophets. But he would never have presumed to consider himself as godly or immortal. His realm was of this world. He was the son of a merchant, and enjoyed great military and political successes during his life. He created a new community in Medina and then liberated his birthplace of Mecca, from which he had been forced to flee. He commanded armies, levied taxes, and imposed the rule of law. For centuries, Christian societies accepted as a matter of course the concept that two authorities existed, that of God`s representatives and that of the emperor. Mohammed was both an interpreter of the true faith and a worldly ruler in one. A separation of church and state is inconceivable in Islam, at least in its original form.

To this day, a large percentage of Muslims believe that Mohammed, in his capacity as the "seal of the prophets," declined to appoint a successor. However, a minority of Muslims are convinced that he did indeed appoint a successor in March of the year 632, three months before his death, during his final pilgrimage to Mecca. According to Shiite lore, when his caravan stopped to rest by a pond halfway to Medina, Mohammed asked his followers: "Do I not have more to say to you than all others." And when his followers gladly agreed, he continued: "All those whom I command shall also be commanded by Ali!"

Ali was the cousin of the prophet and became Mohammed`s son-in-law when he married Fatima. He fought as Mohammed`s deputy in several military campaigns, and was very close to the prophet. However, he was not the prophet`s only companion. After Mohammed`s death, Abu Bakr prevailed as the Caliph (successor). He was succeeded by Omar and Osman, two Muslim rulers from the old urban aristocracy of Mecca who had once made life difficult for Mohammed and only later became his followers. In the eyes of Ali`s supporters, these men were unlawful rulers. They believed that it was their man alone who could claim to be a member of the original religious aristocracy of Medina, and that only he was a true Muslim.

Following the murder of Osman, Ali finally came to power in 656. However, his regency was so disputed that he was forced to retreat to the city of Kufa, not far from Najaf in present-day Iraq. Ali`s position worsened when a majority of Muslims recognized the Syrian Muawija as the true caliph. A small minority bravely held its own against the overwhelming majority. They called themselves the "Shiate Ali" or "party of Ali," bringing the Shiite movement to life. From then on, the paths of the Shiites and the Sunnis diverged. In 661, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed was stabbed to death in the mosque in Kufa, becoming the first in a series of Shia martyrs.

Ali lived on as the first imam (leader), and as a larger-than-life cult figure. His followers refer to him as the "Dhu al-Fikar," or "sword of the prophet." According to one legend, he was able to lift entire city gates from their foundations. Another legend holds that a miracle took place at his burial, when a brilliant white light suddenly emerged from a cliff. To this day, Najaf`s imposing shrine rises from this gravesite. It is the most important pilgrimage site in Iraq.

In the spring of 680, Jasid became the first man to mount the throne of the caliphs in Damascus who had not known the Prophet Mohammed personally. Ali`s supporters sensed a final opportunity to regain power. They sent emissaries to Mecca to visit Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, and offer their assistance in waging a decisive battle against the usurper. Hussein decided to go to war, even though he must have known that he would be facing an overwhelmingly more powerful force. According to legend, he set out with a contingent of only 32 horsemen and 40 men on foot. Hussein didn`t stand a chance, especially as the military help promised by his supporters failed to materialize, and his men were slaughtered near Kerbela. Another golden mosque later built at the site of the massacre is now Iraq`s second most-important pilgrimage site.

Until that point, Ali`s party was principally concerned with acquiring power. However, its political failure and the martyrs` deaths of its heroes transformed it into a religious movement. The men who had so shamefully abandoned the grandson of the Prophet sank into endless self-reproach. They even considered atoning for their disgrace by committing collective suicide. However, they believed that the Koran forbids suicide, just as it forbids the killing of Muslims. Following lengthy discussions, most of them realized that they were left with only one solution: expiatory death on the battlefield, while doing battle against the "infidel enemy."

Those who do not have the opportunity to take this form of martyrdom upon themselves can atone for the collective guilt of their Shiite brothers, at least in part, by engaging in a symbolic ritual of penance. During these annual acts of self-flagellation, which take place on the anniversary of Hussein`s death, the fervent believer can beat himself with his hands, chains or whips, or can cut his brow with a sword. The "Ashura" ritual is a passion play, a sort of worldwide, bloody Oberammergau. But it`s also much more than that. The true Shiite knows that he can in fact be asked to submit to expiatory death - that is, when it becomes necessary to rise up against an army of overpowering oppressors, just as Hussein did.

No other religion is so enmeshed in its cult of martyrdom. The Shiites believe that all of their imams after Ali died a sacrificial death. A small minority only acknowledges seven imams (like the Ismailites), while most consider themselves part of the twelve imam Shia. The twelfth in the sequence of their leaders is said to have suffered an unusual fate. Little Mohammed, born in 869, was hidden by his father and then disappeared. Most Shiites believe that the "hidden imam," or "Mahdi," will reappear one day and will take the helm of the party of Ali to claim the legitimate rights of its ancestors and lead his followers into paradise.

Together with an order known as the assassines, the Shia entered into a secret alliance that systematically and continuously used terror as a weapon, beginning in the late 11th century and continuing through the middle of the 13th century. Because of their supposed drug use, the men in their inaccessible mountaintop fortresses were called "hashish eaters" by the Crusaders. The English and French word for murderer, assassin, is derived from this term. Contrary to widespread legends, these especially radical fighters rarely turned their daggers on the Crusaders when engaging in their suicide attacks. Instead, their targets were mainly local warlords and religious adversaries within the Muslim faith. However, these "original terrorists" have never represented a mainstream movement within the Shia.

Shiite revolts erupted again and again throughout the ensuing centuries. But whether it was during the golden era of Sunni Islam in medieval times or during later periods of Western Christian predominance, the traditional Shia generally remained apolitical and tended to be a persecuted rather than a persecuting minority. However, it was a minority that consistently reserved the right to deceive its rulers in the form of "Takiya" ("secrecy"), one of the basic tenets of the denomination. Until the second half of the twentieth century, the Shiites silently clung to their belief in the return of the Mahdi - until the arrival of Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Iranian ayatollah spent many years teaching in the Iraqi martyrs` city of Najaf. He was able to pull large portions of the Shiites in his homeland out of their lethargy and incite them to rebel against a westernized, corrupt monarchy. From a Shiite perspective, his most important achievement was that he formulated the clergy`s right to political leadership within the state. Khomenei transformed Shiitism into a revolutionary ideology by declaring himself both head of state and religious leader, or God`s representative on earth, so to speak - an ersatz Mahdi who strove to serve in place of the hidden one until his reappearance. It was a revolution in the Shiite faith, one which, following Khomeini`s illustrious return to Tehran in 1979, led to the establishment of the Iranian theocracy.

The merciless Ayatollah soon revealed that he was no longer satisfied with the symbolic ritual of penance on the Ashura holiday. During the war against Iraq, he demanded true martyr`s deaths - even of the underage children whom he sent into the mine fields. Khomeini also planned to export his Shiite revolution. It was an ambition that met with a cool reception among his neighbors. Tehran`s religious revolutionary was unable to find imitators of the Iranian model. When he did attempt to topple governments through terrorist activity, such as in Bahrain, Khomeini failed.

Emissaries of the Ayatollah played a key role in the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon. This militia, formed in 1982 to fight the Israeli occupying forces in Beirut, still receives most of its funding from Tehran today. The Hezbollah minority has long since given up its original goal of turning Lebanon into a Shiite state, and today acts as a "normal" party in the Lebanese parliament. However, a radical wing of the Hezbollah is now beginning to come to power.

Until recently, the revolutionary fervor of the Shiites seemed to have diminished. Tehran had plenty of its own problems, Baghdad was crippled by the Saddam dictatorship, and Beirut was beginning to turn toward the West. The fall of Saddam Hussein has now liberated the long-repressed faithful, and may have forced them into a different direction than the Americans had expected.

Do the Iraqi or even the Lebanese Shiites intend to forcefully establish a new Middle Eastern theocracy based on the Iranian model? Are Shiite fanatics fanning the flames of global terror? Or, as has presumably occurred in Najaf, are they in the process of cutting one another to pieces in an internal religious power struggle?

The most important answers to these questions are likely to be found in Iran, the first and thus far only Shiite theocracy.

If there is one man who symbolizes the Iranian revolution, from its origins through today, it would be the 80-year-old Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montaseri. He was tortured by the Shah`s thugs because of his inflammatory speeches criticizing the corrupt monarchy. He was one of the authors of Iran`s constitution, an accomplishment that gave this religious leader the final say in state matters. In 1979, he joined Khomeini in his triumphant march through Tehran. Khomeini referred to his "younger brother" as "the fruit of my life," and appointed Montaseri as his successor.

But then the two men turned against each other. Montaseri criticized the bloody frenzy of the revolution and the high-handedness of the mullahs, and he refused to support the fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie. Khomeini demoted Montaseri shortly before his death in 1979. Today, agitator Ali Khameni is in power.

In 1997, as Montaseri was becoming increasingly vocal in his criticism of the theocracy`s failings, the new religious leader placed his adversary under strict house arrest. Montaseri`s religious school in the Iranian holy city of Ghom was destroyed by Islamist storm troopers. However, even Khameni didn`t dare to throw Montaseri, a highly respected scholar (whose religious status was superior to that of Khameni), into jail. Seven months ago, the house arrest was also lifted, apparently in an act of mercy, since Montaseri is said to be near death.

His once-round face has collapsed, and the grip of his small hand has weakened. Otherwise the old man, his body enveloped in snow-white robes, makes a rather vigorous impression. What he says is so revolutionary that no one else would dare to say it in public: "Our revolution was correct and good, but our theocracy became a failure. Khameni made some serious mistakes. He should immediately release all political prisoners and introduce true reforms. Because of our excesses, we have lost the respect of the world."

Does this mean that he is not in favor of transferring the Iranian model to Iraq?

"I am pleased about the new freedoms of the Shiites, but God forbid that our neighbors should repeat our mistakes. A truly pluralistic system would be the right thing in Baghdad. But I do not believe that the American occupiers will allow this."

Things are heating up in Ghom. At the Feisije Madrassa, religious students and their teachers hotly discuss the sacred scriptures in an attempt to elucidate how they should respond to the new freedoms of their religious brethren in Iraq. They have embarked on their exploration of their medieval religious past with highly modern tools. "Computer ayatollahs" develop new software containing key words that refer to old passages in scripture, but they also develop e-mail files containing the addresses of thousands of Iraqi Shiites. There are many family ties between Ghom and Iraq`s holy sites. In particular, theology students driven out of neighboring Iraq by Saddam Hussein years ago have settled in Ghom.

The radical Ayatollah Qadim Hussein al-Hairi is from Kerbela, and has been living in Ghom since 1973. In April, he issued a fatwa instructing his fellow Shiites in Iraq to kill all supporters of the old regime and to actively fight the "Great Satan," the United States. In his view, Iraq must become a strict Shiite theocracy. If Shiite "compromisers" stand in its way, says al-Hairi, they too must be eliminated. Could this suggest that he may have been behind last Friday`s murders in Najaf?

Other clerics view such a development with mistrust, and the reasons for their skepticism are often rather worldly. They fear that their city will be marginalized. Although Ghom is more than 1200 years old and houses the shrine of Fatema, the sister of Shiite martyr Imam Reza, it is a third-tier religious site in comparison to Najaf and Kerbela. Now that the Iraqi holy cities are once again accessible, they fear a dramatic decline in the flow of pilgrims and donations to Ghom.

Young people in Tehran couldn`t care less whether or not the center of the Shiite world shifts from Iraq back to its point of origin on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Some undermine their theocracy by simply no longer taking it seriously. They hold private parties with porno videos and whisky. They provoke the moral police by holding hands subversively.

The theocracy has long since condemned itself, partly because of the many children it has produced. According to Khomeini`s directive, the Iranians were to bring as many children into the world as possible. Today the country must feed twice as many people as during the Shah`s rule. Almost two-thirds of Iran`s 70 million people are under 25 and have no recollection whatsoever of the grand acts of the revolution. Many are desperately seeking employment. The competition for jobs is especially tough for Iran`s many university graduates, more than half of them women.

If only to regain their private lives, Iran`s young people have become political. With an overwhelming majority, they elected the worldly Mohammed Khatami to be their president, and have repeatedly demonstrated to support him in his struggles against the hated ultra-religious mullahs. When students demonstrate in the streets they chant "Down with the Taliban, whether in Kabul or Tehran."

But President Khatami has been unable to prevail with his reformist plans. Revolutionary leader Khameni and his Guardian Council control the courts, the secret service, and the military. The president`s actions are more similar to those of an opposition leader than of a head of state, one in which he is forced to oppose a system that threatens to rape the will of the people, simply because it derives its full authority from God.

To many Iranians, however, reforms that are occurring at a snail`s pace are no longer enough. During communal elections in February, Khatami was given a rude awakening. Voter turnout in Tehran dropped from a level of 64 percent in 1999 to less than 12 percent. The reformists were the ones who didn`t vote, leaving the city council to the arch-conservatives.

The US government believes that Iran`s leadership has been actively seeking nuclear weapons and maintaining secret contacts to Al Qaeda terrorists. It claims that terrorists have repeatedly been sighted in back-room meetings with radical clerics, especially in recent times: Al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith, Osama Bin Laden`s son Saad, as well as Saif al Adil, who was probably responsible for the May 12th attack on an apartment complex housing foreigners in the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Charrasi rejected these accusations as being "unfounded and outrageous." According to Charrasi, and contrary to US accusations, Iran is not actively involved in the power struggle in neighboring Iraq.

In Ghom, still the center of religious power in Iran, the clerics find such denials amusing. "Of course we need the bomb, and we have established the necessary conditions in our underground facilities near the city of Natan," says one of the radical ayatollahs. "And why, of all things, should we not avail ourselves of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take the Shiite revolution to our neighboring country, and in doing so humiliate the Great Satan?"

An organization headed by Baqir al-Hakim and established specifically for this purpose, the "Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq," has been receiving millions from the Iranian authorities since 1982. There is evidence that Khameni maintains close ties to the organization`s leadership. After having taken Iranian citizenship, some members of leadership council of the Sciri rose to high-ranking government positions. As head of the judiciary, former Sciri spokesman Mahmud al-Hashimi Schahrudi has even managed to enter the tight-knit group of leaders surrounding the Ayatollah, and is now ranked fourth in Iran`s leadership hierarchy. Khameni also has domestic political reasons for promoting a rigid theocracy in Iraq, as it represents his only hope of undermining the "worldly" reformers surrounding Khatami and combating the depoliticizing of the Shia.

The radicals within the Iranian mullah-cracy apparently viewed the recently murdered Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim as their man in Iraq, their Trojan Horse. Were they disappointed in the moderate words of the cleric in Najaf, so disappointed as to sanction his assassination?

Baqir`s nephew, 43-year-old Riath al-Hakim, has remained in Ghom as the Sciri`s representative - for now. A few weeks before the assassination, he told Der Spiegel that his father and his uncle were principally interested in building a pluralistic government that would incorporate members of all religious communities and ethnicities, a government that was not to be a copy of the Iranian model. According to al-Hakim, one thing is clear: "More than 60 percent of Iraq`s population are Shiites, and they will assert their rights. Iraq will be a country shaped by the Islamic religion."

Riath al-Hakim is an unassuming, soft-spoken man. He says that he screamed a lot in the past - against the walls of his solitary cell in Baghdad`s central prison, especially in the mornings, when he would scream to drown out the cries and whimpers of women, old men and children being tortured in the nearby prison courtyard. He spent eight years in Saddam Hussein`s dungeons, enduring torture with whips and electrodes inflicted by sadistic guards. "I was only able to endure by thinking about our Shiite martyrs and their example."

In 1991, Riath al-Hakim was released and, with the help of his relatives and their Iranian friends, fled to Ghom via Kurdistan. Since then, he has completed the religious studies he began in Najaf, and now writes commentary in Iranian religious publications.

Upon leaving the interview, Riath al-Hakim pointed to portrait photographs handing on a laundry line like mementos. "These are fourteen people from our family whom Saddam murdered - an entire gallery. Others from our clan were recently discovered in mass graves near Baghdad, including my eight-year-old niece." Then this otherwise gentle man clenched his fists. "No one will prevent us from creating the new Iraq according to our religious ideas. Not Saddam`s supporters and not the Americans. They have no concept of the fervor of our Shiite faith."

Of all people, the grandson of Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who led Iraq`s neighbor into one of the darkest periods in its history following the overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlevi in 1979, could now become the opponent of radical leader Muktada al-Sadr and a proponent of Iraq`s US occupiers - creating an even greater headache for Tehran.

Hussein Khomeini lives in a small house in downtown Najaf, from which he calls for reforms in Iran. His grandfather`s bloody theocracy has rejected the grandson. State and religious, preaches the 45-year-old Khomeini who spent a portion of his childhood and youth in Najaf, should be separated.

Such position statements are declarations of war against Sadr`s extremists. A few days after the attacks on the moderate Hakim family, Khomeini and his entourage left Najaf. It was said that he was travelling to Bahrain to visit Shiites living there. According to Khomeini`s neighbors, however, his departure came as a surprise. Did Sadr`s opponent move to a safer place after receiving warnings? In any event, the houses of all religious leaders in Najaf have now come to resemble heavily guarded fortresses.

The possibility that Iraq, envisioned by the US as a model of Western democracy in the Middle East, could descend into full-scale chaos and violence is not the only nightmare for Western intelligence services. They are particularly concerned that portions of Bin Laden`s Al Qaeda network could have joined forces with a newly strengthened group of terrorists surrounding the Shiite Hezbollah militia supported by Iran. If this were the case, these fanatics could extend the scope of their attacks from such "soft targets" as discotheques, bars and apartment buildings housing Western businesspeople to include America`s economic and political arteries in the region.

"What happened in recent months in Riyadh and Casablanca were human tragedies," says one of these intelligence experts, "but as far as possible terrorist attacks committed by Shiite religious fanatics against the poorly secured Saudi oil facilities, combined with attacks on US positions in Iraq, is concerned: that would be another catastrophe on the order of September 11th."

The name of one man keeps popping up in conversations among Western intelligence experts: Imad Mughniyah, chief of the "external security apparatus" of the Hezbollah for many years. US Secretary of State Colin Powell allegedly delivered an ultimatum during his recent visits to Beirut and Damascus: the extradition of Mughniyah. The Americans hold this secretive man, of whom only one photograph exists on the FBI website, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Beirut since the 1980s. The Israelis hunted him, and even murdered his brother in 1994 while attempting to catch the terrorist during a wedding ceremony, but were ultimately unsuccessful.

The only known information about Mughniyah, who is now 41, is that his father was a Shiite scholar from Lebanon, and that he was trained in the training camps of radical Palestinians during the civil war years. After years of remaining on the sidelines, Mughniyah is now allegedly once again involved in the planning of international terrorism - acting through a newly intensified network of fellow Shiites linked by a group of religious fighters from Ghom in Iran, Najaf in Iraq, and Lebanon`s Bekaa Valley. According to one intelligence report, "Mughniyah is the beneficiary of a wave of Shiitism that has taken the entire Middle East by storm in the wake of Saddam Hussein`s downfall, a wave whose extreme factions have paved the way for new violence."

For Professor Hamid Algar of the University of California at Berkeley, "every day in the life of a Shiite is a day of struggle, a day on which he must seek either triumph or martyrdom." University of Tübingen Professor Halm believes that "the Shiite clergy forms a tightly knit network across national borders, a network that can be utilized for political ends if necessary." And presumably for acts of terrorism, as well.

So where is this Imad Mughniyah, the former chief of operations of Hezbollah, wanted worldwide on charges of murder and kidnapping? Did he meet with Osama Bin Laden, as he once did in Sudan, to plan the most recent attacks, possibly in collaboration with his Shiite friends in Iran?

There is one nightmare scenario that Western politicians fear more than anything else, and it looks like this: The terrorists will arrive from across the sea. Their base? A secret site in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Their destination? Platform number four at Saudi Arabia`s most important oil terminal at Ras Tanura. The complex explodes into an inferno following a collision with a boot loaded with explosives.

At the same time, another suicide commando crashes a small plane into the Abkaik complex a few kilometers away in the country`s interior. The world`s largest petroleum processing center is essentially destroyed. As a result of the simultaneous attacks, Saudi Arabia`s oil exports are reduced by a devastating two-thirds, and the world market loses just under five billions barrels of oil a day - almost one-fourth of the US` daily consumption.

On this day, however, the terrorists do not limit their attacks to Saudi Arabia. They also attack in Iraq, storming oil fields near Basra and attacking the US forces command center in Baghdad. Suicide bombers blow up Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responds with a massive military attack. In this vision of horror, the world faces a new Middle East war, an acute bottleneck in the supply of raw materials on world markets, and an exploding price of oil.

For the time being, however, the people of Najaf are busy mourning and burying the dead Ayatollah.

Death is already omnipresent in the holy city, a city in which there are more graves than houses. In front of a mausoleum, a group of young men lights sticks of incense at the grave of their uncle. Twice a year, according to custom, Ruhullah and his brothers travel to Najaf from Baghdad.

Since the fall of Saddam, about 2,000 believers flow into Najaf each day from Iran alone, and not just to pray, something they have been forbidden to do for the past two decades. Some arrive with coffins strapped to the roofs of their cars to bury their family members in Najaf. Kilometer after kilometer of sandstone-colored gravestones and mausoleums stretch to the horizon in Najaf`s gigantic cemetery. Devout Shiites prefer to be buried in the shadow of the holy shrine. This is an honor that will certainly be bestowed upon Hakim.

The Ayatollah`s final resting place will be in the holy city`s famous martyrs` cemetery - in the shadow of the golden dome of the Imam Ali mosque.


Translated by Christopher Sultan



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 4, 2003
A Bigger U.N. Role in Iraq

With terrorism on the rise in Iraq and American forces stretched to the limit, the Bush administration has stepped back from its stubborn resistance to greater United Nations involvement. Washington is now canvassing support for a new Security Council resolution that would place international military operations in Iraq under U.N. auspices, with an American general in command of the troops. Crucial details are now being negotiated. It is unclear how much authority Washington is willing to give the U.N., but the new resolution offers an approach all Council members should support. A broadened security effort has become more urgent since four massive bombs went off in Iraq over the past month, including one that destroyed the U.N.`s Baghdad headquarters and another that killed a leading Shiite cleric.

The administration`s sudden embrace of a broader U.N. role should not be limited to security issues. The resolution Washington is now circulating invites the U.N. to work with Iraq`s American-appointed Governing Council to develop a timetable for constitutional rule and a return to Iraqi sovereignty. But for that to make a difference, the U.N. will have to be given broader political authority. Until his death in the headquarters bombing, the U.N.`s representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, did an impressive job within an unduly circumscribed mandate. His successor should have clearer powers. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund must also have the right to rule on policy decisions affecting the long-term disposition of Iraq`s economic resources, mainly oil. Currently, they are limited to an auditing and advisory role.

The passage of a new Security Council resolution, even if it does no more than place military operations under U.N. auspices, should permit nations like India, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey to contribute troops. Countries have been understandably reluctant to join a military mission accountable only to Washington. A more broadly based force with a substantial Muslim component could help transform what looks uncomfortably like an imperial army of occupation into a true international peacekeeping force.

Other countries would be more willing to offer financial assistance if Iraq`s administration took on a more international cast. When potential donor nations assemble in Spain next month, Washington will be seeking substantial European help with what it now acknowledges will be tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction expenses. Europe`s willingness to share these costs will flow in proportion to Washington`s willingness to share responsibility.

Bringing security, democracy and prosperity to postwar Iraq was always too big a challenge for Washington to have taken on alone. Fuller U.N. involvement would not only reduce the costs in American lives and dollars — it would also improve the chances for success.

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Da fährt ein Präsident vor 6 Wochen durch Afrika und verspricht 15 Mia$ in den nächsten 5 Jahren für die AIDS-Hilfe und anderes. Nun muß er erzählen: April, April, es war nicht so gemeint!

September 4, 2003
Betraying the Sick in Africa

There is an old joke about a man who kills his parents and then begs the court for mercy because he is an orphan. For such chutzpah on a global scale, consider President Bush`s overseas AIDS initiative. In his last State of the Union address, the president announced a new program to fight AIDS in Africa and pledged $15 billion over the next five years. But instead of using existing channels, Mr. Bush created a new bureaucracy. Now the White House and Congressional Republicans argue that since the bureaucracy is not ready, dying patients must wait.

The Senate is scheduled to vote soon on an appropriations bill that contains $2 billion for the AIDS initiative — only $500 million more than this year`s spending. The House has approved even less. This is the White House`s doing. It is twisting arms to get Congress to cut its own program. The House and Senate had authorized $3 billion for next year.

This undercutting of trumpeted compassion initiatives is a habit with the president because of his devotion to tax cuts for the wealthy. But officials are arguing that AIDS money cannot be spent wisely because the office of the AIDS coordinator — and Africa — is not ready.

Both assertions are nonsense. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is besieged with excellent vetted proposals from African nations desperate to fight AIDS. Multiple billions could be effectively spent on AIDS prevention and treatment and help for orphans. And countries that lack the ability to run good programs need money to build that capacity. But the Global Fund is too broke to help. If the administration cannot overcome its mysterious distaste for this organization, it could simply take some of the country proposals and finance them directly.

Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, is proposing to restore the full $3 billion. The Senate should adopt this amendment, then prevail upon the House. Several top Republicans, including President Bush and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, have recently been to Africa, where they hugged orphans and visited the dying. If they break America`s promise on AIDS, they will be cynically using suffering Africans as nothing more than a photo opportunity.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Bush to Seek $60 Billion or More for Iraq
U.S. Floats Plan To Widen U.N. Postwar Role

By Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A01


The White House has informed congressional leaders that it is preparing a new budget request for between $60 billion and $70 billion to help cover the mounting costs of the reconstruction and military occupation of Iraq, sources on Capitol Hill said last night.

The planned request -- which congressional budget analysts said will be nearly double what Congress expected -- reflects the deepening cost of the five-month-old U.S. occupation and serves as an acknowledgement by the administration that it vastly underestimated the price tag of restoring order in Iraq and rebuilding its infrastructure.

The estimate was disclosed on the same day the administration provided details of a draft U.N. resolution that it is preparing in an effort to win foreign pledges for more troops and money for Iraq. The U.S. draft would authorize a multinational peacekeeping force under U.S. military command and would invite the nascent Iraqi Governing Council to submit a plan and a timetable for writing a constitution, creating a government and holding elections.

The decisions to seek new funds from Congress and to try to strike a bargain at the United Nations signaled that President Bush is trying to resolve festering disputes over his administration`s Iraq policies before they turn into political liabilities. Both the rising cost of the military operations and the failure of the administration to share the peacekeeping burden in Iraq have prompted growing criticism on Capitol Hill and by Democratic presidential candidates.

The draft U.N. proposal appears to set up something unprecedented in U.N. history: a multinational force with a United Nations mandate in a country where the world body does not have political control or a say over who has political control.

The initial reaction of U.N. diplomats was mixed, with many viewing the draft as a basis for difficult negotiations over how much power the administration would be willing to cede to win an international imprimatur that some countries have demanded in exchange for their participation in a security force.

Administration officials portrayed the initiative as a further evolution of the president`s pledge to give the United Nations a "vital role" in the rebuilding of Iraq. But it also marked a reversal for an administration that had once argued that the United Nations would become irrelevant if it failed to back the U.S.-led invasion earlier this year. For the first time, the administration is now indicating a willingness to give other nations a greater say in Iraq`s future.

"With the resolution, you`re essentially putting the Security Council into the game," said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who promoted the proposal in a blitz of phone calls to his foreign counterparts.

The spiraling cost of the Iraqi occupation was hinted by L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, last month when he said during a visit to Washington that "several tens of billions" of dollars will be needed over the next year to cover security and construction costs, revive the economy and help the Iraqis form a government.

But the administration has until now been reluctant to put a firm figure on its budget request. The request for new money, which has yet to be formally sent to Congress, follows a $79 billion wartime budget supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that Bush signed in April. The administration must regularly approach Congress to fund ongoing military operations because they are not normally covered by the Pentagon budget.

A White House spokesman said last night that the request for new money "has not been finalized." Other officials said the budget package has not yet been presented to Bush.

Congressional aides said the White House is discussing a variety of breakdowns for the spending. But one proposal would allocate about $55 billion for the Pentagon and $10 billion for reconstruction. Most of the money would be designated for Iraq, and a small part for Afghanistan.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said Bush gave no specific figures about his budget request during a meeting with Republican congressional leaders at the White House yesterday. The president told the leadership he is "not running this war out of Washington" and is going to adopt the requests of Bremer and Army Gen. John Abizaid, who as head of the U.S. Central Command is responsible for Iraq, Santorum said. Abizaid is scheduled to meet with members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees in closed sessions on Capitol Hill today.

"We were very clear that what the president wants, he`s going to get," Santorum said.

The administration yesterday began circulating the draft U.N. resolution among Security Council members. Foreign diplomats welcomed the administration`s willingness to expand the circle of decision-making on Iraq, but they expressed concern over its refusal to give up political power in Iraq in the near term. Thus, it was unclear whether the proposal would be enough to overcome the continuing bitterness over the administration`s decision to launch a war after failing to win approval for a U.N. resolution authorizing military action. U.S. officials aim to begin bargaining next week in hopes of winning a deal before the U.N. General Assembly opens this month.

"It`s going to be tough," said one U.S. official familiar with the reaction to Powell`s calls to his counterparts in France, Germany, Britain, Russia and other key countries. "It`s going to be particularly tough with the French," who led the opposition to a resolution authorizing the use of force and who have been demanding a central role for the United Nations in postwar Iraq.

In particular, diplomats are eager to understand know how much authority on political matters the United States would give to the Iraqis or the Security Council. "The big, big question mark is who will continue to be the [political] authority in Iraq," a senior council diplomat said. "Is it the U.N. or the U.S.? How could the U.N. create a multilateral force, led by the United States, and not be the international authority in the country?"

Another U.N. diplomat who has seen the draft resolution welcomed the U.S. decision to go beyond the military issue to cover the politics of Iraq -- specifically to give Iraqis a defined role in developing a constitution and a timetable for the transition to democracy.

The draft calls for an enhancement of the role of a U.S.-appointed Iraqi council, which has 25 members. It asks the Security Council "to endorse the Governing Council as the principal body of the Iraqi interim administration."

That could prove to be a problem, however, because the Governing Council has not been widely recognized. The Arab League has refused to recognize it, as have such institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"The main question is whether the Governing Council will be accepted, respected and endorsed by the Security Council and the Arab world," a council diplomat said. "Some people call Chalabi a marionette from Washington," he added, referring to Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of the Governing Council, who has close ties to the Pentagon.

Left vague are the relative roles of the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Bremer, and the United Nations itself. A question remains about what authority the occupation officials and the United Nations would have if they did not approve of the Iraqi draft constitution or timetable, the diplomat noted.

Diplomats said the structure of the military force is less of a concern, in part because it appears it would follow the model of previous forces in Kosovo, East Timor and elsewhere, and in part because most of the other nations on the Security Council are not interested in shouldering the burden. India, Pakistan and Turkey are expected to be the largest source of potential troops. Only Pakistan is on the council.

Sources said that the security part of the resolution`s text has already been shown to Pakistan and India, and that the objective right now for the administration is to get them to agree to send in troops.

Powell said he got a "positive response" in his calls, but he noted that "this is before they have studied the resolution and had a chance to make their own judgments. And as I`ve discovered with these resolutions, there`s a large difference between an `and` and an `or.` "

Staff writers Peter Slevin and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Powell and Joint Chiefs Nudged Bush Toward U.N.


By Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A01


On Tuesday, President Bush`s first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli.

In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq -- something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department`s position despite resistance by the Pentagon`s civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode.

Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration`s Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working.

The effort by Powell and the military began with a tête-à-tête in Qatar on July 27 between the top U.S. commander in Iraq and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was furthered in a discussion between the Joint Chiefs chairman and Bush at the president`s ranch on Aug. 8. And it was cemented in the past 10 days after Powell`s deputy, Richard L. Armitage, went public with the proposal.

For an administration that prides itself on centralized, top-down control, the decision to change course in Iraq was uncharacteristically loose and decentralized. As described by officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon, the White House was the last to sign on to the new approach devised by the soldiers and the diplomats. "The [Pentagon] civilians had been saying we didn`t need any more troops, and the military brass had backed them," a senior administration official said. "Powell`s a smart guy, and he knew that as soon as he had the brass behind him, that is very tough to ignore."

For months, Rumsfeld and his civilian aides had successfully resisted wishes of the State Department and the British government for U.N. help, arguing that U.S. troops, and foreign troops assembled outside U.N. authority, could get the job done. But this time was different, because the situation in Iraq made Rumsfeld`s view look increasingly doubtful to the White House. A wave of attacks -- at the Jordanian Embassy, U.N. headquarters and Najaf -- convinced many officials that there were not enough U.S. troops in Iraq to maintain order. Nor were there enough foreign troops or American reserves to replace 40,000 troops Rumsfeld planned to bring home.

While the administration`s plan to go to the Security Council surfaced publicly only in recent days, the seeds of the effort can be found in a trip by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. While Myers was in the area, he had a 90-minute private session in Qatar on July 27 with Gen. John Abizaid, the new chief of the U.S. Central Command and the top commander in Iraq, who pressed him to accelerate efforts to bring in more international force.

According to one senior defense official, who spoke on the condition that he not be quoted by name, Myers came home determined "to get some international troops in here to do things international troops are good at doing -- de-mining, peacekeeping." Myers was convinced international peacekeeping forces were necessary to free U.S. forces to go on the offensive against remnants of Saddam Hussein`s Baathist Party. Back in the United States, the official said, the usually deferential Myers "took that message reasonably strong to the president," when he visited Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., early last month with Rumsfeld and others.

Abizaid, unusual for a field commander, also talks frequently with Powell, though it could not be determined whether they coordinated their efforts. But, about the same time as Myers went to Bush, State Department officials started to put pen to paper on the draft of a proposed resolution in early August. The department had long favored such an action but was waiting until the right time to make its case to Bush. After the bombing of U.N. headquarters, officials saw an opportunity. Though "it looked a little ghoulish" to act immediately, as one senior official put it, they began to prepare.

While the brass and the diplomats worked their cases, events made Rumsfeld`s strategy seem untenable to many administration officials. The ongoing violence in Iraq gave new attention to Democratic presidential candidates` claims that Bush was mishandling the situation there -- just in time for the traditional, post-Labor Day kickoff of the presidential election season.

Concern was furthered by a Congressional Budget Office report that the U.S. Army could not sustain troop strength in Iraq. Bush`s Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer, came to Washington with a stark message for Bush about his need for resources. And Bush, who is expected to speak to the United Nations in three weeks, needed a clear policy.

"You find an interesting correlation with the political calendar," said Leon Fuerth, who was then-Vice President Al Gore`s national security adviser. "They were saying everything is under control and people were not buying it. There became a pressure to change course."

A diplomat at the United Nations who closely followed the evolution of the U.S. position said the "spark" for this week`s decision was a meeting between Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations on Aug. 21, two days after the car-bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. The diplomat said Annan made it clear in that meeting that "the best feasible option was a multinational force under U.S. command," a notion that Powell believed he could sell in part because of the turn of events in Iraq. The idea of a U.S.-led multinational coalition with a U.N. mandate was broached publicly for the first time on Aug. 26 by Deputy Secretary of State Armitage.

The White House was taken by surprise. "The floating of this idea was not expected by the White House," a senior administration official said. "It is very rare that an idea catches the White House by surprise, then is so quickly adopted."

Bush`s national security officials, such as Rice and deputy Stephen J. Hadley, were aware of the long-standing disagreement between the State and Defense departments on a U.N. role but did not take sides because Powell was keeping his powder dry.

Sources said White House officials were still throwing cold water on the U.N. resolution when Bush returned from Texas over the weekend. Just a few hours before Bush`s meeting with Powell, White House press secretary Scott McClellan stood at his lectern and distanced Bush from what McClellan called "one of a number of ideas," saying the United Nations was already playing the role that Bush had promised.

In fact, Armitage`s public remarks had the effect of galvanizing the military brass. It was the kind of solution -- U.N. military help under U.S. authority -- the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been seeking. "It was Armitage`s statement that gave it traction," a Pentagon official said.

Once the Joint Chiefs made their concerns known, the long-standing opposition by the civilian part of the Pentagon to a greater role for the United Nations began to crumble, allowing Powell to tell Bush he had a good consensus for the draft document he presented to Bush on Tuesday. "The Joint Chiefs are the new factor here," a senior administration official said. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently began lobbying key members of the administration to support a resolution.

Sources said there was a continued lack of receptivity, however, in the office of one of Rumsfeld`s top aides, Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. Feith and his staff "didn`t want foreign help" and argued "we can do it better than anybody else; leave us alone," a senior Pentagon official said.

Feith rejected that characterization as "made up out of whole cloth" and said yesterday that for weeks he had championed the idea of going to the United Nations.

At the same time, it was becoming obvious that the administration could not recruit enough foreign troops without U.N. support. "The U.S. had gone around knocking on just about every possible door looking for money and troops, and they got the same answer everywhere: We need some kind of a new resolution," a diplomat at the United Nations said.

"All these strands came together and reached a critical mass," the diplomat said. "The coalition authority is broke. They need bodies. The administration finally understands that you can`t have reconstruction while destruction is still going on."

While Bush finished his vacation, the State Department speeded up planning for the circulation of a resolution. At the end of August, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he had been working with Powell on a new resolution over the previous two weeks. Then, this week, Powell made the final pitch to Bush.

People close to the administration said the Joint Chiefs and Powell (a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs) did not win a bureaucratic battle as much as Rumsfeld lost one. "Rumsfeld lost credibility with the White House because he screwed up the postwar planning," said William Kristol, a conservative publisher with close ties to the administration. "For five months they let Rumsfeld have his way, and for five months Rumsfeld said everything`s fine. He wanted to do the postwar with fewer troops than a lot of people advised, and it turned out to be a mistake."

Pentagon spokesmen said there would be no official Defense Department comment for this report.

Staff writers Mike Allen, Vernon Loeb, Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin contributed to this report.



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U.S. Army military police were accompanied by U.S.-trained Iraqi police during a raid at a mosque last week.
washingtonpost.com
Loyalties In New Iraqi Police Forces Scrutinized
Bombing Heightens Criticism Of U.S. Recruitment Strategy

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A10


BAGHDAD, Sept. 3 -- U.S. and Iraqi investigators today questioned Iraqi police in connection with Tuesday`s car bomb attack on police headquarters in Baghdad, the second time in two weeks that a bombing probe has focused on the possibility that local security forces may have been responsible.

An aide to Interior Minister Nouri Badran described the questioning as routine and said it did not necessarily indicate that the bombing was an inside job. But the official added that as occupation officials seek to bolster security by recruiting more Iraqis, some of whom served in President Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party government, they increase the risk that double agents will infiltrate the police and other forces.

"Inevitably, former Baathists will be in the ranks," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Their ties may be difficult to break. This is a problem both for the Americans and for us."

U.S. administrators in Iraq have repeatedly said that long-term security depends on quickly reconstituting Iraq`s security services and army. U.S. military officials said today that Iraqi police are accompanying American forces on raids against suspected guerrilla hide-outs and sometimes leading the way on search, seizure and arrest operations.

The United States is also building an armed Interior Ministry force to help in its fight against anti-occupation militants. By Saturday, the so-called Civil Defense Battalions will reach 5,000 in strength, the Iraqi official said.

The need to quickly find skilled fighters and intelligence agents, however, has forced the Americans to dip into the ranks of units closely associated with Hussein. Some civil defense recruits, for example, have been drawn from elite units of the disbanded Iraqi army.

The Interior Ministry will also command a domestic intelligence network made up largely of secret police and intelligence agents from the ousted government. "These, of course, were all Baathists," the Iraqi official said. "You couldn`t work in intelligence without party membership. It helped to be enthusiastic."

Although U.S. officials insist that their security recruits, including the police, are all thoroughly screened, Iraqi political leaders say that they should be involved in the selection because they know best whom to choose and whom to reject.

The issue of who recruits and controls Iraqi security forces has been at the heart of a struggle between the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which administers the country, and the Governing Council, an assembly of 25 Iraqis formed to oversee the transition to an elected government.

"We are not completely happy with the way recruitment has been handled," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The group`s leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, an influential Shiite Muslim cleric, died in a massive car bombing last Friday in the Najaf that killed at least 95 people.

"We said that the Governing Council has to be given a bigger role in recruitment. We have to keep an eye on who is going into the security services, especially those who worked for the old regime," Abdel-Mehdi said. "It should be Iraqis and Iraqi political forces recruiting members of a national service that will work with the CPA, not the CPA recruiting Iraqis for itself."

Iraq`s Shiite majority is especially sensitive about the role of Baath Party members in the Interior Ministry. Hussein`s secret police and intelligence agencies brutally repressed the Shiites` political aspirations, and Abdel-Mehdi expressed particular concern about a return of former Hussein loyalists to domestic spying. "This is very dangerous. What`s the point of overthrowing Saddam Hussein if this instrument is going to be revived? It might be easier for the Americans, but it could be hard on us," he said.

Abdel-Mehdi said that despite emotions aroused by Hakim`s assassination, his group had no plans to mobilize its Badr Brigade militia to secure the cities of Najaf and Karbala, both of which have shrines holy to Shiites. Rather, he said, the group will continue to lobby the occupation authority to create a special 2,000-member force to patrol sensitive religious areas.

Badr Brigade members were prominent at the massive funeral procession for Hakim on Tuesday, but Abdel-Mehdi said it was just a one-time revival and did not signal a new policy.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said today that with Iraqis still incapable of securing the country, U.S. forces would play the primary role in law enforcement, peacekeeping and anti-guerrilla warfare for months to come.

"Our coalition efforts have been marked with blood, sweat and tears," Sanchez said. "We must make no mistake that, in some parts of the country, we are fighting a low-intensity conflict."

Sanchez spoke at a ceremony marking the formal transfer of peacekeeping duties in parts of southern Iraq from U.S. Marines to Polish commanders. The Poles will head a multinational force of 9,000 troops that will include units from Spain, Ukraine, Thailand, Romania, Mongolia, Latvia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, the Philippines and Nicaragua.

The Marines will remain in charge of Najaf for at least two more weeks because of tensions over the Hakim assassination.



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Poll: Opposition to U.S. Policy Grows in Europe


By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A15


LONDON, Sept. 3 -- European disapproval of U.S. foreign policy has soared during the past year, with strong majorities in France, Germany, Italy and Britain condemning the Bush administration`s handling of foreign affairs, while support within the United States for those policies has increased, according to a public opinion survey released today.

The poll, which surveyed a total of 8,000 people on both sides of the Atlantic, also found that large majorities -- 83 percent in the United States and 79 percent in Europe -- agreed that Europeans and Americans have different social and cultural values.

Majorities in six of the seven European countries surveyed, which also included the Netherlands, Poland and Portugal, said they disapproved of the way President Bush was handling international policy. The exception was Poland, where 58 percent of those surveyed supported Bush`s policies. Overall, 64 percent of Europeans disapproved, up from 56 percent a year ago.

A similar percentage of Europeans condemned the war in Iraq as not worth the loss of life and other associated costs, while 55 percent of Americans said it was worth it. Just 45 percent of Europeans believe that it is desirable for the United States to exert strong leadership in world affairs, down from 64 percent a year ago.

The results capped a traumatic year for U.S.-European relations in which the leaders of France, Germany and Russia took a high-profile stance in opposing the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq and thwarted American and British efforts to win a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing military action.

"Americans and Europeans are still friends, but Europeans are more likely to be critical both of Bush administration foreign policy in general, and of the Iraq war in particular," concluded the authors of the survey, which was conducted in June and was sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonprofit group seeking to foster U.S.-European cooperation, and the Compagnia di San Paolo, a private law foundation based in Turin, Italy.

The poll found that Europeans and Americans shared similar views in identifying the biggest threats to global security: international terrorism, North Korea`s and Iran`s access to weapons of mass destruction , Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. But they sharply disagreed over the use of military force to deal with global threats. About 84 percent of Americans said war may be used to achieve justice, while only 48 percent of Europeans agreed.

And 78 percent of Europeans and 67 percent of Americans said U.S. unilateralism posed a possible international threat over the next 10 years.

Both sides supported strengthening the United Nations, but 57 percent of Americans were prepared to bypass the world organization when vital interests were at stake, while only about 40 percent of Europeans said they would do so.

Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund, said the results suggested that European anger, while focused on the Bush administration, went deeper. "There is a Bush style that really does drive Europeans up a wall," Kennedy said. "But would it go away if a Democrat took over the White House tomorrow? Frankly I don`t think so. The poll suggests that Bush`s policies are pretty well in sync with American public opinion. If you had a Democrat, they would still have to work basically within those kinds of public constraints. The policies that annoy most Europeans would still be there."

The poll reported that Europeans want to see the European Union become a superpower but said they wanted it to cooperate with, rather than compete against, the United States. At the same time, a sizeable majority of Europeans do not want the EU to drastically increase defense spending.

Public opinion in the seven European countries was less favorable toward the United States than it was a year ago, according to the poll, which used a "thermometer index" of 0 (very cold) to 100 (very warm). It found that France had the largest drop in warmth toward the United States -- down from 60 degrees a year ago to 50. The decline was reciprocated across the Atlantic, with a drop from 55 to 45 toward France among Americans.

At the same time, the poll reported, 77 percent of Americans said they wanted their country to be engaged in the world -- a 50-year high.

Even in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded a reluctant public and House of Commons to participate in the war in Iraq, 57 percent said they disapproved of Bush`s foreign policy.

The biggest internal change from last year`s survey occurred in Germany, the poll found. A year ago Germans seemed uncertain about their global role and about whether Europe or the United States was their natural partner. That ambiguity has faded, with 82 percent of those surveyed saying that Germany must play an active part in world affairs, and 70 percent believing that the EU should become a superpower -- sizeable increases in both figures.



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Back to the United Nations




Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A20


PRESIDENT BUSH`s decision to return to the United Nations for a new mandate and greater assistance in Iraq is an important step toward overcoming the growing difficulties of an occupation authority the administration unwisely sought to dominate. A Security Council resolution won`t stop the attacks on U.S. soldiers by remnants of Saddam Hussein`s regime or the terrorist bombings aimed at blocking Iraq`s political reconstruction. Nor will it turn on lights and air conditioning in Baghdad and Basra. But it should, if skillfully pursued by the administration, allow countries that until now have watched from the sidelines -- ranging from Turkey, India and Pakistan to Germany and France -- to contribute tens of thousands of additional troops and billions in badly needed funding. It could also undo some of the damage of the prewar international debate and allow the United States to forge an international coalition capable of pursuing the broader goals in the Middle East that both Mr. Bush and European leaders say they support: increasing democratization, decreasing support for terror and peace between Israel and its neighbors. Whether they supported or opposed the war, each of the world`s great democracies now has a vital interest in stabilizing Iraq under a representative government; all stand to lose if the country is plunged into chaos or seized by another extremist regime.

It remains to be seen whether prewar U.S. adversaries such as France, Germany and Russia will now act in that larger interest or continue seeking to punish the Bush administration and its European allies. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters yesterday that his first contacts with Security Council members were "positive"; but it should be remembered that the prewar breach in the transatlantic alliance was as much due to the arrogance and unilateralism of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as it was to that of the Bush administration. Excessive concessions to the demand of those countries for "U.N. control" in Iraq could make a bad situation worse. It would be wrong, for example, to slow or reverse the assumption of authority by the Iraqi Governing Council or the speedy recruitment of Iraqi police and security forces.

Still, the draft resolution being circulated by the administration yesterday appeared to offer a reasonable basis for an agreement. The resolution would give U.N. sanction to a multinational force under "unified" -- meaning American -- command, a formula already endorsed by Secretary General Kofi Annan. At the same time it would give the Security Council a decisive role in the political transition by inviting the Iraqi Governing Council to present it with a plan and a timetable for a political transition. If asked by the Iraq council, the United Nations could help establish and oversee the electoral process -- a role that could reassure Iraqis suspicious of purely American management. A separate fund for reconstruction could be established, managed with the help of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to receive international aid donations.

At best, the new U.N. process could give the occupation a vital boost of manpower and money -- and perhaps a second wind of cooperation from Iraqis, whose toleration for the U.S. regime is dangerously attenuated. But it cannot be a substitute for new Iraqi leadership or for a renewed American commitment. The arrival of fresh foreign troops cannot become an excuse for U.S. withdrawals -- the forces now in Iraq will be needed as long as there is a military threat from Iraqi guerrillas and terrorists. Nor can the administration and Congress responsibly avoid a commitment of many more billions for Iraqi reconstruction, over and above military costs. As Mr. Bush finally acknowledged last week, postwar Iraq is "a massive undertaking" in which vital U.S. interests are at stake. A new U.N. mandate might make the challenge more manageable, and success more likely -- and yet this country must still prepare for a difficult, expensive and prolonged effort.



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Iran: Time for Europe to Lead


By Robert M. Kimmitt

Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A21


As the second anniversary of Sept. 11 draws near, Europe and the United States remain at odds on a common approach toward Iraq, both because Europe has not developed a unified position and because the United States insists on a position of continuing primacy. By contrast, with regard to nearby Iran, there is already a common and urgent objective both within Europe and between Europe and the United States to halt Tehran`s effort to acquire a nuclear capability. To achieve that objective, Europe should now step forward, and the United States should step back, even though neither side is instinctively inclined to do so.

While there is debate between Europe and the United States about the nature of Iran`s leadership and its brutal repression of its own people, there is no debate about the fact that Iran is embarked on a path toward obtaining nuclear weapons. In contrast to its efforts in Iraq, the U.N.`s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been widely viewed as effective in detailing Iranian efforts to develop a nuclear capability. Just recently IAEA inspectors reported finding evidence of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear facility south of Tehran. This finding prompted Iran`s foreign minister to declare that Iran was prepared to "enter negotiations on the additional protocol," which would permit broader IAEA access to Iranian facilities, though it would also buy time for Iran to accelerate its clandestine program.

Though its interests are directly implicated, the ability of the United States to influence events in Iran is more limited than ever. Not only has the United States had little contact with Iran in nearly a quarter-century, it is also still the "Great Satan," opposition to which provides the radical theocracy with both a major element of its claimed legitimacy and a major weapon to use against any true reformer who would suggest an opening to the United States.

Europe, on the other hand, has had diplomatic relations with the leadership in Tehran for over two decades, and there is a growing trade relationship of importance to both sides, but especially to Iran. For some European countries, especially Germany, ties with Iran and, earlier, Persia go back centuries, especially in the area of academic exchange.

To the surprise of many of its detractors in the United States, Europe`s policy of "critical dialogue" with Iran has recently become more keenly focused on the dangers posed by Iran`s nuclear activities and aspirations. This sharpening of approach has been hastened by Europe`s growing concern about the parallel acceleration of Iran`s missile development program.

Led by Germany, and on its own initiative rather than in response to U.S. pressure, Europe should publicly announce a policy under which it will not allow its companies to trade with a nuclear Iran, will not provide other than humanitarian financial support to a nuclear Iran and, in the World Bank and other international financial institutions, will vote against all but basic-needs projects for a nuclear Iran.

If Europe goes this route, it should also take the lead in securing consensus for a similar G-8 statement, thus bringing Japan and Russia, both important trading partners for Iran, into the fold. Given his country`s unique ties to both Israel and Iran, this initiative presents a special opportunity for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder when he speaks at the United Nations later this month on the occasion of Germany`s 30th anniversary as a U.N. member.

Visible American support for this European leadership initiative could also help encourage Europe to respond more positively to current U.S. requests regarding Iraq and on blacklisting Hamas. Politically, it is always easier to respond positively in one area if one`s initiative in another area is taken seriously.

Regarding Hamas and Mideast peace, the United States and Europe should move beyond yet another disagreement on the merits of Israeli and Palestinian positions and agree instead that there is no real chance for peace without strong actions against supporters of regional terrorism. Europe could play a decisive role in making clear to Iran (and Syria) that Europe cannot have normal relations with countries that sponsor and harbor groups dedicated to undermining the search for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In return for this public declaration and subsequent actions by Europe, the United States should consider a closer consultative relationship with Europe on its road map and other plans and activities in the Mideast.

This series of steps on both sides could help ease transatlantic frictions, reinvigorate the common war against terrorism, and produce Europe`s first comprehensive (Levant to Gulf) Mideast initiative, including more active support of the peace process, expanded participation in Iraq and a strong, proactive role on Iran. Most important, the initiative would be based on European leadership, which is an essential -- yet now missing -- element of a healthy transatlantic relationship.

The writer was undersecretary of state and ambassador to Germany in the first Bush administration. He will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion at 11 a.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.




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Will the U.N. Really Help?


By Peter D. Feaver

Thursday, September 4, 2003; Page A21


President Bush has reportedly decided to try to give the United Nations more control over the coalition in Iraq. The hope is this will increase the willingness of other countries to shoulder the financial and military burden of reestablishing security there and building a stable, representative Iraqi government.

This may indeed be the best of a bad set of choices. The United States desperately needs more troops to send to Iraq, at a minimum to relieve those units already deployed there when their rotation comes due in a few months. Efforts to secure meaningful commitments outside the U.N. framework have been disappointing and are essentially exhausted. A greater U.N. role may well be the only way to persuade other states to join.

In taking this move, the Bush administration is making a large concession to its critics both domestically and abroad, who have been harping for a greater U.N. role. Thus far, however, those critics have largely invoked the U.N. as a matter of theological commitment, without making a persuasive case for how it could really help. In the next few months, we will see whether there is more to the U.N. option than a knee-jerk preference for the reassuring rhetoric of multilateralism or whether the critics have simply avoided dealing with six tough questions a larger U.N. role raises.

First, do other countries really want to provide sizable pots of money and substantial numbers of high-quality troops, and will they do so in a hurry once an appropriate U.N. cover is established? It`s just as likely that most countries are reluctant to do either, and that they have hidden behind the absence of a U.N. mandate to cover their understandable desire to stay as far away from the conflict in Iraq as possible.

Second, will any troops and money that are provided be additions, or will they merely be one-for-one replacements by the United States, itself eager to reduce a burden? This points to one of the more dishonest arguments in the partisan debate over Iraq. If the situation in Iraq is really as dire as critics maintain, there is no way to reduce the U.S. burden in the short run. All new aid must be added to the commitments the United States is already making.

Third, will U.N.-provided troops be able to handle the quasi-guerrilla war environment in Iraq? For that matter, when is the last time the United Nations did a quasi-guerrilla war well? Its supporters regularly point to the ongoing Bosnia and Kosovo missions as examples of how the U.N. (deputizing NATO) can handle difficult peacekeeping missions. But the current (mixed) success in Bosnia and Kosovo came after five years of quasi-combat during which the U.N. was a disaster. Bush critics studiously avoid discussing a more apt analogy, Somalia -- a nation-building mission that was actively opposed by at least one well-armed militia. In that case, the U.N. was largely a failure. The United States is, of course, counting on a U.N.-NATO operation to run Afghanistan, but it is too early to tell whether that will work. The plain truth is the U.N. does old-fashioned peacekeeping rather well, and neocolonial nation-building fairly well, but only when those missions are not significantly challenged by local militarized groups. If the critics are right that the problem in Iraq is security, then the UN is probably not the vehicle for addressing it.

Fourth, will the U.N. mandate really provide more internal and external legitimacy? A U.N.-run mission might have greater external legitimacy -- meaning Parisians would like the Iraq mission a bit more -- but let`s not pretend it will really change how the world views the Iraq situation: It will still blame the United States for everything that goes wrong in Iraq, and perhaps rightly so. At the same time, the bomb that destroyed the U.N. headquarters also destroyed the myth that the U.N. would provide meaningful internal legitimacy. Those who are opposing U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq will oppose everybody else`s efforts too.

Fifth, has anyone seriously addressed the downside of importing Security Council vetoes into the management of Iraq? Many of the current problems in Iraq owe to planning mistakes that derived from the veto-bound interagency system within the United States. It is hard to see how inviting more vetoes into the management will help.

Sixth, has anyone proposed a coherent plan for taking steps that the current U.S.-led coalition is not already taking? All the practical suggestions critics propose -- increase the Iraqi role, seal the border, rebuild basic services as fast as possible and so on -- are being pursued by L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition. Transferring control to the U.N. would not hasten these steps; it might even slow them.

Still, there are two reasons to be optimistic about Iraq, and even about increasing the U.N.`s role there. Iraq is probably a must-win mission for the United Nations; the failure of its members to reach a consensus in the spring of 2003 pushed it to the brink of irrelevancy. If it finally steps up to the plate in Iraq and then fails again, it will largely lose its role as an arbiter of major global security challenges. Even more, Iraq is a must-win mission for the Bush administration, which clearly appreciates the electoral implications and is taking drastic steps to improve the prospects there. We can only hope members of the U.N. also understand the gravity of the situation.

The writer is a professor of political science at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion

at 12:30 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.



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The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
Auch heute wieder frische Ware. 62 Toons aus amerikanischen Federn. Denkt an die IQ-Warnung für Nannsen(Rep)

http://www.flu-ent.com/graveyard/20030903__062toons.htm

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Nice war - here`s the bill
Donald Hepburn NYT
Thursday, September 4, 2003

Costs in Iraq

TAPPAN, New York In 1991, America`s so-called Operation Tin Cup got enough money from its allies to cover the costs of the Gulf War. In contrast, what could be called "Operation Begging Bowl" after the latest war in Iraq has come up empty, leaving the United States stuck with the bill for the invasion and occupation - the full extent of which is only now becoming apparent.

The Bush administration`s recent willingness to consider a greater United Nations role on the ground is the first sign that it is aware of how vastly mistaken its assertions about the occupation were.

Contrary to the prewar view that Iraq`s oil revenues would greatly offset American costs, we now know that Iraq - with its shattered economy, devastated oil industry and plundered national wealth - is incapable of making any significant reimbursement of the invasion and occupation costs. And the military expense is only a fraction of the cost of making Iraq into a functioning country.

So, how much is this experiment in nation-building going to cost the American taxpayer? First, let`s consider what has already been spent.

According to the Pentagon, the cost of preparation, aid to noncombatant allies and the invasion itself amounted to $45 billion. Then there is the much-bandied "billion dollars a week" phrase, which seems an accurate estimate of military expenses since the end of serious fighting in May. Assuming a five-year occupation, that`s about $300 billion.

But these familiar figures are only part of the story. First, as these are borrowed funds, they are already incurring interest charges. More important, according to material released by American officials, the United States must meet an estimated $5 billion in initial humanitarian aid and $8 billion in Iraqi government salaries, as well as about $7 billion for repairs to public utilities and to restore vital services over the next two years.

In addition, Iraq is buried under a mountain of foreign debt - roughly $350 billion. These debts will have to be paid off eventually.

It will also most likely cost $3 billion to resettle nearly one million Iraqi refugees who are returning from exile (there are also an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who were displaced within the country and will need aid to rebuild their communities).

Ordinarily, assistance could be expected to come through United Nations and nongovernmental groups, but in this case the diplomatic difficulties surrounding the invasion leave the situation unsettled.

Still, the biggest problem facing Iraq is that after decades of corruption, economic stagnation and declining productivity, it faces at least a decade`s worth of reconstruction and improvements. This will include rebuilding ports, farms, roads, telecommunications systems, power plants, hospitals and water systems, as well as introducing a medical benefit plan, a national pension scheme, and new laws for foreign investment and intellectual property rights.

The country needs a revised criminal code and judiciary system, a new tax code and collection system, and an electoral voting system with appropriate technology. Using postwar American and United Nations estimates for these and many other tasks, the total bill is likely to be at least $200 billion over a decade.

Iraq will need long-term loans from the World Bank, the United Nations Iraq Development Fund, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Arab Development Fund, the European Union Aid Program and others.

Yet few of these organizations will be keen to make loans until Iraq has a new constitution and an elected government that has put in place effective legal, arbitration, banking and fiscal systems.

Let`s face it, rebuilding Iraq is going to be far more expensive than Americans have been led to believe. Just as it seems inevitable that concessions must be made to get other countries to relieve the burden on American troops, now is the time for the United States to mend fences with the United Nations and its allies to relieve the burden on American taxpayers as well.

The writer, former chief executive of Bahrain Petroleum Co., is an adviser to the Middle East Policy Council.

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/108724.html

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THE WORLD



Thrust Onto the Throne of an Iraqi District
U.S. Army captain finds it hard to satisfy nearly anyone in his role as overseer of 100 blocks.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer

September 4, 2003

BAGHDAD — U.S. Army Capt. Joe Ewers came to Iraq expecting to chase down Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, but it didn`t work out that way. He`s been thrust into the role of civil administrator and is finding it a tougher, more complex and thankless job than he ever imagined.

Ewers, 31, wields considerable military power as an armored company commander in control of a 100-block zone of downtown Baghdad. It was assigned to him by his 1st Armored Division. His 14 Bradley armored personnel carriers rumble through the streets of the capital two or three times a day.

When he is not displaying American military might, he becomes the near-absolute ruler of 300,000 Iraqis who live in his district, a role he is not sure he is up to. In this capacity he is responsible for enforcing bans on sidewalk sales of liquor and contraband gas, responding to emergency police calls, making sewage station repairs and countless other tasks.

His most daunting task is promoting and forming Baghdad`s embryonic democracy. He recruits and directs two neighborhood advisory councils that are viewed by the U.S.-led administration of Iraq as the building blocks of the country`s future elected government.

Ewers has found democracy to be a hard sell in a country accustomed to repression and state-sponsored mayhem. That and the difficulties he has had meeting residents` expectations in administering his densely populated patch of Baghdad say much about the obstacles ahead as Iraq lurches from dictatorship to democracy.

"No one trusts anyone. It`s all about themselves," Ewers said. "Now all of a sudden they have to obey laws because it`s the right thing to do and because they should take some societal responsibility."

But the Iraqi "civic character" is atrophied by years of fear and mistrust and will take years to rehabilitate, Ewers said.

Half the 50 merchants, teachers and professionals he approached about joining his two groups refused for fear of reprisal from Hussein loyalists. Even after getting enough volunteers to form the councils, his efforts to sell the members on the benefits of joint decisions for the common good met with blank stares.

"How a free government works was second nature to me, but to them it was like an obscure mathematical proof," Ewers said. "They wanted me to decide things for them."

Council member Mohammed Rubayai said fear was justified, that he was constantly threatened by neighborhood thugs who call him a spy for the Americans. "We are trying to prove to our people that the United States is bringing positive changes, something good to the people," Rubayai said.

The neighborhood councils are slowly progressing. The group representing the Karada district of Baghdad is now "self-directed," Ewers says. The agenda at a night meeting last week included items such as parking problems and public drunkenness. Ewers promised that his soldiers would enforce the ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages by street vendors and would increase after-curfew patrols of market areas in response to council complaints about security. He declined to authorize an armed neighborhood watch.

There are some things he can`t fix right away.

One of the council`s demands is that Ewers evict squatters who have occupied the hundreds of apartments in the zone abandoned by the families of Republican Guard and Baath Party members. The squatters cause public disorder, and many disobey the U.S. military`s ban on public firing of weapons in the air, said Suham Abdel Ameer, one of three female council members.

Ewers agreed it was a problem, saying 80 people in Baghdad were killed by celebratory arms fire after Hussein`s two sons were slain in Mosul in July.

But evicting squatters creates another problem Ewers can`t solve: where to put the displaced families. The U.S.-led administration has announced plans for a camp for displaced people but has not yet built it, Ewers said. An order from battalion headquarters to evict people from one house in the zone was rescinded after the captain arrived to find 80 people living there, "at least half of them under the age of 10 — I couldn`t just put them out on the street."

Residents in his zone also demand that he restore electricity and water — which Ewers is in no position to do. But he understands their impatience. "Public services need to be established before anyone here feels indebted to society," Ewers said.

"I can shift combat power around the zone at the drop of a hat. What I can`t do is control the power grid or make more millions of barrels of oil be produced in the country. I can`t do a lot of infrastructure things," he said. "But no matter how many times I explain, they keep asking."

Ewers and his men recently delivered 80 desks, doors, windows, ventilation fans and lamps to the looted Al Ewiya primary school, the first recipient of his battalion`s Operation Wisdom school aid project.

Headmistress Jahan Salim Janabi gave Ewers a rare gift: a thank you.

"Capt. Ewers has a nice smile and a nice way of dealing with people," Janabi said. "As we in Iraq say, he entered my heart without any permission."

Others of the neighborhood council, who were present for the presentation, weren`t as grateful. Fauzi Nassani complained that the student desks were flimsy, a point he demonstrated by standing on one bench until it broke, an embarrassing moment for the young captain.

"You should ask us to get information on contractors before you award this kind of work. You pay for top quality and you have been cheated," Nassani said.

Ewers barely contained his ire toward Nassani. "I am not smiling. I don`t think that was necessary at all," he said. But he later persuaded the contractor to reinforce the desks.

In a city deeply distrustful of the local police force, Ewers unwillingly also has become the go-to guy when there is a law enforcement problem. He is sympathetic. He describes the new Baghdad police force, which the U.S. Army is training, as brutal, corrupt and "a bunch of pansies afraid to put themselves in the line of fire."

Ewers admits that he enjoys the responsibility that the Army has heaped upon him.

He was a troubled Cincinnati youth who joined the Army at 17 to "grow up." He fought on the front lines of Desert Storm. He found that he liked military life, combat and being depended upon.

His superiors took note. He was one of 150 enlisted men and women in 1992 invited to attend the one-year West Point Preparatory School course for admission to the military academy. He later graduated in the top 10% of his class at West Point.

His is the face of the evolving U.S. occupation force here, one that will last longer and be much more complex than Ewers and his fellow soldiers expected.

"I am the monarch of the zone. It`s a burden in many ways, but the weight of having a lot of authority rests on us to do the right thing," Ewers said.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL



Iraq Mire Is a Global Issue

September 4, 2003

After months of arrogant defiance, the Bush administration finally is turning to the United Nations for help with the Iraqi occupation. Bush officials must seize this fleeting moment to revise their dismissive, haphazard approach to postwar Iraq and instead press a U.N. resolution to bring in international forces and the global community to turn around a situation that drifts, by the day, toward disaster.

The longer the occupation goes on, the clearer it has become that Bush officials, who took down Saddam Hussein with alacrity, assumed that rebuilding Iraq would be easy. A new, classified study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff finds hasty, inadequate Iraq planning.

With the Congressional Budget Office stating that the United States can maintain its current level of 140,000 or so troops only until March, the administration`s turn to the U.N. indicates that it is coming to grips with the decaying realities in Iraq. Water, power and especially security — the basics of any nation-rebuilding — still are badly lacking, and an increasingly lethal resistance grows.

The four areas of the U.S.-proposed resolution offer a good start, including calling for efforts by the United Nations, the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi Governing Council and Cabinet to create a democratically elected Iraqi government and to accelerate reconstruction. But the administration should consider more. It should formally ask the U.N. to take over politically in Iraq; it should maintain its military forces and financial commitments under this plan, which also would bring in at least 100,000 non-American troops to help stabilize Iraq.

Especially important is getting Indian and Pakistani troops, many of them Muslims; this would diminish the overwhelming U.S. presence, which only feeds religious and nationalistic tensions, says Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander in Iraq. Reps. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) want the president to include as many troops as possible from the already overtaxed and reluctant NATO countries.

The Iraq reconstruction, of course, will cost the world dearly, U.S. taxpayers especially so. Which is why the administration, while shifting its stance on the U.N. and Iraq, is past due in providing Americans with a full, clear accounting of the price of and plan for the Iraq campaign, which has an estimated cost of $1 billion a week. Congress no longer can sit by and accept whatever the administration deigns to tell it, especially with this nation facing a $500-billion deficit in 2004.

With more than 300 U.S. deaths and many thousands of Iraqi and international casualties, the gravity of the U.S. incursion in one of the globe`s most unstable regions only deepens. Bush officials assured the nation that this involvement was vital to U.S. interests and that America`s best intention was to bring peace to Iraq, and perhaps then to the whole Mideast.

That U.S. commitment will be excruciating to fulfill, would be hugely damaging to back track on. And like it or not, quelling the chaos in Iraq has become a mission in which the international community suddenly has a huge stake. The U.S. and peace-minded nations can`t leave Baghdad in blazes for fear of greater calamities spreading.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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COMMENTARY



All Americans Can`t Grow Up to Be President
It`s not who you are but where you`re born that might slam the Oval Office door
By Robert B. Cox
Robert B. Cox is a financial commentator with breaking views.com in London.

September 4, 2003

On July 17, 1945, the king of Yugoslavia faced a dilemma. His son, Crown Prince Alexander II, was born that day in Suite 212 at Claridge`s Hotel in London. Yet for the heir to the throne ever to lay claim to his kingdom, just vacated by the Nazis, he had to be born on Yugoslav territory.

Luckily for King Peter II and his wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece, Winston Churchill came to the rescue. The prime minister declared the luxurious hotel room in central London a slice of Yugoslavia. As a result, when communism fell, the prince returned triumphantly to his homeland in 1991 with his title intact.

Arnold Schwarzenegger`s parents did not have the foresight, or the connections, to have their little plot in Graz, Austria, designated American soil. As a result, the weightlifting movie star is constitutionally forbidden from ever rising to the presidency of the United States. So, too, is one of his opponents in the race for the California governorship, Arianna Huffington, a columnist born in Athens — Greece, not Georgia. Ditto for Jerry Springer, the British-born celebrity talk-show host who dabbled with a U.S. Senate run in Ohio.

All that stands in their way from rising to the apex of American politics — aside from the small matter of the necessary electoral consensus — is this clause in the U.S. Constitution: "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President." These 31 words make the ultimate American dream — immigrant makes good, becomes president — unattainable.

In the interests of full disclosure, it may also technically forbid my kids from ever winning the presidency. Sam and Ethan Cox, like Arnold, Arianna and Jerry, are foreign-born — Milan and London, respectively. They aren`t immigrants — my wife, Hannah, and I are U.S. citizens, so they are too. But because we failed to prevail upon prime ministers Tony Blair and Romano Prodi to declare the operating theaters where Hannah gave birth as terra Americana, their citizenship isn`t precisely of the "natural born" variety either.

Now, setting aside whether my children — or indeed our latest celebrities-cum-politicos — are in any way qualified for higher office, this is just plain silly. It may have made sense when the founding fathers, fresh from a bloody war of independence, feared attempts by crusty European aristocrats to return the nation to monarchic rule. At least that appears to be the basis for the clause, according to Jay Wexler, a professor of law at Boston University and noted friend of the Cox children.

Wexler cites a letter to George Washington from John Jay contemporaneous with the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which Jay writes: "Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born citizen." Could it be that the prejudices of a few founders will forever subject our migrant millions — not to mention my kids — to a political glass ceiling?

Changing things would require ratification of an amendment to the Constitution by three-quarters of state legislatures. (Action movie fans may recall a fantasy-world precedent. In "Demolition Man," Sylvester Stallone`s policeman character is transported to 2026. Once there, his tour guide, played by Sandra Bullock, happens to mention the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. "Stop! He was president?" asks Stallone. "Yes. Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment," Bullock replies.)

Under normal circumstances this would be tough — we`ve only had 27 amendments in 217 years. And raising the issue now, with the very real prospect of Arnold, a Republican, taking over the world`s fifth-largest economy would provoke howls of opposition from Democrats. That`s why chez Cox backs Arianna`s bid for governor, and we would have backed Jerry`s for the Senate. We want everyone — not just Republicans — to have an interest in repealing the foreign-born exclusion.

Of course, a win for Schwarzenegger may be the best way to finally provoke a Supreme Court interpretation of the relevant clause. After all, he is a man whose movie career was based on sequels, and there is no better follow-up to "California: The Governor" than "America: The President." This would naturally lead to clarifying the question of whether someone born abroad to American parents also qualifies as "natural born."

Not that there haven`t already been tantalizing opportunities to get at least that part of the issue into the high court`s hands — for instance, when Michigan Gov. George Romney sought the Republican nomination in 1968. Romney was born to Mormon missionary parents in Mexico — inspiring one rival to dub him "Chihuahua George." But no Romney nomination meant no one pursued the constitutional question.

It was also briefly discussed in the case of similarly lost presidential causes over the years: Barry Goldwater was born in the territory of Arizona before statehood, Franklin Roosevelt Jr. was born in Canada and John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. In McCain`s case, it was pointed out that the Canal Zone was then under U.S. administration and, more important, the First Congress had approved an act that declared, "The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States."

That only helps the Cox cause, but as Wexler cautions, the Supreme Court, not Congress, is the final arbiter of the Constitution.

So what is the nation waiting for?

In a properly functioning 21st century democracy of nearly 300 million people, we ought to be capable of weeding out candidates who are wily fronts for a foreign power, a feat that might have been difficult in the late 1700s. And if we are to be the world`s model for a democratic, open society, what better way to advertise that fact than by giving any American, born anywhere in the world, a chance to occupy the White House?


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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www.sfgate.com Return to regular view
Why we must leave Iraq
Ted Lewis
Thursday, September 4, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/04/ED27…


The American military occupation in Iraq looks ever more grim as the death toll rises and bombings such as the one at the Najaf mosque last week portend a phase of expanding violence. Increasingly, Americans are questioning the strategy, goals and methods of the Bush administration`s handling of our nation`s most extensive foreign intervention since Vietnam.

Hundreds of U.S. and British troops and untold thousands of Iraqis have died since March, while poor American planning has left Iraq with intermittent electricity, no phones, water shortages and a nearly complete breakdown of public order. Such basic failures guarantee an ever more hostile environment for occupiers, humanitarian workers and any Iraqis who assist them.

Millions of Americans publicly demonstrated against war and occupation. We warned that pre-emptive war based on exaggerations and deception of the American public destabilize Iraq and lead to a draining occupation, gross misspending of our national treasure and potentially serve as a recruiting ground and target gallery for all types of anti-American warriors. When we asked for genuine national debate about the consequences of war, Bush neocons, mainstream pundits and even Washington Democrats dismissed us as unrealistic and unrepresentative rabble.

It is too bad the voices of restraint were right.

President Bush`s version was prettier: a tyrant vanquished; Americans embraced; Iraqis put aside age-old grievances, uniting to practice democracy under American free-market rules; Palestinians and Israelis sheathe their swords; dispirited terrorists throw in the towel from Afghanistan to Bali and an unstoppable wave of democracy sweeps the region, deposing despotic rulers in an orderly, pro-American way.

The painful truth is that the Bush dream for the Middle East has become the region`s nightmare. It would be all too easy for those of us who opposed the war to say "I told you so" and turn away as Bush slides into the pit that he has dug for himself. But we cannot turn away, because our entire nation is in danger of slipping into the pit along with him. We must work together to restore our pride and unity as a nation as well as our reputation with neighbors around the world.

America`s greatest strength lies in using leadership that seeks to inspire, not dominate. This is where Bush has it all wrong. While Bush overuses our finite military resources to enforce our will in remote lands, he does little to call forth the infinite creativity, goodwill and generosity of the American people and their inclination to befriend other peoples -- which is, in the long run, our first and strongest line of defense against violence and terrorism.

Leaving Iraq won`t be simple. The United States promised many things to many people. Sudden withdrawal could throw the Iraqi people from the frying pan into the fire. Yet U.S. occupiers have already blown a priceless opportunity to win the confidence of many ordinary Iraqis who were initially willing to believe that the clever new American rulers could provide them a better life. Now, with our credibility in tatters, common sense dictates that we must:

Leave Iraq sooner rather than later. The more swiftly we turn over responsibility for the job of rebuilding Iraq to an international body, the better. Rapid pullback from Iraq and handover of administrative authority to an international transition force does not represent the "retreat" before terror that Bush says will lead to more attacks on U.S. soil. Rather, it represents the best of the bad options left to us by the anti-democratic decisions of the Bush administration.

Contribute financially to both an international stabilization force and the urgent reconstruction of Iraq. An independent peacekeeping force will more likely succeed than one seen as an appendage of the U.S. occupation army.

Restore alliances with key democracies in Europe and around the globe. We need to rebuild our credibility as a global partner and coalition-builder, not the unilateralist of imperial bent.

When we lead in matters of justice, human rights, environmental stewardship and control of deadly illnesses, we acquire life-long allies and enhance our collective prospects of surviving. Kicking in doors at midnight in Fallujah, Ramadi and Babylon just turns innocent youth into deadly enemies.

Ted Lewis of Global Exchange traveled to Iraq in July to help establish the Iraq Occupation Watch (www.occupationwatch.org).

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Your tax dollars at work
Ruth Rosen
Thursday, September 4, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/04/ED69…


ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER likes to complain that he`s taxed every minute of the day, from the moment he awakens until the second he falls asleep.

It`s an entertaining riff, guaranteed to make you laugh and designed to convince you that our sinister government steals your hard-earned money.

But his litany of taxes conveniently ignores all the invisible government services and regulations that have raised our standard of living. Follow me through a typical day and I`ll show you what I mean:

I wake up and brush my teeth with water whose purity is inspected by government agencies. I pour some cereal and milk into a bowl. No creepy crawlers appear; both are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federally mandated labels on the cereal box and milk container, moreover, list the ingredients contained inside.

I leave home and in the middle of the street intersection are city workers doing routine maintenance on the sewer system before the arrival of the winter storms. I get in my car, reassured that the smog device recently passed the state`s stringent test. On the way to the BART station, I look across the bay and see a breathtaking view of the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge. When I first arrived in California, before the state enacted stricter pollution controls, a brownish haze masked such magnificent vistas.

As I drive, I slow down for city workers fixing potholes and then I pass the public library where I do research. I stop at lights and signs that regulate traffic and keep drivers from hitting all the kids walking to public schools. I park and walk to BART, financed with public money. Although I grumble a great deal and wish BART worked better, I`m glad we have public transit. From the window of the train, I see cars stuck in a traffic jam on an interstate freeway funded by the federal government.

Once at work, I turn on my computer. I seldom remember that a Pentagon agency created the Internet or that the federal government subsidized the development of the chips that now drive my desktop.

To complete some research, I call a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the world`s premier public university. The UC system has educated hundreds of thousands of undergraduates who, as educated and skilled workers, have energized our economy. I also speak with an expert from the California state health department and an inmate at a state prison -- both funded by the people of California.

After several hours of writing, I now have a headache. So I take some ibuprofen, tested and approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

It`s time for lunch, so a colleague and I go out for a sandwich. We don`t even think about the hygiene regulations or public health inspections that allow us to enjoy eating in a restaurant without worrying about getting sick from contaminated food.

On the way back to work, we see police officers dealing with a car accident and hear the shrill siren of a fire truck racing toward some emergency. We stop to shop at a corner convenience store that`s prohibited by law from selling liquor and tobacco to minors.

I`ve only described half my day, but you get the idea. We all take for granted the public services and regulations that contribute to what we once quaintly described as "the common good."

The Republican mantra -- "shrink government and lower taxes" -- is fundamentally dishonest. They would have us believe that we are heavily taxed by an oppressive government and get nothing in return. But the fact is, California ranks 19th of all 50 states and our quality of life is far safer and more convenient and pleasant too because of government ordinances, regulations and inspections.

So when you next hear Schwarzenegger repeat how often he`s taxed, remember how many times, during a single day, you see your tax dollars at work.

E-mail Ruth Rosen at [e-mail].

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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September 3, 2003 CONTRIBUTOR ARCHIVES
The Republican French-English Dictionary

A BUZZFLASH READER SATIRE
by Tom Cato

Dear Buzz,

What with these Republicans cleansing our language of French words, pretty soon we`ll be speaking Anglo-Saxon, which is probably what they want.

Still, with all these new words like "freedom fries," it`s getting harder for us to communicate. I hope this dictionary helps the people understand their rulers better and contributes to the spirit of bipartisanship.

click image for complete dictionary as PDF

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/09/03_french.html

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UN role won`t fix the US mess in Iraq
By William Pfaff, 9/4/2003

PARIS

THE BUSH administration and its supporters continue to react to the deteriorating situation in Iraq with shock and denial. Denial is to be expected from the intellectual authors of the war, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld (leaving aside our phantom vice president, Richard Cheney).

It is less easily understood from those in the opposition who, like the administration, are taking refuge in remedies that have little chance of being adopted, such as placing the occupation under nominal UN authority, with the United States still in charge.

US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage says the Bush administration is "considering" a US-commanded multinational force endorsed by the United Nations.

The idea is that India, Turkey, Germany, and even France would send troops to Iraq for a UN-approved occupation -- still under US command -- allowing part of the American force to be rotated out.

With such an arrangement, it is thought, the governments convoked to a donors conference in October would make financial pledges to reconstruction, which L. Paul Bremer, head of the occupation authority, says will cost "several tens of billions" of dollars.

International agreement to a force under Security Council political control is imaginable but currently irrelevant; the Bush administration has no intention of yielding authority over Iraq`s occupation and reconstruction or over the nature of such political institutions as may eventually emerge.

The administration may, of course, find these ambitions turn to dust, as did its illusions about how cheap and easy it would be to take over Iraq (an undertaking initially promoted as self-financing or even profitable, because of Iraq`s oil).

The question about any UN solution is this: Why should countries that were opposed to the war assume responsibility for its painful consequences? Washington may be misreading the support the French, Germans, and other Europeans have given to the notion that the UN can solve the Iraq problem. The Europeans do not have in mind the same solution as Richard Armitage.

French President Jacques Chirac told his annual ambassadors` conference last week that while the risk of chaos in Iraq makes security a priority, the European Union must insist on a central role for the UN.

"The transfer of power and sovereignty to the Iraqi people themselves is the only realistic option," he said. "It must be started without delay, in the framework of a process upon which the UN alone can bestow full legitimacy." Once this framework is established, he added, the international community can make its "effective and entire contribution" to Iraq`s reconstruction, "in a way that must be defined with the Iraqis themselves."

That is not what Washington is saying. The "old European" heavyweights called on to contribute troops and reconstruction finance nonetheless are not going to agree to an arrangement that leaves the United States in effective control of Iraq.

However the politically incorrect question must be asked: Why should an occupation and reconstruction sponsored by the UN -- with or without the United States in military command -- be expected to work any better than the present unhappy arrangement?

A UN-endorsed multinational force might be politically more acceptable in Iraq, and would certainly be more acceptable to other countries -- but the primary problem today is not political acceptability but restoration of security and order.

There is no particular reason to think that a multinational or UN force could restore order and rebuild political and economic infrastructure any better (or any less worse) than Americans are doing.

The UN may not even be more acceptable politically, given that a great many in Iraq have over the last decade learned to see the United Nations as the agent of a policy of sanctions and penalties demanded by the United States.

President Chirac and others are concerned for the plight of the Iraqi people. This is a worthy sentiment but draws a curtain over the responsibility the Iraqis themselves bear for their present condition.

Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi leader, not some dictator imposed from the outside. Once installed, he obviously became hard to unseat. But Iraqi elites and the Iraqi people permitted him to take power, and many collaborated with him.

Any society not under massive foreign occupation has a revolutionary option. The Iraqis exercised it against their king in 1958 (as the Iranians did against their shah in 1979). The Iraqis did not exercise it against Saddam Hussein.

Iraqis themselves were also responsible for the looting and destruction that followed the war, with ruinous consequences for the country`s hospitals, civil infrastructure, and cultural institutions.

The United States invaded Iraq because it chose to describe it as a threat to the United States and to the region. It turned out to be neither. The Bush administration, like the Iraqis, now confronts the consequences of what it has done. It does not like them. Neither does anyone else.

William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/arti…

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Ramsey Clark Says America Should Pay Full Tab for Rebuilding Iraq
By Steve Brown
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
September 04, 2003

(CNSNews.com) - America is responsible for war-ravaged Iraq and should pay for its reconstruction instead of asking for help from the United Nations, according to one of the nation`s most vocal anti-war activists and former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Clark, whose off-the-cuff comments in January comparing Jesus Christ to a terrorist created a media firestorm, was in Washington, D.C., Wednesday as director of International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER). Among other things, Clark alleged that the Bush administration has lied about its "criminal war."

Clark`s biography includes a stint as U.S. attorney general during the 1960s, Vietnam era administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Wednesday, he announced that his group and a coalition of like-minded organizations would march in Washington Oct. 25 to protest the Iraq war, or what he called "George W. Bush`s Vietnam."

"Now we say to the United Nations, `Hey, you`ve got to share in this burden,`" Clark told reporters. "Well we created it. George Bush created it and we have to pay for it. Anyone who thinks that the United Nations has the skills or capacity to create security in Iraq hasn`t been around... the U.N. can`t possibly handle the situation in Iraq and the U.S. knows it perfectly well."

Citing charges from the Nuremburg trials at the end of World War II, Clark said the war in Iraq was a "crime against peace" and called for Bush`s impeachment. The U.S. government, according to Clark, cannot be trusted.

"While this government is in power it will continue its ways. It really believes it has the right to change regimes," Clark said, condemning Bush for asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, "elected in an internationally observed election," to step down. "What`s going to happen in North Korea if we don`t get some sense in the White House and in the Pentagon? Can we really trust them?"

However critics found Clark`s rhetoric unconvincing.

"Clark has been using and aiding mass murderers and other American enemies for the last 30 years. He should give it a rest," David Horowitz, syndicated columnist and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture told CNSNews.com . "What Ramsey Clark should be doing for peace is asking his buddy, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, to behave."

Referring to Clark as a "terror-hugging radical" and "Communist hack," Horowitz pointed to Clark`s ties to Marxist groups in a May 1 column.

"The current `peace` organizations like International ANSWER... are fronts for the Workers World Party -- a Marxist-Leninist vanguard that identifies with North Korea --and the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist sect," Horowitz wrote.

Clark stuck to the topic of Iraq during his comments at the National Press Club, emphasized that having the U.N. or other nations assist in rebuilding Iraq would only create further turmoil.

"We`re the ones that spend trillions of dollars on arms, we`re the ones that have millions of soldiers in arms and we can`t do it," Clark continued. "What kind of chaos do you want to create? How many Polish and Hungarian and Japanese -- God help us if the Japanese get involved -- and Germans do you want killed there? We have to pay."

Clark urged the Bush administration to set aside 10 percent of the military budget "not for Haliburton (Texas oil company) and not for friends of the White House," but as a fund to rebuild Iraq.

"U.S. companies should be barred from participating in reconstruction in Iraq because you can`t profit from a crime," Clark added.

But Jack Spencer, a senior national security analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said he suspects Clark, ANSWER and its coalition of leftist groups have ulterior motives.

"If they`re comparing Iraq to Vietnam, that says all you need to know about this group," Spencer told CNSNews.com . "They`re far more concerned with politicizing events rather than advancing American or Iraqi interests. They`re more anti-Bush than pro-Iraq."

Spencer said the Vietnam analogy was propaganda that has few, if any, roots in reality.

"They need to take another look at history. This is far from Vietnam. Everything about it is different, so that would completely undermine any credibility they are after as far as I`m concerned," Spencer said. "They`re saying this is a quagmire. This is one of those loaded terms that people like to use to criticize, when in fact this is not a quagmire. This is an ongoing operation."

A quagmire cannot be established in the 126 days since the end of major military operations in Iraq, "each of which gets better than the one before," Spencer asserted.

"There`s a lot of good news coming out of Iraq. People tend to focus on the bad news but that`s okay," Spencer said. "The fact is that an evil regime was removed and Iraq is on its way to becoming a more stable, successful country."

Listen to audio for this story.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPentagon.asp?Page=/Pentagon/archi…

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Reality in Iraq requires help


Bookman
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This has been, from its very inception, a faith-based war. It was an invasion founded on the haughty and irrational belief that the United States could accomplish anything it chose, anywhere it chose, needing no help from anyone.

The United Nations? Irrelevant wimps.

Our French and German allies? We don`t need "Old Europe."

We, the United States, held the power to shape the world to our wishes. We could in a matter of months create democracy in a land that for eons had been ruled only through brutal violence. We could defy history by invading a foreign country and yet be welcomed as liberators. Merely by a show of U.S. will, we could impose peace on Palestinians and Israelis.

And on the seventh day we could rest, before moving on to Syria, Iran and North Korea.

While many of those most fervent in that faith occupied powerful posts in the Bush administration, they remained relatively few in number. Last September, polls still showed a strong majority of Americans opposed to plans to invade and occupy Iraq.

So one year ago this week, a well-scripted media blitz was launched to scare Americans into changing their minds. With the country just days from the first anniversary of Sept. 11, the campaign was timed perfectly, and advocates of war played to our fears with shameless precision.

"We do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon," Vice President Dick Cheney claimed to NBC viewers on Sept. 8. "We`re to the point where time is not on our side."

On Fox News that day, the theme was echoed by Secretary of State Colin Powell. "I just know that time is not on our side," he said. A few channels over on CBS, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added to the chorus, warning again that "time is not on our side."

National Security Adviser Condi Rice, appearing on CNN that day, asked how long America dared to wait. After all, she said, "we don`t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," a warning of imminent danger that President Bush himself would repeat almost word for word in a televised speech to the nation a few weeks later.

As we`ve learned, the claims of "absolute certainty" of a renewed Iraqi nuclear program were false. So were the suggested links between Saddam and al-Qaida. Most damaging of all, repeated claims that our postwar occupation of Iraq would go smoothly have proved false on a spectacular scale.

That was not, however, a surprise. People may claim they can walk on water; they may even have faith they can do so. But when they end up sinking, it`s not a surprise. In this case, experts in the field -- the true believers dismissed them as "realists" -- predicted this would happen, and the realists were right.

So, now what do we do?

This week, Bush finally agreed to seek U.N. assistance in Iraq. Among other benefits, that should silence those who argue that the media have cast a falsely harsh image of how things are going. Only the prospect of true calamity could have driven the president to swallow his pride in this way and publicly ask for help.

Much depends now on two questions: How real is the president`s new humility, and how willing are other countries to help?

Bush is right to insist on American leadership of any international force in Iraq. We`re the best in the world at that role; it makes sense that we handle it.

But on matters such as reconstruction and civil governance, we have room for a great deal of flexibility. We cannot reasonably ask countries that we have recently treated with disdain to bail us out with thousands of troops and billions of dollars, while denying them any real control over how those resources would be used.

Just a year ago, 64 percent of Europeans still supported a strong U.S. presence in world affairs. Today, according to a poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund, that number has fallen to 45 percent. By our arrogance, we have squandered much of our hard-earned support around the world.

In the next few weeks, we`ll find out how high a price we`ll have to pay for that mistake.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/index.htm…
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Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.

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Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:35 a.m. EDT September 4, 2003

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
The top U.S. commander in Iraq says he needs more international forces to deal with looming security threats. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez says al-Qaida terrorists, Iranian fighters and clashes between various ethnic and religious militias could stretch his forces to the limit.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says the U.S. wants to quickly add former Iraqi soldiers to the new Iraqi security forces. He says "This is their country. They are going to have to provide security."
U.S. soldiers have killed three Iraqis who were putting a homemade bomb by the side of a road. It happened last night near a town that`s northeast of Baghdad. It`s an area where guerrillas have reportedly been placing bombs in an effort to target U.S. troops. The military says soldiers engaged the Iraqis, fired a tank round and small arms fire at their truck and destroyed it.
There`s been some intense fighting in Saddam Hussein`s hometown in northern Iraq. U.S. troops traded fire with guerrillas who lobbed at least six mortar rounds at them in downtown Tikrit. An American commander says the mortars missed their targets, causing no injuries or damage.
A U.S. patrol responding to an attack in Tikrit was ambushed with small-arms fire and rocket-fired grenades. Armored vehicles were called in. Tracer bullets lit the night sky and at least one house was set on fire. Helicopters hovered above. The U.S. commander says one attacker may have been killed, while the other insurgents vanished into the night.
U.S. troops acting on a tip raided a house in Tikrit and detained four people, including a suspected bomb-maker. They say they also seized weapons, ammo and a box of explosives.
Prime Minister Tony Blair says he`s made no decision yet on sending more British troops to Iraq. Blair`s comments at a London news conference this morning came after his defense secretary ordered a review of troops levels amid continuing security concerns. There`s also a report that Britain`s foreign secretary is recommending the deployment of an additional five thousand troops.
It`s a signal that Russia may consider getting involved in post-war Iraq. A Russian news agency says Russia may consider sending peacekeepers to Iraq as part of an international force. It quotes Russia`s defense minister as saying the decision depends on details of the resolution the United States is seeking in the United Nations for a more multinational force in Iraq.
The leaders of Germany and France are expected to focus on Iraq at an informal meeting today in Dresden, Germany. It appears unlikely they`ll give full endorsement to the United States` draft U.N. resolution seeking troops and money from all nations.
China`s foreign ministry spokesman says the U.S. offer to share Iraq`s postwar reconstruction is in line with its "objectives."
Thai troops bearing Buddha images and assault rifles have left for Iraq where they will aid in the country`s postwar reconstruction. A 21-man advance team boarded a U.S. military C5 Galaxy plane for the eight-hour flight to the Iraqi city of Karbala, where they will operate under a Polish military commander.
An Army sergeant who was accused of driving recklessly in a Humvee in Iraq when it flipped and crushed a soldier has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Twenty-five-year-old Oscar Nelson of Maryland, has been sentenced to seven years in prison.
Protesters say they`ll be back in Washington next month to oppose the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. The International coalition called ANSWER, which stands for "Act Now to Stop War and Racism," has set the march for Oct. 25. That`s the group that brought thousands of anti-war protesters to Washington in January, March and April.

CASUALTIES
A total of 286 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began. Of those, 70 have died in combat since May first, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


Heute keine Aktualisierung

09/04/03 Yahoo News
Iraqi civilian killed, 2 US soliders wounded, in suicide bombing Sept. 3rd in Al Ramadi.
09/02/03 CENTCOM confirms fatatilty
One 1st Armored Division soldier was killed and another was injured in a helicopter accident early Tuesday morning.
09/02/03 News Interactive
An American soldier was killed and another injured today in a helicopter accident near Baghdad, the army said
09/02/03 MANDATORY READING: The Washington Post
Number of Wounded in Action on Rise
09/02/03 Centcom
2 Military Police Brigade soldiers were killed and one was wounded approximately 3:19 p.m. Sept. 1 when their High-Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device along a main supply route south of Baghdad.
09/01/03 SpaceWar
14 US soldiers wounded in Iraq over weekend
The Wounded: Time Periods:
Reported by Centcom* As of 8 AM EDT, 3 Sept 2003
US troops wounded in action: 1,144
US troops wounded in non-hostile incidents 306
TOTAL US wounded in Iraq since March 20th: 1,450
*we asked the question, they replied
Tracking the Wounded

Coalition War Dead
At least 345 Coalition forces have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
294 from the US and 50 from the UK and 1 from Denmark.
http://www.pigstye.net/iraq/staticpages/index.php?page=20030…

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washingtonpost.com
France, Germany Reject U.S. Draft on Iraq


By GEIR MOULSON
The Associated Press
Thursday, September 4, 2003; 5:30 PM


DRESDEN, Germany - France and Germany refused Thursday to support a U.S. draft resolution that would spread the burden of running postwar Iraq, but said they believed a compromise was possible.

French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder demanded that Washington give the United Nations more influence in Iraq`s political future. Their stance threatened to reopen a barely healed trans-Atlantic rift over their ardent opposition to the Iraq war.

Under the draft resolution circulated Wednesday at the United Nations, Washington seeks money and troops from other countries but would not cede political or military control in Iraq.

Chirac seemed particularly critical of the U.S. initiative and was adamant that the draft foresee the United States` giving up control of the political process in Iraq. France is one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, meaning it has veto power over council actions.

Yet Chirac and Schroeder, meeting in Dresden for informal consultations, struck a conciliatory note. They said they saw a chance to negotiate a compromise at the United Nations, where talks over the draft are expected to be tough and lengthy.

Schroeder also said the proposal fell short, but welcomed it as "showing there is some movement."

"We are naturally ready to study it in the most positive manner," Chirac told reporters. "But we are quite far removed from what we believe is the priority objective, which is the transfer of political responsibility to an Iraqi government as quickly as possible."

Schroeder added: "I agree with the president when he says: Not dynamic enough, not sufficient."

Secretary of State Colin Powell noted that Chirac and Schroeder didn`t present a timetable for Iraqis to take control of their country. Still, he said Washington is "more than happy to listen to their suggestions."

"I don`t sense from their statement that they said what exactly they are looking for or who they would turn it over to if we were turning it over right away," Powell said in Washington.

The United States favors having Iraqis themselves come up with a political transition plans, Powell said.

Chirac and Schroeder sidestepped questions about whether they might send troops to Iraq under any condition.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Thursday he would not rule out sending peacekeepers to Iraq as part of an international force, a strong signal that Moscow`s stance was edging closer to Washington`s.

"It all depends on a specific resolution. I wouldn`t exclude it outright," Ivanov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

France, Russia, India and other countries, including Arab nations, have ruled out contributing soldiers to Iraq unless the United Nations authorizes a a multinational force.

Germany has said it is ready in principle to help rebuild Iraq but has no plans for a military engagement in Iraq.

Addressing the point more directly, German Defense Minister Peter Struck, speaking in Strasbourg, France, said no German troops would be sent in under the current U.S. proposal.

"For the German side, I can say that the situation has not changed even with this reflection by the Americans," Struck told a news conference. "So long as the legal situation in Iraq has not changed ... there is no point in discussing this subject" of German troops.

Syria, a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq and the only Arab member of the Security Council, cautiously welcomed the U.S. proposal, saying it should be looked at positively. But the commentary on state-controlled Damascus Radio also called the draft "inadequate" for insisting on keeping U.S. military control of postwar Iraq and refusing to give the United Nations a "full role."

At the United Nations, Germany`s Ambassador Gunter Pleuger said the U.S. draft was a good basis for negotiations, a view shared by many other Security Council members.

"We will see in the negotiations in the next days how far we can get," Pleuger said. "It`s a good working basis but it certainly can be improved."

Echoing the French and German position, many council nations stressed that the key issues will be the U.N. role in Iraq and the degree of power the United States will be prepared to relinquish.

Mexico`s U.N. Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, whose country opposed the war, said the thrust of a new resolution must be "the restoration of the full sovereignty of Iraqis."

"I think the issue of the U.N. role is going to be an important source of discussion," he said. "The philosophical view of Mexico is that this is a job for the United Nations."

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Associated Press reporter Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.


© 2003 The Associated Press

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Aide exposes Hoon`s role in naming of Kelly
Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd
Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian

The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, was present at a key meeting in which the policy of naming David Kelly - an issue at the heart of the Hutton inquiry - was approved, it was revealed yesterday.

The disclosure appears to contradict Mr Hoon`s evidence to the inquiry in which he made no mention of the meeting and insisted he was not involved in any discussions about the outing strategy.

The meeting actually took place in Mr Hoon`s office on July 9. He discussed with senior advisers what the Ministry of Defence should say if a journalist came up with Dr Kelly`s name. The group decided that it was untenable to refuse to respond to journalists who had guessed Dr Kelly`s identity.

In his evidence to the inquiry, Mr Hoon said he was "not party to discussions" about the outing strategy. He said he was "not aware" that Dr Kelly was "necessarily" concerned about his identity being kept secret.

Potentially more damaging in the light of yesterday`s disclosure, Mr Hoon said he "did not see" and "played no part" in the preparation of the briefing strategy by which the MoD confirmed Dr Kelly`s name to journalists. Nor did the defence secretary refer to the July 9 meeting in his office when asked at the end of his testimony to volunteer any information he thought relevant to the inquiry.

Yesterday`s disclosures came in evidence from Richard Taylor, Mr Hoon`s special adviser, who was called to the inquiry as a late witness. His testimony will have heightened the impression that Mr Hoon failed to give the inquiry a full account of his involvement in the Kelly affair.

It makes it virtually certain that Mr Hoon will be recalled to give a fuller account of his role when the inquiry enters its second phase on September 15.

In his account of the July 9 meeting Mr Taylor said it was attended by Mr Hoon, Peter Watkins, his principal private secretary, and the MoD`s director of news, Pam Teare.

The group was presented with three options - whether to deny Dr Kelly`s name when it was put to the MoD press office by journalists, simply make no comment, or to confirm the name. "It was agreed that it would be not tenable to say `no` because that would be a lie," said Mr Taylor. Making no comment was also untenable, he said. The strategy of naming Dr Kelly was part of the government`s continuing battle with the BBC over a report by the journalist Andrew Gilligan that Downing Street had "sexed up" the Iraqi weapons dossier against the wishes of the intelligence agencies.

Mr Taylor said those at the meeting first agreed a plan for Mr Hoon to name Dr Kelly in a private letter to Gavyn Davies, the BBC chairman. That, said Mr Taylor, was designed to "move the argument forward with the BBC". The government wanted the BBC to confirm Dr Kelly was Gilligan`s source in the hope that once his name was made public the scientist would accuse the BBC journalist of exaggerating what he had been told.

Asked by the inquiry counsel, James Dingemans QC, whether anyone at the meeting raised the question of telling Dr Kelly his name would be confirmed by the MoD as Gilligan`s possible source, Mr Taylor replied: "No."

The inquiry has heard that such a way of naming an official was unprecedented.

The "name-confirming" tactic was agreed after the MoD, with Downing Street`s blessing, issued a press statement offering clues about Dr Kelly`s identity. The MoD then drew up a "briefing strategy" of questions and answers offering more clues to journalists. Further evidence potentially damaging to the government was disclosed yesterday in the last moments before the Hutton inquiry ended its first stage. Mr Dingemans picked out the phrase "ownership lay with No 10" from minutes of a meeting in the Cabinet Office last September to discuss the "public handling and briefing" of the government`s Iraqi weapons dossier.

In their evidence to the inquiry Tony Blair and John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee, repeatedly insisted that Mr Scarlett had "ownership of the dossier".

A covering letter from the Treasury solicitor - Whitehall`s lawyer - which was released by the inquiry said the meeting was "concerned purely with the mechanics of the publication of the dossier" and not with "issues relating to the contents".

Mr Scarlett, a former senior MI6 officer, may be asked to return to the inquiry to explain the document and to say why concerns expressed by intelligence officials about the dossier were ignored.

In another contradiction of inquiry evidence yesterday, Gilligan`s claim that David Kelly volunteered the name of Alastair Campbell in connection with the "sexing up" of the September dossier was disputed by Olivia Bosch, a former Unscom inspector and a close friend of Dr Kelly.

Ms Bosch said Dr Kelly told her that Mr Campbell`s name was raised by Gilligan. "He said Gilligan wanted to play a name game as to who was responsible for inserting information into the dossier. Gilligan said `I will name you some names` and David said the first name he mentioned very quickly was Campbell."

As a civil servant, Dr Kelly was uncomfortable with the situation in which he had been placed, so he replied "maybe", Ms Bosch told the inquiry.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Iraq`s fresh start may be another false dawn
The coalition needs peacemakers not peacekeepers

Brian Whitaker
Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian

Six times since the fall of Saddam Hussein British and US officials have summoned journalists to briefings on Iraq. Six times the story has been the same: there have been mistakes but from now on it`s going to be different.

Once again, amid plans for a UN-mandated peacekeeping force, there is talk of a fresh start. Or perhaps just another false start.

The danger in the UN route, according to Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, is that it could turn a coalition of the willing into a coalition of the unwilling.

"Who is it that is really going to provide major resources?" he asked yesterday. "They have to be forces with the proper skills that will do the job, under arrangements that actually work.

"Most foreign troops," he said, "add problems in terms of logistic and transportation support, financial support, language skills, and command and control."

The need in Iraq was not for peacekeepers but for peacemakers, troops prepared to take casualties and cause casualties, he said.

For Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Warwick University, an increase in troop numbers was "a dangerous answer to a complex set of questions".

"It`s the strategy and the intelligence that is lacking," he said. "There isn`t a strategy that will work at the moment."

There are also worries about the coalition provisional authority (CPA), the Pentagon-controlled body running Iraq, which has been accused of losing touch with the ground reality partly because its staff have been unable to leave their offices for security reasons.

The CPA also has what one insider called an inadequate "county council" budget. The latest estimates are that reconstruction of Iraq`s electricity services will cost $17bn (£10.7bn) and water and sewage $27bn.

The CPA, which at one stage had only 17 Arabic speakers among a staff of 6,000, has failed to "get down and dirty", according to Mr Dodge.

It ought to be busy "building local alliances and convincing the population, in order to get some form of quiescence and allegiance in return", he said.

The intention before the war was that Iraqi exiles who opposed Saddam would provide the link between American administrators and the Iraqi people. But either the opposition groups exaggerated the strength of their local networks or they failed to deliver.

The CPA also has personnel problems. With many of its staff on three-month contracts, there is a high turnover which damages continuity while the brightest of the state department`s staff, who dislike the Pentagon`s approach, do not want to work for it.

Visitors to the CPA have been astonished by the level of ignorance about Iraq among the officials now ruling the country.

"They should bring in a set of Iraq experts," said Mr Dodge. "Not people who know neo-conservative philosophy and which arses to kiss in Washington."

One of the most criticised acts of the CPA has been its wholesale de-Ba`athification. This included disbanding the Iraqi army which might have kept order but instead left thousands of resentful young men kicking their heels.

The best way to improve security would be to get Iraqis back to work, according to a British military expert who asked not to be named. But Iraqis cannot go back to work until security improves.

Contracts for security work in Iraq, often hastily and vaguely drafted, had been awarded to the lowest bidder regardless of competence, the expert said.

Factories that survived the postwar looting cannot restart production until they are sure of distribution for their products which requires security on the roads.

They cannot pay wages until the banking system starts functioning again but that cannot happen until money can be moved around the country safely. The new currency exchange system, due to start next month, is essential to banking. But the US has said it will not provide protection for the money so the job will have to be done by private companies.

That may please Washington`s accountants but it`s unlikely to win hearts and minds in Baghdad.

In Washington yesterday, General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said the reason more international troops were needed in Iraq was not because the current force needed help but because there was a need to counter the impression among Iraqis that the occupation was strictly an American operation.

"This has an awful lot to do with the Iraqi people and how they perceive coalition forces. I think the last thing we want is for them to believe this is a mission of the United States. It`s much bigger than that," he said.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Real lives
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`This is no good, sir!`
There are no police stations or banks, the American troops are scared and hated and anything that isn`t guarded is stolen or destroyed. Is there hope for the people of Baghdad? The distinguished Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa reports from Iraq

Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian

Iraq is the country with the greatest freedom in the world, but since freedom without law and order is chaos, it is also the most dangerous. There are no customs, nor customs officers, and the CPA (coalition provisional authority) governed by Paul Bremer has abolished all tariffs and duties on imports until December 31. As a result, the Iraqi borders have become strainers, through which all kinds of goods - except weapons - are pouring in without difficulties or costs. At the border with Jordan, the US watch officer assured me that just this week an average of 3,000 vehicles a day had entered Iraq with all types of merchandise.

That is why the two large avenues Karrada In and Karrada Out, which zigzag through Baghdad like conjoined twins, present an immense variety of industrial goods, clothes and food. The innumerable shops that flank them have spilled out on to the streets, turning the pavements into a plethoric bazaar - and into a paradise of pirate records, compact discs and videos. However, the one product that citizens of Baghdad are buying most eagerly is parabolic aerials, which allow them to see television broadcasts from all over the world, something that had never been possible before, and that infuriates the conservative Islamic clerics, who see this television frenzy as an invasion of the corrupting western pornography. Now Iraqis can also surf freely over the web, which in the days of Saddam Hussein was considered a crime. It is amusing to observe, in the internet coffee shops which have mushroomed throughout Baghdad, the passion with which the Baghdadis, especially the young, indulge in this new pastime that connects them with the rest of the world.

The active street trade has more in common with primitive bartering than with modern dealing. As there are no banks, nor cheques, nor credit cards, all transactions are made in cash and, given the plunge of the dinar (the rate was approximately 1,500 dinars to the dollar on my last day there), buyers, in order to make a purchase, must bring bundles of notes with them, at times suitcases full, which can be nicked from them at any moment by the scourge of the day: the omnipresent Ali Babas. For on top of the lack of customs officers, there are no policemen, no judges and no police stations to report the robberies or outrages one suffers. The ministries are closed, as are the public registers and the postal service; the telephones don`t work, and there aren`t any rules and regulations that stipulate what a citizen can or cannot do. Everything is left to each individual`s intuition, boldness, prudence and instinct. The result is reckless freedom, which makes people feel helpless and frightened.

The only authority is represented by the tanks, the armoured cars, trucks and jeeps, and by foot patrols of US soldiers who cross and re-cross streets all over, armed with rifles and submachine guns, making the buildings shake with the power of their war vehicles. Soldiers who, on a closer look, seem as helpless and frightened as the citizens of Baghdad themselves. Since I arrived the attacks against them have been increasing systematically, and have already killed 30 and injured around 300. It is not surprising that they seem suspicious and in bad spirits, with fingers on triggers, patrolling streets full of people with whom they cannot communicate, amidst a hellish heat, which for them, dressed in helmets, bullet-proof jackets and other war paraphernalia, must be even worse than for the average local. I tried to talk to them - many being adolescents not yet capable of growing a beard - on four occasions, but I got only very concise replies. They were all pouring sweat, eyeballs perpetually moving, like distrustful grasshoppers.

But Morgana, my daughter, succeeded in conversing on a more personal level with a soldier of Mexican origin who suddenly opened his heart from atop his tank: "I`ve had it! I`ve been here for three months and I cannot stand it any longer! I ask myself what the hell I`m doing here every day! This morning they killed two buddies. I can`t wait to go back to my wife and child, damn it!"

Endless stories about the US soldiers who patrol Baghdad are spreading all over, the majority of which are, without doubt, exaggerations or lies. One example is that, in their desperation against the growing attacks, they burst into houses and abuse their authority under the pretext of looking for arms. I tried to verify some of these charges and they turned out to be unfounded. The truth is that nobody knows what line to take. For the first time in its history there is complete freedom of press in Iraq - anyone can buy a newspaper or magazine without having to ask for permission from someone - and currently more than 50 news papers are being printed in Baghdad alone (where, since April, 70 political parties have emerged, some made up of only one person). Still, the information they publish is so contradictory and imaginative that everybody is complaining of living in complete uncertainty.

I went to the home of Kahtaw K Al-Ani, in the Sadea neighbourhood, because I had been told that in the house next to his there had been a very violent incident the night before which resulted in various casualties. It actually took place five houses beyond his. The patrol entered by breaking the door down with a kick. "This is no good, sir!" And there was one dead Iraqi. But did they find weapons there? Did they fire at the soldiers? He does not know, and does not want to know.

Al-Ani lived in Reading for three years and has good memories of England. He was a technician in the ministry of agriculture and now, like all other civil servants from the fallen regime, has been fired by the CPA. Is this not totally unfair? He and his colleagues hated Saddam Hussein and the Ba`ath party, which they were forced to join, and they were happy that the Americans freed them from the dictatorship. But what kind of liberation is this that puts you on the dole, for no reason, leaving in poverty tens of thousands of families, who previously felt like victims of the regime? "This is no good, sir!" Al-Ani is old and dignified, with close-cropped hair, and is dripping with sweat. His children soak up his perspiration with paper serviettes and he constantly apologises for the fan not working as a result of the lack of electricity. Before he hated Saddam and the Ba`ath party, but now he hates the US soldiers. As I was saying goodbye, he showed me his car: he never takes it out just in case it gets stolen, and he does not dare to leave his house for fear of it being attacked or burned. "This is no good, sir!"

Three wars, 12 years of international sanctions and 30-something years of Ba`ath satrapy have turned Baghdad, which in the 1950s was famous for its beauty, into the ugliest city in the world. Saddam`s strategic centres of power, the ministries and official organisations, and many of the residences which belonged to the dictator and his accomplices now display their open jaws and insides gutted by the impact of the US precision bombing. And one can see everywhere the homes, shops, buildings and installations looted and burned during the criminal pandemonium that took over the city in the days that followed the arrival of US troops, and which has not entirely died down yet.

The Ali Babas ransacked everything that came their way and left half of the population in the street, with no possessions or roofs over their heads. Who were these plunderers? Saddam Hussein, in order to celebrate his re-election as president with 100% of the vote, opened the country`s prison doors on October 15 2002 and set free all the common criminals (while sending the majority of political prisoners to their deaths). How many did he set free?

I`m given dislocated figures that run from 30,000 to 100,000. It doesn`t explain all the outrages committed, but it does explain a good number, the Archbishop Fernando Filoni, Nuncio of His Holiness, assures me. (An expert in catastro phes, he began his diplomatic career in Sri Lanka when the Tamils started their decapitations and throat-cutting.) "The lack of practice of freedom initially spawns catastrophes. That is the reason why the Pope, who is very wise, opposed the war. Wanting to rush into things so fast, the US quickly came across something unforeseen: widespread vandalism."

But it is also true that the built-up hatred towards the ruling clique has incited many victims into destroying residences belonging to the people in power and all other buildings related to the regime. Still, why did they destroy the factories? Nagi al-Jaf, a veteran industrialist with business in the Iraqi capital and in the Kurdish city Suleymaniya, told me that the huge and mixed-regime Farida brewery in Baghdad, in which he owned shares, was mercilessly razed by the Ali Babas. "I could understand robbing things that they could consume or sell, but I can`t see why they would destroy all the machinery and then, as if that were not enough, burn the whole thing down."

How many industries in Baghdad have been victim to similar forms of havoc? The answer is categorical: "All of them." I ask him not to exaggerate, to be objective. He looks at the stars in the Suleymaniya sky for a long time and repeats: "All of them. There`s not a single industrial plant left in Baghdad that hasn`t been wiped off the face of the Earth." How can we explain this? Maybe it is because people cannot live castrated and subject to abjection, terror and servility, as the Iraqis have lived in the three decades under the Ba`ath dictatorship, without reacting on feeling completely and absolutely free, which is just how the Iraqis felt on April 9, with that explosion of anarchy, profligacy and savagery that has destroyed Baghdad and left an open, bleeding wound in the soul of all of its citizens.

As none of the public services works and there are no traffic police on the corners, driving in Baghdad is pandemonium. (Petrol is dirt cheap: filling a tank costs less than half a dollar). Every driver goes wherever he or she wishes, so traffic-related accidents are rife, and the traffic jams can drive people mad. But, at least in this regard, I did notice some indications of the famous "spontaneous institutions" that Hayek sees as the most representative and long-lasting, those which emerge naturally from civil society and are not imposed by power. When the traffic jam reaches paroxysm, volunteers will always emerge who, armed with a whistle and a stick, set themselves up as traffic controllers. And the drivers stuck in the jam heed their instructions, relieved that someone is finally giving them orders.

The same thing happens in the neighbourhoods, overwhelmed by the insecurity that reigns over the city, where people are organised into watch groups to defend themselves against robbers or to cart the rubbish accumulated in the street to the corner to burn it. It is for this reason that the passer-by wanders through Baghdad not only surrounded by rubble, ruins, burned buildings, piles of rubbish and vermin, but also by the foul- smelling clouds of fire with which the citizens of Baghdad try to defend themselves against the rubbish that threatens to flood them.

For the long-suffering population of the Iraqi capital, the lack of electricity and drinking water is perhaps the worst ordeal. The power cuts are constant and in certain parts of the city they can last for whole days. Neighbours are left with no defence against the stifling temperatures, which never go below 40C (104F) in the shade and sometimes top 50. Being subject to this scorching heat, in complete darkness and without running water, is a form of torture.

In the home of my Spanish friends from the Iberoamerica-Europa Foundation, where I stayed during my first week in Baghdad, I experienced first-hand the hardships that the Iraqis have suffered over the past three months. Electricity came every now and then, but there were times when the blackout would last so many hours that it was impossible to cook, wash or cool oneself. And in order to avoid burning up in the oven-like bedrooms, my hosts took their mattresses to the garden, preferring cockroaches over suffocation.

The disheartenment that all this generates is just one of the obstacles the Iraqi people have to overcome so that their country, which has just come out of one of the most corrupt and brutal experiences of authoritarianism that mankind has known, can leave behind the long night of despotism and violence that makes up its history and become a modern, prosperous and democratic nation.

· © El Pais. Translated by News Clips


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Snow falling in China
America plays the economic blame game

Leader
Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian

In search of a scapegoat for an American economic revival that was promised but not yet materialised, the Bush administration has alighted upon China`s success as the reason for its failure. Never mind that the reasons for the loss of 2.6m manufacturing jobs since George Bush came to office are complex and many, the US public has got the impression that China`s $100bn trade surplus is evidence that jobs are being stolen from American workers. Unfair competition is the refrain from Washington. If that sounds like the bashing Japan used to get, that is because it is. China, according to the Bush theory, is subsidising its exports by pegging its currency, the renminbi, to the dollar. As the Chinese currency has become undervalued, it has slipped downward with the dollar. The result is that while most imports have become more expensive in the US, China`s became cheaper - and are able to flood the American market. So Mr Bush`s treasury secretary, John Snow, swung into Beijing this week determined to change Chinese policy, most notably on exchange rates.

Despite voicing an intent to allow its currency to rise and fall eventually, China rebuffed Mr Snow`s request. It was right to do so. Despite becoming the workshop of the world, revaluation of the currency - especially by as much as 40% - would administer a shock to the Chinese economy that it could not absorb. There is already too much reckless bank lending in China, which is in danger of overheating the economy. The skyline of flourishing cities are lined with half-finished skyscrapers, with more springing up. A stronger currency would not help in these circumstances. This is not to say that China should not change and start adopting the characteristics of a developed market economy, only that it will take time - certainly more time than that required by the presidential election of 2004. In fact, China`s accession to the World Trade Organisation means the next four years will see big changes in the country`s economy - many of them will be painful and harder to bear if the US treats China as more foe than friend. The reason for China`s rise is little to do with exchange rates. A cheap, plentiful supply of labour, as well as good roads and ports, has attracted big US companies like General Motors. Much of what America imports from China is made by US firms.

It is not corporate America which is complaining, but the toy-makers and the textile companies that have mobilised in Washington. China`s trade has benefited America in many ways. Consumers get cheaper goods - $10bn worth of Chinese goods were bought by Wal-Mart last year. America`s large current account deficit is also financed by Asian economies, which have accumulated $1.4trillion in currency reserves. The reason why this should bother Mr Bush is that if China were to stop buying US debt then interest rates would rise in America - making mortgages more expensive. Hardly what the president would want in the run-up to elections. The truth is that trade imposes costs and generates benefits for all. All that Mr Bush`s rhetoric exposes is that in an interdependent world no nation, not even America, can exist in splendid isolation.


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Hey, let`s call in the UN
The Hutton inquiry is a complete sideshow to the real issue: did America and Britain have a legal right to go to war without the backing of the UN?

John O`Farrell
Friday September 5, 2003
The Guardian

Lord Hutton was at a dinner party the other evening and somebody asked: "So have you been following all this Hutton inquiry stuff?" And Hutton replied: "Well, I started to read it when it began, but I can`t be bothered with it all anymore."

"I know what you mean, there`s just so much of it isn`t there? Pages and pages in the bloody newspaper - we`re bored to tears with it all."

"Somebody mentioned it at work the other day but everyone was so uninterested that we ended up chatting about the cricket instead."

"What work was that?"

"Oh, you know, the Hutton inquiry."

The reason that the deliberations at courtroom 73 are even less thrilling than ITV`s Rosemary and Thyme, The Gardener Detectives, is because it`s all a complete sideshow. The real issue is: did America and Britain have a legal right to go to war without the backing of the United Nations? An inquiry into that would be a short one: it doesn`t take long to say "nope".

Yet strangely this week has seen a u-turn in George Bush`s attitude to the United Nations. At last he has seen the error of his ways and is now keen to see UN troops deployed in Iraq as soon as possible. How wonderful it is to have an American president committed to international law and global democracy. French fries are back on the menu! Thank God, says Mrs Bush, no more Californian champagne!

Of course, some sceptics out there will probably say that Bush only wants an international force involved now because he`s realised that lots of American soldiers are still being killed and this is damaging his popularity rating in the run-up to next year`s presidential election. Honestly, the cynicism of some people never ceases to amaze me! As it happens, he was prepared to put American soldiers in the most dangerous parts of Iraq, but this plan was abandoned when he was told that there was no way of ensuring that these troops would be Democrat voters from Florida.

George Bush is being very magninimous by bringing in the UN at this most dangerous time. Indeed, his concern for international cooperation is such that he is prepared to hand over all sorts of other jobs of great importance to non-Americans. "Say, guys, Nasa is a bit worried that the Challenger might blow up again, so we think it would be wonderful gesture to have some United Nations astronauts on board for the test run. Oh, and we need someone to go into the gangland of downtown Los Angeles and take all the guns and flick-knives off the Crips and the Bloods - as a gesture of goodwill we would like to hand this job over to the United Nations as well. Oh, and the jury in that big mafia trial have all had death threats - I think what the global community needs now is UN jurors."

Having not been involved in the decision that created the lethal chaos in Iraq, it`s hardly surprising that the UN is unenthusiastic about being brought in to clear up the mess. It`s the same argument as before, with the positions completely reversed. George Bush is saying: "We cannot simply bypass the United Nations on Iraq," and Kofi Annan is insisting: "No, please, the UN has failed to fulfill its historic purpose, so I really feel this job must fall to America."

In fact, many other countries have already been persuaded to deploy troops, including Lithuania, Honduras and Mongolia. Even the Albanian army is now in Iraq. Ha! What chance does the enemy stand now? The Albanians have promised to bring in their army`s mobile unit as soon as they get her back from the donkey sanctuary. Oh, and the Lithuanian army has promised to bring his friend.

But the response has been less positive from more developed countries, where the national leaders have answerphones. In a few months` time they`ll bump into Bush and say: "Oh George, hi, apparently you left some sort of message about us sending troops to Iraq or something? You know what, I think the message must have been wiped off, because we would have been there like a shot if we`d known. Such a shame, remind me to switch to voicemail ..."

If the United Nations really wants to do something for the world it should leave George Bush to clear up the mess he created in Iraq and let him suffer the electoral consequences at the polls next year. This is a win-win situation; don`t deploy any troops and help bring about regime change in the rogue state of America. "Oh they won`t get rid of me that easily ..." says Dubya. "I`m too clever for that. I`m George W Bush. The W stands for `smart`. "

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September 5, 2003
TROOPS LEVELS
Rumsfeld Eager for More Iraqis to Keep Peace
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DEXTER FILKINS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 4 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, arriving in Iraq, said today that his highest priority was to speed up the recruitment, training and deployment of former Iraqi officers to work with the United States to combat disorder and violence here.

"It is their country, and we want them to play a greater role," Mr. Rumsfeld said. An administration official who outlined the American strategy separately said that Mr. Rumsfeld wanted "to get people stood up quickly, attach them to the U.S. Army and then let them go and fight for their country."

The plans outlined by Mr. Rumsfeld today represented a shift and appeared to reflect the growing realization here and in Washington that the money and manpower so far committed to the American project in Iraq are proving insufficient.

Repeated car bombings and attacks on American soldiers, coupled with a growing sense in Iraq and in United States of the limits of American power, appear to have placed the Bush administration in the difficult situation of recognizing a need for more troops without being able to ask for any more from the United States.

Mr. Rumsfeld is the most senior American official to visit Iraq since May, and his journey comes closely on the heels of a wave of bombing attacks, including the strike six days ago that killed a top Shiite cleric and nearly 100 others in Najaf.

The new emphasis on enlisting more Iraqis to work on achieving greater security has come in tandem with the administration`s decision to turn to the United Nations — once viewed with great skepticism — for help in recruiting more non-American soldiers from countries adamant that they will send troops only with United Nations blessing.

At least 50,000 Iraqis are already in place as part of a new Iraqi army, police force and civil defense corps, defense officials said. But Mr. Rumsfeld said he would encourage American commanders and civilian leaders, as well as members of Iraq`s Governing Council, to speed up the recruitment and screening of thousands more former Iraqi officers. These recruitments could include anyone up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, officials said.

Saddam Hussein`s Iraqi army was disbanded in May by L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. At the time, the idea of re-employing Iraqi officers was rejected.

But pressure on American forces here has grown as Iraq has proved more difficult to control than was anticipated. A recent study by the Congressional Budget Office showed that the Army has too few active-duty troops to sustain the occupation beyond March. Estimates of the cost of the Iraqi occupation keep spiraling upward.

The civilian side of the American-led occupation alone is now expected to cost $30 billion over the next year, officials said. This financial burden, as much as the need for new troops, appears to be driving the shift in the Bush administration`s strategy.

It is hoped that the new Iraqi enlistees will work with the roughly 140,000 American military personnel now in Iraq to combat the guerrilla campaign being waged by an array of forces widely believed to include former Baath Party members and Islamic extremists.

Mr. Rumsfeld declined tonight to spell out specific goals, but he said that the number of armed Iraqis in uniform could reasonably be increased to 75,000 or even 100,000 in the months ahead.

"We want to see more force protection, more site protection, more police protection, more border protection by Iraqis," he said. "This is their country."

As recently as several months ago, American officials said a new Iraqi army, for example, should number no more than 40,000 troops, and would not exceed 12,000 soldiers in the first year after the war.

When the United States first moved into Iraq, the belief was widespread that many Iraqi soldiers would rally to the American cause. But this did not happen and Mr. Bremer`s initial moves seemed directed at making a clear break with the past — as represented by Mr. Hussein`s army and security apparatus — rather than working to find recruits among them who could be screened and retrained.

Mr. Rumsfeld criticized the governments of Iran and Syria today for not doing enough to stem what he described as the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

"We are unhappy about the fact that people come across the Syrian and Iranian border," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters on the plane en route to Iraq. "They know we are unhappy about it."

Asked if Syria and Iran were exerting efforts to stop the infiltrations, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "It`s intermittent, uneven."

He acknowledged some frustration at what he said was the lack of a good intelligence picture about the threat facing American forces here.

He said it was still unclear, for example, whether the greater peril to American troops came from former Baathists or from foreign fighters drawn to target Americans, and he would not say whether he thought those groups or others had carried out the recent bombings, including the attack on the United Nations headquarters last month that killed the top United Nations envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

"The intelligence community has imperfect visibility," he said. "They`re trying to sort through numbers and method. They`re not comfortable at the moment with what we don`t know."

In a separate news conference here, the senior American military commander in Iraq outlined situations in which he said extra troops might be needed. The commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said that while he currently had enough troops to accomplish the mission in Iraq, there were several challenges "looming in the future" that would require more troops.

Among those challenges, General Sanchez said, was the need to completely seal the country`s borders, disarming some of the larger rebel groups in the country and stepping between warring Iraqi factions in the event that civil strife broke out.

"Today, if I had to, I could move forces to tackle any one of those challenges, but we would pull forces from an existing mission," he said.

In speaking about Iraq`s borders, General Sanchez alluded to Mr. Rumsfeld`s comments that unguarded frontiers with countries like Iraq and Syria are allowing foreign militants to enter the country to stage attacks against American forces.

At the moment, roughly 14,000 Iraqis are deployed to guard the borders, but American officials have acknowledged that thousands more troops are needed. General Sanchez said that if there was a desire to have Iraq`s borders "100 percent" sealed, then more troops would be needed.

Mr. Rumsfeld met privately this evening with Mr. Bremer, the top American official in Baghdad, and General Sanchez, the top American military commander here.

Officials traveling with Mr. Rumsfeld said afterward that one focus had been the need for more rapid expansion of the new Iraqi civil defense force, which now numbers 2,300 but could grow substantially in the weeks ahead.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that the pool of potential Iraqi recruits included all former Iraqi officers and soldiers at the rank of lieutenant colonel and below, a group that numbers hundreds of thousands of people.

He added that United States would go to great lengths to ensure that Iraqis who volunteered to work with the Americans did not themselves pose a security threat, but he said their value as sources of intelligence and expertise on the country was too important to pass up.

Mr. Rumsfeld said he took issue with those who described the security situation in Iraq as deteriorating. "It seems to me that the trajectory we`re on is a good one," he said.

Security was high for Mr. Rumsfeld`s visit, and the Pentagon would disclose only the barest outlines of his schedule, refusing to say more than a few hours in advance exactly where he planned to travel or with whom he would meet.



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September 5, 2003
U.N. Aide Says Afghan Drug Trade Pays for Terrorist Attacks
By CARLOTTA GALL


KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 30 — The American-led forces in Afghanistan must address the country`s drug trade because the huge opium and heroin crops are being used by militants to finance their activities, the top United Nations drug official has warned.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview here that there were indications that those carrying out violence in Afghanistan were financing their attacks with drug trafficking, and in some places forcing farmers to grow opium poppies.

"The terrorists and traffickers are the same people," he said at the end of a weeklong visit to Afghanistan. "You cannot fight the war against terror without going against drug trafficking."

Mr. Costa said that he had asked the American-led forces here several times to focus on the drug trade, and that he had seen reports that military forces had recently intercepted drug traffickers and had destroyed at least one illegal heroin laboratory.

Afghanistan was the world`s largest source of illicit opium in 2002, producing 3,750 tons, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. This year`s harvest will be much the same, Mr. Costa said.

His agency, which is supporting a 10-year Afghan government program to eradicate opium and heroin production, estimates that the poppy crop brought $1.2 billion to farmers and traders last year. That is double the Afghan government`s yearly budget and roughly the amount spent by the donor countries on reconstruction in Afghanistan last year.

The amount of money "has very major political and military implications," Mr. Costa said. He said Afghanistan was still in danger of falling into the hands of drug traders.

In Badakhshan, a northern province where poppy cultivation has spread this year, farmers chatted freely to visitors last month as they harvested their crops. There seems to be little interference from the authorities here, although the government in Kabul has outlawed growing opium poppies and there have been local efforts in some places to eradicate their cultivation.

"Everyone is doing it, it is free at the moment, without penalty," said Gulistan, the military chief of operations in Taloqan, a northern town. "It really took off during the Taliban period and it is increasing now."

Local and foreign officials cite a power vacuum and lack of central government control in many places, as well as poverty and the influence of drug traders and militant groups for the increase in illegal production.

Local officials complain that neither the central government nor international groups help them fight the drug trade. Gen. Muhammad Daoud, the military chief of the four northeastern provinces, said there had been no international assistance to combat the drug trade in the last two years.

The Afghan cabinet is on the point of passing legislation on drug trafficking, Mr. Costa said, but he warned that the struggle to eradicate opium and heroin production would take a generation.

For the farmers, many of whom subsist on what they grow, the draw is the money.

"We know it is bad, but we are poor and that`s why we do it," said Jorukash, 45, as he and his nephew cut poppy stalks in his fields. He said he could get $100 from his land if he grew wheat, but $1,000 if he grew poppies. Jorukash said he had already collected the opium resin and sold it in the bazaar, and bought grain that would provide enough bread for his family for the winter.



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September 5, 2003
What Price Drilling?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


ARCTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Alaska — In March, Interior Secretary Gale Norton described this area as a "flat white nothingness" that could best be used as an oil spigot.

I thought about that as I rafted down a river here, a giant grizzly bear on my left and a herd of caribou on my right. A bit earlier, I had cooked lunch with my backpacking stove on a sandbar as four musk oxen, huge buffalo-like creatures, observed me as intently as I watched them.

A bush pilot set two friends and me down on a sandbar on Saturday just north of the Brooks Range, and since then we`ve been rafting and hiking through this wilderness, perhaps the wildest place left on earth. I want to understand this land — whose future is hotly debated, mostly by people who haven`t seen it — and figure out whether it should be opened to Big Oil.

Here on the ground, it`s obvious that this refuge, far from being a barren wasteland, is actually teeming with wildlife, even as winter begins. At one spot, I saw grizzly and wolf tracks side by side, a tribute to the way this South Carolina-sized refuge preserves a patch of America as it was before Europeans arrived.

Moreover, the animals seem completely unused to humans. The first time we spotted a distant herd of caribou, we hauled in our raft downwind and crept up silently. Finally the caribou spotted us, and immediately approached for a closer look. They seemed to be trying to determine whether we were pitifully deformed caribou, and I think the females were encouraging the males to ask us for directions to the rest of the herd as it headed south.

The same thing happened when we sailed our raft as close as we dared to the first musk ox we saw, which came in for a closer look and called its pals to share the excitement. This land is truly an Arctic Serengeti.

Still, I believe that the environmentalists exaggerate the damage that drilling would do to the wildlife. The fact is that humans and animals can coexist. Around Prudhoe Bay, the center for oil drilling west of here, caribou, grizzly and polar bears, and even musk oxen are also plentiful. The same is true of the area around the two permanent native villages to the north and south of the refuge, Kaktovik and Arctic Village.

Indeed, Kaktovik sometimes has polar bears on its airstrip, and a grizzly was found last year on the second floor of the Prudhoe Bay Hotel.

A few months ago a major panel of scientists, oil consultants and environmentalists ended a two-year study of the impact of oil drilling on the Arctic coast. It concluded that wildlife had adapted well to drilling, but that the land itself and the sense of wilderness were far more vulnerable.

Drilling technology has improved tremendously in ways that could limit the damage. In 1970 it took a 65-acre above-ground presence to extract oil from 2,010 acres at a depth of 10,000 feet. At one recent Alaska installation, Alpine Pad 2, a 13-acre pad extracts oil from 32,154 acres. But still, the tundra is exceptionally sensitive — vehicle ruts from decades ago are still visible. The oil presence and the security that would go with it would fundamentally change the area.

It`s true, as the oil industry says, that drilling, if it occurred, would be confined to the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain in a refuge of 19.5 million acres. And frankly, the coastal plain is the least picturesque — mostly just barren tundra. But as I write this with numb fingers, I`m wrapped in my sleeping bag in my tent on that coastal tundra, and it`s still majestic — and I`ve seen more wildlife in the area that would be drilled than in the hills and mountains I traversed upriver.

I confess that there are times — when the rapids drench the raft and turn my feet into blocks of ice, when the chilling fog obliterates a view of anything — when I`d be ready to trade this landscape to Big Oil for a hot drink and a pizza. But then I warm up, the sun comes out, the mountains emerge from the fog, the caribou approach, and this land warms my heart with its pristine loveliness.

All week, we`ve seen no sign of humans in the refuge, not even footprints. This is a rare place where humans feel not like landlords or even tenants, but simply guests.

And that`s an issue. As an oil industry geologist told me: "We can build cleanly, and we can drill without hurting the caribou. But we can`t drill and keep this a wilderness. So that`s the choice: Do you want drilling and oil, or do you want to keep this a wilderness?"

My answer? Stay tuned for my next column.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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September 5, 2003
The China Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN


A funny thing happened this week: the Bush administration, with its aggressive unilateralism, and its contempt for diplomacy and international institutions, suddenly staked its fortunes on the kindness of foreigners.

All the world knows about the Iraq about-face: having squandered our military strength in a war he felt like fighting even though it had nothing to do with terrorism, President Bush is now begging the cheese-eaters and chocolate-makers to rescue him. What may not be equally obvious is that he`s doing the same thing on the economic front. Having squandered his room for economic maneuver on tax cuts that pleased his party base but had nothing to do with job creation, Mr. Bush is now asking China to help him out.

Not, of course, that Mr. Bush admits to having made any mistakes. Indeed, Mr. Bush seems to have a serious case of "l`état, c`est moi": he impugns the patriotism of anyone who questions his decisions.

If you ask why he diverted resources away from hunting Al Qaeda, which attacked us, to invading Iraq, which didn`t, he suggests that you`re weak on national security. And it`s the same for anyone who questions his economic record: "They tell me it was a shallow recession," he said Monday. "It was a shallow recession because of the tax relief. Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper. That bothers me when people say that."

That is, if you ask why he pushed long-term tax cuts rather than focusing on job creation, he says you wanted a deeper recession. It bothers me when he says that.

Of course, nobody says the recession should have been deeper. What critics argued — correctly — was that Mr. Bush`s economic strategy of tax cuts for the rich, with a few token breaks for the middle class, would generate maximum deficits but minimum stimulus. "They" may tell him it was a shallow recession, but the long-term unemployed won`t agree.

And the fact that even with all that red ink the recovery is still jobless should lead him to wonder whether he`s running the wrong kind of deficits.

Instead, however, he`s decided to plead with the Chinese for help.

Admittedly, it didn`t sound like pleading. It sounded as if he was being tough: "We expect there to be a fair playing field when it comes to trade. . . . And we intend to keep the rules fair." Everyone understood this to be a reference to the yuan, China`s supposedly undervalued currency, which some business groups claim is a major problem for American companies.

By the way, even if the Chinese did accede to U.S. demands to increase the value of the yuan, it wouldn`t have much effect unless it was a huge revaluation. And China won`t agree to a huge revaluation because its huge trade surplus with the U.S. is largely offset by trade deficits with other countries.

Still, even a modest currency shift by Beijing would allow Mr. Bush to say that he was doing something about the loss of manufacturing jobs other than appointing a "jobs czar." And so John Snow, the Treasury secretary, went off to Beijing to request an increase in the yuan`s value.

But he got no satisfaction. A quick look at the situation reveals one reason why: the U.S. currently has very little leverage over China. Mr. Bush needs China`s help to deal with North Korea — another crisis that was allowed to fester while the administration focused on Iraq. Furthermore, purchases of Treasury bills by China`s central bank are one of the main ways the U.S. finances its trade deficit.

Nobody is quite sure what would happen if the Chinese suddenly switched to, say, euros — a two-point jump in mortgage rates? — but it`s not an experiment anyone wants to try.

There may also be another reason. The Chinese remember very well that in Mr. Bush`s first few months in office, his officials described China as a "strategic competitor" — indeed, they seemed to be seeking a new cold war until terrorism came along as a better issue. So Mr. Bush may find it as hard to get help from China as from the nations those same officials ridiculed as "old Europe."

Sic transit and all that. Just four months after Operation Flight Suit, the superpower has become a supplicant to nations it used to insult. Mission accomplished!



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Democratic Rivals Focus Attacks on Bush


By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 5, 2003; Page A01


ALBUQUERQUE, Sept. 4 -- The Democratic candidates for president joined together here tonight to attack President Bush`s handling of Iraq, saying he has unnecessarily put U.S. troops in danger and destroyed international alliances, but the Democrats split, sometimes bitterly, over global trade, health care and tax cuts.

In the first debate sanctioned by the Democratic Party, the candidates sought to outdo each other by denouncing Bush for costing the country the loss of life, of tens of billions of dollars in military and rebuilding costs, and of credibility worldwide by failing to enlist greater international support for the mission in Iraq.

"This president is a miserable failure," Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) said. "It`s incomprehensible to me that we would wind up in this situation without a plan and without international cooperation to get it done."

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), a proponent of the war, said Bush`s failure to have a plan for securing the country after deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has exposed U.S. forces to even more danger. He said he would support sending in more U.S. troops to protect those who are there now.

The Democratic candidates came here for the first of six party-sanctioned debates with the race for the nomination wide open, yet with all eyes fixed on the surging campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean, the front-runner in key early states. Eight of the candidates participated. Al Sharpton had planned to attend but missed a plane connection because of bad weather and never arrived.

The candidates focused on their own records -- and on their sharp attacks on Bush. In the end, none of them did anything to shake up the race or rattle any of the rivals.

With the exception of Lieberman, who said the Vermont Democrat`s trade policies could create a "Dean depression," the candidates largely avoided attacking Dean during the debate. Instead, their campaign staffs spent much of the debate period challenging Dean`s policies and truthfulness by feeding reporters opposition research on his record.

The debate helped serve a larger purpose for Democrats: reaching out to the fast-growing and politically powerful Hispanic community, which accounts for 45 percent of New Mexico`s population. Strategists from both parties believe the key to the 2004 elections is winning the Hispanic vote, so the Democrats made this the first-ever presidential debate interpreted instantly for Spanish-speaking audiences.

The event, held on the campus of the University of New Mexico, was carried live on Univision and PBS. Several candidates called for amnesty for illegal immigrants working in this country. A few showed off their Spanish-speaking talents, but none offered any new proposals tailored for the Hispanic community.

It was Iraq that garnered the most attention. Bush`s decision to reverse course this week and try to enlist U.N. support for the mission there offered the candidates an opportunity to put aside their differences for more than 30 minutes and to gang up on Bush over his policies. Regardless of who is nominated, Democrats are planning to make their support for a more multilateral foreign policy a centerpiece of their campaign.

For all the past bickering among the candidates over the war and who supported what and when, the candidates generally agreed tonight that the president made a huge mistake by not reaching out to traditional U.S. allies earlier, but that the country cannot afford to withdraw from Iraq now.

Bush is "going to have to go back to the very people he humiliated, our allies, on our way into Iraq," to seek help, Dean said. "Now, we need their help, and that`s not a surprise."

Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry said Bush`s swagger has been no substitute for sound policy. "He failed in his diplomacy, he rushed to war against our warnings, and he has now inherited the wind so to speak," Kerry said.

Most Democratic candidates want a larger force in Iraq, but to come from foreign militaries, not from the United States. Only Lieberman advocates sending in more U.S. troops. If Bush follows through on his new strategy of winning U.N. support, the president and the Democrats seeking to challenge him will hold very similar views on the best way to finish the job in Iraq.

Recent polls show that nearly two-third of voters do not know the name of even one of the eight candidates who took the stage tonight. But in New Hampshire and Iowa, two critical early-voting states where the candidates are becoming household names, Dean is surging.

Lieberman, who has criticized Dean in past forums for opposing the war and for advocating the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, opened a new line of attack on the former governor: global trade.

Dean said the United States should not have "free and open borders with countries that don`t have the same environmental, labor and human rights standards," arguing that by adopting that kind of policy, "[w]e`re going to be able to create manufacturing jobs in America again, and they`ll stay in America."

But Lieberman challenged Dean by citing a column in The Washington Post that quoted the Vermont Democrat as saying that China and other countries would get trade agreements only if they adopted "the same labor laws and labor standards and environmental standards" prevailing in the United States.

Lieberman said that would mean the United States would break agreements with Mexico, other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, costing the economy millions of jobs. "One out of every five jobs in America is tied up with trade," he said. "So if that ever happened, I`d say that the Bush recession would be followed by the Dean depression."

Dean said he did not necessarily mean that other countries would have to abide by U.S. standards and that perhaps international standards would suffice. When Lieberman countered that Dean had talked about U.S. standards in the Post interview, Dean replied, "Either is fine with me."

"Well, then, that`s a reassuring change of position," Lieberman said.

Gephardt, who opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and permanent normal trade relations with China, chided many of his rivals for playing up their support for tougher labor and environmental standards in future trade agreements. "Most of the candidates here voted for those treaties without proper standards," he said. Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich said if he becomes president, he will immediately repeal NAFTA.

On other economic questions, the candidates denounced Bush for the loss of jobs during his presidency, with North Carolina Sen. John Edwards saying that Bush has carried on a "war on work." "You know, the president goes around the country speaking Spanish," he said. "The only Spanish he speaks when it comes to jobs is, `Hasta la vista.` "

Kerry used humor to pillory Bush on the economy, saying the only jobs the president has created "are the nine of us running for president of the United States."

On immigration, several of the Democratic candidates said they would support amnesty for undocumented workers in the United States and accused Bush of reneging on a promise to push for an immigration liberalization, which he abandoned after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Kerry, Gephardt, Kucinich and former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun explicitly supported amnesty for undocumented workers, with Kerry saying, "It`s a matter of human rights, a matter of civil rights, a matter of fairness to Americans." Florida Sen. Bob Graham said he supports "earned amnesty."

On health care, the candidates sparred over whose plan would best help provide access to health insurance and whose was the most fiscally responsible. Kucinich and Braun favor a single-payer system, but the others have advocated expanding the current employer-based system.

Edwards said it would be wrong to try to expand health care coverage "by raising taxes on working families, the very people . . . we`re trying to help." This is a charge he has leveled at Gephardt for several months.

Gephardt, who has also been attacked by Kerry on the tax issue, argued that expanded health care coverage is "a moral issue." He said he is prepared to repeal the Bush tax cuts to provide that coverage.



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Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, left, and Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, attend a closed briefing for House members.

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Hill Braces For Iraq Request
Lawmakers Want Details From Bush

By Mike Allen and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 5, 2003; Page A01


Lawmakers in both parties expressed surprise yesterday at the newly disclosed White House estimates for spending in postwar Iraq and said they will demand many details President Bush has withheld so far, including an exit strategy and a multiyear forecast, as the price of their support.

The White House has told congressional leaders to expect a budget request of $60 billion to $70 billion for occupying and rebuilding Iraq next year. White House officials said yesterday that the request is still in flux, and could be closer to $50 billion.

The plan could be submitted within the next two weeks, Capitol Hill sources said. The unexpectedly high amounts reflect a White House conclusion that Iraqi oil revenue and allies` contributions will be less than estimated before the war, the sources said.

The result is likely to be weeks of scrutiny of Bush`s mission in Iraq. Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, said that before approving tens of billions of dollars to continue U.S. operations in Iraq, he wants to see "the light at the end of the tunnel."

"I`m going to be very wary of a proposal for more money without a more clear plan of how and when we`re going to exit," he said. "That`s what I believe Congress is going to say to the president."

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds foreign aid, said he was "happy to see a dose of reality, whether they came to it later or earlier."

Democratic lawmakers said the figures justified their earlier suspicions about undisclosed costs of the war. Sen. Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.) said: "This reveals the bankruptcy of their planning process and this go-it-alone strategy."

Despite such expressions of skepticism, House and Senate leaders said Bush is likely to get whatever he requests. Some GOP-controlled committees plan to demand more detail and accountability than the White House has provided in the past. "Even when your house blows down, the insurance company asks you for three estimates," a Republican congressional aide said.

In a reflection of lawmakers` growing concern, Gen. John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command and the top commander in Iraq, was hurriedly summoned to a closed-door briefing for the House and Senate armed services committees yesterday. Afterward, he expressed support for Bush`s decision this week to open negotiations with the U.N. Security Council about a resolution that would establish a multinational force in Iraq under U.S. command.

"It`s important that we put a face on this mission as one that the entire international community is interested in participating in," Abizaid said.

Lawmakers said Abizaid described the type and number of fighters arrayed against U.S. forces in Iraq. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) said that the briefing did not answer his concerns and that the administration "needs to demonstrate the light at the end of the tunnel it talks about is not a freight train."

The administration said yesterday that to attract more financial contributions from foreign governments, Bush would be willing to forgo control over the money. Undersecretary of State Alan Larson said the administration supports the creation of Iraqi reconstruction trust funds that would remain outside U.S. control.

Diplomats from many countries have expressed wariness about contributing significant sums to the reconstruction when the United States remains the dominant force in Iraqi politics, making key budget choices, doling out contracts and appointing the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. Under the new proposal, the money could be run by the World Bank or the United Nations, with management boards composed of Iraqis, officials from major donor countries and members of international organizations.

Also yesterday, top national security officials -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- reacted angrily to a report in yesterday`s Washington Post that said Powell and the Joint Chiefs had pushed Bush to seek U.N. support for the occupation.

Powell and Myers emphasized that there was no collusion between them, or between uniformed generals and State Department diplomats, to circumvent the Pentagon`s civilian leadership. "There was no need for any such collusion," Powell said. "The idea of a resolution has been something that I have been talking about with the president`s approval."

Bush and his aides had resisted providing even a range of next year`s possible costs in Iraq, and the White House has yet to provide any official notice to Congress about its budget request or when it might come.

Bush said yesterday in an interview with CNBC that he has yet to decide on a total because his budget office is still evaluating the requests of military commanders and civilian officials in Iraq. "The way I run the administration is I say to those who are responsible for the actions in the field: What does it take to get the job done?" Bush said. He added that his budget officials will work through "any excesses, as they may see them," then he will make a decision.

Congressional sources said the most likely breakdown of the request will be about $55 billion for the Pentagon and close to $15 billion for relief and reconstruction, including money for training foreign forces and about $1 billion for Afghanistan.

Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon`s chief financial officer, warned that Congress should expect additional budget requests. "This isn`t a flash-in-the-pan kind of problem," he said at a joint meeting in Arlington of the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, two professional organizations for military officers. "We`re at war -- for some time."

Lt. Gen. Robert Magnus, the Marine Corps` chief budget officer, agreed with that estimate of long-term costs. "This is a generational war," he said, speaking alongside Zakheim. "This isn`t just Osama bin Laden."

Democrats said they will use debate over the spending request to call attention to domestic programs they believe are being shortchanged because of the unexpected fiscal drain from Iraq. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said he will introduce an amendment calling for "parity" between spending on education, public works and health in Iraq and the United States.

In a sign of growing friction between Bush and the military establishment, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a Gulf War commander, said in an interview during the meeting in Arlington that he is hearing an unprecedented amount of concern among retired officers over how the Bush administration has handled Iraq. Their criticism focused on Rumsfeld, he added.

"I`ve never seen so such discontent among the retired community," Van Riper said. Last week, he said, he was at a breakfast with eight retired generals at which one asked about Rumsfeld, "When are they going to get rid of this guy?"

Staff writers Juliet Eilperin and Peter Slevin contributed to this report.



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U.S. Officials Warn of New Tactics by Al Qaeda
Homeland Security Dept. Cites Concern About Attacks, but Does Not Raise Alert Level

By John Mintz and Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 5, 2003; Page A02


The Department of Homeland Security warned yesterday that al Qaeda might launch attacks in the United States using tactics not employed here in the past, such as car bombs, men dressed as women to avoid scrutiny and hijacking airliners in Mexico or Canada that can be flown into U.S. targets.

But the department did not raise the national threat alert level from yellow for "elevated risk" to orange for "high risk" because, department spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "the intelligence information we have isn`t specific enough to do that."

Homeland Security officials have said they would avoid frequent raising and lowering of the threat level for fear that Americans would grow jaded about terrorism threats. Earlier this year, the government sounded three orange alerts in four months, and many citizens as well as public officials all but ignored them.

The government sounded the alarm yesterday because of several factors, officials said: the approaching second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; an alarming rise in intelligence indicating al Qaeda operatives are scouting an array of targets; and recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Iraq.

Airline officials said even before yesterday`s warning that they are expecting a light travel day on Sept. 11 because travelers avoided the date out of caution.

In a conference call with governors and state civil defense officials, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge explained that while he was not elevating the threat level, "they should review and maintain their security procedures," Johndroe said.

"We remain concerned about al Qaeda`s continued efforts to plan multiple attacks against the U.S. and U.S. interests overseas," said a Homeland Security advisory that was sent to local authorities, airlines and critical industries, and was released to the public. "However, at this time, we have no specific information on individual targets or dates for any attack.

"Arrests over the past several months of key al Qaeda members around the world may have delayed or even disrupted some plans," it continued. "We do know, however, that operatives still at large view attacks on U.S. territory as a priority. . . . Al Qaeda`s primary intent is to conduct synchronized attacks against U.S. interests."

At the same time, the recent attacks overseas against "soft" targets that were attributed to al Qaeda or its allies suggest terrorists could target the same relatively unprotected types of facilities here, the bulletin said. Among them could be apartment complexes, gas stations and restaurants, the department said. VIPs in this country also could be targeted, it said.

Homeland Security raised the alert level to orange a year ago, shortly before the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. But in recent days Ridge, along with White House, Justice Department, FBI and CIA officials, decided the government doesn`t have enough information to justify doing the same now.

Government officials said they are concerned recent terrorist bombings overseas might indicate al Qaeda has embarked on a frenzy of attacks. They are focusing on recent assaults in Iraq -- on the United Nations headquarters and near a Shiite shrine -- as well as the bombing of the J.W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta, and earlier attacks on residential compounds in Saudi Arabia.

The department noted that while al Qaeda has never carried off an attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons, the network is aggressively trying to develop such weapons.

"However, the acquisition, production, or theft of these materials and subsequent dissemination is a top al Qaeda objective," the Homeland Security advisory said. "We believe it continues to research more advanced CBRN operations, including production of pathogenic organisms and toxins, as well as high-impact dissemination methods such as contamination of water and food, and aerosolization of an agent in enclosed densely populated space.``

But some of its most pointed warnings focused on commercial airliners. "A growing body of credible intelligence indicates al Qaeda continues to develop plans for multiple attacks against targets in the U.S. involving commercial aircraft," the bulletin said. "Some plans [call] for hijacking airliners transiting near or flying over the continental United States -- but not destined to land at U.S. airports."

Al Qaeda operatives "have been studying countries to determine which have the least stringent requirements for entry, visas or other documentation," it added. "Identifying which countries have the least restrictive requirements for entry may also tell terrorist operatives which airline flights would be easiest to board and take control in order to crash into targets in the U.S."

Last month, the government suspended a program allowing foreigners to travel through this country without obtaining visas, because of intelligence that al Qaeda views international flights transiting this country as candidates for takeover and use in suicide attacks.

Most airports across the country will likely rethink staffing levels of airport police and security plans with Homeland Security`s Transportation Security Administration, said Carter Morris, a vice president at the American Association of Airport Executives.

Spokesmen for Dulles International, Reagan National and BWI airports said the airports will keep the same levels of police patrols. Some airlines said they expect travel on Sept. 11 to be as light as it was last year.

Meanwhile, a senior FBI official said yesterday that there are relatively few al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and those who are here are raising funds or recruiting members rather than actively planning attacks.

"Our concern continues to be, `What exists in the U.S. that we`re not aware of?` " he said.

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.



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A Slimmer Energy Bill




Friday, September 5, 2003; Page A20


SOMETIMES, IT makes sense for Congress to pass large omnibus bills covering a wide range of policies. This is not one of those times. In the case of the vast energy bill that a House-Senate conference committee is due to begin discussing this week, a far better result would be achieved if a much narrower electricity bill were extracted from the many pages of energy legislation, improved upon and then passed quickly. Congress could then go on arguing indefinitely about how best to subsidize the nuclear energy industry or whether to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. In the meantime, the nation`s electric power producers could get on with the task of meeting new reliability standards and updating the financial and physical workings of the national grid.

Unfortunately, that isn`t likely to happen, not least because the one proposal on the table doesn`t go nearly far enough. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), ranking minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has introduced a bill that sets mandatory reliability standards -- something that several Congresses have agreed upon but never managed to pass. His bill, however, leaves out not only the rest of the energy legislation but all of the more controversial aspects of electricity legislation. That makes it too easy to dismiss as a transparent political ploy, a way for House Democrats to avoid voting for the energy bill while arguing that they favor "reliability" in electricity nonetheless.

Genuine reform of the grid needs to go deeper, including not just mandatory reliability standards but requirements for utilities to join regional transmission organizations, as well as the establishment of consistent rules for the national market. House negotiators don`t strongly oppose such measures, but a handful of senators, mostly notably Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), have tried to postpone them.

That points to the major obstacle to a clean but useful bill to improve the electricity grid. Special interests and regional biases work against the kind of legislation that is needed. That leads advocates of a broader energy bill to argue that the electricity rules will be hard to change without a bit of "bribery," in the form of popular subsidies and earmarked grants. Members who feel ambivalent about some of the changes to electricity regulation might be enticed to vote for the bill anyway, for example, if it brings subsidies for ethanol (in corn-growing states) or for drilling (in oil-producing states). Unfortunately, Congress seems to be heading toward passage of a bill that contains all of the bribes and little of the essential reform. One month after a costly and perilous blackout, legislators ought to do better than that.




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Letting Iraq Save Itself


By David Ignatius

Friday, September 5, 2003; Page A21


President Bush has wisely bitten the bullet and asked for help in Iraq from the United Nations. But he still lacks a clear strategy for restoring sovereignty to the Iraqi people so that U.S. troops can eventually leave.

The most interesting plan I`ve heard for this political transition comes from Ghassan Salame, a Lebanese political scientist who was senior political adviser to the U.N.`s chief in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and who narrowly escaped when Vieira de Mello was killed by a truck bomb on Aug. 19.

Salame said in an interview yesterday that France, Russia and other members of the Security Council will probably support a new U.N. resolution calling for a multinational force in Iraq under U.S. command. This U.N.-sponsored force will help stabilize Iraq, but Salame argues there must also be a rapid devolution of political power to the Iraqis. He wants to replace U.S. civil administrator Paul Bremer not with a U.N. substitute but with Iraqi sovereignty.

Security will remain the crucial issue in Iraq, and the addition of U.N. troops to handle routine peacekeeping will allow the U.S. military to concentrate on the harder task of fighting the Iraqi terrorist resistance. But foreign troops won`t put this shattered nation back together. That`s the importance of Salame`s plan, which he stressed is personal rather than a U.N. proposal.

Salame`s basic argument is that Iraqis have to take more responsibility for their country, and the only way to achieve this goal is to give them the political power they have been demanding. To that end, Salame proposes that three steps be taken immediately:

• First, a provisional government should be created. The easiest way to do this would be to merge the existing Governing Council and cabinet. The two 25-member interim bodies are duplicative, with the heads of key political factions sitting on the council and their deputies typically serving as ministers. The merged body would be reduced to 20 to 25 people, and the United Nations would then recognize it as Iraq`s legitimate government.

"The present political situation is not tenable," says Salame. Instead of "creeping" gradually toward eventual Iraqi control, America and its allies should agree to "go straight to the Iraqis."

• Second, Iraq should quickly regain control of its national budget, so that the provisional government is forced to make hard decisions about where to spend limited money.

Rather than give Iraqis this power of the purse, the United Nations is currently planning to replace its cumbersome "oil for food" program with a jury-rigged "development fund." Bremer would sign checks, in consultation with a monitoring group drawn from international organizations such as the World Bank.

But if Iraqis controlled the budget, they would have to negotiate the compromises that are the essence of politics. Instead of blithely calling for 1,500 new schools, as the interim Governing Council recently did, the new provisional government would have to set priorities.

• Third, a constitutional conference should begin work now on a document that will provide a democratic political structure for the new Iraq. Its membership should include the 25 members of the constitutional committee already named, plus another 100 or so members to be selected by the provisional government. The goal would be to have a new constitution ready for a nationwide referendum in January, with elections to follow in March or April.

Salame, whom I first met more than 20 years ago in Beirut in the last, convulsive stages of the Lebanese civil war, says he is worried that in its efforts to stabilize Iraq, the United States is turning back the clock by transferring power to tribal and religious leaders.

"It`s a Lebanization of Iraq, and I regret that," he says. "The country is becoming less secular, and reverting to its old cleavages." He hopes the new constitution will not mirror Lebanon`s religious spoils system but will create something more modern and stable.

Bush swallowed his pride this week and admitted that the United States doesn`t have the resources, financial or military, to go it alone in Iraq. He was acceding to pressure from his uniformed military, and also to reality. Hoping for the best simply wasn`t a strategy.

As Salame notes, long-term U.S. administration of Iraq would require perhaps 10,000 civilians -- an unimaginable financial and military burden. So in that sense, Bush may not have an alternative to the kind of devolution Salame suggests.

What makes Salame`s proposals compelling is that they are quick and clean, and they place responsibility where it has always belonged, with the Iraqi people themselves. To those who wonder if the United States can risk moving so fast, Salame would probably answer: Can it risk moving more slowly?

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The Cartoon Graveyard
Just the Cartoons Without the Commentary
Mit 112 mal neuer, frischer Ware solltet Ihr bis heute nachmittag auch ohne mich auskommen.

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THE WORLD



Germany, France Fault U.S. Offer of U.N. Iraq Role
Schroeder and Chirac favor more authority for world body and a quicker transfer of power. Diplomats see a starting point for talks.
By Maggie Farley, Sebastian Rotella and Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writers

September 5, 2003

UNITED NATIONS — The leaders of France and Germany criticized the Bush administration`s new proposal for a greater international role in occupied Iraq on Thursday, saying the U.S. must speed up the transfer of power to an Iraqi government and give the U.N. more authority.

Although their words sounded like a reprise of their alliance in opposition to the war earlier this year, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder did not completely reject the U.S. plan. Diplomats at the United Nations interpreted that as a starting point for negotiations.

In Baghdad, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq said he had enough soldiers for the tasks assigned to him, but new challenges "looming in the future" would require more soldiers. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez confirmed that the Pentagon would like to see 10,000 more troops from other countries take part in the postwar peacekeeping and cleanup.

U.S. and Turkish officials began discussions Thursday on the conditions for sending Turkish troops to Iraq.

Chirac, who held a regularly scheduled meeting with Schroeder in Dresden, Germany, told reporters that the U.S. proposal "seems rather far from what we see as the foremost objective, which is the transfer of political responsibility to an Iraqi government as rapidly as possible."

Schroeder said the U.S. proposal that began circulating this week was "not dynamic enough, not sufficient."

Emphasizing a desire to help Iraq, the French president said France would study the resolution "in the most positive manner possible" and that France and Germany would work "in full collaboration" to amend it to reflect their concerns.

Their comments suggested that prewar divisions between the allies had not entirely disappeared. But diplomats said they might be able to resolve the differences.

"We didn`t expect everyone to agree on the first day," said one Security Council diplomat. "There`s a big gap to close, but everyone wants to see Iraq succeed, so I think we can close it."

Russia and China, which like France hold veto power on the U.N. Security Council, sent positive signals about the resolution in media statements and in a closed-door meeting of the five permanent council members.

"They were making suggestions, not objections," said Richard Grenell, spokesman for U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte, who convened the meeting. "But it`s very early in this process."

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the U.S. was willing to work with France, Germany and others.

"I think the resolution is drafted in a way that deals with the concerns that leaders such as President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder have raised in the past, and if they have suggestions, we would be more than happy to listen to them," he said.

A senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said German officials had contacted the State Department after the comments by Schroeder and Chirac became public to say that Schroeder`s remarks weren`t meant to be negative.

The draft has not yet been formally submitted to the Security Council, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, mindful of the prewar divisions, cautioned ambassadors this week to keep their debate private until they reach a consensus. The council will meet as a whole today for its first informal discussion of the proposals.

The draft resolution calls for a multinational force under U.S. command to help stabilize Iraq and provide enough security so Iraqis can begin to reclaim sovereignty over their country.

The proposal has the U.N. in a central role helping to organize elections and overseeing Iraq`s political transition, though the United States and Britain would retain ultimate control. The resolution calls for the Security Council to formally endorse the interim Iraqi Governing Council. It would be up to the Governing Council, it says, to create a timetable for drafting a constitution and holding elections.

France and Germany are preparing an amendment that would accelerate the transfer of power from U.S.-led occupation authorities to Iraqis, under U.N. supervision and according to a precise timetable.

"We think the situation is deteriorating," said French Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere. "We will make a proposal on how to transfer responsibility to Iraqis. It is important that they have ownership of the process."

Gunter Pleuger, the German ambassador to the United Nations, added, "We would like to see the U.N. take over the political process. We would like to improve the security situation. And third, we would like to have transparency in economic reconstruction," he said. "We will have to find language that reflects this."

Key for the United States is finding countries to share the military and financial burdens.

The pressure on U.S. officials to win more foreign troops and money for Iraq stems partly from Capitol Hill, where the administration told congressional leaders this week that President Bush soon would submit a request for additional funding for the military operation. Administration officials denied reports that they had settled on about $65 billion, though congressional analysts say they expect that the administration will need at least that much.

The administration also sent Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, to brief members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said lawmakers are hungry for more information about the situation in Iraq and the administration`s plans before they approve another big pot of money.

"There`s no question [the money] can be passed, as long as it is properly justified," Portman said. "It needs to be coupled with a more aggressive effort to explain" the administration`s plans.

Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, spoke Thursday as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived in the region on a visit that appeared to be aimed at determining how many troops from other countries are needed. More than 90% of the troops in Iraq are Americans.

U.S. officials have contended since Bush declared an end to active combat on May 1 that there are enough soldiers to secure the peace and get the country on the road to reconstruction and democracy. But resistance is growing, and terrorism and sabotage are diverting manpower.

"In terms of additional coalition assets and U.N. forces coming into the country, our position over time has been consistent — that we welcome international participation," Sanchez said. "It will clearly show the world and the Iraqi people that this is not a business of occupying Iraq. This is a business of getting the security and stability to ensure a vision of democracy for the Iraqi people.

"I have sufficient forces to accomplish the missions that are currently assigned to [U.S.-led forces]," Sanchez continued. "There are some security challenges out there that are looming in the future that would require additional forces."

In London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was quoted as calling for an additional 5,000 British soldiers to join the 11,000 stationed in southern Iraq. The Daily Telegraph reported that Straw thought the current British force was too small to handle the massive reconstruction work ahead and that reinforcements were needed to improve security.

Sanchez said the coalition would welcome troops from Muslim nations and noted that Turkish troops could be used in areas where their presence wouldn`t anger Iraqi Kurds, who often have had strained relations with their neighbors.

The general emphasized that Iraqi security forces are being trained to take some of the burdens off the coalition, including relieving the occupation force of responsibility for police work, guarding the borders and patrolling major highways now plagued by armed bandits.

Rumsfeld kept a low profile on his visit but told reporters on the flight from Washington that he would be meeting with mission commanders and visiting U.S. troops. He said the occupation force should draw in more foreign troops and work to boost Iraqi security forces.

"I think that there is a value in showing that this coalition is broad," Rumsfeld said. "So I think the idea of going to the U.N., seeking an appropriate resolution, possibly having the effect of broadening somewhat the coalition, although it`s quite broad at the present time, is a good thing for Iraq. I think it`s a good thing for the region."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Farley reported from the United Nations, Rotella from Paris and Williams from Baghdad. Staff writers Robin Wright and Janet Hook in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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NEWS ANALYSIS



Regardless of Outcome, Resolution Poses Risks
By Robin Wright
Times Staff Writer

September 5, 2003

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration faces enormous risks in going back to the United Nations for help in Iraq — with no guarantees that it will win passage of a new resolution or, even if it does, that it will be able to persuade skeptical, nervous and cranky allies to provide the infusion of foreign troops and funds it wants.

But the United States had little choice, according to U.S. officials and analysts as well as foreign envoys.

A confluence of factors — including congressional pressure, public anxiety, the approaching presidential campaign, the impending new U.N. session, worsening violence in Iraq and growing impatience among Iraqis — forced President Bush to return to the world body and put his Iraq policy on the line, the array of sources said.

Although the U.N. Security Council refused to endorse military action against Iraq earlier this year, going back to the arena of one of the administration`s worst defeats appears to be the only way to address problems the world`s mightiest military and strongest economy cannot resolve on its own, they added.

The biggest risk is being rejected — again.

"If we are rejected, it will be a major diplomatic defeat and another black eye that will make us look even worse in the eyes of the world. Our ability to get countries to sign up or help financially will then be even more limited," said Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council staff member in the Clinton and current Bush administrations and now director of research at the Brookings Institution`s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

Failure to find common ground could also deepen the divide in ways that affect not only Iraq but future cooperation on other foreign crises, the analysts warned.

Yet winning passage of a new resolution may not solve the issues that led Washington to ask for help.

"With passage of a new resolution there will be expectations that all problems will be resolved, and the reality is that they won`t," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst who is now at the National Defense University.

"A new resolution may end up giving us more people to provide more protection, but it`s not going to ease our security problem because those who want us out want all foreigners out of Iraq."

"The people who blew up U.N. headquarters were signaling that the U.N. was not acceptable either," she said. "So we have to be careful what we ask for."

U.S. officials, however, counter that Washington has nothing to lose — just as, they say, it had nothing to lose in trying for a resolution on the eve of war.

"As difficult as our experience was this spring, it offered an example and a lesson," a senior State Department official said.

"When this administration goes to the U.N., we`re not giving the Security Council a veto over what happens. We`re trying to work with others.

"Even though we didn`t get that resolution, just going there helped us get Britain, Italy and Spain to send troops."

Failure this time would mean the administration could lose the prospect of getting new troops from India, Pakistan, Turkey and Bangladesh. Assistance from the latter three, with predominantly Muslim populations, is seen as particularly important to defusing tensions with the Islamic world and giving the occupation a broader legitimacy.

"We also might lose the approval of French diplomats, which doesn`t pain us very much," the senior administration official said. "And we`d probably lose a little in public opinion.

"But whatever happens, what is emerging is a consensus about the need for further international support to ensure Iraq`s stability and reconstruction."

In other words, he argued, the process itself boosts America`s goals.

But analysts warn that going to the world body may instead make the United States look uncomfortably vulnerable, undermining the administration`s agenda.

"The risks in the short term expose us to direct criticism from those who will now be able to tell us what a mess Iraq is," said Ellen Laipson, former vice chairwoman of the National Intelligence Council and now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington defense think tank.

"Asking for help can also lead to a perception of weakness or inconsistency or not having had a strategic plan, which could have longer-term consequences."

After a briefing Thursday before Congress, which has been urging the administration to seek more U.N. help, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz argued that the administration`s decision to seek a new U.N. resolution did not represent a shift in policy and was instead a sign of the administration`s ability to be flexible in the face of changing events.

"Things change," Wolfowitz said. "You exploit opportunities, you deal with surprises."

If the White House does win passage of a new resolution and gets commitments for more troops, it will still take time to get those forces in place.

Deploying tens of thousands of additional troops could take three to four months, probably meaning only limited relief for U.S. and coalition troops before early next year, according to William Durch, a senior associate at the Stimson Center.

Resolving the sensitive issue of who will pay the costs would also take time; many of the countries now being asked to offer troops expect at least partial assistance.

That cost will range from $125,000 a year for each soldier from a developed country to about $40,000 a year for each soldier from a developing country, said Durch, a specialist on peacekeeping and nation-building operations.

And additional troops mean more targets, Laipson noted.

"That`s the dilemma," she said. "More troops can sometimes increase vulnerability. It`s very paradoxical."


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Times staff writer Janet Hook in Washington contributed to this report.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-usaf…
THE WORLD



Bush Planning to Boost Aid to Afghanistan by $1 Billion
By doubling the current annual spending level, he aims to accelerate lagging reconstruction and fight a mounting Taliban insurgency.
By Sonni Efron
Times Staff Writer

September 5, 2003

WASHINGTON — President Bush is planning soon to announce a doubling of this year`s aid to Afghanistan in an effort to make visible improvements in the lives of the Afghan people before the country`s first elections, scheduled for June.

Some diplomats and aid workers say the anticipated $1-billion boost in aid is long overdue to speed up reconstruction and combat the Taliban insurgency that is gaining ground in southern Afghanistan.

Guerrillas have been clashing with U.S. and Afghan forces by day and leaving letters in villages by night threatening death to those who collaborate with Americans. Two police chiefs and three mullahs who supported the U.S.-backed central government of President Hamid Karzai have been assassinated in the last six weeks.

"It is in our interests, in the Afghans` interests, in the security interests of the region that a moderate government emerge from that election," a senior Bush administration official said. If the moderates are to prevail, he said, Karzai and members of his government need "to show their people that they delivered security, economic benefits, reconstruction, political advancement That it`s built schools, clinics and roads."

U.S. officials acknowledge that aid efforts in Afghanistan leveled off while the United States was preoccupied with the war in Iraq. But they reiterated that the United States will not repeat the mistake it made by abandoning Afghanistan to chaos after the Soviet Union ended its occupation in 1989.

The United States spent $900 million in Afghanistan in 2002 and expected to do the same this year. The new initiative means that this year`s spending would be boosted to about $1.9 billion. The administration also will seek matching contributions from other nations at a Sept. 21 donors conference in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, officials said.

"We never again want Afghanistan to be the home of terrorists," said William Taylor, the State Department`s coordinator for Afghanistan.

Details of the new package — including where the money will come from — are still being hammered out, said the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. At least a third of the aid will be used to accelerate recruitment and training for the Afghan National Army and national police force, to improve security. The Afghan army had been losing up to 40% of its recruits, but improvements in salaries and living conditions have boosted retention to about 85%, an official said.

The aid will be focused on areas where reconstruction has been slow — including the Pushtun areas of the south and southeast, where the Taliban is active, another official said.

Bush specifically wants a shattered 300-mile road the U.S. is rebuilding between Kabul and Kandahar — a project of great economic and symbolic importance — to be completed as promised by December, a senior State Department official said.

With help from Britain, New Zealand and possibly Germany, the U.S. also plans to double the number of U.S.-Afghan joint "provincial reconstruction teams" that patrol far-flung Afghan provinces, rebuilding schools, wells, bridges and communications and keeping an eye on local warlords. The present four teams will be increased to eight by fall, and Taylor said he was pushing for more.

"Their presence has an amazing effect on perceptions of security," Taylor said. "Confidence goes up that the local warlord will not be able to have the run of the place as they have in the past."

U.S. planners are trying to ensure that money pumped quickly into the undeveloped country is used to help the poorest Afghans, not the best-connected, he said.

In a commitment to the "nation-building" that the administration once shunned, eight to 12 senior political advisors will be sent to each Afghan minister, and a cadre of technocrats will be dispatched to help Afghanistan`s largely untrained bureaucracy administer the aid.

The technocrat program is politically delicate, because the Soviet Union filled Afghanistan`s ministries with technical advisors during its occupation — and still failed to run the country effectively.

International expertise is clearly needed to create a modern Afghanistan, but "the question is whether from a cultural and psychological perspective you can make this work," said Alexander Thier, an Asia Foundation official working in Kabul, the capital. "People see foreign advisors as a portent of more sinister things."

The only way to gain the confidence of the Afghan people — and defuse support for the Taliban — "is to get them jobs and give them a voice in governing their country," Thier said.

The recent Taliban insurgency has heightened Washington`s sense of urgency about the pace of reconstruction in Afghanistan.

The Taliban revival in Afghanistan is "very serious," Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who is director of New York University`s Center on International Cooperation, said in an interview from Kabul. Although the resurgence is not a threat to either the central or local Afghan governments, Rubin said, it makes large areas of the country off-limits to aid workers, prevents the government from exercising its authority and reinforces a vicious cycle of excluding the ethnic Pushtuns who live in those areas from political and economic gains.

Rubin cited reports that Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorist forces are openly organizing and operating out of bases in Pakistan, allegedly with help from Pakistani security services. Pakistan has denied this. But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said after a visit to the region last month that Pakistan was not doing all it could to stop cross-border attacks.

Taylor said Taliban fighters who used to infiltrate Afghanistan from Pakistan in groups of one to three are now moving across the border in large formations.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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A Seattle man catches a nap -- and the spirit of this dry Seattle summer -- at the Leschi Fishing Pier yesterday. The city`s tally of days at 70 degrees or above was up to 59 yesterday, when the mercury hit a high of 86. (September 05, 2003)

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/138108_ourplace05.html

Our Place In The World: We must follow path of diplomacy
Friday, September 5, 2003

By BREWSTER C. DENNY
GUEST COLUMNIST

On Aug. 21, U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee convened a public forum in his district on the need for a non-partisan national commission to examine the role of intelligence in the national security decision-making process leading to the Iraq War. It was clear that Inslee`s purpose was not a partisan intelligence blame game expedition.

The forum was a search for an understanding of the policy process that led to a premature decision to invade a sovereign country without the support of the international community and in violation of the charter of the United Nations. Inslee was chairman of the panel, which also included former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, retired Adm. William Center and this author.

More than 1,200 citizens turned out at Shoreline Community College on a weekday at noon to give their views on this critical question -- a remarkable turnout. What consensus did this forum appear to reach, and what remains to be learned?

Here is what I heard. There was not sufficient evidence to justify an invasion of a foreign country in violation of international law and in absence of an appropriate action of the international community.

There was not sufficient evidence of an imminent threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion. The international inspection regime was not given enough time and assistance to do the job assigned to it by the United Nations.

It also appears, although further study may be required, that at least some information on the actual threat was hyped, spun or otherwise skewed to justify a decision already made. The United States did not seek the cooperation mid support of the international community or regard its input with respect. On the famous 16 words in the State of the Union address, the United States acted in bad faith to its oldest and most loyal ally.

To understand what remains to be learned, remember that what we are dealing with here is presidential, i.e. National Security Council, decision-making on vital national security matters. The question is: Given what they actually knew, did they make the right decision? Was the policy based on a sound understanding of what should be our place in the world? Does our arrogant (as seen by the rest of the world) decision to go it alone really augur well for the many years to come?

After telling the United Nations and most major nations to stay out, how do we reverse that terrible failure, especially since we appear to be at last seeking their help because of our budget problem? Should we abandon the experience of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the lessons of Vietnam and just forge ahead virtually unilaterally? These are policy questions that must be answered by the decision makers and with the full understanding of the public.

Inslee is to be commended for calling for a bipartisan group of experts to deal with this, the most pressing crisis in American foreign policy, in years. His study must address how we get out of the cul-de-sac into which our policy has placed us. We must sharply improve the perception that our longtime allies have of this new imperial America and work hard at the collaborative reconstruction efforts and try to gain the respect of the Muslim world.

We must reverse the course of this country toward international machinery for peace, human welfare, human rights and the environment. We must join and support the several international commitments that we have rejected: Law of the Sea, Kyoto, International Criminal Court, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, ABM Treaty and the Pacific Salmon Commission. We must use diplomacy and the support of the international community, not the threat of unilateral pre-emptive war to deal with dangerous and threatening regimes.

With the full involvement of the United Nations, we must restore Iraq and Afghanistan to peace, self-government and safety and an opportunity for a better life for their citizens. In an earlier outstanding piece in the Our Place in the World series ("Experience says Iraq will resist U.S. imposed democracy," July 18), James Huntley, who helped build democracy in postwar Germany from 1952 to 1955, sets forth how difficult it will be to do this job.

We must do it and, so far, we are not prepared to do it. And we cannot do it as a colonial occupying power, which is how we are viewed in the world and the region. Above all, we must recraft our place in the world. And we must do it with national security policy leadership of the quality of President Truman, President Eisenhower, Dean Acheson, George C. Marshall, Robert Lovett and George Kennan.



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Brewster C. Denny is the founder and first dean of the University of Washington`s Evans School of Public Affairs. Submissions for Our Place in the World, of up to 800 words, can be e-mailed to [e-mail]; faxed to 206-448-8184 or mailed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, P.O. Box 1909, Seattle, WA 98111-1909.

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The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch
A $1 mil book deal, zero memory of any "rescue" and the worst book you`ll read this year
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 5, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/



Hey, remember that dramatic CNN footage of that big statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled by U.S. forces in that Baghdad square a few months back, during the "war"? Remember how powerfully symbolic it was supposed to be?

Remember, later, seeing the wide-angle shot on the Internet, the one of all the U.S. tanks surrounding the square and the whole bogus setup of how they staged the event, complete with a big crane and some strong cable and strategically positioned "citizens" cheering their "liberation" as the statue fell, as just off camera, a handful of genuine Iraqis loitered nearby, looking confused and bored?

Remember how you felt then? Like this little black worm had bored into your skin and was crawling around in your small intestine and you had the perpetual urge to go off into the corner and eat pie and slam double scotches and scream at the state of BushCo`s nation?


The Jessica Lynch story is just like that, only much, much worse.

These are the things that make you wince and sigh. These are the things that put it all in perspective, make you realize what the Pentagon and the military hawks really value.

These are the things that make you realize, goddammit, here I am working every day and struggling to make ends meet in a BushCo-gutted economy and all I really needed to do all along to make a million bucks is stage some sort of bogus wartime heroics and sell it to a war-numbed American populace for $24.95 in hardback, and, boom, Range Rover City.

Jessica Lynch. You know the one. The sweet, American-pie 19-year-old soldier and kindergarten-teacher wanna-be whose army squad took a wrong turn in Iraq and was, apparently, ambushed.

And some of her comrades were killed and she was taken prisoner, full of stab wounds and bullet holes, and she was whisked off to a ragged Iraqi hospital and held for eight days by vicious Iraqi guards and ostensibly abused, and later supposedly "rescued" in the most daring and macho made-for-TV moment of the war by elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs. Wow.

Except that it never really happened that way. Except that Lynch herself doesn`t remember a single thing and all the nurses and doctors and eyewitnesses on the scene say the Iraqi fedayeen guards had fled the day before the "rescue," and there was no danger whatsoever, no resistance of any kind, the U.S. forces could just walk right in, and they knew it.

And the hospital doors were wide open, and the nurses and doctors had gone out of their way to provide decent care for our precious Jessica, considering the circumstances, and doctors even tried to return Lynch to U.S. forces themselves.

And despite U.S. claims, Lynch had no knife wounds or bullet holes at all, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic and violent "rescue" was really just inane and silly and entirely faked and yet America bought it, hook, line and Rumsfeld, because it was on TV.

And now, here we are. Jessica and disgraced N.Y. Times reporter Rick "Oh my God do I need a gig" Bragg just inked a $1 million book deal to tell her nonstory, titled "I`m a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," not "Oh My God You Are Such a Sucker for Buying This Book I Mean Wow."

Because this is how we fabricate our history. This is how we spin our patriotism, how we bake our jingoistic cake, the Lynch tale the most apt and definitive myth of the war so far.

Because Jessica`s story, much like WMDs and Saddam`s nukes and biotoxins and Orange Alerts and our imminently prosperous economy and Jenna Bush`s ostensible prowess with a beer bong, does not rely on truths. We do not rely on first-hand reports. We do not rely on anything so piffling and small and dangerous as honesty.

We rely, simply, on PR. We believe the TV images of the bogus "rescue" at the expense of common sense because we are a nation drunk on the idea that the U.S. can do no wrong and TV would never lie.

And goddammit if Hannity and Rush and O`Reilly say it happened like that, it must be true, and damn you America-hating libs for daring to question the integrity of our armed forces when they are out there right now protecting us from, uh, what was it again? Higher gas prices? Israel`s scorn? Dick Cheney`s pallid sneer? Something like that.

Look, there is no war without spin. There is no war without outright lying to the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into supporting our unprovoked savagery by way of Hollywood-style set pieces performed specifically to deflect attention from the brutality and the decapitated children and the still-dying U.S. soldiers and the burning bodies by the side of the road.

This is nothing shocking. This is nothing even remotely unusual or uncommon. The fabric of war consists not of gallant battles fought by hardy soldiers for some noble collective good yay yay go team, but of manufactured tales of valiant brotherhood and purebred heroism designed to make the vile pill slightly less bitter.

War is, of course, vicious and primitive and disgustingly violent and not the slightest bit gallant, and America has rarely been more thuggish in its short history than when we annihilated Afghanistan and Iraq lo these past few years, the world`s greatest bloated superpower hammering down on two nearly defenseless, piss-poor nations in the name of, well, petrochemical rights and strategic political positioning. It`s not a war, it`s a gang beating. Uncle Sam wants you.

And, hence, we need the sugar. We desperately need the sweet, teary-eyed images of flags and salutes and stunning "rescues" to make it all go down smoothly, to suppress the collective recoil, the national gag reflex. After all, who wants to see burning babies and crying mothers and hot screaming death on prime time? Show me Old Glory waving in slo-mo! Ahh, that`s better.

We need, in short, pretty 19-year-old memory-impaired soldier girls being rescued by manly SEALs wearing bitchin` night-vision goggles and yelling "Go! Go! Go!" with lots of explosions and helicopters and maybe a cameo by Bruce Willis looking squinty and tough, with the Pentagon cameras rolling and everyone`s adrenaline pumping like at a horse race, except for maybe the baffled Iraqi hospital personnel who were calmly taking care of Ms. Lynch when the U.S. storm troopers swooped in and knocked them down.

Of course, this isn`t about Jessica herself at all. She has served her country bravely and is probably very sweet and at least partially articulate and is just in it for the quick wad of cash, and what the hell she doesn`t remember a damn thing about the rescue anyway, which makes her the perfect one to write a whole book about it, with Bragg along to, ahem, "fill in the blanks." Ain`t that America.

And we can just imagine how the Pentagon brass doubtlessly winked at Jessie and said hey sweetie, you go girl, take the book deal, and the movie deal, and the commemorative plates by the Franklin Mint, it would be good for the country if you go along with the ruse, there there now, that`s a good little soldier.

Jessica Lynch is but a puppet, a toy, a convenient TV-ready canvass onto which we can project our impotent myths of patriotism and war, spit forth by the BushCo military machine to ease America`s pain, to assuage that increasingly nagging fear that we have committed this horrible thing, this irreversible atrocity.

In short, Jessica`s myth helps numb the idea that we have removed a pip-squeak, nonthreatening tyrant from power and left behind a reeking miasma of violence and bloodshed and thousands of dead citizens, more rabid anti-U.S. sentiment and mistrust and global instability than Saddam (or Osama) could`ve ever dreamed.

And little Ms. Lynch, she is America`s new doll. She is our little G.I. Jessica, all safe and clean in her homecoming fatigues, her imaginary story ready to grace the nightstands of the happily gullible across America.

Because really, why bother with all that icky messy nonfiction, all that violent unsavory fact, when straight fiction is so much more, you know, patriotic?


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Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

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Rationalizing War Crimes

By JOSEPH COLEMAN, Associated Press Writer

PARIS - The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was justified in part because Saddam Hussein retained scientists capable of building nuclear weapons, Washington`s top arms control official said Thursday.

In an interview with The Associated Press, John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said that whether Saddam`s regime actually possessed weapons of mass destruction "isn`t really the issue."

"The issue I think has been the capability that Iraq sought to have ... WMD programs," Bolton said at the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

Bolton said that Saddam kept "a coterie" of scientists he was preserving for the day when he could build nuclear weapons unhindered by international constraints.

That fact, combined with Iraq`s history of deceiving U.N. inspectors, showed that Saddam could not be trusted to abandon his ambition to develop unconventional weapons, Bolton said.

"Whether he possessed them today or four years ago isn`t really the issue," he said. "As long as that regime was in power, it was determined to get nuclear, chemical and biological weapons one way or another."

"Until that regime was removed from power, that threat remained — that was the purpose of the military action," added Bolton, who was in Paris for a two-day conference on interdiction of shipments of weapons of mass destruction.

Disarming Saddam Hussein was the Bush administration`s top rationale for the war, which started in March, and officials said beforehand that they knew where weapons were hidden.

But they have not reported finding any weapons in five months of searching. Government officials, however, still express hope that evidence of weapons programs will be found in Iraq.

The lack of success so far, after warnings that Iraq posed an immediate danger, has led critics and some former government analysts to suggest the administration exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam.

During a news conference before the interview with the AP, Bolton said that CIA weapons adviser David Kay, who is leading the hunt for weapons, would soon release a new report on his mission.

He did not say whether he expected the report to contain proof of Iraqi weapons programs.

"I have been confident that under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were determined to break the U.N. inspections and sanctions regime," he told reporters. "And that that`s why the elimination of Saddam Hussein`s regime was critical, and the evidence to support that I think is there."

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Don`t Say We Were Not Warned About This Chaos

By Robert Fisk
05 September 2003:
How arrogant was the path to war. As President Bush now desperately tries to cajole the old UN donkey to rescue him from Iraq - he who warned us that the UN was in danger of turning into a League of Nations "talking shop" if it declined him legitimacy for his invasion - we are supposed to believe that no one in Washington could have guessed the future.

Messrs Bush and Blair fantasised their way to war with all those mythical weapons of mass destruction and "imminent threats" from Iraq - whether of the 45-minute variety or not - and of the post-war "liberation", "democracy" and map-changing they were going to bestow upon the region. But the record shows just how many warnings the Bush administration received from sane and decent men in the days before we plunged into this terrible adventure.

Take the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in Washington on the eve of war. Assistant Under Secretary Douglas Feith, one of Rumsfeld`s "neo-cons", revealed that an office for "post-war planning" had only been opened three weeks earlier. He and Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman conceded that the Pentagon had been "thinking" about post-war Iraq for 10 months. "There are enormous uncertainties," Feith said. "The most you can do in planning is develop concepts."

US senators at the time were highly suspicious of the "concept" bit. When Democrat Joe Biden asked if anyone in the Bush administration had planned the post-war government of Iraq, Grossman replied that "There are things in our country we`re not going to be able to do because of our commitment in Iraq." Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman then asked: "Who will rule Iraq and how? Who will provide security? How long might US troops conceivably remain? Will the United Nations have a role?"

Ex-General Anthony Zinni, once the top man in US Central Command with "peacekeeping" experience in Kosovo, Somalia and (in 1991) northern Iraq, smelled a rat and said so in public. "Do we want to transform Iraq or just transition it out from under the unacceptable regime of Saddam Hussein into a reasonably stable nation? Transformation implies significant changes in forms of governance... Certainly there will not be a spontaneous democracy..."

Zinni spoke of the "long hard" journey towards reconstruction and added - with ironic prescience - that "It isn`t going to be a handful of people that drive out of the Pentagon, catch a plane and fly in after the military peace to try to pull this thing together."

But incredibly, that`s exactly what happened. First it was Jay "pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you`re-proud-to-be-an-American" Garner, and then the famous "anti-terrorism" expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad to hire and then re-hire the Iraqi army and then - faced with one dead American a day (and 250 US troops wounded in August alone) - to rehire the murderous thugs of Saddam`s torture centres to help in the battle against "terrorism". Iraq, Bremer blandly admitted last week, will need "several tens of billions" of dollars next year alone.

No wonder Rumsfeld keeps telling us he has "enough" men in Iraq. Sixteen of Americas`s 33 combat brigades are now in the cauldron of Iraq - five others are also deployed overseas - and the 82nd Airborne, only just out of Afghanistan (where another five US troops were killed last weekend) is about to be deployed north of Baghdad. "Bring `em on," Bush taunted America`s guerrilla enemies last month. Well, they`ve taken him at his word. There is so far not a shred of evidence that the latest Bush administration fantasy - "thousands" of foreign Islamist "jihadi" fighters streaming into Iraq to kill Americans - is true.

But it might soon be. And what will be told then? Wasn`t Iraq invaded to destroy terrorism rather than to recreate it? We were told Iraq was going to be transformed into a democracy and suddenly it`s to be a battleground for more "war against terror". America, Bush now tells his people, "is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan... so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or... Los Angeles." So that`s it then. Draw all these nasty terrorists into our much-loved "liberated" Iraq and they`ll obligingly leave the "homeland" alone. I wonder.

But notice, too, how everything is predicated to America`s costs, to American blood. An American commentator, Rosie DiManno, wrote this week that in Iraq "There`s also the other cost, the one measured in human lives... one American a day slain since Bush declared the major fighting over." Note here how the blood of Iraqis - whom we were so desperate to liberate six months ago - has disappeared from the narrative. Up to 20 innocent Iraqi civilians a day are now believed to be dying - in murders, revenge killings, at US checkpoints - and yet they no longer count. No wonder journalists now have to seek permission from the occupation authorities to visit Baghdad hospitals. Who knows how many corpses they would find in the morgue?

"The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things are far worse than we have been told... We are today not far short of a disaster." The writer was describing the crumbling British occupation of Iraq, under guerrilla attack in 1920. His name was

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Myths, Truth And U.S. Re-Construction

Iraqi Girl Blog

09/04/03: The Myth: Iraqis, prior to occupation, lived in little beige tents set up on the sides of little dirt roads all over Baghdad. The men and boys would ride to school on their camels, donkeys and goats. These schools were larger versions of the home units and for every 100 students, there was one turban-wearing teacher who taught the boys rudimentary math (to count the flock) and reading. Girls and women sat at home, in black burkas, making bread and taking care of 10-12 children.

The Truth: Iraqis lived in houses with running water and electricity. Thousands of them own computers. Millions own VCRs and VCDs. Iraq has sophisticated bridges, recreational centers, clubs, restaurants, shops, universities, schools, etc. Iraqis love fast cars (especially German cars) and the Tigris is full of little motorboats that are used for everything from fishing to water-skiing.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most people choose to ignore the little prefix ‘re’ in the words ‘rebuild’ and ‘reconstruct’. For your information, ‘re’ is of Latin origin and generally means ‘again’ or ‘anew’.

In other words, there was something there in the first place. We have hundreds of bridges. We have one of the most sophisticated network of highways in the region: you can get from Busrah, in the south, to Mosul, in the north, without once having to travel upon those little, dusty, dirt roads they show you on Fox News. We had a communications system so advanced, it took the Coalition of the Willing three rounds of bombing, on three separate nights, to damage the Ma’moun Communications Tower and silence our telephones.

Yesterday, I read how it was going to take up to $90 billion to rebuild Iraq. Bremer was shooting out numbers about how much it was going to cost to replace buildings and bridges and electricity, etc.

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad – we’ll call the company H. This company is well known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward: $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated – let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around – brace yourselves – $50 million!

Something you should know about Iraq: we have over 130,000 engineers. More than half of these engineers are structural engineers and architects. Thousands of them were trained outside of Iraq in Germany, Japan, America, Britain and other countries. Thousands of others worked with some of the foreign companies that built various bridges, buildings and highways in Iraq. The majority of them are more than proficient - some of them are brilliant.

Iraqi engineers had to rebuild Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991 when the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ was composed of over 30 countries actively participating in bombing Baghdad beyond recognition. They had to cope with rebuilding bridges and buildings that were originally built by foreign companies, they had to get around a lack of raw materials that we used to import from abroad, they had to work around a vicious blockade designed to damage whatever infrastructure was left after the war – they truly had to rebuild Iraq. And everything had to be made sturdy, because, well, we were always under the threat of war.

Over a hundred of the 133 bridges were rebuilt, hundreds of buildings and factories were replaced, communications towers were rebuilt, new bridges were added, electrical power grids were replaced… things were functioning. Everything wasn’t perfect – but we were working on it.

And Iraqis aren’t easy to please. Buildings cannot just be made functionary. They have to have artistic touches - a carved pillar, an intricately designed dome, something unique… not necessarily classy or subtle, but different. You can see it all over Baghdad – fashionable homes with plate glass windows, next to classic old ‘Baghdadi’ buildings, gaudy restaurants standing next to classy little cafes, mosques with domes so colorful and detailed they look like glamorous Faberge eggs – all done by Iraqis.

My favorite reconstruction project was the Mu’alaq Bridge over the Tigris. It is a suspended bridge that was designed and built by a British company. In 1991 it was bombed and everyone just about gave up on ever being able to cross it again. By 1994, it was up again, exactly as it was – without British companies, with Iraqi expertise. One of the art schools decided that although it wasn’t the most sophisticated bridge in the world, it was going to be the most glamorous. On the day it was opened to the public, it was covered with hundreds of painted flowers in the most outrageous colors – all over the pillars, the bridge itself, the walkways along the sides of the bridge. People came from all over Baghdad just to stand upon it and look down into the Tigris.

So instead of bringing in thousands of foreign companies that are going to want billions of dollars, why aren’t the Iraqi engineers, electricians and laborers being taken advantage of? Thousands of people who have no work would love to be able to rebuild Iraq… no one is being given a chance.

The reconstruction of Iraq is held above our heads like a promise and a threat. People roll their eyes at reconstruction because they know (Iraqis are wily) that these dubious reconstruction projects are going to plunge the country into a national debt only comparable to that of America. A few already rich contractors are going to get richer, Iraqi workers are going to be given a pittance and the unemployed Iraqi public can stand on the sidelines and look at the glamorous buildings being built by foreign companies.

I always say this war is about oil. It is. But it is also about huge corporations that are going to make billions off of reconstructing what was damaged during this war. Can you say Halliburton? (Which, by the way, got the very first contracts to replace the damaged oil infrastructure and put out ‘oil fires’ way back in April.)

Well, of course it’s going to take uncountable billions to rebuild Iraq, Mr. Bremer, if the contracts are all given to foreign companies! Or perhaps the numbers are this frightening because Ahmad Al-Chalabi is the one doing the books – he is the math expert, after all.

Former exile and Pentagon favorite Ahmad Al-Chalabi was charged in absentia for embezzling millions from a bank he operated in Jordan. This entry of Girlblog was found at: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

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The Collapse of the Middle Class

A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Rep. Bernie Sanders

The corporate media doesn`t talk about it much, but the United States is rapidly on its way to becoming three separate nations.

First, there are a small number of incredibly wealthy people who own and control more and more of our country. Second, there is a shrinking middle class in which ordinary people are, in most instances, working longer hours for lower wages and benefits. Third, an increasing number of Americans are living in abject poverty -- going hungry and sleeping out on the streets.

There has always been a wealthy elite in this country, and there has always been a gap between the rich and the poor. But the disparities in wealth and income that currently exist in this country have not been seen in over a hundred years. Today, the richest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent, and the CEOs of large corporations earn more than 500 times what their average employees make. The nation`s 13,000 wealthiest families, 1/100th of one percent of the population, receive almost as much income as the poorest 20 million families in America.

While the rich get richer and receive huge tax breaks from the White House, the middle class is struggling to keep its head above water. The unemployment rate rose to a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, 2003. There are now 9.4 million unemployed, up more than 3 million since just before Bush became President. Since March, 2001, we have lost over 2.7 million jobs in the private sector, including two million decent-paying manufacturing jobs -- ten percent of our manufacturing sector. Frighteningly, the hemorrhaging of decent paying jobs is now moving into the white-collar sector. Forrester Research Inc. predicts that at least 3.3 million information technology jobs will be lost to low-wage countries by 2015 with the expansion of digitization, the internet and high-speed data networks.

But understanding the pain and anxiety of the middle class requires going beyond the unemployment numbers. There are tens of millions of fully employed Americans who today earn, in inflation adjusted-dollars, less money than they received 30 years ago. In 1973, private-sector workers in the United States were paid on average $9.08 an hour. Today, in real wages, they are paid $8.33 per hour -- more than 8 percent lower. Manufacturing jobs that once paid a living wage are now being done in China, Mexico and other low-wage countries as corporate America ships its plants abroad.

With Wal-Mart replacing General Motors as our largest employer, many workers in the service economy not only earn low wages but also receive minimal benefits. Further, as the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs soar, more and more employers are forcing workers to assume a greater percentage of their health care costs. It is not uncommon now that increases in health care costs surpass the wage increases that workers receive -- leaving them even further behind. With the support of the Bush Administration many companies are also reducing the pensions they promised to their older workers -- threatening the retirement security of millions of Americans.

One of the manifestations of the collapse of the middle class is the increased number of hours that Americans are now forced to work in order to pay the bills. Today, the average American employee works, by far, the longest hours of any worker in the industrialized world. And the situation is getting worse. According to statistics from the International Labor Organization the average American last year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours in 1990 -- an increase of almost a week of work. We are now putting more hours into our work than at any time since the 1920s. Sixty-five years after the formal establishment of the 40-hour work week under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost 40 percent of Americans now work more than 50 hours a week.

And if the middle class is having it tough, what about the 33 million people in our society who are living in poverty, up 1.3 million in the past two years? What about the 11 million trying to make it on a pathetic minimum wage of $5.15 an hour? What about the 42 million who lack any health insurance? What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in this year, 1.3 million of them children? What about the elderly who can`t afford the outrageously high cost of the prescription drugs they need? What about the veterans who are on VA waiting lists for their health care?

This country needs to radically rethink our national priorities. The middle class is the backbone of America and it cannot be allowed to disintegrate. We need to revitalize American democracy, and create a political climate where government makes decisions which reflect the needs of all the people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors. We need to see the middle class expand, not collapse.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

* * *

Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the only Independent in the U.S. House.
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/09/04_sanders.html

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Randolph T Holhut: `The schemers who turned 9/11 into a foreign policy disaster`
Posted on Friday, September 05 @ 09:44:04 EDT
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By Randolph T. Holhut

DUMMERSTON, Vt. - We`re two years removed from that tragic September morning of death and destruction in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

As painful as that day was for Americans, little did we know that as the ash and smoke were rising from the pyre that was once the World Trade Center, there were people scheming to take advantage of the tragedy.

Two years ago, few people had heard of a Washington-based neo-conservative think tank called The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Few knew then about its plans for a global American empire or knew that its alumni - Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney`s chief of staff Lewis Libby and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, among them - had considerable power in the White House.



In the fall of 2000, PNAC issued a report entitled "Rebuilding America`s Defense: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century." The PNAC report was mostly a rehash of an earlier strategic proposal drawn up for the Pentagon by Libby and Wolfowitz in the early 1990s. Libby and Wolfowitz envisioned a world where the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy is establishing permanent U.S. military and economic dominance over the Persian Gulf region and any other part of the world where U.S. interests lie.

President George H.W. Bush and the Pentagon rejected the Libby/Wolfowitz report as being too radical. But their ideas never went away. All that was needed was more fertile ground for them to grow. That came with the Republican theft of the 2000 presidential election, which put Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and several other PNAC alums in charge of American foreign policy.

The PNAC vision of a Pax Americana in the Middle East - starting with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq - might have remained merely a vision. But in the worst case scenario of what happens when ideologues get an opportunity to put their plans into action, the Sept. 11 attacks gave the neo-conservatives the chance they had been waiting for.

Within hours of the collapse of the World Trade Center, the talk within the inner circle of the Pentagon and the White House was of invading Iraq. Even after the responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks was squarely placed on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the focus in the White House remained on Iraq. That focus would not waver, even as the Taliban were routed in Afghanistan.

When President Bush gave his 2002 State of the Union speech, Iraq was front and center in the "Axis of Evil," and the propaganda campaign to convince people of the need to invade Iraq began in earnest.

There was no way the PNAC crew could have sold us a war based on its vision of "regime change" in Iraq as the first step toward a peaceful, totally transformed Middle East. And so the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" would became ubiquitous in the news media as President Bush and his underlings lied repeatedly and outrageously about Iraq`s military capabilities and the threat they posed to the U.S.

The Bush administration eventually adopted the PNAC strategy as its own. Last fall, it presented to Congress "The National Security Strategy of the United States," the official foreign policy blueprint of the Bush administration. The 33-page document outlined how the U.S. wouldn`t allow any other nation to catch up with its huge advantage in military power and advocated a policy where the U.S. "will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively."

Those last 17 words became the guiding principle behind the Iraq invasion. The rest of the world figured it out quickly and opposed the Bush administration`s war plans. The global opposition only intensified the desire of the neo-conservatives to dispense with the United Nations and go it alone in Iraq.

While many feared chaos in Iraq, the PNAC crew - which had founded The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and pushed Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi as the eventual replacement for Saddam - maintained that the Iraqis would greet U.S. and British forces with flowers and ecstatic celebration. Iraq would become a beacon of stability and democracy in the Middle East and Iraqis would be forever grateful to the U.S. for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

This was the plan that was set in motion by the Sept. 11 attacks. Two years later, we now clearly see what happens when foreign policy gets hijacked by far-right ideologues who are totally convinced of the righteousness of their actions.

The invasion of Iraq went relatively smoothly. The occupation has been anything but smooth. This is a direct result of the total reliance on the overly optimistic and unrealistic ideas of the PNAC folks in the Bush administration. Chalabi was instantly rejected by Iraqis. Anyone associated with the U.S. occupation has been killed or targeted for death. A civil war with U.S. troops caught in the crossfire seems to be what`s ahead in Iraq.

The best possible outcome from what we`ve seen happen to this nation in the two years since 9/11 would be that Americans would not allow something like this to happen again.

Too many of us allowed our fears of another 9/11-style attack cloud our judgment. Too many of us allowed our leaders to stampede us into an unnecessary war. Too many of us allowed them to lie with impunity about the need for an immediate, unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq. Too many of us allowed the silencing of those who disagreed with the Bush administration`s plans. And too many of us didn`t realize how easily our democracy could be corrupted by a small group of scheming men.

The tide is starting to turn, though. As more people see through the tangled web of lies spun by the Bush administration since 9/11 and realize how a national tragedy could so ruthlessly exploited for political and financial gain, the more unlikely it is that we`ll see another four years of a Bush presidency.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books).
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=12832&mode=nest…

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Triumph of a Bush
Anthony Lappé, September 4, 2003

Viele Links:
http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_terrorism/doc2839.html
"[H]aving just been told the country was under attack the commander in chief appeared uninterested in further details. He never asked if there had been any additional threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to best protect the country from further attacks, or what the current status of NORAD or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nor did he call for an immediate return to Washington. Instead, in the middle of a modern-day Pearl Harbor, he simply turned back to the matter at hand; the day’s photo op. Precious minutes were ticking by, and many more lives were at risk. `Really good readers, whew!` he told the class as the electronic flashes once again began to blink and the video cameras rolled. `These must be sixth graders.`"- From James Bamford`s "Body of Secrets"

To say "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," the Sept. 11 docudrama that airs on Showtime this Sunday, is a piece of Leni Riefenstahl-esque propaganda would be a cliché, and it would be wrong. The Nazi propagandist`s films were much too crude to compete with this level of celluloid revisionism. This is 21st Century propaganda, with all the bells and emotional whistles of Hollywood`s most sophisticated productions. Imagine the "West Wing" without the liberal whining, a Bruckheimer blockbuster without the bimbos, "24" without the complicated plotlines, and you have "DC 9/11," a two-hour feel-good saga that blends news footage, fictionalized scenes and fictionalized scenes made to look like news footage into a highly-effective pseudo-historical soap opera, not unlike USA Network`s recent Giuliani puff-pic "Rudy." The only difference is this film (which GNN secretly obtained an advance copy of) immortalizes an embattled politician seeking re-election. It is an altogether new genre, the made-for-TV campaign adver-movie.


Bush is played by Timothy Bottoms, best known for impersonating the president on the "South Park" creators` Comedy Central flop "That`s My Bush!" In "DC 9/11," for some reason, he magically looses his Texas accent, goofy smirk, and faulty command of the English language. The effect is bewildering. We get the Bush Karl Rove always dreamed he could be - patient, knowledgeable, poised, able to speak in complete sentences extemporaneously, and infallibly wise. The film chronicles the transformation of Bush from boy to man in the eight days between Sept. 11 and his historic `either you are with us or against us` address to Congress. In between, he utters real(ish) off-the-cuff lines like "They think all we can do is file a few lawsuits," and absurdly fabricated ones like, "Modernity, pluralism, freedom. These are good things. Liberty is God`s gift and it is not negotiable on this watch." He comforts the injured and reads from his bible for strength. Rove, who is conspicuously absent in the film, could never have thought up a commercial this slick.

The film was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, but the brains behind the operation are Lionel Chetwynd`s, a right-wing Hollywood producer whose credits include the Vietnam POW pic "Hanoi Hilton," and most recently, "Varian`s War," a Showtime movie about a homosexual French resistance fighter during WWII.

Chetwynd, a Canadian, is a favorite of the Bush inner circle. He calls Rove a "friend," and was appointed to the President`s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2001.

According to news reports, in writing the script for "DC 9/11," unlike those conducting the long-stymied 9/11 investigation into what actually happened that day on behalf of the American public, Chetwynd had access to top White House officials, including Bush. He also consulted a coterie of conservative talking-heads, including Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer and Morton Kondracke - all of whom appear regularly on the Fox News Channel.


He told the Toronto Globe & Mail, without irony, "This isn`t propaganda. It`s a straightforward docudrama. I would hope what`s presented is a fully colored and nuanced picture of a human being in a difficult situation."


He also didn`t see any irony in producing the film in Canada, where the producers avoided paying union wages and, according to the Globe & Mail, were "eligible for the federal Film or Video Production Services Tax Credit, the Ontario Film and Television Production Services Tax Credit and a federal tax-shelter program, which together could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in Canadian government checks being sent to the producers." Shooting ultra-patriotic flicks north of the border must be a trend, the Giuliani film was also shot in Canada.

The film is in some ways a movie version of "Bush at War," the breathless account of the lead-up to the Afghan invasion written by Watergate reporter turned court hagiographer Bob Woodward. Just as in Woodward`s book, Rumsfeld comes off as downright sage-like. The film begins on the morning of 9/11 with an uncanny Rumsfeld warning a group of clueless congressmen that if they didn`t approve his overhaul of the military something really bad was going to happen. Of course, in real life, most of Rummy`s proposals had little to do with fighting terrorism - he was obsessed with programs like weaponizing space and a revitalized anti-ballistic missile defense system. And his boss had just spent the first year of his tenure thwarting investigations into the very people who were supporting the evildoers who would attack later that morning (for more on this subject see reporting by Greg Palast, Robert Baer and the book "The Man Who Warned America" about FBI agent John O`Neill).

The film gives short rift to Bush`s appearance at Booker Elementary - which is understandable. It`s hard to put a heroic shine on our commander in chief continuing to read a story about goats to second graders for twenty full minutes after learning the country is under attack.

In fact, the film gives short rift to much of what actually happened that day. I guess they figured all the stuff about not scrambling jets in time to protect the Pentagon almost a full hour after the first plane hit the WTC would get too complicated for viewers. Instead, we see a command and control operation whip into action with all the speed and efficiency of a Tom Clancy film. There`s confusion in the streets, but the inner circle, especially Bush, is calm and deliberate. Bush reacts angrily when the Secret Service refuses to take him immediately to Washington. "No tinhorn terrorist is going to tell me what to do." Cheney bravely orders the shoot-down of Flight 93, which tragically disappears off the radar screen before his eyes.

For a complete chronology of what really happened that fateful day, go here. And for a look at some unanswered questions about that fateful day see GNN`s half-hour documentary "Aftermath" here.

News broadcasts for the film are supplied by the Fox News Channel, which is probably accurate. Who else would Bush be watching? But you wonder why the producers didn`t throw in a little CBS News, after all Showtime and the news org are owned by the same mega-corp. Most people focus on Murdoch`s sycophantic flag-waving, but Viacom has proven itself no slouch when it comes to sucking up to the White House. MTV, for instance, banned antiwar music videos and public service ads. CBS threw out the carrot of an MTV dance party for all her friends and a book deal to Pvt. Jessica Lynch if she would appear on a CBS News program.

The film spends most of its time, like Woodward`s book, on how and where revenge would be exacted. Afghanistan is targeted quickly. But Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz plead their case for Iraq. Rumsfeld repeats what would become his mantra a year later, `Al Qaeda hates us, Saddam hates us, Saddam may have WMD, he may give them to Al Qaeda.`

Powell is portrayed as something of a stick-in-the-mud, and an obstacle to the whole "infinite justice" project. When he complains that we can`t go after Saddam because we don`t want to look like we`re at war with "all of Islam," Rumsfeld counters menacingly, "Only Islam that`s against us" - Saddam`s secularism and bin Laden`s stated hate of his secular regime non-withstanding.

Among other Saddam-related nadirs, the film repeats the distortion that Saddam kicked out UN inspectors, when, in fact, the inspectors were ordered to leave by UNSCOM head Richard Butler just before Clinton launched "Operation Desert Fox" in December 1998. The failure to take out Saddam in the First Gulf War is blamed on Arab allies in the coalition not having "signed up" for removing another Arab leader from power. They even throw in a line about Saddam being responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a theory only the most hardcore neocons support.

This is where the propaganda lays on thick, in the quick policy lines that will go over most people`s head - like when Bush asks about a Saudi link to the attacks, "Surely, there`s not an official Saudi connection?"


"Oh, no, no," comes the chorus.


Or when Bush appears concerned about the loss of civil liberties in Ashcroft`s "patriot" plans.


At every stage, Bush simultaneously comes off as tough but kind, quick but patient. When he is shown comforting New Yorkers with lost loved ones, the viewer cannot help but be taken in.

Ultimately, if old-school propagandists like Riefenstahl gave us the "leader as superman," Chetwynd gives us the "leader as super-human," an ordinary man called upon to do great things in historic circumstances. It`s a familiar American myth.

Like most American myths, this film is a powerful pack of lies with enough truth in it to make it truly dangerous. Bush really was transformed in those fateful days between his stumbling, deer-caught-in-the-headlights address to the nation on the eve of 9/11 and his triumphant speech to Congress that closes the film.

But it is that heartwarming finale that turns out to be DC 9/11`s fatal flaw. When the film cuts abruptly from actor Bottoms to the real Bush, our real president`s twangy voice, squinty eyes, and vengeful gaze all of a sudden seem small, like a man trying to impersonate someone great he once saw in the movies.

Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv.

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U.S. Says Taliban on the Run, 70 to 100 Dead
Fri September 05, 2003 11:28 AM ET

By Yousuf Azimy
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Friday it was pursuing remnants of a large Taliban force in the mountains of southeastern Afghanistan after killing 70 to 100 of them in more than a week of fighting.

The Taliban force in the Zabul province, some 1,000 strong, was the largest concentration of the Islamic militia`s fighters since it was ousted from power in late 2001, and the battle, which began on August 25, the biggest in at least 18 months.

"We believe we have been very successful, we believe we have the enemy on the run," Colonel Rodney Davis told reporters at Bagram air base, headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

"From what we can determine they have withdrawn to some extent. There has been relatively light resistance in the last 24 hours, but we`re not going to stop, we`re going to press on."

On Wednesday a senior government official said Afghan government and U.S.-led forces, backed by helicopter gunships, bombers and fighter jets, had driven Taliban forces out of their mountain stronghold in the Dai Chopan district of Zabul.

Zabul`s intelligence chief Khalil Hotak said the corpses of 124 Taliban fighters, including two Arabs, had been found in and around the mountain caves.

The Afghan commander in Zabul, General Groni, told the Afghan Islamic Press another 30 Taliban who had fled Dai Chopan had been killed on Thursday in Zabul`s Nobahar district.

"PROPAGANDA"

Davis gave a lower overall figure than those from Afghan officials.

"We can confirm coalition and Afghan militia forces have killed somewhere in the range of between 70 and 100 enemy personnel," Davis said. "That is probably a conservative estimate."

The commander of Taliban forces in Zabul said only seven of his men had been killed and 10 to 20 wounded, dismissing the U.S. figure as propaganda.

"If their claim is true, why don`t they show the bodies?" Mullah Abdul Razzaq Nafees told Reuters by satellite phone.

Davis said Operation Mountain Viper would continue against forces he described as "primarily Afghan, primarily Taliban."

"We`re taking the fight to the enemy," he said. "If they move to the west, we`ll move to the west. If they move to the north, we`ll move to the north."

In the past, Taliban forces have often frustrated their U.S. pursuers by slipping away into the rugged mountains of southeastern Afghanistan, or over the border into Pakistan.

On this occasion, government officials from neighboring provinces say they have sent forces to cut off Taliban escape routes.

In May, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said most of Afghanistan was now secure, and the United States had moved from a period of major combat operations to one of stabilization and reconstruction.

Since then the Taliban and allied rebels have staged almost daily attacks on government posts, U.S. bases, aid workers and other targets in different parts of the country.

The movement has declared a "jihad," or holy war against foreign forces, aid organizations and their allies. (Additional reporting by Saeed Ali Achakzai in Chaman, Pakistan)

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Would you like some freedom fries with your crow, Mr. President?
Six months after spitting in the face of the world, the Bush administration is crawling on its belly before the U.N. If the world doesn`t rush to help it, the White House has only itself to blame.

By Gary Kamiya

Sept. 4, 2003 (Salon) Let me make sure I`ve got this right. After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America`s disastrous Iraq occupation -- while the U.S. continues to run the show?

In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed.

The rest of the world may be crazy, but it ain`t stupid.

The Bush administration`s humiliating announcement that it wants the U.N. to bail it out officially confers the title of "debacle" upon the grand Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz adventure. Not even the world-class chutzpah of this administration can conceal the fact that by turning to the despised world body, it is eating a heaping plate of crow. This spectacle may give Bush-bashers from London to Jakarta a happy jolt of schadenfreude, but it does nothing to help Americans who are stuck with the ugly fallout of the Bush team`s ill-conceived, absurdly overoptimistic attempt to redraw the Middle East.

The bitter truth is that everything the administration told us about Iraq has turned out to be false.

The biggest falsehood, of course, concerns the reason we went to war in the first place. President Bush`s recent hints that we invaded Iraq to get rid of the evil tyrant Saddam are patently false: The administration`s entire prewar argument, until it began to grasp desperately for other explanations on the eve of the invasion, was that Iraq represented an imminent threat to our security. That was, of course, a lie. Iraq never had any connection to al-Qaida (not even the ever-serviceable Tony Blair tried to claim that) and if it had weapons of mass destruction -- which in any case there is no reason to believe it would have used against the U.S. -- none have been found. (In this light, Bush`s somewhat peculiar attack on "revisionist historians" appears to have been a Freudian slip.)

However, the Bush administration has succeeded in making its fears come true: Iraq now does harbor enemies who represent an imminent threat to the lives of the 140,000 American servicemen who are hunkered down there. By removing Saddam`s dictatorial regime, the U.S. turned a nation that borders Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Syria into a lawless, anarchic swamp, open to every jihadi and America-hater who wants to blow up the Yankee infidels who invaded a sovereign Arab state. A G.I. dies almost every day, and 10 more are wounded, and there is no end in sight, and the reasons why are beginning to seem even murkier than the reasons we were in Vietnam.

The Bush administration is probably hoping that the American people won`t notice that the invasion created the very problem it was supposed to solve. After all, half of all Americans believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 -- the result of months of the administration`s repetitive, hypnotic demonizing of Saddam and total silence about the embarrassingly uncaught Osama bin Laden. Why not go for an even bigger lie and claim that the Iraq nightmare shows that the invasion was needed because now we see just how evil those terrorist ragheads really are?

Perpetual war for perpetual reelection: According to this master strategy, even a losing "war on terror" is a winning hand for Bush, because it makes the world a scarier place and when people are scared they vote for the tough guys. Even if the tough guys don`t know what they`re doing.

The administration, which in its supreme arrogance regarded postwar planning as beneath it (that`s for sissy nation-builders), never acknowledged or even considered that the war and occupation could be messy, long and ruinously expensive -- and it silenced those who tried to warn that it was living in a fool`s paradise. When straight-shooting Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to pacify Iraq, the insufferably smug Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld squashed the now-departed officer like a bug: "Any idea that it`s several hundred thousand over any sustained period is simply not the case."

Sober contingency analysis could not be allowed to derail the administration`s carefully timed new product rollout. The misgivings and warnings of professionals could not be allowed to spoil the grand visions of inspired amateurs embarked on a grand crusade.

Bush said the U.N. must sanction his war on Iraq or "become irrelevant." It did not. Yet today he is crawling on his belly to the supposedly irrelevant U.N., begging it to bail him out of the quagmire he created.

The administration said that America was so omnipotent that it could afford to spit in the face of the rest of the world. Indeed, for the ideologues who run the Bush show, flouting our solo might almost seemed to be a sign of God`s special favor. Now, having burned our bridges to all of our allies except Britain, the America über alles crowd is reduced to sputtering in rage as the rest of the world -- surprise! -- declines to rush forward with open checkbooks.

Had the U.S. worked with the U.N. to deal with Iraq, as Bush`s considerably more world-wise father did in 1991, we would not be facing this problem. The community of nations would have regarded Iraq as its shared responsibility and stepped forward. But by alienating the world -- and squandering the unparalleled goodwill created by 9/11 -- the Bush administration created a powerful disincentive to even those nations that understand the vital necessity of rebuilding Iraq. The unpleasant truth is that for much of the world, helping this shattered nation, even if understood to be a worthy and necessary goal, now equals lending aid and comfort to an American regime that is perceived as blustering, simplistic, addicted to violence, self-righteous, and dangerously out of control.

In a nobler world, France and Turkey and Germany and Russia would forget all those nasty things that Bush officials (and their mouthpieces in the Murdoch media empire) said about them and send tens of thousands of troops to bail us out. But the real world does not work that way. The "axis of weasels" is now enjoying every minute of it while the Bush regime squirms.

By insisting that any U.N. forces be placed under U.S. control, the Bush administration is trying to save what little face it has left, but also making it that much harder to enlist the help of other nations. Moreover, no one at the United Nations is likely to have forgotten that the bombing that blew up the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad could never have been carried out except in the power vacuum that followed the ouster of Saddam. Had the Bush administration not poured contempt upon the U.N., that fact might not have led to acrimony and finger-pointing -- after all, it is unreasonable to blame the U.S. for that vile deed. But the Bush team is reaping what it has sowed.

To be sure, some kind of deal may yet be worked out. But if the terms of that deal are more niggardly than the Bush administration would like, if much of the world stands on the sidelines and watches the bully twist in Iraq`s deadly breeze, it will have only itself to blame.

- - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Gary Kamiya is Salon`s executive editor. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/09/04/un/print.htm…

[Joerver]

‘Frauds-R-Us’

The Bush Family Saga

Part II
By William Bowles


"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you have to focus on" – GW Bush

"You have to look at the entire Bush Family in this context -- as if the family ran a corporation called ‘Frauds-R-Us,’

George Jr.’s specialty was insurance and security fraud.

Jeb’s specialty was oil and gas fraud.

Neil’s specialty was real estate fraud.

Prescott’s specialty was banking fraud.

And George Sr.’s specialty? All of the above." -- Lt. Cmdr. Al Martin, US Navy,(Ret)



"While opportunism isn’t new in U.S. politics, never did so many in one family extract so many dollars from taxpayers as when George Bush senior was president a decade ago" -- David E. Scheim, author of Contract on America.

"What you’ve got with Bush [George senior] is absolutely the largest number of siblings and children involved in what looks like a never-ending hustle." -- Republican pundit Kevin Philips



"Texas businessmen [are] not crooks, "they just have an over-developed sense of the extenuating circumstance."" -- Molly Ivins



Just too many jinks, links

Updated - 05/12/03: (Information Clearing House) I started this second part with the objective of extending the dossier on the Bush Gang, but I quickly realised that short of writing a (very long) book, I’d never be able to encapsulate all of it in the easy-to-digest form of an essay, hence the external pages, so that if you want to pursue a particular character or company, all you need do is click on a particular link. You`ll find that many of the names and companies are cross-linked, pointing to the intricate network of associates that the Bush clan have built up over the years. No doubt if one were to do the same thing with Rockefeller, you`d end up with the same rats nest of associations (pun intended).

Gangster Capitalism
And in any case, the critical issue is not so much the individual goings-on of these ne’er do wells, but that they are typical of a system, which since its foundation (one built on slavery, genocide, continental land theft and gangster capitalism) has utterly corrupt institutions which it nevertheless claims make it the bastion of the ‘free world’! As the saying goes, they have ‘no shame’.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil
The other really important question to ask is how can one family which has so many skeletons in the family closet, get away with such dirty dealings and over such a long period of time without being called to task? It’s as if the mass media goes deaf, dumb and blind when the name Bush comes up. For no matter what your politics are, left, right or indifferent, a family which has its fingers in so many dirty dealings has surely got to get you thinking about exactly what kind of country it is you live in (if you’re an American) and what kind of world is it that’s dominated by a country with a media (not to mention a legal system) that’s quite content not to challenge its president or his lying, thiefing family and their tenticular network of associations which includes: the Mafia, the Chinese Communist Party, Japanese Triads, the Vatican, Central American drug smugglers and gun runners, international arms dealers, the Ayotollah Khomeini (RIP), Cuban-American terrorists, money laundering, illegal arms sales, countless conflicts of interests, nepotism, coverups, tax avoidance, SEC fiddles and banking scams? A veritable ‘school for scoundrels’.

The fact that this litany of evil is effectively left unscrutinised and unquestioned by the dominant media, or, on the few occasions when it is mentioned, it’s only ‘in passing’, reveals the cynical, opportunistic attitude toward not only the concept of access to information, but acting on it. The system also makes a complete mockery of the so-called moral approach used by the leaders of the ‘free world’ when they accuse others of the same behaviour. Is it any wonder that we have populations who have ‘dropped out’ of the political process. Where is the accountability? Where indeed?

It’s a shell game
In recent years the problem has been excerbated by the ‘gutting’ of the government through wholesale deregulation and privatisation, which has enabled those with the ‘right’ connections to gain access to vast gobs of money in the form of subsidies and lucrative contracts (eg Marvin Bush’s Ignite corporation, or the Kuwaiti Harken Oil deals, Choicepoint’s Homeland Security contracts and the software company it uses, Sybase Inc which has Bush family connections). The effect has been to turn various and sundry government agencies into hollow shells. Companies can then effectively write themselves blank cheques or simply ignore the toothless edicts issued by the regulators (eg the SEC over the Silverado S&L scandal).

Assault on Liberty
The assault on the rights of citizens, won at great cost and over generations of struggle, has since the 1970s, been steadily eroded to the point that we are now left with a façade of the original, a cardboard mockup that has all the appearances democracy, civil rights and so forth but virtually no substance. Our cynical leaders would have us believe that,

"Failure to vote, as Britain’s Chancellor remarked after the last UK election,
is the mark of the satisfied citizen."
Perry Anderson

Satisfied or cynical? Or perhaps fatalistic about a system which has systematically encouraged its citizens to disenfranchise themselves?

Ultimately of course, it exposes the real nature of the political class and who it really serves – the rich and powerful and their utter disdain for those without any real power. With ‘elections’ being reduced to no more than tokenised democracy (only about a quarter of the electorate actually bother to vote in US national elections and a fraction more in the UK), it’s no surprise that firstly, there is no genuine representation ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’, but just as importantly, the total lack of representation or accountability encourages an arrogance and bravado on the part of the power elite that they can get away with anything, because they we let them (and they do)!

The 4th Estate – Absentee Landlords
A comparable process is at work in the ‘4th Estate’ who have reduced journalism (when they bother to actually cover the real stories) to another hollow shell, where the act of merely reporting is now considered sufficient to fulfill their obligations as ‘watchdogs’ of the nation’s affairs. The thought of actually leading with a story, and pursuing it, day after day, until someone actually takes notice and says, ‘enough is enough’ is simply not permitted because the same corporations that own the media are also part and parcel of the same power elite that’s busy ripping off the nation and holding the world to ransom.

Par for the Course
Forget ‘Dynasty’, although maybe they got the idea for the programme from the Bush posse. Staggering, is all I can say about the Bush family saga. Yet actually it’s par for the course as they say and not at all exceptional in the annals of the US power elite. The history of US capitalism is made up of family dynasties of one kind or another, from the robber barons of the Du Ponts, Mellons, Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Kennedys, through to the newcomers like Enron, Worldcom, Halliburton, Bechtel, Harken, Carlyle and so forth. And, like the landed aristocracies of England, they marry into each other’s families, go to the same schools and universities, sit on each other’s corporate boards and invest in each other’s business dealings. Importantly, they watch each other’s backs and for obvious reasons.

The Actors
Below are the sections in alphabetical order, of some of the companies and individuals connected to the Bush family (or vice versa). Clicking on the bold link at the start of each section will take you to a page of additional links.

Arbusto Oil and the bin Laden Connection
Oh what a tangled Web we weave. Salem bin Laden, one of 57 children their father Mohammed sired with his 12 wives, and Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Texas (I assume not with the 12 wives as well).

He died in a plane crash -- like his father -- but not before the Arbusto Energy Oil Company, founded in 1978, had become hugely successful. Later, Spectrum 7 Corp bought out Arbusto (now called Bush Exploration Co). In 1986, with the company on the verge of bankruptcy, it was purchased by Harken, and even though Bush Exploration Co had debts of $3 million, Harken paid Bush $2 million for his stock.

See also the BCCI (Bank of Credit & Commerce) connection below, another murky international scandal involving drug money laundering etc which one of the original investors in Arbusto, James R. Bath, a Houston businessman and old friend of GWB was involved in.

"Time magazine described Bath in 1991 as "a deal broker whose alleged associations run from the CIA to a major shareholder and director of the Bank of Credit & Commerce." BCCI, as it was more commonly known, closed its doors in July 1991 amid charges of multibillion-dollar fraud and global news reports that the financial institution had been heavily involved in drug money laundering, arms brokering, covert intelligence work, bribery of government officials and—here`s the kicker—aid to terrorists."
James Hatfield

John Ashcroft: Attorney General And Defender Of The Confederacy

Corporate Connections:

AT&T; Microsoft; Schering-Plough; Enterprise Rent-A-Car; Monsanto

As a senator from Missouri, John Ashcroft received generous campaign contributions from companies, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Monsanto, which were based in his home state. But a company didn’t have to be from Missouri to get some attention from the senator. Ashcroft was one of only a handful of senators sponsoring a bill that extended the patent on Schering-Plough’s ultra-profitable allergy pill, Claritin. Extending the patent, which expires in 2002, would save the company billions of dollars in potential revenue. The bill died in committee, but Schering-Plough still gave Ashcroft $50,000 for his failed 2000 Senate bid. Schering-Plough donated the money to Ashcroft’s joint fundraising committee, which Ashcroft set up with the National Republican Senatorial Committee to encourage unlimited soft money contributions from corporations that could not legally contribute to his main campaign committee. (Check out Schering-Plough`s campaign contributions to other candidates.) Besides Schering-Plough, Ashcroft’s joint committee logged contributions from AT&T ($25,000) and Microsoft ($10,000). Microsoft, of course, is hoping the new attorney general drops the justice department’s antitrust suit against the company."

Baker & Botts

James Baker III
"He says the government shouldn`t overreact to corporate scandals. He led the campaigns of the last four Republican presidents. He watched the September 11 attacks at the Ritz-Carlton with the Bin Laden family. He`s defending the Saudi`s against a trillion-dollar lawsuit brought forth by the September 11 families.

BCCI (Bank of Credit & Commerce)

"BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the `80s in what has been called the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau."
Wayne Madsen

The BCCI-Bush connection is, it could be argued an ‘accidental’ one, but it’s highly unlikely even if it is difficult to track, But the seeds are all there, including GW Snr’s CIA connection (as head of it) in the 1970s and the links to BCCI as well as his long time association with James R. Bath an investor in Arbusto. Bath, was a Houston businessman and old friend was also an investor in BCCI. Essentially, BCCI was a convenient ‘channel’ for moving money through to fund the various illegal enterprises being undertaken at the time including, Iran-Contra, the Iranian arms sales, CIA money laundering operations, connections to powerful Middle Eastern businessmen, the Vatican and its right-wing connections through BNL.

Perhaps this extract from "Texas Connections" http://www.thedubyareport.com/txconnect.html gives you an idea of the reach:

"… Sheikh Abdullah Bahksh of Saudi Arabia, a 16% shareholder in Harken Energy at the time, was represented by a Palestinian-born Chicago investor named Talat Othman, who served with George W. Bush on the board of Harken Energy. Othman made at least three separate visits to the White House to discuss Middle East affairs with then President George Bush. At about the same time, and just prior to the Gulf War, Harken Energy, with no previous international or offshore drilling experience, was awarded a 35-year petroleum exploration contract with the emirate of Bahrain.

Sheikh Bahksh emerged as a co-investor in the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a criminal enterprise since dissolved, that existed primarily as a mechanism for obtaining political influence using Middle Eastern oil money. Bahrain`s prime minister, Sheik Khalifah bin-Sulman al-Khalifah, was a major investor in BCCI`s parent company, BCCI Holdings, of Luxembourg. Through its commodities affiliate, Capcom, BCCI was used as a money laundering service by drug traffickers, arms dealers, etc. BCCI`s front man in the U.S., and the person chiefly responsible for its takeover of First American Bank in the U.S., was Kamal Adham. Adham is referred to in the Kerry Committee report on BCCI as having been "the CIA`s principal liaison for the entire Middle East from the mid-1960`s through 1979." He was also the head of intelligence for Saudi Arabia during the time George Bush Sr. was Director of the CIA."

Carlyle Connection – There’s no business like war business
There are so many connections between the Bushes, the ‘Defence’ establishment, the global trade in arms, that the mind boggles. That it barely gets a mention in the mainstream media (except of course, to simply ‘report’ it) is a scandal of the grandest proportions. But it only goes to show the power of big business and the political class they have installed in both the US and the UK (after all, John Major is employed by the Carlyle Group and BAE Systems, the major arms supplier to the UK, is part-owned by Carlyle). Not only the connections beggar belief but the sheer hypocrisy of the Bush government should put it in a new category in the Guinness Book of Records. As you’ll see from just a few of the links to information on Carlyle below, their tentacles extend to many of the armed conflicts going on in the world. There’s no business like war business!

Elliot Abrams
Unless you were around and following events in the 1980s, especially Central American affairs and later, the Iran-contra scandal, you probably won’t know who Elliot Abrams is. More’s the pity too. As Reagan`s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs he used to oversee US foreign policy in Latin America, and was active in covering up some of the worst atrocities committed by the US-sponsored Contras. According to congressional records, under Abram`s watch, the Contras "raped, tortured, and killed unarmed civilians, including children," and that "groups of civilians, including women and children, were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded."

His partners-in-crime include John Negroponte, the new ambassador to the UN, who served under Reagan as ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985. He is known for his role in the cover up of human rights abuses by CIA trained paramilitaries throughout the region. Coincidentally? Honduran exiles associated with the paramilitary forces that had been living in the US, were exported to Canada prior to Negroponte`s Senate confirmation hearing, thus rendering their testimony unavailable.

Another partner from the ‘good ol’ days is Otto Reich who has been appointed as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs (which includes Latin America). The Bush administration used a "recess appointment" during January 2002 to side step the Senate confirmation hearing otherwise required of the appointment. Democrat opposition to Reich`s nomination had been predicted.

But they are still up to their old tricks:

"The coup in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez sports the sticky fingerprints of all three men and the modus operandi of a long line of US-led cold war interventions.

But if these covert ops were tragedy, the Chavez plot was farce. The rapid unraveling of the coup suggested that the Venezuelan plotters would have done better seeking advise from Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist rather than from Reich. It soon became public that Bush officials maintained a web of connections with the conspirators and appeared to have foreknowledge of the plot. Using the same conduit Reagan used to fund the contras, the National Endowment for Democracy, the administration had funneled money to Venezuelan opposition.

According to British media, Abrams gave a nod to the plotters; Otto Reich, a former ambassador to Venezuela, met repeatedly with Pedro Carmona and other coup leaders. The day Carmona seized the presidency, Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office and endorsed the new government.

Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress in 1991, for which George Bush senior subsequently pardoned him in December 1992."

Terry Allen

Enron Connection
As there’s so much information on the Bush-Enron connection (over a quarter of a million links on Google), rather than attempt to show the bankruptcy side of things, I’ve sifted through a number of stories and tried to find the ones which show the bigger picture, starting wuth the Argentine connection between Enron, the Bushes, George Snr, Jeb and Neil.

Fresh Del Monte and IAT Group: Rotten Fruit? It just doesn’t stop…
Let’s start with January 2003.

From the report below:

"The new year begs for a fresh start. But business accusations of international bribery, nefarious investors and a Bush brother awkwardly involved in a troubled company all have a too-familiar ring.

Here`s the latest Robert Ludlum-style financial spat.

…. Marvin Bush, the brother of President Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, joined the board of directors of Fresh Del Monte in 1998, after the alleged events took place. Marvin Bush was re-elected to the company`s board this year for a term ending in 2005, and served on the board`s critically important audit and compensation committees.

In October, Bush decided to resign from the board at the end of 2002. Without any public notice of Bush`s planned departure by Fresh Del Monte, news of his pending resignation was not reported until last month."

The Harken Connection
Taken from Covert Action Quarterly "The Family That Preys Together

Issue No. 41, Summer, 1992 by Jack Colhoun

This a consummate piece on the Bush family from a magazine, now sadly defunct.


"This is an incredible deal, unbelievable for this small company," energy analyst Charles Strain told Forbes magazine, describing the oil production sharing agreement the Harken Energy Corporation signed in January 1990 with Bahrain.

Under the terms of the deal, Harken was given the exclusive right to explore for gas and oil off the shores of the Gulf island nation. If gas or oil were found in waters near two of the world`s largest gas and oil fields, Harken would have exclusive marketing and transportation rights for the energy resources. Truly an "incredible deal" for a company that had never drilled an offshore well.

Strain failed to point out, however, the one fact that puts the Harken deal in focus: George Bush, Jr., the eldest son of George and Barbara Bush of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, is a member of Harken`s board of directors, a consultant, and a stockholder in the Texas-based company. In light of this connection, the deal makes more sense. The involvement of Junior-George Walker Bush`s childhood nickname-with Harken is a walking conflict of interest. His relationship to President Bush, rather than any business acumen, made him a valuable asset for Harken, the Republican Party benefactors, Middle East oil sheikhs and covert operators who played a part in Harken`s Bahrain deal.

In fact, Junior`s track record as an oilman is pretty dismal. He began his career in Midland, Texas, in the mid-1970s when he founded Arbusto Energy, Inc. When oil prices dropped in the early 1980s, Arbusto fell upon hard times. Junior was only rescued from business failure when his company was purchased by Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. As part of the September 1984 deal, Bush became Spectrum 7`s president and was given a 13.6 percent share in the company`s stock. Oil prices stayed low and within two years, Spectrum 7 was in trouble.

In the six months before Spectrum 7 was acquired by Harken in 1986, it had lost $400,000. In the buyout deal, George "Jr." and his partners were given more than $2 million worth of Harken stock for the 180-well operation. Made a director and hired as a "consultant" to Harken, Junior received another $600,000 of Harken stock, and has been paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year since 1986.

Junior`s value to Harken soon became apparent when the company needed an infusion of cash in the spring of 1987. Junior and other Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc., a large investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas (Stephens made a $100,000 contribution to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.)

In 1987, Stephens made arrangements with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Harken in return for a stock interest in Harken. As part of the Stephens-brokered deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken`s board as a major investor. *5 Stephens, UBS, and Bakhsh each have ties to the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

It was Stephens who suggested in the late 1970s that BCCI purchase what became First American Bankshares in Washington, D.C. BCCI later acquired First American`s predecessor, Financial General Bankshares. At the time of the Harken investment, UBS was a joint-venture partner with BCCI in a bank in Geneva, Switzerland. Bakhsh has been an investment partner in Saudi Arabia with Gaith Pharoan, identified by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a "front man" for BCCI`s secret acquisitions of U.S. banks.

Stephens, Inc. played a role in the Harken deal with Bahrain as well. Former Stephens bankers David and Mike Edwards contacted Michael Ameen, the former chief of Mobil Oil`s Middle East operations, when Bahrain broke off 1989 talks with Amoco for a gas and oil exploration contract. The Edwardses recommended Harken for the job and urged Ameen to get in touch with Bahrain, which he did.

"In the midst of Harken`s talks with Bahrain, Ameen- simultaneously working as a State Department consultant-briefed the incoming U.S. ambassador in Bahrain, Charles Hostler," the Wall Street Journal noted, adding that Hostler, a San Diego real estate investor, was a $100,000 contributor to the Republican Party. Hostler claimed he never discussed Harken with the Bahrainis.

Harken lacked sufficient financing to explore off the coast of Bahrain so it brought in Bass Enterprises Production Company of Fort Worth, Texas, as a partner. The Bass family contributed more than $200,000 to the Republican Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s. *9 On June 22, 1990, George Jr. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560-a cool 200 percent profit. The move was well timed. One week after Junior sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf.

"There is substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits in the weeks before he sold the $848,560 of Harken stock," asserted U.S. News & World Report. The magazine noted Harken appointed Junior to a "fairness committee" to study possible economic restructuring of the company. Junior worked closely with financial advisers from Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company, who concluded "only drastic action could save Harken."

George "Jr." also violated Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations which require "insider" stock deals to be reported promptly, in Bush`s case by July 10, 1990. He didn`t file the stock sale with the SEC until the first week of March 1991.

Meanwhile, a cloak-and-dagger aura surrounds Junior`s business dealings. James Bath, a Texas entrepreneur who invested $50,000 in Arbusto Energy, may be a business cutout for the CIA. Bath also acted as an investment "adviser" to Saudi Arabian oil sheikhs, linked to the outlaw BCCI, which also has ties to the CIA.

Bill White, a former Bath partner, claims that Bath has "national security" connections. White, a United States Naval Academy graduate and former fighter pilot, charges that Bath developed a network of off-shore companies to camouflage the movement of money and aircraft between Texas and the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.

Alan Quasha, a Harken director and former chair of the company, is the son of attorney William Quasha, who defended figures in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal in Australia. Closed in 1980, Nugan Hand was not only tied to drug-money laundering and U.S. intelligence and mi- litary circles, but also to the CIA`s covert backing for a "constitutional coup" in Australia that caused the fall of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

The Harken deal with Bahrain raises another troubling question: Did the Bahrainis and the BCCI-linked Saudi oil sheikhs use the production sharing agreement with Harken to curry favor with the Bush administration and influence U.S. policy in the Middle East? Talat Othman`s sudden rise to prominence in Bush administration foreign policy circles is a case in point. Othman, who sits on the Harken board as Sheikh Bakhsh`s representative, didn`t have access to President Bush before Harken`s Bahrain agreement. "But since August 1990, the Palestinian-born Chicago investor has attended three White House meetings with President Bush to discuss Middle East policy," the Wall Street Journal pointed out. "His name was added by the White House to a select list of 15 Arab-Americans chosen to meet with President Bush, [then White House Chief of Staff John] Sununu and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft in the White House two days after Iraq`s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait."

Ignite!
This maybe small potatoes by comparison with all the other Bush clan scams, but nevertheless Ignite! Learning has made Neil Bush $20 million over the past three years. Not bad for a guy who ran Silverado S&L into the ground. With accusations of nepotism flying around all over the place, especially now that Neil Bush is trying to get the Florida school system to buy into his learning software (at $30 a pop per student per year), the state that his brother Jeb is governor of, it’s no wonder. Connected is the wholesale privatisation of state services, which opens such areas as education to the predations of people like Neil Bush and indeed, the whole issue of influence peddling and nepotism.

International Medical Centers

The Jeb Bush Connection
This is a murky story with connections to the Nicaraguan Contras, the Mafia, Cuban-American terrorists, Iran-Contra, bribery and corruption, coverups and the CIA. Essentially, IMC was contracted to give medical assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras but the story is in fact, a lot more complex and gives you some idea of just how inter-connected events really are, especially when you’re dealing the Bush clan. Perhaps this review of a book by Duncan Campbell The Bush Dynasty and the Cuban Criminal, will give you some idea:

"The Bush family connections go back to 1984 when Jeb Bush began a close association with Camilo Padreda, a former intelligence officer with the Batista dictatorship overthrown by Fidel Castro.

Jeb Bush was then the chairman of the Dade county Republican party and Padreda its finance chairman. Padreda had earlier been indicted on a $500,000 (£320,000) embezzlement charge along with a fellow exile, Hernandez Cartaya, but the charges were dropped, reportedly after the CIA stated that Cartaya had worked for them.

Padreda later pleaded guilty to defrauding the housing and urban development department of millions of dollars during the 1980s.

The president`s younger brother was also on the payroll in the 80s of the prominent Cuban exile Miguel Recarey, who had earlier assisted the CIA in attempts to assassinate President Castro.

Recarey, who ran International Medical Centers (IMC), employed Jeb Bush as a real estate consultant and paid him a $75,000 fee for finding the company a new location, although the move never took place, which raised questions at the time. Jeb Bush did, however, lobby the Reagan/Bush administration vigorously and successfully on behalf of Recarey and IMC. "I want to be very wealthy," Jeb Bush told the Miami News when questioned during that period.

In 1985, Jeb Bush acted as a conduit on behalf of supporters of the Nicaraguan contras with his father, then the vice-president, and helped arrange for IMC to provide free medical treatment for the contras.

Recarey was later charged with massive medicare fraud but fled the US before his trial and is now a fugitive.

Jeb Bush sealed his popularity with the Cuban exile community by acting as campaign manager for another prominent Cuban-American, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, when she ran successfully for Congress.

George Bush Sr famously appeared with her during her campaign in Miami declaring: "I am certain in my heart I will be the first American president to step foot on the soil of a free and independent Cuba."

She has since lobbied successfully for the release of several exiles convicted of terrorist offences held in US jails but who now live freely in Miami.

Most controversially, at the request of Jeb, Mr Bush Sr intervened to release the convicted Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch from prison and then granted him US residency.

According to the justice department in George Bush Sr`s administration, Bosch had participated in more than 30 terrorist acts. He was convicted of firing a rocket into a Polish ship which was on passage to Cuba. He was also implicated in the 1976 blowing-up of a Cubana plane flying to Havana from Venezuela in which all 73 civilians on board were killed.

CIA memorandums strongly suggest, according to Bardach`s book, that Bosch was one of the conspirators, and quotes the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as writing that the "US government had been planning to suggest Bosch`s deportation before Cubana airlines crash took place for his suspected involvement in other terrorist acts and violation of his parole".

Bosch`s release, often referred to in the US media as a pardon, was the result of pressure brought by hardline Cubans in Miami, with Jeb Bush serving as their point man. Bosch now lives in Miami and remains unrepentant about his militant activities, according to Bardach.

In July this year, Jeb Bush nominated Raoul Cantero, the grandson of Batista, as a Florida supreme court judge despite his lack of experience. Mr Cantero had previously represented Bosch and acted as his spokesman, once describing Bosch on Miami radio as a "great Cuban patriot"".

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1202-05.htm

Lynne Cheney, champion of democracy?
"Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey, and William Bennett, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, all play prominent roles in domestic suppression of criticism of the War on Terrorism. A group founded by Lynne Cheney, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, recently released a report titled "Defending Civilization." It listed 127 "unpatriotic" statements made on U.S. college campuses since September 11."
http://www.publiceye.org/foreign_policy/just-fp.html

National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty
This takes us back to the 1980s although as the article below informs, like a bad meal, the sins of the past keep coming back, in this case it’s Otto Reich who was part of the original Contra force funded and supported by the Reagan/Bush government with its links to drugs for guns and connections to the CIA and the Iran-Contra affair. I have also included links to the official CIA version of events.

"Bush nominee linked to Latin American terrorism" By Bill Vann 24 November 2001
Source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/reic-n24.shtml

"As the Bush administration exhorts governments throughout the world to line up behind its "war on terrorism," it is pressuring the US Senate to push through confirmation of a nominee to a key foreign policy position whose own links to terror and an illegal CIA propaganda operation have raised concerns even among the usually docile Democratic leadership.

Otto Reich
Who is Otto Reich? Well basically, he`s a friend of terrorists, there`s no other way to describe him.

"Otto Reich came to prominence during the Reagan administration when he was appointed head of the office of public diplomacy within the state department. According to the national security archives, Reich used this role to pursue his own agenda to such an extent that in 1987 the Comptroller-General of the US, a Republican appointee, found that some of the efforts of his office were "prohibited, covert propaganda activities ... beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities". A letter of September 30 1987 concluded that Reich`s office had violated "a restriction on the state department`s annual appropriations prohibiting the use of federal funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorised by Congress"".
Duncan Campbell - The Guardian http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/FoT.html

He is now George Bush`s assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. The central point is that Bush is filling his government with characters like this, people who have broken the law, an enemy of human rights, a thoroughly unsavoury character.

Richard Armitage – another Iran-Contra figure come back to haunt us
"On March 23, after being recommended in a unanimous 18-0 vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former Vietnam-era covert operative and Contra-era figure Richard Armitage was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of State in a voice vote on the Senate Floor. The unchallenged confirmation of a figure who had previously been investigated by President Reagan`s Commission on Organized Crime (1984) for alleged links to gambling and prostitution was totally ignored by the major American media. Armitage has already begun work at the State Department and is deeply involved in negotiations over a US spy plane recently captured by the Chinese government."
From the Wilderness

Source: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/politics/armitage_SS.h…

The Silverado Savings and Loan Scandal
The savings and loans crashes of the 1980s, themselves directly the result of Reagan’s deregulation of the banking industry, is more interesting because of how it reflects the rapacious nature of unbridled capitalism than of Neil Bush himself. Who by the way, is now embroiled in another scam with his latest venture, educational software, Ignite (turnover $20 million, much of it from educational subsidies obtained in the state of Florida ,where, ‘coincidentally’ of course, his bro Jeb, is governor).

Altogether, it’s been calculated that bailing out the failed S&Ls countrywide cost the US taxpayer around $1.4 trillion!

There are nowhere as many digital sources on the S&L debacle because it predates the Web. Much of it is contained in pages that refer to the numerous scandals and malfeasances of the Bush clan at large. Even so, I’ve managed to uncover a number of dedicated sources.

Stratesec/Securacom, KuAm (Kuwait-American Corporation), HCC Insurance
The links between these companies is strange. All have a Bush connection as well as a World Trade Centre, United Airlines, Dulles International Airport security, aviation and Kuwaiti connection. What is known, is that SEC regulations were breached by Marvin Bush in filings submitted to the SEC.

Who is Marvin P. Bush?
The public rarely sees Marvin P. Bush, brother of President Bush II.

Marvin P. Bush is the founder (1993) and Managing Partner of Winston Partners Group of Vienna, Virginia. It`s a private investment company. He is also the Managing General Partner of Winston Growth Fund, LLP; Winston International Growth Fund, LP; Winston Small Cap Growth Fund, LP; all related companies.

Before this, he spent 12 years in the investment business with the firms of Mosley, Hallgarten, Estabrook and Weeden, Shearson Lehman Brothers, and John Stewart Darrel & Company.

In January, 1998, Marvin Bush was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Fresh Del Monte Produce company, the giant fruit company (major product bananas) that makes the canned goods we buy in our markets. Del Monte is owned by a very wealthy family from Kuwait, the Abu-Ghazaleh family. Mohammed Abu-Ghazaleh is the CEO and he has several family members on the Board alongside Marvin Bush. Another member of the Fresh Del Monte Board of Directors is Stephen Way, who is a major Bush fundraiser. Way is the head of the Houston-based HCC Insurance Holdings Company. In early 2000, Stephen Way acquired the appointment of Marvin Bush to the Board of Directors of HCC. In that transaction, Bush not only landed a very large salary, but a sweet stock option deal. He purchased about $130,000 worth of HCC stock which is now valued at close to $600,000, not even one year later.

Marvin Bush is also on the Board of Directors of something called the Kerrco Company.

Marvin also was named to the Board of Directors of the Stratesec Company, another large publicly-traded firm. This company is very secretive and you can find virtually nothing about it. Their website does not allow entry to several links unless one has a password. Virginia-based Stratesec is a provider of high-tech security systems. Two of the major customers for which they provide security are the Dulles International Airport at Washington, D.C. and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Stratesec`s revenues recently went up by 60%, due to what the company describes as "new customers" Prominent people at Stratesec also include former Reagan operatives including Barry McDaniel and Air Force General James A. Abrahamson (who was involved in the Reagan "Star Wars" project). Stratesec is a company is heavily inter-related with the Kuwam Corporation ("Kuw" = Kuwait; "am" = America). Kuwam is a major Kuwaiti Company into many, many activities including the aircraft business. Stratesec`s Chief Executive is also the Managing Director of Kuwam Corporation and Kuwam`s Chairman Mishal Yousef Saud Al Sabah sits on Stratesec`s Board of Directors. Stratesec is providing the primary security for one of the most sensitive airports in the world. Dulles in D.C., has a heavy middle eastern airline connection.

Winston Partners, Sybase, Choicepoint, H.R. 3162, called "The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" (or USA Patriot)

Another can of worms. Actually, I’m getting fed up with the Bush clan. It’s like the only life they have is screwing up everybody else’s! Sybase software is part of the Choicepoint system which is part of the Patriot Act which part of the whole damn system for keeping track of everybody and everything we do, read, visit, buy, and no doubt think about.

Viva Zapata!
Zapata is the story of oil and the Bush clan and of course, Texas. This is the company GW Bush Snr founded in 1953 and, depending on your predilictions for conspiracies, the Bush connection can take you all the way to the Kennedy assassination and back, and given the scale and scope of the Bush saga, it doesn’t surprise me at all, if indeed there are links between all the goings on of the Bush clan, oil, Texas, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefellers, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Nugan-Hand Bank,the Mob, The Pope (or at least the Vatican, I think the current uncumbent is a little too doddery) and the assassination of JFK. Of one thing I am sure, when billions and governments are at stake, anything is possible.

Other important sources

Federation of American Scientists Website http://www.fas.org/index.html

The FAS Website contains probably the most complete record of the US dealings with the Iraqi regime, arms sales and related information, including Congressional records. For example I did a search on "iraqi arms sales" and pulled up 882 locations including:

"1992 Congressional Record Documents"

A particularly useful set of documents, because they are the official record of US congressional representative Henry B. Gonzalez and his longstanding investigations into a range of related dealings which included BCCI, Banco Nazionale Lavoro (BNL), Iraq-gate, illicit arms dealings, and especially attempts by the Bush government to block his investigations. http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/index.html

Other Bush family -connected Companies & Institutions
Amsec Corp, Global Strategies LLC, Bass Enterprises Production Co, Asset Management International Financing and Settlement Ltd, Palmer National Bank

Other Bush Men (and the odd woman) that at some point, I`ll get around to adding to this dossier.
Dick Cheney, Ari Fleisher, Asa Hutchinson, Robert Mueller, John Negroponte, Paul O`Neil, Theodore Oison, Richard Perle, John Poindexter, Colin Powell, Michael Powell, Otto Reich, Orlando Bosch, Leonel Martinez, Robert Reilly, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, John Walters, Eduardo Noriega, Richard M Nixon, Robert Mosbacher, Ferdinand Marcos, John Erlichman, Robert McFarlane, Brent Scowcroft, Donald Regan, Jim Baker, William Casey, Santos Trafficante, Miguel Recarey, Jr, Oliver North, Manucher Ghorbanifar, Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, Tongsun Park, Sargis Soghnalian, Dan Quayle, Salem bin Laden, Prince Mohammed Ben Abdullah, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

A final word; I’m all Bushed out as the saying goes, but if I’ve learned one thing in putting this testimony together (because that’s what it is), it’s the awesome power of US capitalism to corrupt and to corrupt totally. Defeating a juggernaut of this size is going to be a long struggle, probably not in my lifetime but what the hell!

Copyright © 2003. William Bowles. All rights reserved.

[Joerver]

Etwas Lektüre fürs Wochenende, die Geschichte der Bush`s in zwei Teilen und eine Video-Documentation der BBC.

A Nazi in the (pocket) is worth four in the Bush (family)

Part One
URL mit vielen Links 1.Teil
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article3255.htm
2. Teil
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article3308.htm
Die BBC Fersehdokumentation auf Real-Player
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article4115.htm

What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin Laden…on and on it goes.

A lapse of memory?

By William Bowles

05/07/03: (Information Clearing House) It’s as well to remember that the Web never forgets, at least the US pres should take note of this fact and be careful of his utterances and how they can come back to haunt him. In fact four generations of Bush family history and too many skeletons in too many closets to count are to be found on the Web.

And given all the ‘pullpit pounding’ (more of which below) by ol’ Duyba and his minions, over the dubious moral character of Saddam and his cronies, much of which has underpinned the justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it’s as well to compare the two sets of rogues. Not surprisingly, there’s little to choose between the two except that, in the case of the Bush gang, they have a ‘pedigree’ in perfidy which extends back almost a century and four generations that makes Saddam look positively angelic by comparison.

Prescott Bush – setting a family example

In a previous piece (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3243.htm) a quote I used mentioned Prescott Bush the present pres’s granpa (http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030210Koop.html) so I decided to do a little researching to see what other dirty little secrets the Bush family have hidden in the dark recesses of the WWW and lo and behold, there’s a load of stuff out there (7,630 links to be precise, according to good ol’ google just on granpa Prescott Bush).

Geronimo!

It’s 1918 and, well you know students, they’re always up to innocent pranks. It seems Grandpa Bush set his grandson some fine family precedents starting with digging up Geronimo’s skull,

"In 1918, Prescott Bush and two companions crept into the cemetery near Fort Sill and pried open the grave of Geronimo.

The head was taken out, spiffed up and forwarded to New Haven, where it was given pride of place for goofy rituals that have been attended by generations of Bushes and a veritable army of powerful types."

http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20000923roddy.asp

The Apache nation (what was left of it anyway) was not amused. Okay, we’ll forgive granpa Bush his ‘juvenile pranks’ but it seems that this set the scene for the rest of his miserable life until his death in 1972 from carcinoma of the lung.

From skulls to Zyklon B (and back again)

But it seems that great-granpa George Walker was also in on the business of making money out of death (like great-granpa like great grand-son),

"George Walker, GW`s great-grandfather, also set up the takeover of the Hamburg-America Line, a cover for I.G. Farben`s Nazi espionage unit in the United States. In Germany, I.G. Farben was most famous for putting the gas in gas chambers; it was the producer of Zyklon B and other gasses used on victims of the Holocaust. The Bush family was not unaware of the nature of their investment partners. They hired Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, to hide the funds they were making from Nazi investments and the funds they were sending to Nazi Germany, rather than divest."

Source: http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/

Banking on Fascism

It just doesn’t stop does it, as Prescott Bush, son of George continued in the ‘grand tradition’ of skullduggery by also doing deals with the Nazis,

"On October 20, 1942, the US Alien Property Custodian, under the "Trading With the Enemy Act," seized the shares of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), of which Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder. The largest shareholder was E. Roland Harriman. (Bush was also the managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, a leading Wall Street investment firm.)

"The UBC was established to send American capital to Germany to finance the reorganization of its industry under the Nazis. Their leading German partner was the notorious Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book admitting much of this called "I Paid Hitler."

"Among the companies financed was the Silesian-American Corporation, which was also managed by Prescott Bush, and by his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, who supplied Dub-a-Ya with his name. The company was vital in supplying coal to the Nazi war industry. It too was seized as a Nazi-front on November 17, 1942. The largest company Bush`s UBC helped finance was the German Steel Trust, responsible for between one-third and one-half of Nazi iron and explosives.

"Prescott Bush was also a director of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, (this one owned largely by Roland`s brother, Averell Harriman), which owned about a third of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the rest owned by Friedrich Flick, (a member of Himmler`s "Circle of Friends" who donated to the S.S.)."

Source: http://www.lpdallas.org/features/draheim/dr991216.htm

What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin Laden…on and on it goes. It looks like this’ll have to be part one of an on-going series on the Bush dynasty and their dirty dealings.

Double Dutch?

The story of steel magnate and billionaire bankroller of the Nazis, Fritz Thyssen and his Bush family connection is so incredible, that it deserves to be turned into a movie (obviously not by Hollywood). It all starts with John Loftus, a former U.S.Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor who is the source of the following,

"From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany…. [The interrogation of] [m]ultibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine."

They were trying to find out what had happened to Thyssen’s billions but without success. Why?

"What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts--from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City, Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen`s partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States [my emph. WB].

…

"The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel enScheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich.

"If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank`s lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles` client [my emph. WB] as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles`s other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch [my emph. WB]. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles` cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.

…

"[T]he Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published the book "The Secret War Against the Jews." As a matter of historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers Harriman [my emph. WB], and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation. Union Bank, in turn, was the Bush family`s holding company for a number of other entities, including the "Holland American Trading Company."

Source: http://www.baltech.org/lederman/bush-nazi-fortune-2-09-02.ht…

There are so many twists and turns to this story, that this is not the place to to go into all the labyrinthine links between the Nazis, the Bush Family and the CIA (via Allen Dulles) or indeed, a host of other corporate connections. But this final quote from the same source, gives you an idea of just how much money is involved,

"The enormous sums of money deposited into the Union Bank prior to 1942 is the best evidence that Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Banks` books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951. At that time, Union Bank shares representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of industrial stocks and bonds were unblocked for distribution. Did the Bush family really believe that such enormous sums came from Dutch enterprises? One could sell tulip bulbs and wooden shoes for centuries and not achieve those sums. A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies."

For the full story please go to the link above.

Crocodile tears

All of which makes the following quote from Dubya all the more sickening,

"In April 1999, [then] Texas Governor George W. Bush proclaimed a week of remembrance for the Holocaust. He said, "I urge Texans to never forget the inhumanity of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, and reflect upon our own humanity and our responsibility to respect all peoples."

Source: http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/

Like granpa like grand-son? Well given where Dubya got his money from, and his continuing in the ‘grand tradition of the Bush gang, I’m feeling quite biblical about things, so I thought following,

Short diversion

Would be useful. I know there will be some among you who think I’ve just got it in for the Bushes, so in my wanderings over the Web, I came across this little gem from http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/herskowitz.html

"Duty, Honor, Country

The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush

By Mickey Herskowitz

This paean to the life of Prescott Bush, by a conservative writer is a salutory warning to us all. I quote,

"He [Prescott Bush] was a unifier, not a divider. And he was of such high integrity [sic] that behind the scenes was where he was at his best. He was a man of great faith. His grandfather was a minister whose faith and integrity were fully ingrained in the Bush family. Prescott always emphasized honesty, charity, fairness and proactive dedication to God, family and country."

From a review by Susan Kurz.



I could go on quoting, but I’m afraid I’ll throw up. Check it out for yourself at http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/herskowitz.html. Townhall.com is, by the way, "the first truly interactive community on the Internet to bring Internet users, conservative public policy organizations, congressional staff, and political activists together under the broad umbrella of "conservative" thoughts, ideas and actions."

There’s none so blind as those that refuse to see.

From Eugenicist to anti-abortionist

Not content with digging up the ancestors, supporting Fascism,laundering Nazi money through a Dutch-based bank, selling weapons to the mullahs of Iran, trading guns for drugs, doing business deals with Osama bin Laden, the Bush family in the form of ol’ granpa Prescott was an early supporter of the Eugenics movement (or racial purity, to give it its real name). And a rather embarassing connection it is too, as Bush Snr discovered,

"…And the Birth Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for eugenical births--fewer births for parents with "inferior" bloodlines. Prescott [Bush’s] partner Tighe was a Connecticut director of the league, and the Connecticut league`s medical advisor was eugenics advocate Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School.

Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement. There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open advocates of sterilization of "unfit" or "unnecessary" people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General Draper and his friend George Bush

Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush was publicly exposed for being an activist in that section of the old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election by about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes

In his foreword to a population control propaganda book, George Bush wrote about that 1950 election: "My own first awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day, ‘revealed’ that my father was involved with Planned Parenthood.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth controllers to cost him the election...."

Source: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2412/eugenics/Bush.htm…

The Bush story is such a fascinating history of capitalist corruption and power that it needs to be presented to a public that is consistently lied to, not only by the corporate media but by our so-called leaders. In Part Two, I’m going to give you the low-down on the Bush family’s involvement in the scams and dealings of the Reagan years, the Iran-Contra scandal and one of the biggest rip-offs in history, the savings and loan scandal, which cost the US taxpayer literally trillions of dollars. Yeah, you read right, trillions!

Part II ‘Frauds-R-Us’

Copyright © 2003, William Bowles.

[Joerver]

Final Interview from the Lazy W

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by One Citizen

George W. had just concluded his final photo-op at his Crawford, Texas compound (see photo below) when a reporter noticed one of Bush`s neighbors nearby getting into an old pickup truck. Because of this assignment he hadn`t been able to report any real news for the past month, so he desperately tried to strike up a conversation with the old-timer to see if he might have something interesting to offer.

"Sir... Hey! Can I talk to you for just a second?" the newsman asked.

"Well I was just leavin`... Got chores to tend-to". the older rancher said as he began rolling up his window.

"The flies seem be a bit worse this time of year" the veteran reporter commented. He had tried unsuccessfully to interview all of Dubya`s neighbors during several of his past month-long Crawford vacation assignments, and was hoping that a more relaxed conversational style might get this one to stop long enough to open up a bit.

Not one to be rude, the old rancher stopped rolling up his window. "Them`s circle-flies" he said, shooting the reporter a sidelong glance.

"Circle-flies? Never heard of `em" replied the newsman, so surprised that he`d gotten an answer that he`d almost forgotten about the interview.

The old boy tilted his hat forward, and squinted towards Dubya`s farm. "Circle-flies is what we call `em down here. They mostly circle `round the tail-end of livestock." He started rolling his up his window again.

Just before the window shut the veteran reporter blurted. "HEY.. There`s no livestock on the President`s ranch! Did you just call George W. Bush a horse`s ass?"

"Didn`t say any such thing" he replied, starting up his pickup. "But it sure is hard to fool them circle-flies."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[Joerver]

Focus Iraq: At A Glance

UPDATED: 10:14 a.m. EDT September 5, 2003

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
A U.S. military commander says Saddam Hussein is probably around his hometown of Tikrit. That`s the assessment of the commander of U.S. troops in the region. Major General Ray Odierno says several of Saddam`s bodyguards have been captured in the past month. He met in the city with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who`s touring Iraq.
Germany and France say they`re willing to work with the United States to reach agreement on a proposed U.N. resolution on Iraq. The draft resolution seeks more international help with post-war efforts, with the U.S. retaining political and military control.
Thousands of people gathered today at a Shiite Muslim mosque in Iraq`s holy city of Najaf. They were expecting a sermon from the brother of the leading cleric who was killed at the shrine a week ago. But he did not appear. The sermon was delivered instead by a deputy of the slain leader.
There`s reportedly been a shooting attack outside a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baghdad. A cleric at the mosque says three gunmen got out of a pickup truck and opened fire on worshipers with assault rifles. Three people were injured.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard says his nation will not send peacekeepers to Iraq even if the U.N. Security Council supports a new multinational force to help U.S. troops there. Howard says he told President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair before war broke out that Australia would only be involved in Iraq during the conflict and not provide peacekeepers afterward.
Lawmakers and congressional aides this week say the Bush administration is considering asking lawmakers for up to $70 billion for the Iraq mission. Officials say final decisions haven`t been made, and the numbers could change.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says American officials want to speed up training for Iraqi security forces, including former members of Saddam Hussein`s military and intelligence services. Rumsfeld says making Iraq safe is a job for Iraqis, and no more U.S. troops are needed in the country.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld says security in Iraq is a problem, but it`s a problem that the Iraqi people will deal with, with the help of coalition forces. The top U.S. commander in Iraq says he needs more international forces to deal with potential security threats.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says the United States has wanted U.N. support since the fall of Baghdad to bring in more international troops. And he says the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad may have increased the likelihood of U.N. help.
CIA weapons adviser David Kay, who`s heading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, believes he will find such weapons. That`s according to Michigan Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who was recently briefed on the effort.

CASUALTIES
A total of 287 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began. Of those, 70 have died in combat since May first, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



Summary
++++US+++++UK++++++Other+++++Total++++Avg++++Days

++++287++++50++++++++2++++++++339+++++2.01+++169

Latest Fatality Date: 9/2/2003
09/05/03 Yahoo: U.S. Civilian Worker Fatally Shot in Iraq
A civilian affiliated with oilfield services giant Halliburton was shot and killed in Iraq, the second person connected to the firm to die in an attack in a month.
09/05/03 BBC: Bomb expert killed in Iraq
A 53-year-old British bomb disposal expert has been killed in a roadside ambush in northern Iraq.
09/04/03 Department of Defense
DOD announces a 3rd death on Sept. 1st ... a US soldier who died in Kuwait City in a vehicle accident.
09/04/03 Yahoo News
Iraqi civilian killed, 2 US soliders wounded, in suicide bombing Sept. 3rd in Al Ramadi.
09/02/03 CENTCOM confirms fatatilty
One 1st Armored Division soldier was killed and another was injured in a helicopter accident early Tuesday morning.
09/02/03 News Interactive
An American soldier was killed and another injured today in a helicopter accident near Baghdad, the army said
09/02/03 MANDATORY READING: The Washington Post
Number of Wounded in Action on Rise
09/02/03 Centcom
2 Military Police Brigade soldiers were killed and one was wounded approximately 3:19 p.m. Sept. 1 when their High-Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device along a main supply route south of Baghdad.