Guten Morgen Mr. Bush - 500 Beiträge pro Seite (Seite 24)

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer1…
COMMENTARY




Schwarzenegger Just Acts Like He Cares for the Poor
The pain he says he feels for them is the fake suffering of an actor -- it ends when the cameras are turned off.
By Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for The Times and is co-author of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" (Seven Stories Press/Akashic Books, 2003).

January 13, 2004

We should have known from his movie roles that California`s new governor would be nothing more than a blowhard bully boy. Lacking the guts to take on the entrenched special interests, as he promised when he played the heavily scripted role of outsider candidate, he now proposes to do what all cowardly politicians do: balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

A Los Angeles Times headline Saturday said it all: "Budget Ax Will Fall Heavily on the Poor, Ill." The story on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger`s budget plan explained how it "promises higher costs and hurdles for thousands of Californians, from some children with cancer who will no longer get state help paying for chemotherapy to high school graduates who will be shunted to community colleges instead of universities."

Those kinds of cuts, including reneging on an already-approved cost-of-living increase for mothers and children on welfare, are not only hardhearted, but they won`t save enough to dent the state`s $14-billion revenue shortfall for the 2004-05 budget. They are window dressing to give the governor the cover of making what he termed "painful" spending cuts while selling his $15-billion bond initiative — which is a way of raising taxes without appearing to do so. Another scam involves the $1.3 billion in property tax revenue Schwarzenegger proposes to steal from cash-strapped local governments and school districts — you know, the people who bring you police, firefighters, street repairs, schools, parks and all that other frivolous stuff.

"It`s perplexing to me that the governor would say that public safety is the top priority of the state of California and do something like this that really jeopardizes our ability to provide public safety to our citizens," said Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, who had praised the governor`s promise of a few weeks ago to restore funding to cities and counties. That was before looking at these budget numbers.

Unchallenged are such questionable expenditures as the continued irresponsible expansion of our prison system far beyond our needs; under the governor`s proposal, the youth and adult corrections budget would increase by 8%, causing no pain for the powerful prison guards lobby, which will now switch its allegiance to Schwarzenegger.

"The aged, the blind, the disabled and poor women with children are paying for a big chunk of the loss of revenue from the vehicle tax," state Senate Leader John Burton told me Monday. "Them and college students and people needing medical assistance. The reality is the only way to balance this budget without exploiting these groups is to raise taxes on the wealthy, and the governor doesn`t want to do that."

Put another way, if you have a few Schwarzenegger-branded Hummers in your garage, you`ve just received a tidy windfall at the expense of those who can least afford it — such as mothers trying to work their way off welfare through the CalWORKS program. A mother in Los Angeles raising two kids would see her transitional family aid drop from $704 a month to $669, according to The Times. That wouldn`t even support the governor`s stogie habit, even if he cut back to two decent cigars a day.

What hypocrisy for mega-millionaire Schwarzenegger to refer to "painful" budget cuts. His kids, after all, are not enrolled in the Healthy Families program, which encourages working poor parents to get needed dental and vision care for their children, nor another initiative that helps working families meet the extraordinary expenses associated with treating severe medical problems like cerebral palsy and cancer — both of which would be curtailed in the governor`s budget. His kids will never have to drop out of community college because of the fee hikes he`s imposed or suffer from the deep cuts in Medi-Cal funding for the health needs of the poor.

No, the pain that Schwarzenegger claims to feel is the fake suffering of actors in movies — blood and bruises that can be wiped away when the filming stops. Perhaps that is why he evidenced so much wisecracking good humor at his press conference announcing the budget cuts, which are not likely to hurt anyone in his circle.

"It has been terrific," he told the more than 100 reporters, domestic and foreign, who yuk it up at his cornball jokes. "I have enjoyed every single day of this job."

Well, good for him. Perhaps he could stop grinning long enough to imagine how much fun it would be to support his family for a month on $669 or be unable to pay his children`s medical bills.


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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Anti-Bush ad contest proves popular online
Winner out of 1,500 entries to be shown on TV in key states
Mark Simon, Chronicle Political Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/13/MOVE.TMP



The leaders of the grassroots, Internet-based political phenomenon MoveOn.org were surprised when their national contest to create an anti-President Bush TV ad attracted hundreds of thousands of participants.

Now, the question is whether the winning ad, which will air next week in a $15 million campaign in key electoral battlegrounds, will surprise the political establishment by having an impact beyond what it already has achieved.

The winner of the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, one of the most visually arresting of the entries, is called "Child`s Pay," by Charlie Fisher of Denver.

The ad shows young children working on assembly lines, checking groceries and working as janitors. The ad concludes: "Guess who`s going to pay off President Bush`s $1 trillion deficit."

It was chosen from among 14 finalists, each attacking the policies of the Bush administration in ads ranging from hard-hitting to humorous, and announced Monday night at a celebrity-studded gala in New York City.

The ads, which can be seen at the Web site www.Bushin30seconds.org,http://www.bushin30seconds.org/ are uniformly angry about Bush policies and allege that the administration has been less than truthful with the American people.

"A lot of people are gravely concerned about the direction President Bush is taking our country," said MoveOn.org Executive Director Peter Schurman. "A lot of people have found creative, witty, poignant and powerful ways to express that concern."

The contest was begun in December and was intended to tap a creativity outside the customary and exclusive circle of Washington media consultants who produce most of the national political advertising.

"We thought we`d get a few hundred ads," Schurman said.

Instead, 1,500 ads were submitted from all over the nation. When MoveOn members were asked to rate the ads online, more than 175,000 individuals participated, offering more than 2 million ratings.

The result was the 14 finalists, which were submitted for final review to a panel of judges, including movie star Jack Black, Democratic political strategists Donna Brazile and James Carville, comedian Margaret Cho, author-comedian Al Franken, recording artists Moby, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and author-filmmaker Michael Moore.

The winning ad "Child`s Pay" is scheduled to air throughout next week, timed to appear before and after President Bush`s State of the Union address next Tuesday.

MoveOn will spend $15 million to buy time on TV stations in "battleground states," where the voting could have swung either way in the 2000 presidential election, Schurman said. The ads will not air in California.

MoveOn`s plans represent a substantial media buy, said political science Professor Jack Pitney of the Claremont Colleges, but that doesn`t translate into impact.

"The flame burns hot but narrow," he said. "The MoveOn material in general and the ads in particular are designed to make angry people even angrier, but they don`t necessarily broaden the anti-Bush coalition," he said.

And, Pitney said, "it could complicate things."

Indeed, it already has. Two the contest submissions, posted on the Web site along with all the others, equated Bush`s statements with the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.

The ads were denounced by Republicans and others, and they were pulled from the Web site as MoveOn co-founder Wes Boyd acknowledged they were in "poor taste" and expressed regret they had "slipped through" the screening process and had been posted on the Web site.

Even without inflammatory Nazi imagery, Republicans found plenty objectionable in the remaining ads.

"They should rename their contest `30 Seconds of Fear and Loathing,` `` said Christine Iverson, press secretary for the Republican National Committee. "There is not a single positive message in any of those ads. They`re promoting protest, pessimism, negativity and personal attacks on the president of the United States."

But if the point of the contest was to develop sophisticated, anti-Bush TV ads built from the ground up, the 14 finalist ads have a style and polish that could compete with anything currently airing on television.

And they hew closely to the basic liberal claims that Bush policies have produced job losses, skyrocketing federal deficits and tax cuts for the wealthy. The ads also accuse the president of deceiving the American people about the reasons leading to the war in Iraq as well as weakening environmental regulations and civil rights.

Most of the ads are serious in tone, but there is the occasional touch of humor, such as "Hood Robbin`," by Nathania Vishnevsky of Foster City. Her ad depicts a man dressed in a Robin Hood costume and wearing a Bush mask taking toys from children, ripping down drapes to reveal a naked man and picking the pocket and stealing the cane of an elderly man. All the loot is turned over to a man at the entrance to a corporate headquarters.

The contest is a project of the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, an offshoot of MoveOn.org, an Internet political action group created by Boyd and Joan Blades of Berkeley, who made millions from their own computer product -- the famous flying toaster screen saver.

Five years ago, frustrated by the national political dialogue they circulated an online petition calling for a swift end to the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton, asserting that the country wanted to "move on."

Since then, MoveOn.org merged with another similar organization, has grown to more than 1.7 million members and has become a force that can produce hundreds of thousands of online petition signatures advocating other policy positions.

MoveOn.org is nonpartisan and under the laws governing its formation cannot advocate on behalf or against any candidate. It can, however, "educate" voters about issues and candidates, and in that regard it is clearly opposed to the president.

Similarly, MoveOn.org Voter Fund can`t involve itself in specifically opposing or supporting a candidate.

MoveOn has formed its own political action committee, MoveOn.org PAC, and it will weigh in directly on political campaigns, Schurman said.

But MoveOn.org Voter Fund and the ads, Schurman said, have a different goal.

"The point is to influence voters -- not to reach them through the elite media -- and to educate them about the failures of President Bush`s policies," he said.

E-mail Mark Simon at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |

Overall Best Ad and People`s Choice Winner:

http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/1024_large.shtml

Funniest Ad:

http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/1024_large.shtml

Best Animated Ad:

http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/2232_large.shtml

Best Youth Ad:

http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/2472_large.shtml

Modem und ISDN auf der Seite:
http://www.bushin30seconds.org/

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Selling of a war

Tuesday, January 13, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/13/EDG0C47J1D1.DTL


"INTELLIGENCE gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," said President Bush in a national address on March 17, 2003.

A majority of Americans believed him. In fact, more than half the public thought that Saddam Hussein not only had close links with al Qaeda terrorist networks, but had a role in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But it was not true. The Bush administration used innuendo and exaggerated evidence to persuade the American people that a pre-emptive war against Iraq was necessary to protect the nation from terrorism.

Now, the use of that distorted evidence is coming back to haunt the Bush administration. Consider:

-- An extensive study by the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented" intelligence assessments to the American people.

-- The U.S. Army`s premier academic institution, the War College, issued a scathing report, criticizing the Bush administration for pursuing an "unnecessary" war in Iraq that has left the Army "near the breaking point." Authored by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, the report argued that Iraq was "a war-of- choice distraction from the war of necessity`` against al Qaeda.

-- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill, fired by Bush for opposing a second round of tax cuts, now says that shortly after taking office, senior Bush administration officials began to plan for regime change in Iraq. In "The Price of Loyalty," written by former Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer prize-winner Ron Suskind, O`Neill argues that neither Bush nor his senior officials questioned why a war against Iraq was necessary; instead, they discussed how to make it happen.

-- Kenneth Pollack, a former national security official in the Clinton administration and author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," wrote in Atlantic magazine that estimates of Iraq`s capabilities to build weapons of mass destruction were hugely exaggerated.

-- Barton Gellman, who interviewed key Iraqi scientists and members of American weapons search teams, reported in the Washington Post that sanctions and arms embargoes had ended Iraq`s efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

These recent reports and revelations are clearly unsettling to people who have trusted their president. But they do support the many defense analysts and experts who, before the war, argued that Iraq did not represent an imminent danger to the United States.

We support the Carnegie report`s call for an independent commission to investigate the administration`s alleged misuse of intelligence evidence. If this really was a "war of choice," the American people have a right to hold their government accountable.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle |

[Deep Thought]

http://news.focus.msn.de/G/GN/gn.htm?snr=128553&streamsnr=7&…

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POLL ANALYSES
January 13, 2004


Nationally: Two-Candidate Race for Democratic Nomination?
President Bush leads major Democratic candidates by 12 to 15 points


by David W. Moore
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- In less than a week, the voters in Iowa will have indicated their preferences for the Democratic Party`s nominee for president, setting the stage for a substantial realignment in the rank order of candidates among Democratic voters nationally.

Polls in Iowa show that former Vermont Governor Gov. Howard Dean and Missouri Congressman Rep. Richard Gephardt are in a competitive race for first, while Massachusetts Senator Sen. John Kerry and North Carolina Senator Sen. John Edwards are hoping to produce a strong showing.

Nationally, the picture looks quite different. A new CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey finds that the contest for the Democratic nomination right now is becoming more of a two-man race between Dean and retired General Wesley Clark -- who declined to run in the Iowa cCaucuses, citing his late entry into the presidential contest.

The poll shows Dean receiving 26% of the vote among registered Democrats nationally, closely followed by Dean Clark with 20%. No other candidate reaches double-digits.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr040113.asp

[bares@nobles]

Die Neocons um Richard Perle legen gerade die Agenda für Bush`s zweite Amtszeit auf.
U.a. soll Frankreich demnach nicht mehr zu den Alliierten der USA zählen. Ob auch in Frankreich ein regime change wie in Syrien, Iran verfolgt wird, bleibt noch unklar. Der Rest Europas soll gezwungen werden sich entweder für Frankreich oder die USA zu entscheiden.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/31/1072546588325.html

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/156352_bushsummit13.h…

Bush admits he targeted Saddam from the start
Comments could boost criticism of president`s case for war against Iraq

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

By STEWART M. POWELL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that he was mapping preparations to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as soon as he took office.

Bush`s comments came in response to former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill`s contention in a new book that the chief executive was gunning for Saddam nine months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and two years before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Bush`s comments appeared likely to stoke campaign claims by Democratic rivals for the White House that the president was planning to attack Iraq, possibly in retaliation for Saddam`s attempted 1993 assassination of his father, former President Bush.

"The stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear -- like the previous administration, we were for regime change," Bush told a joint news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, with Mexican President Vicente Fox. "And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with (enforcing a no-fly zone over Iraq) and so we were fashioning policy along those lines."

Bush said al-Qaida`s surprise Sept. 11 attacks on the United States put him on a hair trigger to take pre-emptive action against Iraq rather than await evidence of a new threat to Americans.

"September the 11th made me realize that America was no longer protected by oceans and we had to take threats very seriously no matter where they may be materializing," Bush said.

A president`s "most solemn obligation" is to protect the United States, Bush said, adding: "I took that duty very seriously."

Democratic presidential candidates seized upon O`Neill`s comments. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said the accusation of a ready-to-go effort to oust Saddam "calls into question everything that the administration put in front of us."

Asked about O`Neill`s contention that the first National Security Council meeting of the Bush administration in January 2001 discussed ousting Saddam, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan didn`t deny that account.

McClellan tried to focus attention on Bush`s claims of success in Iraq rather than preparations to oust Saddam.

Bush "exhausted all possible means to resolve the situation in Iraq peacefully" before launching the invasion in March, McClellan said. Saddam defied a "final opportunity to comply" with U.N. demands to disarm, prompting Bush to take action "in the aftermath of Sept. 11th (because) it`s important to confront threats before it`s too late."

Bush, who fired O`Neill as treasury secretary in December 2002, said he "appreciated" O`Neill`s nearly two years of service in the administration.

McClellan said the O`Neill book appeared to be "more about trying to justify personal views and opinions than it does about looking at the results that we are achieving on behalf of the American people."

McClellan said the White House was "not in the business of selling or promoting or critiquing books," adding: "It`s just not something this administration gets caught up in."

O`Neill told CBS News` "60 Minutes" program Sunday night that "from the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go."

O`Neill, who headed Alcoa before joining the Bush administration in 2001 as treasury secretary, gave the interview as part of an effort to promote a new book, "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O`Neill." The book was written by Ron Suskind with O`Neill`s cooperation, including providing access to some 19,000 notes and documents.

Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols said Treasury officials had asked for an investigation into how a possibly classified document appeared in O`Neill`s televised CBS interview.

Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe accused the White House of launching "an all-out attack on the man Bush once praised as a straight shooter," adding: "Implied in O`Neill`s allegations is that the president of the United States and his administration may have consistently lied to the American people in making the case for war against Iraq."

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Soros pins his hopes on defeat for Bush

By JULIA MALONE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution


Rick McKay / AJC
Author of "The Bubble of American Supremacy," billionaire George Soros says he will devote this year to unseating President Bush.


WASHINGTON -- Billionaire George Soros, probably the single biggest giver to Democratic causes, said Monday that Republican criticism of him could be very costly.

"It has got a rise out of me," he said, adding that his anger "will probably find expression" in additional donations to efforts to defeat President Bush.

How much, Soros wouldn`t say. He already has given $10 million to Americans Coming Together and $2.5 million to www.moveon.org, groups that are running anti-Bush campaigns.

Soros, recently ranked as the 28th richest man in America by Forbes magazine, said he will devote this year to unseating Bush.

"I`m ready to put my money where my mouth is," said the Hungarian-born financier, who made his fortune in New York as a hedge-fund operator. His opposition to the Bush administration is based chiefly on the invasion of Iraq.

Soros declined to endorse any Democratic contender but said his views are closest to those of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

"I`m keen for Dean," Soros said, dismissing a published report that he had doubts about the apparent front-runner.

He made the remarks at the Carnegie Center for International Peace to promote his new book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy," a searing analysis of the Bush administration`s foreign policy.

Soros said the president had "deliberately deceived the public" about his reasons for invading Iraq and said Bush had "used the war on terrorism as a pretext to pursue a dream of American supremacy."

He complained that he had been "demonized" by the "Bush propaganda machine." He especially objected to a Wall Street Journal editorial last month that criticized him for financing pro-marijuana voter initiatives and repeated a charge by Joseph Califano, secretary of health, education and welfare in the Carter administration, that Soros is "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization."

Soros, who favors medicinal use of marijuana, complained that critics skip over his donations of $700 million to assist the growth of democracy in Eastern Europe.

He also has come under fire from both Republicans and some campaign finance reformers for making big-dollar donations to political groups. They say Soros, who supported a new law banning unlimited so-called "soft money" donations to political parties, has violated the spirit of the statute by giving huge amounts to groups that are not technically affiliated with parties but have partisan leanings.

Soros countered Monday that he has fully disclosed his contributions.

"I think MoveOn is doing a very good job," he said of the liberal, Internet-based group that is collecting money to run ads critical of the White House. "It`s a very appropriate and exciting way of communication."

The group recently stirred a controversy by including two spots on its Web site comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler.

That was a mistake, Soros said, but he added that it was no reason for him to curtail his support.

Americans Coming Together, the other group he is supporting, plans to raise $95 million to run a get-out-the-vote campaign in key battleground states.




Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0104/13soros.html

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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
War News for January 13, 2004

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Central Baghdad mortared, more explosions reported.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqis riot in Kut over food and jobs. One coalition soldier and two Iraqi policemen injured.

Bring ‘em on: Anti-American demonstrations reported in Fallujah, apparently caused by this incident of hostage-taking.

Bring `em on: US troops under RPG fire in central Fallujah. Four Iraqi civilians killed after US troops open fire.

Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed in two ambushes in Mosul.

Bring `em on: US Apache helicopter shot down near Habbaniya.

Goodwill of Iraqi Shi’ites towards US eroding. “But the relatively slow pace of reconstruction, soaring unemployment, fuel shortages, inadequate services and widespread charges of corruption have steadily eaten into that good will. Al-Sistani`s warnings that more violence could beset Iraq if elections are not held may feed the rising frustration.”

Iraqi Sunnis uniting for political leverage.

Three years predicted before Iraqi electrical power is restored.

Baghdad fashion maven and incompetent administrator L. Paul Bremer rules out compromise on Iraqi elections before he cuts and runs.

Troops get their tours extended in Iraq.

General Clark says Lieutenant AWOL was so obsessed with Iraq that he ignored warnings from Clinton administration about Osama bin Laden.

Iraqis desperate for jobs.

Human Rights Watch says US policies in Iraq may violate international law.

Commentary

Editorial: Iraq was a mistake and Bush is a liar. “Instead, the administration`s case was based on two central pillars: Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons in large quantities and was hot in pursuit of nuclear weapons; he also is closely tied in with Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, to which he could at any time provide weapons of mass destruction for use against the United States or its friends. Neither of those assertions was true, and the administration had reason to know they weren`t true. Indeed, according to a new book, former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill says that as early as January 2001 the Bush administration was talking about removing Saddam from power.”

Editorial: Bush’s lies about Iraq are a legitimate issue for the 2004 campaign. “If WMDs and al-Qaida were not valid reasons for an American invasion, we must wonder whether bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq is the real justification for the American occupation. Or is this instead an exercise in projecting American military power into the heart of the oil-rich Middle East and closer to the borders of hostile states, including Syria and Iran? The American people should know, and we hope the election campaign will generate some answers.”

Opinion: The Awful Truth. “People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren`t sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.”

Operation Cut and Run: Version 6.2

Team Bush "revises" Iraqi transition plan again. "Officials held a round of urgent meetings in Washington and Baghdad in the wake of the rejection on Sunday by a powerful Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, of the administration`s complex plans to hold caucuses around the country to select an interim legislature and executive in a newly self-governing Iraq. Officials say they are responding to the cleric`s objections with a new plan that will open the caucuses to more people and make their inner workings more transparent…The new hope in Washington, the officials said, was in effect to make the caucus system look more democratic without changing it in a fundamental way." Emphasis added.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Indiana soldier wounded in Iraq.

Home Front

Cheney raises cash for George "More Important Than A Couple of Dead Soldiers" Nethercutt in Portland, Oregon. "Oregon Republican officials said the event -- which carries a $1,000 admission charge, or $10,000 for those who want to have their picture taken with the vice president -- will attract at least 75 attendees."






# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:02 AM
Comments (6)

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SEPT. 11 ATTACKS
Iraq was distraction, Clark says
By Raja Mishra and Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff, 1/13/2004

BISMARCK, N.D. -- Retired Army General Wesley K. Clark said yesterday that the Bush administration, distracted by plans to invade Iraq, discounted intelligence on Al Qaeda handed over by outgoing Clinton administration officials in 2000, leaving security gaps that made it easier for Osama bin Laden`s terrorist agents to strike on Sept. 11, 2001.

Clark`s charges follow public statements from former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill, who, in a forthcoming book, says the Bush administration had been planning an invasion of Iraq since its first days in the White House.

But Clark`s accusation that Bush bears responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks has increasingly become the national security centerpiece of Clark`s campaign, with Clark going beyond standard Democratic critiques of the Iraq war to confront Bush on the event that has come to define his presidency.

"They didn`t do everything they could have before 9/11 to prevent the tragedy that was 9/11," Clark said on board his campaign plane. "This is a story that needs full investigation."

Yesterday, Clark -- who served during the Clinton administration in several high-ranking Army positions -- went into further detail than he has in the past, saying Clinton`s national security team had compiled a lengthy intelligence record on Al Qaeda, accelerating its efforts in 1998 after a bin Laden lieutenant issued a fatwa, or religious directive, calling for the killing of Americans.

After the bombings at American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the attack on the USS Cole, Clark said, the Clinton team spent months devising a detailed special operations plan to dismantle Al Qaeda that was in place in 2000.

"They built a plan and turned it over to the Bush administration," said Clark, who said the plan was ignored. "This administration failed to do its duty to protect the United States of America before 9/11." A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee shot back at Clark yesterday, questioning whether the Clinton administration should have acted on such a plan, and pointing to rumors she said Clark has cited as truth. In October, for example, Clark said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had leaked his own memo charging that the United States had no strategy for dealing with terrorism. When questioned, Clark said he had heard rumors to that effect.

"Wesley Clark is long on wild accusasion and conspiracy thories and very, very short on facts to back these things up," said Christine Iverson, the RNC spokeswoman. "His comments on 9/11 have drawn fire even from his fellow Democratic primary candidates."

Clark said he believes Bush administration officials were more focused on ousting Saddam Hussein than Al Qaeda from the outset. However, Clark stops short of asserting a causal link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Bush`s alleged neglect, saying "You can never really know if the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented."

Yesterday`s accusations also follow a New York Times report that in October 2002, Clark -- who was reportedly mulling a race for president -- told a New Hampshire gathering that he believed there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Clark`s aides said yesterday that, at the time, Clark was referring to a New York Times story that cited a leaked letter from CIA director George Tenet, asserting a tie between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

"Hindsight is 20/20, but at the time, everyone thought that there was the possiblity of some kind of connection," said Clark`s press secretary, Bill Buck. "When you see a front-page story saying that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that [Clark] had relied on during his career, was telling the United States Senate that there was a tie, well then if he was asked about it, the logical answer is that there is."

Earlier this fall, former Vermont governor Howard Dean was criticized for publicly raising the rumor that Bush had advance notice about Sept. 11. Dean, however, quickly distanced himself from the rumor.

Dean`s antiwar position has been a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Other leading candidates have focused their foreign policy criticism on Bush`s diplomacy before the war and ongoing efforts to rebuild Iraq.

Raja Mishra can be reached at [e-mail].

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The Doctor Is In
Dan Tyler

The Doctor is in
The Doctor is in
You know who I mean
Doctor Howard Dean

He`s the one for me
A man of destiny
The people`s friend
The Doctor is in

The Doctor is in
Let`s give him a hand
We gotta make things right
In this troubled land

There`s a lot to do
It`s up to me and you
We got a race to win
And put the Doctor in

He will make his mark
with a strong hand
Reminding us
with his brave stand
This is our land
Your`s and my land

(instrumental overture)

The Doctor is in
The Doctor is in
You know who I mean
Doctor Howard Dean

He`s the one for me
A man of destiny
The people`s friend
The Doctor is in

Happy days again!
The Doctor is in

The Doctor Is In" Copyright 2003, Mota Music
Moving too slow for you? Try our Lo-Fi Version of the site.
http://www.howarddeansong.com/

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$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Joerver]

Mehr als die Hälfte der Zugewinne seit der Gefangennahme von Saddam sind wieder weg. Das andere stammt aus der wirtschaftlichen Erholung.

More than half of the American public continues to approve of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president.



Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?



± 3% Margin of Error
January 9-11, 2003
Sample Size=1,029

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Collective Punishment and Kabobs

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 12, 2004 - 07:13 PM
While creeping through the hideous Baghdad traffic en route to Ramadi to meet with a Sheikh, my friend Harb mentions that the CPA has created several thousand new jobs for Iraqis—as street sweepers! He tells me many of them are sweeping along the highways around Baghdad; that they have probably been sent to do so to find mines and IED’s. A terrible thought, one I try to put it out of my mind.

But with all the problems facing the CPA here, is having clean streets and roads really that high of a priority? After all, I have seen countless men cleaning the streets of Baghdad the last several weeks.


Lake Habaniyah just outside of Falluja, Iraq.

As we inch our way through the streets, a US Humvee patrol is inching along beside us. Harb talks with Mishi and I as if there is no problem at all, while I attempt to will the Humvees away, as I see them as moving targets for resistance fighters. I peer inside their vehicle and see several pictures of what I presume to be their girlfriends or wives on the dashboard behind their computer screen. An M-16 rests on the window, pointing out at all of us.

Finally we get on the highway, and shortly thereafter I spot several men sweeping dirt in a seemingly meaningless way, off to the side of the highway.

Then another group further out. I should point out, that the section of highway leading north-northwest out of Baghdad is one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq for US convoys and patrols.

Harb spent the last few days working as a driver and translator for a Japanese team who was studying DU effects in the south. They had a Geiger counter which they watched go off the scale on many occasions. While in a hospital in southern Iraq visiting with the administrator, a group of 5 US soldiers and a captain brought in a box of medicines; stomach medicine, aspirin, plastic syringes, etc., for a hospital that treats upwards of 600 children per day, many of which suffer from the terrible effects of DU. The administrator smiled and accepted the small gift with grace.

Meanwhile, while en route to Ramadi Mishi purchases a box of various medications for the Sheikh to distribute to the children of his tribe in Ramadi.

The three of us talk a lot about the various aspects Iraq suffers from today. Another disturbing topic is that I have a friend who recently received an email from a US Air Force captain … a sort of veiled threat that he was being watched because he was writing some things that weren’t perceived as being ‘supportive’ of the coalition. The said captain suggested to my friend that he stop by the CPA to have a talk about ‘democracy’. Not a comforting thought.

Like I’ve heard so many Iraqis say during interviews,

“This is the freedom?”

The Sheikh we are to visit in Ramadi is unfortunately in Mosul, so we share soft drinks and fresh oranges with two of his sons, who stand every time one of us leaves or returns to our chairs.


Two sons of the Sheikh in Ramadi.

After a nice visit with them in the sun and clean air of rural Iraq, we carry on towards Falluja.

As we enter the bustling streets of Falluja we pass a wall with graffiti on it that says,

”Stealing from the American’s is accepted, and killing them is even better!”

The word on the street is that no US Patrols go through the city of Falluja, and I’ve yet to see one there myself; whereas in Baghdad I see one about every half hour when I’m out and about.

The man we went to see in Falluja is Sheikh Haji Barakat, who is a law professor. The problem was that the Sheikh was detained by US soldiers three months ago, and remains in Abu Ghraib prison to this day. This, despite the fact that the US Commander of Falluja has already told his family that the Sheikh is innocent. Each time the family has asked for his release, they get the same promise: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

“Sheikh Haji Baraket,” explains his cousin Khamis, “is a great, honorable man. The Americans accused him of financing the resistance. But even the Sheikh told the Americans his seven sons are involved in the resistance. This doesn’t mean that their father is guilty. But they have detained him illegally anyway.”

Omar is the 20 year old nephew of the Sheikh, who was detained as well. He tells us of being interrogated. The Americans asked him if he was Sunni, when he had last seen his mother, and other odd questions, then released him. He also tells us that when the Americans came to detain him, the door to the house was smashed, papers and passports were taken, the manifest for the family car, and all the money in the house.

Omar states that while in prison the Americans who questioned him wore civilian clothing, and threatened to release German Shepherd dogs on him.

We are sitting in the sun drinking tea in the beautiful green fields and palm trees of rural Falluja, in the shadow of a mosque that the Sheikh had built with his own money for the people in his area.


Beautiful countryside of rural Falluja.

Khamis breaks in on the conversation to add,

“We need to have a vote in Iraq, then have the Americans leave. The Americans are good for removing Saddam, but now they are behaving worse than Saddam. We have three hours of electricity a day, no security and no running water at all.”

He tells us that even the flour they are allowed by the Americans is corrupted. That there is nobody they can complain to about the electricity and water, or the detentions for that matter. They just have to try their best to deal with it.

He continues,

“We used to be humiliated by Saddam, but now it is worse. We have no medicine for our children. It is the same for all of us, and we are running out of food. This is worse than Saddam, I cannot believe it.”

Two little boys whose father is in jail sit with us, listening to the conversation, as Khamis continues,

”We used to believe the Americans and Europeans would bring justice to Iraq. Instead they have taken it out of Iraq.”

I take a drink of water from the Euphrates River, and watch some Apaches fly low over the fields in the distance. Tradition says that if one drinks the water from the Euphrates River, he/she will return to Iraq.

The saddest part of the story of the Sheikh, is that he is one of 14 brothers. All of the brothers fled Iraq after being tortured by Saddam Hussein for standing up against him. After the Americans invaded Iraq, the Sheikh and one of his brothers returned from Saudi Arabia where they were seeking refuge. Now the Sheikh and his brother sit in prison, detained by the Americans.

After visiting their home and the four beautiful sitting areas for councils, we pay a quick visit to Lake Habaniyah. Walking near the blue water gently lapping on the rocks the sun is warm on my skin. Palm trees and flowers complete the calming experience. I begin to feel as though I’m on a vacation of sorts, until I hear the thudding of ‘controlled explosions’ by the Americans a little to the south, then the rumbling of three Apaches flying low across the desert to the northwest.

We leave the idyllic setting to return to Falluja for the famously tasty Kabobs at a restaurant in the city. A small demonstration of angry men passes in the street as many of the patrons in the restaurant crowd to the windows to watch them pass.

We eat quickly, take some Iraqi tea, and are quickly on our way. Needless to say, Falluja isn’t the safest place for Americans and Europeans, even with an older Iraqi man who knows the people well.

Driving back to Baghdad I watch out the window as the desert darkens as dusk fades into night. We pass a couple of terrible auto accidents, then a little further pass by the glaring lights of Abu Ghraib.



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This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
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BUSH `ON PAR WITH GERMAN WAR PLAN`


AMERICA`S war on terror was likened yesterday to Germany`s strategy during two world wars.

President Bush was warned that his campaign could drag the US into conflicts with countries that posed no real threat.

The invasion of Iraq was an unnecessary part of America`s "dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious" war on terror, said a report published by the US Army War College.

It said the White House should focus on al-Qaeda.

The report`s author, Professor Jeffrey Record, said the anti-terrorism campaign is "strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate US military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security".

Prof Record, comparing Bush`s strategy to Germany`s, said: "Keep your enemies to a manageable number. The Germans were defeated in two wars...because their strategic ends outran their means."

TRAVELLERS using US airports will be "terror" colour-coded on computer from next month, with red as high risk, yellow subject to extra searches and green trouble-free.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=138104…

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U.S. Death Toll in Afghanistan Now 100
Mon Jan 12, 2:28 PM ET

By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan - An American soldier returning from a patrol became the 100th fatality in the U.S. military`s two-year Afghan campaign when his vehicle collided with a truck, highlighting the dangers facing U.S. forces in a nation roiled by a stubborn Taliban insurgency.


The toll pales in comparison to the tally of American dead in Iraq , which is approaching 500. But it is still a striking number in a force that is a small fraction of the size of the 130,000-strong U.S. contingent in Iraq.


The U.S. military did not identify the soldier in a brief statement issued Monday. It said he was involved in an accident southwest of the Afghan capital Friday night and died of his injuries the next morning.


"His death underscores the dangers inherent in Operation Enduring Freedom, and our condolences go out to his family," the statement said, without giving further details.


As in Iraq, where the U.S. military also triumphed, the number of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan has continued to rise, undermining claims by American leaders that the military campaign has brought stability to Afghans left destitute by a quarter-century of war.


Only 16 Americans died in the lightning war that drove the Taliban from power at the end of 2001 for providing a refuge and base for Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. The rest of the Americans died after the Taliban`s defeat.


Likewise in Iraq, most of the deaths — both combat and non-combat — have occurred since President Bush declared an end to major fighting on May 1. A roadside bomb explosion Monday killed the 495th American service member since the Iraq war began in March.


Pentagon spokesman James Turner confirmed that the weekend death brought the total from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan to 100 — 30 from hostile fire and 70 "non-hostile" casualties.


When measured against the large disparity in forces, the tally belies conventional wisdom that Afghanistan has become a far safer place to operate. The U.S. provides 9,000 of the 11,000-member coalition troops stationed in Afghanistan.


The Afghan government said Monday it "honored" America`s sacrifice to free the country from al-Qaida and the Taliban and appealed for continued international support.


"At an important time like this, Afghanistan needs all the support that the international community can provide, in all areas, in order to make its progress completely irreversible," said Jawed Luddin, President Hamid Karzai`s spokesman.


Despite the rapid victory more than two years ago, bin Laden has evaded capture and an international manhunt has failed to find him. He is believed to be hiding somewhere along the rugged, porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, possibly sheltered by tribesman who were sympathetic to the Taliban.


The total of 100 includes deaths in other parts of Operation Enduring Freedom, such as a helicopter crash in the Philippines nearly two years ago that killed 10 American soldiers.


But it excludes CIA agents such as the two contractors killed in an Oct. 25 ambush near a U.S. base near the eastern border town of Shkin, which American soldiers have dubbed "the most evil place in Afghanistan." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the first American killed in combat here, in November 2001, also was a CIA employee, and is not included in the total.


Afghans are the chief victims of the insurgency. At least 40 people have died in an outburst of violence since the ratification of the country`s first post-Taliban constitution on Jan. 4.


In the worst incident, 15 children were killed by a bomb in the southern city of Kandahar on Jan. 6 that U.S. and Afghan officials have blamed on the Taliban. On Monday, dozens of suspected Taliban fighters armed with assault rifles attacked a police checkpoint in the southwest, killing four policemen, a provincial governor said.


The last U.S. soldier killed in action in Afghanistan died Nov. 14 when his vehicle struck a land mine during a sweep for insurgents in the snowy mountains in northeastern Afghanistan.


In November, five U.S. soldiers died in a helicopter crash near the main U.S. base at Bagram, north of Kabul, apparently due to mechanical failure.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said the attrition rate had come down since the war, and that he hoped it would continue to decrease even if there is an upsurge in violence in the spring.

Casualties will be "hopefully low," he said. "We will continue aggressive patrolling and aggressive reconstruction."

In a major change of strategy, U.S. security teams are deploying for the first time to provincial capitals across the south and east, hoping to open the way for some of the promised $2 billion in U.S. aid.

The joint military-civilian effort is the latest bid by American officials to shore up Afghanistan in time for landmark elections planned for June.

The United Nations has welcomed the move, but warns that the elections cannot go ahead unless security improves.

The new drive will put American troops on the streets of some of the most hostile towns in the country for the first time, and U.S. commanders have forecast a sharp reaction from the enemy.

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January 12, 2004
Q&A: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 12, 2003

Who is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani?

He is the most important Shiite cleric in Iraq, a nation that is about 60 percent Shiite. This means the reclusive, Iranian-born 73-year-old wields a tremendous degree of influence over the nation`s future. Sistani disagrees with the latest U.S. plan to choose delegates for Iraq`s interim government through a complex series of nationwide caucuses, and instead calls for direct elections. This disagreement could delay the timetable for transferring sovereignty back to Iraqis, scheduled to take place by July 1.

What are his views on postwar Iraq?

Sistani has been tolerant of the U.S. occupation and, by and large, has encouraged Shiites to cooperate with the coalition. "Sistani has been very, very helpful as far as the American presence in Iraq is concerned. Because of him, the insurrection has not spread to the Shiite areas," says Yitzhak Nakash, professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University and the author of "The Shi`is of Iraq." On the other hand, Sistani also wants Iraq to be an Islamic state, and this concerns U.S. policymakers, who would prefer a secular Iraq. "If Sistani gets everything he wants at this stage, you`d have the Islamic Republic of Iraq up and running already," says Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst at the Congressional Research Service.

What is the source of Sistani`s power?

He is a revered Islamic thinker and one of the most respected Shiite clerics in the world. Experts say most of Iraq`s Shiite Muslims turn to Sistani for guidance on how to live their lives in accordance with Islamic law.

What kind of Islamic state does Sistani want?

Sistani has said that no law in Iraq should conflict with Islamic principles, and he wants Islam to be recognized in law as the religion of the majority of Iraqis. He has not promoted an official role for Islamic clerics in Iraq`s new government; clerics play such a role in neighboring Iran. Some experts say Sistani`s religious philosophy favors creation of an Islamic state that would seem moderate compared with neighboring Iran. "Sistani is not a [Ruhollah] Khomeini" [the spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran], Nakash says. Some U.S. Iraq experts believe Sistani could support an Islamic state that is compatible with elections, freedom of religion, and other civil liberties--a government that is more religious than Turkey`s, but more inclusive than Iran`s. Others are less sure.

What is the difference between Sistani`s philosophy and that of Iran`s government?

The Iranian revolution deepened a growing disagreement within the Shiite community over the proper relationship between religion and politics, says Juan Cole, an expert on Iraqi history at the University of Michigan. Ayatollah Khomeini was a proponent of an Islamic political theory that emerged in the mid-20th century called velayat-i-faqih, or rule by Islamic jurist. This theory backed the idea that governments with authority over Shiites should be run by religious clerics in accordance with Islamic law. A more traditional Shiite position--often called quietism--holds that clerics shouldn`t get involved in day-to-day affairs and instead should serve as an authority independent from politics. Sistani has long favored the quietist, or moderate, tradition.

What has Sistani said about the occupation of Iraq?

Sistani`s first statements after the start of the war were viewed as tacitly supportive of the U.S.-led effort to depose Saddam Hussein. He counseled followers that they could work with the occupiers--as long as, at the end of every conversation with them, they "would ask [the occupiers] when they were leaving," Nakash says. He did not call for Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

On the other hand, Sistani has also condemned some aspects of the U.S. plan to return sovereignty to Iraqis. In June 2003, he issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, stating that the framers of Iraq`s constitution had to be elected, not appointed by U.S. officials and governing council members. In November, he issued another statement saying that elections--not a system of regional caucuses organized by the coalition--would be the proper way to select a transitional government. Despite efforts by Iraqi Governing Council members to get Sistani to change his mind, he has stuck by this position, reiterating it on January 11.

Has Sistani been seen in public since the occupation began?

No. Because of security concerns, he meets privately with visitors and issues statements from his office in Najaf, one of Shiism`s holiest cities. Members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council have met with Sistani, as did former U.N. Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello (who later died in the August 19 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad). Sistani has refused to speak with L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the U.S. occupation authority, likely because he does not want to appear too close with the Americans.

How has the coalition reacted to Sistani`s statements?

It has taken them seriously, because losing Sistani`s support could compromise the legitimacy of the coalition`s actions and perhaps lead to resistance on the part of his followers, some experts say. Sistani`s June fatwa helped force a shift in U.S. planning on how the constitution would be written. His November statement on direct elections has cast doubt on the Bush administration`s current plan to create a transitional government. The governing council and coalition must now decide how seriously to take Sistani`s call for interim elections. If they heed him, some fear it will set a precedent that allows a Shiite cleric the final say in politics. On the other hand, if they ignore him, "any government they put in place now will collapse after they leave," Nakash says. "We cannot over-push the secular democratic card--we must be realistic. The government created has to reflect the will of the majority of the people."

Why does Sistani support elections?

In part because they are the most legitimate expression of the will of the Iraqi people, Sistani argues. If chosen through elections, "the parliament would spring from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a just manner and would prevent any diminution of Islamic law," he wrote in his November statement. Analysts also say that Sistani appears to believe that Shiites, as the majority in Iraq, will affirm Islamic ideals if given the chance. "I think he sees democracy as a way of getting what he wants. He doesn`t fear it," Katzman says.

Do Sistani`s recent statements indicate that he is taking a more activist approach to politics?

This is the fear of administration officials and others, who believe that Sistani may be carving out a Khomeini-like role in Iraq by acting as the dominant power behind the scenes, Katzman says. Sistani has been meeting regularly with members of groups thought to be sympathetic to Iranian-style Islamism, including governing council members affiliated with the Islamist group al-Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Other experts, however, say that while Sistani is speaking out more than he did under Saddam Hussein`s regime, there is little evidence that he would call for resistance from his supporters if he does not get his way. Because he is so respected, there may be little need for such dramatic steps, Cole says. “What`s more likely is that he will stand by his position and eventually, when the Americans leave, he will get what he wants."

What is Sistani’s background?

Sistani was born near the Iranian city of Masshad, a holy place of Shiite pilgrimage centered on the tomb of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam. At age five, Sistani began studying the Quran, the Muslim holy book, and continued his studies as a young man in the Iranian city of Qom, according to Sistani`s website, sistani.org. His rise to eminence began when he moved to the Iraqi city of Najaf in 1952. There he studied with the some of the most important Shiite clerics of the time, including the Grand Ayatollah Imam Abul Qassim al-Khoei, a major figure in the quietest tradition. When Khoei died in 1992, Sistani was selected by his peers to head the most important hawza--or network of schools--in Najaf. He has written many books on Islamic jurisprudence, and over the years has gained a reputation as one of the top Shiite religious authorities in the world. Some 10 percent to 20 percent of the world`s 1.4 billion Muslims are Shiites.

Did Sistani have any rivals for leadership of the hawza?

Yes, Cole says. One of the most important was Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, who was gunned down in 1999 along with one of his sons (Saddam Hussein`s forces are suspected in the murder). Sadr preferred the more activist, Khomeini-like tradition, urging underground resistance to Saddam`s rule. Sadr and other critics portrayed Sistani as a coward and referred to him derisively as the "silent authority," Cole says. Today, Sadr`s son, 30-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr, considers himself a rival of Sistani and calls on Iraqis to resist the occupation.

How are Shiite leaders chosen?

They rise by consensus through the ranks, from the level of prayer leader to ayatollah, a title awarded to those who have exhibited mastery of Islamic law and jurisprudence and have attracted many followers. The apex of the hierarchy is the marjah al-taqlid, or object of emulation. Sistani has attained the level of marjah.

What`s the role of a marjah?

A marjah has the authority to interpret Islamic law and provide guidance to Shiites on day-to-day matters. All lay Shiites, Cole says--even relatively non-religious ones--have a marjah. His admonitions are often related to mundane questions of so-called personal law, such as whether a Muslim is permitted to wear perfume (yes, according to Sistani) or sell lottery tickets (no--it`s a form of gambling, Sistani says). While more than one marjah is followed in the Shiite world today, Sistani is probably the most influential, Cole says.

Is the marjah speaking in the name of God?

No, Islam experts say. He is practicing ijtihad, which is defined as the competence to use independent judgment to decipher the Quran and other sacred Islamic texts. Only the most advanced clerics are awarded permission by the hawza to practice ijtihad. The interpretation of a marjah is his best judgment and can sometimes be wrong. But according to Shiite tradition, as long as the marjah gives the interpretation his best effort, Allah will forgive any error, Cole says.

Is it significant that Sistani is Iranian-born?

The position of the marjah is similar to that of the pope in Roman Catholicism: he has moral and religious authority across national boundaries. Opponents of Sistani have sometimes played up his Iranian roots in an attempt to argue that he maintains some loyalty to the Iranian state. But Sistani`s views reflect his independence from the Iranian clergy, experts say. "I don`t see any evidence that he is playing the Iranian card," says Phebe Marr, author of "A Modern History of Iraq." Other Shiite groups and leaders in Iraq, such as SCIRI and Muqtada al-Sadr, maintain much more active ties with Iran than Sistani does, she says.

-- by Sharon Otterman, staff writer, cfr.org.



Copyright 2004

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washingtonpost.com
What, We Worry? Yes.


By William H. Gross

Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page A17


The United States is overextended, not just militarily but economically. We are trying to do too much, borrow too much, spend too much, and sooner or later we will have to suffer the consequences. We are a country in the beginning stages of what can best be described as hegemonic decay. Empires take decades if not centuries to wither, a process more clearly viewed through a rearview mirror; Edward Gibbon`s masterful account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is perhaps the greatest example of this truth. But here and now, we`re much less inclined to Gibbon`s viewpoint than we are to Alfred E. Newman`s. "What, we worry?" is pretty much the national motto when it comes to our finance-based economy and its future prospects.

Let me approach this predicament from a more personal angle -- by comparing a large nation to a typical U.S. family. Pretend that you`re a head or co-head of a household. You earn a good salary, but it never seems to be enough. There are bills to pay, the Joneses to keep up with, and you`ve had your eye on that goofy Hummer for at least a few months now. You`d like to save money, but you can`t or you won`t, so you don`t. As a matter of fact, each year for the past decade or so you`ve had to borrow 4, 5, 6 percent of your annual income to pay for what you want. You`re running a personal deficit. But that`s still okay, you figure. You`re strong, vibrant, prospects are good, and there`s no way you shouldn`t be able to handle it. You can grow your way out of current liabilities and have more than enough to pay for future obligations such as college for the kids, that faraway retirement for you and your spouse, and health care, if that should ever come up. And your creditors undoubtedly will see it the same way. They know a good risk when they see one.

But then something happens. Your company`s prospects sour, your pay raises virtually vanish, your health deteriorates, your family life sours -- who knows? With no savings and a boatload of debt, the wheels all go into reverse. Creditors are not so friendly. Not only will they not lend you that 6 percent of your salary every year but they want a higher interest rate on what you`ve already borrowed.

The United States is strikingly similar to the Alfred E. Newmans just described. It`s strong and vibrant, with a future seemingly as bright as that of any country on the planet. Productivity is soaring, markets are recovering, its salary (or gross domestic product) shows decent increases almost every year. It goes wherever it wants to go, its Humvees symbolic of global military domination. Where`s the decay in this hegemony?

Well, maybe I`m just pessimistic because I`m a Californian, and currently the state of California is not good. But California is 15 percent of this country, and it`s a trendsetter in more ways than fashion, Hollywood and tongue rings. It has a huge deficit based on overspending that was in turn based on the anticipation that booming financial markets and their capital gains would continue indefinitely.

The United States is in a similar predicament. For years Americans have wanted to save money, but the savings rate has hovered close to zero. They have depended on those 1990s capital gains to give the impression that their liquid assets were on the rise. And they have had to borrow 4, 5, 6 percent of their annual income (GDP) to pay for what they wanted. Economists call that the trade deficit.

Add to that new evidence that our government`s budget deficit is hitting new highs, with few prospects for improvement as President Bush and his economic team claim this is an investment in America, and after all, "we owe it to ourselves." Such nonsense belongs in Mad magazine. The $450 billion is paying for overconsumption, for Hummers in L.A. and Humvees in Iraq, and we increasingly owe it to foreign creditors. "I.M.F. Warns That U.S. Debt Is Threatening Global Stability," read a front-page headline in the New York Times last week. It is plain for all to see that we are living beyond our ability to pay if things go awfully wrong.

Could they? Typically, the spending-savings discipline necessary to right such a fiscal ship has to come from the outside. It`s the creditors who say no. And their discipline has already started. Bond market vigilantes have suddenly recoiled in horror at the U.S. budget deficit and the failure of the Fed to guarantee its funding at exorbitantly low interest rates. In turn, foreign creditors have for more than a year been liquidating dollars in favor of other countries` currencies.

But despite the resultant higher interest rates and cheaper dollar these actions imply, our country`s economy appears to be chugging right along. So where`s the big, bad wolf in this story? Well, in addition to future domestically induced bond market sell-offs destroying the housing market, and a finance-based economy inexorably slowing down as restrictively higher yields work their historical magic, the fulcrum of a future creditor-based revolt probably rests in Beijing rather than in New York or Washington.

Because China`s monthly trade surplus of $10 billion-plus with the United States implies a $120 billion annual addition to its dollar reserves, there will come a time when its hundreds of billions in holdings of U.S. notes and bonds look a tad too risky. In turn, the hundreds of billions that Japan and other Asian countries have been buying to keep their currencies competitive with the Chinese yuan and the U.S. dollar will be subject to a sanity check as well. At some point our Asian creditors will wake up and smell the coffee. Perhaps there will be dollar or Treasury note sell-offs or a revaluation of the yuan and then the yen. In any event, we pay the price: higher import costs, a cutback in spending on cheap foreign goods, rising inflation, perhaps chaotic financial markets, a lower standard of living.

China`s willingness to buy our bonds, and its philosophy of fixing its currency to the U.S. dollar, will one day be tested. And should it lose patience, all its neighboring Asian states will move in near unison. U.S. interest rates will rise, our goods in the malls and the showrooms will be less affordable, and the process of national belt tightening and increased savings will have begun.

Are the Newmans worrying yet? Not if they bought stocks six months ago. Not if they refinanced their home in early June or bought that Hummer with zero-percent financing.

But they will.

The writer is founder and managing director of Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO).




© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

Monday, January 12th, 2004
American Dynasty: Fmr. Top Republican Strategist Discusses The Bush Family`s Rise To Power Since WWI

Watch 256k stream :
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We speak with Kevin Phillips, a former top Republican strategist, who was generally acknowledged as the Republican party`s principal electoral theoretician after Ronald Reagan`s election in 1980. His latest book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics in the House of Bush examines how the Bush family has been consolidating its power for four generations. [includes transcript]
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We speak with Kevin Phillips is a former top Republican strategist. He first became well known in 1969 with the publication of his book his book The Emerging Republican Majority which Newsweek described as "the political bible of the Nixon Administration."
After Ronald Reagan`s election in 1980, Phillips was generally acknowledged as the Republican party`s principal electoral theoretician. In 1982, the Wall Street Journal described him as "the leading conservative electoral analyst -- the man who invented the Sun Belt, named the New Right, and prophesied `The Emerging Republican Majority` in 1969."

He has since become a prolific writer and a critic of the current state of the Republican Party. Among his books are Wealth and Democracy and The Politics of Rich and Poor.

His latest book is American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics in the House of Bush. It examines how the Bush family has been consolidating its power for four generations and how the Bushes have been staging their ascent to national power since World War I.


Kevin Phillips, author of the new book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics in the House of Bush.

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TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Today we turn to Kevin Phillips, talking about American dynasty, aristocracy, fortune, and the politics of deceit in the house of Bush. Phillips is a former top Republican strategist. He first became well known in 1969 with the publication of his book, ?he Emerging Republican Majority,?which Newsweek described as the political bible of the Nixon administration. After Ronald Reagan`s election in 1980, Phillips was generally acknowledged as the Republican Party`s principle electoral theoretician. In 1982, the Wall Street Journal described him as the leading conservative electoral analyst, the man who invented the Sun Belt, named the New Right and prophesied ?he Emerging Republican Majority?in 1969. He since has become a prolific writer and a critic of the current state of the Republican Party. Among his books are ?ealth and Democracy and The Politics of Rich and Poor.?He game into our new studios here at Downtown Community Television in the bottom floor of the firehouse, where the engines used to come in and out. He came in last week to talk about his book, ?merican Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: It`s kind of amazing because it really did fly in under the radar. The biographies that were written about George H. W. Bush in the 1980`s, where actually, one was written by a fellow who had worked for him at the United Nations and the second was by a social chum from Rhode Island who had a C.I.A. connection, like I think Bush did. Oddly enough, nothing was ever really done by somebody else, and the up shot of this was, as you say, that nobody looked at the two previous generations in any depth. Now, they have had scatterings, but -- what really happened where the Bush dynasty started was the role of the current president`s two great grandfathers in the period around World War I. Now, the one who was really the founding father, George Herbert Walker, that`s a familiar set names in terms of the names of the 41st and 43rd presidents. He was a financier from St. Louis, very hard-charging and very successful, was very much involved in his earlier days before World War I in repackaging companies in the south central United States, railroads, gas companies and so forth. He became known to the Harrimans who were Union Pacific and railroad people, at very large scale in that role. Ultimately, Averell Harriman lined him up as Harriman`s partner in 1919. But before that, he and his chums from St. Louis were very much involved in the wartime finance and the relations with the allies. The United States provided huge amounts of materiel for the British and French. George H. Walker ultimately came out of all of this as a major, major player on Wall Street in the 1920`s and 1930`s. What he did in that role with Harriman was that they did a lot of business in France -- a little in France and mostly in Germany and Russia. Some of these episodes were really diplomacy on a pretty grand scale, because George H. Walker and Harriman went in and developed and tried to fix up the Russian oil industry in the Caucasus as things would happen 400 miles from Iraq where we are now. That didn`t go over too well with some of the people in Washington, but they practically had under Harriman and Walker a kind of little intelligence operation in the investment business. Through one of the companies that they were involved in, the American International Corporation, which had played a considerable role in World War I they actually hired as one of their directors, the fellow who had been the number two in the State Department intelligence operation. To make a long story short, his role in international business, George H. Walker`s, was huge: ties to Russia and Germany and the ties to Germany will swim back into the portrait a little later. Samuel Prescott Bush, who was another great grandfather of the current president`s was a major steel executive in Ohio. And his connection was to the Rockefellers. Because Standard Oil of Ohio, the famous Standard Oil of the history books, owned some of the shares in Buckeye Casting, which was the business of Sam Bush.

So, he was connected to the Rockefellers, and Standard Oil used its power over the railroad industry through carrying oil to get their business for Buckeye Castings, which was mostly a railroad equipment. But during World War I, Buckeye Castings did war manufacturing, barrels for guns and casings for shells and so forth. But Sam Bush went to Washington and he was the -- in charge of the section of the war industry`s board that regulated small arms, ammunition, and ordinance, ordinance being guns, basically, of an artillery nature. He was a major player in the wartime regulation of who was selling what in terms munitions. By the time the two streams converge, you get Samuel Bush`s son, Prescott, marrying George H. Walker`s daughter, Dorothy in St. Louis in 1921. What you have got is a family union that had more than a little bit to do with the emergence of the military industrial complex in the United States. And I was on a couple of St. Louis radio stations on the day that the president went out to St. Louis, and I was asked by one of them, had I noticed that he never introduces himself as having had any tie to St. Louis. I said, I wasn`t too surprised, because St. Louis was the -- takes you back into the George H. Walker and the whole role of that family, and I went through what the role was. So, that`s a very cursory look at Sam Bush and George H. Walker. These were big-time players behind the scenes in Washington, in World War I, and then especially George H. Walker in the 1920`s, and Prescott Bush, who is the current president`s grandfather was George H. Walker`s assistant and prot?g? in the W. A. Harriman firm and then in Brown Brothers Harriman, and he, too, had a lot of dealings with the intelligence services in Russia and Germany.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that as we move to the second World War, as we move to the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency where he comes from, and where the secret societies that all of the Bushes seem to be a part of, particularly at Yale, Skull and Bones, fits into this?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I hate to overdo the secret societies, because the average person has no idea of this. And I went to Harvard Law School and then Harvard has these secret societies, too. But the ones at Yale, I think, if anything, are more influential it`s hard to cold turkey reign in and say, my god, Skull and Bones, this is virtually like a diplomatic or international business piracy. You can almost see the pirate flag. But they all took it very serious because admiral Harriman had, instead of going to Harvard and getting involved in The Porks, so to speak, which was the club up at Harvard, he went to Yale and did Skull and Bones. A crowd of people who were involved in operations like National City Bank, and Guaranteed Trust and just a whole lot of people that were major players in finance were Skull and Bones. The crowd that was at W.A. Harriman was full of Skull and Bones people and Prescott Bush was Skull and Bones. A lot of these people who were Skull and Bones wound up in the intelligence services or they were assistant secretaries for aviation in the war department and things like this. It was a whole network.

AMY GOODMAN: But for people who don`t know what Skull and Bones is, what you are referring to...

KEVIN PHILLIPS: It`s a Yale secret society. And Yale has other secret societies. Another one was called Book and Snake. So, they came up with these names. But these people took secrecy incredibly seriously. Books that have been written about Skull and Bones, they have got a vault at Yale and nobody is supposed to be able to get in there. You cannot even tell your wife about Skull and Bones. Averell Harriman, his wife received a letter that was in hieroglyphics, and she didn`t know what to make of this, and Averell Harriman said, well, that`s Skull and Bones, and I have got to tell you about that, and he said, oh, no, I cannot tell you about that. If you want to know why they deal in secrecy and all of this, it`s because, (A), you have got Skull and Bones, and (B), so many of them were also in the intelligence services and that whole side of Washington and New York.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, can you talk about that, the beginning of intelligence and how the Bush family fits into the beginning of intelligence agencies?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well this gets complicated because nobody quite agrees when the Intelligence Agency started. But Yale was front and center because the statue that`s in front of the C.I.A. is Nathan Hale. Nathan Hale`s statue that they copied that from appears in front of Connecticut Hall at Yale in New Haven. If you go back to the revolution you have Yale and the secret service.

AMY GOODMAN: And it also goes over to Andover where Bush went as well.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Andover was really in the thick of this sort of stuff. They had a secret society sort of junior grade where you practiced to be a Skull and Bones type at Yale when you were at Andover. It all sounds like a joke today, but it certainly wasn`t back then. What happened was the crowd that was in with Prescott Bush and George H. Walker with W. A. Harriman, a number of them became prominent in the intelligence community and then when you get to the firm that was merged out of W. A. Harriman, which was Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the partners there was Robert A. Lovett, who was the son of one of the big cheeses in Harriman`s railroad operation. I mean it all fits together. Robert A. Lovett was the man who came up with the blueprint for the C.I.A. after World War II, which was never acknowledged and only became public knowledge -- maybe 15, 20 years ago. So, he was a major player, and Prescott Bush, I have no doubt, was very close to the intelligence agencies during World War II. He was a director of two companies, one was Dresser Industries, which is now part of Halliburton, and the second was Vanadium Corporation of America. They were both involved in the atomic energy project. Prescott Bush was a friend of Alan Dulles, who went on to be the C.I.A. director, but he was also a lawyer in the 1930`s for some of the Brown Bros. Harriman international gamesmanship, so to speak. They were very tightly knit into all of this. The real thing about the Bushes is how far back they go in this loose combination of investment banking, Wall Street law, the intelligence community, the international business, the state department, and the war department.

AMY GOODMAN: We`re talking to former top republican strategist Kevin Phillips. His new book is called, ?merican Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.?We`ll be back with him in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I`m Amy Goodman. As we continue our conversation with Kevin Phillips, who has written a new book called "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush." He talks about how the world is fully aware of the family ties between the 41st and 43rd American presidents, but Phillips shows how not two, but four generations of Bushes have mounted the ladder of national power since World War I. Since then, through a recurrent flair for old boy networking at Yale, on Wall Street, in the Senate and the C.I.A., and through their involvement in finance, energy and national security, three key enterprises of the American 20th century, the Bush family has moved to the forefront. Phillips argues the Bush family has parlayed its financial and social credentials, its aristocracy into political and dynastic clout, thereby subverting the very core of democracy, he says. We continued the conversation when I asked him about the Bush family generations, and their relationship with Cuba.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: George H. Walker was a real piece of work. I mean, he was a buccaneer. He was sort of a Joe Kennedy, but with a social register type qualification. He got involved in the 1920`s with a bunch of Cuban companies, because of his ties to Percy Rockefeller and the National City Bank. They handled a lot of investments in Cuba. He was a director during the 1920`s of eight or nine Cuban companies. George H. Walker had ties to the -- investment ties that were independent, so he had invested in some of these companies. One of them turned out several -- several turned out to merge into something called West Indies Sugar. West Indies Sugar became one of the major American companies in Cuba, and George H. Walker Jr., the son of George H. Walker and Prescott, Bush`s cousin was a director, held a family seat on West Indies Sugar. Now during the late 1950`s, West Indies Sugar was based in the Indy province in Cuba. That`s where the Castro insurgency was developing. Castro and his people sort of shook down West Indies Sugar. They used their trucks and hit them up for money and so forth. They were unhappy with the Castro movement. In 1959 or 1960, I forget which year, Castro`s people nationalized West Indies Sugar, and at this time George H. W. Bush`s uncle was Director of West Indies Sugar. The value of West Indies sugar had been about $50 million and it wound up being virtually peanuts. I don`t know how much their stake was. I couldn`t begin to guess. It may not have been nearly as much as one would suggest from the bigger numbers. They were an unhappy set of campers when West Indies Sugar went bye-bye.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the date, November 29, 1963.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: That was the date, I believe, when a document came out of the F.B.I. in which they mentioned having briefed a George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency on the rest of this in Miami after the Kennedy assassination. The C.I.A. and "The Nation" magazine had a couple of articles about this. This is where that came from. The C.I.A. said, well, it`s a different George Bush. And it turned out they were talking about a fellow who was a G.S.5, a low-grade federal classification, was an analyst that he analyzed coastlines, so it couldn`t have been the same. They were coming up with a red herring there. The allegations of George H. W. Bush`s involvement in the C.I.A. often come back to something in the Caribbean and something involving the Bay of Pigs. This is just another suggestion of the probable C.I.A. connections of some sort of George H. W. Bush.

AMY GOODMAN: This was just a week after President Kennedy was assassinated?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: That`s right.

AMY GOODMAN: You seem to have evolved yourself during this book. You write about your dismay and disillusionment, you said, as you were writing, more than you have imagined. The result, an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family, great in power, not morality, that has built a base over the course of the 20th century in the back corridors of the new Military Industrial Complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishments. You talk about the three presidents from Texas and their three wars, Lyndon Johnson? Vietnam, and the Bushes?Iraq, Iraq and how unusual that is. The two Bushes, one carrying on the legacy of the other.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: There are a bunch of questions in that question. It`s difficult for me to know where to start slicing it. The emergence of the Military Industrial Complex is often something that the average American may think is an unfair term that rose with the left and so forth. In fact, Dwight Eisenhower when he gave his farewell address in 1961, in leaving the presidency, good Republican President from my standpoint of my old politics, warned against the Military Industrial Complex and the danger it would pose to the United States if it gained power. I was a little bit appalled as I got into all of this to see that probably the Bushes were connected with the rise of exactly what Eisenhower had warned against. And the Republican I work for, Richard Nixon, when I wrote a book called ?he Politics of Rich and Poor?that came out in 1990, which attacked Bush economic policies, he gave me the lead quote on the back of the book jacket, and the Bush people didn`t like that at all. I would say that anybody that figures that the Republicans were complicit in doing all of this or another bunch of Republicans that were against it. In no sense does this represent, I think, what a lot of the people I knew in the Republican party in the 1960`s, and even in the 1970`s wanted to see happen. And what`s happening with the emergence of this Military Industrial Intelligence Complex is that you have had a family able to create a dynasty, and the dynasty has become the first family in American politics to basically pass the presidency to the eldest son eight years after his father left office. That`s a major change in democratic -- with a small d, and republican with a small r, governance in the United States. And as the further I got into this, the more that I found that it wasn`t simply a phenomenon of dynasty, but it had all of these underlying connections. I had thought there were probably things like this, because George H. W., as he rose through the ranks of politics in Washington, he never seemed to win elections. He was defeated twice in Texas senate races, but, you know, he continued to thrive. What he had were these connections to the establishment and a kind of permanent government that kept him going even though he didn`t really have the elections success. And I always thought that, but as I got into this book, and I could see the family background, and how the economics and the corporate connections interacted with the intelligence and war departments and so forth, I really began to be convinced that there was something pretty big here.

AMY GOODMAN: You have appendixes in this book. Appendix B reviews the family`s penchant for secrecy and for cleaning and locking up government records. Can you talk about not just the secrecy of the intelligence agency, but this idea of -- well of wiping things out, information.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, you have a whole set of factors that add up to -- have made the Bushes favor this sort of disinformational clandestine approach. The first is simply that they were -- both of the great grandparents were involved in this backstage World War I. A lot of it would have been quite secret. They were involved in munitions. They were involved in supplies for the British and the French and what have you. They basically didn`t talk about it a lot. That`s not unreasonable if you come out of that. Then, when their businesses in the 1920`s, or George Herbert Walker`s businesses, they were clandestine because he was doing stuff that the government didn`t know about, and in some cases when they knew about it, they didn`t like it. If so, you have the sense of being closemouthed. Prescott Bush was in Skull and Bones. And all of the Skull and Bones people, that was secrecy to the end degree. Averill Harriman, he used his Skull and Bones code number on his briefcase and all of this, and I mean, here we`re talking about a Democrat. I mean it was bipartisan. So, they had that whole sense of secrecy from Skull and Bones. They had the intelligence communities. The C.I.A. obviously is an institution that has indulged enormously in disinformation and deceit. Sometimes they probably had a good reason. Other times they did not have a good reason. The Bushes absorbed after lot of this, but the Bushes would also -- let`s call it deceive about their economic status. The President`s grandfather, Prescott Bush was actually quoted, and I have it in there somewhere, about how his father couldn`t afford to send him to law school. He didn`t have enough money. His father had been a business partner of John D. Rockefeller`s brother. He made a lot of money during the war. I was able to get -- World War I. I was able to get a book on business that included something about Buckeye Steel Castings. That was a very successful company based on war contracts. So, Prescott Bush`s father had plenty of money, but he didn`t want people to know that. He didn`t want people to know about the Rockefeller connection. He did all of this poor mouthing because George H. W. would talk about when he interviewed for a job. I don`t think he ever interviewed for a job in his life. His father had all of these connections. So, there was a major misrepresentation there, too. The last thing they did, which was involved in this kind of secrecy disinformation, and I don`t know when it started, but they got into Machiavelli. I was always interested in Machiavelli from the stand point of he was influential in change in Renaissance politics in Europe and in Italy. But interestingly enough, both of the Bush presidents have had political advisers who read Machiavelli. Karl Rove, the advisor to George W., and Lee Atwater was the adviser to George H. W. Now, Rove was quoted in one of the books that came out recently as saying that Lee Atwater, who was his friend, reread Machiavelli`s "The Prince" once a year to sort of keep up on the wisdom of the master, so it speak What Machiavelli says in one of these book, most notefully, the prince, is that the prince has to be all talk about humanity and religion and fairness and nice-nice type of things, but what really makes a prince a success is to deceive, because you can basically pull the wool over most people`s eyes most of the time. His historical analysis is that people like Pope Alexander VI and others there were successful because they deceived. And his analysis in the discourse is Machiavelli is the -- is that the history of success sort of in the Renaissance period didn`t come from force as a way of getting leadership positions. Fraud was how you got leadership positions. I don`t know how many copies of Machiavelli? ?he Prince?are at the C.I.A. It? possible that C.I.A. George H. W. got this from his C.I.A. connections. They would think in terms of keeping things quiet and deceiving. You had the advisers that fed on Machiavelli.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you call President Bush now a liar?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, I would say if it`s a lie to talk about things that involve the C.I.A. with a large degree of falsity, then you probably had a list of liars that began with Woodrow Wilson with the intelligence community went through all of the Republicans in the 1920`s to F.D.R. to Harry Truman to everybody, because the C.I.A. Presidents have not discussed that with candor. In fact, you could probably say with great certainty, if you knew what they really knew, that they had lied. So, you know, I would say that the Bushes have lied about things like this, but I wouldn`t say only the Bushes.

AMY GOODMAN: The Enron-Halliburton state.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, this is again kind of mind boggling to me, because the Enron connection spreads across two generations. Enron through Ken Lay, who was the big cheese at Enron, got involved with George H. W. Bush when he was running for President in 1980. This was before Ken Lay was at Enron. He was at another company. He wasn`t a major force then, but after the 1984 election, when Bush was Vice President, he was working on energy deregulation in the Reagan administration, and Lay, who was interested in deregulating the natural gas industry got a little closer to Bush. I wouldn`t say they were buddies or anything, but Lay was involved in Republican fund raising. When George Bush senior was elected in 1988, he was again closer to Lay. He named Lay as one of the members of the President`s Export Council. He appointed him to head the preparation for one of the economic summits in Texas. This helped Lay`s credibility enormously in terms of expanding overseas and getting support from the Export-Import Bank, which is a government agency that supports foreign operations. Then you pass the baton to George W., who was very close to Ken Lay, in the mid 1980`s. One of the episodes with George W. and Ken Lay is that apparently right after his father was elected in 1988, he is alleged to have gotten on the phone to the minister of whatever it was in Argentina to say that they wanted this contract -- or this pipeline or whatever it was to go to Enron in Argentina, and George W. Appears to have had some relationship according to the Chicago Tribune with gas properties in Texas, where the gas was bought by Enron, but with certainty, as George W. was Governor of Texas, he got very close to Enron again, and of course, when he came to Washington in 2000, Enron was just omni present in terms of appointments in the Commerce Department and the Trade Operations and especially the Energy Department and even the Department of the Army because they were expecting to privatize military procurement of energy, one of the Enron executives went in as Secretary of the Army. So, it`s just quite a relationship. And Halliburton, of course, that was the Dick Cheney company, but Halliburton bought Dresser, which was the industry that Prescott Bush first--that was the company where he got involved with the oil industry in 1930. So, what Prescott Bush had been involved with Dresser Industries became part of Halliburton, which was the Cheney company, and it all became one group of happy people connected to the Enron-Halliburton administration also known as the Bush-Cheney administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And you talk about how you had independent prosecutor for Clinton, then certainly one should have been appointed when it comes to the Bushes and Enron.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: What you have to bear in mind is that the Republicans were all over Clinton big-time. I didn`t like Bill Clinton, and I thought he disgraced the presidency in the way that he behaved, but the Republicans were trying to nail him 25 hours of every day. And the Democrats are a very feckless crowd by Careson. They just didn`t really go in like sharks for the kill. I think partly because Enron had financed more than a few Democrats, too.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Kevin Phillips, who is a Republican strategist, who has written a very damning book about the Bushes, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," saying that dynasty subverts democracy. You can talk more about that?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think it does. The implicit aspect of dynasty is you get an office by factors and forces that are related to heredity, and a line of descent and a power structure outside of the democratic, small d, and republican, small r, framework. I think that`s what we have seen. The whole notion that the Bushes could put in George W. Bush in 2000, I think, part of that was because there was this enormous religious reaction against Clinton, which is something I try to measure in several portions of the book, too. And Al Gore, who had been a very active Southern Baptist, was sufficiently tainted by the Clinton connection. He couldn`t carry a single southern state. The Bushes orchestrated -- I`m not suggesting there was a great nefarious plot, but I think clearly there was an attempt to harness the whole Bush apparatus from his father to get George W. into the White House. Now, you have to go back and look at the family. George H. Walker, four generations in the beginning, was a great believer in politics as the vehicle of real power. And his son-in-lay, Prescott Bush, who in 1952, became a senator from Connecticut, by the late 1950`s was saying to his wife that he wished he had gotten into politics earlier. So, he thought he could have been president. She said that in sources and so she acknowledged that her husband thought he might have become president. This in the early 1960`s, George W., when he was at Andover, said that his father wanted to be president. This was even before he ran for the Senate in 1964. So, they have had the oval office up there in the secret ink on the wall of the house of Bush for a long time. And it was tied in to all of these connections, and to me, that is not what you want to have in the United States. That is not what Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Adams basically helped set the country up for. I mean, we just dumped two Georges throwing the -- George I George II, and George III, and we dumped George II, and now we have George I -- we dumped George III, and now we have George the I and George II. You talk about John Adams` son, too, became president.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, but that doesn`t matter much because it was 24 years after his father left office, and they shared no machinery, and they were in different parties. How did they differ from the Kennedys?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The Kennedys never became a dynasty that elected more than one president. Now, they certainly tried in 1968 and they tried in 1980. They didn`t pull it off. I think the big difference is that the Kennedys had some connections that they never wanted people to realize. John Kennedy shared a girlfriend with a mob leader, and they obviously bought a couple of ever estates that they carried in 1960. Nobody can debate that now. They were never a dynasty that A. ever got two presidents and B., had this whole tie to the real power structure of United States in investment banking and oil and defense and the old line social upper crust. Because that wasn`t what the Kennedys were. They were outsiders. Joe Kennedy made his money out of bootlegging whiskey.

AMY GOODMAN: Then you have Jeb Bush, who seems to be in the wings?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, Albie is not in the wings. He is actual the one that his parents thought would be the serious presidential candidate. In the 2000 inauguration, his son, George P., actually commented and was quoted by one of the newspapers as saying, you know, nobody ever believed that his uncle would be the one who ran. I don`t think people thought he had the temperament. I`m not certain that Jeb had any temperament either. He? been involved in a lot of cute stuff but hopefully he`s not waiting in the wings.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Bush, the current president, George W., how he rose to power. His re-inventing himself from a silver spoon Yankee WASP to a bible-thumping Texan and how he started his oil company, Arbustos, Spanish for Bush, and the connections for perhaps the Bin Laden family?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, there`s probably not much doubt about this. The Bin Laden family is not the same thing as Osama in the sense that Osama is a black sheep who rebelled against them. But it`s absolutely true that the Arbusto package involved a $50,000 investment by a fellow named James Bath, who was the U.S. representative of the Bin Ladens, and the Khalid Bin-Mafuse, who was also distantly related, because they had all had four wives, and the concubines kids could get in the pie and everything. A lot of people were related. These two are said by some of the experts to have actually been the ones who provided the money that Bath gave to Bush in 1979, and then in his later business, Harkin Energy, which was in the late 1980`s, B.C.C.I., the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which was mixed up in Iran contra and a lot of other scandals was front and center in Harkin. You have a tie to two of Bush`s oil investments that bring you to the Persian Gulf types. The Bin Laden family was also involved in the Carlysle group, which George H. W., after he left office in 1993, became very prominently affiliated with the Carlysle group. There are these ties.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the fact that the Carlysle group has benefited so handsomely. In other words, George H. W. Bush the father of the President, has benefited so handsomely from the war in Iraq, from the whole militarization after 9-11?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, there were 12 Saudi families who were involved in Carlysle, so you can say that the Saudi establishment also benefited from a lot of this. I have no idea how much money George Bush has taken out of the Carlysle group. I have no idea of the size of his investment. You cannot get these numbers. There`s just no way to get them. So, it`s not fair to say hugely. You can just say it`s pretty probable that he made a fair amount of money on it. Nobody really knows.

AMY GOODMAN: Former White House Represent Strategist, Kevin Phillips. His new book is, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush." 5XÌ?

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Tuesday, January 13th, 2004
Richard Perle v. Paul Krugman: A Debate On The War On Terror

Watch 256k stream:
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We host a debate between Richard Perle, the man the Washington Post calls "the intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy" and one of its fiercest critics, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
Perle, a Pentagon adviser and former assistant secretary of defense, calls for the U.S. secession of Saudi oil fields, for regime change in Iran, for the isolation of Syria, possible attacks and a blockade against North Korea and the treatment of France as an enemy.

Perle says Saudi Arabia should be included in the "axis of evil" but refuses to condemn the Bush family financial ties to Saud Arabia. [includes transcript]


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Dana Milbank of the Washington Post calls him the "intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement," saying "he has profound influence over Bush policies and officials." Columnist Jim Lobe says he has written the "Neocons` Manual for Global Warmongering."
I`m talking about Pentagon adviser and former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle. He has a new book out called "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," co-written with David Frum, a former special assistant to President George W Bush.

As Perle promotes his book, he continues to make headlines. On Sunday, he told CNN that Saudi Arabia qualifies for the "axis of evil" club. Saudi papers blasted Perle yesterday, saying that he only speaks the language of "force, murder and destruction."

The book is written as a victory manual. But it has already caused a firestorm of controversy around the globe and in Washington.

Perle calls for the U.S. secession of Saudi oil fields, for regime change in Iran, for the isolation of Syria, possible attacks and a blockade against North Korea and the treatment of France as an enemy. He describes France and Russia as the UN mouthpiece of the Iraq.

Domestically the book targets the State Department and CIA for being too soft on the war on terrorism. The Clinton Administration is blamed for turning a blind eye to the growing threat from Islamic fundamentalists.

Regarding Muslims the authors write "The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself. There is no middle way for Americans. It is victory or holocaust."

To Washington, insiders Richard Perle has been a well-known figure. He has been a close friend of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz since 1969 and is a close ally of both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.


Richard Perle, co-author of the new book "An End to Evil: How To Win the War on Terror" with David Frum. He served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and as chairman of the Defense Policy Board under President Bush. He is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and Professor of Economics at Princeton University. His latest book "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century" is a collection of his New York Times columns.

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TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: To Washington insiders, Richard Perle has been a well known figure. He has been a close friend of Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz since 1969, is a close ally of both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. He joins us on the line now. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Richard Perle.

RICHARD PERLE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Saudis qualifying for their own membership in the axis of evil. The Bush family has had a long, close relationship with the Saudi regime. President Bush senior getting a million dollars for the Bush presidential library. Also Barbara Bush getting a sum like that for literacy program from the Saudi regime. That`s just the beginning. Do you condemn their relationship with the Saudi regime?

RICHARD PERLE: I don`t think that`s the issue. The issue is what have the Saudis been doing with their vast oil wealth. It`s clear that billions have gone to supporting extremist institutions around the world. Places where young people are taught it is their mission to bring about an Islamic universe by force, if necessary, by suicide omissions if necessary. The propagation of that extremist is a threat to us, and to the world, and I think the Saudis are now beginning to realize it, too themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: But that relationship between the Bushes also, James Baker, who has been named as the kind of point man on Iraq right now. Baker Botts representing the Saudi regime against 9-11 families in a lawsuit.

RICHARD PERLE: Well, that`s not a case I would take on. There are theories about everyone being entitled to a defense. I think it really trivializes a very large issue to focus on whether this or that member of the Bush family at some time in the past or even now deals with some Saudis in a way other than the way we should be dealing with the Saudi government on the issue of their funding of terrorism. We ought to be persuading the Saudis by every means we have that the continued support for this extremism is a danger to themselves and others, and is intolerable.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Perle is co-author of a new book, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror." Paul Krugman is also with us, an OpEd columnist for the New York Times. He, too, has a new book, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in The New Century." Paul Krugman, your response.

PAUL KRUGMAN: I have no grief for the Saudis. I think there`s a lot that you can say. They have not been good allies here. The trouble that I have with all of this is there seems to be some delusions of grandeur going on here about how many -- how much of the world the United States is prepared to take on all at once. If you have got a point of view that says that well, France is practically an enemy, that we`re going to pursue a regime change in every nasty regime in the world, and where is this -- where are the resources for this coming from? The United States has about 5% of the world`s population and 25% of the world`s gross product. If we are -- we are a superpower, but we`re not a colossus bestriding the world. What I saw in the run-up to the Iraq war and subsequently is that we saw again and again the limits of US power in everything except ability to fight an open battle. The kind of program, as I understand it, that Perle and Frum are pushing, is one that would require a huge increase in the army, would -- you know, put enormous drain on our resources. It`s inconceivable you would be doing all of this without reinstating the draft. Is this a practical, sensible thing to be advocating?

RICHARD PERLE: You have read our book. I haven`t read his. We are not recommending what he suggests. We are not recommending going after every nasty dictatorship in the world. We`re not recommending reinstating the draft or increasing the size of the army. What we are recommending is a sustained and concerted effort to isolate a relatively small number of terrorists, and the States that support them before they can do even more damage than they did on September 11. And I don`t understand.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Let me ask -- I mean -- we`re told that the book includes our advocacy of regime change in Iran, that it calls for a blockade of North Korea. The book hasn`t been available. Mine`s been out for a while.

RICHARD PERLE: Hundreds of thousands of copies are out there. It calls for a blockade of North Korea, if we are unsuccessful in stopping their production of nuclear weapons. The alternative is to leave them free to ship those weapons around the world.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Let`s just go back here. You know, stage one, the pilot project was Iraq. There were many warnings from the professional military that the initial battles would be easy, but that the occupation was going to severely strain our military forces. And so, it has turned out. Now --

RICHARD PERLE: We -- 100,000 -- we are going down to 100,000 troops in Iraq out of the uniformed military in excess of a million. I don’t believe. .

PAUL KRUGMAN: You know that every professional military person is talking about the extreme strain. That we have 40,000 soldiers who are on stop loss, who have not been given the freedom to leave when they normally would be able to. Let`s not minimize this. If you want to say the war was worth doing, fine, but to pretend it`s a low cost venture, that`s silly.

RICHARD PERLE: I didn`t say it was a low cost venture. I thought it was an essential venture, and I think we are emerging with an Iraq that has a future. There was no future before the war. I don`t appreciate the incorrect characterizations of what we say. On the regime change in Iran, it has nothing to do with the United States army or the military forces. We are proposing that we give support to the millions of Iranians who don`t want to have every aspect of their lives dictated to by a handful of mullahs who you may have noticed in the last 24 hours have been blocking any possibility of reform in that country through the electoral process. Should we not be identifying with people who want to liberate their country in this case?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Big difference between -- I mean, I -- I mean, I look forward to reading the book. But let me just come back to this. The -- an awful lot of this discussion seems to be predicated on the notion that the United States has a level of power that it doesn`t.

RICHARD PERLE: I don`t know what you mean when you say a lot of this discussion. We are very concrete and very specific about what we ought to do, and not everything that we advocate as a last step is -- should be thought of as a first step. So, for example, with respect to North Korea, we encourage the effort to bring the Chinese and others in, in order to persuade the North Koreans to abandon their nuclear weapons program. It is only after all else has failed that we say we would have to act to try to prevent them from moving nuclear weapons they were producing around the world. That would entail a blockade and ultimately possibly even the use of the -- the use of force.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you something, Richard Perle. A new report from the U.S. Army War College is calling for the Bush administration to greatly scale back the scope of the so-called war on terror because the army is near a breaking point. According to the Washington Post, the study likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler`s overreach in World War II. It says, “a cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number.” Your response?

RICHARD PERLE: Well, first of all, let`s not describe this as an Army War College product. It is an essay, rather than a study, and it is by Jeffrey Record, who I have known for years, who used to work on Capitol Hill for democratic senators, who was opposed to the war to begin with. So, Jeffrey can make his own argument without having to invoke the army in his behalf. I simply disagree with him. We don`t choose enemies. We have been chosen by our enemies, by countries like North Korea, and Iran, and Iraq, and organizations like al Qaeda and the states that support them. We can`t wish them away. We`re not looking for new enemies. I don`t believe we have created new enemies. On the contrary.

AMY GOODMAN: But speaking of creating enemies, you write the roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself. There is no middle way for Americans. What about American Muslims?

RICHARD PERLE: Well, I think most American Muslims are very unhappy at what is being done in the name of Islam. Because they certainly don`t subscribe to the intolerant view that says we are all infidels, and the whole world must become an Islamic state.

AMY GOODMAN: But you say that the roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself.

RICHARD PERLE: Yes, but if you read that in the context, it is not saying that all Muslims believe that, in fact, we go to great lengths in the book to distinguish between the views of Muslims who believe in tolerant Islam and a small fringe group that would be insignificant if it didn`t have Saudi money behind it. That is propagating holy wars, jihad and violence, and death and destruction for Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: The Saudi ambassador to the United States is quoted in the New Yorker saying: “There`s a split personality to Perle. Here he is on the one hand trying to make $100 million deal and on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail. If we get in business, he will back off on Saudi Arabia as I have been informed by participants at the meeting.” He is talking about the meeting that you had with Adnan Kushogi. The piece that Seymour Hirsh wrote about where you called him a terrorist. You said you’d sue him though you haven’t. Your response?

RICHARD PERLE: It`s not clear whether the bigger of the two liars is Hirsh or the ambassador. It`s a lie. It`s an out and out lie. As it happens, it was investigated thoroughly by the Inspector General of the Defense Department. And I -- I was fully cleared of all of Hirsh`s malicious charges. And Ambassador Bandar`s lie.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you planning to sue, Seymour Hirsh? The statute of limitations is running out.

RICHARD PERLE: There`s time. As you well know, one has to prove malicious intent. That`s a very difficult thing to prove. There is no question that the falsity of Hirsh`s allegations can be proven, can be established, and can be established in court, and those allegations were repeated in jurisdictions where you can get a finding on the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you stand by your statement that he is a terrorist, Seymour Hirsh, the reporter?

AMY GOODMAN: Anyone who saw that program understood that this was not a literal designation as a terrorist. I said he was a journalistic terrorist and defined this as someone who sets off bombs without regard to who they injure.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Krugman, I gave Richard Perle the first word. I give you the last.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Let me just come back. We have got an elusive target here. One hand we have strong statements. On the other hand, you -- we see Mr. Perle saying, if you talk about anything concrete that might actually involve risk, at least not really advocating that, except as a last resort. Still, what it comes down to is a very broad definition of enemy, a very broad definition of what is a kazistelli for the United States. I`m happy with the view that we should not be viewing Saudi Arabia as an ally. I think that something -- a definition that leads you to say that France, which we have disagreements with, but which in a fundamental way shares our most important values, is not an ally. There`s got to be something wrong with that world view.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note --

PAUL KRUGMAN: and we are not powerful enough to go it alone.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 [phone].

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White House rethinks Iraq plan
Objections by the Shias` religious leader and the Kurds throw Washington`s vital `smooth transition` plan into confusion

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Wednesday January 14, 2004
The Guardian

The US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, admitted yesterday that Washington was having to rethink its plan to ask unelected committees to choose an interim Iraqi government, which the country`s pre-eminent Shia cleric has opposed as undemocratic.

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani`s criticism is the second ominous augury in recent weeks for Washington`s hope of achieving a smooth political exit from Iraq.

Kurdish leaders have made it clear they are unwilling to contemplate the prospect of yielding control to a central authority in Baghdad.

A smooth transition this summer is essential for President George Bush if he is going to campaign for re-election on the rightness of his decision to begin a war that has killed 500 US soldiers so far.

That gives Washington precious little time to arrive at a transition plan that is broadly acceptable to Iraqis and will help to ensure that the country does not disintegrate into civil war.

"We don`t have the luxury of time to let them sort things out, and the Iraqis don`t have the patience for it either," Judith Yaphe of the National Defence University said.

Officials in Washington and Baghdad were believed to be exploring a compromise between the White House`s and the ayatollah`s positions.

"We are looking for a method that will be both legitimate and transparent but also meet the timeline, and I`m sure we will find one," Mr Bremer told Fox News.

He said a series of public meetings across the country represented a form of democracy in choosing new leaders. But he indicated that there could be changes.

Some analysts believe that Washington may be getting short of options.

David Mack, a US diplomat who has served two stints in Iraq, said: "They are running out of ideas. They had obviously hoped the people they are working closely with in the Iraqi governing council would be able to exercise more influence than they have in brokering some kind of arrangement.

"It may well be that we will have to bargain away the vested interests of some of the members of the Iraqi governing council plus the cabinet in order to get enough support so it can be legitimate."

The US-led occupation authority favours the adoption of a complicated system of committees which would put forward representatives for the governing council to approve. That would ensure that Washington controlled the outcome.

The ayatollah insists that there must be national elections and that any agreement for US troops to remain in Iraq must be ratified by an elected Iraqi government.

In his rounds of the morning talk shows Mr Bremer tried to portray the ayatollah`s objections as "a technical problem".

But it will be difficult to dismiss the views of a scholar who is the pre-eminent religious leader of Iraq`s Shia majority, or overlook the sweep of his differences with Washington. A previous intervention by Mr Sistani forced Mr Bremer to drop a political plan.

His objections to Washington`s transition plans are fun damental, and he has been consistent in his demand for a more representative government, and for elections.

So far Washington is unwilling to go that far to meet his demands, Mr Bremer saying it would be impractical to hold elections in the next few months.

"At present there`s no electoral commission, there`s no electoral law, there are no political party laws, there`s no census, there`s no voter registration, there are no electoral constituencies," he told CBS television. "There are none of the things that you need to conduct a legitimate and effective election here in the next six months."

Analysts said that Washington recognised the impossibility of proceeding with a plan so comprehensively rejected by a religious authority representing 60% of the population. But it would not want to be seen as surrendering to the Shia`s demands.

Michael O`Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington said: "My guess is that there is potential for a compromise solution.

"Instead of local caucuses there could be some kind of locally run elections that have some kind of special rules."

Another option would be to inject greater scope for popular representation in the caucus system envisaged by Washington, or to conduct a restricted form of elections.

"It seems to me that there should be ways that are halfway between what Sistani wants and what we have been saying."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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US opens new front in war on terror by beefing up border controls in Sahara
Rory Carroll, Africa correspondent, and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Wednesday January 14, 2004
The Guardian

The US is sending troops and defence contractors to the Sahara desert of west Africa to open what it calls a new front in the war on terror.

A small vanguard force arrived this week in Mauritania to pave the way for a $100m (£54m) plan to bolster the security forces and border controls of Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger.

The US Pan-Sahel Initiative, as it is named, will provide 60 days of training to military units, including tips on desert navigation and infantry tactics, and furnish equipment such as Toyota Land Cruisers, radios and uniforms.

The reinforcement of America`s defences in a remote, poorly patrolled region came on a day when US police forces gained important powers in the homeland to conduct searches.

In a 6-3 ruling, the supreme court yesterday reversed a lower court decision in Illinois not to allow police to set up roadblocks to collect information from motorists. The supreme court said it did not represent an unreasonable intrusion on privacy. The three dissenting judges said the ruling exposed motorists to police interference.

West Africa is not known as a hotbed of support for Osama bin Laden`s al-Qaida network but Washington is taking no chances in a region with strong Arab and Muslim ties.

"A team of military experts has been here since Saturday to teach, train and reinforce the capacities of the Mauritanian army charged with frontier surveillance against cross-border terrorism," Pamela Bridgewater, a US deputy undersecretary of state for African affairs, told reporters in the capital, Nouakchott.

Since dropping support in the mid-90s for Saddam Hussein`s Iraqi regime, the government of Mauritania has angered some local Islamic groups by forging links with Washington. At least one such group was allegedly behind a failed coup last year but some sceptics claim the government exaggerated the threat.

Mali, Chad and Niger also have porous borders, sizeable Muslim populations and disgruntled opposition groups but al-Qaida has so far concentrated its African operations in the east: blowing up US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and a rocket and car bomb attack against Israeli targets in the Kenyan resort of Mombasa last year.

Armed groups roving the desert have abducted western tourists and caused the Paris-Dakar rally to be rerouted, but whether they are opportunistic bandits or Islamist guerrillas is not clear.

Ms Bridgewater said there had been threats against US interests in Mauritania`s neighbour Senegal, the scene of extraordinary security measures during President George Bush`s visit last year.

"Yes, we have heard. But this question is very sensitive, and I don`t want to respond to this question," she said.

West Africa is comprised largely of former French colonies and Paris might be expected to be wary. The French defence minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, is to visit Washington this week to meet Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

Legality of Changing Iraq Is Questioned

Wednesday January 14, 2004 7:46 AM


By GEORGE GEDDA

WASHINGTON (AP) - The old Iraq wasn`t particularly hospitable to foreign investors, but L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator in the new Iraq, is making it clear that times have changed - and a new era for outside entrepreneurs is at hand.

``This Order replaces all existing foreign investment law,`` Bremer said in a directive issued last September as part of the Coalition Provisional Authority`s ongoing makeover of the nation Saddam Hussein once ruled.

Other U.S.-initiated decrees for Iraq include a free market economy, a 15 percent tax ceiling and a new banking code.

But questions are being raised about whether these and other moves are consistent with international law, particularly the Geneva conventions of 1949 and the Hague Resolutions of 1907, both ratified by the United States.

The Hague accord, for example, directs occupying powers to respect, ``unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.``

Section 4 of Bremer`s September directive, known as Order 39, states: ``A foreign investor shall be entitled to make foreign investments in Iraq on terms no less favorable than those applicable to an Iraqi investor.``

The changes planned for Iraq aren`t only about economics. On the political front, the Bush administration envisions a one-person, one-vote system that it hopes will serve as a model for other Arab countries.

David Scheffer, a Clinton-era ambassador-at-large for war crimes, believes the administration, along with co-occupier Britain, is carrying things too far.

``The whole point of an occupation is to create a temporary stabilizing system on a foreign society and then transform that very quickly to sovereign status,`` Scheffer said in an interview.

Scheffer, now a Georgetown University professor, said occupation law was designed to discourage countries which may be tempted to invade, occupy and transform another country.

They can ``tinker around the edges`` but not much more, he said in an article in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of International Law.

Without restraints, ``the door would be wide open for abuse by aggressive and benevolent armies alike.``

Bush administration officials say U.S. actions in Iraq were authorized in general terms by U.N. Security Council resolution 1483, adopted May 22.

It permits occupying nations in Iraq ``to promote the welfare of the Iraqi people`` by ``working toward the restoration of conditions of security and stability ... in which the Iraqi people can freely determine their own political future.``

Beyond that, a State Department official said basic decision-making in Iraq these days is in the hands of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council and the ministries under its control.

The council is acquiring more power each day from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which, in any case, is due to hand over authority to Iraqis on June 30, the official said.

At that time, Iraqis will be free to reverse any dictates by the provisional authority, the official noted. Left unchecked in the interim, Iraq could once again revert to a ``bastion of terrorism,`` said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Existing occupation laws may have been reasonable early in the past century but not in the terrorism era, the official added.

A Jan. 10 New York Times article said there are few precedents to guide experts on the legality of U.S. actions in Iraq because the number of self-declared occupiers is small.

It pointed out that the United States did not claim occupier status in Germany and Japan after World War II because both had surrendered.

The Times account said coalition concerns about legal overreach in Iraq prompted the administration to scrap a plan to privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises. Decisions on those issues will be made by Iraqis.

Scheffer says the Iraq`s occupiers could be subject to civil or criminal liability under the Hague and Geneva accords.

They have failed, he wrote, ``to establish and maintain public order,`` to restore in a timely manner electricity and other services, and ``to create unemployment on a massive scale`` by demobilizing Saddam`s police and military.

---

EDITOR`S NOTE - George Gedda has covered foreign affairs for The Associated Press since 1968.







Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

[Joerver]

January 14, 2004
INTELLIGENCE
Hussein Warned Iraqis to Beware Outside Fighters, Document Says
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle American troops, according to a document found with the former Iraqi leader when he was captured, Bush administration officials said Tuesday.

The document appears to be a directive, written after he lost power, from Mr. Hussein to leaders of the Iraqi resistance, counseling caution against getting too close to Islamic jihadists and other foreign Arabs coming into occupied Iraq, according to American officials.

It provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Mr. Hussein`s government and terrorists from Al Qaeda. C.I.A. interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Mr. Hussein.

Officials said Mr. Hussein apparently believed that the foreign Arabs, eager for a holy war against the West, had a different agenda from the Baathists, who were eager for their own return to power in Baghdad. As a result, he wanted his supporters to be careful about becoming close allies with the jihadists, officials familiar with the document said.

A new, classified intelligence report circulating within the United States government describes the document and its contents, according to administration officials who asked not to be identified. The officials said they had no evidence that the document found with Mr. Hussein was a fabrication.

The role of foreign Arab fighters in the Iraqi resistance to the American-led occupation has been a source of debate within the American government ever since the fall of Baghdad in April. Initially, American analysts feared that thousands of fighters would flood into Iraq, seeking an Islamic jihad in much the same way an earlier generation of Arabs traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980`s to fight the Soviet occupation.

Military and intelligence officials now believe that the number of foreign fighters who have entered Iraq is relatively small. American military units posted along the border to screen against such an influx have reported that they have seen few signs of foreign fighters trying to cross the border.

In December, American military officials in Iraq estimated that foreign fighters accounted for no more than 10 percent of the insurgency, and some officials now believe that even that figure may be too high. Only 200 to 300 people holding non-Iraqi passports are being detained in Iraq by American forces, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman, told reporters in Baghdad in December.

"They`re a threat, but the vast majority of the personnel that we have in detention for activities against the coalition, for activities against Iraqi citizens, remain personnel from this country," General Kimmitt said then.

But several officials said American forces were not certain of the accuracy of the American intelligence on the issue and acknowledge that there could be more foreigners inside the country than they currently think. "I`ve seen numbers from a couple hundred to a couple thousand," said one United States military official.

Another unresolved issue has been the level of coordination between foreign fighters and Iraqi insurgents, many of whom are former members of Mr. Hussein`s security apparatus. Military and intelligence officials say they have detected cooperation at the tactical level, on individual attacks, but have less evidence of any coordination at a broader strategic level. Asked whether it appeared that Iraqi insurgent leaders had heeded Mr. Hussein`s advice to keep foreign fighters at arm`s length, officials said it was difficult to tell without more information on the full extent of the cooperation between the sides.

The use of suicide car bombings as a weapon in the insurgency has made American officials wonder whether Islamic militant fighters are behind some crucial attacks. The secular Iraqis who were members of Mr. Hussein`s government are unlikely recruits for martyrdom, American officials said.

"There is no question that some foreign fighters have crossed into Iraq," observed Judith Yaphe, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington and a former Middle East analyst at the C.I.A. "How many? I don`t think there are more than a couple hundred. Are they significant in the insurgency? I don`t think they are. There are too many Iraqis who know how to do these things. The real question is the suicide bombers, that`s not strictly speaking an Iraqi thing."

In addition to its value in understanding the nature of the enemy that American and allied troops now confront in Iraq, the document found with Mr. Hussein could also be grist for further debate about his relationship with Islamic fundamentalists.

As President Bush sought to build a case for war with Iraq, one of the most hotly debated issues was whether Mr. Hussein was in league with Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Senior officials at the Pentagon who were certain that the evidence of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda were strong and compelling found themselves at war with analysts at the C.I.A. who believed that the evidence showed some contacts between Baghdad and the terrorist organization, but not an operational alliance.

At the Pentagon, several officials believed that Iraq and Al Qaeda had found common ground in their hatred of the United States, while at the C.I.A., many analysts believed that Mr. bin Laden saw Mr. Hussein as one of the corrupt secular Arab leaders who should be toppled.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 13, 2004
Q&A: Pre-war Intelligence `Failures`

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 13, 2003


George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a co-author of a new report on Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), says that administration officials used U.S. intelligence on Iraq`s weapons programs to justify war even though the information was not as clear cut as they claimed. He says that a new, independent commission should be established to look into the intelligence "failures" on Iraq`s WMD.

Perkovich, an expert on nonproliferation issues, wrote the report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," with Jessica T. Matthews and Joseph Cirincione, both of the Carnegie Endowment. He was interviewed on January 12, 2004, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor of cfr.org.

Why do you think the United States launched a war against Iraq?

In our report, we actually looked at what the president said in his key speeches leading up to the war, such as the speeches to the American people, to Congress, and to the United Nations. What the speeches said to the American people and to the international community was that weapons of mass destruction existed and so did the possibility that those weapons could be handed to terrorists, i.e., al Qaeda, and that those were the reasons we were going to war. Now, after the fact, we have other rationales being emphasized more strongly [such as, that the world is safer with Saddam Hussein gone]. They were always there, especially among pundits and others, but the president`s words prior to the war focused on the grave threat [posed] by the combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill said in a book and interviews that President Bush wanted to go to war against Iraq well before 9/11 and that 9/11 then became a rationale for doing so. Did your report get into that?

Our report literally looks at words that were produced by the intelligence community, the various intelligence assessments, what administration officials said, and then what United Nations agencies had said prior to the war, and what they found afterwards. All of that, when you look at it, is consistent with Secretary O`Neill`s view in the sense that there`s a pattern whereby administration officials` statements go well beyond what the intelligence said in terms of the specificity of the threat from Iraq. One way to look at that, but we don`t do this in the report, is to say that it appears as if people knew what they wanted the outcome to be and were looking for any kind of scintilla of evidence they could find to back the policy that they had already determined. That`s the essence of what O`Neill was saying. We don`t go into that, but we provide raw material for people to make their own judgments.

On the question of WMD, nobody has found any such weapons in Iraq and many people doubt they`ll ever be found. Is that your conclusion too?

We don`t know. We called in the beginning for ongoing inspections, and I think the inspections should be completed so we could find out if there are any weapons. In fact, there was a report that some chemical weapons shells from the Iran-Iraq war were found by a Danish group [on January 9]. That may turn out to be true, so we would not preclude that such weapons [might be found]--but again, that was the whole point of the inspections that the war terminated.

What was your assessment of how well the U.N. inspectors did in Iraq?

One of the things we found was that [chief U.S. weapons investigator] David Kay, in his initial report last October, suggests that the inspections, starting with UNSCOM [the original U.N. inspection agency in Iraq sent in after the 1991 Gulf War], had worked formidably, and that the sanctions regime and other measures to isolate and keep a magnifying glass on Iraq had really worked. So one of the things we call for is a post-action commission to look at the whole process of inspection and say, "Well, what part of inspections worked the best, what part was least relevant?" This may be a case where nonproliferation was actually working. We have other problems out there in the world we are going to worry about, whether it is Iran, North Korea, Libya, or others to come. We ought to find out what works and what doesn`t.

The president`s September 2002 U.N. speech called on the Security Council to authorize inspections in Iraq, but when the inspectors made their initial reports in early 2003, they were slammed by the administration. That`s led me to believe that war was inevitable, because it looked as if the administration wasn`t taking the inspectors seriously. Is that your conclusion too?

As you know in the report, we try to systematically document what the inspectors--prior to 1998, when they were first removed--had found and what they were finding when they went back in late 2002. You hit it on the head. On March 7, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei [the head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency], said, "There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities [in Iraq], nor any indication of nuclear related prohibited activities at any inspected sites." [Two week after that] the inspectors would be pulled out and the war would begin. We now know [ElBaradei] was right. The inspectors were getting it right. They were in the process of doing their work. The U-2 flights [to aid the inspections] had just begun when we pulled the plug on the whole thing.

On the intelligence community`s work, your report calls for an examination of the intelligence community`s performance in this crisis, headed by a non-partisan intelligence expert who has knowledge of the contents of the Iraq files. That will be a hard person to find. You don`t think the congressional committees or the CIA itself can come up with a decent post-mortem?

No, because one of the other variations in what we are recommending is that at least one person in this commission should be intimately familiar with the UNMOVIC [the successor group to UNSCOM] and the UNSCOM record. One of the problems here has been that for whatever reasons--and we can all guess what they are--the U.S. government was very mistrustful and disregarding of the international inspectorate. And yet, there is a 30-million page digitized record from UNSCOM and UNMOVIC. Those were the guys who really knew the Iraqi programs. I know from my own work on the history of India`s nuclear program that you have to get a feel for what the individual scientists and engineers were doing in order to know where to look and how to interpret [information]. The international inspectors had all this. We didn`t have it. So to do the post-action assessment of the intelligence failure right, it is very important to have people familiar with what the international inspectors were doing. One of the things we may find, in fact, that led to part of the failing on the U.S. intelligence side was the barrier between the U.S. and international inspectorates.

The Director of Central Intelligence should do his own assessment. That would be a self-examination, which Aristotle said is a good thing, but we live in a more skeptical time and so you [also] want independent people looking. Similarly, in Congress it`s impossible to escape from the partisan angling. We think this is a problem that goes beyond partisanship. This was a bipartisan failure of governance, and so we need to have a group that is more focused on issues of governance than on politics.

Is there any chance that this recommendation will be accepted by the current administration?

I don`t know. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post editorialized on Sunday in favor of a version of this kind of commission. We know that neither of those papers is read avidly by some in the administration, but I think it would be in the [administration`s] interest to come out and say, "We`re in favor of good governance and this wasn`t something we manipulated on purpose. There was an intelligence failure and we, too, want to find out what lay behind it."

Did policy makers pressure the intelligence community in advance of the Iraq war?

The report points out a number of indicators that would warrant an investigation. We don`t claim to have an answer, but we notice the creation of a separate intelligence body, basically under [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] Doug Feith in the Pentagon. Then there were the trips by Vice President Dick Cheney to the CIA. We`re not judging it. We`re saying that this ought to be explored. What we didn`t put in the report, but I know from my own interactions with analysts at the [CIA], is that they felt under a lot of pressure to come out with the right answers: that Iraq was "a clear and present danger."

The Office of Special Plans that was set up in the Pentagon went out and looked for particular bits of evidence that made their case. [Officials] weren`t saying that they were trying to evaluate that evidence against all the counterevidence and so forth. They were looking for the evidence that was part of their case. In fairness to them, many of them believed that the CIA was biased against the case for war, so this Office of Special Plans was going to go out and get the countervailing evidence.

I suppose the seminal statement during the run-up to the war was Secretary of State Colin Powell`s February 5, 2003, presentation to the Security Council, in which he insisted that his claims about Iraq`s WMD arsenal were based on proven facts and yet, as your report points out, these were not "proven" but fragmentary or hypothetical. How will history judge that presentation by Powell?

What we know so far is that these weren`t actual facts or have not turned out to be facts, so the question is: did the intelligence community strongly perceive these things to be true and did they have reasons they could marshal that Secretary of State Powell and others thought were solid enough? Where I would come out is that the secretary believed what he said was true and factual.

We don`t go into this in the report, but from what we`ve heard about his trip out to the CIA and the days [he and other officials] spent "scrubbing" his presentation and the arguments and the supposed data he threw out suggested that he didn`t, at the end of that process, go forward with a case that he didn`t feel was true. So the problem must lie deeper. That is why an investigation would be worthwhile. Were there solid high-level bodies in the intelligence community who were tasked with arguing the opposite case? In other words, saying: "What if what the Iraqis are saying is true? What if there aren`t WMD?" I don`t know if that kind of alternate planning and assessment was being made, but that`s the kind of thing we should find out.

The two biggest problems we talked about in the report are actually more conceptual. One of them is the link between Iraq and al Qaeda-like terrorists. The assumption was that Iraq, under some circumstances, would transfer WMD to terrorists. There is no evidence that Saddam was undeterrable after 1991, for example. There is no evidence that prior to 1991, when he did support various types of terrorism, that he ever handed over chemical weapons that we know he possessed. He didn`t transport them to the terrorists he was supporting then. So by past record, strategic logic, by behavior which shows that this guy was highly deterrable, there was no reason to take as a given [the assumption he would give WMD to terrorists].

The other great conceptual failure was the conflation of very different kinds of weapons into this rubric of WMD. To put it simply, would you go to war, at the expense of hundreds of billions of dollars, and [risk] the international consequences and the loss of thousands of lives, if, for example, Iraq had a residual chemical weapons capability and some old chemical weapons shells? I think the answer is you probably wouldn`t. It was the nuclear threat which would lead you to say, "Boy, this is so big we can`t let this materialize." And yet, the intelligence on that was actually pretty solid that he did not have nuclear weapons.

But Cheney said Iraq was already developing nuclear weapons, didn`t he?

The statements that depart the furthest from the intelligence record come from the vice president.



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January 14, 2004
LETTER FROM ASIA
Hurray! A Constitution! (Tell It to the Warlords)
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 13 — For Ahmad Shah Mirdad, head of monitoring at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, the adoption of a new Constitution by the loya jirga this month was something of a nonevent.

He spent a fruitless day this week trying to help two families whose houses in District 15 of Kabul have been forcibly occupied by the Afghan intelligence service, the National Security Directorate. "The intelligence office did not cooperate at all, so we will try to get the police to help," he said. "Sometimes a government order does not work, and often the order of President Hamid Karzai is ignored."

"In Kabul," he went on, "where the government is more or less in power, things are better than elsewhere, but people are still seizing houses even in downtown Kabul." In the provinces, especially in remote areas where self-appointed commanders reign, there is no rule of law at all and horrendous human rights abuses are occurring, he said.

The adoption of a Constitution was unquestionably a major step for Afghanistan. But the West should be under no illusions about the document`s value to a nation bristling with arms, one that would almost certainly slide back into chaos and factional warfare were it not for the military forces of NATO and the United States. Afghans certainly are not.

"It`s a good Constitution and will bring change if implemented," said Abdul Latif Amiri, a delegate to the loya jirga from the southern city of Kandahar. "But implementation is not possible while there are still arms all over the country," he added.

Even the United Nations special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, spoke in an unusually critical manner at the closing ceremonies. "The people of Afghanistan are afraid of the guns that are held by the wrong people and used not to defend them and not to wage a jihad, because the time for jihad is finished, but to terrorize people, to take advantage for their own and the people who are close to them," he said.

Since it opened last year, the Afghan Human Rights Commission has recorded 1,700 complaints of violations from around the country and has investigated about half of them. They include 225 accusations of murder, which, Mr. Mirdad said, all represent incidents of abuse of power because they involve commanders or other officials. "We don`t look into individual murders, only when it concerns an abuse of power," he said.

Still fresh in his mind is the day in October when a distraught family arrived with the headless and armless body of their relative. "They brought it here to the office — it was terrible," said Mr. Mirdad, a quiet man in a suit and woolen scarf.

The dead man was Sayed Habib, from Parwan Province, north of Kabul. He had made the mistake of asking a commander to repay money he had borrowed. The Human Rights Commission successfully pursued the case and forced the police to arrest two men, Sardar Agha and his brother Shirin Agha. Both men are former mujahedeen and still serve under their old commander as part of the Defense Ministry.

There are also 242 cases of confiscation of land, 195 cases of destruction of property, 66 incidents of torture, 82 of illegal detention and 56 of looting, all involving commanders or local leaders, whether self-appointed or government officials.

Those are only the cases that the commission knows about, and because of the extreme lawlessness in some places the commission cannot investigate all of them.

"The cases we cannot follow up are where the government has no power, and the governors and commanders are selected by themselves," Mr. Mirdad said. "The level of the rule of law varies, but for example in Uruzgan Province, in Daikundi and Sharestan districts, since the government does not rule there, there are all types of violations, seizing and burning of property, kidnapping of women, rape, murder and forced marriage," he said. "Also we find innocent people are put in jail for a very long time and for no reason," he said.

Many of the delegates at the loya jirga brought up similar complaints, either in their speeches to the assembly or in interviews. Most famously, a young woman, Malalai Joya, called for the "criminals" in the assembly — a clear reference to the mujahedeen faction leaders who killed thousands during vicious in-fighting in the early 1990`s and continue to prey on people — to be put on trial rather than be allowed to preside over the process of drafting a new constitution.

The irony of approving a new Constitution, while the rule of law is ignored countrywide, was not lost on the 502 delegates at the loya jirga. Sitting in the front row of the assembly for the three weeks of debate were the most notorious warlords of all, the leaders of the main mujahedeen factions — Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Sheik Mohammad Asif Mohseni and the former Communist, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

It was to them that Ms. Joya was referring in her outburst. Behind the scenes, Mr. Brahimi and the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, reportedly used the men`s own brutal histories against them in arguments. When Mr. Sayyaf and Mr. Rabbani pushed too hard for their desires in the Constitution, they were reminded that they could face trial for war crimes. General Dostum was told that he had no credibility in Kabul and the south where people remembered his cruelty, according to one official close to the negotiations.

"These people are criminals and they have to answer to the people, and I hope they will not be in the new Parliament," said Sima Samar, the head of the Human Rights Commission, just minutes after the Constitution was approved.

Yet from their front row seats they remain overwhelmingly powerful. When the police chief of a Kabul district was killed several months ago, the Interior Ministry appointed a replacement, a trained professional. But the man never took up his post. Instead, Mr. Sayyaf himself selected and installed the replacement, a man loyal to him.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 14, 2004
On to the Moon, and to Mars, via von Braun
By KENNETH CHANG

Once again, it is back to the future for NASA.

In 1952, Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who spearheaded America`s first two decades of space efforts, laid out a step-by-step blueprint of space exploration, starting with putting a satellite in orbit around Earth.

The next steps in von Braun`s blueprint read like NASA`s achievements of the past four decades: launching astronauts into orbit, sending astronauts to the Moon, the space shuttle, a space station. Only the order was changed when President John F. Kennedy made the push for sending people to the Moon. That goal was originally supposed to come after the space shuttle and the space station.

Today, in remarks at NASA headquarters in Washington, President Bush is expected to announce new efforts to complete the last two items on von Braun`s list: a permanent Moon base and a mission to Mars.

"It would be the culmination of the von Braun paradigm," said Roger D. Launius, chairman of the division of space history at the National Air and Space Museum and a former chief historian at NASA. "The von Braun paradigm has been played out almost religiously since it was first enunciated in the 1950`s. It was very logical. It`s easy to grasp."

This will be NASA`s third major push for Mars. A couple of months after Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in 1969, von Braun and NASA advocated an ambitious sequel: a space station in Earth orbit, a fleet of space shuttles, a second space station around the Moon, a base on the Moon, a nuclear-powered shuttle to and from the Moon, and an expedition to Mars as early as the 1980`s.

President Richard M. Nixon agreed to only the space shuttle and Skylab, a rudimentary space station that circled Earth in the 1970`s.

In 1989, the first President George Bush announced plans for a permanent Moon base and sending astronauts to Mars. But the plans died after NASA estimated it would cost more than $400 billion to get to Mars.

After that costly proposal, engineers at Martin Marietta contended that a Mars mission could be achieved at a fraction of the cost by sending a robot ship first that would manufacture fuel for the return trip.

NASA has since incorporated many of those ideas into a proposal, last updated in 1998, that would cost $50 billion.



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January 14, 2004
Keeping Detentions Secret

The Supreme Court made it easier this week for the government to drape a cloak of secrecy over the imprisonment of people accused of crimes when it rejected an appeal seeking the identity of hundreds of men rounded up after the Sept. 11 attacks. The freedom of all Americans is diminished.

In the days after the terrorist attacks, nearly 1,000 suspects, most of them Muslim men, were detained. A vast majority proved to have no connection to terrorism. Many were deported for immigration violations. The government released the names of the 129 who were accused of crimes, but it refused to identify the hundreds who were not charged.

The Center for National Security Studies and other groups sued under the Freedom of Information Act to learn their names and the circumstances of their arrests. The government invoked an exemption to the act. But the plaintiffs, backed by news organizations, including The New York Times, contended that the exemption did not apply because this sort of information was given out in ordinary police investigations. They argued that the public needs to monitor detentions to ensure that the government is not trampling on constitutional rights.

The trial court agreed, and ordered most names released. But an appeals court reversed that decision, 2 to 1. In dissent, Judge David Tatel warned that the court was ignoring the public`s interest in knowing whether detainees` rights had been denied by "detaining them mainly because of their religion or ethnicity, holding them in custody for extended periods without charge, or preventing them from seeking or communicating with legal counsel."

The Supreme Court`s decision not to hear this appeal comes as the Bush administration is increasingly asserting the right to conduct law enforcement in secret. It argues in the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen accused of being part of a dirty bomb plot, that merely by labeling him an "enemy combatant," it can hold him in secret indefinitely. In a Florida case involving Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, a post-Sept. 11 detainee, the federal courts have sealed the court records and decisions, listing the defendant only by his initials.

The Supreme Court will soon confront the larger issue of civil liberties after Sept. 11. It has agreed to hear the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen being held as an enemy combatant, and accepted the appeal of 16 foreigners being held in Guantánamo Bay. We hope that beginning with these cases, it will start reining in the disturbing excesses of the administration`s war on terror.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 14, 2004
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Paul O`Neill, Unplugged, or What Would Alexander Hamilton Have Done?
By ANDRÉS MARTINEZ

Read Robert Rubin`s recently released memoir and "The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind`s new book on Paul O`Neill`s time in the Bush administration, and a few things become apparent. The first is that Mr. O`Neill would have really liked having Mr. Rubin`s job.

Of course, Mr. O`Neill thought he was getting Mr. Rubin`s job when George Bush appointed him Treasury secretary, but in fact he was only assuming the title. Mr. Rubin`s job, as described in his book, "In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington," was to analyze an often mystifying world, alongside Alan Greenspan and an insatiably curious president, and to shape domestic and global economic policy accordingly.

Mr. O`Neill, who had been a budget wiz in the Nixon and Ford administrations and a successful chief executive at Alcoa, was able to sift through economic data to his heart`s content with his old pal, Mr. Greenspan. But he soon discovered that this was merely an academic undertaking. In addition to the damage that Mr. O`Neill did to himself with his erratic public statements, he was serving in an administration that was not eager to have facts get in the way of policies set by a "praetorian guard" of ideologues surrounding the president.

Mr. O`Neill can`t tell you what it feels like to steer the world economy. For that, read Mr. Rubin`s book. Mr. O`Neill`s is a woeful tale of what it feels like to sit in the office once occupied by Alexander Hamilton and be subservient to people like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes.

"We need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process," Mr. O`Neill told Dick Cheney, his old friend from the Ford administration who had recommended him for the job early on. In this tale, the Treasury secretary repeatedly implores the vice president to foster a more open and rigorous policy-making process in the White House, but to no avail. These scenes are reminiscent of a spy thriller in which the protagonist warns the head of counterintelligence that there is an enemy mole in their midst, only to discover that his confidant is actually the mole.

Long after the reader has figured it out, Mr. O`Neill finally realizes that Mr. Cheney is the leader of the inner circle, which keeps facts — whether about global warming, the deficit, steel tariffs or Iraq — from getting in the way of policy.

Mr. O`Neill did manage, for a time, to head off talk of a tax cut on dividends. But when the issue comes up once more right after the midterm elections, and Mr. O`Neill again notes that the country cannot afford it, Mr. Cheney cuts him off: "Reagan proved deficits don`t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due."

To his credit, President Bush, who is depicted as having a hard time following the discussion, wonders at the same meeting whether he hasn`t already given wealthy people enough of a break. That`s when Mr. Rove chimes in that the president ought to "stick to principle."

Mr. O`Neill came to feel that he, Christie Whitman and Colin Powell were essentially hired for cover by a president who had pledged to govern from the center, but really had no intention of doing so.

Mr. O`Neill was a Nixonian Republican caught up in a Reaganite restoration. He had admired how President Bush`s father, when faced with a dire fiscal outlook, had reneged on his "no new taxes" pledge. And while some Democratic liberals had viewed President Bill Clinton`s fiscal discipline as a betrayal, for the likes of Mr. O`Neill it represented the triumph of Republican values.

The new Treasury secretary and Mr. Greenspan shared concerns that even the bulk of the first round of tax cuts in 2001 could prove unaffordable if projected $5.6 trillion surpluses over the next decade turned out to be a mirage (as they did). That`s why Mr. O`Neill, whose presidentially conferred nickname was downgraded over time from "Pablo" to the "Big O," tried to get Mr. Bush to agree to condition the phasing in of these cuts on the availability of surpluses.

He failed. "I won`t negotiate with myself," the president told his Treasury secretary, as if responsible economic stewardship was a compromise too far.

The White House is upset that a departed cabinet member has provided such an intimate and devastating portrait of presidential decision-making — in an election year, no less. But Mr. O`Neill, who comes across as somewhat naïve and politically tone-deaf in this thick stew of self-justification and insider revelation, also feels betrayed by a White House that discouraged any serious policy debates.

Whether it`s Mr. Cheney`s energy task force, the supposedly independent commission on Social Security reform or the president`s ridiculously scripted Waco economic summit meeting in the summer of 2002, the Treasury secretary continually registered his deep shock at what he rightly considered shoddy, if not dishonest, decision-making.

"When you have people with a strong ideological position and you only hear from one side, you can pretty much predict the outcome," he says of the energy task force. Too often, the fix was in, as when steel tariffs were imposed, and when Mr. O`Neill`s post-Enron efforts to make chief executives more accountable for their companies` misbehavior were thwarted by White House concerns about "the base."

When Mr. Cheney finally called to fire his old friend in November 2002, the O`Neill account quotes him as saying, "We`d really like to do this in an amicable and gracious way."

It was clearly too late to start down that road.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 14, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Kurdish Question
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

On Monday, Kofi Annan will have a chance to play "a vital role" in Iraq that the U.S. has promised. Iraqi, U.S. and British representatives will troop into his New York office with a request: inform the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that the world body supports a reasonable timetable for Iraqi elections, not a premature election that would amount to a coup by Iraq`s Shiite majority.

As the U.N thus demonstrates its nation-building usefulness, the U.S. will face its own delicate task: to persuade the Kurds in the north not to demand so much autonomy that it may endanger the nation`s unity.

Here is what we owe the Iraqi Kurds, targets of genocide, as demonstrated in Saddam`s poison-gas massacre of 5,000 innocents in Halabja:

(1) We abandoned Kurds to the shah in the 70`s, after Mullah Mustafa Barzani placed his trust in America. We double-crossed them again after the gulf war, when their forces rose at our instigation and were decimated by Saddam`s gunships. Despite this double duplicity, Kurds fought on our side with little equipment and great valor against Saddam for over a decade.

(2) After we protected this non-Arab people in a no-flight zone, Kurds overcame tribal differences to establish a working free-enterprise democracy in Iraq`s north, now a model of freedom for the rest of the country.

(3) Despite casualties elsewhere in the post-victory war, not a single U.S. soldier has been killed (knock wood) in the area called Iraqi Kurdistan and patrolled by the pesh merga, its battle-hardened Kurdish militia. (But in a blunder, Kurdish leaders suspicious of Turkey blocked the contribution of 10,000 Turkish troops to help us put down the Baathist insurgency.)

The Kurds owe their American ally plenty, too: U.S. and British air forces, from bases in cooperative Turkey, secured the Iraqi Kurds from Saddam`s predations for a decade. And last year we freed all Iraqis from that dictator forever.

Now Americans and Kurds need each other`s understanding. The U.S. is committed to helping to build a unified Iraq, with no path to secession, and with representation based on geography, not ethnicity. The Kurds, a 20 percent minority in Iraq, are committed only to autonomy within a federal Iraq: they refrain from declaring independence, but require constitutional and security guarantees that they will not be tyrannized again.

"We cannot afford another Halabja," says Barham Salih, the articulate Kurd who would make Iraq`s most effective U.N. representative. "Surely Americans grasp the value of states` rights, and remember how all states had to ratify your Constitution."

Commitments to unity and autonomy may not be in conflict, but they are not in accord. Though Arab Iraqis are happy to let the Kurds continue to run their local affairs in what used to be the no-flight zone, many find trouble arising in other Kurdish lands seized by Saddam, who drove Kurds from their homes and moved in his supporters to "Arabize" the area.

The key is the city of Kirkuk, which Iraqi Kurds consider their capital. But Arab colonists and indigenous Turkmen dispute that hotly, as does Turkey, worried about a rich Kurdistan attracting Turkish Kurds. Kirkuk sits atop an ocean of oil holding 40 percent of Iraq`s huge reserves.

Determined to reverse Saddam`s ethnic cleansing, Salih insists that "Kirkuk is not about oil." (I think of Senator Dale Bumpers`s line during impeachment: "When you hear somebody say, `This is not about sex` — it`s about sex.")

Our Paul Bremer told Kurdish leaders brusquely last week to forget the past U.S. autonomy policy and get with the unity program; they suggested he stick that in his ear. He has since modified his demeanor, and Washington is reviewing our policy reversal. Mollified Kurds then met constructively with Iraqi Arabs, and Salih meets tomorrow with "our friends to the north [Turkey]."

The solution should include relocation funds for Arabs displaced by returning Kurds; a referendum to decide status within a Kurdish or other Iraqi "governorate"; legal protections in Kirkuk for Turkmen, Christians and other minorities; and the pesh merga`s place in Iraq`s national military command.

"The oil is part of the national treasure," says Salih, in autonomy`s concession to unity. "We just want to make sure that Iraq`s oil wealth is never again used against Kurds."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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District of Columbia Democratic Presidential Primary
Liste aller Staaten.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/elections/2004/dc/

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A wounded Iraqi is wheeled into a hospital after protesters clashed with Ukrainian soldiers and Iraqi police in Kut. The protesters complained that officials who were previously Baath Party members or exiles were abusing their power.
washingtonpost.com
Clashes Rise in Southern Iraq
Jobless Protesters Confront Ukrainian Troops and Local Police

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 14, 2004; Page A14


KUT, Iraq, Jan. 13 -- The boom of exploding dynamite packets, followed by the rat-a-tat of returning assault-rifle fire, echoed all Tuesday morning through the streets of this gritty, once peaceful city on the Euphrates River, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Angry demonstrators confronted Ukrainian army tanks and Iraqi police at City Hall plaza for the second day in a row. A block away, Ali Aziz, 35, a stocky, out-of-work laborer, watched the battle from behind a schoolyard wall, red-eyed and shaking with anguish.

"I have three children to support, we are living in one rented room and I have to hold up a bucket to the ceiling when it rains," he said. "I helped protect the city offices during the war, but now the old thieves are back inside, and they only give jobs to their friends." The protesters were "out there to defend all our rights," he said.

Officials and witnesses said at least a dozen civilians and police were injured Tuesday, the fifth day of anti-government protests since Jan. 6 in southern Iraqi cities with largely Shiite Muslim populations.

The southern Shiites were systematically repressed during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and until recently they largely supported the U.S.-led invasion and the appointed interim government. But in the past week, protests have broken out in the cities of Kut, Amarah and Basra.

There were also several violent incidents in the capital Tuesday. After a roadside bomb blew up an Army vehicle, killing one soldier, U.S. troops fired on a car, killing a man and a 10-year-old boy. Two mortars exploded near the central Baghdad Hotel, incinerating several cars.

The southern demonstrations coincided with a growing split between U.S. officials and a prominent Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who demanded Monday that direct elections be held soon. U.S. authorities plan to hold regional caucuses to choose a national assembly but do not want to schedule elections until mid-2005.

By most accounts, Tuesday`s protests in Kut were sparked by local and personal grievances. The crowd of about 1,000 demonstrators, who tried to storm City Hall and break into a bank, included recently dismissed soldiers and laborers who have long been jobless. Their wrath was directed largely at local and regional officials who they said demanded bribes or were former members of Hussein`s Baath Party.

"I was a policeman before the war. When I went back to rejoin my station, they said I had to pay $150. Every single department is asking for bribes, and they are all followers of Saddam," complained Mohammed Ali, 23, whose head was wrapped in a bandage after two days of confronting the security forces. "People have gone without jobs for a year, and they are ready to tear down buildings."

Some Kut residents asserted the protests were instigated by extremist Shiite groups who had access to grenades and dynamite, which were thrown at Ukrainian occupation troops on Monday and Tuesday. But the protesters insisted that no political or religious group was behind them.

As the mob grew increasingly aggressive Tuesday, surging toward government buildings and setting off explosions, a local Shiite cleric, Laith Rubaie, intervened at the request of Iraqi police. At about 1 p.m., Rubaie called for calm over a loudspeaker and drew the demonstrators toward his downtown mosque for prayers.

"We are with you, we are beside you, we will demand jobs for you, but please don`t use grenades and weapons. . . . You are frightening the women and children," Rubaie called over the din of agitated, argumentative voices. He said he agreed with the crowd that some police were "corrupt Baathists," but he said others were "caught in the middle. They don`t want to shoot our own people."

Throughout the day, Iraqi police fanned out across the city, with pistol-brandishing agents careering around corners in unmarked cars and riflemen darting from block to block with their faces hidden by scarves.

Ukrainian occupation troops sat in tanks surrounding City Hall and lay on nearby rooftops with rifles.

Police said a half-dozen officers had been wounded during the two days of demonstrations, and protesters said they had taken several wounded friends or bystanders to hospitals, including a schoolgirl they said was shot in the leg Tuesday.

Many residents -- including doctors, school principals and police officers in riot gear -- said they were concerned about the violence but also sympathized with the protesters. They said the combination of high unemployment and widespread official corruption had driven many people to despair.

Some people complained that occupation authorities had been slow to deliver promised jobs and services, but most blamed Iraqi officials, including both former Baath Party members who managed to retain niches in the bureaucracy and former exiles who were appointed to national and regional posts by U.S. officials but have done little to help the public.

Although calm had been restored by mid-afternoon, the city remained tense and residents said that violence could easily flare again if authorities did not respond to the need for jobs. Aides to Rubaie said he had spoken with provincial officials and then promised the crowd a response to its demands within two days.

"The Shiite people are peaceful and dignified, but when their rights are stolen, no foreign troops can stop them," said Abdul Karim Mustafa, 43, a physician who was watching the protests from several blocks away. "These people are not terrorists, but they are desperate enough to die."




© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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U.S. Army troops guard an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter downed by insurgent gunfire near the town of Fallujah, Iraq. Its two crew members escaped uninjured. It was the third U.S. helicopter downed this month.
washingtonpost.com
Helicopter Crews Dread The Six O`Clock Shadow
Iraqi Insurgents Take Deadly Aim at Aircraft From Behind

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Desk
Wednesday, January 14, 2004; Page A14


FALLUJAH, Iraq, Jan. 13 -- For Spec. Stephen K. Sadeo, a gunner on a Black Hawk troop transport helicopter, 6 o`clock means danger.

It doesn`t refer to the hour, but the angle of approach of a shoulder-launched missile fired from the ground directly behind his aircraft.

"You scan and scan the landscape, but it is hard to see one bad guy pop up maybe a mile away. We travel in twos. He shoots when we are past. It`s the trailing chopper that is really risky," Sadeo said as he worked on a Black Hawk at Base Ridgway, the dusty home of Task Force Wolfpack, a helicopter team attached to the Army`s 82nd Airborne Division.

For guerrillas in this volatile region 35 miles west of Baghdad, U.S. Army helicopters have become a target of choice. In the past two weeks, three choppers have been hit. On Jan. 2, a missile struck an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopter, killing the pilot. On Thursday, a missile destroyed a UH-60 Black Hawk, and nine crew members and passengers died. And on Tuesday, an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter was brought down by ground fire. The two crew members escaped after making an emergency landing a few miles north of Habaniyah.

The shooting down of a CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter on Nov. 2 near here, killing 15 soldiers on board, marked a turning point, pilots and crew members here said.

"Until November, things were pretty relaxed. Then we had to be more careful," said Maj. Thomas Von Eschenbach, the executive officer for Task Force Wolfpack.

"Yeah, it got more serious after November," Sadeo said.

"If one of our helicopters goes down, it helps the enemy cause, partly because it makes news. It`s always been like that," said Capt. Scott Jackman, another Task Force Wolfpack pilot.

With increasing frequency, guerrillas are targeting U.S. helicopters with Soviet-designed shoulder-fired missiles known as SAM-7s. Compared with rocket-propelled grenades, another weapon commonly used against helicopters in Iraq, the heat-seeking SAM-7 requires careful maintenance and more skill on the part of the shooter.

"SAMs are expensive and harder to get," Von Eschenbach said. "These are things the locals don`t have."

Von Eschenbach said that according to intelligence reports, the missiles and their operators infiltrate Iraq from abroad. "They come in from Syria. They`re paid or are just here because they`re against the U.S. They bring in the weapons," Von Eschenbach said.

Over the past few weeks, the insurgents have clearly been studying the flight patterns of U.S. helicopters, Von Eschenbach said. "There has been a lot of discussion about that. It`s like Afghanistan when the rebels figured out how the Soviets flew. The Russians got too predictable."

Ridgway is located near Fallujah, one of the most hostile towns to American forces in Iraq. Troops have been battling for months with insurgents and the townspeople who support them. Hardly a day goes by without some sort of attack on Americans, either in Fallujah, the farmland to the west or the city of Ramadi farther west toward the border with Syria.

On Tuesday, insurgents fired rockets on U.S. troops in downtown Fallujah. The Americans shot back and killed at least two people. Blood stained the main commercial road through town. On the highway west toward Ridgway, a convoy of jeeps came across a roadside bomb. A demolitions expert in full-body protective gear carefully inspected the package before detonating it.

It is in this hellish atmosphere that Task Force Wolfpack performs narrow but, in the view of soldiers, valuable services. Low-flying helicopters provide cover for ground troops as they raid towns and hamlets looking for guerrilla suspects.

If snipers take to rooftops or try to sneak up on the raiding troops, the helicopters are ready with machine guns and rockets. From no more than 150 feet off the ground, they inspect roads and highways for suspicious items that might be bombs. They escort convoys through treacherous territory.

"The satisfaction is to hear from the guys on the ground that things go better when we`re in the air. We`re kind of proud of that," said Warrant Officer Douglas Dolson, a pilot with Task Force Wolfpack.

This week, Task Force Wolfpack has been mourning the death of one of its pilots, Chief Warrant Officer Aaron Weaver, 32, who was aboard the Black Hawk that was shot down Thursday. It was a medical evacuation helicopter marked with a red cross.

Comrades remember Weaver as a modest and quiet man who had a heroic story to tell: He took part in the rescue of crew members of a Black Hawk shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, a saga recorded in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."

"He would talk about it if asked. He didn`t boast. He would change as soon as he opened up. You know, that 1,000-yard stare. Mogadishu was fixed in his memory," said Dolson.

"He used to say that the landscape here and Somalia was a lot alike," 1st Lt. Benjamin Boardman recalled.

Weaver was an Army Ranger at the time. He went on the rescue mission in a Humvee, Von Eschenbach recounted, and at one point, a rocket-propelled grenade sliced through the vehicle but did not explode. It did, however, tear off part of the driver`s hand. "He grabbed the guy`s hand and held it together. They recited the Ranger creed to keep the guy from going into shock while medics came," Von Eschenbach said.

"Never will I fail my comrades" is one line from the creed.

Weaver had suffered from testicular cancer and underwent surgery in 2001. The need for periodic follow-up exams almost kept him out of Iraq. Army doctors forbade him to go, but Weaver insisted. "He had trained with us, he was part of us, and if we were going to Iraq, he was coming with us," said Dolson.

Von Eschenbach discovered that military medics in Baghdad could perform the necessary blood tests, required every three months. Weaver got the go-ahead.

On Thursday, he was traveling to Baghdad for his next checkup.

He was going to take the opportunity to visit with his brother, Ryan, who is a helicopter pilot based in Baghdad. His other brother, Stephen, is a pilot soon to be deployed to Afghanistan.

Their father, Mike Weaver, of Inverness, Fla., is the production manager for the Citrus County Chronicle.

"I`m anxious, of course. I watch the news every day. But they don`t want to be left behind, like they would not leave anyone behind. These boys train for this. They want to show the training paid off," their father said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Good for Investors, Bad for the Rest


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, January 14, 2004; Page A19


If you work for a living in George W. Bush`s America, you`re a sap.

Take a quick look, or a long one, at the tax code as Bush has altered it during his three years as president, and you`re compelled to conclude that work has become a distinctly inferior kind of income acquisition in the eyes of the law. Bush tax policy rewards investment and inheritance. Relying on work for your income, by contrast, turns you into a second-class citizen.

In his first round of tax cuts in 2001, Bush got Congress to phase out the estate tax by 2010. Last year, with Republicans in control on Capitol Hill, he reduced the top tax rate on dividends from 39.6 percent to 15 percent, and brought the capital gains tax rate down from 20 percent to 15 percent as well.

This year, his new budget proposes that families be allowed to shield as much as $30,000 yearly on their investment income, which will abolish all remaining taxes on such income. Meanwhile, the income tax cuts to most middle-class families don`t exceed a couple of hundred dollars, and payroll taxes for employees remain untouched. In part, this devaluing of work is simply an expression of Bush family values. As Kevin Phillips points out in his new biography of the Bush dynasty, the Bushes don`t do anything so vulgar as going into professions. Rather, the clan lives by its connections. For George W. and his brothers, work has meant riffling through Pappy`s Rolodex. Theirs is the cronyest form of capitalism.

But a broader theory is at work here, too. It says that investment, rather than labor, powers economic growth, so rewarding investment is merely the most direct way to help the economy. As Ernest S. Christian, a former Treasury official in the Reagan administration, recently told The Post`s Jonathan Weisman, the tax reform proposals advanced by the Democratic presidential candidates -- most of which restore some of the taxes on investment and cut the tax rates for work-derived income -- won`t do the economy any good. "Tax reform is supposed to mean removing barriers to economic growth," Christian said.

A lovely theory, but if anyone thinks the Bush tax cuts have spurred economic growth, I have a low-tax investment in a bridge to Brooklyn. To be sure, investment income and corporate profits are high. But just 278,000 new jobs have been generated since June, which means the recovery is about 7.5 million jobs shy of the norm for post-World War II recoveries. Bush`s Council of Economic Advisers had predicted job growth of 510,000 from the 2003 tax cuts, plus another 1,335,000 new jobs, during the second half of last year.

To say that reality is lagging behind the theory of investment-led growth, then, is to understate. The problem is that to invest today in stocks or mutual funds doesn`t mean you`re investing in job creation in the United States.

Outsourcing has turned the phrase "investment-led growth" into the grimmest of oxymorons. It means that Bush`s tax policy subsidizes job growth in India and China rather than the United States. And in failing to create more employment here at home, the tax cuts have also helped depress wages. Real wages in the United States actually fell 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

To all this, the Democratic presidential candidates have proposed a reversal of the Bush tax priorities. John Edwards is the most explicit, calling for an increase in taxes on most forms of investment income while lowering the taxes on employment. Wesley Clark has proposed eliminating income taxes for more than half the households in the United States, and Howard Dean is reportedly mulling over a plan to cut payroll taxes.

All that is good in itself, but doesn`t really grapple with the conundrum of job creation in a globalized economy. This afternoon a broad array of unions, environmental groups and Democratic politicos will unveil a proposal to do just that. Treming itself a new Apollo Project, this Teamster-Turtle coalition calls for using tax credits and public investment, totaling $300 billion over a 10-year period, to promote energy independence by investing in clean energy sources and in energy-efficient public and private transportation systems, office buildings, factories and homes. They calculate this will create 3.3 million jobs, which is a good deal more than President Bush`s own neo-Apollo Project, sending men to the moon and to Mars, could possibly create (not to mention the benefits to national security that would accrue from reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil).

The notion of job creation through public investment rather than private is anathema to conservatives, of course. But the burden of proof is on those on the right to demonstrate how private investment in a global economy creates jobs here at home. And why the hell our tax policy should boost income in Bangalore, not Baltimore.


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washingtonpost.com
The Specter of Outsourcing


By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, January 14, 2004; Page A19


We Americans are drifting into a global labor market -- and don`t like it. The latest fear is that hordes of white-collar jobs, from low-paid filing clerks to well-paid software engineers, will vanish into a giant global sinkhole of well-educated and underpaid workers, mainly from India and China. Although we knew that manufacturing jobs could be lost abroad, we imagined that service jobs -- most U.S. jobs -- were safe from international competition. The fact that they aren`t could profoundly alter U.S. attitudes toward globalization, even though the danger is exaggerated and misunderstood.

Let`s disentangle fact from fiction. It`s true that many companies, facing relentless competition, will seize almost any approach to cut costs, including "outsourcing." The logic that applies to manufacturing is now spreading to many services as a result of trends that Americans have generally favored: (a) the ability to "digitize" information instead of using paper; (b) cheap international communications; (c) rising educational levels abroad (India now has about 9 million college students, compared with 13 million in the United States); and (d) more big countries -- China, India, Russia -- joining the world economy.

Jobs that involve collecting or analyzing information seem vulnerable, because wages abroad are so low. Compare the United States and India. For software engineers, it`s $60 an hour vs. $6; for call-center workers, $10 an hour vs. $1.50; for insurance claim workers, $1,500 a month vs. $300; for accountants, $75,000 a year against $15,000. (These figures come from the Information Technology Association of America, or ITAA.) The easiest jobs to send abroad involve routine "back office" recordkeeping that`s fairly labor-intensive: insurance claims, personnel and billing records.

"A lot of [insurance] claims processing is done in India," says Shailen Gupta of Renodis, a U.S. outsourcing firm. In the United States, claim forms are scanned and then zapped to India, where keypunchers read them off a screen and enter the information into databases. Easy communications means that more highly skilled jobs can also move abroad. Gupta cites a U.S. software company that plans to shift 80 percent of its workforce -- about 200 jobs -- to India. Computer programs would still be designed in the United States, but Indian workers would write the detailed software instructions and do the testing.

From India, it`s possible to do market research, maintain financial databases and write patent applications. Evalueserve, a three-year-old company with 270 Indian workers, does all three. Robert Daigle, Evalueserve`s U.S. vice president for marketing, describes its Indian workers as "eager and bright. Most have an MBA. We recruit from the India Institutes of Management and the India Institutes of Technology -- think of these as the Whartons, Harvards and MITs of India."

Sounds grim -- and if it`s your job, it could be. But it probably won`t be your job.

Like most new trends, this one inspires hype. No one knows how many service jobs have been "outsourced" abroad, but guesses cluster around 300,000 to 500,000. Harris Miller of the ITAA estimates that 2 percent of the 10 million computer-related jobs have been sent abroad. According to ITAA`s surveys, 12 percent of information technology ("IT``) companies have "outsourced" work, as have 3 percent of non-IT firms. Of course, there will be more. John McCarthy of Forrester Research projects a loss of 3.3 million jobs by 2015, including 1.7 million back-office jobs and 473,000 IT jobs. But that`s still a tiny fraction of today`s 138 million U.S. jobs -- nevermind future growth.

The truth is that, for most Americans, the main sources of job destruction and insecurity remain domestic: Wal-Mart battering competitors; the dot-com and telecom collapses; the business cycle. More important, job losses have been offset by job gains. Manufacturing employment peaked in mid-1979 at 19.5 million; now it`s 14.5 million. But over that period, total U.S. employment grew about 40 million, and manufacturing output rose more than 80 percent. American companies became more productive and shifted to more valuable products. Cheap foreign labor has threatened individual U.S. workers but not the economy as a whole.

The reason is that imports also create gains. Despite job losses, consumers or companies gain. Lower prices boost purchasing power or profits. That creates more demand at home. Consumers can spend more; businesses can invest more. As long as the economy responds by expanding production -- and offering new things to buy -- then most job losses, even if traumatic for individuals, are temporary. Similarly, what other countries earn abroad through exports they can also spend abroad. Their imports may not initially come from the United States, but if our products remain competitive, we`ll get an adequate share of global trade.

In theory, service imports (the result of outsourcing abroad) shouldn`t be different. Although more workers may face the unsettling global competition, job gains ought to dwarf job losses. What`s unknown is whether this theory -- which has worked for 60 years -- will continue to work.

Is America`s economic vitality still suffering from the technology and stock "bubbles``? If companies won`t expand -- if they`re glum about the future -- then lackluster job growth will choke the recovery. And what about the trading system? In Asia, some countries hoard export earnings. They accumulate huge reserves of "hard" currencies (mainly dollars) rather than spend for imports. If too many countries do this, the trading system promotes stagnation and merely shifts jobs from one country to another. In a weak job market, outsourcing -- a small threat by itself -- could become a large lightning rod for anti-globalization discontent.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Corroborating O’Neill’s Account

Official Confirms Claims That Saddam Was Bush’s Focus Before 9/11.

By John Cochran

01/13/04: (ABC News) President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, an official told ABCNEWS, confirming the account former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill gives in his new book.

The official, who asked not to be identified, was present in the same National Security Council meetings as O`Neill immediately after Bush`s inauguration in January and February of 2001.

"The president told his Pentagon officials to explore the military options, including use of ground forces," the official told ABCNEWS. "That went beyond the Clinton administration`s halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force."

In The Price of Loyalty, O`Neill says that from the very start of his administration, Bush was focused on ousting Saddam. Bush says that his policy at the time was merely a continuation of the Clinton administration`s stance. White House aides have suggested O`Neill, whom Bush fired in December 2002, is merely trying to sell books.

Both the official who spoke to ABCNEWS and O`Neill have acknowledged that Bush had not yet made up his mind for a ground invasion at the start of his administration, but they say officials were told to find ways to get rid of the Iraqi leader.

"Getting Hussein was now the administration`s focus, that much was already clear," O`Neill says in his book.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld disputed O`Neill`s account today. "I don`t know what meetings he could have been in," Rumsfeld told reporters during a Pentagon briefing.

Classified Documents?

A briefing paper for O`Neill — and obtained exclusively by ABCNEWS — directed him to work on "keeping Saddam`s finger off the trigger" by stopping imports of military technology. The Treasury Department is now investigating whether O`Neill took classified documents for the book. He says he did not.

"I don`t honestly think there`s anything that`s classified in those 19,000 documents," O`Neill said on NBC`s Today Show today.

Regardless of whether the book uses classified documents, it has been a headache for the White House. O`Neill insists he did not intend to cause the president any embarrassment.

Copyright © 2004 ABCNEWS

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The O`Neill Factor
THE REAL NO-SPIN ZONE!

By Ted Lang
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01/13/04: (ICH) The truth stands alone and is founded in fact. It is unemotional and vital in securing justice. It would indeed be comforting if truth could always be found in an aura fostered by good intentions, compassion, understanding and tolerance. But more often than we care to admit, the truth is usually exposed via jealousy, recrimination or base retaliation. To the intellectually mature, the politically astute, and the worldly among us, this should never come as a surprise. We should always prefer the truth over the manner and mode in which it is delivered to our doorstep.

As we have now been assured by an element of the normally unreliable mainstream media, certain facts have come to light confirming irrevocably that President George W. Bush lied us into an unnecessary, unjust and unconstitutional war. At this point in time, 500 of our finest citizens, our military, have lost their lives. Thousands more are casualties. And the loss of civilian life in Iraq is too horrible to contemplate.

Evidence continues to mount that the Bush administration had advance knowledge of the imminent terrorist attacks of 9-11, yet planned no modicum of preventive measures to save American lies. Even the simple precaution of the long-standing FAA-sanctioned prior practice of arming cockpit crews with sidearms wasn`t neither suggested nor reinstated.

Any and all avenues available to the Bush administration to absolve themselves of any and all suspicion of complicity, incompetence, unconscionable plotting, and even cover-up, have been arrogantly dismissed, and no attempt has ever been made to address any of the many concerns of the people. To make matters worse, the mainstream establishment media remained complicit by their silence. And Bush administration apologists, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O`Reilly, continue to ridicule and lambaste anyone who disagrees with the readily evident tyranny of the Bush administration. And now, the Wall Street Journal can be added to this list of Bush protectors.

The CBS "60 Minutes" expose was a breath of fresh air. The Bush administration and its protectors in the media are initiating full damage control tactics to discredit the revelations of former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill. Of course, administration flacks attacked O`Neill as being incompetent, rather than merely pointing out his disagreement with Bush`s insane, huge deficit-generating programs while advancing tax reductions. And to be clear, wasn`t that O`Neill`s function, to be an advisor? If Bush disagreed with his advice, how does this translate to incompetence? As to the asset value of loyalty, that can manifest itself also within such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, and the Nazi Party.

On the O`Reilly factor in the evening of the very next day, know-it-all Bill O`Reilly, the neoconservative talking head of FOXNews that always educates those of lesser nobility by the battle cry "the rich and powerful always protect the rich and powerful," stated that O`Neill`s charges were invalid, regurgitating the line fed to him by the Bush administration that O`Neill made the charges to get back at President Bush for having fired him. O`Reilly belittled and relegated as insignificant O`Neill`s revelation that there was now evidence that Bush II had intended to take out Saddam right from the beginning.

Then O`Reilly shares with us his towering intellectual assessment: "Of course Bush was upset at Saddam - he tried to kill his father!" Good point, but how does this justify the death of 500 of our military, the maiming and wounding of thousands more, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis? It is O`Reilly who is naïve here, and expects us to accept as Gospel his narrow, intellectually challenged assessment and Bush-protecting views. Saddam was adjudicated a bad guy by this administration, and whether or not we had a right to invade his country doesn`t seem to faze O`Reilly one bit.

And now, the Wall Street Journal has sided with the illogical and vacuous right wing neocon conspiracy in pointing out Secretary O`Neill`s wrong-headed emotions. In his cheap shot column of January 12th, WSJ`s John Fund attacks O`Neill`s revelations as the "Rage of a Relic." He begins, "Paul O`Neill is angry that the world has passed him by." Fund provides absolutely no proof of this - it was something he snatched out of thin air to set the tone of his piece without offering any evidence. Anyone who believes O`Neill is, of course, a fool as far as Fund is concerned, never ever addressing the validity of the charges, their impact relative to wrongfully getting us into an unnecessary war and the resultant loss of life. Nor does he address the 19,000 documents O`Neill and former WSJ reporter Ron Suskind have in their possession, other than merely mentioning this in passing.

All of a sudden, Bush and his secret cabal-controlled government have religion. They are launching an investigation into O`Neill`s possible wrongdoing in obtaining classified documents. Frankly, I see nothing wrong in that, even if they were obtained illegally. What law is being advanced as having been violated? Shouldn`t a similar investigation be launched concerning Bush`s constitutionally required State of the Union Speech where he lied and conned us into an unconstitutional war? When will that investigation, hopefully leading to Bush`s impeachment, begin?

Fund`s shallowness is easy to disassemble. He asserts, "Bush critics will hail Mr. O`Neill as a truth-teller, White House aides are already calling him a back-stabber." What else would they call him? "In fact," Fund goes on, "Mr. O`Neill is a relic." Notice how cleverly he weaves this back to the title of his piece? "Mr. O`Neill came into the Bush administration on the recommendation of three old friends from the Ford years: Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan and Donald Rumsfeld," he writes. But aren`t these guys relics too? He precedes this gem with, "[O`Neill] .was clearly a product of the Nixon and Ford administrations, in which he had served, and simply hadn`t adapted to the post-Reagan Republican Party." Now what party would that be, the Leon Trotsky-originated neoconservative PNAC war party?

Undeniably, O`Neill had exhibited some bizarre behavior after breaking publicly with Bush on economic issues. Fund proclaims O`Neill economically naïve for wanting to reform Social Security and our atrocious income tax code. Sounds to me like O`Neill had his economic ducks in order. But even if he did flip out somewhat, what about the accusation itself? Does Fund address that? Of course not!

Fund also writes: "In [a] conversation he told me things about his disagreements with the administration that I was surprised a cabinet officer would reveal. I was impressed with his candor but not by his wisdom. He was saved from my publishing them only by his offhand request . that they be off the record."

Now let me see if I have this right: Fund was impressed by "his candor;" does that mean Fund was impressed by O`Neill`s truthfulness? And Fund refrained from publishing O`Neill`s remarks because O`Neill requested that they be "off the record?" Then, why are they now on the record? Isn`t Mr. Fund confirming Mr. O`Neill`s indiscretion at revealing things yet confirming his truthfulness?

It is clear that both O`Reilly and Fund want us to pay absolutely no attention to that man behind the green curtain. And never mind that there was no reason to attack Iraq other than for oil and to advance the military posture of another nation not vital to our national interest. And of course, world domination also has its benefits. Never mind that we have virtually alienated every nation on the planet in the pursuit of this madness. And if anyone believes loony Paul O`Neill, well then, they`re crazy. They are asking us to focus on the wrongful emotions that delivered the truth to us, and not to focus on the facts learned. But if you are used to doing that, then why are you reading this?

© THEODORE E. LANG 1/13/04 All rights reserved

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Lunacy:

"It`s time for the human race to enter the solar system." - George W. Bush

By Dom Stasi
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01/13/04 (ICH) This week George W. Bush is expected to announce that he wants to go to the moon. Once there, he wants to set up a Lunar base, and from that permanent settlement launch manned missions to the planet Mars and back. Wow! Three years ago he`d never even been to Europe.

THE INSPIRATION:
But hold on, and before we get all judgmental (Oh, I shall, just not in this paragraph), let`s take a lesson from the Supreme Court and give our president the irrational benefit of doubt. Perhaps - as with other really big decisions our president has made when his administration came under criticism, decisions simple-minded mortals such as I cannot comprehend, decisions so big that they will come to have historical implications that the press and future generations of Americans can completely ignore - perhaps as with those, God told him to do this? They do, after all, have conversations. We all know that. Because, in stark contrast to important, world altering conversations George has had with other intimates - like the bin Ladens, Ken Lay, Karl Rove, Ahmed Chalabi - George actually admitted to taking advice from God about the magnificent job he`s doing in the Middle East. Could it be that God, suitably impressed by the improvements George has made to His original design of the little blue planet upon which we stand, has decided it would be a good idea to turn George loose on His little red planet as well? I don`t know. Neither do I presume to know why God might have told George to bomb the Holy Land, but as far as space exploration goes, let`s presume that the god who talks to George is the God Bless America god, the peace on Earth god. Let`s assume He`s God The Creator. If one of the voices in George`s head is that of the Creator, I gotta figure that god already knows all about Mars. Why can`t George just ask Him next time they talk? Seems that in this context - the rare context of knowing exactly Who gives George his ideas - an actual manned round trip mission would be a big waste of time and money. George is the president. He should learn to be demanding, use his contacts rather than buy solutions to everything from Haliburton. Save some dough. Ask God what`s cooking on Mars and relieve the uncertainty, just like he did with Iraq. Because right now America is a little strapped for cash. That makes for unreliable spacecraft.

THE RATIONALE:
But of course as regards a manned mission to Mars, all of that "we can`t afford it" negativism will sublimate if George tells America that Mars is where he`ll find Osama bin Laden. If he goes on Fox News and says Osama`s on Mars - even if it`s a bunch of baloney invented by Karl Rove or Ahmed Chalabi - George will still get the funding for a manned mission to Mars or just about anywhere else he wants to pay Boeing to take him. Face it. Today`s self proclaimed American patriots will give their poster boy anything he demands. He just has to promise to protect them from evildoers wherever them folks may or may not be skulking, no questions asked. In just three years our president`s policies have depleted the United States Treasury of $650 billion dollars and killed over 7000 unarmed people in just one little crusade. Nobody`s questioning the expense. After all, if George said it was in the dual interests of national security and of maintaining our individual freedoms, that`s good enough for real Americans. It matters but little (if at all) that today our nation is less secure than ever, and the only individual who`s achieved any measure of freedom under George W. Bush`s presidency seems to be Osama bin Laden.

Now there are those who would still be quick to say that six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-million-dollars and 7000 lives is a lot of other people`s stuff to squander without getting so much as a receipt to show for it. Certain nattering nabobs of negativism would be quick to say that neither the $650 billion nor those 7000 lives were George`s to take. But he took them all, and 60% of Americans don`t care a wit. In fact, most Americans like it. So, what the heck. We`re America. We can do anything. We`re preemptive!

So I say forget about local rocks like Mars and the moon. Let`s launch a real space mission. Let`s go to Heaven. George can afford it, and, unlike Osama bin Laden, George knows where it is, and unlike Mars, George knows how to get there.

Alrighty, then. As promised, the time has come to get judgmental. Because to not do so would be to join our herd of countrypersons in allowing this man, George W. Bush, this primitive who has had not a single legitimate success in his entire mortal life, this man who does not know how to pronounce nuclear, and has the scientific aptitude of a mollusk, to take on at our expense the most complex and challenging endeavor in the entire history of life on planet Earth… all four-thousand years of it! The time has come to put on the brakes, jam them on. The time has also come to get serious. We need to do a reality check, the kind scientists call a gap analysis.

Simply stated, while most of us would settle for being able to fly from Paris to Los Angeles in Bush`s world, we are suddenly presuming to fly people to another world altogether, sustain them there, and then bring them back alive. Subjectively speaking, that`s a damned wide gap. So what`s really up with this?

Let`s consider that question. In the interest of fairness, let`s also consider what might be the only justifiable and understandable rationale for Bush`s wanting to go to the moon and Mars. The first and only plausibility that comes to mind relates to his brief but influential management of a relatively small part of another nearby planet. The one beneath our feet. The blue one. The Earth. Given that our part of the Earth - the American part - is anticipating a trillion dollar annual financial deficit by the second year of Bush`s next term of office, and given that if we expect to keep America`s lights on, we will need to bankrupt not only Social Security, but Medicare as well, and further, given that we`ve already reduced overtime pay for civilian workers, medical benefits for our veterans, combat pay to our troops, and promised educational programs for our children, with no plan for recovery that will not create an exponential debt crater deeper than this planet`s core, and given that we are now alienated from every other civilization on planet Earth, I personally cannot think of a better time for George W. Bush to go to Mars. Nor can I think of a more suitable place for him to be. But Mars is, after all, the god of war, so George might say he wants to go there, he might even pose for some photos in a space suite, but when the time comes to actually go, he`ll send other people.

Well, if George himself isn`t going, I would then suggest we think this project through a little further before we write the check. I suggest we think it through from the point of view of mission success probability. Because no "Mission Accomplished" banner will be big enough to hide a failure on this ride. We need to face the reality, as demoralizing as it sounds, that our economic condition and the responsibilities with which we`ve now hobbled ourselves, leave America with about as much justification for funding a manned mission to Mars (and back) as we had for funding one to Baghdad. One must ponder, then, upon the real rationale behind this president`s sudden yen for cosmic exploration. When such a sudden and uncharacteristic curiosity is exhibited by a man who has an abject disrespect for the very planet that sustains him, and an unparalleled disregard for any of its life forms that aren`t him, it gets my attention. It should get yours too. Because this, combined with an overt disdain for the life sciences, a history of rejecting physical science in the interest of superstition, and a propensity for discounting geological evidence in the acceptance of myth, render this president`s sudden interest in cosmology suspect at the very least. This luddite who believes embryonic stem cells are little tiny people suddenly aspires to the scientific Mecca of interplanetary travel. What for? This guy - this incurious George - already presumes to know how the whole universe was created: he thinks it took a week four thousand years ago. He completely ignores what his home planet tells him about the origins of life. So I have no idea what Bush is up to with this Mars thing, but speaking for myself - a person who has spent his entire professional life in the aviation and space technologies - I`ve followed this guy about as far as I`m gonna go. Here`s why.

THE OBJECTIVE(S): In order to fully appreciate the rigor of manned, reciprocal, interplanetary travel we`ll need to touch on the physics and economics involved. So, as the song says, let`s get physical. Let`s get astrophysical. Let`s talk space talk.

Even our comic book leader probably has some childlike idea of the technology involved with getting humans to another planet, so I will not dwell on details of that part of the mission. But I doubt that he has the dimmest clue of what humans might do while there, or how they`ll get back home. The former is, after all, the reason they should have for going in the first place. But is it the reason George would be sending them? The American public is funding the mission. Will we be told the truth about why we`re embarking? A human mission to Mars poses daunting challenges. But engineers and scientists have proposed many workable scenarios to the technical challenges. "The biggest obstacle," says Scientific American magazine, "is the enormous cost." More on that later.

If George makes his Kennedyesque announcement this week as expected, will the obedient press corps whom he acknowledges, ask him the valid questions? Will George be prepared to answer the boring stuff like, How long will EVAs (Extra Vehicular Activities) last? After all, in hostile environments, humans are higher maintenance than machines. How will they spend that EV time? What are they going to achieve that machines alone cannot? What tools, lab equipment, and robotics will be available to them? How will the tools and science be uniquely augmented by the presence of humans? How far will these surface sojourns take the astronauts? And so on.

While on the nearby and little Lunar surface Apollo EVAs were scripted to the last detail, they were monitored in near-real-time, and they were short. Mars is huge, hostile, and very far away. So far American Mars missions - all unmanned - have catastrophically failed six out of fifteen times. Russian missions suffer a far more dismal success rate. No Mars missions - ours or anyone`s - landed and came back. There`s a pretty good chance then that on an immensely more complex manned round-trip, the astronauts will encounter unforeseen circumstances. They will have questions that need answers and need them fast. Mars at a given time can be anywhere from 4 to 20 light-minutes distant from Earth. That means if the astronauts need to ask a question of mission control it will take between four and twenty minutes for the radio signal to reach the Earth, and another four to twenty minutes for the answer to travel back to Mars. Can Astronauts in distress wait that long for their questions to be answered? Suppose Huston answers a question with another question (i.e. Apollo 13). Discourse is not an option. Mission control will have no situational awareness. Mars is not the moon. Mars is a rocky planet, dense, distant, and diverse in its topology. How much would we know about our own planet Earth if we were limited to a few short jaunts on a single part of a single continent, returning to our habitat at least every night? We`re ostensibly looking for signs of microscopic life forms on a foreign world whose land surface area is greater than all of the continents of the Earth combined. Yet, after eleven years of searching we can`t find 26, 000 liters of anthrax, 38, 000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of nerve gas, thousands of tons of VX and Sarin gas, an entire uranium plant!, and 16 scud missiles in a foreign country the size of Texas right here on Earth.

Since Mars, though smaller and less massive than Earth, is a full-on planet. Its gravity is more substantial than that of the moon. That means its escape velocity - the speed that must be achieved by a payload-carrying vehicle on its surface, and endeavoring to escape the planet`s gravity and come home is higher: about 25,000 miles per hour. It takes a pretty good sized rocket to either go that fast or get high enough above the surface to mitigate that speed when it`s carrying a payload and the planet is trying to pull it back down. Wax wings ain`t gonna cut it. Currently postulated ascent vehicles can weigh up to 30 metric tons (in Earth`s gravity). Will the crew take such a rocket with them? Will the astronauts build another Cape Kennedy on one of their EVAs? Or do we plan to leave the Astronauts on Mars? Plan? What plan?

I`m being deliberately simplistic. Imaginative answers to all of these questions have of course been postulated. But does the American public know them? Or more to the point, does Bush?

Let`s get closer to the administration`s real reason for talking about a manned mission to Mars. It`s election year. America and millions of impressionable Americans need a morale booster. While we won`t take responsibility for our tax dollars incinerating children in Iraq, we`ll be quick to assume credit for funding a Mars mission - if it works. Though the hype and buildup for a manned Mars mission will be orchestrated to peak at election time, whatever ultimately happens on or to this mission and its crew, will happen long after Bush is out of office. We`re basking this week in the success of NASA`s Mars Spirit Rover. But in short, Mr. President, what you`re asking here is much more than was demanded by Rover. In short Mr. President, before you - you of all presidents - presume to send human beings to another world affordably and bring them back alive (feats this planning-averse leadership has been unable to accomplish even on Earth), perhaps you should answer two far more simple questions. They are these. How? Why?

Methinks that an honest answer to those simple questions would reveal that George`s sudden other worldly aspirations proceed less from the achievements of a thing named Rover than they do from the influence of a thing named Rove.

THE TIMING:
I love the art and science of space travel. Not in my wildest nightmares did I imagine I`d ever be writing such an opinion as is this. But here`s the part that depresses me most - the pragmatic part. The "what could have been" part. So - just like the smart talking TV news guy - I`ll spice it up with space talk so it`s less boring, less depressing.

Immediately prior to Bush`s assumption of power, we the American people had achieved an international status and economic thrust powerful enough to lift and propel this nation to a height and velocity adequate to overcome the gravity of a future that will now be characterized by critically under funded (fueled) social programs mandatory to the life-support of our oldest and our youngest citizens. We`re in social retrograde. Having failed to achieve escape velocity, our nation is now in a terminal rate plummet from the apex of what was its most prosperous period ever to the nadir of what is already the deepest financial impact crater in its history. We`ve ablated our protective surplus of $260 billion. With that heat shield gone, the fires of reentry have already melted through $450 billion of our life support capsule. If we don`t burn up in our freefall through this economic atmosphere, with no plan for a controlled recovery, the next four years will see America crash.

To responsibly and adequately fund a manned interplanetary mission, requires nothing less than a king`s ransom. The engineering cannot be less than robust in each parameter. Every system must be deeply redundant and derated to what would be considered absurd levels for any other endeavor. Money was lavished on Project Apollo. Lavished! We`ve seen the horrific results of modest funding in even comparatively simple Soviet manned programs. We`ve seen the embarrassing failure of NASA`s naïve "Faster, Better, Cheaper" program as well. We engineers have a saying, "Faster, better, cheaper. Pick two." Evan a "Mars Direct" mission - the simplest and "cheapest" of the options so far considered - is at least a decade out. That`s 2014 at the earliest. In the intervening decade we`ll be spiraling into an unprecedented national indebtedness. In fact, on August 27th - the very day Mars passed closer to Earth than it had been in the last 50,000 years - on that very day the Congressional Budget Office announced that George W. Bush`s fiscal policies will result in a $4.4 Trillion deficit by the year 2014. Corners will be cut. Money will not be lavished in such an economic milieu. The timing couldn`t be worse. A failure would cost lives and would set back manned space programs a virtual eternity. So why now, Mr. Bush? Why now indeed.

CONCLUSION:
As the planet Mars now recedes from us at about the same time-rate-of-change that we as an earthbound nation become financially unable to sustain ourselves on our home planet, the effective cost of such a mission also increases exponentially. By that I mean the social and real scientific cost of showboating with human life. It has already become not just irrational but irresponsible and financially implausible to send Americans to the planets and back. Is this the most sensible use of already scarce scientific research money? Of course not. Sending humans to Mars now, while the nation concurrently descends deeper into debt than at any time in its history is simply not a sustainable ambition. Face it, America, that ship has sailed. A mere three years ago we as a nation were coming off the most prosperous and enlightened period in our history. We could have properly researched and responsibly funded a safe Mars mission. Tax cuts, Iraq, Homeland Security - the largest growth of government in the history of the Earth - and a yearly deficit spiraling toward the trillions have made all that a pipe dream.

At the start of last year, as Mars began its closest approach to Earth in recorded history, there was much talk coming from the White House about science. But the talk was about the science of Earth`s exploitation, not Mars`s exploration. We cannot be gods, so we`ve chosen to be monsters.

To commit to such an endeavor as a human mission to Mars as recently as 2002 would have positioned America and Americans a nation and a people apart. We`re a people and a nation apart now, but for all the wrong reasons. We`d have been a people to emulate, not fear. Which is exactly what our leaders are afraid of. Our greed-driven, neurotic, and ignorant leadership has determined that America should never be challenged by others, in any regard. So we decided instead on an expedition to Iraq. We decided instead to squander our incalculable blood and treasure in the service of subhuman ignorance, fear, and violence. Now it`s payback time. We`ve abdicated our right to dream of glory. Ignorance, ignorance and fear are to be this generation`s legacy. Their combined and bitter fruits will be our children`s future. Human travel to other worlds is but the first unfulfilled promise we`ve made to our kids and the kids of the world. Without a mid course correction, there will be many, many more.


About The Author
Dom Stasi is Chief Technology Officer for a national satellite network based in Los Angeles. He was the original chief engineer who helped design and build both HBO and MTV`s satellite infrastructures, remaining as an executive with both for much of his career. Mr. Stasi also flew aerial reconnaissance during the Cold War and was a member of the Project Apollo technical team at Grumman Aerospace. An active member of The Planetary Society, and the Center For Inquiry, he is a frequently published science and technology writer. Opinions expressed in this piece are solely his own.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-prob…

9/11 Inquiry Panel, Citing Access Hurdles, Seeks More Time
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

January 14, 2004

WASHINGTON — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks has approached the White House and congressional leaders about securing more time to continue its inquiry, panel officials said Tuesday.

Members of the commission said delays in obtaining materials from numerous agencies and constraints on access to sensitive White House documents were among the factors that had made them skeptical that the panel could produce a comprehensive report by its May 27 deadline.

The push for an extension has created new friction between the panel and the Bush administration, which is concerned that a delay could lead to the release of damaging information about its counterterrorism efforts as the presidential campaign is heating up in late summer.

Al Felzenberg, a commission spokesman, said the White House had not responded to an approach from several commissioners in recent days expressing concern that the existing deadline may be unrealistic. "They didn`t say no, they didn`t say yes," Felzenberg said.

But two other commission sources said the administration made clear it opposed an extension, and that the panel must decide whether to press its case with the public and on Capitol Hill, over White House objections. A Bush administration lawyer reached at the White House on Tuesday refused to discuss the matter; a spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.

The standoff comes at a particularly delicate moment for the commission in its relationship with the White House. Felzenberg said the panel was in the process of submitting requests to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to appear before the commission. Similar requests also will go to former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore.

And the commission is still poring over highly classified intelligence documents, known as the "president`s daily brief," which could show whether Bush was told ahead of time about the possibility of airplane attacks like those on Sept. 11, 2001. The commission recently was granted access to those documents after lengthy negotiations. The White House imposed restrictions that allow only a handful of members to see the materials.

The Bush administration initially had opposed the creation of the commission. When it dropped the objection under political pressure, the administration pressed to shorten the panel`s lifespan from the 24 months proposed in the original legislation to 18 months.

Until now, the commission has said that it was committed to producing a final report within 18 months. But officials said that members got into a heated discussion at a Jan. 5 meeting over whether the panel could hit the deadline without sacrificing the quality of its work. The prospect of a delay was first reported on Newsweek`s website this week.

Felzenberg said the commission did not take a vote or adopt a formal position on the matter, but at least one commissioner said a majority favored seeking an extension.

"Most of the people on the commission believe that additional time is necessary," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor and one of five Democrats on the 10-member panel. Ben-Veniste said he believes the commission could finish its work with an extra two months. Others are pressing for three to five months.

Another Democratic member, former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, said an extension was necessary largely because the administration had dragged its heels in providing access.

In addition to protracted negotiations over the president`s daily brief, the panel has criticized numerous federal agencies for being slow to turn over records, and has issued subpoenas to the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command and New York City to get them to comply with demands for materials.

"We`ve taken too much time dealing with access when we`ve been wanting to submerge ourselves in substance," Roemer said. "Asking for a couple more months for the most important investigation in the history of the country is, I think, a reasonable and sound request."

Felzenberg said the Republican co-chairman of the commission, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, opposes an extension. "He feels we`ve got the stuff and that we should continue to put in extra hours and try to meet the deadline," Felzenberg said. Kean was not available for comment, nor was his Democratic counterpart, former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton.

The panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is charged with investigating government agencies for their failure to detect or prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

Felzenberg said the panel had conducted more than 800 interviews but that it had "almost an equal number planned" in the coming months. The commission also has obtained more than 2 million pages of documents to examine before it produces its report.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Monterrey, Mexico, and Edwin Chen in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-employm…
EDITORIAL


More Help for Unemployed

January 14, 2004

President Bush pointed to rising business investment and a higher stock market in his weekly radio address Saturday to proclaim that "tax relief has got this economy going again." Maybe tax cuts have helped bolster the investment and finance end of the economy, but what about the 1.9 million workers who have remained jobless for more than six months and account for 22.3% of the official 8.4 million unemployed, not to mention the increasing toll of those who`ve stopped looking for work altogether?

Congress has abandoned these continued victims of a shrinking job pool. In late December, it allowed a temporary extension of 13 weeks of federally funded additional benefits to lapse. Congress should renew the extended jobless benefit immediately when it returns Tuesday.

The economy has lost 2.4 million jobs since March 2001, mainly because of the flight of manufacturing. Last month, the number of newly created jobs was down to a disastrous 1,000. The Labor Department says that only 66,000 jobs were created in the previous four months.

Treasury Secretary John W. Snow blames the lack of growth on rising productivity, but he and other officials have repeatedly said that tax cuts would quickly lead to big job growth.

Temporary extra benefits provide a vital cushion for families. A Congressional Budget Office study has shown that without them, more families would exhaust their assets and plunge into poverty. Once they`ve slipped into the ranks of the poor, it becomes that much harder for them to regain a good job. Nationally, about 100,000 workers a month are exhausting state benefits. In California alone, more than 200,000 lost their benefits from August to November.

Opponents of renewed benefits, like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), say the recovery will take care of the unemployed. But a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study reports that, since World War II, the decline in the overall number of jobs this far into a recovery is unprecedented.

The cost of enacted tax cuts, sold to the public as an engine of job creation, is $272 billion. That`s more than 20 times the annual cost of temporary benefits, which tend to be spent right away, giving a faster kick to the economy. Instead of ignoring the lack of new jobs, the administration and Congress should acknowledge that the long-term unemployed continue to need help. Tax cuts haven`t benefited them, but a modicum of assistance will.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Biotech critics at risk
Economics calls the shots in the debate
Mark Dowie
Sunday, January 11, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/INGHT44JFS1.DTL


Four biologists from Europe and North America met face to face for the first time on the UC Berkeley campus last month.

Although none of them is particularly famous as a scientist -- not one Nobel among them -- they know each other`s names and work as well as if they had been working together for 10 years in the same laboratory. They share a painful experience.

Between 1999 and 2001, unbeknownst to the others, each made a simple but dramatic discovery that challenged the catechism of the same powerful industry -- biotechnology -- that by then had become the handmaiden of industrial agriculture and the darling of venture capitalists, who are still hoping they have invested their most recent billions in "the next big thing."

If any one of the experiments of these four scientists is proved through replication to be valid, the already troubled agricultural arm of biotech will be in truly dire straits. No one knows that better than Monsanto, Sygenta and other biotech firms that have so aggressively attacked the four discoveries in question.

When he was the principal scientific officer of the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, Hungarian citizen Arpad Pusztai fed transgenically modified potatoes to rodents in one of the few experiments that have ever tested the safety of genetically modified food in animals or humans. Almost immediately, the rats displayed tissue and immunological damage.

After he reported his findings, which eventually underwent peer review and were published in the United Kingdom`s leading medical journal, Lancet, Pusztai`s home was burglarized and his research files taken.

Soon thereafter, he was fired from his job at Rowett, and he has since suffered an orchestrated international campaign of discreditation, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair played an active role.

While Pusztai was fighting for his professional life, Cornell Professor John Losey was patiently dusting milkweed leaves with genetically modified corn pollen. When monarch butterfly larvae that ate the leaves died in significant numbers (while a control group fed nongenetically modified pollen all survived), Losey was not particularly surprised.

The new gene patched into the butterfly`s genome was inserted to produce an internal pesticide, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), intended to attack and kill the corn borer and some particularly troublesome moth caterpillars.

What did surprise Losey was the vehement attack on his study that followed from Novartis and Monsanto, their open attempts to discredit his work and the extent to which mass media leapt to their support. Losey is still at Cornell, where his future seems secure.

Not true of Ignacio Chapela, a microbial ecologist in the plant sciences department at UC Berkeley. In 2000, Chapela discovered that pollen had drifted several miles from a field of genetically modified corn in Chiapas into the remote mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico, landing in the last reserve of biodiverse maize in the world.

If genes from the rogue pollen actually penetrated the DNA of traditional crops, they could potentially eliminate maize biodiversity forever. In his report, Chapela cautiously stated that this indeed might have happened. He expressed that sentiment in a peer-reviewed study published by Nature in November 2001.

After an aggressive public relations campaign mounted for Monsanto by the Bivings Group, a global PR firm that began with a vicious e-mail attack mounted by two "scientists" who turned out to be fictitious, Nature editors did something they had never done in their 133 years of existence. They published a cautious partial retraction of the Chapela report. Largely on the strength of that retraction, Chapela was recently denied tenure at UC Berkeley and informed that he would not be reoffered his teaching assignment in the fall.

When Tyrone Hayes, a UC Berkeley endocrinologist specializing in amphibian development, exposed young frogs in his lab to very small doses of the herbicide Atrazine, they first failed to develop normal larynxes and later displayed serious reproductive problems (males became hermaphrodites), suggesting that Atrazine might be an endocrine disrupter.

Hayes` subsequent experience differed slightly from the other panelists`, but was no less troubling to academic scientists. As soon as word of Hayes` findings reached Sygenta Corp. (formerly Novartis) and its contractor, Ecorisk Inc., attempts were made to stall his research. Funding was withheld. It was a critical time, as the EPA was close to making a final ruling on Atrazine. Hermaphroditic frogs would not help Sygenta`s cause.

Hayes continued the research with his own funds and found more of the same results, whereupon Sygenta offered him $2 million to continue his research "in a private setting." A committed teacher with a lab full of loyal students, Hayes declined the offer and proceeded with research that he knew had to remain in public domain.

This time he found damaging developmental effects of Atrazine at even lower levels (0.1 parts per billion). When his work appeared in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sygenta attacked the study and claimed that three other labs it contracted had been unable to duplicate Hayes` results.

Hayes, who keeps his head down on the Berkeley campus, has obtained tenure and continues to teach. But his studies that could affect approval of the most widely used chemical in U.S. agriculture are being stifled at every turn.

In a public conversation attended by 500 people and Webcast to 4,000 more worldwide recently on the Berkeley campus, Pusztai, Losey, Hayes and Chapela shared their experiences and together explored ways to prevent similar fates from ever happening to their peers. Their similar stories provide a unique window into a disturbing trend in modern science.

None of the four complained that his science had been challenged, although in each case it had. All science is and should be challenged. No one knows that better than a practicing scientist, who also knows that if tenure depended on a perfect experimental record, there would be very few tenured scientists anywhere in the world.

These four men were not attacked because of flawed or imperfect experiments but because the findings of their work have a potential economic effect. The sad part is that the academies and other allegedly independent institutions that once defended scientific freedom and protected employees like Hayes, Chapela, Losey and Pusztai are abandoning them to the wolves of commerce, the brands of which are being engraved over the entrances to a disturbing number of university labs.

Mark Dowie lives in Point Reyes and teaches a science writing class at UC Graduate School of Journalism.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Mars Needs Dim Republicans
Dubya dons a shiny spacesuit, dreams of spending billions to meet little green men. The nation cringes
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/14/notes011404.DTL



Oh right like this is exactly what we need.


Let us imagine the discussion: "Boys, the nation`s in massive reeling record-breaking debt and morale`s at an all-time low and disposable American soldiers are dying brutal horrific deaths every day over nothing at all except our greed and flagrant cronyism and corporate petrochemical profiteering.

"Our cities are gasping and health care is a joke and we`ve mauled Medicare beyond recognition, and we`re plundering the living hell out of Social Security, the last remaining stable and sound fund left, to try and shore up our rapacious and gluttonous spending.

"There are no WMDs and our former allies openly resent us and the poll ratings are slipping and the big glops of warmongering lies are drying like blood stains into a carpet. And it`s an election year. Damn.

"What`s to be done? What could rally a wary country during its time of humiliated need and force-fed ignorance? What could turn this troubled nation around in the face of oily corporate war and fiscal gluttony and environmental savagery?

"Why, neato space stations on the moon, and sending men to Mars, that`s what!"

Yes indeed. Leave it to BushCo to try and slap an astronomically expensive, useless balm on the nation`s gaping wounds by vainly attempting to recapture some of that droning faux-`50s and -`60s nostalgia no one really asked for.

Remember that time? The "greatest generation"? A time when white-bread repressed often unhappily married segregationist America gathered `round the ol` black-and-white to gaze in passionate wonder at the images beamed back from the Apollo landings?

What a time it was. Don`t you want some of that sense of desperate hopefulness back? Of course you do. Got $500 billion to pay for it? Hey, that was the cost estimate for a similar man-on-Mars scheme when Dubya Sr. proposed it in 1989, just before he was promptly laughed off the fiscal stage.

Of course, like every obscene BushCo proposal, there was never a mention of how NASA could ever possibly pay for such a venture, and no mention of how BushCo could rape the Treasury that much further to fund random exercises in ridiculous excess. Oh well.

Look at it this way. Dubya will, by every account, go down as the worst environmental president in American history. He will also be remembered as the most blindly warmongering president and the least articulate president and the most corporate-shilling president and the most flagrantly fraudulent and borderline treasonous president.

And, hence, you can bet your big snakeskin Texas cowboy boots he wants this "big ol` Mars thingy" to be some sort of, you know, legacy. He wants his name in the history books as the one who decided to meet the little green men. He wants to stick a flag in the rusty planet and claim it in the name of, you kow, Ronald Reagan.

This from a man who never cared a whit for space exploration in his entire spoon-fed career, a man who never even once visited the famed Johnson Space Center in Houston while serving as Texas governor. And just know half the impulse for this inane new idea is so Shrub can get himself flown to the space-shuttle launch pad and have his picture taken in a shiny spacesuit. How cute.

It`s got that reek. It`s got that reek of typical macho Republican election-year BS, the sort of hollow grandiose chest thumping that stains so many BushCo PR stunts, all war and guns and rockets and oil and big slabs of chemically blasted hormone injected semirancid Texas beef (hey, it`s what`s for dinner).

Look. NASA is wonderful. Space exploration is magnificent and essential and we learn enormous amounts about ourselves in the process. The Spirit rover on Mars right now? Breathtaking.

Astounding new technologies are developed during major NASA missions, ideas that trickle down into the cultural mainstream and make life, if not easier, then at least more interesting, or lighter, or thinner, or edible at temperatures down to minus 450 degrees with a battery pack that lasts 127 hours and a new infrared extrasensory ink that can be read by blind comatose monkeys. Space is good.

But look again. Our schools are desperate. The Wal-Mart/SUV mentality is a national cancer. Basic services nationwide are being starved and shut down as cities scramble for fiscal scraps. John Ashcroft still has a job.

The national treasury has been looted and plundered like never before in American history, toppling from a record surplus to a record deficit in a little over three years, with 3.1 million newly unemployed Americans as a bitter kicker. That tiny blip of an economic "recovery" you keep reading about? Tell that to your unemployed neighbors.

And it`s just shy of appalling that BushCo is suddenly all atwitter over a massive, impossible, ridiculously expensive scheme to send a manned mission to Mars, when any 5-year-old could come up with roughly 2,323 more vital and needful areas where such huge sums of money could be spent. Can you think of five, just off the top of your head, as you step around that homeless person? Damn right you can.

Do we need to recall that sucker-punch $87 bil BushCo reamed through Congress to help pay for our continued occupation of Iraq, a nation that doesn`t want us and was never a threat to us and that is now equaling Vietnam in costs, both fiscal and humanitarian? Does Mars mean we get to bring our troops home and save those budget-gutting billions and redirect them toward something progressive? One guess.

Maybe we should just shrug it off. Just dismiss it as yet another a silly exercise in political ego and bogus machismo. After all, it`s all about big dumb gesture, all about trying to cover up appalling atrocities and insulting policy in an election year -- much like suddenly pretending to care about immigrants, or health care, or gay rights, when your party defines itself as the world headquarters of homophobic pro-corporate isolationism.

This is what it boils down to, really: a big joke. There will be no men on Mars in 2020. There will be no massive, super-keen space station on the moon anytime soon. Even BushCo`s own financial advisers openly cringe when the Mumbly One tosses up such an obvious and impossibly costly PR stunt, one so clearly designed to instill a false sense of hope and "America rules!" faux patriotism in a country heavily drugged on fear and false righteousness.

All well and good, right? All just silly politics as usual, really, just so much election-year flatulence from the administration that brought you the New Vietnam.

That is, until you realize who the joke is on.


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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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$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Deep Thought]

@ Joerver
An dieser Stelle moechte ich Dich ganz herzlich fuer Deine unermuedliche Arbeit danke, die bei mir fuer so viel Heiterkeit und Nachdenklichkeit sorgte.

Weiter So !

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DT
Danke für das Lob.
Solange es mir Spass macht, werde ich weiter die Internet-Seiten durchstöbern.

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Surreal moments serving a mythological president
By Marian Wilkinson, Herald Correspondent in Washington
January 15, 2004

The weekend after September 11, George Bush`s former Treasury secretary, Paul O`Neill, sat in a leather armchair at Camp David, the presidential retreat, devouring a pile of intelligence documents on al-Qaeda handed out by the CIA boss, George Tenet.

A two-day crisis meeting of Mr Bush`s senior advisers had finally wound up. The President had gone to bed.

Across the room, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was singing hymns, accompanied on the piano by the Christian fundamentalist Attorney-General, John Ashcroft.

Leafing through the CIA documents, Mr O`Neill was astonished to read plans for covert assassinations around the globe designed to remove opponents of the US Government. The plans had virtually no civilian checks and balances.

"What I was thinking is, `I hope the President really reads this carefully`, Mr O`Neill said. "It`s kind of his job. You can`t forfeit this much responsibility to unelected individuals. But I knew he wouldn`t."

Mr O`Neill`s account of that famous cabinet meeting is just one of many surreal episodes he recalls from his two-year tenure as Mr Bush`s top economic official in The Price of Loyalty, the controversial new book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Ron Suskind. But there are many similar moments in the 328-page book on Mr O`Neill published on Tuesday with the subtitle: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O`Neill.

Mr O`Neill`s story, backed up by thousands of pages of documents, is the first inside account by a top Bush Administration official to strip away the carefully crafted mythology surrounding Mr Bush as a "can-do" president. It reveals what many long suspected, that Mr Bush is often disengaged from policy debates, lacks intellectual rigour, runs on gut instinct and is heavily influenced by conservative ideological advisers.

Describing the book as "sour grapes", the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has denied that he telephoned Mr O`Neill after hearing about plans for the book in an effort to persuade his former colleague and long-time friend not to do it.

While Mr O`Neill`s revelations are dismissed by White House officials as the revenge of a sacked cabinet officer, at least some of his tales and anecdotes have a ring of truth to them. Like the President describing his love of "comfort food" - homemade chicken noodle soup and sandwiches on freshly baked bread. When Mrs O`Neill politely asked what comfort food his mother, Barbara Bush, cooked, George Bush replied bluntly: "You got to be kiddin`. My mother never cooked. The woman had frostbite on her fingers. Everything [was] right out of the freezer."

On the eve of the book`s release, Mr O`Neill said he did not believe the White House would punish him "for telling the truth" and he was "too old and too rich" to be threatened. Sure. But after a barrage of attacks from the White House and having become the target of a Treasury investigation into whether he leaked classified documents to Suskind, Mr O`Neill has been backpedalling.

He told NBC`s Today program he regretted having described the President as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people". He also agreed with Mr Rumsfeld that Mr Bush`s policy from day one that Saddam Hussein should be removed had indeed also been Bill Clinton`s policy.

But on whether that policy justified a war, Mr O`Neill insisted that he never saw "concrete evidence" that Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction before the war.

"That also doesn`t make a point that we shouldn`t have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. I`m not making that case," Mr O`Neill said.

"I`m making a really clear case that I know the difference between evidence and what is illusion and assertion and the rest. That`s my point."


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/14/1073877904634.html

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Danish Tests Show Arms Found in Iraq Not Chemical
Wed January 14, 2004 12:24 PM ET

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The Danish Army said on Wednesday initial tests showed a cache of mortar rounds found buried in Iraq on January 9 did not contain any chemical substances as originally suspected.
"The expert group from the Iraq Survey Group have investigated five ... and none of them have showed any trace of chemical substances," the Danish Army Operational Command said in a statement.

Samples would be sent to the United States for further tests and the results were expected within three to five days, the command said.

Denmark said its troops found the 36 mortar shells buried in southern Iraq and that early examination had suggested they could contain blister gas.

The shells had been buried for at least 10 years, it said.

Blister gas, an illegal weapon which Saddam Hussein said he had destroyed, was used extensively against the Iranians during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

President Bush ordered U.S.-led forces to invade Iraq after accusing Saddam of possessing weapons of mass destruction. No such arms have been found so far.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
War News for January 14, 2004 Draft

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Car bomb kills two civilians, wounds 14 Iraqi policemen in Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: ICDC soldier killed in firefight near Tikrit.

Bring `em on: Eight Iraqis reported killed in firefight with US troops in Samarra.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi policeman killed in attack on police checkpoint in Ramadi. (Last Paragraph.)

Bring ‘em on: US military administrators attacked during meeting with local leaders in Kirkuk.

CENTCOM reports one US soldier died in a "non-hostile incident" in Mosul.

US troops arrest family members of Iraqi fugitive.

India abandons plan to establish military hospital in Najaf. “Well-placed Government officials attribute the decision to the lack of confidence in the security situation in Iraq.”

Bremer’s CPA concocts a recipe for continued unrest.

Tribal leader in Tikrit warns US raids inflame tensions.

Another Bush lie exposed. “The document provides a second piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Hussein`s regime and al Qaeda terrorists. CIA interrogators already have elicited from the top al Qaeda officials in custody that, before the U.S.-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work with Hussein.”

Commentary

Opinion: O’Neill snatched the covers off Lieutenant AWOL. “In a move that some think was designed to intimidate, the Treasury Department has announced that it will investigate whether O`Neill broke the law by taking and then releasing classified documents to Ron Suskind, author of the book about the former Cabinet member.” Number of days before DOJ initiated an investigation after Robert Novak blew the cover of a CIA agent: 74. Number of days before Treasury initiated an investigation of O’Neill: One. “Nuff said.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Georgia soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Minnesota soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Oregon soldier wounded in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:53 AM
Comments (4)

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SCHWARZENEGGER ORDERS BREAST IMPLANT INSPECTIONS

Names Self Inspector-in-Chief

Calling silicone breast implants “the biggest problem facing California today,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today ordered mandatory silicone breast implant inspections for every woman in California.

“The time has come to say ‘hasta la vista’ to fake breasts,” Governor Schwarzenegger said, introducing a bill calling for silicone inspection teams to fan out across the state.

With a towering budget deficit plaguing California, many observers in Sacramento were surprised that Mr. Schwarzenegger would name fake breasts the most worrisome problem on his agenda.

But the Governor today declared his commitment to cracking down on what he called California’s “fake breast epidemic,” naming himself California’s “breast inspector-in-chief.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger then led a team of breast inspectors through southern California’s San Fernando Valley, which the Governor has derided as “Silicone Valley” in recent speeches.

Wearing a baseball cap reading, “Fake Breast Inspector #1,” Governor Schwarzenegger pounded on doors, shouting, “This is your Governor! Show me your breasts!,” causing many residents to bolt their doors and phone the authorities.

While opposition groups howled that the fake-breast-implant-inspection regime was improper and might even be unconstitutional, the Governor remained undaunted.

“We just need more time,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “The inspections are working.”

In other news, `GOVERNOR ARNOLD: A Photodiary of His First 100 Days in Office` arrives in bookstores TODAY!

The critics are raving about this latest hit book from the The Borowitz Report, chronicling Governor Schwarzenegger’s first 100 days in doctored photos and even faker captions. Go to www.amazon.com and buy GOVERNOR ARNOLD today for only $9.95!

“No-holds-barred – and I mean NONE.” -- Daily Variety
“Hot Book Pick.” – US Weekly

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Suicides of U.S. Troops Rising in Iraq -Pentagon
Wed January 14, 2004 03:25 PM ET

By Charles Aldinger
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At least 21 U.S. troops have committed suicide in Iraq, a growing toll that represents one of every seven American "non-hostile" deaths since the war began last March, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

"Fighting this kind of war is clearly going to be stressful for some people," Assistant Defense Secretary for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder told reporters in an interview.

He said the military was taking steps to prevent suicides, ascribed by one defense analyst to a perception among young soldiers that the U.S. force in Iraq was spread thin and faced an endless task.

"What you`re really talking about here more than anything else is the perception that the future just looks indefinite and there are not enough troops coming in. It can look awfully bleak for an awful long time," said Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel who now works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Winkenwerder said that of 21 confirmed suicides during the past year associated with the war in Iraq, 18 were in the Army and three others in the Navy and Marine Corps.

The suicide toll is probably higher than 21 because some "non-hostile" deaths are still being investigated, he added.

14 PERCENT OF `NON-HOSTILE` DEATHS

A total of 496 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq since the war began last March, 343 of them in combat and 153 in non-hostile incidents ranging from accidents to suicide, according to the Pentagon.

The 21 suicides represent nearly 14 percent of non-hostile deaths reported by the military, an increase over the proportion of 11 percent as of three months ago when the suicide number totaled 13.

Winkenwerder added that that nearly 400 troops had been evacuated from Iraq for stress-related problems.

The United States has about 123,000 troops in Iraq. The Pentagon plans to reduce that to about 110,000 by summer as it rotates those in the country home for rest.

Winkenwerder said the military was concerned over the suicides and was moving to deal with combat stress and other emotional problems triggered by armed conflict.

The military`s responses to stress problems now include toll-free telephone numbers for troops to call for help as well as an increased number of military psychiatric specialists in Iraq to deal with problems before they become critical.

"Are those individuals who need (stress) support getting it? Are they being identified?," Winkenwerder asked. "We believe `yes."`

Winkenwerder suggested that the Army had become more aware of stress after several domestic murders involving soldiers who returned to their base in North Carolina from Afghanistan in 2002.

Authorities say four soldiers at Fort Bragg killed their wives in June and July of 2002. Three of the cases involved Special Operations soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Two of the soldiers committed suicide and the other two were charged with murder. A fifth case involved a Special Forces major who was killed, with his wife charged with murder.

A November 2002 Army report concluded that the stress put on military families by frequent separations as the soldiers trained and fought may have contributed to the killings.

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January 14, 2004
Former Finance Chief of Enron Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy
By KURT EICHENWALD and KIRK SEMPLE

Andrew S. Fastow, the former chief financial officer of Enron, pleaded guilty today to two counts of conspiracy for his involvement in the company`s collapse.

Under the plea deal, Mr. Fastow would be sentenced to at least 10 years in prison and would be required to cooperate with the federal government`s continuing investigation.

Mr. Fastow also agreed to forfeit $23.8 million in assets, most of which were previously frozen by federal authorities.

Mr. Fastow`s wife, Lea, is also expected to plead guilty later today on a single tax charge. Under her plea agreement, Mrs. Fastow would serve at least five months in prison.

The couple had been expected to enter their guilty pleas in Federal District Court in Houston last Thursday, but the plans were upended after Judge David Hittner, who was hearing Mrs. Fastow`s case, made a series of comments suggesting he was deeply uncomfortable with the length of her prison term.

A judge does not have to accept the terms of a plea deal, and Judge Hittner could sentence Mrs. Fastow to as much as 16 months, at which point she would have the right to withdraw her plea.

With Mrs. Fastow merely an asterisk in the Enron case — the government`s main interest is the cooperation of her husband — Judge Hittner`s comments sent defense lawyers back to the negotiating table, seeking terms that could result in the dismissal of the case against her. They argued that without such a deal, the cooperation of Mr. Fastow might slip away. But the government refused to agree to the terms Mrs. Fastow was seeking, causing the negotiations to collapse on Friday.

The discussions resumed this week, with the Fastows ultimately agreeing to take virtually the original deals, with only small changes in Mrs. Fastow`s deal, people involved in the case said. But Mrs. Fastow will still be required to plead guilty to a single felony count, they said; at one point last week, prosecutors raised the possibility of allowing her to plead to a misdemeanor, but that option never turned into a formal offer.

The plea deals clear the way for Mr. Fastow, long considered a central figure in the criminal investigation into the Enron collapse, to provide evidence and testimony against other executives in the case.

As part of his effort to obtain a plea deal, Mr. Fastow has already provided evidence against other former Enron executives. Some of the information he offered was used in writing a criminal complaint that was set to be filed last week against Enron`s former chief accounting officer, Richard A. Causey, people involved in the case said. The collapse of the Fastow negotiations, however, led to a delay in those plans. There has been no indication of when, or if, the government planned to revive that complaint.

In his plea negotiations, Mr. Fastow also offered evidence about the involvement of Jeffrey K. Skilling, Enron`s former chief executive, in certain accounting issues, people involved in the case said. But it is not clear whether that information would suggest or sustain criminal charges.

Mr. Fastow also plays significant roles in criminal cases involving other defendants who have already been charged. If Mr. Fastow pleads as expected, those other cases are sure to feature him as a primary government witness.

Mr. Fastow — who was implicated in wrongdoing by a onetime friend and subordinate, Michael J. Kopper — has long been viewed as a means for prosecutors into the final stages of the Enron investigation. Given the strength of the case against Mr. Fastow, prosecutors had more leverage over him than over any other senior Enron executive. In the end, he was viewed as the man most likely to succumb to pressure to reveal everything he saw in the executive suites.

The criminal charges against Mr. Fastow — which include fraud, money laundering and conspiracy — depict him as a facilitator who manipulated accounting and financial techniques to allow Enron to hide its many business failings, even while enriching himself at the company`s expense. His wife was charged with conspiracy and tax violations for aiding him in disguising secret income he received as payment from a loan to Mr. Kopper.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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January 14, 2004
Kennedy Denounces Bush on Planning for Iraq War
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 — Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts issued a scathing denunciation today of the Bush administration`s planning for the Iraq war, saying the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was misrepresented, was in part political, and could represent "one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries" of American foreign policy.

Mr. Kennedy said the administration, by taking the nation into a war he said was avoidable, had "put the state of our union at risk" — costing lives, overstretching the military and diverting attention from the war on terror.

The comments were noteworthy not only for their virulence in coming from a senior Democratic spokesman. They also built on recent comments by Paul H. O`Neill, the former Treasury secretary. Mr. Kennedy, citing Mr. O`Neill`s words as confirmation, argued that the administration had begun moving toward war with Iraq long before it shared that decision with the public.

The Bush administration, in response to Mr. O`Neill`s comments, has noted that "regime change" in Iraq has been United States policy since 1998, under President Bill Clinton.

But Mr. Kennedy said there was nothing in the Clinton policy to stipulate war as the necessary means to effect such change.

Mr. Kennedy`s earlier criticism on Iraq had paved the way for Democratic presidential candidates to take a less cautious tone in assailing a still-popular president.

The Massachusetts senator said today that conservative aides surrounding Mr. Bush — led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Mr. Kennedy called "the axis of war" — had overwhelmed objections from some in the administration, like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who felt Mr. Hussein could be contained.

Mr. Kennedy said the administration had used "scare tactics" and a "gross abuse of intelligence" to gain Congressional approval and public support for war with Iraq, bringing it to a vote in September 2002, two months before midterm elections, although, he said, it could as easily have been announced earlier.

"The politics of the timing is obvious," Mr. Kennedy said.

When Mr. Bush said in his State of the Union address a year ago that Iraq reportedly had sought African uranium, the administration knew this was false, Mr. Kennedy said. "Has any other State of the Union address ever been so disgraced by such blatant falsehood?" he asked.

He also asserted that the administration`s plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people by the end of June, while pushing Afghanistan for elections, was "intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country."

Mr. Kennedy spoke before a meeting of the Center for American Progress, a self-billed nonpartisan research and educational institute headed by John Podesta, who was President Clinton`s chief of staff.

Mr. Kennedy began lashing out at the administration`s Iraq policy in mid-September, as the White House was seeking $87 billion for war and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq. He then called Mr. Bush`s Iraq policy "a fraud" and "a colossal failure."

While Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Bush have cooperated on some major legislative initiatives, including education reform and a plan to help older Americans pay for prescription drugs, the senator did not hold back today, describing the administration as "breathtakingly arrogant" and "vindictive and mean-spirited."

"The election," he concluded, "cannot come too soon."

Mr. Kennedy`s speech came as the nomination race has heated up both in Iowa, which begins the national nominating process on Monday with Democratic caucuses, and New Hampshire, which will stage the first primary election eight days later.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, has seen his lead in both states steadily decline in recent days, according to polls.

The Iowa contest has been particularly volatile, with "major movement every day," according to the pollster John Zogby.

The latest daily sounding by his organization found that support for Dr. Dean had fallen by 4 percentage points to 24 percent, while Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had gained 4 points to tie Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri at 21 percent. That put both Kerry and Gephardt within the poll`s margin of error, 4.5 percent, of Dr. Dean.

Thirteen percent of likely caucus-goers surveyed said they had yet to select a candidate.

In New Hampshire, three polls showed Dr. Dean with a shrinking, but apparently still commanding lead over the rising Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO.

An independent poll by the American Research Group Inc. gave Dr. Dean 34 percent support to 20 percent for General Clark in the three days that ended Monday. But private polling by two campaigns showed that a onetime Dean lead of 25 percentage points had fallen to single digits, The Associated Press reported.

Dr. Dean is expected to receive visible support, if not a formal endorsement, from former President Jimmy Carter on Sunday.

Dean aides said the two would appear together in Mr. Carter`s hometown of Plains, Ga., and that the former president would praise the former Vermont governor but stop short of an official endorsement.

Like Dr. Dean, Mr. Carter began his own presidential nomination bid, in 1976, as a governor with little national name recognition.

Dr. Dean has already lined up key endorsements, led by those of former Vice President Al Gore and Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator who sought the party`s presidential nomination four years ago.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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The Slaughter Continues...

Articles / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 14, 2004 - 03:58 PM
Continuing Slaughter of Iraqi Civilians, Police, and US Soldiers

Today on CBS television, Paul Bremer boasted, "In the last three or four weeks we`ve seen a rather dramatic reduction in the number of attacks on the coalition. They are down by about 50 percent,"

I read this quote to my friend Hamoudi here in Baghdad. He raises his eyebrows and says,

“But attacks on helicopters has been up 100%. The resistance is finding it easier to attack the helicopters than the ground patrols. Attacks are not decreasing, they are changing. Doesn’t Mr. Bremer see this?”


Iraqi girl with shrapnel head wound from US gunfire

I don’t know if the attacks on helicopters has risen 100%, but I do know that 4 have been shot down in the last 2 weeks. And that just a few days ago the CPA admitted to over 20 attacks per day on occupation forces. And that, on average, is at least 1 US soldier dying per day in Iraq, with several more wounded.

At the same time, tens of thousands of US troops are being involuntarily retained past their scheduled departures from the US military.

But my Iraqi friends could really care less about Mr. Bremer’s news of a decrease in attacks on occupation forces. Why? Because it has only meant an increase in attacks on Iraqi Police and Iraqi civilians.


US Occupation troops standing watch in Iraq

While the Governor of Iraq was boasting of this supposed success we receive news this morning of a suicide car bomb in Baquba which exploded at a police station, killing at least two people and wounding 14. A policeman said he watched a white car speed towards the police station, then explode in a powerful blast that knocked down scores of people.

This atrocity is only the most recent of a horrible pattern that has emerged. For car bomb attacks on police stations in Baquba and a town near it in November killed 16 people. 8 people died in a car bomb at a restaurant in Baghdad on New Years Eve. Last Friday a bomb strapped on a bicycle exploded near a mosque in Baquba killing 6 people.

Despite the spin given by Governor Bremer, the situation on the ground in Iraq today is horrendous, and Iraqi civilians, Iraqi Police, and US troops are all paying the price with their blood.

The problems here are not confined to Baghdad and the so-called, ‘Sunni Triangle.’ In the south, the largely Shiite Muslim population who the US hopes to be supportive of the occupation, has erupted in riots in Kut, Amarra and several other cities protesting the lack of jobs. Iraqi Police, British and Ukrainian Soldiers have killed several civilians at these protests.

The governor of the province where Kut is located, Ni’mat Sultan Pasha, resigned from his position with the CPA as the result of the unemployment riots.

At the same time Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, has said he opposes the American plan for creating a transitional government by July 1st.


Iraqi boy wounded by US gunfire

Monday night found another horrible killing of innocent Iraqis, when a man and a 10 year old boy were killed by American soldiers who shot their car when a roadside bomb went off near a US patrol. The boy’s mother, aunt and two of his siblings were injured and taken to local hospitals.

My friend Rana was at the scene, and told me of seeing a candy bar that the boy, Mustafa was eating when his car was riddled with bullets by the Americans.

“It was horrible. There was a piece of chocolate on the ground with pieces of his brain stuck to it.”

An Iraqi policeman said, “You know the truth? I`ll tell you the truth. The Americans did this. I know after this conversation they will fire me from my job, but that`s what happened."

In the hospital where the wounded were taken, an Iraqi woman yelled,

“God curse the Americans! God curse those who brought them to us!”

By the end that day, in violence around the country involving the American military, an American soldier and at least 9 Iraqis had been killed, as well as 10 Iraqis and 2 American soldiers wounded.

Meanwhile, yesterday in Mexico George Bush told reporters of his plans to give NASA $1 Billion over the next several years for space exploration. "The spirit is going to be one of continued exploration ... seeking new horizons and investing in a program that ... meets that objective," he said.



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This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News…

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"Haven`t We Already Given Money To Rich People," Asks Puppet Bush?
"The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter [Ron Suskind] draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.

But the main source of the book was [former Bush Sec. of Treasury] Paul O`Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports....

"The thing that`s most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said X during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing Y," says Suskind. "Not just saying Y, but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election."

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress. But O`Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O`Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

"Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand," says Suskind. "He says, `You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don`t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.` O`Neill is speechless."

"It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation`s resources to improve the condition of our society," says ONeill. "And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."

" Did he think it was irresponsible? Well, it`s for sure not what I would have done," says ONeill.

The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says ONeil....

Everything came to a head for O`Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.

"It`s a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there," says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.

He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.

"He asks, `Haven`t we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut`s gonna do it again,`" says Suskind.

"He says, `Didnt we already, why are we doing it again?` Now, his advisers, they say, `Well Mr. President, the upper class, they`re the entrepreneurs. That`s the standard response.` And the president kind of goes, `OK.` That`s their response. And then, he comes back to it again. `Well, shouldn`t we be giving money to the middle, won`t people be able to say, `You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?`"

But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.

"Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. `Stick to principle. Stick to principle.` He says it over and over again," says Suskind. "Dont waver."

In the end, the president didn`t. And nine days after that meeting in which O`Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.

With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O`Neill maintains he was in the right. --60 Minutes, 01.11.04

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Saddam wanted jihadists kept at arm`s length
Julian Borger in Washington and Richard Norton Taylor
Thursday January 15, 2004
The Guardian

From his hideout after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein warned the insurgency against working too closely with "jihadists" who had come to fight the US-led occupation, according to a document reported yesterday.

An order signed by the ousted leader, pointing out the dangers of jihadists, was found among documents in the briefcase with him when he was captured last month, according to the New York Times. The intelligence report based on the document is said to be circulating in the administration. The directive expressed Saddam`s fears that the Islamists would hijack the insurgency for their own ends, and were not interested in restoring the Ba`athist regime. He instructs leaders of the insurgency not to allow the alliance to become too close.

The document further undermines pre-war and post-war claims by President George Bush`s administration that Saddam had close links with Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida. Instead, it confirmed the long-held belief of CIA analysts and British intelligence that the two - one a secular dictator, the other a religious zealot - mistrusted each other deeply, and that Saddam would have been loath to share any weapons secrets he might have had with a group he could not control.

"He never trusted the Islamists. He never cooperated with Osama. This rings absolutely true," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert at the National Defence University.

The CIA`s deputy director, John McLaughlin, recently said that the agency believed that 90% of the insurgents were former Ba`ath party loyalists. However, foreign jihadists are believed to have brought with them suicide tactics, and are cooperating with Ba`athists at least at street level. The document suggests the cooperation is new and improvised.

A month before going to war, President Bush told Americans: "Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct, and continuing ties to terrorist networks ... Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaida have met at least eight times since the early 1990s Iraq has also provided al-Qaida with chemical and biological weapons training."

Vice-president Dick Cheney repeated claims of the link, even after the fall of Baghdad.

CIA officials who tracked al-Qaida in the 1990s say they believe there were meetings between Iraqi intelligence and the al-Qaida leadership in Sudan and in Afghanistan, but they did not lead to significant cooperation.

Ms Yaphe said: "You`re Saddam and you have an intelligence service. Wouldn`t you want to meet these people and see if you could use them, figure out what they want, suborn them? It doesn`t mean you`re working together."

Claims of a direct link between the September 11 hijackers and the Saddam regime remain unproved.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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A rebel Republican
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 15, 2004
The Guardian

One of the tacit operating assumptions of the Bush administration is that the checks and balances have been checked. But that implacable wall has been cracked by an insider`s surprising confessions. The former treasury secretary Paul O`Neill, fired and forgotten, mild-mannered and grey, appears an unlikely dissident. He was, after all, the CEO of Alcoa, a pillar of the Republican establishment.

More is involved with him than pride and pique. While O`Neill records slights and is dismissed by some as a dotty reject, he does more than tell a few tales in the book The Price of Loyalty. The attack on him, consistent with Bush efforts to intimidate anyone who challenges the official version, underscores the inherent fragility of Bush`s public persona, upon which rests his popularity. Bush`s greatest political asset is his image as a masterful commander in chief who happens to be a nice man. Alongside him, Dick Cheney is viewed as the sagacious Nestor.

O`Neill`s persuasiveness and the long-term damage he does to these icons comes from his years in the Nixon and Ford administrations and his first-hand critique of a government radically unlike any before, especially Republican ones. O`Neill`s threat is to a president unusually dependent in an election campaign on fear and credibility to sustain a sense of power and inevitability. He sounds an alarm against an unfit president who lacks "credibility with his most senior officials", behind whom looms a dark "puppeteer", as O`Neill calls the vice-president, and a closed cabal.

Invading Iraq was on the agenda of the first "principals" meeting of the National Security Council (NSC), of which O`Neill was a member, months before September 11, and relentlessly pushed. Regressive tax cuts creating massive deficits were implemented without economic justification as "the administration has managed to kill the whys at every turn".

When the political team distorts basic economic numbers on tax cuts and inserts them into the 2001 state of the union address, O`Neill yells: "This is complete bullshit!" It is "something that knowledgeable people in the US government knew to be false". The business executive is shocked at the derogation of policy in favour of corporate interests - a "combination of confidentiality and influence by powerful interested parties". He learns that moderate Republicans like him; that Christie Whitman, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, sees her efforts to affirm policy on global warming "slaughtered" by Cheney and the politicos; and that secretary of state Colin Powell "may have been there, in large part, as cover".

Bush appears as a bully, using nicknames to demean people; he is querulous (when Bush waits impatiently for a cheeseburger, he summons his chief of staff. "`You`re the chief of staff. You think you`re up to getting us some cheeseburgers?` ... He all but raced out of the room"); he is manipulated ("`Stick to principle` is another phrase that has a tonic effect on Bush" - used by his senior adviser Karl Rove to push for additional tax cuts); he is incurious; and, above all, he is intently political. When Bush holds forth it is often to show that he`s not Clinton. He informs his NSC that on Middle East peace "Clinton overreached", but that he will take Ariel Sharon "at face value" and will not commit himself to the peace process: "I think it`s time to pull out of that situation." Powell is "startled".

The "inscrutable" Cheney emerges as the power behind the throne, orchestrating leaks to undermine opposing views. He uses tariffs as "political bait" for the midterm elections. When O`Neill argues that out-of-control deficits will cause a "fiscal crisis", Cheney "cut him off. `Reagan proved deficits don`t matter,` he said ... `This is our due.`" In the end, Cheney fires O`Neill, the first vice-president to dismiss a cabinet member.

O`Neill`s revelations cut deeper than mere polemics. They have been met not by any factual rebuttal but by anonymous character assassination from a "senior official" - "Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"

Then the White House announced O`Neill was under investigation for abusing classified documents, though he said they were not and the White House had shovelled carefully edited NSC documents to Bob Woodward for his shining portrait of Bush at War. Quietly, O`Neill and his publisher prepared an irrefutable response. Soon they will post each of the 19,000 documents underlying the book on the internet. The story will not be calmed.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1122719,00.html

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`God gave me two children and I loved them so much` The suicide message of a mother who left home to kill
By Justin Huggler at Erez border crossing, Gaza Strip
15 January 2004


In the video she left before she died, Reem al-Riashi said she had dreamt of becoming a "martyr", that she wanted pieces of her body to fly like "deadly shrapnel".

Yesterday they were sponging up her body parts from the floor, indistinguishable from the flesh of the four other people she murdered when she detonated the bomb in her vest.

Riashi was only the second Palestinian mother to become a suicide bomber. She left behind two children: Mohammed, three, and Doha, two. "God gave me two children and I loved them so much," she said in her videotaped suicide message. "Only God knew how much I loved them." Yesterday, her children were motherless.

She died just a day after Tom Hurndall, the unarmed British peace activist who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier just a few miles south in the Gaza Strip last April, and left in a coma for nine months. Riashi was 22, the same age as Hurndall. He died trying to rescue Palestinian children trapped in the line of fire. Riashi died in order to kill and maim.

Her family disowned her for what she did. "I condemn it," said her brother-in-law. "I support peace." Some said they saw her husband sitting, crying. He did not know what she was going to do. She talked her way past an Israeli security check at a border crossing out of the Gaza Strip, then set off her explosives, killing two Israeli soldiers, a member of the military-style border police, and an Israeli civilian.

Some time before 9.30am - the time that Riashi detonated the bomb wrapped around her - she arrived to queue at the border crossing for Palestinian workers into an industrial complex on the Israeli side of the border. Some 3,000 Palestinians cross to work in the complex every day.

Yesterday, Israelis were describing it as a symbol of co-operation between Palestinians and Israelis. But it is a symbol of another sort for the Palestinians trapped inside Gaza. Desperate for work, they have to queue for hours penned in like sheep in narrow spaces between metal bars to be allowed in to the industrial area.

It was Riashi`s first time queuing here. She claimed she had come to apply for an ID card with a magnetic strip, which would allow her to cross every day to work in the complex. She was faking a limp to get past security, and witnesses told reporters one woman had helped Riashi, believing that she was disabled. Riashi thanked the stranger, then warned her to back away.

When she reached the front of the queue, Riashi told the Israeli soldiers manning the security check that she had a metal implant in her leg, which she feared would set off the metal detector, Major Gadi Shamni, the Israeli army brigade commander in Gaza said. Because she was a woman, the soldiers sent for a woman soldier to check her by hand, and asked her to step inside and wait.

Suddenly there was an explosion. Under her clothes, Riashi was wearing a vest packed with explosives, and once inside the room she set them off. The room was full of people: Israeli soldiers and security guards, and Palestinians waiting to cross. Seven were wounded, four of them Palestinians. One Palestinian woman said she saw the woman ahead of her in the queue, who had just gone into the room, with blood pouring from her legs.

In the upmarket neighbourhood of Gaza City where Riashi lived, the mood was sombre. There was the usual tent for mourners but little of the mood of defiance and even celebration that usually comes after a suicide bomber`s death.

Riashi`s brother emerged from her funeral prayers in the mosque but he would not say anything. At the house where she lived, they did not want to talk either. They were taking the furniture out before the Israeli army got there. They were even unscrewing the metal gate.

The army routinely demolishes the homes of suicide bombers, a practice condemned by international human rights groups as collective punishment because it is the bombers` relatives who suffer. At first, her brother-in-law denied any woman from the family had done such a thing, then he said he condemned it. He would not give his name.

What prompted a mother of two small children to abandon them and carry out such a terrible deed remains mysterious. Gaza is a pressure cooker, where millions of Palestinians are trapped in a small coastal strip, with mass unemployment and poverty. But Riashi`s family was well off. She lived in a new four-storey house. There were rumours of a disagreement between her husband and the family, even that he had not been at home for some time.

In the video she left behind, Riashi said she had dreamt of becoming a "martyr" since she was 13. Swathed in a green sash and headband of the militant group Hamas, clutching an American-made assault rifle and smiling, she said: "I always wanted to be the first woman to carry out a martyr attack, where parts of my body can fly all over. That is the only wish I can ask God for." She was not the first Palestinian woman to carry out a suicide bombing, but she was the first to do so for Hamas. The militant group and another faction, the al-Aqsa Martyrs` Brigades, claimed joint responsibility. Hamas said it had sent a woman suicide bomber for the first time because Israeli security had created "obstacles" for male bombers, and there would be more use of this tactic.

"Resistance will escalate against this enemy until they leave our land," said Hamas` spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In recent weeks, the talk from Hamas has been of a possible ceasefire. Now it seems the killing is back.
15 January 2004 10:23



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Gangsters operate own prisons as kidnapping soars in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
15 January 2004


Kidnapping is now the crime of choice among gangsters in Baghdad.

Colonel Feisal Ali, a veteran Baghdad policeman, said: "Criminals who used to steal gold and jewellery now specialise in kidnapping because it is easier and more profitable. Some actually maintain their own private prisons."

Even the very moderately wealthy in Baghdad are terrified that kidnappers will strike at them or their families. They drive their children to school fearing that, otherwise, they will be seized at the school bus stop. Some of the richer businessmen have sent their children out of the country to Jordan or the Gulf.

Col Ali, the head of the anti-kidnap unit of the Iraqi police - which has 17 officers and 15 men - said that kidnapping really got under way in June.

Criminals, many of them released by Saddam Hussein under an amnesty in 2002, realised that the police force had collapsed. He said: "Before the war, kidnapping made up only about 1 per cent of serious crime, but now it is 70 per cent." Even criminals themselves are not safe. Col Ali said he had arrested a man the previous day who confessed to having kidnapped another criminal who had looted a bank during the fall of Baghdad in April. He only released the bank robber in return for $10,000 (£5,400).

Kidnappers have also become more professional. They often insist that the family of the kidnap victim purchase a Thuraya satellite telephone through which to conduct negotiations, because the call is impossible for the Baghdad police to trace.

Many of the victims are children. Eleven-year-old Sara was grabbed as she waited for a bus and held in a room with four other kidnap victims while kidnappers asked her father for $20,000, later reduced to $5,000. She was released but is traumatised by the experience.

Not everybody survives. The owner of an animal food factory in east Baghdad was kidnapped. According to a member of his family, $7,000 was demanded and paid after three months. The relative said: "But all we got back was his dead body and we think they killed him just after he was captured."

Some victims have disappeared. While we were waiting in another part of the police headquarters, a woman dressed in black accompanied by two children said her husband had been an intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein and had been kidnapped three months before. She had received one phone call asking for $50,000 but, otherwise, there was silence.

Col Ali admitted that the families of most kidnap victims do not tell the police what has happened because they fear their relatives will be killed if they do so. Asked how he would deal with organised crime, he said, showing a certain nostalgia for the methods of the old regime: "I would hang those responsible for kidnapping in front of their own houses and I am confident that crime would be reduced to 10 per cent of its present level." The serious crime organisation of the Iraqi police is housed in a school in the Amariyah quarter of Baghdad because their old headquarters was destroyed. Several weeks ago the new premises was attacked by two suicide bombers, though without effect, and is protected by an obstacle course of concrete barriers and containers filled with earth.

The police headquarters still has an improvised air but the police said they are now receiving vehicles, weapons and flak jackets from the Americans. Some complain that no sooner have they sent criminals to Abu Ghraib prison than they are released by the US. But Colonel Anwar Abdul Jabbar, the head of the organised crime division of the police, said: "I have arrested 400 criminals and I don`t know any that have been released from Abu Ghraib without my knowledge. This is really just an excuse used by policemen who don`t have a case."

The campaign against organised crime in Iraq is largely supervised by the US. American military police officers could be seen stomping in and out of police offices at Amariyah. At one moment, a thick American accent could be heard bellowing angrily on the other side of a partition wall, shouting: "Don`t you realise we are working our arses off for you!" An Iraqi policeman, giggling slightly, confided later that the relative of a kidnap victim had told the American officer that Iraq was better off under Saddam, precipitating the outburst.
15 January 2004 10:43



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Lt. Lotfi Ali, right, helps carry away a tank shell that insurgents had set up to use a bomb in Baghdad.
January 15, 2004
OCCUPATION
Iraqi Team Disables Bombs With a Snip and a Prayer
By NEELA BANERJEE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 12 — The four police officers were squeezed into a small pickup truck, screaming down the highway from Baghdad at 90 miles an hour toward a bomb sighting, and they were happy.

They thrive on busy days, and today, the third call of the morning for the Baghdad police bomb squad had come in minutes before, at 11:20, with the usual sketchy information: possible explosives on the road south to Salman Pak.

For every bomb that kills Iraqis and coalition soldiers, many more are defused every day by the ordnance experts of the Baghdad police. The squad existed under the old government but was far less active. Since August, a steady trickle of calls about bomb sightings has become a torrent.

On this morning, Majid Mahdi and Hazim Khadem, both lieutenants in the squad, had already taken down an array of rockets aimed at a police station near Haifa Street. Then they defused what was left of a set of 11 rockets aimed at an American Army base. (Six rockets had been fired, but no soldiers were hurt.)

Lieutenant Mahdi, his feet resting on an AK-47 on the floor of the pickup, lighted a Gauloise cigarette.

Lt. Lotfi Ali, who drives as though he has seen "The French Connection" too many times, turned off the siren, tuned in to Arabic pop and sang along. In one smooth gesture, he took out his Glock pistol and began shifting gears with it in his hand. "Thieves," he said, pointing with the gun out the window. "Fedayeen."

The pickup stopped at a threadbare little roadblock the local police had made of motor oil jugs and soda cans. The bomb was 150 yards up the road, the police said.

Lieutenant Khadem stepped out of the car, dressed only in street clothes, and told himself what he always does as he jogged forward: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet."

As the American-led coalition begins turning over self-rule and security to Iraqis, some, like those in the Baghdad bomb squad, are already shouldering the burden.

"It`s a war," Lieutenant Mahdi said. "It`s not a war for the Americans. It`s a war for us."

Lt. Col. Mustafa al-Wahab estimated that among the 30 or so calls a day the squad receives, half turn out to be roadside bombs or rockets aimed at some target. In the last nine months, the 11 ordnance experts in the squad have probably defused an average of 40 to 50 bombs per man, Colonel Wahab said.

Car bombs are the most feared. A deep anxiety about them has gripped Baghdad. On a window near the entrance to the squad`s offices in the center of the city, someone has taped a diagram in English of vehicles that can be used for car bombs, how much explosive each can hold and the lethal zone around the blast.

Any car parked for an extended period is suspect.

One recent evening, Lieutenants Mahdi and Khadem received a call about a car that had sat all day at a central market. It turned out to be a battered white Volkswagen Passat. The two officers, quickly attracting a group of onlookers, smashed a side window, and opened the doors and the hatchback. They looked under the hood. No bomb. It was all over in less than five minutes.

The Americans, in the Iraqis` place, would have cordoned off the site by several hundred yards, sent for their ordnance team, which in turn would have dispatched a robot equipped with cameras to check the vehicle. If something had been found, an ordnance expert in full body armor would have gone in to defuse the bomb, very slowly.

Sometimes when the Americans arrive first, the Iraqis have a hard time getting through the cordon because they walk around in street clothes, carrying little more than identification and wire cutters.

"Sometimes I don`t blame the Americans," said Brig. Gen. Munaam Said Abdul-Qadr, the head of the squad. "They say, `You are heroes, but at the same time, you are crazy.` "

Col. Ismael Ayash of the squad thinks his men are cavalier about wearing body armor because, in part, it takes so long to put it on and take it off, and they have so many calls to respond to. But the Iraqis especially want the robots that the Americans use, as well as better training, neither of which has been forthcoming, they said.

Requests for advanced training and equipment have been "supported by the M.P. chain of command and coalition E.O.D.," said Capt. Kelly Traynham of the 143rd Military Police Detachment, Montana National Guard, referring to the explosives ordnance disposal unit. "But I also know it takes time to get the latest and greatest equipment and training."

It will clearly take time, too, for squad members to adjust to new differences in pay and status. Lieutenant Mahdi, 35, has a new wife and a baby on the way. His squad was among the elite in the old government and were paid much more than other police units. Now, he grumbled, he makes about $150 a month, about the same as a security guard. But he said he had done this kind of work for 16 years and could not imagine chasing criminals.

A few weeks ago, he said, he was at a bomb site when a colleague`s arm was blown off. It was the squad`s first casualty since the end of major fighting. He answered another call just afterward. "I was thinking, `I could lose an arm or leg, or I could die,` " he said, "But it`s my job. This is my life."

Surviving each day is its own gift. So are the big finds, like the squad`s discovery near the Doura power station: an ambulance carrying more than 3,000 pounds of explosives. He and the others were recently told that the Americans might present commendations to them at a ceremony soon.

Since the war, the lieutenant says, he has come to expect a different kind of bomb in each part of the city. The Aadhimiya quarter, home to many supporters of the old government, is a trove of roadside bombs. On the west bank of the Tigris, the bombs are made from old munitions. On the east bank, vessels are filled with explosives and metal.

For the most part, the bombs are triggered by simple household items: timers from washing machines, remote controls from doorbells, and receivers from parts of car alarms.

"Of course, I feel a rivalry with the bomb-makers," Lieutenant Mahdi said. "Once I find and defuse one bomb, the next time they will hide it by paving it over. Or they will use walkie-talkies so that they can explode a bomb on us."

Lieutenant Khadem, too, discussed strategy, saying that when he or one of his comrades approaches a bomb, everything else falls by the wayside: the Americans, the fear, one`s own family.

Near Salman Pak, he ran down the highway, grabbing his wire cutters from his kit. He and two others came upon some bushes leaning against a fallen tree trunk. Blue and white wires peeked out from under the bushes. In three breaths, the men moved the bushes and Lieutenant Khadem clipped the blue wire, tearing off the link to any remote control. The wires were attached to two huge artillery shells. The men heaved them into the bed of the truck and returned to Baghdad, playing pop music again, dancing in their seats and waving their hands.

Back at the station, General Abdul-Qadr was worried. He had talked to the Americans about removing the two and a half tons of munitions the Iraqis have accumulated in a storehouse just behind his office, but no one has come. "If there is any bit of friction in that room . . . ," the general said, his voice trailing off.

He also had some news for Lieutenant Mahdi. That medal ceremony he had been waiting for? The bomb squad would not be included in it.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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January 15, 2004
Former Bush aide set to inspect Iraq authority
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington

The US Defense Department is poised to appoint Stuart Bowen, a former counsel to President George W. Bush, as the new inspector-general for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

The appointment is likely to draw fire from Democrats uncomfortable with an appointment of an official who has close White House ties. Mr Bowen also held several legal positions on Mr Bush`s staff when he was governor of Texas. It is understood Mr Bowen could take up the position as soon as next week.

When Congress in November approved Mr Bush`s request for $87bn (£48bn) to rebuild Iraq, lawmakers insisted on the appointment of a CPA inspector-general to ensure US taxpayer money would not be wasted.

But while Democrats welcomed the move, they criticized the decision to restrict the powers of the inspector-general. At the time, Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut senator who is seeking the Democrat presidential nomination, said the president had "tied [the inspector-general`s] hands".

Hillary Clinton, a New York senator, in December described the position as a "fake inspector-general" after Democrats failed to persuade Republicans to give the official broader powers.

On Wednesday, Mrs Clinton said: "I am very concerned that this inspector general will lack the independence needed to fully monitor the way American taxpayer dollars are spent on Iraqi reconstruction...the General Accounting Office should be provided the authority to audit the process and there should be greater transparency in Iraqi reconstruction contracts. Billions are being spent and only a truly independent audit can provide the American people the accountability they deserve."

One criticism levelled at the new position is that Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, may terminate an investigation under certain circumstances without notifying Congress. Mr Bowen will report to Paul Bremer, civilian administrator in Iraq, and Mr Rumsfeld.

The White House was instrumental in the decision to pick Mr Bowen. In December, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, had approved Robert Cobb, who is currently the inspector-general at Nasa, to become the CPA inspector- general. At the last minute, however, the White House blocked his appointment, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

A senior government official said Mr Cobb had expressed concerns to the White House about the limitations that would be placed on the CPA inspector-general. Mr Cobb declined to comment. One of the issues that Mr Bowen, who is currently a Washington-based partner at the lobbying firm of Patton Boggs, is expected to have to tackle involves the awarding of licenses for mobile telephone services in Iraq. Last October, Haider al-Abadi, Iraq`s communications minister, announced that three Middle Eastern companies - Orascom Iraq, Atheer and Asia Cell - had been awarded lucrative licenses to roll out mobile phone services in Iraq.

But the contracts have proved controversial following allegations of irregularities in the bidding process. In December, the Pentagon`s own inspector general concluded a preliminary investigation by referring the matter to another branch of the government for full investigation. The Pentagon also referred the case to an allied government. Both the CPA and Mr Abadi have denied there were any irregularities in the bidding process.

As his presidential campaign moves into a higher gear, Mr Bush will be keen to avoid any criticism that the contracting process is tainted. The administration has been heavily criticised by Democrats for awarding no-bid contracts to Bechtel and Halliburton, the oil services company formerly run by Dick Cheney, vice president.



© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004

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January 15, 2004
Bush`s Space Vision Thing

Critics will no doubt accuse President Bush of fiscal folly for proposing a grandiose plan for space exploration at a time when the nation faces onerous deficits and insufficient money to meet costly obligations on planet Earth. The critics would be right that money is short and there are many more important things to do than put astronauts on the Moon or Mars. But Mr. Bush is a canny enough politician to avoid committing much money to his new space vision. He calls for only $1 billion in new financing for NASA over five years and a reallocation of the current five-year budget of $86 billion. The cost will of course explode later on, when NASA tries to actually carry out the program. What Mr. Bush has really done is promise the moon (literally) while leaving future presidents and Congresses to figure out how to pay the potentially large future bills while they cope with the severe revenue losses caused by Mr. Bush`s reckless tax cuts.

The political significance of Mr. Bush`s proposal seemed obvious when Mr. Bush gave special thanks to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida for attending his speech. Each comes from a potential swing state, rich in electoral votes, that is or has been governed by a Bush. It is probably not a coincidence that each would benefit from a rejuvenated space program.

Fiscal issues aside, the Bush space exploration plan has some commendable aspects. It would end the troubled shuttle program in 2010, thus relieving NASA of a costly burden that relies on old and finicky technologies. Retirement makes far more sense than trying to extend the shuttle lifetimes for a decade beyond that. The plan would refocus research conducted on the International Space Station to concentrate on the long-term health effects of space travel, a prerequisite to long-distance missions, thereby ending studies of more limited importance. The plan also calls for development of a new spacecraft that could fly not only into low-Earth orbit but also to the Moon and Mars.

Before Congress signs off on this plan, it needs to carefully consider whether the reallocation of funds within NASA will cause serious harm to important science programs, robotic explorations or climate-related studies. If so, the loss may be too great to justify full financing of the new program. Congress should also hold a vigorous debate on whether Mr. Bush is right to head for the Moon first, or whether Mars is a more important destination. In the end, the Moon may serve more as a diversion than a steppingstone. The space program badly needs a bold new goal as an organizing principle, but it is important to get it right.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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"Friedman übersetzt die Neocontheorie in verständliche Worte." So ähnlich wird die Aufgabe von Friedman von den NeoCons beschrieben.

January 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
War of Ideas, Part 3
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

During the next six months, the world is going to be treated to two remarkable trials in Baghdad. It is going to be the mother of all split screens. On one side, you`re going to see the trial of Saddam Hussein. On the other side, you`re going to see the trial of the Iraqi people. That`s right, the Iraqi people will also be on trial — for whether they can really live together without the iron fist of the man on the other side of the screen.

This may be apocryphal, but Saddam is supposed to have once remarked something like: Be careful, if you get rid of me, you will need seven presidents to rule Iraq. Which is why this split-screen trial is going to be so important. Either Saddam is going to be laughing at us and at Iraqis, saying "I told you so," as Iraqis are squabbling and murdering each other on the other side of the screen.

Or, we and the Iraqi people will be laughing at him by proving that it is possible to produce something the Arab world has rarely seen: a self-governing, multiethnic, representative Arab government that accepts minority rights and peaceful transfers of power — without a military dictator, monarch or mullah standing overhead with a stick.

You don`t want to miss this show. This is pay-per-view history. If, somehow, Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, Turkmen, Christians, Assyrians and Shiites find a way to embrace pluralism, it will be a huge boost to moderates in the war of ideas all across the Muslim world. Those who scoff at the idea of a democratic domino theory in the Arab world don`t know what they`re talking about. But those who think this is a done deal don`t know Iraq.

If Iraq is going to be made to work as a decent, pluralistic, self-governing entity, noted the Iraq expert Amatzia Baram of the United States Institute of Peace, all the key factions there will have to accept being "reasonably unhappy." All will have to settle for their second-best dream in order to avoid their first-class nightmare: chaos or a return to tyranny.

Islamists will have to accept being unhappy that the system does not mandate Sharia law as the constitution, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because Islam will be the official religion of the state and respected as an important basis for legislation and governance. Secularists will have to accept being unhappy that Iraq`s new basic law gives Islam an important symbolic place in governance, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because this secular law and judges will still provide the basis for a new rule of law. Kurds will have to accept being very unhappy not to achieve their dream of an independent Kurdistan, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because the special autonomous status of the Kurdish region will be concretized in Iraqi law.

The Sunnis will have to accept being unhappy that they are no longer controlling Iraq and its oil wealth, but only "reasonably" unhappy, because they will discover that they still have a significant role in the parliament, and a share of the nation`s oil wealth in their own provinces, thanks to the new Iraqi federalism. The Shiites will be unhappy that, now when their majority political status will finally be realized, power and resources are going to be diffused throughout a federal system and constraints are going to be placed on the power of the majority. But they will only have to be "reasonably" unhappy, because there will eventually be a Shiite head of government, and the very federalism that disperses power and resources will also enable Shiite provinces that wish to adopt a more Islamist form of government to do so.

"Let us put aside the literary phrase `We are brothers but others are dividing us,` " wrote the thoughtful Arab columnist Hazem Saghieh in Al Hayat. "We in Iraq and elsewhere are not brothers — there are problems we inherited from our own history and social makeup, which were not helped by oppressive modern regimes. . . . Let`s be frank: the Shiites today scare the Sunnis; the Sunnis and the Shiites together scare the Kurds; and the Kurds scare the other minorities. . . . All the ethnic groups of Iraq have the responsibility of putting nation-building above their selfish and conflicting calculations."

In short, our most serious long-term enemy in Iraq may not be the Iraqi insurgents, but the Iraqi people. Can they live together reasonably unhappy at first, and then grow reasonably happy? If they can, we will be Iraq`s temporary midwife, helping give birth to its democracy. If they can`t, we will be Iraq`s new, always unhappy, baby sitter, and the old one, Saddam Hussein, will be laughing at us all the way to the gallows.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 15, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Doctor Is Out
By MAUREEN DOWD

DES MOINES — Not satisfied with colonizing the Moon, scouting for Martians and civilizing Iraq, President Bush is lavishing more gazillions on another audaciously quixotic plan.

He wants to become the national yenta.

As Robert Pear and David Kirkpatrick wrote in The Times, administration officials are planning an extensive election-year initiative to please conservatives in a swivet over gay marriage; their social engineering scheme will try to shore up traditional marriage, offering training to couples in the interpersonal skills needed to achieve and sustain "healthy marriages."

Before Mr. Bush ventures into the inner cities to practice his conjugal noblesse oblige, perhaps he should beeline to a more rural spot — a split-level ranch house with green shag carpeting and Grateful Dead albums in Burlington, Vt.

The doctors Dean seem to be in need of some tips on togetherness and building a healthy political marriage, if that`s not an oxymoron.

Even by the transcendentally wacky standard for political unions set by Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Deans have an unusual relationship.

She is a ghost in his political career. She has never even been to Iowa, and most reporters who have covered Howard Dean`s quest here the last two years would not recognize her if she walked in the door, which she is not likely to do, since she prefers examining patients to being cross-examined by voters and reporters.

The first hard evidence most people had that Howard Dean was actually married came with a startling picture of his wife on the front page of Tuesday`s Times, accompanying a Jodi Wilgoren profile.

In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband`s side — the anti-Laura. You could easily imagine the din of Rush Limbaugh and Co. demonizing her as a counterculture fem-lib role model for the blue states.

While Elizabeth Edwards gazes up at John from the front row of his events here, while Jane Gephardt cheerfully endures her husband`s "Dick and Jane" jokes, while Teresa Heinz Kerry jets around for "conversations" with caucusgoers — yesterday she was at the Moo Moo Cafe in Keokuk at the southernmost tip of the state — Judith Steinberg has shunned the role of helpmeet.

Many women cheered Judy Steinberg as a relief and a breakthrough. Why should she have to feign subservience in 2003, or compromise as Hillary Rodham and Teresa Heinz did when they took their husbands` names? But many political analysts said that just as the remote technocrat Michael Dukakis needed Kitty around to warm him up, the emotionally chilly Howard Dean could benefit from the presence of someone who could illuminate his softer side. So far he has generated a lot of heat but little warmth.

And at a moment when he`s under attack by Democratic rivals for reinventing his political persona and shifting positions, he could use a character witness on the road to vouch for his core values.

The couple did pose for a spread in the new People magazine, where they revealed that he gave her a flowering shrub for her 50th birthday. "Being practical," he said, "I wanted something to plant in the back lawn."

Even some who admired Dr. Steinberg`s desire to stay focused on her own life, healing the sick, still thought it odd that she would be so thoroughly disengaged from her husband`s wild political ride, missing the thrilling moments and the poignant ones, like the repatriation ceremony of his brother`s remains in Hawaii.

Since the frugal, no-frills couple does not subscribe to cable TV, she has not even seen much of the virtual campaign, and has to go into his Vermont campaign headquarters if she wants to watch a debate.

"What will she tell their grandkids?" wondered one political reporter here. "Yeah, Grandpa was once a front-runner for president with crowds all over America cheering him but I was too busy to go see it?"

It will be interesting to see, if her husband falters, whether the exigencies of politics will require her to make a house call on his campaign.

Physician, heal thy spouse.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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FINALLY, BUSH ADMITS IT: HE LIED

U.S. Calls Off the Hunt for Weapons in Iraq
NANTES, FRANCE--Once again Bush and his top officials are responsible for an outrageous scandal whose monumental scale and grotesquely terrifying implications for our democracy make Watergate look like a fraternity prank. Yet the miscreants are getting away scot-free.

As usual.

The Bush Administration, reported The New York Times on January 8, "has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment. The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March."

The Bushies have good reason to think they won`t find any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. They knew full well that the flimsy reports they used to sell their sleazy oil war were more than four years out of date--ancient history by intelligence standards. And, as The Washington Post reports, a newly discovered memo to Saddam Hussein indicates that Mr. Worse Than Hitler got rid of his WMDs in 1991. Unlike the United States, which unilaterally partitioned Iraq into no-fly zones and created a new Kurdish state, Saddam appears to have complied with the ceasefire agreement that ended the Gulf War.

1,400 members of the Iraq Survey Group have been searching for WMDs during the last seven months. They`ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars. They`ve been to every government installation in the country. They`ve come up empty-handed.

All we`ve gotten are numerous false alarms, each trumpeted as vindication of the Bushies` claim that Saddam would have nuked or gassed or poisoned us if we hadn`t taken him out first. On May 31, Bush said: "You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons...we`ve so far discovered two. And we`ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven`t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they`re wrong. We found them."

Actually, we didn`t find anything. Both "mobile labs" turned out to be rusted trailers used for filling weather balloons. But Bush`s lies got so much more media coverage than subsequent attempts to set the record straight that all but the most press-obsessed were misled. By June 18, 35 percent of Americans told a Harris poll that they believed that we had already found WMDs in Iraq. And 48 percent thought that Bush`s fictional link between Iraq and Al Qaeda had been "proven."

Iraq`s WMDs were probably destroyed at least 13 years ago. Fortunately for Bush, they exist only in the one place he cares about: the deluded minds of a frighteningly ignorant American electorate.

Which is why our troops in Iraq are no longer bothering to go through the motions of searching for them. And why Bush yanked the Joint Captured Matériel Exploitation Group that was supposed to destroy WMDs if and when they had been discovered. "Its work was essentially done," a Defense Department official told The Times, because it was tired of "waiting for something to dispose of."

Nearly 500 American servicemen have been killed in the war against Iraq. At least 2,400 more have been wounded. We`ve killed so many Iraqis--tens of thousands, certainly--that the Pentagon can`t keep count. We`ve borrowed more than $160 billion to pay for this extravaganza, with many more hundreds of billions to follow. And what was the point of this waste of life and treasure? "To disarm Iraq," Bush told us.

But Iraq, as everyone from the CIA to Hans Blix to Saddam told us beforehand, didn`t have any arms to dis.

Calling off the WMD hunt is Bush`s tacit admission that he lied about the reasons for war. It`s hard to think of anything worse that a president can do. It`s even harder to imagine the American people, so cynically accepting of deception, holding him accountable.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America`s best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL

RALL 1/14/04

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The Crash Of a Symbol Of Enron Greed
Andrew Fastow Trades In Riches for a Prison Term


washingtonpost.com
Enron Wizard Admits Conspiracy


By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A01


The mastermind behind secretive partnerships that led to the collapse of Enron Corp. pleaded guilty yesterday to two conspiracy charges and agreed to help investigators learn what the company`s top executives knew about its crumbling finances.

Andrew S. Fastow, 42, is the highest-ranking Enron executive to admit wrongdoing and cooperate with prosecutors, who continue to investigate widespread earnings manipulation at the Houston energy company. In a courtroom packed with relatives and former Enron employees, the former chief financial officer admitted to working with unidentified co-conspirators to cook Enron`s books and to keeping more than $45 million for himself.

Under the terms of the settlement, he will serve 10 years in prison and three years on probation. Legal experts said the 10-year term was unusually stiff for a white-collar criminal who agreed to help prosecutors. At a Washington news conference, Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey called the sentence "unheard of."

Fastow will remain free on $5 million bond while he assists prosecutors. He and his wife, Lea W. Fastow, who pleaded guilty to a tax charge yesterday, will be sentenced later this year. The couple, their family foundation and other relatives also agreed to forfeit $29 million, including property in Galveston, Tex., and Vermont, and cash in brokerage accounts, to resolve Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission charges.

Investigators said the Fastow deal was the biggest break yet in their two-year-old probe. Leslie R. Caldwell, head of the Justice Department`s Enron Task Force, said in Houston that for the first time, prosecutors "have a seat on the 50th floor of Enron. Whatever Andrew Fastow knows about what happened at Enron . . . the task force will now know as well."

The primary focus of investigators remains what former chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling and former chairman Kenneth L. Lay knew about Enron`s troubles at the same time they made optimistic public statements about the company`s financial health and were selling Enron stock. Neither has been charged with wrongdoing. Bruce A. Hiler, a lawyer for Skilling, and Mike Ramsey, an attorney for Lay, said that if Fastow tells the truth, their clients will be exonerated.

Skilling denied knowledge of many of Enron`s financial practices in 2002 appearances before Congress, and sources briefed on the case said investigators might compare his testimony with information Fastow can offer about Skilling`s involvement in decision-making.

"What you can read into this plea is a belief on the part of the government that Andrew Fastow will shed light into the darkest corners of the Enron scandal and hand up to them at least Jeff Skilling and possibly Ken Lay," said Robert A. Mintz, a former prosecutor who has been following the case. "The chief financial officer is generally the most critical player in a financial scandal. He is essentially in the catbird seat and should know where the bodies are buried."

Fastow invented secretive business partnerships and used them to conceal Enron`s mounting debt and protect the company`s credit rating -- and to reap tens of millions of dollars for himself and his relatives, according to congressional testimony.

Fastow didn`t hide his dealmaking creativity from others at Enron or the rest of the financial world. In 1999, CFO magazine lauded his "unique financing techniques" and quoted Skilling as backing the aggressive strategies, which helped boost Enron`s stock price.

When outside auditors finally leaned on Enron to restructure some of the deals to follow accounting rules, the disclosure of the company`s rising debt and Fastow`s self-dealing in the business partnerships sent the stock in a tailspin, pushing one of the nation`s largest energy firms into bankruptcy protection in December 2001 and resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for shareholders.

Enron has yet to recover from the nosedive. Its bankruptcy lawyers in New York this summer hope to move forward with a plan to restructure the company that would give investors back about 20 cents on the dollar. Stockholders also are suing Fastow, Skilling, Lay and other former Enron executives.

Fastow already has given prosecutors evidence against former Enron chief accounting officer Richard A. Causey, who could surrender to face criminal charges as early as next week, sources said. Fastow`s plea agreement, released yesterday, said he had an unwritten agreement with Causey guaranteeing one of Fastow`s partnerships a profit at Enron`s expense.

By virtue of his place in Skilling`s inner circle and his close dealings with the heads of Enron`s operating units, Causey is a central figure in any case that prosecutors would make with the theory that Enron`s earnings were manipulated for years. Causey`s attorney, Reid H. Weingarten, said his client followed the law and accounting rules.

Regulators continue to investigate other Enron executives, particularly those involved in a 1999 deal to sell energy-generating barges to Merrill Lynch & Co. to help Enron meet earnings targets. Sources said Fastow also may provide information about allegedly improper dealings he had with Wall Street bankers and others in the investment business.

Fastow already has paid taxes on some of his gains and much of the money he collected from Enron has since been used to pay his lawyers, sources said.

His public admission of guilt can be used by plaintiff lawyers in shareholder lawsuits to wrest more money from the couple in the coming years, experts said.

The Fastows` plea agreements were supposed to be filed in court last week, but were held up when U.S. District Judge David Hittner indicated that he might give Lea Fastow a stiffer sentence than the five months in prison that prosecutors agreed to recommend.

Yesterday, under virtually the same conditions, Hittner accepted her guilty plea to one count of filing a false tax return for failing to report $141,000 in income from one of her husband`s off-the-books partnerships. The judge ordered court employees to conduct a background investigation before he sentences her. Lea Fastow`s maximum sentence would 16 months, but she is likely to serve much of that time in home detention, lawyers involved in the case said.

Special correspondent Aaron Katersky contributed to this report from Houston.

Andrew S. Fastow, left, and his wife, Lea, leave the federal courthouse in Houston yesterday with Lea`s father, Jack Weingarten. Andrew and Lea Fastow each pleaded guilty to Enron-related charges.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Fastow`s new house, in Houston`s toniest neighborhood, became a symbol of his greed
washingtonpost.com
The Crash Of a Symbol Of Enron Greed
Andrew Fastow Trades In Riches for a Prison Term

By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page C01


Sherron Watkins, Enron whistle-blower, is in her husband`s car, talking on the cell phone, and she`s just taken a wrong turn in downtown Houston, a turn onto a street that takes her right by the federal courthouse.

"I`m driving by the courthouse now and there`s just satellite truck after satellite truck," Watkins says, sounding both amazed and amused. "Oh my goodness! Everybody is here!"

They are there to see Andrew Fastow, accused architect of the Enron financial scandals, accept a plea bargain that will send him to jail for 10 years. They are there to see the man who has become synonymous with the word "greed" finally get his comeuppance. They are there to see the first really big Enron domino -- the first from the top threesome of Fastow, CEO Jeff Skilling and Chairman Kenneth Lay -- fall.

This is what the public has been waiting for: They want to see someone pay for the millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs that were lost in the Enron scandal. They don`t want just fines and frozen assets and promised investigations. They want to see someone Go. To. Jail.

"It`s like piranhas with raw meat," says Watkins`s attorney, Philip H. Hilder, just after returning from the courthouse. Hilder represented Watkins during the investigations but has since done numerous interviews about Fastow and other aspects of the Enron case.

On the phone in her car, though, Watkins -- the woman who wrote the now-famous memo to Lay calling the company on its shady dealings -- is telling a different story about Fastow. It`s a story about last Sunday afternoon, a glorious afternoon in Houston, the temperature in the mid-60s, the sun out, the air gentle. Watkins was in her front yard, talking to her neighbor, watching her little girl play with the little girl next door. Then, from around a corner down the block, there came a father and his young son, both on bicycles, helmets on, out for a ride.

As the two came closer, Watkins realized that, underneath the helmet, she was staring into the face of her onetime boss Fastow -- "Andy," she still calls him -- and that the little boy was Michael, his youngest son. Their houses are only seven blocks apart.

"Oh, good luck with everything," Watkins said, at a loss for anything better to say in such odd and awkward circumstances.

Fastow, she remembers, looked stricken, his only reply a strangled "What?"

"It was just kind of weird," says Watkins, whose memo warned about some of the accounting irregularities that would lead to his indictment. "In some respects, Andy was a bad guy. He did some bad things. But you can bet he`s cherishing every minute of his bike ride, because there aren`t going to be many more of them."

Fastow wasn`t the Enron executive with the stable of sports cars, or the stable of women, or even the stable of fancy show horses (a predilection of Lou Pai, the former chairman and CEO of Enron Energy Services, and his ex-stripper wife). He was the one who was devoted to his wife, Lea -- who also pleaded guilty yesterday and is expected to receive a five-month sentence -- and his kids, who taught Sunday school at his synagogue and coached his older son, Jeffrey, on his baseball team.

But Fastow also was the hot-tempered executive who wanted more than anything to accumulate wealth, according to several people who knew him, including Watkins. Great wealth. Exorbitant wealth. Fastow wanted to buy art and vacation homes -- and he did. He got the house on the bay in Galveston. He got the cottage in Vermont. He got a boat, an 18-foot Boston Whaler. At one point, some of his art was on loan at the Menil Collection, a Houston art museum.

He also wanted to move out of the nice neighborhood of Southampton Place, and into tony River Oaks, where the richest of the rich live in Houston. Where Lay lived. Where Skilling bought his new house.

And he made it there. Almost. Construction was taking place on Fastow`s $4 million-plus dream home when the Enron scandal erupted. Eventually he was indicted for fraud, money laundering and conspiracy in October 2002. The house has since been sold, and the proceeds frozen by the federal government -- just like most of Fastow`s millions in assets. (As part of the plea agreement, the Fastows, their family foundation and other relatives will forfeit $29 million, including the Galveston and Vermont properties.)

"If I had worked for Enron, I`d sure be mad as the dickens about what these people did," says Dwight Boud, a retired schoolteacher from New Providence, N.J., who taught Fastow in high school and has been widely quoted on Fastow`s "foibles," as he calls them (such as trying to get by on charm alone, and acting like a wheeler-dealer).

"But having known the human being involved," Boud adds, "you can`t help feeling a little saddened by the squandering of promise because he made a couple of different turns. He certainly had plenty of ability."

When Fastow will actually go to prison is anyone`s guess. His plea agreement includes his cooperation with authorities, and he is free on $5 million bond. Fastow is expected to help advance the federal government`s investigations of Skilling and Lay.

Watkins, who once socialized with the Fastow family, sees Skilling as a major influence on Fastow.

"There`s fear and there`s greed, and supposedly fear is what checks greed, the fear of reprimand -- other than your own moral convictions, of course," Watkins says. "I think Jeff Skilling helped remove the fear from Andy. He thought if Jeff Skilling said it was okay, it was okay. Andy didn`t think he was going to get caught."

Watkins adds later, "Andy`s been in the hot seat two years now, but people also know that Jeff Skilling cashed out $66 million worth of stock in 2001, and he`s still living in his multimillion-dollar mansion, and they`re concerned that he and Ken Lay have not been indicted."

Bruce Hiler, Skilling`s attorney, expressed amazement that anyone was listening to Watkins anymore. "She doesn`t have any facts about my client," Hiler said. ". . . All she`s done is slander my client."

Over the past two years, Skilling got remarried -- to former Enron employee Rebecca Carter, in 2002 -- and he remained in River Oaks, but kept a relatively low profile around Houston. Lay returned to his life on the Houston social circuit, lunching at hot spots and attending benefits. Watkins co-authored a book about the scandal ("Power Failure: The Inside Story on the Collapse of Enron," with Mimi Swartz) and has gone out on the lecture circuit; currently she`s stumping for Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark. Rebecca Mark, once the highest-ranking woman in the company, moved to her ranch in New Mexico and, according to an interview she gave to Fast Company magazine last summer, she`s hanging out, being a mommy and watching cattle walk around.

Meanwhile, Fastow worried about jail. Sources told The Post shortly before he was indicted that jail terrified Fastow more than anything. Especially because of his boys. As Watkins points out, Michael likely will be off the little-boy bike and behind a steering wheel by the time his father finishes his sentence.

"The children are victims here," says Hilder, Watkins`s attorney. "But certainly the [parents`] crimes have left a lot of other children in dire financial situations, parents losing jobs. . . . There`s a significant impact here. Considering the harm that he did, 10 years is quite a good deal."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
On to Mars?




Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A20


IF ALL President Bush had in mind was beginning the long, slow process of phasing out the troubled space shuttle when he declared yesterday that he wants to "give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration," then it`s hard not to approve. But a directive to return to the moon and ultimately use it as a "launching point for missions beyond" seems more likely to result in yet another ambitious but unfocused and underfinanced goal for NASA. The nation faces a yawning budget deficit, educational and health needs, and an international terrorist threat. That makes this an odd moment to embark on a dispensable project of great expense.

It was difficult, from listening to his speech and the briefings preceding it, to fathom the president`s intentions. The White House stated that extra spending on the project would be limited to "mostly existing funds." More concretely, the plan is to transfer $11 billion of NASA`s current budget into a program to build a new manned space vehicle, and increase the space agency`s budget by $1 billion over the next five years. Yet NASA`s record of confining itself to predicted costs is not good. The space shuttle has constantly overrun its budget. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, NASA estimated it would take more than $400 billion to get to Mars -- and that was in 1989 dollars. Notwithstanding the question of whether this is the best way to spend $12 billion at the moment, it does sound, by space program standards, like a gross underestimate of what the real costs will be.

More serious than the price, though, is the absence of clear arguments for the project. The president argued that "the human thirst for knowledge cannot be satisfied with even the most vivid pictures." But the need for space travel just for space travel`s sake is questionable. There must be concrete scientific reasons to set up a permanent colony on the moon -- goals that can be achieved only by sending human beings to the moon, as opposed to robotic probes. Sending astronauts into space just to have astronauts in space would be a sad misuse of NASA`s stunning intellectual and technical resources.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Doubt vs. Hope in the Middle East


By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A21


BERLIN -- Initial steps by the Bush administration to make the Middle East the new strategic center of U.S.-European relations are encountering muted questioning and moderate skepticism from alliance partners. Count this reaction as progress, of a sort.

Count it, that is, as someone not hitting you in the face with a wet fish.

Countries that angrily opposed the invasion of Iraq want to avoid a repeat of the open bitterness and division of 2003. France and Germany have joined other NATO nations in welcoming alliance consultations recently launched by Washington, which has its own reasons to reach out internationally.

Berlin, the city that was the cockpit of the Cold War, now hosts foreign policy conferences in which Moscow is rarely mentioned. Instead, events in Ankara, Tehran, Jerusalem or Baghdad are analyzed, celebrated or deplored in terms of their impact on global stability. Conceptually the Middle East today drives U.S.-European relations as directly as the Soviet threat once did.

But a transatlantic strategic consensus on combating terrorism and other threats arising from the Middle East is yet to be reached. Disagreement on Iraq is only the most urgent and salient point of dispute when it comes to a region that many European governments fear can only get worse and the Bush administration feels must be made better.

This psychological gap is important: Europeans decades ago charged into the developing world with a mixture of bold determination and romanticism that presaged the Bush administration`s effort to remake the Middle East. But they bogged down in colonial wars and economic quagmires and can expound at length now on why the "utopian" U.S. effort to implant democracy in Iraq and beyond will meet the same fate.

President Bush and his aides hope to counter both complacency and cynicism with their "Greater Middle East Initiative," a package of political, military and economic programs that the White House will assemble and display at high-level international gatherings. If the initiative fares well, they`ll also use it on the campaign trail this election year.

The White House hopes that NATO, at its June summit in Istanbul, will offer to extend military training and other cooperation to Israel and the Islamic countries from Morocco to Afghanistan. As U.S. diplomats have outlined it to European colleagues, this effort would be modeled on the Partnership for Peace plan that NATO extended to the Eastern European and Central Asian countries that emerged from the Soviet empire at the end of the Cold War.

At the Sea Island, Ga., summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations in early June, the administration will seek coordinated economic help for the region to underpin a political transformation akin to the 1975 "Helsinki process" on human and economic rights that helped end the Cold War.

The Europeans are not going to rush to agreement on Bush`s still-evolving, vastly ambitious plan. For one thing, they will want to make sure he is going to be reelected before they commit resources and prestige to the effort. Bush`s puzzling delay in formally accepting an invitation to the 60th anniversary celebrations of D-Day in France also slows planning for the summer.

But there are deeper doubts. France is concerned about losing influence in North Africa and is joined by Germany and others in worrying that the European Union`s Mediterranean policy (and funds) will be displaced or absorbed by a bigger U.S. effort. There is also a suspicion that Washington will use its big initiative to deflect urgent action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is not clear if major European countries will wind up opposing the initiative, ignoring it or, as I suspect, putting forward their own alternative, which will center on diplomatic and economic help for Turkey and Iran as vital to modernizing the Middle East.

A hint of this came at the annual Bertelsmann Forum here last week, where Turkey`s future relations with Europe dominated the opening session. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed that Turkish membership in the European Union would entrench democracy in his country and show that democracy and Islam can coexist. He made no mention of Turkey`s once-strong relations with the United States.

Disillusioned Europeans are betting the sure thing. They see failure as the default position for the Arab world: Democratization efforts will bring chaos. Give Bush credit for being much bolder and more imaginative. And hope that he can shape a strategy that gets him to his worthy goals in the Middle East.


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Karl Rove`s Nightmare


By Richard Cohen

Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A21


DALLAS -- Karl Rove had a bad moment here the other night. It came as Wesley Clark was speaking to a packed hotel ballroom, when the retired general derided the president of the United States for what was supposed to be his supreme, cinematic moment: landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. "I don`t think it`s patriotic to dress up in a flight suit and prance around," Clark bellowed. The men had been separated from the boys.

For Clark, it was a monster evening. His campaign raised upward of $300,000, and the once-stiff speaker brought his audience out of their chairs several times. He was forceful and occasionally eloquent. But what really mattered was that Clark was prepared to go at President Bush in the one area where he once seemed unassailable: his leadership as a wartime president.

That was the moment I imagined Rove took notice. Of all the other Democratic presidential contenders, only John Kerry has the military credentials to challenge Bush. But being a wounded and decorated Vietnam vet is not the same as being both that and a retired four-star general. Anyway, Kerry is easily caricatured as a Massachusetts liberal.

Not so Clark. He is a "duty, honor, country" guy -- the West Point mantra he recites constantly. His themes are patriotism and leadership, and his credentials are unimpeachable. He was wounded in Vietnam. He rose to command NATO and made war in the Balkans. Four invisible stars glitter from his shoulders.

Wes Clark does not like what George Bush has done with Wes Clark`s Army. Make no mistake: It`s his Army. He can hardly go a sentence without mentioning the military -- and how, in his mind, Bush has abused it. He sent it to war precipitously and then used its men and women as "props," he says. Clark`s sincerity on this point is patent. In a conversation on his campaign plane, he suddenly turned intense, a kind of growling, low-grade rage that lifted my nose from my note-taking. His Army has been abused.

In a way, Clark is this season`s John McCain. As did McCain in 2000, he makes a special appeal to veterans -- asking them to stand at his speech here, for instance. His themes are similar, too, but where McCain ran to the left of Bush, Clark runs to the right of the Democratic field. That assessment has nothing to do with his actual positions, some of which are downright liberal -- he has no problem with civil unions or marriage for gays, for instance -- but rather with his military record and his Southern roots.

Whatever the reason, the general is on the move. Polls show him second to Howard Dean in New Hampshire -- Dean moving down, Clark moving up, with what his campaign says are approval ratings in the high 70s. Some of that can be explained by a palpable desire for "none of the above" and some by his record and some by the fact that on occasion he has delivered a good speech -- one, incidentally, that does not disparage his Democratic opponents.

But Clark has a way to go. When he talks about patriotism, leadership, the military and his own remarkable life, he can be moving and persuasive. But when he gets into domestic programs, you hear a "voice mail" recitation -- no passion, little inflection and often a comparison to some military program, as if the Army is just civilian life with worse food. He lacks the politician`s ability to morph with his audience.

Still, the Clark I saw in New Hampshire and Texas has come a long way from the Clark I saw months ago. At the earlier event, people fell asleep. No more. On his campaign plane, he seemed relaxed -- and so, importantly, did his staff. I could dig up only one story about him losing his temper, but it was not recent and not important. You and I should be as disciplined.

At the fundraiser here, Clark stood before a huge American flag like George C. Scott in "Patton." And when he talked about Bush and the war in Iraq, it was not as some Democrat who could be caricatured as a peacenik, but as a warrior who felt that the president had fought the wrong war at the wrong time -- and then pranced all over a flight deck reserved for Clark`s genuine heroes, "the men and women who serve."

Karl Rove, call your office.


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Kennedy: Iraq war a product marketed by Bush to win elections
By Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press, 1/14/2004 18:26

WASHINGTON (AP) The Iraq war was a ``political product`` marketed by the Bush administration to win elections, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said in a speech Wednesday.

As a result, Kennedy said, Bush and the Republicans in Congress ``put the state of our nation at risk, and they do not deserve another term in the White House or in control of Congress.``

In a speech sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group, Kennedy, D-Mass., said Bush`s decisions to target Saddam Hussein, go to war in Iraq and transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people have all been made for Republican political gain and timed to influence elections in 2002 and 2004.

Laying out a broad critique of the administration, Kennedy said Bush`s arrogant march to war in Iraq did not make American safer, but instead has given Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida new life and made the war on terrorism harder to win.

``The war has made America more hated in the world,`` Kennedy said. ``And it has made our people more vulnerable to attacks both here and overseas.``

Bedford, Mass., residents Brian and Alma Hart, whose son Army Pvt. John Hart, 20, was killed in Iraq last fall, were in the audience.

``I don`t agree with Ted Kennedy on a lot of policy issues,`` said Brian Hart after the speech. ``It was difficult to be here today, but I think he`s right on this. It`s time for an honest debate on Iraq. I know bin Laden is not in Iraq.``

Asked about Kennedy`s remarks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush worked to exhaust all diplomatic means before going to war.

``The president took the action he did because his most solemn obligation is to protect the American people,`` said McClellan. ``And America is more secure because of the action that we took in Iraq.``

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, called the speech a ``hateful attack,`` and said Kennedy ``insulted the president`s patriotism, accused the Republican Party of treason and resurrected the weak and indecisive foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis.``

The speech continues Kennedy`s vigorous assault on Bush`s Iraq policies. Last September, in an interview with The Associated Press, Kennedy called the war a fraud ``made up in Texas.`` Bush later called Kennedy`s remarks ``uncivil.``

On Wednesday, Kennedy praised Former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill, who earlier this week asserted that Bush had begun planning for regime change in Iraq long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. O`Neill, said Kennedy, has great integrity and intelligence, and ``it is easy to see why he was so concerned by what he heard about Iraq in the Bush administration.``

Drawing on O`Neill`s remarks and statements by other officials over the past two years, Kennedy concluded that Bush and his ``axis of war`` Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz turned their focus on Iraq to divide Congress, distract Americans from the troubled economy and secure votes in the 2002 elections.

And now, he said, the ongoing reconstruction in Iraq and plans to turn control over to the Iraqi people this summer ``are intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country as well.``

As a result, said Kennedy, the American military is overextended and soldiers have been needlessly killed and wounded. And, he said the shift to Iraq allowed al-Qaida and Taliban fighters to regroup, restore their drug trade and step up their terrorist campaign in Afghanistan.

``We are reaping the poison fruit of our misguided and arrogant foreign policy,`` said Kennedy. ``No president of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war.``

And by doing so, he said, Bush broke the bond of trust with the American people.

``No president who does that to this land we love deserves to be re-elected,`` said Kennedy, who is backing fellow Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry for president.

Kerry`s opponent, Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean, was the first to applaud the speech, saying, ``Senator Kennedy said that the war has made America more hated in the world and more vulnerable to attacks both here and overseas. I could not agree more.``

Kennedy voted against going to war.

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Jan. 14, 2004, 4:44PM

2 Halliburton subcontractors killed in Iraq
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Two Halliburton Co. subcontractors were killed and one company employee was injured today, when their convoy was ambushed near Saddam Hussein`s hometown of Tikrit, company officials confirmed.

Halliburton officials declined to identify the victims, pending notification of relatives. The workers were part of a team providing logistical support for the U.S. military in Iraq.

Last week, a driver was killed in a similar ambush, the Associated Press reported. A Halliburton spokeswoman said "several" workers have been killed or wounded in Iraq.

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from the January 15, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0115/p16s01-usfp.html

US financial power: a bang and a whimper
By David R. Francis | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
No one denies America`s economic power. The US holds more than a third of the world`s stock value, headquarters nearly a third of its top 100 nonfinancial companies, and produces a quarter of its goods and services.



World`s largest economies

Right after World War II, the US gross domestic product accounted for half of world output. Its relative size has diminished but still remains No. 1.

COUNTRY GDP IN 2002
(in millions of dollars)
1. United States 10,416,818
2. Japan 3,978,782
3. Germany 1,976,240
4. Britain 1,552,437
5. France 1,409,604
6. China 1,237,145
7. Italy 1,180,921
8. Canada 715,692
9. Spain 649,792
10. Mexico 637,205
Source: World Bank

American views and values have shaped everything from world trade agreements to key international economic institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

What`s less clear is whether the US abuses that economic power, as its critics charge, for control in an imperial manner.

The most obvious trend is that since the end of World War II, the economic rise of the rest of the world has trimmed America`s power, forcing it to seek compromises. And when the US has thrown its weight around - imposing embargoes and trade sanctions on other nations or by bargaining hard in trade and other international deals - it has met with mixed results. But the nation retains, not control, but a marked influence in the world economy. Sometimes subtle, sometimes bald (especially in the case of oil), America`s economic clout is more pronounced than since Britain ruled the world.

"Our ability to use our economy as a weapon is limited," says Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C. In his recent book "Rogue Nation," he writes: "Empires are something Europeans or Chinese or Japanese have, but not Americans. Nevertheless, if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, chances are it`s a duck."

Fear of domination by an economic behemoth is nothing new. In the 1960s, Europe was alarmed by the scale of investment by US companies. In the 1980s, Americans talked of the invasion of Japanese investors. And in the 1990s, European purchases of American companies began to attract attention.

But the situation is more balanced than six decades ago. Right after World War II, the US accounted for half of world output. Since then, its dominance of the globe`s economy gradually diminished as Western Europe revived and came together; Japan flourished; and India, China, and many other developing nations moved ahead.

Now the US produces about a quarter of total world output of goods and services. American stock markets account for about 36 percent of global market value.

Impact of sanctions
The US has employed trade and financial sanctions against other countries probably more than any other industrial nation in modern times. Sanctions probably help end apartheid in South Africa. Libya may have been influenced by sanctions to end its effort to build nuclear bombs - perhaps also by the US action in Iraq. But US success in changing other nation`s policies has been limited, especially when other industrial nations don`t go along. Fidel Castro, for one, still governs Cuba despite a 40-year US embargo.

"The US is very big, but not as big as it was 20 to 25 years ago," says Zbigniew Zimny, chief investment issues analyst at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva (UNCTAD). Today`s world "is more balanced."

For example, of the world`s top 100 nonfinancial multinational companies (ranked by the value of their foreign assets), 28 have their headquarters in the US - 29 if DaimlerChrysler is regarded as American rather than German.

True, US multinational companies (MNCs) have more plants and equipment and other "direct" investment assets in foreign countries ($1.5 trillion) than do the MNCs of any other nation. Britain is next with $1 trillion. But as a group, the European Union has invested more than twice as much ($3.4 trillion). Much of European MNC money is invested in the US.

Indeed, those investment flows represent a key difference between the US and previous empires. While Britain exported investment money to the rest of the world, including its empire, America has been a huge importer of capital (see sidebar).

As a result, the US is the world`s biggest "debtor nation." Foreigners own far more of its direct investments (plants, equipment, office buildings) and financial assets than Americans own in other nations. That fact was noted last week in an IMF report warning that the voracious appetite of the US for borrowing money could push up world interest rates.

Not surprisingly, most US analysts see America using its economic might relatively benevolently, even absent-mindedly. American MNCs and government representatives are "very haphazard" and "not terribly organized" in employing US economic and political power to protect US interests, says John Walsh, director of the Group of Thirty, an international body of experts in international economics. It`s less organized than European nations or Canada, he adds.

The view that MNCs are "instruments of US imperialism is fundamentally mistaken," says Michael Mussa, a former top economist at the IMF. Unlike the British East India Co., which ran India for about 150 years in cooperation with the British government, today`s American MNCs have as their prime goal making money for stockholders, says Mr. Mussa, now at the Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank.

American dominance
Not everyone agrees the US is so disorganized or benevolent, especially when it comes to oil. "A core concern of US foreign policy since World War II has been to control Middle East oil - control, not use," says Noam Chomsky, author of "Hegemony or Survival: America`s Quest for Global Dominance."

Even in the 1920s, the US maneuvered "to weaken the British imperial system and take over some of its international role," he charges, with its "capitalist institutions" emerging after World War II with "overwhelming influence."

Few analysts believe President Bush went into Iraq to take over its giant oil reserves. Nonetheless, "the US is looking for reliable sources" and would like to see a "friendly government" in Iraq, Mr. Walsh says. "Oil companies and the government work hand in hand."

Prestowitz, in an interview, says: "Through military might, unequal treaties [with other nations such as South Korea and Japan], intellectual excellence, entrepreneurial reward, and friendly persuasion, America has established unprecedented condominium over the globe."

Its condominium, or joint rule, is "not malevolent in a sinister sense," he adds. Rather, it is ideological, aiming to spread democracy and freedom to other nations.

How does the United States hegemony compare with the famed British Empire of the 19th and early 20th century?

Niall Ferguson, a British historian now teaching at New York University`s Stern School of Business, finds both similarities and differences:

• At its peak, when the sun literally did not set on its empire, Britain accounted for 10 percent of total world output of goods and services. The US now produces 25 percent of world GDP.

• Militarily, British imperial power never dominated the world like that of the US military today.

• In 1881, about 220,000 British troops were stationed overseas. Today, the US has somewhat more than 250,000 military personnel abroad.

• Britain was a net exporter of capital to its empire, acting as a "world banker" channeling funds to relatively poor countries. In contrast, the US is a massive importer of foreign money. A new IMF report suggests US foreign indebtedness will soon reach a level equivalent to 40 percent of its GDP.

• The US empire is one without colonists or settlers. US service personnel tend to regard foreign postings as "rare and unpleasant duties." About 4 million Americans live abroad, but mostly in Canada, Mexico, and Europe. The British Empire deployed its military, civil service, and businessmen abroad for long periods of time. More than 15 million British subjects were settled in the temperate zones of its empire a century ago.

Mr. Ferguson sees the US as managing an "empire in denial" with an "attention-deficit disorder," unable to maintain for long a public commitment to foreign intervention.

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

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US offer for Russian base exit
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Wednesday January 14, 2004
The Guardian

Washington has offered to help fund the withdrawal of Russia`s two remaining military bases from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, raising the moral stakes in the regional battle between the two former cold war foes.

Russia has agreed to withdraw its troops, but recently said this might not happen for 11 years, a delay which is unacceptable to Georgia`s new government. Georgia`s interim leader, Nino Burdzhanadze, said: "Russian-Georgian relations would become much better if the bases were withdrawn."

Yesterday the US deputy assistant secretary of state, Lynn Pascoe, said in Tbilisi: "We would be happy to provide some assistance... to pull out the forces."

Washington`s offer ensures that the only obstacle to Russia`s quick withdrawal remains Moscow`s unwillingness to retreat from the former Soviet Union while the US expands eastwards. Washington has been slowly increasing its presence in Georgia, training local troops and considering storing military equipment in the region.

Yesterday Mr Pascoe offered a further £1.6m to train Georgian troops, and 77 US heavy armoured vehicles arrived to aid the training.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Powell`s shrinking credibility on Iraq
By Derrick Z. Jackson, 1/14/2004

SECRETARY OF State Colin Powell was a huge loser in last week`s report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that said Saddam Hussein`s weapons program was not an immediate threat to the United States or even his neighbors. The report said Saddam`s nuclear program had been dismantled, his large-scale chemical weapons capabilities had been destroyed, and "there was no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam`s government and Al Qaeda."

Powell was asked about the report at a news conference last week. He was forced to cough up: "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

Powell did more than "consider" the possibilities. He was the man who went before the United Nations Security Council last Feb. 5 to persuade the world that Saddam was an imminent threat. In the march to war, he had come in for perhaps the least criticism among top White House officials, as he was considered by both supporters and critics of the administration as being its least rash figure and the one least likely to cherry-pick intelligence reports only for what he wanted to hear.

The image holds up no more. In its report, the endowment highlighted several of Powell`s most important assertions about Saddam. In September 2002 Powell said of Saddam, "There is no doubt that he has chemical weapons stocks." In December 2002 a State Department fact sheet asked, "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?" In January 2003 Powell said, "Iraq continues to conceal quantities, vast quantities of highly lethal material and weapons to deliver it."

Then came the presentation on Feb. 5. Powell said: "We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons. . . . Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed. . . . We also have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines . . . to enrich uranium."

Powell also said, "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan. . . . When will we see the rest of the submerged iceberg? Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons."

Powell said: "One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq`s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. . . . We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. . . . We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agents factories. . . . Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox, and hemorrhagic fever. And he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox. . . . There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."

At one point Powell said: "This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well documented."

But no stockpiles of either chemical or biological weapons have been found. There was no effective nuclear program. The United States still invaded Iraq.

Powell told the UN that his intelligence told him Saddam had ballistic missiles that could "dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that cause massive death and destruction." Powell talked of small planes with "a wingspan of only a few meters to deliver biological agents to its neighbors, or if transported, to other countries, including the United States."

To date no such missiles or planes have been found. The United States still invaded. Nearly 500 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Just before the war, Powell proclaimed that Iraq`s 2002 claim to the UN that it had no weapons of mass destruction "repeated the biggest lie of all. . . . Inspections will amount to little more than casting at shadows unless Iraq lifts the fog of denial and deception that prevents inspectors from seeing the true magnitude of what they`re up against."

With report after report coming in showing that weapons of mass destruction did not exist or were destroyed over the past decade, it is clear that Powell can no longer be seen as the softer face of the White House. No matter how cautious he was, he still perpetuated the lie. He rolled in the fog for America`s denial and deception.

Derrick Z. Jackson`s e-mail address is [e-mail].

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Published on Wednesday, January 14, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Hallucinations of Grandeur
by Rosa Maria Pegueros

Much has been made of George W. Bush’s devoutness; it rankles atheists and cynics, worries the civil libertarians, and disturbs the churchgoers who fear that his religious fanaticism undermines the tolerance that is the civil religion of our country.

I worry about Bush’s determination to end evil. End evil? Better men and women have tried and failed.

Evil defies definition. It eludes your grasp; it squirts out between your fingers like a crazed jellyfish, and packs a nasty sting when you try to grab it. While Americans generally agree that terrorism is bad and that it was a good thing that Saddam Hussein was captured, we can’t agree on what terrorism is, who the terrorists are, and certainly not on what the meaning of the word ‘evil’ is.

But W. keeps using it. The trouble with trying to end evil is that it requires an absolute rigidity and resolve--W’s favorite word-- but the likely outcome is not the end of evil but the imposition of one man’s or woman’s will on a community, an entire country, or worse.

One wonders what specific ills the president thinks are worthy of being labeled ‘evil.’ Funneling projects to his friends and cutting their taxes seems to be okay. Encouraging their greed and benefiting from it does not cause any pangs of remorse in this president. Letting poor people stagnate in a sluggish economy while their dreams of better lives dry up seems to be all right, too. Poor mothers without prenatal care? Tough luck. Youths who cannot afford to pay for college? Apply to Yale; if Bush could get in, you might be able to get a scholarship!

Of seven deadly sins--greed, envy, pride, anger, sloth, lust, gluttony--all seem to be evident in his administration, although not all are his own personal sins.

We’ll leave the consideration of lust to Laura. Greed, well, that one is self-evident. Pride is also known as vanity; that might describe a president who spends more hours exercising than most Hollywood starlets.

Anger: How much of our foreign policy is determined by Bush 43’s anger over Bush 41’s failure to capture Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, his rage at Saddam’s subsequent attempt to assassinate him, and his father`s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton?

Gluttony: Can a man be gluttonous without weighing a single pound more than he should? Perhaps we should think of the essential meaning of the word: To consume more than one needs. That describes every SUV driver, and the government officials who are getting rich from the oil addiction in this country.

Envy: If only we had Iraq’s oil fields, we could drown ourselves in the oil, use it all up, then raid another oil-rich country.

Sloth: What other word is there for a man so bereft of intellectual curiosity? As Fidel Castro said when Bush assumed the presidency, “I hope he isn’t as stupid as he seems.” So do we, Mr. Castro, so do we.

Why aren’t hypocrisy and lying among the sins that are traditionally said to be the ones that impede a soul’s spiritual progress? Could it be because those who articulated the seven sins were members of the hierarchy and did not reflect upon their own sins as they judged others?

Considering that George W. Bush is pretty much a bust in relation to the traditional seven sins, perhaps we could turn his attention to the seven sins that Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian leader and peacemaker, articulated:

· Wealth without Work

· Pleasure without Conscience

· Science without Humanity

· Knowledge without Character

· Politics without Principle

· Commerce without Morality

· Worship without Sacrifice

The list speaks for itself. By any measure, George W. Bush falls short. We can only hope, pray, and work for his defeat before he does any more damage to the moral fiber of this country.

Rosa Maria Pegueros, J.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor of Latin American history and women`s studies at the University of Rhode Island. To contact her, write to [e-mail]

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-clarkpr…
CANDIDATES 2004 | TURNING POINTS


Pentagon Defeat Fired Up Clark for White House Fight
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer

January 15, 2004

When the call came on that summer night in 1999, Gen. Wesley K. Clark was dining with Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus at the leader`s elegant estate in Vilnius. A fine cut of roast beef was on his plate, French wine filled his glass and Clark was in excellent spirits.

A military aide whispered in Clark`s ear: The Pentagon was on the line. "Excuse me, Mr. President," Clark said. "I`ll have to take this call."

On the phone was Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with news that would change the life of Clark, then supreme allied commander in Europe and one of the brightest stars in the U.S. military.

Should he find a secure phone, Clark asked Shelton. Don`t bother, was Shelton`s reply. Then, curtly, Shelton informed Clark that Defense Secretary William S. Cohen was relieving him of command early, cutting short Clark`s meteoric military career.

When Clark returned to the dinner table, he quietly informed Adamkus. "I couldn`t believe this was happening," Adamkus recalled recently. "I asked Gen. Clark if he had expected this, and he said he had to admit it was a surprise."

The full effect took awhile to sink in. When Margaret Sullivan, one of Clark`s aides, saw him later, she remembered, "Wes looked like he had been hit by a car. He felt he had been publicly humiliated."

While Clark knew his relations with Cohen and Shelton were strained, he had not anticipated the move, which came in the glow of his crowning achievement: the successful intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to stop ethnic bloodshed in Kosovo, the small, mountainous province of Serbia.

But it was a turning point in the career of this ambitious American general. And it would lead, four years and two months later, to Clark`s decision last fall to enter a crowded field of candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

"Here he had spent his entire career serving his country, led a near perfect operation in Kosovo and was now being summarily dismissed," said Sullivan, his Pentagon aide. "I have often wondered … would he be running for president if his military career had ended on a different note?"

Clark`s 33-month tenure as NATO chief is cited by his supporters as evidence of his brilliant, skillful leadership in an international crisis. But his detractors, including former colleagues in the military, say it`s an example of Clark`s overriding ambition and thirst for the limelight.

No one disputes, though, that Clark was at the nexus of a bruising fight within the Clinton administration over the Western role in the Balkans. At issue was whether the United States should try to stop Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic from carrying out murderous attacks against Kosovo`s 1 million ethnic Albanians, who are mostly Muslim.

Pentagon leaders then were opposed to intervention, arguing that it would serve no important national security or economic purpose. But the State Department and White House countered that the United States could not afford to ignore another large-scale humanitarian disaster.

Clark aligned himself with the White House, giving it the key military support it needed to win the argument. In the Pentagon, though, Clark`s position was seen as an act of betrayal that bordered on insubordination.

In the end, NATO succeeded in stopping Milosevic with a 78-day bombing campaign. Milosevic now is on trial in The Hague for war crimes. But Clark`s efforts, particularly his use of the news media to advance his views, earned him enemies among the military`s senior officer corps. As one foe put it, Clark had become "a political courtier who had lost the ethos of a warrior."

The path taken by this 59-year-old Arkansas native to the Democratic campaign trail this month began with a career launched in glory at West Point, where he was quickly identified as a future leader. First in his class at West Point in 1966, he spent a year studying social sciences and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, earning a reputation as one of the Army`s "intellectual" leaders.

He went to Vietnam and was shot Feb. 19, 1970, in the shoulder, hand and hip when the company of infantry soldiers he was leading was ambushed. For continuing to command his troops while wounded, he was awarded the Silver Star.

After Vietnam, though, West Point graduates like Clark fell out of favor. The unsuccessful war in Southeast Asia was blamed by some on a cadre of Pentagon intellectuals, led by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and his "whiz kids" analysts. Clark returned to West Point in 1971 to teach in the social sciences department with "The Lincoln Brigade," a corps of Army intellectuals named for a World War II general who championed the soldier-scholar-statesman model for officers.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Clark was more or less indistinguishable from other accomplished bureaucrats in the Army. He earned a reputation as a smart, hard-driving and highly competent Vietnam veteran who could efficiently carry out orders and train soldiers. He was promoted quickly, though he spent many of those years at Army bases far from the military center of power.

But in April 1994, he arrived back at the Pentagon as a freshly minted three-star general with the key job of running strategic planning and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not long after walking in the door, Clark got his first big assignment: to develop a plan for a U.S. intervention in Rwanda in east-central Africa, where the slaughter of the Tutsi minority by the Hutu majority was beginning.

But the White House wasn`t interested, and Clark`s assignment turned out to be a pointless exercise.

"There was no serious military planning undertaken, because there was no go-ahead," Clark recalls. "Then it was too late."

Too Late for 800,000

When the ethnic violence ended in Rwanda, 800,000 Tutsis had been killed. Only later, when Clark read the detailed journalistic descriptions of the brutality, did he realize the implications of the failure to act.

Why, "if we could prevent these things, wouldn`t we?" Clark asked recently.

Samantha Power, a Harvard University lecturer and author of a book on genocide, says that attitude is what set him apart. "General Clark was one of the few in the military that allowed human considerations … to affect him, not cripple him, but affect his judgment of what should be done," she said.

As his tour in the Pentagon drew to a close in 1996, Clark faced a crossroads. Under the Army`s rules, he needed to either get promoted to a four-star general job or retire. Only one four-star job was open — commander of U.S. forces in South and Central America.

Gen. Marc Cisneros, credited with capturing Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega, thought he had that job in the bag. But, while visiting the Pentagon during job interviews, he heard a rumor that Clark was angling for it.

Cisneros recalls thinking, "Well, I know Wes Clark. I`ll just ask him if it`s true." When he did, Clark denied he was seeking the job.

"He outright lied to me," said Cisneros, now chief executive of a charitable foundation in Texas.

Clark denies that he ever campaigned for the job and says he genuinely thought his Army career was over when he talked to Cisneros.

In fact, the two men represented very different armies. Cisneros said Clark`s support came from a circle of "elitist West Pointers." Added Cisneros: "It is not good to have an elitist group have all the power." Clark notes that neither Cisneros nor any of his other critics attended West Point. "Whether there was a bias or not, I don`t know," he said. "Maybe there was."

But Clark had important allies: Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Defense Secretary William J. Perry. It was Shalikashvili who had selected Clark as director of strategic planning. And, as would later become clear, Shalikashvili shared Clark`s belief in the use of military power for humanitarian causes.

Clark spent 13 months as South Command chief before being tapped, with Shalikashvili`s support, as supreme allied commander of NATO in July 1997. It would be Clark`s last assignment.

When Clark arrived at NATO headquarters in Belgium, tensions were rising in the Balkans. The Dayton accords had settled matters in Bosnia, but conditions were deteriorating inside the Serbian province of Kosovo.

President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and White House national security advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, wanted to intervene. After sitting idly by during the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, Clinton wanted a different outcome.

But the Pentagon was cautious, partly because of the embarrassment of its failed peacekeeping mission in Somalia. To the generals, peacekeeping was a potential quagmire that served no vital U.S. security interest and, in fact, hampered the military`s readiness to face higher-priority threats, should they arise.

Clark already had had two difficult experiences in the Balkans.

Three years earlier, in 1994, Clark had gone to talk with Bosnian and Serb forces. During the meeting with Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, who would later be indicted for war crimes, Clark and Mladic exchanged hats and posed for photographs. Those photos incensed members of Congress and left Clark looking like a lightweight easily manipulated by a crafty international outlaw. Clark later admitted it was a mistake, but he learned how important it was to use a tough hand when dealing with the Serbian leadership.

Then, a year later, in 1995, Clark and a team of senior U.S. officials traveled to the Balkans to help carry out the Dayton peace accord. Clark had a special friendship with one member of the delegation, Joe Kruzel, an assistant secretary of defense.

In fact, soon after arriving in the region, Kruzel and Clark, on a dare, climbed to a third-story window of their seaside hotel, dove into the Adriatic Sea and swam across a harbor. It was, Kruzel`s wife would say later, "a life-affirming event, a crazy thing to do. That was my husband. I guess it was Wes too."

The U.S. team intended to travel to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, by air, but Milosevic refused to guarantee their safety at the airport. So the team drove in a convoy over a hazardous mountain road. A shoulder of the rain-soaked road gave way, and the vehicle carrying Kruzel and two other Americans plunged more than 1,000 feet.

Clark disregarded warnings that the area was mined and clawed his way to the burning vehicle. Two men died at the scene; Kruzel died several hours later.

"I loved Joe Kruzel," Clark said recently. "Joe`s death was a huge blow to me."

The deaths, though, were one reason Clark was so committed to using force against Milosevic in 1997. It was "very personal for Clark," a senior defense official recalled. "Clark had a great animosity toward Milosevic, rather than the cool detachment you would expect from a senior military officer."

When the question of whether to intervene to protect Kosovo arose, Clark already had a personal stake.

Cohen, the Defense secretary, and Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, opposed the Kosovo campaign. Clark, Albright and Berger were behind it. For Clark, the decision to put himself at odds with his military superiors wasn`t taken lightly. Not only were innocent lives at stake, but NATO and Europe`s stability were on the line.

"There was not any way of tilting toward what they wanted, because what they wanted in the spring of `98 was to say nothing about what was happening," Clark said.

"The Pentagon was not interested," Albright agreed. She added, in a recent interview, that Clark was "not out of sync with the administration." Added Berger: "Clark was forward-leaning on Kosovo. It would have been quite unfortunate if the final act of the 20th century had been the ethnic cleansing of a million people in Europe."

Weeks after NATO ended bombing in June 1999, the United Nations estimated that 800,000 refugees who had fled their homes in Kosovo were returning. An estimated 10,000 had died during the violence, according to Human Rights Watch. No U.S. soldier was killed in the NATO military operation.

Cohen and Shelton declined to comment for this article.

But their dispute with Clark was exacerbated by the way he conducted himself, Clark`s critics say. Cohen and Shelton are said by friends to feel that Clark went around them in promoting the Kosovo campaign, using contacts in the White House and taking his case to the public through the media.

Clark has denied circumventing his superiors and he never spoke directly with Clinton during the Kosovo war, according to Berger.

However, Clark did employ all of his considerable communications skills — honed on the West Point debate team — in articulating his views to the public. Clark was being quoted more in major newspaper and news broadcasts than any other military officer between 1998 and 2000. He was mentioned in more than 300 stories in the New York Times alone. By comparison, Shelton received 24 mentions.

`Get Your Face Off TV`

At one point, Cohen grew so angry that he sent Shelton with a message to Clark: "Get your … face off the TV. No more briefings, period," according to Clark`s account in his book, "Waging Modern War." The demand was punctuated by an obscenity.

After Clark entered the presidential race, Shelton publicly attacked Clark`s "integrity and character." Shelton has since refused to explain his choice of words, but his opinion has been endorsed by several retired generals. Clark defenders, including Albright and retired Army Gen. Don Kerrick, say Shelton`s attack is "ridiculous" and untrue.

Clark "stood for personal integrity," said Chris Hernandez, a retired Army warrant officer who led Clark`s security detail at NATO. "There were generals out there who really abused the system. If a general left his gloves some place, he would send a helicopter crew to get them. That wasn`t Clark."

"I have known him almost his entire adult life," said retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency. "And he is one of the most extraordinarily talented persons I have ever known. He is a man of enormous integrity and good judgment."

The tension between the Pentagon and Clark was partly due to the nature of Clark`s job in Europe. He did command U.S. forces. But the other hat he wore was leading the 19-nation NATO alliance, and many of its members were tepid about the Kosovo intervention. Also, by its very nature, the post of NATO commander has a greater visibility than almost any other U.S. military officer.

"You can not overstate his role in holding together the NATO alliance," said Stephanie Hoehne, a retired colonel who ran NATO`s news media office.

Nonetheless, military officers have criticized Clark for some of his detailed decisions during Kosovo: for strongly advocating the use of ground troops; miscalculating how quickly Milosevic would capitulate to bombing; introducing Army helicopters into the area; and the ineffectiveness of the early weeks of the bombing campaign.

Dennis Reimer, retired Army chief of staff, said Clark had spent more time with Milosevic before the Kosovo campaign than any other U.S. military official and had concluded he would cave in to NATO demands with the threat of force or with several days of bombing. After weeks of bombing, though, Milosevic hadn`t budged.

"I don`t necessarily fault Clark for that," Reimer said. "He sincerely felt Milosevic would cave in."

Clark says his support for intervening in Kosovo is consistent with his position today on the Iraq war. He didn`t oppose unseating Saddam Hussein, he says, but the Bush administration should have secured an international consensus and used NATO forces.

The phone call in Vilnius ended Clark`s military career. The NATO job is nominally a three-year appointment, but most NATO commanders routinely receive one- or two-year extensions. Cohen set Clark`s retirement date in May 2000, three months shy of the basic two-year tour of duty.

After the dinner that night, Clark placed a call in hopes of talking directly with Cohen. But he was told the Defense secretary was unavailable. By then, the Pentagon already had leaked word of Clark`s fate.

The official reason given for the decision was that Cohen wanted to retain Air Force Gen. Joe Ralston, who would have had to retire if a four-star job was not found for him.

But to Clark, that explanation "didn`t wash." Ralston served three full years as NATO commander and now works for Cohen`s lobbying firm in Washington.

*

Friday: John F. Kerry

*

(Begin Text of Infobox)

Wesley K. Clark

Personal

Born: Dec. 23, 1944, in Chicago

Hometown: Little Rock, Ark.

Family: Married Gert Kingston in 1967. One child, son Wes Clark II, born in 1969

Education: United States Military Academy at West Point, 1966. Oxford University, 1968

Career: Retired four-star general. NATO supreme allied commander, from 1997 to 2000.

By the numbers

38

Years Gen. Wesley K. Clark spent in the Army.

4

Number of times Clark was shot on a jungle patrol in Vietnam.

19

Number of nations under Clark`s command as supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1997 to 2000.

2

Number of nonfiction books written by Clark that have war themes.

More than 20

Number of awards Clark received from foreign nations, including honorary knighthood in Britain.

$1.9 million

Amount Clark`s campaign spent on TV ads in the last six months of 2003.

20%

Share of New Hampshire voters who support Clark, according to an American Research Group poll this week.

A closer look

"Possesses the highest standards of professional competence and ethics of any officer I know…. Tempering brilliant intellect with pragmatic know-how, and strong leadership qualities, LTC Clark is the most gifted officer of his rank in the Army today. He undoubtedly will wear three or four stars some day. Promote and send to the war college immediately; select for Brigade Command as quickly as regulations permit." — Evaluation given by Gen. Edwin Burba Jr. in March 1980, when Clark was a lieutenant colonel.

The lowdown

After a stumbling start, Clark turned in a solid fourth-quarter fundraising performance, finishing second in the Democratic money chase. His military background lends him strong national security credentials. But his strategy, counting on victory after the first round of voting in Iowa and New Hampshire, is a risky one that has failed others.

*

— Analysis by Times staff writer Mark Barabak

*

Sources: New Yorker, Boston Globe, National Journal, Campaign Media Analysis Group and http://www.Clark04.com

Los Angeles Times


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-retire1…
THE NATION


More Workers Are Likely to Retire Without Company Health Benefits
By Debora Vrana and Vicki Kemper
Times Staff Writers

January 15, 2004

Increasing numbers of Americans are likely to learn in the next three years that they will retire without any health-care benefits, according to a survey of some of the largest U.S. companies that was released Wednesday.

Citing the rising costs of health care, 71% of 408 companies surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Hewitt Associates said they had made retired workers shoulder a bigger share of insurance premiums in the last year.

About 10% said they had eliminated subsidized health benefits for future retirees, and 20% said they probably would eliminate the benefits by 2007.

If employers follow that path, more Americans who retire could join the growing ranks of the underinsured.

"This is a retreat from the promise that companies have made to workers since World War II," said Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica. "It`s an abrogation of a social contract."

Kaiser, a nonprofit health policy organization, and Hewitt, a consulting firm, didn`t identify the companies surveyed but said they included 45% of the Fortune 100. Each of them has more than 1,000 employees.

In the survey, 86% of companies said they planned to increase retirees` health insurance costs in the next three years.

"This is something we are seeing with both retirees and employees," said Tricia Neuman, a vice president at Kaiser. "It`s the same story — costs are being shifted to both groups."

Companies across a number of sectors — including SBC Communications Inc., the nation`s second-largest local phone company; NCR Corp., a computer services firm; and Tribune Co., a large media company and owner of the Los Angeles Times — are shifting more health costs to retired workers.

Last year, Bethlehem Steel Corp. won Bankruptcy Court permission to eliminate or reduce health-care and life insurance benefits for about 90,000 retirees and their spouses.

Another employer in bankruptcy proceedings, United Airlines` parent UAL Corp., said Wednesday that the carrier`s 35,000 U.S. retirees would have to chip in more for their medical benefits to help the firm emerge from bankruptcy.

"We regret having to make this choice, but we need to exit Chapter 11 and we are trying to cut costs across the board," UAL spokeswoman Jean Medina said.

One union vowed to fight. "These retirees are very angry," said Sara Dela Cruz, spokeswoman for the Assn. of Flight Attendants, which represents 21,000 flight attendants at United. The extra health costs are "just not necessary."

Corporate health benefits have long helped many seniors fill the gaps in their Medicare coverage. Though the federal program assists with doctor and hospital bills, it has offered no coverage for prescription drugs.

As a result, about 12 million Medicare beneficiaries have relied on former employers for help with their medication costs.

The Kaiser-Hewitt survey was taken before Congress in November voted to require Medicare to begin offering drug coverage in 2006. In addition, $89 billion in direct subsidies and tax benefits were created to encourage employers to retain prescription-drug coverage for their retirees age 65 and older.

Deere & Co., the world`s largest manufacturer of agricultural and forestry equipment, said those incentives were bright spots for businesses struggling to manage health-care costs.

"We applaud that effort as a step in the right direction," said Mertroe B. Hornbuckle, Deere`s vice president of human resources.

According to the Kaiser- Hewitt survey, the cost of giving retired workers health benefits rose by nearly 14% to $20.6 billion in 2003. At the same time, the health premiums paid by employers climbed 13.9% last year.

It was the third straight year of double-digit percentage increases in premiums, according to another Kaiser survey released in September.

On average, active-worker contributions for health insurance rose 8% for individual coverage to $42 a month, and 13% for family coverage to $201 a month, according to the earlier Kaiser survey.

For retirees under 65, the average health-care-coverage payment increased 20% to $166 a month, while retirees age 65 and over paid an average of $129 a month, an 18% increase, according to the survey released Wednesday.

The surveys found that, on average, retirees in the U.S. paid 39% of their health-insurance premium costs.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-onei…
THE NATION


To O`Neill, Ideologues Won the Tax-Cut War
A book says the former Treasury chief bluntly warned Bush of perilous deficits. The result was the triumph of fiscal recklessness, he says.
By Warren Vieth
Times Staff Writer

January 15, 2004

WASHINGTON — For Treasury Secretary Paul H. O`Neill, the moment of truth had arrived. Seated in the Oval Office on Sept. 4, 2002, he looked President Bush in the eye and told him that another big tax cut could prove disastrous.

"Mr. President, if you start pushing through a second major stimulus plan, you run out of money," O`Neill said, according to a new account of his two years as Bush`s Treasury chief. "You won`t have any money to do anything you want to do, such as changing Social Security or fundamental tax reform, for the rest of your term. Now`s the time to keep your powder dry. Any other path is not responsible."

O`Neill knew he had presented Bush with a stark choice: If the president wanted to pursue the tax-cut plan being pushed by other administration officials, he would have to fire his Treasury secretary first.

"Got it," Bush reportedly replied. Two months later, O`Neill was out of a job, and the tax cuts were headed for passage.

The fateful exchange, recounted in "The Price of Loyalty," a book written by journalist Ron Suskind with O`Neill`s assistance, involved more than a contest of wills between two determined political leaders.

It underscored what, in O`Neill`s view, was a monumental struggle over policy priorities and the ultimate triumph of fiscal recklessness over budgetary caution within an administration split from the start between ideologues and pragmatists.

In the latter camp was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who allied himself with O`Neill in a campaign to keep future deficits from getting out of hand.

In the end, O`Neill said, the ideologues prevailed.

O`Neill`s assessment is shared by some independent analysts, who say the wisdom of the tax cuts will be debated long after the initial furor over the book`s revelations of personality clashes and administrative spats fade from view.

Already a central issue in the 2004 campaign, the sudden shift from big surpluses to record deficits may leave as big an imprint on Bush`s legacy as the war on terrorism or the invasion of Iraq, some economists say.

"Without a doubt, he was a voice of caution," former Congressional Budget Office director Robert Reischauer said of O`Neill. "He wasn`t listened to. He should have been the most important policy voice in this area."

Robert E. Rubin, Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, said Bush`s tax reductions set the stage for an "endless string of projected deficits" that could trigger a crisis of confidence in financial markets, dampening U.S. economic growth for years. "I haven`t read his book," Rubin said of O`Neill. "But I don`t think we should have put in place either of those tax cuts."

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said Wednesday that she had not read the book, but disputed any suggestion that Bush was not concerned about future deficits.

"He believes the budget needs to address America`s priorities, which are fighting the war on terrorism and promoting America`s economic security," Buchan said. "The budget reflects those priorities. In addition, it reflects spending restraint in other areas."

Not all administration observers agree with O`Neill`s interpretation of events, and some question the book`s accuracy.

Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995, said the book was based on extensive interviews with O`Neill and other administration officials, as well as 19,000 government documents, including meeting minutes and transcripts. O`Neill proofread the manuscript before publication, and dialogue "was vetted by all sides," Suskind said.

Former Bush economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey, a tax-cut advocate who lost his own job soon after O`Neill left, wrote in a Wall Street Journal column published Wednesday saying that O`Neill`s descriptions of Bush and his economic policy "do not comport with my recollection or with the public record."

The book, he said, "does a grave injustice to the president, to the truth, and to Mr. O`Neill himself."

Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett said participants in a key tax-cut discussion described in the book told him that statements attributed to the president and other officials bear little resemblance to what was actually said.

"Mr. O`Neill may think he is getting revenge on a president he believes treated him shabbily," Bartlett said. "But I think all he has really done is remind people of why he never should have been named Treasury secretary in the first place."

According to the book, O`Neill said as much to Bush in late 2000, when the president-elect asked him to leave his position as chairman of Alcoa Inc. to become the nation`s chief financial officer.

"I like to say what I think," O`Neill reportedly told the president-elect. "In Washington these days, that might make me a dangerous man."

"We know all that stuff," the book quotes Bush as replying. "Doesn`t matter. We want you to take the job."

That same evening, O`Neill received a call from Greenspan.

"We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make some lasting changes."

O`Neill and Greenspan had worked together during the Ford administration and had stayed in touch. They considered themselves pragmatists and had supported President George H.W. Bush`s decision a decade earlier to abandon his no-new-taxes pledge, a policy reversal that helped rein in runaway deficits but alienated conservatives.

With the government expected to accumulate a $5-trillion surplus over 10 years, they supported the younger Bush`s campaign proposal to reduce taxes by $1.6 trillion. But they wanted to earmark part of the surplus for Social Security reform, and worried what might happen if an economic slowdown, combined with a big tax cut, caused the surplus to evaporate. Already, there were signs of a recession.

The two men forged an alliance to try to persuade Bush to accept budgetary "triggers" that would automatically scale back future tax cuts to prevent deficit spending, the book said.

"And so it was hatched: a secret pact," Suskind wrote. "What they were doing felt perfectly natural. Two men with nearly 90 years of experience in and around Washington, colluding to prevent an elected president — with virtually no experience in setting national economic policy — from acting in a way that they were convinced was ill-considered. He`d thank them later."

A Federal Reserve spokesman said Greenspan was in Europe and declined comment.

For several weeks, O`Neill and Greenspan tried to advance the trigger idea, the book said. Their stance put them at odds with the administration`s tax-cut champions, including White House economic advisor Lindsey and political advisor Karl Rove.

Ultimately, the trigger plan was shot down by Bush. "I won`t negotiate with myself," he told O`Neill, refusing to modify his campaign pledge. "It`s that simple." Three months later, the first tax cut became law.

The rejection of triggers was a setback, but it paled in comparison to Bush`s rebuff of O`Neill`s advice when the second tax-cut plan was being formulated in 2002.

By then, the fiscal outlook had deteriorated. Revenue had plummeted and analysts had concluded that previous estimates of tax collections had been overly optimistic. The war on terrorism, launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was taking a big bite out of the budget. The government expected to post its first annual shortfall in five years, and anticipated surpluses were morphing into deficits.

Nevertheless, Lindsey and other tax-cutters were pushing for another big reduction, arguing that it would help stimulate the economy in the short term and promote growth over the long term. Once again, O`Neill and Greenspan feared that more tax cuts could drown the government in red ink and foreclose any possibility of Social Security reform.

It was against that backdrop that O`Neill entered the Oval Office on Sept. 4, determined to support fiscal restraint. "I`m going to make a stand on principle," he reportedly told Greenspan before heading to the White House. "Call it a human sacrifice."

After speaking his mind to Bush, O`Neill suspected his days were numbered. But it would be several more weeks before the tax-cutters overpowered the budget hawks. At one point during a fractious meeting in the White House Roosevelt Room, even Bush seemed to have doubts about a tax package that would bestow most of its benefits on wealthy Americans.

"Didn`t we already give them a break at the top?" Bush reportedly asked.

"Mr. President, remember the high earners are where the entrepreneurs are," Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the Office of Management and Budget, reportedly replied.

The president was persuaded. The White House assembled a plan that cut the tax on corporate dividends and accelerated rate reductions approved in 2001. Combined with the previous initiative, it set the government on a course that independent analysts now believe could add as much as $5 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.

For O`Neill, the punch line arrived on Dec. 5, 2002, in the form of a phone call from Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Paul, the president has decided to make some changes in the economic team," Cheney said.

"And you`re part of the change."


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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O’Neill’s Claims Against Bush Supported By Letters
Thursday, 15 January 2004, 2:15 pm
Opinion: Jason Leopold
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0401/S00046.htm
O’Neill’s Claims Against Bush Supported By 1998 ‘War’ Letters to Clinton Signed By Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz

By Jason Leopold
Anyone who doubts former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s recent claims that President Bush mislead the public and secretly planned the Iraq war eight months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 needs to read the two letters sent to then President Bill Clinton in 1998 and Speaker of the House Trent Lott by current members of the Bush administration urging Clinton to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq.

Back then, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz and other pro-war hawks lobbied Clinton and Gingrich to remove former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power using military force and indict him as a "war criminal." Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, both of whom were working in the private sector at the time, were affiliated with the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century, which was founded by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol in 1997 to promote America’s foreign and defense policies.

Other familiar names on PNAC’s roster of supporters include Richard Armitage, currently Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq war and former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, and Robert Kagan, a former Deputy for Policy in the State Department’s Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during the Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Kagan is also co-chair of PNAC.

PNAC has been instrumental in helping the Bush administration shape its defense policies. Since Bush has been in office, PNAC has succeeded in getting Rumsfeld to scrap the multibillion-dollar Army Crusader Artillery Program and also advising the Defense Secretary to request a $48 billion one-year increase for national defense, both of which were written about extensively in reports posted on PNAC’s web site before Rumsfeld was approached by the group.

However, one of PNAC’s first goals when it was founded in 1997 was to urge Congress and the Clinton administration to support regime change in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was allegedly manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, claims that today have turned out to be untrue.

"Only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq…" PNAC founder Kristol wrote in a 1997 report. Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine is owned by News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox News Channel, considered by many media critics to be the mouthpiece of the Bush administration.

A year after Kristol’s report, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Armitage and other PNAC members sent a letter to Clinton, repeating much of what Kristol said in his report a year earlier.

"We urge you to turn your Administration`s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam`s regime from power," says the letter sent to Clinton. "This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council."

However, in an ironic twist, Clinton rebuffed the advice saying his administration was focusing on the worldwide threat posed by the terrorist group al-Qaeeda and it’s leader Osama Bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who Iraq war critics say the Bush administration should have been focusing on after 9/11 instead of Saddam Hussein.

The 1998 letters to Clinton and Gingrich seems to back up the revelations made by O’Neil in the book "The Price of Loyalty" that the Iraq war was, in fact, planned in the days after Bush was sworn into office-possibly even earlier-if you consider that between 1998 and late 1999, when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the chief architects of the Iraq war, they spent nearly two years lobbying Congress to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein from power.

When Clinton refused, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and others from PNAC wrote another letter on May 29, 1998, to Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, saying that the United States should "establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf-and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."

"We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein`s claim to be Iraq`s legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal," says the letter to Gingrich and Lott. "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein`s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime."

All of the Iraq "war" letters are posted on PNAC’s web site, http://www.newamericancentury.org

The letters offered no hard evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction but it did say that with Saddam Hussein in power "a significant portion of the world`s supply of oil will all be put at hazard . . ."


******************
- Jason Leopold is an investigative journalist based in California, he is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis. He can be contacted at [e-mail]. This story is available for republication, please contact the author by email.

Hier der Brief.

January 26, 1998


The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, DC


Dear Mr. President:

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.


Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.


Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration`s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam`s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely,

Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett

Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky

Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad

William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman

Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber

Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick

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Thousands March in Iraq to Demand Early Elections
Thu January 15, 2004 08:53 AM ET


By Abdel Razzak Hamid
BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of demonstrators shouting "No to America" marched through Basra on Thursday supporting a call by Iraq`s most revered Shi`ite cleric for direct elections to form a sovereign Iraqi government.

The demonstration, which concluded peacefully after a speech at a local mosque, was a huge show of strength by the country`s Shi`ite Muslim majority, and its top leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, against the U.S. blueprint for the transition.

The demonstration took place on the day bank notes bearing the face of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein ceased being legal tender, another removal of his image from everyday Iraqi life.

In mainly Shi`ite Basra, Iraq`s second city, demonstrators chanted "Yes, yes for Islam; No America, No Saddam" and slogans promoting unity with the minority Sunni community.

Sistani has objected to U.S. plans for a transitional Iraqi assembly to be selected by regional caucuses rather than an election. The assembly will select an interim government that is due to take over sovereignty by the end of June.

The protesters marched to a mosque, waving banners and photographs of Sistani, although he himself did not attend.

A senior Basra cleric, Ali al-Hakim al-Safi, told the crowd at the mosque that Shi`ites would seek their goals by peaceful means -- for now.

"We do not need to use violence to get our rights while there are still peaceful ways we can work together," he said. "But if we find peaceful means are no longer available to us we will have to seek other methods.

"We don`t want to resort to violence for our demands to be met, but if it reaches a stalemate then the coalition will face the wrath of the Iraqi people."

A bomb was found on a street in Basra close to where the protesters were gathering. British troops sealed off the area while they prepared to destroy the device, witnesses said.

U.S. officials and most of Iraq`s U.S.-appointed Governing Council say the country cannot hold elections until 2005. They have been trying to persuade Sistani to soften his stance.

U.S. SAYS RESPECTS SISTANI

Paul Bremer, Iraq`s U.S. governor, has said he respects Sistani, but that there is not enough time to hold elections before handover of sovereignty. U.S. officials say they are reviewing the plan for regional caucuses to make the process as open as possible.

The United States and the Governing Council are pushing for the United Nations to play a role in the political transition by overseeing the regional caucuses.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shi`ite Muslim on the Governing Council, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking the United Nations to study the possibility of early polls or find a compromise path to election of an assembly.

Annan said in reply that it was technically impossible to organize elections by June and stopped short of promising U.N. action in solving the dispute or endorsing the current process.

Security remains precarious in Iraq. Foreign organizations and Iraqis working with them have been the target of frequent attacks. Since the start of the war, 343 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq, 228 of them in guerrilla attacks since major combat was declared over at the start of May last year. (Additional reporting by Evelyn Leopold at the United Nations)

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$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Deep Thought]

@ Joerver

Clinton war damals leicht erpressbar - Monica Levinsky!

Wann genau wurde die sache mit Monica oeffentlich?
Vor oder nach der Weigerung Clintons, Krieg fuer oel zu fuehren?

Wenn man an Politik als dreckiges geschaeft denkt, koennte man durchaus denken, dass man das Problem Clintons als Anlass fuer einen Wink mit dem zaunpfahl sehen sollte oder als "Strafe fuer die weigerung nach dem Motto: dann machen wir das nach dem Impecheament: der verlorenen wahl mit Dummkopf Bush"

Nur so ein sich aufdraengender Gedanke...

[Joerver]

DT
Die Geschichte des Briefes ist schon seit langem bekannt, wurde im Zusammenhang mit der O`Neill Story wieder aufgefrischt.
So war es auch seit langem bekannt, dass Saddam die WMD schon 1996 vernichtet hat lt. Uno Berichten.
Nur hat es keiner geglaubt oder wollte es nicht glauben.

[Joerver]

Cheney`s grim vision: decades of war
Vice president says Bush policy aimed at long-term world threat
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback | FAQ


URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/15/MNGK14AC301.DTL


Los Angeles -- In a forceful preview of the Bush administration`s expansionist military policies in this election year, Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday painted a grim picture of what he said was the growing threat of a catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States and warned that the battle, like the Cold War, could last generations.

The vice president`s tone, in a major address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, was sobering, unlike many other comments recently by senior administration officials that have stressed successes in the war on terrorism.

Cheney mentioned only in passing the administration`s domestic policies, while saying President Bush would present a blueprint of his domestic goals in next Tuesday`s State of the Union speech.

Cheney devoted the half-hour speech to a frightening characterization of the war on terrorism and the new kind of mobilization he said it demanded. He sounded the alarm about the increasing prospects of a major new terrorist attack and the extraordinary responses that are required. While many of his remarks echoed past comments by the president and senior officials, Cheney struck a surprisingly dour note and suggested only an administration of proven ability could manage the dramatic overhaul necessary for the nation`s security apparatus.

"One of the legacies of this administration will be some of the most sweeping changes in our military, and our national security strategy as it relates to the military and force structure, and how we`re based, and how we used it in the last 50 or 60 years, probably since World War II," Cheney said. "I think the changes are that dramatic."

He also said the administration was planning to expand the military into even more overseas bases so the United States could wage war quickly around the globe.

"Scattered in more than 50 nations, the al Qaeda network and other terrorist groups constitute an enemy unlike any other that we have ever faced, " he said. "And as our intelligence shows, the terrorists continue plotting to kill on an ever-larger scale, including here in the United States."

Cheney provided no details, however, of the kinds of attacks he expected.

Although the administration has been criticized by some, including most of the Democratic candidates for president, for not doing enough to eliminate known programs for developing weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Cheney said they were a priority and confronted the United States with its gravest threat.

Again, he presented the risks of a terrorist attack involving these weapons in stark terms.

"Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives as the result of a single attack, or a set coordinated of attacks," Cheney said.

While polls show that many Americans support the president`s aggressive war on terrorism, he also has many critics for the way the battle has been waged. The president initially justified the war in Iraq by saying that Saddam Hussein had active programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The United States has yet to find evidence of such programs since overthrowing Hussein and installing a military occupation, prompting questions about the president`s agenda and the quality of intelligence he is receiving.

In addition, an expert at the U.S. Army War College, Jeffrey Record, recently released a 62-page analysis that concluded the war in Iraq might have set back American efforts to stop terrorists by diverting precious resources to a battle that will do little to prevent new attacks.

As a result, Record concluded, the war on terrorism "lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives and may not be sustainable over the long haul."

But in his speech Wednesday, Cheney compared this moment to the challenges faced by President Harry Truman at the beginning of the Cold War, when there was a hot war flaring on the Korean Peninsula and a long-term nuclear standoff developing with the Soviet Union.

Cheney said Bush was establishing, as Truman had, a new structure for a new long-term war and spreading the military into new areas of the globe. "On Sept. 11, 2001, our nation made a fundamental commitment that will take many years to see through," Cheney said.

E-mail James Sterngold at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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Nach anderen Zählungen sind es bis gestern 498 Opfer bei den US-Soldaten. Und bei den Koalitionstruppen sind es 96 Tote.
Ich glaube, es gab bisher noch nie eine solange Zeit ohne größere Opferzahlen unter den Besatzungstruppen.
Im Januar sind es bisjetzt 22 Tote bei den Besatzungstruppen.
Der blutigste Monat war während der gesamten Zeit der November mit 109 Opfern.
Die Opferzahlen der irakischen Bevölkerung ist um ein vielfaches höher.

U.S. Iraq Toll Nears 500 But Support for War Remains
Thu January 15, 2004 01:55 PM ET

By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq is nearing 500 but experts said this had not shattered public support for the war even as critics question whether the lives were lost for a worthwhile cause.

Since the U.S.-led invasion to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in March, 496 American service members have been killed, 343 in combat and 153 in "non-hostile" circumstances such as vehicle accidents and suicide, the Pentagon said.

A further 2,493 U.S. troops have been wounded in combat, plus 395 hurt in non-combat incidents.

Experts who study the link between casualties and public support in wartime said that Americans` willingness to stomach a rising death toll depended heavily on a belief in the prospect for eventual victory, which remains firm.

"There`s no doubt that hitting 500 forms something of a psychological moment," said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University in North Carolina. "But it doesn`t really change the underlying dynamics of public opinion on this issue, which remain pretty stable."

The remains of dead troops, wrapped in body bags and transported in metal cases, regularly arrive aboard aircraft at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The Pentagon does not permit the media to show the return of the bodies to U.S. soil.

President Bush has attended none of the funerals for U.S. troops killed in Iraq, with some critics accusing him of seeking to avoid bringing attention to the death toll.

Public opinion polls show an American public uncomfortable with the casualties, but still supportive of the war.

POLLS SUPPORT WAR

Sixty percent of respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll in December said the level of U.S. military casualties in Iraq was unacceptable while 37 percent said it was acceptable.

But 59 percent of respondents in the poll, in which 1,001 adults were questioned between Dec. 18 and 20, said the war was worth fighting, compared to 39 percent who said it was not.

"Typically women are less accepting of casualties than men," said Texas A&M University political sociologist James Burk, who identified casualties and the perception of whether Bush has a clear plan in Iraq as key factors that could drive down public support for the war.

Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland`s Program on International Policy Attitudes, said polls found that the public expected about 1,000 U.S. fatalities from war in Iraq and that U.S. troops would remain two to three years.

"They have not come to the conclusion that it`s failing. They are not completely convinced that it will work, but they`re not seeing it falling apart," Kull said.

Some analysts critical of U.S. policy argue that the Iraq war represents a detour from the vital objective of crushing the al Qaeda network, responsible for the 2001 attacks on the United States, and in the process wastes lives and money.

"Are these causalities that are worth taking? Are these service men and women who are dying, are they giving up their lives truly in defense of our country, as our military should be doing?" asked analyst Charles Pena of the Cato Institute. "Those are the fundamental questions that seem to be ignored."

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Bush to Wear `Lucky` Monkey Pants

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WASHINGTON (IWR News Parody) - White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed today that President Bush will be wearing his `lucky` monkey pants every day until the November election is over.

http://www.robotmonkeypants.com/monkeypants.mp3

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POLL ANALYSES
January 15, 2004
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr040115.asp

Republican Party Favored on Security Issues, Foreign Policy
Democrats lead on economic and social issues


by Lydia Saad
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- Democrats` chances of beating George W. Bush in the presidential election in November may depend on many factors, but to the extent that issues matter, fiscal management and healthcare may be the Democrats` strongest suits. Although the Democratic candidates for president have spent considerable time assailing Bush`s Iraq policy -- clearly playing to their base -- Iraq as well as terrorism are solidly Republican issues, with few Americans saying they prefer the Democratic approach to these.

Other issues on which Republicans hold a perceptual edge are foreign affairs generally and gun policy. Democrats have a clear lead on the environment and education. Only four points separate the parties in perceived handling of the economy and taxes, but the Democrats hold the edge on both.

SUMMARY TABLE: PARTY HANDLING OF ISSUES OR PROBLEMS

http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr040115.asp

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In other news, the President said today that he had not read former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s book because, in his words, “it’s a book.”
ANDY BOROWITZ

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Blind Loyalty to an Empire of Greed: The Corruptions of Patriotism

By GLEN T. MARTIN

10/05/03: (Counterpunch) The United States administers a global empire. This used to be a secret. Through the 1990s, our government told us that we stood for democracy, freedom, and independence of nations worldwide (lying to us). But the majority of U.S. citizens refused to critically examine their government out of patriotism. Sheeplike, we acted in defiance of the founding fathers of our nation who distrusted the power of government, who realized that small acts of terrorism (which existed then as now) were nothing compared to the potential for tyranny from those who wield governmental powers.

From the late 1940s to the 1990s, most citizens of the U.S. thought that patriotism meant blind faith in the pronouncements of our leaders, even when the public statements of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Regan, Bush, and Clinton were shown by a few decent and honest critics in this country to be one lie after another. They told us we stood for "democracy" against the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union and people (like children) wanted to be patriotic and believe the lies from Washington.

Meanwhile the U.S. government secretly overthrew the democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, carpet bombed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 70s, helped install a dictator in Indonesia in 1965 (at the cost of half a million lives), overthrew the democratic government of Chile in 1973 and destroyed the democratic government of Nicaragua with a terrorist army based in Honduras in the 1980s. The list goes on and on, and any informed, honest citizen will be well aware of it.

But such blind patriotism destroys democracy and corrupts the people who blindly follow their corrupt and deceitful leaders. Today, we reap the whirlwind, the judgment of God, so to speak, the consequences of our trashing the vision of the founding fathers. For today, our leaders no longer keep it a secret. They openly admit and act on the truth that the United States runs a brutal, world-wide empire based on the immense military might of the Pentagon and the immense domination of U.S. multinational corporations over the global economy.

The Bush government does not even try to cover up its lies. It simply makes all public records that world expose its lies "top secret." It openly censors and suppresses the truth, and we do not care because our patriotism has corrupted us to this sorry extent. They know they can count on the loyality of the majority of the U.S. who are willingly coopted by the thinnest and most transparent tissue of lies.

We openly invade sovereign nations, ignoring the United Nations and world opinion. We led NATO to do this to Yugoslavia in 1998 (killing many more innocent civilians than were killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center). We bombed the towns and villages of Afghanistan, destroying more homes and lives or poor, innocent peasants (men, women, and children) in that bleeding country than were killed during 9/11. And we openly invaded, conquered, and established a military dictatorship in Iraq in defiance of world opinion and the United Nations, again killing thousands more innocent civilians than were killed in 9/11.

Democracy has its moral basis in truth, tolerance, freedom, and respect for human dignity. These are all universal values. If we are loyal to these universal values, then we cannot at the same time be blindly loyal to one government or nation. We corrupted ourselves with our blind patriotism of the late 1940s to 1990s to the point where patriotism today most often means openly supporting the empire (under self-serving lies like "liberating Iraq"), the oppression of freedom worldwide, global economic exploitation and domination, and even the suppression of freedom at home.

Those honest people who believe in universal values should not attempt to redefine "patriotism" so that it looks as if holding universal values is what is "really" patriotic. We need to repudiate that term. Decent and honest people resist the empire out of universal moral values, out of justice, not out of patriotism. It is universal values like justice and compassion that make us human. Patriotism only divides us from our suffering brothers and sisters worldwide.

Our war against the poor majority in Columbia who are struggling for a decent society used to be covered up under the lie of a "war on drugs." Today, in Columbia, we send ever more billions of dollars in weapons and training to the country with the worst human rights record of the past three decades while openly declaring that we are trying to crush its revolution. We no longer hide our global lust for world-wide domination. Patriotism corrupts, and absolute patriotism corrupts absolutely.

Recently, our unelected, dictatorial President George W. Bush visited Africa, beginning with the country of Senegal in West Africa. According to one Senegal witness, just before his visit 1500 people were arbitrarily arrested and jailed for the duration of his visit. U.S. military planes flew over the capital city of Dakar night and day so the people could not even sleep for the noise. About 700 U.S. security personnel arrived with their dogs, their own cars, and high tech equipment. They would not even let Senegal security personnel near the U.S. President.

Bush even brought his own armchair and furniture and would not use Senegal furnishings. All trees in places where Bush passed were cut down, some of them over 100 years old. All roads going downtown (where schools, hospitals, and businesses are located) were closed down during his visit. People were not allowed to go to school, the hospital, or work. The list of indignities continues. One Senegal economist estimated that this poor country lost an immense amount of money by being shut down in this way by the visit of the American President.

The message, of course, was that the United States is the world dominator and that these poor and weak countries are in effect ours to do what we want with. The arrogance and lack of respect for the people of Senegal are astonishing. These arrangements remind one distinctly of Caesar, Napoleon, the Czar, Hitler, or Stalin. They are the actions of world dominators surveying the empire with utter disdain for the people whose lives and economies they crush.

Any informed person knows that Bush and his junta are utterly corrupt. They openly assign multi-billion dollar contracts to their former business partners without any competitive bidding. They openly represent the big oil companies in Alaska, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They openly oppose environmental regulations for their friends in big business. They openly lie. They openly defy world opinion and invade any country they please.

The really sad part is that our absolute patriotism has corrupted us: we, the people in the United States. We are no longer outraged by anything our government does. We are blindly obedient and, therefore, have thrown away the moral basis of our existence as human beings and as a country. That moral basis rested on loyalty to the universal values of truth, tolerance, freedom, and respect for human dignity. Blind patriotism, loyalty, and obedience to one nation or government are not legitimate moral values. As a nation, we have corrupted ourselves absolutely.

Glen T. Martin is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Radford University in Southwest Virginia and President of International Philosophers for Peace.

Copyright: Glen T. Martin

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Jan. 15, 2004. 06:44 AM


U.S. to open files on air passengers
Personal data, itinerary required
Clampdown called invasion of privacy


TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON—Canadians who board flights in the United States will be assigned a number and colour code based on their security risk under the next step in airline security which begins this summer.

The U.S. government is forging ahead with the controversial program over objections from airlines and civil libertarians, saying it is needed to track potential terrorists on domestic flights.

Under the new system, known as CAPPS2 (Computerized Assisted Passenger PreScreening Program), all passengers will be compelled to release their full names, home address, telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary to airlines, who will then provide the data to American authorities.

Data will be compared with existing criminal and suspected terrorist databases and those who receive a "green" code will be allowed to board their flight. A "yellow" score will subject the passenger to further screening and a "red" alert will bar the traveller from boarding.

A spokesperson for Air Canada said the Canadian carrier is still awaiting clarification as to whether CAPPS2 includes foreign airlines.

But Mark Hatfield, a spokesperson for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, said the program would cover all passengers boarding flights in the United States, regardless of the airline`s country of origin.

That means a Canadian vacationing in the United States would be subject to CAPPS2 on any flight taking off from a U.S. airport. That would include connecting flights.

Hatfield said the personal data would remain on file only for the duration of a visitor`s stay in the country, then would be destroyed "almost instantaneously" upon departure.

U.S. authorities say the passenger`s full name and date of birth are needed to avoid confusion involving those with similar or identical names on terrorist watch lists.

Privacy advocates are concerned the CAPPS2 system will access public records and commercial computer banks, such as shopping mailing lists, in a bid to verify that passengers are who they say they are, the Washington Post reported.

Airlines may be ordered to provide the information on their ticket holders. Frequent travellers who volunteer the information to government officials will receive speedy boarding priority under the plan.

When Washington sought to enlist airlines in a test of CAPPS2 last year, they balked. Delta Airlines, the first to co-operate, backed out when it was threatened with a passenger boycott.

Discount carrier JetBlue Airways was sued in several states by passengers after the airline admitted it had volunteered passenger information to the Pentagon as part of a military project to test aviation security.

Domestic U.S. airlines carried 612 million passengers in 2003, according to the Census Bureau. Hatfield said the current system sees about 15 per cent of them flagged as security risks. He says the new system will lower that number to 5 per cent.

Critics say the biggest failing in U.S. air security is the lack of a master list of suspected terrorists and the country is still using a plethora of lists held by various government departments.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge had pledged to have a list up and running by last May — now officials are giving no deadline for completion.

Privacy advocates are fighting the system.

"CAPPS 2 is nothing less than a Soviet-style system of internal border controls," said the U.S.-based privacy group dontspyon.us.com. "An incredible invasion of privacy, the system is un-American and unconstitutional, not that a pesky thing like the Bill of Rights has stopped the extremists down at Homeland Security."

Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union said the "incredibly invasive system" will collect information that will be used for purposes well beyond airline security.

CAPPS 2 comes on the heels of US-VISIT, a controversial program to track visitors who need visas to enter this country by fingerprinting and photographing them.

The Department of Homeland Security said 3,478 passengers were fingerprinted and photographed at Toronto`s Pearson International Airport during the first week of US-VISIT.

They said only a small percentage of those travellers would have been Canadians carrying U.S. visas.

The Toronto numbers are small compared to major U.S. airports. Miami, for example, processed 47,065 visitors under the controversial plan in the first week since it began Jan. 5.

Additional articles by Tim Harper

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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservative."
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
British philosopher

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Economic Crisis, Threat of Jihad, Violence

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 15, 2004 - 05:07 PM
Economic Crisis, Threats of Jihad, and more Violence in Iraq

The big news today is the plummeting value of the US dollar in Iraq. Here are some figures to give you an idea of the current financial crisis in Iraq:

2 months ago:
1$ = 1950 Iraqi Dinars (ID)

The value continued to drop, and 2 days ago the value was:
1$ = 1410 ID

Yesterday:
1$ = 1100 ID


Money exchange office, Baghdad

Keep in mind that all Iraqis working for the CPA are paid in US dollars. In addition, all of the severance pay for Iraqi ex-Army personnel, unemployment payments, and a large percentage of Iraqis are paid in US dollars.

When an Iraqi ex-Army man was being paid 60$ per month by the CPA, this translated to 120,000 ID’s 2 months ago. Now he makes 60,000 ID’s. At the same time the cost of basic food products has been rising, and continues to rise. How is this man going to make ends meet?

Imagine if your pay scale remained the same at your job, yet in two months time the value of the US dollar dropped by 50%, so it now took you twice as much money to buy food and pay your mortgage? Getting a second job would be impossible, because unemployment is 60% in your country and rising.

Khalil Abrahim works as a carpenter. He had a business agreement with a man to repair his home and make him some furniture. They agreed on an amount to be paid for the work at 1,100,00 Iraqi Dinars ($550 US), made a little over two months ago when the exchange rate was 2000 ID’s per US dollar. Khalil was advanced 400,000 ID ($200), and used this money to buy his supplies.

He finished the job the day before yesterday, and went to collect his money. The man told Khalil he would pay him the remaining amount, ($350), at the rate of exchange that day, which was 1410 ID per US dollar. So both men lose money. If Khalil is paid at the rate of 1410 ID, he will lose $103.25 (205,500ID). If the man who hired him pays him at the original exchange rate of 2000 ID’s per dollar, he will lose the same amount.


Khalil Abrahim, Baghdad carpenter

Unable to reach a compromise thus far, Khalil remains unpaid, and doesn’t know how to resolve the situation.

This is but one example of a problem plaguing businesses, big and small, in Iraq on the day, ironically, that Iraqi currency with the face of Saddam Hussein on it is no longer valid.

Where will this lead? How will this be resolved?

Mr. Shuker is a Jordanian business man who does much work with the Iraqi government. He bought several containers of televisions to import to Iraq to sell, at $20,000 per container of TV’s. If he sells these in Iraq, he will lose money on his merchandise now. He told me he cannot do any business now with the dollar so low. Any transaction he makes will lose him large amounts of money.

When the ID was over 2000 per US dollar, businesses and the government of Kuwait bought heaps of them and took them out of the country. Now, because of the physical lack of ID’s in Iraq, their value has risen strongly against the US dollar. Think about the disparity now caused that businesses in Iraq have to deal with.

If the CPA does not step in to resolve this economic crisis, the likelihood of crime increasing in an already abysmal security situation is very high.

Meanwhile, food costs continue to rise and there is no solution to the rampant unemployment problem.

All of this with the backdrop of tens of thousands of people (mostly Shia) demonstrating in Basra today, demanding democratic elections within the next 2 or 3 months. At the demonstrations Ali al-Hakim al-Safi, a senior Basra cleric, told the crowd that the Shia people would seek their goals by peaceful means at first, but were prepared for other measures if necessary. He stated,

“We do not need to use violence to get our rights while there are still peaceful ways we can work together, but if we find peaceful means are no longer available to us we will have to seek other methods.”

Thus the specter of Jihad looms over Iraq.

At the same time, violence continues to the north of Baghdad. 14 people died in various attacks on US troops. 8 Iraqis were killed during an attack on US troops near Samarra. On a road between Samarra and Tikrit guerrillas attacked vehicles carrying KBR employees, killing three men as well as wounding a US soldier and US civilian.

Also last night, a soldier with the 101st Airborne Division died in a ‘non-hostile incident’ in Mosul.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=110

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3 Dire Warnings Fall on Deaf Ears!

Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
[e-mail]

01/15/04: (ICH) This weekend, I had a strange dream.

I was many years older than I am today. My graying beard was white; my hair, mostly gone. I even had two grandchildren - a 12-year-old girl and a 10-year old boy.

We were at home, and it seemed to be the holidays. I was sitting on the floor, trying to answer the children`s inquisitive questions. But there were too many people around and they were very loud.

So the remaining details of my dream are fuzzy. But after I awoke, I daydreamed to fill in the blanks ...

WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO US?

My granddaughter of the future was especially gifted and demanding.

She wanted to know why the world had gone downhill so quickly. She insisted on hearing why all the adults of our time had done absolutely nothing to stop it.

"Why did you do this to us?" she asked. "Didn`t you guys realize that what you were doing was wrong? Didn`t you realize it would lead to big trouble someday? How could you have been so dumb?"

She pouted. Then she continued, proudly displaying her knowledge of history:

"When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, all the people of Pompeii died. But how could they have known? Could they blame the emperor in Rome? Of course not! The same for Krakatoa in 1883. It exploded. Then came a series of tidal waves. Thousands of people died. But it was no one`s fault. They had no way of knowing."

As I listened solemnly, she lifted her finger and began wagging it at me - and at any other adult in the nearby vicinity, declaring:

"But you guys were different. You knew you were screwing things up for us kids. All kinds of smart people told you that. Those smart people were making speeches all over the place. They were writing about it in the newspapers. They even sent their reports to all the presidents of all the big countries. And what did you guys do? Did you listen to them? No! You just kept on doing all the wrong things they told you to stop doing."

The room suddenly turned silent, as all the boisterous adults in the room stopped and turned, listening intently to her every word.

In response, she lowered her voice to a whisper. "They warned you. They warned you once. They warned you twice. They warned you three times. But you were all asleep. You were the masters of your house, but you let it burn down."

DIRE WARNING NUMBER ONE, SEPTEMBER 17, 2003.

The place was the National Press Club in Washington; the occasion, a monumental, landmark speech by David M. Walker, the Director of the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and Comptroller General of the United States.

Its title: "Truth and Transparency: The Federal Government`s Financial Condition and Fiscal Outlook."

His words:

"Importantly, while we are starting off in a financial hole we don`t really have a very good picture of how deep it is.

"Specifically, there are a number of very significant items that are not currently included as liabilities in the federal government`s financial statements; for example, several trillion dollars in non-marketable government securities in so-called `Trust Funds.`

"In the case of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, the federal government took in taxpayer money, spent it on other items and replaced it with an IOU. Given this fact, why aren`t the amounts attributed to such activities shown as a `liability` of the U.S. Government? At the present time, they are not! Does this make sense, especially when the government continues to tell Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries that they can count on the bonds in these `Trust Funds`? ...

"The current U.S. government liability figures also do not adequately consider veterans` health care benefit costs provided through the Department of Veteran`s Affairs, nor do they include the difference between future promised and funded benefits in connection with the Social Security and Medicare programs.

"These additional amounts total tens of trillions of dollars in discounted present value terms. Stated differently, they are likely to exceed $100,000 in additional burden for every man, woman and child in America today, and these amounts are growing every day ... The burden of paying for these is not a very nice present for a child born today!

"...In my view, the federal government`s current financial statements and annual reports do not give policymakers and the American people an adequate picture of our government`s overall performance and true financial condition. This is a serious issue.

"As Thomas Jefferson once noted, an informed electorate is the basis for a sound democracy. But how can the American people and their elected officials make sound decisions if they aren`t given timely, accurate and useful information?

"The recent accountability failures in the private sector serve to re-enforce the importance of proper accounting and reporting practices. It is critically important that such failures not be allowed to occur in the public sector ...

"In this regard, earlier this year GAO was unable to express an opinion as to whether the U.S. Government`s consolidated financial statements were fairly stated for a sixth consecutive year. I can assure you that the U.S. Government will not receive an opinion on its financial statements from the GAO until it earns one!

"... It`s true that deficits are understandable and sometimes necessary in times of recession and/or war. However, while it may not seem like it to those who are out of work or underemployed, we have not been in a recession for almost two years. In addition, the current and projected deficits far exceed the costs associated with Iraq, the global war against terrorism and any incremental homeland security costs.

"The bottom line is, there is little question that deficits do matter, especially if they are large, structural and recurring in nature. In addition, our projected budget deficits are not `manageable` without significant changes in `status quo` programs, policies, processes and operations ...

"In less than 10 years, due primarily to the retirement of the baby boom generation, the United States will be hit by a huge demographic tidal wave that is not expected to ever recede! This is unprecedented in the history of our nation ...

"We cannot simply grow our way out of this problem ... The ultimate alternatives to definitive and timely action are not only unattractive, they are arguably infeasible.

"Specifically, raising taxes to levels far in excess of what the American people have ever supported before, cutting total federal spending by unthinkable amounts, or further mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren to an extent that our economy, our competitive posture and the quality of life for Americans would be seriously threatened ...

"While many members of Congress and other key policymakers and opinion leaders agree that we have a major fiscal challenge that must be dealt with, many do not want to talk about it publicly. Many believe that we will ultimately act to address this imbalance, but when will we start? Other nations have already started to address their long-range imbalances. When will we?"

This first warning was largely ignored. It was posted on the GAO`s website, at www.gao.gov. It was broadcast on C-SPAN. But beyond that, no one talked about it. There were no editorials in the Wall Street Journal. No op-ed pieces in the New York Times.

DIRE WARNING NUMBER TWO, JANUARY 4, 2004

The occasion - a joint session of the American Economic Foundation (AEF) and the North American Economics and Finance Association (NEAFA). The presenters - Robert E. Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury; Peter R. Orszag, senior fellow at Brookings Institution; and Allen Sinai, Chief Global Economist at Decision Economics, Inc.

Their topic: "Sustained Budget Deficits: Longer-Run U.S. Economic Performance and the Risk of Financial and Fiscal Disarray." Their own words:

"The U.S. federal budget is on an unsustainable path. In the absence of significant policy changes, federal government deficits are expected to total around $5 trillion over the next decade. Such deficits will cause U.S. government debt, relative to GDP, to rise significantly.

"Thereafter, as the baby boomers increasingly reach retirement age and claim Social Security and Medicare benefits, government deficits and debt are likely to grow even more sharply. The scale of the nation`s projected budgetary imbalances is now so large that the risk of severe adverse consequences must be taken very seriously, although it is impossible to predict when such consequences may occur ...

"The adverse consequences of sustained large budget deficits may well be far larger and occur more suddenly than traditional analysis suggests, however. Substantial deficits projected far into the future can cause a fundamental shift in market expectations and a related loss of confidence both at home and abroad. The unfavorable dynamic effects that could ensue are largely if not entirely excluded from the conventional analysis of budget deficits.

"This omission is understandable and appropriate in the context of deficits that are small and temporary; it is increasingly untenable, however, in an environment with deficits that are large and permanent.

"Substantial ongoing deficits may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy:

" * As traders, investors, and creditors become increasingly concerned that the government would resort to high inflation to reduce the real value of government debt or that a fiscal deadlock with unpredictable consequences would arise, investor confidence may be severely undermined;

" * The fiscal and current account imbalances may also cause a loss of confidence among participants in foreign exchange markets and in international credit markets, as participants in those markets become alarmed not only by the ongoing budget deficits but also by related large current account deficits;

" * The loss of investor and creditor confidence, both at home and abroad, may cause investors and creditors to reallocate funds away from dollar-based investments, causing a depreciation of the exchange rate, and to demand sharply higher interest rates on U.S. government debt;

" * The increase of interest rates, depreciation of the exchange rate, and decline in confidence can reduce stock prices and household wealth, raise the costs of financing to business, and reduce private-sector domestic spending;

" * The disruptions to financial markets may impede the intermediation between lenders and borrowers that is vital to modern economies, as long-maturity credit markets witness potentially substantial increases in interest rates and become relatively illiquid, and the reduction in asset prices adversely affects the balance sheets of banks and other financial intermediaries;

" * The inability of the federal government to restore fiscal balance may directly reduce business and consumer confidence, as the view of the ongoing deficits as a symbol of the nation`s inability to address its economic problems permeates society, and the reduction in confidence can discourage investment and real economic activity;

" * These various effects can feed on each other to create a mutually reinforcing cycle; for example, increased interest rates and diminished economic activity may further worsen the fiscal imbalance, which can then cause a further loss of confidence and potentially spark another round of negative feedback effects.

"Although it is impossible to know at what point market expectations about the nation`s large projected fiscal imbalance could trigger these types of dynamics, the harmful impacts on the economy, once these effects were in motion, would substantially magnify the costs associated with any given underlying budget deficit and depress economic activity much more than the conventional analysis would suggest ..."

This warning, like the GAO`s warning in September, was also posted on the Web (at http://www.brook.edu/views/papers/orszag/20040105.htm).

But unlike the previous warning, it WAS picked up by the press, in an op-ed column in the New York Times, by Paul Krugman, on January 6, entitled "Rubin Gets Shrill."

Krugman writes: "Argentina retained the confidence of international investors almost to the end of the 1990`s. Analysts shrugged off its large budget and trade deficits; business-friendly, free-market policies would, they insisted, allow the country to grow out of all that. But when confidence collapsed, that optimism proved foolish. Argentina, once a showpiece for the new world order, quickly became a byword for economic catastrophe.

"So what? Those of us who have suggested that the irresponsibility of recent American policy may produce a similar disaster have been dismissed as shrill, even hysterical. (Hey, the market`s up, isn`t it?)

"But few would describe Robert Rubin, the legendary former Treasury secretary, as hysterical: His ability to stay calm in the face of crises, and reassure the markets, was his greatest asset. And Mr. Rubin has formally joined the coalition of the shrill ...

"The point made by Mr. Rubin ... is that the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to third-world-style financial crises isn`t a birthright.

"Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt only because they believe in our political maturity - in the willingness of our leaders to do what is necessary to rein in deficits, paying a political cost if necessary. And in the past that belief has been justified. Even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when the budget deficit soared ...

"If this kind of fecklessness goes on, investors will eventually conclude that America has turned into a third world country, and start to treat it like one. And the results for the U.S. economy won`t be pretty."

DIRE WARNING NUMBER THREE, JANUARY 7, 2004

Until January 6, some might accuse the authors of these dire warnings of political partisanship. Although they profess neutrality, this IS, after all, a political election year. So almost everything and anything that comes out of the mouths of any opinion-maker in this environment is naturally suspect.

But no one, not even in his wildest of dreams could raise such questions regarding the International Monetary Fund - the IMF.

The IMF is not partisan. And even if it were, it would tend to be partisan in FAVOR of the United States, its government, and its current political leaders - not against them.

But the IMF`s words and data confirm and reconfirm the earlier warnings, almost verbatim:

"U.S. government finances have experienced a remarkable turnaround in recent years. Within only a few years, hard-won gains of the previous decade have been lost and, instead of budget surpluses, deficits are again projected as far as the eye can see. The deterioration has not been restricted to the federal budget but has also taken place at the state and local government levels. As a result, the U.S. general government deficit is now among the highest in the industrialized world ...

"[T]he return to large deficits raises two interrelated concerns. First, with budget projections showing large federal fiscal deficits over the next decade, the recent emphasis on cutting taxes, boosting defense and security outlays, and spurring an economic recovery may come at the eventual cost of upward pressure on interest rates, a crowding out of private investment, and an erosion of longer-term U.S. productivity growth.

"Second, the evaporation of fiscal surpluses has left the budget even less well prepared to cope with the retirement of the baby boom generation, which will begin later this decade and place massive pressure on the Social Security and Medicare systems. Without the cushion provided by earlier surpluses, there is less time to address these programs` underlying insolvency before government deficits and debt begin to increase unsustainably ..."

Again, the information was picked up by the media, this time appearing on the FRONT page of the New York Times of January 8, under the glaring headline "IMF SAYS U.S. DEBT A THREAT TO THE WORLD."

No one could ignore the warnings any more. No one could say "they didn`t know."


CAKE OR CRUMBS?

In my dream, I had no excuse to give my grandchildren. We sacrificed their future for our present. We got fat and never wanted to diet. We were indeed masters of our house, but we were fast asleep.

We thought debt was wealth. But we were wrong.

We thought we could defy the laws of nature and get away with it. We were wrong.

Even the market tried to teach us a lesson, slapping us down in 2000, 2001 and 2002. But we thought the market was "just kidding," and we were wrong again.

We thought we could have our cake and eat it, too. But in the end, all we got was crumbs.

Like December of 2003, when each of the 50 states in the Union produced an average total of just 20 new jobs. Not thousands! Not hundreds! Just twenty.

"I`m sorry." I said to my granddaughter at last, with as much empathy as I possibly could muster.

Her response was not exactly heartwarming: "I`ll never forgive you for this. Not for the rest of my life."

Good luck and God bless you (and us all!)

Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. [e-mail]

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January 15, 2004
U.S. and Iraqis to Press for U.N. Role in Sovereignty Plan
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and WARREN HOGE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 15 — L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the occupying authority in Iraq, is leaving for Washington today to consult with the White House before a meeting on Monday at the United Nations. There, both the United States and the Iraqis it has temporarily installed in office will press for a significant United Nations role in support of their plan for a rapid handover of sovereignty.

The meeting, called by Secretary General Kofi Annan and attended by leaders of the American-backed interim Iraqi Governing Council as well as the Americans, will be the first significant, high-level negotiations between them all to discuss the mechanics of selecting a new legislative body for Iraq by this summer. That selection is a crucial step in the handover of power in June that the Iraqi council and the American-led occupation agreed to in November.

Senior Bush administration officials are also likely to join the talks in New York, according to an official of the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Mr. Bremer.

Both American and Iraqi officials said today that they would seek specific pledges of help from the United Nations, with its expertise in how to hold elections in frail new democracies, both before and after the June 30 handover that they are planning.

The United States has resisted any suggestion that the United Nations should be a controlling authority over the transfer of power, but it has increasingly come to recognize the support that the United Nations can offer both in putting democratic systems in place and resisting a headlong rush to direct elections. The United Nations, for its part, is wary of assuming a major role, having largely withdrawn its personnel from Iraq after a devastating truck bomb demolished its headquarters here in August.

Both Iraqi and American officials now appear to think that a significant United Nations role would not only give the process legitimacy in the eyes of the world, but might also defuse opposition among some Iraqis, including leaders of the majority Shiite sect, who favor direct elections over the current plan.

At the United Nations, Fred Eckhard, the spokesman for Mr. Annan, said the organization had not been directly informed that Mr. Bremer was coming to New York on Monday but had noted the news reports with satisfaction.

"If the news reports are true, the Secretary General will be very pleased," Mr. Eckhard said, noting that the dispatching of Mr. Bremer represented the "maximal" representation the Americans could have produced.

Mr. Annan first issued his invitation on Dec. 18 to hold three way talks next week between the Iraqi Governing Council, the Coalition Provisional Authority and himself. The Iraqis agreed immediately to send a delegation, but the United States balked at saying whether coalition provisional authority members would be attending.

Pressed repeatedly on the point in recent days, American Ambassador John D. Negroponte would say only that the United States would send "appropriate representation."

The United States has been urging Mr. Annan to send back into Iraq the international staff workers whom he ordered out in October. That decision was largely the result of the bombing of the organization`s headquarters in August — in which 22 people died — and subsequent attacks on relief workers and diplomats.

Mr. Annan has replied that he needed more assurances that they would be safe and clearer guidelines on what their duties would be if they returned to Baghdad before the June 30 end of the occupation. He called Monday`s meeting last month to take up those questions.

The United States has been reluctant to open up the political timetable in Iraq to to the scrutiny of members of the Security Council, which blocked United Nations approval of military action in Iraq last year. Several ambassadors are known to have questions about the feasibility of meeting the June 30 date and whether the emerging government will be fully representative.

While Mr. Annan does not want the United Nations to be seen as taking sides in the ongoing political debate in Iraq, he has said that he views calls for direct elections — instead of the caucus-based assembly vote in the American plan — as unrealistic.

He made that view known in a letter last week to Abdel Aziz al-Hakimm, a leading Shiite Muslim who served as the president of the Iraqi Governing Council last month and who is part of the delegation going to New York Monday.

The United States has been refining its transfer plan since Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani, a powerful and influential Shiite cleric, said that only direct elections would produce a sufficiently representative new government in Baghdad. American diplomats believe that a public statement by Mr. Annan of his doubts about elections at this time would help them convince Mr. Sistani to drop his objections.

In Basra, Iraq`s largest southern city, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched today to support calls by Mr. Sistani for direct elections. The people of Basra are overwhelmingly Shiites, as are the majority of Iraq`s population.

As Mr. Bremer was getting ready to leave, the current head of the Iraqi Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, said the council is eager to see the United Nations play a prominent role in the tricky transition to democracy. But in an apparent bid to mollify critics in Iraq, he also declared that members of the council, too, would like to see "improvements" in the mechanics of selecting the legislature, even if direct elections cannot be held in such a short time, as many Iraqis would prefer.

"If the United Nations is unable or unwilling to play a big role, that would be a matter of great regret for us," Mr. Pachachi said.

But he suggested that given the difficult choice between a quick handover of power this summer and waiting for full, direct elections, Iraqis would prefer the quicker alternative.

"The choice for us is, either we keep this date and settle for something less than elections, which we all want, or we accept a delay of the whole thing for two years," he said. "But I want to tell you this: The Iraqi people would be extremely disappointed and frustrated" by such a delay.

As Mr. Bremer prepared to fly to Washington, an official at his Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters said it was not yet clear what role the United Nations might play.

"The bottom line is this: We want the U.N. to be involved here in some way," he said. Mr. Bremer is to meet with other administration officials, possibly including President Bush, at the White House on Friday, and the administration would also decide soon whether Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or some other senior administration official should attend the talks at the United Nations next week.

In a symbolic display of what the occupying force wants to portray as steady progress to rid Iraq of any remnant of the old regime, currency bearing images of the ousted leader Saddam Hussein was put into furnaces today, replaced by new bank notes.

Getting rid of all remnants of the old Iraqi regime, and making sure that the Baath Party cannot return, is just one of the Americans` goals, though.

Another is preventing a rapid shift to democracy from producing an Islamist state of the kind that some fear could arise by virtue of the long oppressed Shiite majority`s flexing its muscles in a direct election.

John H. Cushman Jr. reported from Baghdad from this article, and Warren Hoge reported from the United Nations.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Rise of the cleric with all the answers
Shia clergy flex muscles in tussle with US

Rory McCarthy in Najaf
Friday January 16, 2004
The Guardian

In the months since America`s war in Iraq, the Shia clergy of Najaf`s respected and influential religious school, the hawza `ilimiyya, have begun to assert a political strength denied them for decades. Ironically, it is from these clerics, who America feared would try to engineer an Iranian-style theocracy, that the most strident calls for democracy have emerged.

Foremost among them is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, 73, a learned, white-bearded cleric who refuses to meet Paul Bremer, America`s administrator in Iraq, but who commands the unswerving loyalty of his country`s Shia majority.

Already, Ayatollah Sistani has forced the American administration in Baghdad to tear up its first political plan for postwar Iraq. In a fatwa last June, he declared it "fundamentally unacceptable". He insisted that Iraq`s new constitution be written by an elected body, not a US-appointed council, as was proposed. In the past week he has criticised Washington`s revised political programme, under which appointed provincial caucuses would indirectly elect a transitional government by July. In a statement this week, he demanded full direct elections instead.

"The mechanism to create an interim government does not at all represent the Iraqi people in a just way," he said. "The best mechanism is to have proper elections ... Otherwise the new government will not be able or qualified to work. The political situation will be worse and the security situation will be worse."

Ayatollah Sistani`s aides have attached similar edicts to the notice board near his office at the end of the Street of the Messenger, by the gate of the shrine of Imam Ali, the most revered site in the Shia Islamic faith. Now US officials have suggested that they may revise their election plan in the light of his latest complaints.

Such influence marks an astonishing turnaround for the hawza, which under three decades of Ba`athist rule was almost completely destroyed. Once Najaf was a leading intellectual force in the Shia faith, which attracted students like Ayatollah Khomeini, who led Iran`s Islamic revolution, and Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon`s Hizbullah. But Saddam Hussein regarded the Shia clergy as a threat. He had dozens of clerics killed, including some of the most senior ayatollahs, and the student population dropped from several thousand to a few hundred.

Now, the clerics say, students from across Iraq and abroad, are flocking back.

In a small grey room a few hundred metres from Ayatollah Sistani`s office sits Syed Ali Sabzewari, a black-turbaned cleric whose late father was one of Najaf`s most senior ayatollahs in the mid-1990s. A succession of Iraqis come to his door, kiss the ring on his finger and ask for his guidance. A group of men say they plan two major undertakings in their lives. Without explaining, they ask if it is wise for them to take these steps. The cleric prays under his breath and several times opens a Koran at random pages. He reads and prays again. The first step is good, he says; the second they should not carry out.

Another man is worried that if his wife becomes pregnant she will fall seriously ill. Can she take birth-control pills, he asks? If the doctors say she risks serious illness, she can, the cleric answers. Others have questions about the right procedure for praying in Mecca, or about how much money to pay in religious taxes.

"The hawza has started to breathe again," says Syed Sabzewari. "We have started to receive new students and we have shaken off the fear in our souls."

But the real duty of the centre - the study and teaching of religion - has been eclipsed for now by concerns about Iraq`s political future. "The hawza tries to keep itself away from political life, unless it is a matter of the life of the Islamic nation," the cleric says. "Then the hawza should be involved to make sure that what happens is in accordance with the Islamic faith."

Although Najaf has schooled some of the leading political activists of the Shia world, it has a quietist reputation. None of the clerics covets a position in government. "I am one of those who believe that religion should be separate from politics," Syed Sabzewari says. But he admits that when Ayatollah Sistani, the most senior of Najaf`s four marjiya (literally, the sources of emulation), makes a pronouncement it is followed without question. "When the highest marja talks about this issue, I will stop talking," he says.

Ayatollah Sistani, who was born in the Iranian city of Mashhad, commands a similar respect from the Shia tribes. "Syed Sistani is the first and the last for us," says Sheikh Ali Mohammed al-Abbassi, one of Iraq`s most important tribal leaders. "He is a patriotic man and an intellectual. He is neither on the right side, nor the left side. He walks the middle path."

Since the Shia represent perhaps 60% of the Iraqi population, it is clear that direct, democratic elections will bring into power a Shia-dominated government. That in itself would bring a seismic shift in the power balance in Iraq.

The Shia tribes sense this imminent victory. "We are the majority, so democracy will bring back the rights of the majority," says the sheikh`s brother, Ibrahim bin Mahmoud al-Abbassi. He believes that if Ayatollah Sistani`s views are not accommodated, the Americans risk a Shia rebellion. "It is not possible for the political authorities to jump over Syed Sistani," he says. "He is the final card in the relations between the Shia and the coalition forces."


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The failure of intervention demands a new modesty
The west has overestimated its ability as an agency of change

Martin Woollacott
Friday January 16, 2004
The Guardian

There is a dispiriting resemblance between recent news about former Yugoslavia and news about Iraq, the two places which bracket the modern era of intervention. The story began properly more than a decade ago when the halting process of persuasion, interference and coercion began which eventually brought a sort of peace to the ex-Yugoslav states. It continued, through some terrible failures and some small successes in Africa and south-east Asia, to culminate in the American descents on Afghanistan and Iraq. What was called humanitarian intervention merged into the campaign against terrorism and then into an assault on a so-called rogue state. Very different interventions, certainly, but some important similarities areevident in the outcomes.

They suggest we should be thinking as much about the sheer difficulty of intervention as about the justification for particular interventions. The Hutton inquiry, straddling these two questions, is only the latest indication that western countries have exaggerated the reliability of the instruments at their disposal. Ineffective diplomacy, overvalued voluntary agencies, armed forces that promise more than they can deliver, and intelligence establishments that deliver more than they should, are all parts of the picture. The weakness of institutions which claim, or are assigned, more competence than they actually possess looms as large as the decisions, right or wrong, of elected governments.

Americans and Iraqis are now arguing over what form elections should take, lurching between the twin dangers of an outcome unacceptable to the majority community and one unacceptable to anybody else. Serbians, meanwhile, voted in large numbers for the extreme nationalist Radical party. The success of the Radicals follows the victory of the nationalist HDZ, or Croatian Democratic Union, in Croatia`s December elections, and the earlier success of nationalist parties in Bosnian elections; an obdurate communalism, after all these years of intervention, especially in Serbia.

It is worth recalling that Serbia has been the object of intensive diplomacy, of sanctions, of war, of international legal action, and, more recently, of "democratic subversion" by outside political helpers. And yet Vojislav Seselj still triumphs. Of course, the survival of Greater Serbia thinking has been helped by western decisions, which have preserved a Serbian entity in Bosnia and a Serbian connection to Kosovo.

Western countries made these decisions because it was easier to accommodate nationalist forces than to confront them a second or third time. Occupying armies which wanted a minimum of trouble were part of the calculations. The scene in Iraq has this in common, that the occupiers are driven by their calculation of likely resistance as much as by their calculations of what would be best for the country. It is not clear whether Shia and Kurdish objections to the proposed American political dispensation will prevail nor that, if they do, it would be a bad thing. But what does link former Yugoslavia and Iraq is an element of the intervening state or states bargaining their way out of a situation they find wearing and threatening and dropping some of their objectives in the process.

While American and British intervention in Iraq differs in many obvious ways from the continuing collective intervention in former Yugoslavia, its course already illustrates the same parabola. That arches from initial overconfidence to unexpected difficulties and on to an outcome which, if not a failure, is far from an unalloyed success.

It may always have been part of the wisdom to understand that changing other societies is hard, or, in other words, that foreign policy is difficult to do. But western countries emerged from the cold war with the sense that they had, or were developing, some very effective externally focused institutions. Their diplomatic services, released from the imperatives of the conflict with Russia, could now concentrate on the arrangements, including those within a revitalised United Nations, for more peaceful relations between most states.

Their intelligence services, after years of extreme alertness to a single main enemy, could turn undistracted to critical problems like terrorism and organised crime. Their armed forces could now justify in new tasks the money that had been lavished on them for so many years. And the burgeoning world of non-governmental agencies represented an informal arm of policy which could reach deep into other societies and change them at the grassroots.

Some crises, like Rwanda, were ignored. Others got attention, but we were not far along before a certain Potemkin aspect became visible. Diplomacy failed to head off trouble. Foreign ministers, special envoys and senior soldiers were sent off as double and triple acts, conferences came and went, threats and blandishments were both tried, to not much effect. The failure of western diplomacy in the Balkans and the failure of diplomacy before America`s intervention in Iraq had this in common, that nobody could bring about coherence among supposed allies.

When the military were used, the first shock, in the Balkans, was that European armed forces, with only limited exceptions, were very inadequate. The second surprise was that although the Americans had far greater capacity, their military also had serious limitations, a surprise experienced a second time in Iraq. Either they were too careful, obsessed with force protection, as in the Balkans, or, as in Iraq, they sought big confrontations in which their greater firepower could be used but which endanger civilians and are frequently counter-productive for that reason.

The most resounding intelligence failure of the whole intervention era has certainly been that of accurately assessing Saddam`s holdings of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The US and British governments would not have gone to war if their intelligence chiefs had bluntly said there were no, or very few, such weapons or programmes. You cannot spin a No.

This was not just a failure in the run-up to the recent war, but a failure going back years, if the growing evidence that the WMD programmes were abandoned or had collapsed in the course of the early 90s is accepted. If intelligence is this much out, it massively undercuts the pre-emptive principle which the Bush administration favours.

But it should be remembered that western intelligence also failed in the Balkans - failed to predict the wars themselves and failed also to take a true measure of Serbian military strength, hugely inflating it and thus inhibiting action by our governments.

Faltering diplomacy, misleading intelligence, inadequate military forces and well-meaning but not always beneficial civil action - the defects demonstrated over the years in these critical institutions suggests the necessity not only for reform, but for a new modesty in the approach to intervention.

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The Guardian profile: Paul O`Neill
The new memoirs of George Bush`s ex-treasury secretary have hurt the president`s image, and the imminent release of his internet archive will not help. Why did the White House ever hire a successful troublemaker?

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday January 16, 2004
The Guardian

In retrospect, the unceremonious firing of Paul O`Neill in December 2002 made perfect sense. It is rather his hiring two years earlier that remains one of the great mysteries of the Bush administration.

No one, least of all Mr O`Neill himself, seems to understand why an old-fashioned moderate Republican pragmatist with a reputation for disarming bluntness and unpredictable views was given one of the top jobs in a ideological and radical cabinet obsessed with secrecy, discipline and loyalty.

It is clear now that the president`s recruiting of the elderly businessman is going to damage Mr Bush`s image. A new book, The Price of Loyalty, is based on Mr O`Neill`s recollections of the Bush cabinet - along with 19,000 pages of documents he took with him when he was sacked.

The book was written by a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Ron Suskind. Mr O`Neill`s version of events, particularly his assertion that the administration was determined to invade Iraq from its first day in office, is now being hotly challenged by others in the administration.

Lawrence Lindsey, a former head of the national economic council, was fired at the same time as Mr O`Neill, despite being a true believer in the Bush economic policy. He wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal: "His bitterness, some would say, is quite understandable." But, Mr Lindsey added, the memoir "does a grave injustice to the president, to the truth and to Mr O`Neill himself".

Mr Lindsey has every reason to be upset, as he appears in the book as a toadying courtier.

The public will be in a better position to judge for itself over the next two weeks, when many of Mr O`Neill`s documents are due to be made public on the internet. The archive promises to provide one of the most devastating insiders` accounts of US governmental dysfunction since the Nixon administration (in which Mr O`Neill also served, and which emerges from the book as a paragon of level-headedness compared to the current White House).

Nevertheless, the Bush team appears to have gone to great lengths at the beginning to recruit the elderly businessman. As soon as the supreme court had handed victory to George Bush by a one-vote margin in December 2000, the president elect`s kingmaker, Dick Cheney, began stalking Mr O`Neill by telephone with an offer he could not refuse.

After 13 years at the aluminium corporation, Alcoa, Mr O`Neill was a few days away from retirement and was planning a trip along America`s backroads in a Bentley with his wife, Nancy. She was was furious, but he was ultimately won over by the flattery from his old friend.

By his own account, Mr O`Neill actually warned the president-elect and his deputy not to hire him. When he was flown in for a secret meeting in a Washington hotel, he took a list of his past pronouncements that could prove embarrassing to a conservative administration.

He had called for a petrol tax, and worse still, he believed global warming to be a real threat. But in the Washington hotel room, the book suggests, Mr Bush was not listening. Mr O`Neill was telling a long anecdote about an encounter with an environmental pressure group when Mr Bush held up his hand and asked: "Where`s lunch?". The president then upbraided his chief of staff for failing to produce a cheeseburger on time.

In the alarming portrait Mr O`Neill paints, the new president is petulant and detached because he is out of his depth. In their discussions about the economy in the two years that followed, the president listens in blank silence to his treasury secretary`s concerns and recommendations.

In Mr Bush`s defence, the columnist Tina Brown suggested in the Washington Post this week: "It might just mean he was so bored with Mr O`Neill`s pedantry, he tuned out. It`s the difference between stupidity and stupefaction."

Certainly, Mr O`Neill comes across as a man convinced he has the answers to the world`s problems. It is perhaps not surprising for someone who successfully pushed himself from modest beginnings, working as a dustman and a construction worker in Alaska before getting an economics degree and finding himself a staff job in the Nixon White House, alongside a young Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Like his two longstanding colleagues, he stayed on for the Ford administration and then went into business when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. Unlike Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, however, Mr O`Neill did not succeed by parlaying his government contacts into lucrative contracts for his firm.

He transformed Alcoa from an industrial dinosaur into a sleek business model with $1.5bn (£82m) in profits by 2000. He also virtually eliminated workplace accidents, and was notable among industrial leaders for his conviction that global warming was a serious environmental danger.

In 2001, as treasury secretary, he met the rock star Bono, and much to the latter`s surprise, accepted the challenge of accompanying him on a tour of Africa the following year, to confront poverty face to face.

Their odd-couple trip became an emblem of Mr O`Neill`s maverick tenure. The visual high-point came when he and Bono donned colourful chief`s robes in a Ghanaian village. "So what if we never live this down?" the treasury secretary gamely declared, little knowing how prescient his remarks were for his career.

"There`s no arrogance there," Bono said later. "He just wants to know what you`re thinking and he really listens."

Wall Street was less impressed. The trip confirmed it in its view of Mr O`Neill as a lightweight, blissfully unaware that his words and behaviour had a direct effect on the markets` faith in the US economy. In his first months he had caused a small run on the exchange markets by suggesting to a German newspaper that the administration did not have a strong dollar policy. Events have since proved the remark to be true, but it broke a taboo.

"He was from industry, where you could say what you liked," said a member of the treasury department who worked for Mr O`Neill. "He didn`t figure out how much weight his words carried. He should have."

The African trip also aroused the ire of a president who is clearly jealous of the limelight. When he next saw Mr O`Neill at the White House, he glared at him and said: "You know something? You`re getting quite a reputation as a truth-teller. You`ve got yourself a real cult following, don`t ya?"

The treasury secretary`s quirky ways did not help his cause within the cabinet, and he found his advice being shrugged off even by more junior officials. But his cause was probably lost anyway, as the administration took a sharp turn to the right.

In March 2001, the president broke with the Kyoto protocol on global warming, taking Mr O`Neill and the head of the environmental protection agency, Christine Todd Whitman, by surprise.

The treasury secretary`s attempt - in collaboration with the federal reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan - to make tax cuts conditional on the size of the government surplus - was politely rejected. And his scepticism about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was ignored, along with the open doubts of the secretary of state, Colin Powell.

Mr Greenspan and Mr Powell still have their jobs - Mr Greenspan because he has largely kept his misgivings about the size of the deficit to himself, and because his position is above party politics. As for Mr Powell, most observers believe he is still at the state department because he is a loyal soldier, and too powerful to remove.

The fundamental question remains as to why any of them were hired at all by an administration that had no time for their views. Mr O`Neill concludes they were there simply as "cover", to make the Bush White House appear reassuringly moderate. In that case, the president and Mr Cheney made the wrong choice in Mr O`Neill. He was never going to be happy serving as someone else`s window dressing.

Life in short

Born Dec 4 1935, St Louis, Missouri

Education Fresno State College, California; University of Indiana

Family Married with four children

Career Joined US office of budget and management 1967, deputy director 1974-77; vice-president and president, International Paper 1977-87; chairman and chief executive, Alcoa 1987-99; chairman 1999-2000; treasury secretary 2001-02

On Bush in cabinet meetings "Like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection"

On the US tax code "9,500 pages of gibberish"

On the US "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap"


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Protests at Bush visit to King tomb
AP in Atlanta
Friday January 16, 2004
The Guardian

Hundreds of people pushed past security barricades yesterday to protest against President George Bush`s visit to the grave of Martin Luther King on what would have been his 75th birthday.

Two people were arrested as the protesters pushed toward the street in front ofthe civil rights leader`s tomb, in Atlanta, abandoning a designated area several hundred metres away. The authorities responded by parking three city buses on the street to block the protesters from the president`s motorcade.

As Mr Bush arrived, the crowd, estimated by police to be about 700, booed and chanted "Bush go home!" Some of the protesters pounded on the sides of the buses, but no one was injured.

Mr Bush`s visit to observe King`s birthday upset some civil rights activists who said the president`s policies on Iraq, affirmative action and funding for social services, conflicted with King`s legacy.

Mr Bush placed a wreath on King`s grave before heading to a $2,000-a-plate (£1,100) fund-raiser in Atlanta.

Beating drums and chanting "in 2004, Bush no more", protesters marched in circles near the tomb. Some held signs that displayed King`s image and read, "War is not the answer." One bystander, Kathy Nicholas, a flight attendant from Atlanta, Georgia, said: "When I heard Bush was coming here I couldn`t believe it. I was outraged and disgusted, and I just think it`s a photo op. It`s so transparent."

The protesters who were arrested had stepped into the street and refused to move, police said.

Officials at the King Centre for Nonviolent Social Change, the organisation founded by King`s widow, said they extended no formal invitation to Mr Bush but accepted his offer to come.

A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, claimed that the president`s visit was a way to pay tribute to "Dr King`s legacy, his vision and his lifetime of service".

He added: "This is a way to honor a lifetime dedicated to fighting for equal opportunity and equal justice for all people."

King`s widow declined to comment on the visit but has been vocal about her opposition to the war in Iraq.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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`US lied about deaths of journalists in the Palestine Hotel`
By Kim Sengupta
16 January 2004


The shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by an American tank, which killed two journalists and injured two others, was an act of "criminal negligence", said a report by an international media watchdog.

Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) accused US authorities of concocting lies to hide what had happened on 8 April last year, and a subsequent official "investigation" was nothing more than a whitewash. They said the Bush administration must bear some responsibilities for the deaths as US forces entered the Iraqi capital, as well as the "cover-up" which followed.

The US government is accused of "ignoring the key to the tragedy". Despite information being available to the Pentagon, the report said "the soldiers in the field were never told that a large number of journalists were in the Palestine Hotel. If they had known they would not have fired. When they did know, they gave and received instructions and took precautions to ensure the hotel was not fired on again".

The RSF decided that the attack was not a deliberate attack on the media, and the gunner who fired the shell, Sergeant Shawn Gibson, and his commander, Captain Philip Wolford, of the 3rd Infantry Division, should not be held responsible for the deaths of the cameramen Taras Protsuyk of Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish television station Telecinco, and the wounding of Samia Nakhoul, a Reuters reporter and photographer, and the photographer Faleh Kheiber. The two men had not been told that 150 journalists were in the hotel, and their immediate superiors, the battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Philip DeCamp and the brigade commander Colonel David Perkins, were similarly lacking information.

The report charges General Buford Blount, their commander, of bearing a "heavy responsibility for not providing the necessary information that would have prevented the deaths of the journalists".

The report said: "It is inconceivable that the massive presence of journalists at the Palestine Hotel ... could have passed unnoticed. The question is whether this information was withheld deliberately, because of misunderstanding or by criminal negligence."

Pentagon officials initially claimed the tank had fired in response to enemy fire. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said the use of force was "justified" as the soldiers had responded to "hostile fire". Later, the official version was changed to "the soldiers who fired the shell were seeking to `neutralise` an Iraqi `spotter`".
16 January 2004 08:41


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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January 16, 2004
Gore Environmental Speech Becomes an Assault on Bush
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Former Vice President Al Gore said yesterday that the Bush administration was "wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining industries" and that President Bush was a "moral coward" for not standing up to his campaign contributors when their interests conflicted with those of the public.

Mr. Gore`s speech in New York, billed as an attack on Mr. Bush`s environmental record, proved to be a far broader critique.

The former vice president used environmental issues to highlight what he called moral failures and deceptions by the Bush administration.

"While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward, so weak that he seldom if ever says `no` to anything, no matter what the public interest might mandate," Mr. Gore said to a standing ovation.

The speech, co-sponsored by the group MoveOn.org, was his fourth in a series that takes the administration to task while helping keep Mr. Gore in the nation`s political dialogue. He is not a candidate for office, but he looked and sounded like one with a speech that blended humor with outrage.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, called Mr. Gore`s remarks "political hate speech" and said in a statement: "Instead of repudiating these tactics, Al Gore chose to embrace the vile tactics that are becoming the hallmark of the Democrat Party at its highest levels.

"Like the Democrat presidential candidates, Al Gore has once again chosen to use his time at the podium to attack the president rather than put forward a positive agenda of his own."

But Mr. Gore appeared to give the crowd what it wanted. Organizers said they had distributed 3,500 tickets in just two hours via the Internet and despite frigid temperatures, the Beacon Theater on Broadway was packed. On several occasions Mr. Gore could hardly be heard above the applause.

The speech began as a familiar tutorial on climate and mankind, of the kind Mr. Gore has been giving for two decades. But it soon encompassed foreign policy and the president`s recent proposal to try to build a base on the moon, which Mr. Gore called an "unimaginative and retreated effort." He accused the Bush White House of often operating in secret, of intentionally deceiving the public and of "radical changes that reverse a century of American policy designed to protect our natural resources."

Mr. Gore assailed Mr. Bush as having criticized the concept of "nation building" during the campaign in 2000 only to invade and occupy Iraq. He said Mr. Bush`s promise as a candidate to regulate carbon dioxide as a polluting greenhouse gas "was instantly transformed by the inauguration into a promise to the generators of CO2 that it would not be regulated at all."

Mr. Gore`s impassioned delivery prompted several people in the audience to remark afterward that had he been as forceful as a candidate in 2000, he might have won.

Doug Hattaway, Mr. Gore`s national spokesman in 2000, said he believed that Mr. Gore was speaking out with one goal in mind: to help defeat Mr. Bush in 2004. "He is helping to add fuel to the fire and keep issues in the news that are problematic for the administration," Mr. Hattaway said.

But while Mr. Gore may have helped rally the Democratic faithful, the political cast to his speech drew concern that he might be undermining the very cause he said he was addressing.

"In many ways it is the politicization of the climate issue that has stifled discussions of new and innovative policy options," Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado commented after reading the speech. "As opposing sides use the issue for political gain, it is very difficult for new ideas to enter the discussion. The politics is all well and good, but meanwhile we lack effective options on climate."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 16, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Justices Take On the President
By ANTHONY LEWIS

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed a new federal government, many Americans feared tyranny. James Madison told them that the Constitution had a "precaution" against that possibility: separation of the government into legislative, executive and judicial branches. If one of the three overreached, he wrote in the Federalist Papers, another would stop the abuse of power.

Madison`s theory is about to be profoundly tested. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear challenges to two of the Bush administration`s most sweeping claims of power — the power to declare any American citizen an "enemy combatant" and detain him or her indefinitely without trial, and the power to hold the alien captives at the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without a chance for them to challenge the basis of their imprisonment in any court.

Times of war and national crisis have led presidents before George W. Bush to claim extraordinary power. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, though the Constitution indicated that only Congress could take that action. In 1942 Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent removed from their homes and confined to camps.

The Supreme Court has usually been reluctant to intervene. When the Japanese relocation program reached the court in 1944, a majority declined to look past the military judgment that Japanese-Americans might be disloyal, though events had proved that false. In 1861 Chief Justice Roger B. Taney called the suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional and sent a copy of his statement to President Lincoln, but the full court never considered the issue during the war.

The present chief justice, William Rehnquist, published a book in 1998, "All the Laws but One," that describes the generally submissive judicial attitude in these matters. Thus it is somewhat surprising that the Supreme Court has taken on the two Bush cases — and has done so over strenuous objections from the administration, which urged the court to leave the issue to the executive branch.

Why did the court step in? There can be no sure answer, and of course what the court will ultimately decide is unpredictable. But one possible reason is that in both situations the administration`s actions are direct challenges to judicial responsibility and power.

The court`s willingness to confront the executive branch is not unlimited. This week it refused to review a decision upholding Attorney General John Ashcroft`s right to keep secret the names of aliens arrested in a sweep after 9/11. But that turned on an interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act, not on a question of constitutional power.

The two cases the court has agreed to review involve more momentous issues. The indefinite quality of the war on terrorism, as President Bush calls it, may make infringements on individual rights more worrying. No one can define how or when this "war" will end. An American detained as an "enemy combatant" could be imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Two Americans have been held in solitary confinement as "enemy combatants" now for more than 18 months. Yaser Esam Hamdi was captured on or near the battlefield in Afghanistan. Jose Padilla was arrested at O`Hare International Airport in Chicago, when he flew in from overseas. Attorney General Ashcroft, judging him without a trial, said Mr. Padilla was a "known terrorist" who had planned to explode a "dirty bomb" in this country.

Both men have been under interrogation. They were denied the right to see a lawyer, and the Justice Department argued at one stage that giving Mr. Padilla access to counsel might disturb the atmosphere of dependence required for successful questioning. More recently the department, perhaps hoping to quiet objections in the legal community, has said that both men may see lawyers.

The idea of jailing someone forever on the say-so of the president, without a lawyer — as the administration still says it has the power to do — would probably strike most Americans as a violation of their rights: the right to have a trial of any alleged offense, to call witnesses and so on. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says that no person shall be deprived of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Is due process in a time of terrorism whatever the president says it is?

In the Hamdi case the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said that when someone, even an American citizen, is captured in a combat zone, the courts must accept the president`s finding that he is an enemy combatant if the government produces "factual assertions" for the finding. Mr. Hamdi`s lawyers say the finding should be tested in a full judicial hearing, with firsthand evidence and cross-examination.

The case of Mr. Padilla, arrested at O`Hare, is a different matter. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the president could not simply declare him an enemy combatant and imprison him without trial. The Justice Department said it would take the case to the Supreme Court, where it will most likely be heard along with the Hamdi case.

The Guantánamo cases test the role of the federal courts in habeas corpus, the ancient writ by which a prisoner can challenge the lawfulness of his imprisonment. The Bush administration argues that American courts have no jurisdiction to hear habeas petitions by prisoners at Guantánamo because it is outside United States sovereignty — although the United States has absolute control of the territory under a perpetual treaty with Cuba, one that cannot be ended without American consent. Lower courts, agreeing with the administration, dismissed the habeas petitions.

The more than 650 men and boys (as young as 13) imprisoned at Guantánamo were captured in Afghanistan or turned over by the governments of other countries — some as remote as Zambia. The underlying question is whether they are prisoners of war or were acting outside the laws of war — as terrorists, for example. The Third Geneva Convention, which the United States has signed and ratified, says that when there is doubt about a prisoner`s status, the question is to be determined by a "competent tribunal." That means an independent one.

But the Bush administration has refused to comply with the Geneva Convention. A government brief in the Supreme Court put it bluntly: "The president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has conclusively determined that the Guantánamo detainees — both Al Qaeda and Taliban — are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention." In other words, the courts have no business getting into the issue.

American policy at Guantánamo came under powerful criticism last fall from a remarkable source: Lord Steyn, a judge of Britain`s highest court. The prisoners were in "a legal black hole," he said, unable to show a neutral body that they were victims of mistaken identity or, say, to show that they were being mistreated at Guantánamo. "As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice," Lord Steyn said, "I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice."

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide only the jurisdictional issue, whether habeas corpus actions can be brought in United States courts, not such underlying substantive questions as whether the administration must comply with the Geneva Convention. But if the decision goes against the government, it would be a setback for the administration`s pattern of using the attacks of 9/11 and the war on terrorism to assert claims of unreviewable power.

Power, in the constitutional sense, is what these cases are about. Critics see an increasingly imperial presidency at home as well as an imperial unilateralism abroad. In the American system as it has developed, it falls on the Supreme Court to have the last word. George W. Bush can hardly object to that role for a court that made him president.


Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.



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January 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Masters of Deception
By BOB HERBERT

It was snowing and the temperature was headed toward single digits when I left the hotel on Park Avenue Wednesday night. A doorman flagged a cab and I climbed in. I`d just finished an interview with Al Gore and it was hard to shake the melancholy feeling that the man who should be president was spending a stormy night in Midtown Manhattan while the momentous world events he should be shaping were careering in all sorts of dangerous directions.

The former vice president was in town to give a speech on the Bush administration`s environmental policies, which he basically described as an exercise in wholesale environmental destruction. Instead of caving in to such special interests as the coal, oil and chemical industries (as the administration has done), Mr. Gore said that the U.S. should be leading the effort to rein in pollution and get control of the potentially devastating problem of global warming.

During the interview, he spoke passionately about the environment and opened his laptop computer to give what amounted to a spontaneous seminar on global warming. He noted that most of the glaciers in the world are melting at an alarming rate and added wryly, "Glaciers don`t give a damn about politics. They just reflect reality."

The environmental speech, which he delivered at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side yesterday afternoon, is the latest in a series of formal critiques of the administration that Mr. Gore has delivered in recent months. Previous subjects have been national security, economic policy and civil liberties.

The theater, including the balcony, was packed. People had waited in a long line in the cold and snow to pass through metal detectors and be allowed in. The crowd, enthusiastic from the very beginning, included families with small children, elderly men and women and students. When Mr. Gore strode onto the stage he was greeted with a long standing ovation.

At one point, he told his audience: "In preparing this series of speeches, I have noticed a troubling pattern that characterizes the Bush-Cheney administration`s approach to almost all issues. In almost every policy area, the administration`s consistent goal has been to eliminate any constraints on their exercise of raw power, whether by law, regulation, alliance or treaty. And in the process, they have in each case caused America to be seen by the other nations of the world as showing disdain for the international community."

Amid cheers, he made it clear that the broad interests of the American public are consistently betrayed by the policies and practices of President Bush and his administration. "They devise their policies with as much secrecy as possible," he said, "and in close cooperation with the most powerful special interests that have a monetary stake in what happens. In each case, the public interest is not only ignored, but actively undermined. In each case, they devote considerable attention to a clever strategy of deception that appears designed to prevent the American people from discerning what it is they are actually doing.

"Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that vastly increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative."

Our history has shown that we can and should be better than this. Mr. Gore leaned forward during Wednesday night`s interview and ticked off some of the nation`s greatest successes — the simultaneous victories in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, the Marshall Plan, the eradication of polio, the civil rights movement, the space program and the victory over Communism in the cold war. There is no reason to expect less, he said, as the country faces its biggest challenges today.

The fates dealt Mr. Gore and the United States a weird hand in 2000. He got the most votes but the other guy became president. And the country, its Treasury looted and its most pressing needs deliberately ignored, has been rolling backward ever since.

"This is insanity," said Mr. Gore, referring to the administration`s handling of the environment. But his speech made it clear that he could just as easily have applied that sentiment to the full range of Bush-Cheney policies. History will not be kind to the chicanery that passes for governing in the Bush II administration.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 16, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who Gets It?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words about the state of the nation. "I think we`re at risk with our democracy," he said. "I think we`re dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."

In other words, the general gets it: he understands that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a "Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on the same side of the great Democratic divide.

Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry`s hair.

But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it`s about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.

The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren`t.

What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren`t his policy positions but his willingness — shared, we now know, by General Clark — to take a hard line against the Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of elections that were won by emphasizing the positive. Indeed, George Bush`s handlers have already made it clear that they intend to make his "optimism" — as opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents — a campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let`s cut directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive, pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.)

But even Bill Clinton couldn`t run a successful Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.

One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of money from business, partly because there really are liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans control all three branches of government and exercise that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have grave misgivings about the Bush administration — a much larger group than you might think — are afraid to give money to Democrats.

Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian. The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind`s "The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie Plame, shows the lengths they`re willing to go to in intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul O`Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.) A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten alive.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican media, but asymmetric treatment even from the mainstream media. For example, some have said that the intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean`s Vermont record is what every governor who runs for president faces. No, it isn`t. I`ve looked at press coverage of questions surrounding Mr. Bush`s tenure in Austin, like the investment of state university funds with Republican donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.

So what`s the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.

That doesn`t mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical — which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn`t a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.



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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Scrambles to Salvage Transition
Bremer to Confer Today With White House`s Foreign Policy Team

By Robin Wright and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A01


The U.S. governor in Iraq headed back to Washington for talks today with President Bush`s foreign policy team amid deep uncertainty within the administration over how to save its plan for handing over political power to Iraqis by July 1.

L. Paul Bremer will meet with administration officials on the eve of talks Monday at the United Nations over Iraq`s future. After a year of tension with the world body, Washington is now trying to build a partnership with the United Nations to help solve a growing dispute over how to select a new Iraqi government to replace the U.S. occupation, U.S officials said yesterday.

As they reached out to the United Nations, administration officials sought to placate key allies yesterday by saying that they are leaning toward switching course to allow France, Germany and Russia to bid on contracts for rebuilding the war-torn country. [Story, Page A12.]

But U.S. officials still have not settled on a strategy for overcoming the latest obstacle to their plan in Iraq -- the growing insistence by Iraq`s most popular religious leader that an interim government must be chosen through elections, rather than through a system of caucuses as envisioned by the United States. Officials in Washington fear that a failure to settle the dispute could imperil prospects for a peaceful political transition in Iraq.

After weeks of quiet overtures and secret letters to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, administration officials say they are baffled over exactly what he wants -- and even more confused about what it will take to get him to back off his demand for direct elections.

On substance, the United States is not even sure how well Sistani understands the complicated U.S. plan to hold 18 regional caucuses to select a national assembly, which would pick a government to assume power when the occupation ends. Complicating the problem is the fact that there is no precise equivalent in Arabic for "caucus" nor any history of caucuses in the Arab world, U.S. officials say.

Through intermediaries and in letters from Bremer over the past two months, the U.S.-led coalition authority has tried to explain its plan, which it calls "election by conference" in Arabic. But Sistani`s responses have been limited and often vague, U.S. officials say.

Sistani has refused to see any U.S. official, and Washington is not sure how many of the indirect communications have reached the aging and reclusive cleric, U.S. officials add. The United States is still looking for people who know Sistani well enough to act as go-betweens for the negotiations or to explain Sistani`s thinking.

Senior U.S. officials note that the current uncertainty is just a part of the political process in a country with no experience in democracy. "The fact that there are demonstrations in Iraq is fundamentally a good thing. The fact that they are about us and things that we haven`t delivered on yet is something we acknowledge and understand," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

But with deadlines looming, other U.S. officials now express concern that the plan to hand over power could unravel if a solution is not found soon.

In a strong indication that Sistani`s objections may be gaining momentum, between 20,000 and 30,000 Iraqis in Basra marched through the streets of the country`s second largest city shouting "No to America!" to support the ayatollah`s call for early elections. Other smaller demonstrations took place in Baghdad, Ramadi and Mosul over various aspects of the U.S. plan for Iraqi self-rule.

At a news conference yesterday in Baghdad, Iraqi Governing Council President Adnan Pachachi acknowledged that the two-month-old plan faces considerable opposition. "I am not denying that there are a few differences in points of view in regards to the selection of the national assembly," he said, adding that time is running out for a resolution.

Either Iraq regains its sovereignty in five months as scheduled, he warned, or "we scrap the whole thing and postpone the whole process, until we can agree on some acceptable method, which means we may end up keeping the occupation another two years."

Whether half-measures will work is an open question, given the vehemence of Shiite rhetoric. Sistani met with leading clerics Tuesday in Najaf, and one participant said that jihad, or holy war, was "in the air." Sistani, however, made no move toward urging a violent expulsion of the Americans. He did, however, endorse the large demonstration in Basra and the smaller ones in several other cities.

In Baghdad, clerics are circulating CDs of a sermon given by a local cleric and Sistani follower, Mohammed Yahya, in which he asked: "Does the occupation authority have the right to express the mission and high interests of the Iraqi people? This will mean that American policy will control and manage everything in the country. This will be very dangerous." In the sermon, Yahya insisted that a future constitution must specify Islam as the basis of Iraq`s identity.

Pachachi, a foreign minister under Saddam Hussein who later went into exile, met with Sistani Sunday in Najaf, a Shiite holy city. He said they both "agreed there is room for improvement" in the U.S. plan, and that "there are many, many ideas to make it more transparent and inclusive, whereby the Iraqi people, in a very obvious way, can manifest their desires."

According to sources, Pachachi informed Sistani that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had written him a letter saying that elections could not be properly held soon, as Sistani has insisted. The country, he noted, lacks an up-to-date census, voting rules and an election law. He said he will travel to New York to persuade the United Nations to help in preparing for a future vote.

Sistani reportedly replied that he wants to know not about long-range election plans but about the next few months. Pachachi warned that trying to prepare for snap elections would delay the return of sovereignty to Iraqis. Sistani agreed, but still he insisted that improvements must be made in the way the new assembly will be created.

"Ahsan maysur," Sistani said -- choose the best possible way -- according to sources in Iraq. He offered no formula, other than to restate his demand for elections.

For some, Sistani`s power heralds Iraq`s move toward a system similar to neighboring Iran`s, in which a council of clerics wields an effective veto.

One Governing Council member said that if Sistani pushes too far, members would revolt and the council might collapse. That would leave the United States without an Iraqi face on its authority here and with dim prospects for transferring the management of Iraq to Iraqis.

"The Iraqi people would be very disappointed and frustrated . . . and suddenly we`re back to `No, sorry,` " Pachachi cautioned.

In both Baghdad and Washington, U.S. officials are struggling to come up with "refinements" to the U.S. proposal that would accommodate Sistani, without abandoning the plan signed on Nov. 15 by Bremer and the Iraqi council. U.S. and Iraqi officials said one option is to expand the number of caucus members who would choose the legislators, and then to open the process to monitoring.

Bremer will meet today with President Bush and top advisers, with further meetings possible through the weekend in preparation for Monday`s meeting at the United Nations between Bremer, Pachachi and Annan, U.S. officials said.

The Bush administration has asked the United Nations to return to Iraq and play an advisory role in support of the U.S.-backed plan, U.N. officials said. Washington has also pressed the world body to reach out to Shia and Sunni Muslim groups inside Iraq and urge them to back the American plan.

But U.N. officials sought yesterday to dampen expectations that the United Nations might intervene and play a meaningful role in Iraq`s political transition in the coming weeks. "You shouldn`t expect decisions or dramatic outcomes from the January 19th [meeting]. It`s a stage along a road," a senior U.N. official said.

The United Nations is reluctant to get enmeshed in a political transition over which it has no authority.

Another major U.N. concern is security. After two suicide bombings against the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last year, the United Nations is not eager to deploy officials in the 18 Iraqi governates where the caucuses are to be organized, sources said. Although the tenor of the talks has been positive, U.N. officials indicated this week that they do not envision a major U.N. role until after a provisional government is formed and the U.S. occupation ends by July 1.

Williams reported from Baghdad. Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Iraqi women have been protesting moves to restrict their rights, including the Governing Council`s decision to cancel laws that are among the most modern in the Muslim world.
washingtonpost.com
Iraqi Women Decry Move To Cut Rights
Council Would Place Matters Of Family Under Islamic Law

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A12


BAGHDAD, Jan. 15 -- For the past four decades, Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes.

Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of strict Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia.

This week, outraged Iraqi women -- from judges to cabinet ministers -- denounced the decision in street protests and at conferences, saying it would set back their legal status by centuries and could unleash emotional clashes among various Islamic strains that have differing rules for marriage, divorce and other family issues.

"This will send us home and shut the door, just like what happened to women in Afghanistan," said Amira Hassan Abdullah, a Kurdish lawyer who spoke at a protest meeting Thursday. Some Islamic laws, she noted, allow men to divorce their wives on the spot.

"The old law wasn`t perfect, but this one would make Iraq a jungle," she said. "Iraqi women will accept it over their dead bodies."

The order, narrowly approved by the 25-member council in a closed-door session Dec. 29, was reportedly sponsored by conservative Shiite members. The order is now being opposed by several liberal members as well as by senior women in the Iraqi government.

The council`s decisions must be approved by L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and aides said unofficially that his imprimatur for this change was unlikely. But experts here said that once U.S. officials turn over political power to Iraqis at the end of June, conservative forces could press ahead with their agenda to make sharia the supreme law. Spokesmen for Bremer did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

"It was the secret way this was done that is such a shock," said Nasreen Barawi, a woman who is Iraq`s minister for social welfare and public service. "Iraq is a multiethnic society with many different religious schools. Such a sweeping decision should be made over time, with an opportunity for public dialogue." There is no immediate threat of the decision becoming law, Barawi said, "but after June 30, who knows what can happen?"

In interviews at several meetings and protests, women noted that even during the politically repressive Hussein era, women had been allowed to assume a far more modern role than in many other Muslim countries and had been shielded from some of the more egregiously unfair interpretations of Islam advocated by conservative, male-run Muslim groups.

Once Hussein was toppled, several women noted wryly, they hoped the new authorities would further liberalize family law. Instead, in the process of wiping old laws off the books, they said, Islamic conservatives on the Governing Council are trying to impose retrograde views of women on a chaotic postwar society.

Although it remained unclear which members of the council had promoted the shift of family issues from civil to religious jurisprudence, the decision was made and formalized while Abdul Aziz Hakim, a Shiite Muslim who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was chairing the council under a rotating leadership system.

This week, several moderate council members spoke strongly against the decision in public forums, calling it a threat to both civilized progress and national unity. Nasir Chaderchi, a lawyer and council member who heads the National Democratic Party, criticized the council`s action at a professional women`s meeting Thursday. "We don`t want to be isolated from modern developments," Chaderchi told the gathering of the Iraqi Independent Women`s Group. "What hurts most is that the law of the tyrant Saddam was more modern than this new law." He said he hoped women would continue to protest until the order was reversed.

The council`s new policy decree was brief and vague, mentioning neither particular family issues nor individual branches of Islamic law that would replace current civil law. But lawyers and other experts from Iraqi women`s groups said the ambiguity of the decision was especially worrisome, since rival Islamic sects in Iraq espouse different policies for women`s legal and marital rights.

Some critics said the proposed law might exacerbate tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, already divided over other power-sharing issues in postwar Iraq, and could even destroy families that have intermarried between the two strains of Islam. Under Saddam, they said, the universal application of civil family law prevented such issues from sparking sectarian strife.

Zakia Ismael Hakki, a female retired judge and outspoken opponent of the new order, said Thursday that since 1959, civil family law had been developed and amended under a series of secular governments to give women a "half-share in society" and an opportunity to advance as individuals, no matter what their religion.

"This new law will send Iraqi families back to the Middle Ages," Hakki said. "It will allow men to have four or five or six wives. It will take away children from their mothers. It will allow anyone who calls himself a cleric to open an Islamic court in his house and decide about who can marry and divorce and have rights. We have to stop it."




© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Gore Calls Bush a `Moral Coward`
Environmental Policies Decried as Driven by Campaign Funds

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A10


Former vice president Al Gore called President Bush "a moral coward" yesterday for allegedly tailoring his policies on global warming and other environmental and energy matters to benefit his allies in the coal, oil and mining industries.

In a stinging assessment of the president`s environmental record, Gore criticized Bush for reneging on his 2000 campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed by many scientists for Earth`s rising temperature, and for launching a "totally meaningless" voluntary program after disavowing a 1997 international accord negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, that imposed mandatory emissions cuts.

Gore also complained that Bush has appointed many industry lobbyists and lawyers to key policy and regulatory posts, that his administration has "routinely" drafted new regulations that favor industry and that the Environmental Protection Agency has slowed the cleanup of toxic waste sites under the Superfund program.

"While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that, in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward -- so weak that he seldom if ever says `no` to them on anything -- no matter what the public interest might mandate," Gore said.

"The problem is that our world is now confronting a five-alarm fire that calls for bold moral and political leadership from the United States," he added, in a speech in New York sponsored by the political advocacy groups MoveOn.org and Environment2004.

Gore`s remarks drew quick and sharp rejoinders from the White House as well as from industry and conservative policy groups, which dismissed his rhetoric as alarmist and highly partisan. Gore lost the 2000 presidential election to Bush, though he won the popular vote. He decided not to run again in 2004 and recently endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean`s bid for the Democratic nomination.

"It`s clearly a political speech," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy. "The president is focused on doing the people`s business -- winning the war on terror, making our homeland safer and bringing back job growth and a strong economy. He has a very strong environmental record, and I`ll just defer on the politics to others."

Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy at the anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute, said derisively that "because of his reputation as a boring technocrat, most of the public is still not aware of the loony extent of Gore`s green ideology."

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla..), who contends that global warming is "a hoax," said that "what this shows is that, at times, emotion, politics, shortsightedness and alarmism can overwhelm objectivity."

Although controversy surrounds research on global warming, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences concluded in June 2001 that it is a real problem caused at least in part by man-made pollution building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat like a blanket. At present rates, the trend could well have a "serious adverse" impact on the climate by the end of the century, the panel said.

Gore repeatedly sought to link industry`s campaign contributions to Bush with administration decisions favorable to industry. Utility industry officials were among Bush`s biggest fundraisers, and Bush received $1.9 million in contributions from the oil and gas industry alone in 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.



© 2004 The Washington Post Co

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. May Lift Postwar Contracting Ban
French, German, Russian Firms May Be Allowed to Bid for Work in Iraq

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A12


Bush administration officials are leaning toward reversing a ban on bidding by French, German and Russian companies for U.S.-financed contracts in postwar Iraq, administration aides said yesterday.

The disclosure follows President Bush`s announcement Tuesday that he would allow bids by companies based in Canada, which had been among the countries blacklisted by an administration policy that opened bidding only to nations that had joined the U.S.-led coalition in the Iraq war.

That announcement, which Bush made in Mexico beside Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin at the Summit of the Americas, was one of the few times the administration has publicly conceded error in its Iraq policy.

Officials said the decision on France, Germany and Russia was not final, and said no announcement is imminent.

The release of the Dec. 5 memo outlining the policy reopened diplomatic wounds that had begun to heal since the run-up to the war. Several major U.S. allies complained that the Pentagon was branding them a security risk when they were being asked to help fund postwar operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The administration immediately began backtracking, and pointing out ways that companies in blacklisted countries could still bid. The policy applies only to prime contracts, not subcontracts, and only to construction contracts, not to contracts for services.

Officials said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had spoken by telephone with her French counterpart, diplomatic counselor Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, and pointed out that French companies are eligible to bid for prime contracts on non-construction services.

Alcatel, a French telecommunications giant, and Siemens, a German electronics firm, are already working in Iraq as subcontractors.

A senior official said the White House has always said the contracting policy could change as circumstances change, and the countries are being given credit for their pledges to postwar Iraq.

The administration has pointed to Bush`s lunar and Mars exploration plan as an example of ways that the United States wants to work with former adversaries.

"The president has always tried to stress that there are areas where we`re going to disagree, but that`s not going to prevent us from being able to pursue a common agenda elsewhere," a senior administration official said. "Where he`s said the most about that is probably about Germany, and the efforts that they`re providing in Afghanistan. He deeply appreciates that."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had signaled Tuesday that the administration planned to give flexibility to several of the countries on the list. He declined to name them. "There were three or four I saw on the list as the interagency [group] was working this," he said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
. . . But First, an Earthly Idea


By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A19


"Why the moon? Why Mars?" asked President Bush. "Because it is humanity`s destiny to strive, to seek, to find and because it is America`s destiny to lead."

Nothing like a proposed new venture into space to inspire soaring rhetoric. Thus those stirring words, offered not by the current President Bush but by the first President Bush back on July 20, 1989.

It makes you wonder why anyone should take Bush`s election-year Mars gambit seriously.

The suspicion that this is a retread idea deepens when you read through the coverage from 15 years ago. The Page One headline on a Washington Post follow-up story five days later: "Bush Proposes Lofty Goals, But Not Financing For Them; Budgeting for Space, East Europe Criticized."

Here is William J. Broad, writing in the New York Times on July 30, 1989: "Although skeptics dismissed the speech as political oratory with no firm commitment of dollars, White House officials say the plan is real, and in recent days some experts have said the odds on success are not as long as they first seemed."

Rudolph Penner, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, told The Post`s David Hoffman back then: "It`s not that we`re not a rich enough society to do a lot more of these kinds of things. It`s simply that the American people don`t want to pay for them."

But that is the beauty of this administration`s approach: It`s not asking current taxpayers to finance this adventure. It is going to keep cutting taxes and is putting only modest new sums into NASA. The big stuff happens later -- "our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020," Bush said on Wednesday. No date was set for the actual journey to Mars. Maybe it will happen when Sens. Chelsea Clinton and Karenna Gore Schiff face off in Iowa`s Democratic caucuses.

No, there is nothing wrong with setting big goals, since "a dream to be realized by future generations must begin with this generation." Yes, that was also the first President Bush back in `89. But let`s defend Bush 41 here. At least he was willing to bear the burden of financing the government through those tax increases that helped doom his chances for reelection in 1992. The current president, by contrast, is leaving behind a trail of IOUs: his tax cuts, a Medicare drug plan whose full costs won`t be felt for years to come and now a promise of the moon and Mars for his successors to keep.

As Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt put it: "Mr. President, there`s no such thing as a free launch." Gephardt said that back in 1989, when he was the House majority leader.

I am not one of those who say we should scrap the space program and put all the money into, say, health insurance. A wealthy and creative country should be able to pursue several important goals simultaneously.

But I could not help noticing that the day before the president proposed to make a small patch of the moon habitable, about 800 people gathered at a Baltimore church to urge the federal government to do more to redevelop blighted neighborhoods. The event`s organizers, the Industrial Areas Foundation-East and Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, said cleaning up low-income neighborhoods was not a matter of aesthetics but a health care emergency.

How many Americans know -- I didn`t -- that the percentage of children with asthma has more than doubled since 1980, from 3.6 percent to 8.7 percent; that deaths from asthma have increased by more than 75 percent; that 25 percent of all children in central Harlem have asthma? These numbers come from an IAF paper that, I warn you, makes for gruesome reading: "The explosion of asthma and other respiratory problems has been triggered by the overwhelming presence of roach droppings and rat urine in the projects and tenements that house these children." When these hazards are "combined with the harsh pesticides and cleaning agents often used to remove pests . . . you have the polar opposite of an oxygen tent in a sanitized hospital room."

So here`s an offer: We`ll forget that this President Bush is being a copycat on his Mars endeavor if he begins an experimental program to make our inner cities more habitable for the humans who live there. Who knows what technological spinoffs could result?

In that great 1989 speech, the first President Bush quoted William Jennings Bryan: "Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for."


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© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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America`s Empire of Bases

by Chalmers Johnson; TomDispatch; January 15, 2004

As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize -- or do not want to recognize -- that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can`t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.



Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.



Our installations abroad bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or, like the now well-publicized Kellogg, Brown & Root company, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation of Houston, undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. One task of such contractors is to keep uniformed members of the imperium housed in comfortable quarters, well fed, amused, and supplied with enjoyable, affordable vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the American economy have come to rely on the military for sales. On the eve of our second war on Iraq, for example, while the Defense Department was ordering up an extra ration of cruise missiles and depleted-uranium armor-piercing tank shells, it also acquired 273,000 bottles of Native Tan sunblock, almost triple its 1999 order and undoubtedly a boon to the supplier, Control Supply Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and its subcontractor, Sun Fun Products of Daytona Beach, Florida.



At Least Seven Hundred Foreign Bases



It`s not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department`s annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more.



These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11.



For Okinawa, the southernmost island of Japan, which has been an American military colony for the past 58 years, the report deceptively lists only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in the center of that modest-sized island`s second largest city. (Manhattan`s Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people`s countries, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure, although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years.



For their occupants, these are not unpleasant places to live and work. Military service today, which is voluntary, bears almost no relation to the duties of a soldier during World War II or the Korean or Vietnamese wars. Most chores like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail call, and cleaning latrines have been subcontracted to private military companies like Kellogg, Brown & Root, DynCorp, and the Vinnell Corporation. Fully one-third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq (about $30 billion), for instance, are going into private American hands for exactly such services. Where possible everything is done to make daily existence seem like a Hollywood version of life at home. According to the Washington Post, in Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, waiters in white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties serve dinner to the officers of the 82nd Airborne Division in their heavily guarded compound, and the first Burger King has already gone up inside the enormous military base we`ve established at Baghdad International Airport.



Some of these bases are so gigantic they require as many as nine internal bus routes for soldiers and civilian contractors to get around inside the earthen berms and concertina wire. That`s the case at Camp Anaconda, headquarters of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, whose job is to police some 1,500 square miles of Iraq north of Baghdad, from Samarra to Taji. Anaconda occupies 25 square kilometers and will ultimately house as many as 20,000 troops. Despite extensive security precautions, the base has frequently come under mortar attack, notably on the Fourth of July, 2003, just as Arnold Schwarzenegger was chatting up our wounded at the local field hospital.



The military prefers bases that resemble small fundamentalist towns in the Bible Belt rather than the big population centers of the United States. For example, even though more than 100,000 women live on our overseas bases -- including women in the services, spouses, and relatives of military personnel -- obtaining an abortion at a local military hospital is prohibited. Since there are some 14,000 sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults each year in the military, women who become pregnant overseas and want an abortion have no choice but to try the local economy, which cannot be either easy or pleasant in Baghdad or other parts of our empire these days.



Our armed missionaries live in a closed-off, self-contained world serviced by its own airline -- the Air Mobility Command, with its fleet of long-range C-17 Globemasters, C-5 Galaxies, C-141 Starlifters, KC-135 Stratotankers, KC-10 Extenders, and C-9 Nightingales that link our far-flung outposts from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides seventy-one Learjets, thirteen Gulfstream IIIs, and seventeen Cessna Citation luxury jets to fly them to such spots as the armed forces` ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld flies around in his own personal Boeing 757, called a C-32A in the Air Force.



Our "Footprint" on the World



Of all the insensitive, if graphic, metaphors we`ve allowed into our vocabulary, none quite equals "footprint" to describe the military impact of our empire. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers and senior members of the Senate`s Military Construction Subcommittee such as Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) are apparently incapable of completing a sentence without using it. Establishing a more impressive footprint has now become part of the new justification for a major enlargement of our empire -- and an announced repositioning of our bases and forces abroad -- in the wake of our conquest of Iraq. The man in charge of this project is Andy Hoehn, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. He and his colleagues are supposed to draw up plans to implement President Bush`s preventive war strategy against "rogue states," "bad guys," and "evil-doers." They have identified something they call the "arc of instability," which is said to run from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia. This is, of course, more or less identical with what used to be called the Third World -- and perhaps no less crucially it covers the world`s key oil reserves. Hoehn contends, "When you overlay our footprint onto that, we don`t look particularly well-positioned to deal with the problems we`re now going to confront."



Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. America`s version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions. The only way this is discussed in our press is via reportage on highly arcane plans for changes in basing policy and the positioning of troops abroad -- and these plans, as reported in the media, cannot be taken at face value.



Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, claims that in order to put "preventive war" into action, we require a "global presence," by which he means gaining hegemony over any place that is not already under our thumb. According to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, the idea is to create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from "frontier stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we get some intelligence on them.



"Lily Pads" in Australia, Romania, Mali, Algeria . . .



In order to put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has been proposing -- this is usually called "repositioning" -- many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six permanent ones in Iraq. A number of these are already under construction -- at Baghdad International Airport, Tallil air base near Nasariyah, in the western desert near the Syrian border, and at Bashur air field in the Kurdish region of the north. (This does not count the previously mentioned Anaconda, which is currently being called an "operating base," though it may very well become permanent over time.) In addition, we plan to keep under our control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait -- 1,600 square miles out of Kuwait`s 6,900 square miles -- that we now use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for Green Zone bureaucrats to relax.



Other countries mentioned as sites for what Colin Powell calls our new "family of bases" include: In the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe -- Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria; in Asia -- Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa -- Morocco, Tunisia, and especially Algeria (scene of the slaughter of some 100,00 civilians since 1992, when, to quash an election, the military took over, backed by our country and France); and in West Africa -- Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.



Most of these new bases will be what the military, in a switch of metaphors, calls "lily pads" to which our troops could jump like so many well-armed frogs from the homeland, our remaining NATO bases, or bases in the docile satellites of Japan and Britain. To offset the expense involved in such expansion, the Pentagon leaks plans to close many of the huge Cold War military reservations in Germany, South Korea, and perhaps Okinawa as part of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld`s "rationalization" of our armed forces. In the wake of the Iraq victory, the U.S. has already withdrawn virtually all of its forces from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, partially as a way of punishing them for not supporting the war strongly enough. It wants to do the same thing to South Korea, perhaps the most anti-American democracy on Earth today, which would free up the 2nd Infantry Division on the demilitarized zone with North Korea for probable deployment to Iraq, where our forces are significantly overstretched.



In Europe, these plans include giving up several bases in Germany, also in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder`s domestically popular defiance of Bush over Iraq. But the degree to which we are capable of doing so may prove limited indeed. At the simplest level, the Pentagon`s planners do not really seem to grasp just how many buildings the 71,702 soldiers and airmen in Germany alone occupy and how expensive it would be to reposition most of them and build even slightly comparable bases, together with the necessary infrastructure, in former Communist countries like Romania, one of Europe`s poorest countries. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann in Hanau, Germany, has said to the press "There`s no place to put these people" in Romania, Bulgaria, or Djibouti, and she predicts that 80% of them will in the end stay in Germany. It`s also certain that generals of the high command have no intention of living in backwaters like Constanta, Romania, and will keep the U.S. military headquarters in Stuttgart while holding on to Ramstein Air Force Base, Spangdahlem Air Force Base, and the Grafenwöhr Training Area.



One reason why the Pentagon is considering moving out of rich democracies like Germany and South Korea and looks covetously at military dictatorships and poverty-stricken dependencies is to take advantage of what the Pentagon calls their "more permissive environmental regulations." The Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys our forces so-called Status of Forces Agreements, which usually exempt the United States from cleaning up or paying for the environmental damage it causes. This is a standing grievance in Okinawa, where the American environmental record has been nothing short of abominable. Part of this attitude is simply the desire of the Pentagon to put itself beyond any of the restraints that govern civilian life, an attitude increasingly at play in the "homeland" as well. For example, the 2004 defense authorization bill of $401.3 billion that President Bush signed into law in November 2003 exempts the military from abiding by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.



While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to create ever more lily pads in the Third World remains unchecked, there are several reasons to doubt that some of the more grandiose plans, for either expansion or downsizing, will ever be put into effect or, if they are, that they will do anything other than make the problem of terrorism worse than it is. For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of U.S. military power on its borders and is already moving to checkmate American basing sorties into places like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The first post-Soviet-era Russian airbase in Kyrgyzstan has just been completed forty miles from the U.S. base at Bishkek, and in December 2003, the dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, declared that he would not permit a permanent deployment of U.S. forces in his country even though we already have a base there.



When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic politics may come into play. By law the Pentagon`s Base Realignment and Closing Commission must submit its fifth and final list of domestic bases to be shut down to the White House by September 8, 2005. As an efficiency measure, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has said he`d like to be rid of at least one-third of domestic Army bases and one-quarter of domestic Air Force bases, which is sure to produce a political firestorm on Capitol Hill. In order to protect their respective states` bases, the two mother hens of the Senate`s Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Dianne Feinstein, are demanding that the Pentagon close overseas bases first and bring the troops now stationed there home to domestic bases, which could then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein included in the Military Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission to investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer needed. The Bush administration opposed this provision of the Act but it passed anyway and the president signed it into law on November 22, 2003. The Pentagon is probably adept enough to hamstring the commission, but a domestic base-closing furor clearly looms on the horizon.



By far the greatest defect in the "global cavalry" strategy, however, is that it accentuates Washington`s impulse to apply irrelevant military remedies to terrorism. As the prominent British military historian, Correlli Barnett, has observed, the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the threat of al-Qaeda. From 1993 through the 9/11 assaults of 2001, there were five major al-Qaeda attacks worldwide; in the two years since then there have been seventeen such bombings, including the Istanbul suicide assaults on the British consulate and an HSBC Bank. Military operations against terrorists are not the solution. As Barnett puts it, "Rather than kicking down front doors and barging into ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums of `freedom and democracy,` we need tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on a profound understanding of the people and cultures we are dealing with -- an understanding up till now entirely lacking in the top-level policy-makers in Washington, especially in the Pentagon."



In his notorious "long, hard slog" memo on Iraq of October 16, 2003, Defense secretary Rumsfeld wrote, "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror." Correlli-Barnett`s "metrics" indicate otherwise. But the "war on terrorism" is at best only a small part of the reason for all our military strategizing. The real reason for constructing this new ring of American bases along the equator is to expand our empire and reinforce our military domination of the world.



Copyright C2004 Chalmers Johnson



Chalmers Johnson`s latest book is The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan), published as part of the American Empire Project. His previous book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, has just been updated with a new introduction.



[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq16j…
EDITORIAL


Finding the Balance in Iraq

January 16, 2004

The U.S. is having difficulty governing Iraq, but it is unlikely to find it easier to decide when to leave. A Monday meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York can make progress toward determining when to hand over political authority, but it will require compromises from everyone there.

Delegates from the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council should be prepared to face Iraqi voters sooner rather than later and not depend on Washington to keep them in power indefinitely. The U.N. should be ready to return its international staff to Iraq even before June 30, the deadline the United States set to give power to the Iraqis. The U.S. should be prepared to let the deadline slip, if necessary, but not indefinitely.

Monday`s meeting will not include Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has much to say in determining Iraq`s future. He is the most revered clergyman for the country`s Shiite Muslims, who account for more than half the population. He has counseled patience with the occupation, but for months he has insisted on direct elections of an Iraqi government to replace the Governing Council. The U.S. contends that it cannot enroll voters and hold an election by June 30; instead, it wants to use caucuses to choose an interim administration.

Sistani, who communicates with the U.S. through his aides, should understand that the next election, although important, will not be the last one. He cannot have veto power over U.S. actions. But Washington should try to accommodate his wishes as much as possible. It will not do to hand over the government by June 30 if the main motive is to minimize the war and aftermath as issues in the U.S. presidential election. Nearly 500 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, more than 300 of them because of hostile action. Leaving Iraq prematurely and risking chaos spilling over to neighboring countries would be a betrayal.

The U.S. stiff-arming of the United Nations was a mistake. The U.N. has no objection to the U.S. controlling security in Iraq, but it doesn`t want to be seen as merely doing Washington`s bidding — especially after its top envoy in the country was killed in an August bombing. The U.N. said this week it would send a small team to Baghdad soon to study the security. That could be an important first step toward installing U.N. staff experienced in rebuilding war-torn countries.

Iraq needs international experts on staffing ministries, distributing food, opening voting rolls and holding elections. That assistance should quiet misguided critics who question the U.N.`s relevance.

The U.S. is likely to keep troops in Iraq for years after Iraqis start to govern themselves. Washington must find the line between keeping political power too long — angering Iraqis even more — and yielding it too soon. To reach that goal, it must seek more help than it has. Listening closely to the U.N. and important Iraqis is a good start.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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God Hates Unmarried Losers
It`s BushCo`s $1.5 bil plan to let the homophobic Christian Right dictate love. Whee!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 16, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/16/notes011604.DTL



Man, those inner-city poor people sure are dumb.

Just look at `em, popping out babies like crazy and draining the welfare system like there`s no tomorrow, all while remaining completely unable to either get or stay married in their sad, un-Christian, gangsta-rap lives. Pathetic.

And oh my God, those damnable gays. Would you just look at them, fighting for basic human rights, whining about wanting to get married, as if they knew anything about God`s manly, flag-waving, 100 percent heterosexual love?

Clearly it`s some sort of flaming pagan sorcery those gays used to persuade all those misguided states to suddenly begin to offer more and more rights to gay couples, granting civil unions and nearly full benefits and allowing them to copulate and hold hands in public and sodomize each other with strange phallic-shaped devices in the privacy of their own homes, even in Texas.

I mean, what the hell is the world coming to? And what, pray tell, is a self-righteous, homophobic, God-thumping, conservative administration that constantly kowtows to the preening Christian Right to do about all this?

Why, hurl $1.5 billion of your tax dollars at the problem, that`s what. Educate them dumb poor people on how to fly right and learn more "interpersonal skills" so they can get married -- you know, just like their much happier and more heavily narcotized, sanctimonious, Botoxed, Zolofted, blank-eyed Republican masters -- er, fellow citizens.

And, hey, if that $1.5 bil happens to reinforce the inviolable God-approved mega-sanctity of all-American ultra-hetero man-woman marriage, if it shows those icky gay people a thing or two about what this country truly values, all while appeasing a perpetually terrified right-wing contingent of BushCo voters, why, all the better.

This, then, is the plan: $1.5 billion to promote "healthy marriages," especially among the lower-income plebes, with the ulterior motive of bashing gays yet again, all newly spawned from the bowels of BushCo to assuage the ever-irritated Christian Right.

You remember them? The masses that are, apparently, incessantly nagging BushCo to get in there and do something to protect the sanctity of marriage before it all falls apart and their straight white gay-hating God up and abandons them entirely and we become a nation of body-pierced single-parent sodomites who read The New York Times and drive Volvos.

Look. This is not a completely hideous idea. You want to help people learn to love more deeply and stay together and deal with their personal issues? You want to educate folks about the value of honest communication and of raising healthy happy kids? Wonderful. I`m all for it.

Here`s what you do: Teach them to shun political agenda and hollow religious doctrine and become more self-defined and open and spiritually kaleidoscopic humans.

Teach them to be free to define love and family and human relationship in as raw and intimate and uniquely divine a way as possible. This is what you do. And, oh, yes, teach them to ignore the living hell out of the dishonest Christian Right.

And, oh, those "interpersonal skills." Say it like you mean it. Say it like you believe they have any idea what the hell they`re talking about. Say it like it doesn`t somehow imply that neocons actually believe the problem with these damn poor people and their damn poor relationships is that they just don`t know how to talk better and suck up to Jesus and quit shooting each other over all them illegal drugs.

Hey, $1.5 billion should buy a lot of interpersonal skills. It should pay for a great many notions of how love is this deep potent chaotic impossibly difficult but worthwhile thing, with marriage as one of its more fascinating and culturally applauded expressions. Right?

Or maybe not. Maybe the voices of the Christian Right mean something entirely different. Maybe they mean all those happy hetero marriages we all see every day. You know the ones.

Like when two people, one of whom is a ditzy slut-wanna-be celeb, get totally loaded on vodka slammers and run off to Vegas and get hitched in a puerile drunken haze, only to have it annulled 55 hours later in an embarrassing bout of ugly Hollywood PR. Is that a good sanctified hetero marriage? Oh no wait, that can`t be right.

Maybe matrimony is all about sad-looking white Christian people gathering together in overlit studio audiences to bewail, in "Chicken Soup for the Suburban Soul" style, their desperate lack of sex and physical contact and decent stemware, with Dr. Phil looking all furrowed as we all just ignore the 50 percent divorce rate, including all those straight happy Christians. Wait, no, that can`t be it, either.

Or maybe "healthy" marriage is when your miserable GOP wife stays home and raises the disgruntled kids and keeps her big trap shut like a good wife should, and, as a reward, she gets all the Botox and therapy and Nordstrom shopping sprees your credit card can handle. Yes. That must be it. Isn`t that right, senator?

Interesting, really, how difficult it is to track down one pure example of a healthy and beautiful and communicative Christian marriage -- isn`t it, Dubya? We could ask Laura, but it looks like she`s busy being a nice GOP token wife, smiling that perpetual wooden-mannequin smile off in a corner somewhere, reading books to baffled children, harmless as a sterile bunny.

Here`s a hard flick of the finger into the forehead of GOP sanctimony: Marriage has nothing to do with God. Marriage has nothing to do with Christian "interpersonal skills." Marriage has nothing to do with how one colon-clenched segment of the power elite decides it must restrict matrimony lest it lose more control and become increasingly insignificant and tumble further down the slope into hot pools of rage and intolerance and bad sex once a year with the lights off.

And, finally, marriage has nothing to do with political attitudes or party affiliation or how big your right-wing campaign contribution was during the last election, and therefore how much you get to shove your personal pseudo-pious homophobic missionary-position ethos down the nation`s throat.

Because marriage is, of course, about connection. It is about social ritual and new, wide-open definitions of family and the ability of two people to commit to going deep and peeling each other back and agreeing to deal with each other`s crap for the next 50 years.

Marriage is, in truth, just one weird messy culturally endorsed facet of the massive, overarching, impossibly powerful love impulse that fuels, engorges and enrages the entire species at all times and in all places across the entire known and unknown universe. Simple, really.

And guess what? You cannot legislate that force. You cannot stop its various mutations and progressions in our culture, and its absolute insistence on forcing our bewildered species to evolve, despite itself.

Such a force laughs in the face of $1.5 billion attempts to slap some sort of hissy little right-wing agenda on it. Such a force laughs in the face of anything that tries to limit its delicious, kaleidoscopic progress.

And, really, shouldn`t the rest of us do the same?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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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.

©2004 SF Gate

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[Deep Thought]

[Joerver]

Published on Thursday, January 15, 2004 by UPI
"Whitewash`: 9/11 Director Gave Evidence to Own Inquiry
by Shaun Waterman

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The panel set up to investigate why the United States failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was rocked Thursday by the bizarre revelation that two of its senior officials were so closely involved in the events they are investigating that they have had to be interviewed as part of the inquiry.

Philip Zelikow, the commission`s executive director, worked on the Bush-Cheney transition team as the new administration took power, advising his longtime associate and former boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, on the structure of the incoming National Security Council.

"He came forward in case he might have useful information," said commission spokesman Al Felzenberg.

Zelikow, who the commission says has withdrawn himself from those parts of its investigation directly connected with the transition -- a process known as recusal -- was also appointed to the President`s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in October 2001.

The board provides the White House with advice about the quality, adequacy and legality of the whole spectrum of intelligence activities.

Jamie S. Gorelick, one the 10 members of the commission and the other official who has answered investigators` questions, was a senior official under Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton administration.

"(Zelikow) recused himself from those relevant parts of the inquiry," said Felzenberg. "Frankly, we don`t see what the fuss is about."

But the revelations have been greeted with dismay by the commission`s critics, especially survivors and relatives of the dead, because they suggest the investigation will be -- in the words of Kristen Breitweiser, who lost her husband Ron in tower 2 of the World Trade Center -- "a whitewash."

The families have said for many months that they are unhappy with Zelikow`s role, and are furious that they were not told he would be giving evidence.

"Did he interview himself about his own role in the failures that left us defenseless?" asked Lori Van Auken, the widow of Kenneth. "This is bizarre.

"We entered a looking glass world on Sept. 11 and we`re still in it."

The news is a particularly sharp blow to the commission`s credibility because Gorelick and Zelikow are the two officials to whom the White House has granted the greatest access to the most secret and sensitive national security documents of all, the presidential daily briefings.

Last year, officials acknowledged that one such briefing in August 2001, more than a month prior to the attacks, warned that al-Qaida was determined to strike in the United States. Some reports suggested that hijacking -- and even the use of airplanes as missiles -- was mentioned as the mode of assault.

The question of the transition is a significant one, because critics of President Bush say the incoming administration "dropped the ball" on the fight against Osama bin Laden, which had been ramping up under President Clinton after a suicide attack by the al-Qaida network nearly destroyed the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000.

Bush`s supporters counter it was Clinton`s failure to capture or kill bin Laden after his network destroyed two U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998 that emboldened the extremists to attack the United States on Sept. 11.

The families planned a meeting on the issue Thursday evening with commission members and staff, which one predicted would be a "slugfest."


Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

###

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$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

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John Chuckman: President From Podunk Drilling Inc.
Friday, 16 January 2004, 11:49 am
Column: John Chuckman
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0401/S00055.htm
President From Podunk Drilling Inc.

by John Chuckman
January 15, 2004
Thinking people aren`t surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.

Bush`s halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignorance also manages to come through. Still, it never hurts to have a first-hand account, expert testimony, to reinforce even our strongest perceptions, and former Bush Cabinet-member Paul O`Neill has now supplied that in spades.

As to the moral portion of Bush`s substance, it is an interesting phenomenon that a President who claims Jesus as mentor thinks nothing of lying, enjoys bloody revenge, and shows little tolerance for those who disagree. Not that any of that matters to his spiritual advisors, all CEOs of major fundamentalist conversion-operations: their bond to him is not one respecting truth but knowing what`s good for business. You can only stage profitable theatrics like tears running down your cheeks for the boys battling damned heathens with a man of Bush`s caliber in office. He is good for collection-plate take.

Paul O`Neill, in interviews to publicize a new book, offers candid snapshots of a President who doesn`t even discuss policy with some of his highest officials. It is interesting that O`Neill got himself sacked as Treasury Secretary for voicing sound and traditional conservative views on two Bush economic policies, the imposition of import tariffs against steel and a gigantic, irresponsible tax-cut.

Bush`s tariff against foreign steel violated basic economic understanding and the rules governing international trade, and it was repealed after the WTO declared it illegal. While those rules permit tariffs as a response to dumping (selling a product abroad below its domestic production cost ), often what is called dumping by the United States is not dumping at all, but simply lower-cost, more efficient production. So it was with foreign steel, and one does not expect sound conservatives to support tariffs under these circumstances.

It does not take an education in economics to understand how irresponsible Bush`s monstrous tax cuts are at the very time American military spending is exploding. The economic mumbo-jumbo of the Reagan era that tax-cut induced growth generates a revenue greater than the lost taxes has been thoroughly discredited by Reagan`s legacy of gigantic deficits. No so-called "tax and spend" liberal ever produced such astonishing piles of debt.

I would add, that at a time when economic disparity in America is growing vigorously (in good part owing to the effects of globalization on employment and wages for those with the least skills), it is poor public policy to reduce the tax burden on the well-off, especially when that burden already was low by world standards. These taxes finance many forms of needed redistribution including education and healthcare, services already starved of funds, but this kind of thinking is social and could not be expected to carry weight with most Republicans.

Many contemporary Republicans seem to reject classical economics, and balanced budgets with sound accounting have evaporated as fitting national responsibilities. Tax cuts have become a form of buying votes, an inverted form of what liberals were long accused of when they promised new programs. And just as with careless promises of new spending, the tax cuts are never done with sound accounting. Voters are not told what services should be cut as the price for reduced taxes - only the vision of lower taxes is dangled before them. Perhaps voters should know better, but they are conditioned to slick promises of gain twenty-four hours a day on television, including from Bush`s spiritual advisors.

To a considerable degree, taxes cut at the federal level since Reagan`s time have had to be made up by local communities, the very political entities with the least flexibility and wherewithal to increase taxes since they depend largely on property taxes. Maintaining even a token sense of equal opportunity across a large nation in basic services like education and healthcare can only be done with transfers from higher levels of government. But what is true for many communities, whether blighted or small, is true also of states with unfavorable ratios of resources and obligations.

You might think a Treasury Secretary with a successful background in international business (quite unlike the President`s failed Podunk drilling company, failed, that is, for investors but not for Bush who bailed out with handsome profits) worth listening to on such matters, but Paul O`Neill tells us that this President engages in little discussion, sitting mainly in silence at high-level meetings. O`Neill felt in one-on-one meetings as though he were having a conversation with himself.

One suspects from what O`Neill relates that Bush`s modus operandi consists of having his éminence grise, Dick Cheney, tell him in a private conference after any meeting of experts what in fact the policy should be. That is not the kind of consultation he would want to share with others.

O`Neill forcefully comments on the invasion of Iraq, telling us that despite seeing high-level intelligence on Iraq as a member of the National Security Council, there was never evidence of dangerous Iraqi weapons. The President simply was determined from the start to topple Hussein. Indeed, Bush began his first National Security Council meeting with a demand that those around the table find a way to get rid of Hussein.

Bush was fixated on his father`s failed policy in Iraq, perhaps attributing to it his father`s failure to be re-elected - something Bush père is known to have taken very hard. If you add Hussein`s purported assassination plot against Bush pére, the stain on the family escutcheon must have been troubling, although I still do not believe personal matters motivated the invasion. The neo-con institute crowd had been whining and puking about Iraq for years, despite all the horrors inflicted on that country by the First Gulf War, including tens of thousands poor draftees and civilians incinerated by American bombing, but there is never enough war and death to satisfy these grasping, manipulative people.

O`Neill`s revelations imply three years of dissimulation by Bush. They imply also months of intense and steady lying as non-existent weapons were talked up, and, of course, Bush`s lying to this day about Hussein`s non-existent connections to terror. But they imply something more profound that goes to the very meaning of democracy. Bush never submitted the prospect of a conflict to voters. Had he done so, I doubt he could have successfully argued his case, something he hasn`t done to this day.

O`Neill`s account of the first National Security Council meeting has been confirmed by another official who attended but remains anonymous. Bush`s lying about Iraq`s weapons has been confirmed by a study of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which concluded that the threat from Iraq had been systematically misrepresented. The stupidity of Bush`s invasion has been confirmed by the observations of a professor at the Army`s War College who characterized it as a costly, pointless distraction.

One of the White House`s immediate responses to the press about Paul O`Neill was along the lines of, "Nobody ever listened to him when he was in office. Why would anyone listen to him now?" Snotty, eighth-grade stuff, nothing to do with facts, having about the same moral tone as candidate Bush`s calling a New York Times reporter "asshole"

Bush`s smarmy White House isn`t content with efforts to insult O`Neill, he is to be investigated for inappropriately using Treasury material marked "secret." This from the same crowd who revealed the secret identity of a CIA agent, the wife of someone else whose honest words they scorned. Watch your back, Paul.

ENDS

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040202&s=borosage


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The Kitchen-Table State of the Union
by ROBERT L. BOROSAGE

[from the February 2, 2004 issue]

With the stock market surging and the economy growing, George W. Bush has begun touting the success of his tax cuts. In his State of the Union address on January 20, Bush will no doubt argue that we`re on the right track and need to stay the course. But for most Americans the rosy statistics don`t reflect their reality. When they talk at night after the kids have gone to bed, they worry that things are getting worse, not better. And in case after case, the President`s policies are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Consider the State of the Union as it looks not from the White House or Wall Street but from America`s kitchen tables.

Jobs. Jobs are scarce and increasingly insecure. The new jobs that laid-off workers are getting generally don`t have the pay or benefits of the ones they lost. Despite the much-advertised economic recovery, Bush will have the worst jobs record of any President since the Great Depression. In addition to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, high-tech and service jobs are headed overseas too. Bush has not only pushed for more of the same trade accords that helped get us into this hole, but he has failed to address China`s mercantilist trade and currency policies, which have led to a staggering $100 billion US trade deficit. Much of the corporate investment that came from the wealthy benefiting from Bush`s tax cuts went abroad, not here. Bush`s policies are generating more jobs in Shanghai than in Saginaw.

Wages. Wage growth is the slowest in forty years. Homelessness is up, and more working people are in poverty. But the Bush Administration not only effectively opposes any increase in the minimum wage, it pushed regulations that will strip millions of workers of overtime pay, despite the opposition of many Democrats and some Republicans in Congress.

Healthcare. Healthcare costs are soaring, with businesses forcing workers to pick up more of the tab or dropping coverage altogether. Americans now pay the highest prescription drug prices in the world. Yet Bush not only did nothing to bring the costs of HMOs and insurance companies under control, he pushed through a prescription drug bill that prohibits Medicare from negotiating a better price for seniors. To add insult to injury, the bill outlaws buying cheaper drugs from Canada. Bush turned a $400 billion benefit for the elderly into a $400 billion subsidy to the drug companies.

Schools. The largest number of children ever entered our public schools this past fall. But schools across the country are being forced to cut back, laying off teachers, doubling up classes, putting off needed construction. Bush not only broke his promise on funding his school reforms, but, with the states facing the worst fiscal crisis in fifty years, he also opposed state aid that would protect schools from debilitating cuts. Then he zeroed out funding for school construction in the federal budget.

College Costs. Tuition at four-year public colleges is going up nearly 15 percent a year. Federal grants for deserving students haven`t kept up. The maximum Pell grant now covers 39 percent of public college tuition, down from 84 percent in 1975-76. Students graduate with 35 percent more debt than a decade ago. More and more are priced out of four-year colleges altogether. Bush broke his campaign promise to raise the maximum grant; under his new budget, grant levels will fall even further behind costs.

Retirement Security. Many older workers saw their retirement dreams shattered when the stock market collapsed. Only one in five employees in the private sector has a defined-benefit pension at work. And the Enron scandal showed how corporate executives were abusing worker savings accounts. But Bush now wants to privatize Social Security, which would almost certainly lead to cuts in benefits. And his post-Enron pension "reform" legislation would make it legal for corporations to provide pensions for the few on the top floor and reduce the number covered on the shop floor.

Safe Food. Parents sensibly worry about what their children are eating, as more of our food is imported and less of it is inspected. Food-borne diseases have caused some 228 million illnesses and more than 15,000 deaths since Bush took office. And now there`s a mad cow threat. Yet Bush and the Republican Congress blocked legislation to impose stronger penalties for food-safety violations and opposed measures that would have made it easier to trace the source of contaminated meat.

Safe Workplaces. More than 4.7 million workers were injured or became ill on the job in 2002. Violations of workplace safety laws have grown as companies seek to cut costs. Federal inspectors are unable to keep up. But Bush has tried every year to cut the Occupational Safety and Health Administration budget, which currently allows for inspections of only 5 percent of workplaces.

Personal Debt. Personal debt is at record heights, as are personal bankruptcies. Credit card companies continue to impose obscene interest and penalty charges, yet Bush and the GOP leadership in Congress blocked efforts to provide consumers with clear warning about credit card charges and pushed to make it easier to collect against families forced into bankruptcy.

National Security. Since 9/11, Americans can`t help worrying about terrorist threats. Even here Bush has fallen short. The EPA reports that there are 123 plants where release of chemicals would threaten more than 1 million people. Yet after the oil and chemical lobby mobilized against it, Bush opposed legislation to create minimum standards for security and hazard reduction in such plants.

The list could go on, but the point is clear. Bush`s boasting about his economic program may simply indicate that he is out of touch with the reality that most Americans face. But the reason his policies are making things worse is that they are designed to serve the wealthy and the corporate lobbies that pay for his party. And that means rewarding the few and leaving the many to pay the price.

This is beginning to sink in. With the capture of Saddam Hussein and the revival of economic growth, Bush`s job-approval ratings have bounced back. But what pollsters call his "re-elect numbers"--the number of Americans who say they would vote to re-elect him--remain low. Americans are notoriously inattentive to national politics and sensibly cynical about politicians. But they know that although champagne corks may be popping in the boardrooms, there is little to celebrate around the kitchen table.

[Joerver]

Giving money to rich people
Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate

01.15.04 - AUSTIN, Texas -- My long-reigning favorite Bushism has now been edged out by a fresh contender I cannot resist. The old fave goes back to Oct. 4, 2001, when Bush, still trying to reassure a shaky nation, said, "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."

I didn`t think he could top that, but there is something so winningly confused about my new No. 1. This is from Paul O`Neill`s report of the large meeting in November 2002 about a second round of tax cuts. O`Neill argued against it, noting that after 9-11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing and the nation faced urgent problems.

Everyone expected Bush to rubber stamp the plan, but he surprised them by asking: "Haven`t we already given money to rich people? Why are we going to do it again?"

Now, it is true that Karl Rove promptly quashed this unseemly fit of populism by jumping in with: "Stick to principle. Stick to principle." Dick Cheney further elucidated the matter for the president by explaining: "Reagan proved that deficits don`t matter. We won the midterm elections, this is our due."

During Watergate, people used to hold readings from the transcripts of the Nixon tapes. Friends would take different parts -- Haldeman, Ehrlichman or Nixon -- and render their pals helpless with laughter just reading what our leaders had actually said. While one sees the script possibilities here immediately, I still find that one plaintive question quite touching: "Haven`t we already given money to rich people?"

For a truly surreal experience, as someone at The New York Times editorial page has already noted, try reading Ron Suskind`s book "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O`Neill" along with "In an Uncertain World," by Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton`s secretary of treasury.

A chapter from one book, then a chapter from the other. That is an educational experience.

One of the sadder items from Suskind`s book is that Bush thinks the recession was caused by "SEC overreach." Oh dear. The trouble with O`Neill`s book is that it raises the "George W. Bush is a nincompoop" debate again, which is wholly unproductive.

True, it is not reassuring to hear his loyalists praise him as a mental giant -- eerily like the Reaganistas at the end of that era insisting the old boy was not slipping when he clearly was. Given Bush`s obviously bored and disengaged performance in Mexico, I`d say the larger problem is that Bush is just rude. I don`t think we should send him anywhere to represent the country if he can`t behave better than that. He really does consistently display bad manners.

The news that Bush & Co. wanted to invade Iraq from Day One does not surprise -- Bill Clinton has been telling a similar story for some time about his meeting with Bush on Inauguration Day, 2001. It is the, "So what?" reaction that needs to be addressed.

We learn that there are no weapons of mass destruction, and the Bushes reply, "So what?" We learn there never was a connection between Sadism Hussein and Al Qaeda, and the Bushes say, "So what?" It matters because we need to understand how we got into the mess we`re in, so we won`t get ourselves into another one.

There has to be some recognition of how seriously we were misled. If one then wants to argue that invading Iraq was worth doing anyway, fine -- but it must be acknowledged that it was done on false premises. And as an excellent article in the current issue of Mother Jones called the "The Lie Factory" shows, the false premises were carefully manufactured in the Pentagon. Conservatives cannot possibly be comfortable with that, no matter how repellent Sadism Hussein.

Perhaps more unnerving still is a third book (which I have not yet finished), "An End to Evil" by Richard Perle and David Frum. It might more aptly be titled, "The Beginning of Evil," since it is a plan for unlimited, unprovoked war, in which we overthrow the governments of Iran, Syria, North Korea and, apparently, China. One would dismiss this as mere crackpottery if one author, Frum, had not written the "Axis of Evil` speech for Bush and the other, Perle, were not a leading neo-con.

Perle is a longtime advocate of invading Iraq and still on the Pentagon`s Defense Policy Board despite numerous conflicts of interest. Interesting exercise to triangulate these three books -- like the old blue-book essay, "Compare and Contrast."

***
.

(c) 2003 Creators Syndicate


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16283

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Thursday, January 15, 2004

Shari`a and Family Law...
On Wednesday our darling Iraqi Puppet Council decided that secular Iraqi family law would no longer be secular- it is now going to be according to Islamic Shari`a. Shari`a is Islamic law, whether from the Quran or quotes of the Prophet or interpretations of modern Islamic law by clerics and people who have dedicated their lives to studying Islam.

The news has barely been covered by Western or even Arab media and Iraqi media certainly aren`t covering it. It is too much to ask of Al-Iraqiya to debate or cover a topic like this one- it would obviously conflict with the Egyptian soap operas and songs. This latest decision is going to be catastrophic for females- we`re going backwards.

Don`t get me wrong- pure Islamic law according to the Quran and the Prophet gives women certain unalterable, nonnegotiable rights. The problem arises when certain clerics decide to do their own interpretations of these laws (and just about *anyone* can make themselves a cleric these days). The bigger problem is that Shari`a may be drastically different from one cleric to another. There are actually fundamental differences in Shari`a between the different Islamic factions or `methahib`. Even in the same methahib, there are dozens of different clerics who may have opposing opinions. This is going to mean more chaos than we already have to deal with. We`ve come to expect chaos in the streets… but chaos in the courts and judicial system too?!

This is completely unfair to women specifically. Under the Iraqi constitution, men and women are equal. Under our past secular family law (which has been in practice since the `50s) women had unalterable divorce, marriage, inheritance, custody, and alimony rights. All of this is going to change.

I`ll give an example of what this will mean. One infamous practice brought to Iraq by Iranian clerics was the `zawaj muta`a`, which when translated by the clerics means `temporary marriage`. The actual translation is `pleasure marriage`- which is exactly what it is. It works like this: a consenting man and woman go to a cleric who approves of temporary marriage and they agree upon a period of time during which the marriage will last. The man pays the woman a `mahar` or dowry and during the duration of the marriage (which can be anything from an hour, to a week, a month, etc.) the man has full marital rights. Basically, it`s a form of prostitution that often results in illegitimate children and a spread of STDs.

Sunni clerics consider it a sin and many Shi`a clerics also frown upon it… but there are the ones who will tell you it`s `halal` and Shari`a, etc. The same people who approve it or practice it would, of course, rather see their daughters or sisters dead before they allow *them* to practice it- but that`s beyond the point.

Anyway, secular Iraqi family law considers it a form of prostitution and doesn`t consider a `pleasure marriage` a legitimate marriage. In other words, the woman wouldn`t have any legal rights and if she finds herself pregnant- the child, legally, wouldn`t have a father.

So what happens if a married man decides to arrange a pleasure marriage on the side? In the past, his legitimate wife could haul him off to court, and ask for a divorce because the man would be committing adultery under Iraqi family law. That won`t be the case now. Under certain clerics, a pleasure marriage will be considered legal and the woman won`t have a case for divorce. Under other clerics, he`ll be committing adultery- so who gets to judge? The cleric she chooses, or the cleric he chooses?

Another example is in marriage itself. By tribal law and Shari`a, a woman, no matter how old, would have to have her family`s consent to marry a man. By Iraqi law, as long as the woman is over 18, she doesn`t need her family`s consent. She can marry in a court, legally, without her parents. It rarely happened in Iraq, but it *was* possible.

According to Iraqi secular law, a woman has grounds to divorce her husband if he beats her. According to Shari`a, it would be much more difficult to prove abuse.

Other questions pose themselves- Shari`a doesn’t outlaw the marriage of minors (on condition they`ve hit puberty). Iraqi secular law won`t allow minors to marry until the age of at least 16 (I think) for women and the age of 18 for men.

By Iraqi civil law, parents are required to send their children to complete at least primary school. According to Shari`a, a father can make his son or daughter quit school and either work or remain at home. So what happens when and if he decides to do that? Does Shari`a apply or does civil law apply?

There are hundreds of other examples that I can think of and that make me feel outrage. I practice Islam, but do I want an Islamic government? No. I feel that because we have so many different methahib and religions, any religious government is bound to oppress some faction of society. It`s already happening in the south where fundamentalist Shi`a are attacking Christian families and shops.

Juan Cole had something to say about the subjecthttp://www.juancole.com/2004_01_01_juancole_archive.html#107… and he referred to an article written in Financial Times appropriately titled, "Iraqi plan for Sharia law `a sop to clerics`, say women". http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/Sto…Unfortunately, the writers of the article apparently have no background on secular Iraqi law beyond what the GC members have told them. The fundamentalist GC members claim that civil Iraqi law forced people to go against their doctrine, which isn`t true because a large part of civil law was based on Shari`a or the parts of Shari`a that were agreed upon by all the differing Islamic factions (like the right to divorce) and taking into consideration the different religious groups in Iraq.

Women are outraged… this is going to open new doors for repression in the most advanced country on women`s rights in the Arab world! Men are also against this (although they certainly have the upper-hand in the situation) because it`s going to mean more confusion and conflict all around.

What happens when all the clerics agree that a hijab isn`t `preferred` but necessary? According to this new change in the `ahwal shakhsiya` laws or `personal circumstances` laws, all women will have to cover their heads and according to Shari`a, if a woman`s husband decides that she can`t continue her education or work, she`ll have to remain a house-wife.

Please don`t misunderstand- any oppression to women isn`t a reflection on Islam. It`s a reflection on certain narrow minds, ignorance and the politicization of religion. Islam is a progressive religion and no religion is clearer on the rights of women- it came during a time when women had no rights at all.

During the sanctions and all the instability, we used to hear fantastic stories about certain Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar, to name a few. We heard about their luxurious lifestyles- the high monthly wages, the elegant cars, sprawling homes and malls… and while I always wanted to visit, I never once remember yearning to live there or even feeling envy. When I analyzed my feelings, it always led back to the fact that I cherished the rights I had as an Iraqi Muslim woman. During the hard times, it was always a comfort that I could drive, learn, work for equal pay, dress the way I wanted and practice Islam according to my values and beliefs, without worrying whether I was too devout or not devout enough.

I usually ignore the emails I receive telling me to `embrace` my new-found freedom and be happy that the circumstances of all Iraqi women are going to `improve drastically` from what we had before. They quote Bush (which in itself speaks volumes) saying things about how repressed the Iraqi women were and how, now, they are going to be able to live free lives.

The people who write those emails often lob Iraq together with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan and I shake my head at their ignorance but think to myself, "Well, they really need to believe their country has the best of intentions- I won`t burst their bubble." But I`m telling everyone now- if I get any more emails about how free and liberated the Iraqi women are *now* thanks to America, they can expect a very nasty answer.



- posted by river @ 7:55 PM

Darkness and Dust...
The last few days we`ve sort of been on an electricity schedule- for every four hours of no electricity, we get two hours of electricity. It`s not much, but it`s an improvement on one or two hours for every fourteen of darkness.

The last few minutes of electricity, we run around the house switching off lights, and appliances so that nothing is ruined. Sometimes the electricity doesn`t go out immediately- it sort of dims, flashes back on and then stutters to a close. We`re getting less generator time because there`s still a gasoline problem and everyone is being really careful about the type of fuel they`re using because the gas being sold on black market is sometimes mixed with kerosene.

A couple of days ago there was a lot of dust. Iraq is famous for its dust storms. Within a matter of hours, the horizon turns orange and everything looks slightly faded. The stucco houses take on a pale, peach hue and even the people look a little bit dull. It becomes difficult to breathe and it`s almost catastrophic for people with allergies.

We`ve been dusting the last 24 hours because we found everything covered with a light film of dust. The kids spent the day drawing stick figures in the dust on the furniture which drove my mother just a little bit crazy- she rushed about the house wielding a rag and attacking everything with a smooth surface.

Everyone is feeling somewhat depressed these days. The weather isn`t particularly good and the air feels charged with a combination of disappointment and impatience.

People are asking what the reaction is to the claims of the former American treasurer about Bush planning regime-change before September 11. Why is that such a shock to Americans? I haven`t met a single Iraqi who thinks Iraq had ANYTHING to do with September 11. The claims were ridiculous and so blatantly contrived that it was embarrassing to see people actually believed them.

I sometimes wonder how the American people feel. After these last two wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, do the American people feel any safer? We watch the `terror alerts` announced on television- politicians with somber faces and dramatic pauses alerting the population that at any minute, there might be an explosion or an attack. It`s amusing because Iraq has been at the red level for the last 9 months. Why is it a drama when collective America experiences some strain for a couple of weeks during the holiday, but it`s ok for Iraqis to experience five times the strain and apprehension for the next five years? Apparently, we are more tolerant- our blood pressures don`t go up, our hearts don`t palpitate and our kids can`t be traumatized.

We heard about the American embassies being closed and secured all over the world… diplomats being withdrawn from countries or asked to remain locked indoors. Is that part of the `war on terror`? Are Americans worldwide any safer? Do they sleep better at night now knowing that they are definitely safe from the fabled Iraqi WMD? We`ve forgotten what it feels like to feel completely safe.





- posted by river @ 5:45 AM

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US weapons hunter won`t return to Iraq: report. 16/01/2004. ABC News Online

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1026893.htm]


Last Update: Friday, January 16, 2004. 8:10pm (AEDT)
US weapons hunter won`t return to Iraq: report
David Kay, the chief United States weapons hunter in Iraq, has told the CIA he will not return to his post, a US government source said today.

"He has told the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet) that he doesn`t want to go back, they have been trying to get him to stay," the source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

It was unclear whether the CIA had had any success in persuading Mr Kay, who came back to the United States for the Christmas holidays, to stay on the job, the source said.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Mr Kay, reached earlier this week, also declined to comment and referred questions about his status to the CIA.

Tenet last June appointed Mr Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector, as a special adviser to lead the search for biological and chemical weapons and any signs of a resurrected nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

But the hunt, which is being conducted by the Defence Department`s Iraq Survey Group, has come up empty, finding no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons or any evidence that Iraq had restarted a program to develop nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration cited weapons of mass destruction as its main justification for the war against Iraq that ousted Saddam Hussein from power last April.

A US official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, called Mr Kay`s status "up in the air."

Major General Keith Dayton of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who heads the Iraq Survey Group under Mr Kay`s guidance, was returning to Iraq this week to continue the weapons search.

US officials last month said Mr Kay had told administration officials he was considering leaving the job as early as January, citing family obligations.

At that time, officials described Mr Kay as frustrated that no banned weapons were found and that some of his staff had been diverted to other tasks.

The White House also said the weapons hunt was a priority for the administration whether or not Mr Kay stayed on the job.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last week issued a report that accused the Bush administration in the lead-up to the war of making the threat from Iraq sound more dire than the underlying information warranted.

The report`s authors said they did not expect any large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons to be found.

--Reuters




© 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

William Pfaff: The end of Bush and Blair`s friendship?
William Pfaff TMSI/IHT
Thursday, January 15, 2004

Bush and Blair

PARIS The Hutton Inquiry report on the death of the British scientist David Kelly, dealing with Downing Street`s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is scheduled to be released later this month. As the date approaches, the infatuation of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain with President George W. Bush seems to be waning.

One cannot call the Blair-Bush relationship a love affair, because love affairs are reciprocal, and on George`s side this affair seems to have been a heartless flirtation. Tony was useful while he was useful; and now, as the Hank Snow song has it, George has moved on.

For Tony it was the real thing. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, his instructions to his government have been to stick tight to the United States in support of everything it does.

This was justified politically as a measure of strategic realism: The United States is the superpower. As Winston Churchill said, Britain - if it has to choose - must choose the seas, not the European Continent.

Blair`s commitment, nourished by speeches to the U.S. Congress and by weekends at Camp David, first began to falter on practical matters. Now, according to The Daily Mirror, "the diplomatic temperature is in the deep freeze."

The latest blow suffered by Blair was self-inflicted, but had to do with the prime minister`s total support for Bush on the weapons issue. It came when Blair, during his New Year`s visit to his troops in Iraq, told them that U.S. forces looking for weapons had found laboratories "irrefutably proving" that weapons of mass destruction had existed.

An unscrupulous but enterprising journalist quoted the statement to L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, without sourcing it, and Bremer called it ridiculous - "a red herring" probably invented by someone "who wanted to undermine the coalition."

A fundamental problem has been that Washington never kept Blair`s government in the picture. U.S. policy was driven by highly unpredictable domestic political developments, and by parochial interests not readily comprehensible outside Washington. This put the British in the position of following without knowing where they were going.

Blair also has had to take account of the annoyance of his military and political people in Iraq with American tactics in the guerrilla war.

The choice in December of still more massive shock-and-awe attacks on neighborhoods or tribal areas suspected of being the source of attacks reflected what the British military consider a naïve notion that shows of force - and they were shows preceded by warnings - can intimidate a nationalist insurgence.

Experience suggests the opposite. The British military is better at counterinsurgency, much more attentive to civilian interests and more apprehensive about the long-term consequences of what they do.

Some British military sources also complain that they are not kept properly informed on U.S. intelligence concerning guerrilla plans and movements potentially affecting the security of British forces.

This is generally attributed to the total self-absorption of the U.S. coalition authorities and the American military. Americans are reproached for ignoring the interests and needs of the British in Iraq except when they want something from them - and then they take for granted total cooperation.

The most important recent development in the relationship, however, is not a result of indifference. The Foreign Office and Downing Street have recognized that the Bush administration is exploiting Britain`s position in Europe in a way that is destructive of Britain`s interests.

They believe that Washington deliberately announced that Germany and France would get no reconstruction contracts in Iraq - a perfectly gratuitous announcement, since no one was so foolish as to think they would - on the eve of the EU summit meeting in Brussels in December so as to envenom relations between Britain and the French and Germans.

This, London officials assume, was meant to undermine British cooperation in a common European security policy - seen in Washington as a threat to the United States.

The neoconservative camp in Washington has decided that Britain can be used to undermine the European Union, now known as "Superpower Europe," according to a recent anti-European Union "Wake up America!" issue of the once-liberal New Republic magazine.

The Europeans` common security policy is currently so feeble that this might be called pre-emptive paranoia. But whatever it is, it puts Tony Blair on the spot. It is one thing to choose the sea rather than the Continent when survival is at stake. But to choose the neoconservatives over Europe risks the ridiculous.

Tribune Media Services International

Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune

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Mal wieder was aus dem Spectator, ausgefallen wie immer.

I believe in conspiracies

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=cu…

John Laughland says the real nutters are those who believe in al-Qa’eda and weapons of mass destruction Believing in conspiracy theories is rather like having been to a grammar school: both are rather socially awkward to admit. Although I once sat next to a sister-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk who agreed that you can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, conspiracy theories are generally considered a rather repellent form of intellectual low-life, and their theorists rightfully the object of scorn and snobbery. Writing in the Daily Mail last week, the columnist Melanie Phillips even attacked conspiracy theories as the consequence of a special pathology, of the collapse in religious belief, and of a ‘descent into the irrational’. The implication is that those who oppose ‘the West’, or who think that governments are secretive and dishonest, might need psychiatric treatment.


In fact, it is the other way round. British and American foreign policy is itself based on a series of highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest of which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a cave in the Hindu Kush controls a secret worldwide network of ‘tens of thousands of terrorists’ ‘in more than 60 countries’ (George Bush). News reports frequently tell us that terrorist organisations, such as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have ‘links’ to al-Qa’eda, but we never learn quite what those ‘links’ are. According to two terrorism experts in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this is because they do not exist. ‘In the quest to define the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow al-Qa’eda out of proportion,’ they write. They argue that the name ‘al-Qa’eda’ was invented in the West to designate what is, in reality, a highly disparate collection of otherwise independent groups with no central command structure and not even a logo. They claim that some terrorist organisations say they are affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and name-recognition for their entirely local grievances.

By the same token, the US-led invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy that Saddam Hussein was in, or might one day enter into, a conspiracy with Osama bin Laden. This is as verifiable as the claim that MI6 used mind control to make Henri Paul crash Princess Diana’s car into the 13th pillar of the tunnel under the Place de l’Alma. With similar mystic gnosis, Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that the failure to find ‘weapons of mass distraction’, as Tony Blair likes to call them, shows that they once existed but were destroyed. Indeed, London and Washington have shamelessly exploited people’s fear of the unknown to get public opinion to believe their claim that Iraq had masses of anthrax and botulism. This played on a deep and ancient seam of fear about poison conspiracies which, in the Middle Ages, led to pogroms against Jews. And yet it is the anti-war people who continue to be branded paranoid, even though the British Prime Minister himself, his eyes staring wildly, said in September 2002, ‘Saddam has got all these weapons ...and they’re pointing at us!’

In contrast to such imaginings, it is perfectly reasonable to raise questions about the power of the secret services and armed forces of the world’s most powerful states, especially those of the USA. These are not ‘theories’ at all; they are based on fact. The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other US secret services spend more than $30,000,000,000 a year on espionage and covert operations. Do opponents of conspiracy theories think that this money is given to the Langley, Virginia Cats’ Home? It would also be churlish to deny that the American military industry plays a very major role in the economics and politics of the US. Every day at 5 p.m., the Pentagon announces hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to arms manufacturers all over America — click on the Department of Defense’s website for details — who in turn peddle influence through donations to politicians and opinion-formers.

It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories often allow that conspiracies have occurred in the past, but refuse to contemplate their existence in the present. For some reason, you are bordering on the bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11, when it is established as fact that in 1962 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, tried to convince President Kennedy to authorise an attack on John Glenn’s rocket, or on a US navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba. Two years later, a similar strategy was deployed in the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, when US engagement in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on a US destroyer. Are such tactics confined to history? Paul O’Neill, George Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, has just revealed that the White House decided to get rid of Saddam eight months before 9/11.

Indeed, one ought to speak of a ‘conspir- acy of silence’ about the role of secret services in politics. This is especially true of the events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is the height of irresponsibility to discuss the post-communist transition without extensive reference to the role of the spooks, yet our media stick doggedly to the myth that their role is irrelevant. During the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, on 22 November 2003, the world’s news outlets peddled a wonderful fairy-tale about a spontaneous uprising — ‘the revolution of roses’, CNN shlockily dubbed it — even though all the key actors have subsequently bragged that they were covertly funded and organised by the US.

Similarly, it is a matter of public record that the Americans pumped at least $100 million into Serbia in order to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and huge sums in the years before. (An election in Britain, whose population is eight times bigger than Yugoslavia’s, costs about two thirds of this.) This money was used to fund and equip the Kosovo Liberation Army; to stuff international observer missions in Kosovo with hundreds of military intelligence officers; to pay off the opposition and the so-called ‘independent’ media; and to buy heavily-armed Mafia gangsters to come and smash up central Belgrade, so that the world’s cameras could show a ‘people’s revolution’.

At every stage, the covert aid and organisation provided by the US and British intelligence agencies were decisive, as they had been on many occasions before and since, all over the world. Yet for some reason, it is acceptable to say, ‘The CIA organised the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in 1953’, but not that it did it again in Belgrade in 2000 or Tbilisi in 2003. And in spite of the well-known subterfuge and deception practised, for instance, in the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s, people experience an enormous psychological reluctance to accept that the British and American governments knowingly lied us into war in 2002 and 2003. To be sure, some conspiracy theories may be outlandish or wrong. But it seems to me that anyone who refuses to make simple empirical deductions ought to have his head examined.
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© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk

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Published on Friday, January 16, 2004 by Reuters
U.S. Still Holds Child Detainees at Guantanamo
by Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON - The United States has held three child detainees at its military base in Guantanamo Bay for more than a year and the Pentagon said on Thursday it has no plans to move or free them, despite international pressure.

A defense official said doctors estimated the boys were 13-15 years old and were deemed "enemy combatants" along with about 660 prisoners being held at the base in Cuba after the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America.

"There has been lots of media speculation they were going to be moved out but that`s all it has been, just speculation," the official told Reuters when asked if there were plans to move or release the teen-age detainees any time soon.

A spokeswoman for the military task force holding the prisoners told Reuters last August that prison camp commander, Brig-Gen. Geoffrey Miller, would recommend the three boys be sent home, and this was confirmed by Miller a month later.

The detentions without trial at Guantanamo Bay have drawn worldwide criticism from governments and human rights groups who have urged the United States to file charges against the prisoners and to send the children home to their families.

The military official said the three were being kept separately from older prisoners in a refurbished house. They shared a large bedroom and there was also a dayroom, a kitchen and a facility where the teens received daily lessons.

"They are being tutored in their own language and are learning other skills. They are being taught to read and mathematics."

The official said there was a large yard around the house where the teens played soccer, volleyball and other games.

NO FAMILY CONTACT

He did not know whether family members had been informed of the teen-agers whereabouts but said they had been given access to Red Cross officials who visited the base.

"None of the detainees has had direct contact with their families except for one," he said, referring to an Australian man David Hicks who was allowed to speak to his father on the telephone.

In the past, senior Pentagon officials described the children as "enemy combatants" who despite their age were "very, very dangerous people" who "have stated they have killed and will kill again."

Asked whether there had been any incidents involving the children, the official said he did not believe so.

"The conditions they are being held in are humane. There have been very many media down there who have seen the conditions they live in," he said, adding that the media had not seen the children themselves.

"We are not going to hold them up for public scrutiny or ridicule," he said.

Jo Becker, advocacy director for children`s rights at Human Rights Watch, voiced deep concern the children were still being held and called for their release.

"They have been in detention since the early part of last year without any direct contact with their families or knowledge about what is going to happen to them," said Becker.

She appealed to the military to free the detainees so they could be re-integrated with their communities and said there was particular worry about them being separated and detained during the vulnerable teen years.

She said other teen-agers, aged between 16-18, were also being held at the U.S. base along with the older prisoners. The military official declined to provide any details on detainees aged between 16-18.

Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd

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Ein neues Flash-Movie von toostupidtobepresident:
http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/shockwave/get_stupid.h…

Wie immer sehenswert!

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Wants U.N. to Send Team to Iraq to Determine if Elections Feasible


By William Branigin and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; 5:05 PM


The United States, faced with mounting resistance to its transitional plans in Iraq from a leading Shiite Muslim cleric, wants the United Nations to send a team to Iraq to determine whether elections are feasible in the coming months and, if not, to help negotiate a compromise, U.S. and U.N. officials said today.

The request for such a team is to be made Monday when L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and Adnan Pachachi, the current head of the Iraqi Governing Council, visit U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York. The scheduled meeting will mark the first time that Bremer has appeared at the United Nations since taking over as administrator of the U.S.-led occupation authority in Iraq last year.

In asking for a U.N. team to be sent to Baghdad, officials said, the Bush administration is signaling that it wants to involve the United Nations in trying to gain support for its transition plans from Shiites led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a leading Shiite cleric and Iraq`s most popular religious leader. Sistani has denounced a U.S. plan, endorsed by the Iraqi Governing Council Nov. 15, to convene regional caucuses to select members of a new Iraqi assembly, which in turn would choose a provisional government by a June 30 deadline for the United States to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis.

Sistani wants the new government to be chosen through direct elections, a demand that U.S. officials say is unreasonable because the country has no election law, up-to-date voters lists or experience with democracy enabling it to hold nationwide voting within such a short time frame.

After meeting at the White House this afternoon with Bush and senior aides, Bremer said he hoped the United Nations could play a productive role in Iraq`s political transition, including the formulation of a new constitution and the establishment of an electoral system.

"We do think there is a role for the United Nations in this process that I`ve laid out," he told reporters.

On the question of direct elections sought by some leading Iraqi Shiites, Bremer said he did not think a nationwide vote could be organized in time to meet the deadline for establishing a provisional government.

"It`s quite clear that the Iraqi people also are anxious to get sovereignty back, and we`re not anxious to extend our period of occupation, as the occupation authority, past June 30th," he said. "So we`re intending to stick to the timeline that we`ve laid out."

At the same time, Bremer repeated the willingness of U.S. and Iraqi officials to consider tweaking the regional caucus structure they have proposed in order to address the concerns of Sistani and other Iraqi religious leaders.

"We`ve always said we`re willing to consider refinements," Bremer said. He said he did not want to go into "technical details," but that there were "all kinds of ways to organize partial elections and caucuses."

Before the meeting with Bush, the White House indicated it was anxious for the United Nations to return to Iraq to help work out a transition to Iraqi sovereignty, a U.N. role that the Bush administration had previously resisted.

While the United States is continuing to work within the framework of the Nov. 15 agreement, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said today, "obviously there are discussions about ways to refine or improve that agreement." He declined to discuss any specific proposed changes.

In a Dec. 30 letter to Annan, Abdul Aziz Hakim, then president of the Iraqi Governing Council, requested that a U.N. team be sent to Iraq to look into "the possibility of conducting elections for the provisional national assembly." If such elections are not feasible, the letter said, U.S. and Governing Council officials would cooperate with the United Nations to find the best way to choose representatives to the assembly "with the utmost transparency to reflect the real opinion of the Iraqi people."

In sending the letter, Hakim was widely seen as acting on behalf of Sistani. Hakim heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite Muslim political party. Shiites make up an estimated 60 percent of the population in Iraq, which long has been dominated politically by Sunni Muslims.

Annan replied in a Jan. 8 letter that "there may not be time to organize free, fair and credible elections for a provisional government within the framework of the 15 November agreement."

U.N. officials said Annan was reluctant to get drawn into negotiations between U.S. authorities and Sistani, and that he wanted the United Nations to have sufficient authority and independence to carry out any eventual role in Iraq.

Lynch reported from the United Nations in New York.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Published on Friday, January 16, 2004 by the Jurist
The Concentration Camp at Guantanamo: Wrong Treatment in the Wrong Place
by Marjorie Cohn

Anyone who has traveled to Cuba or listened to mariachis sing in myriad Latin restaurants is familiar with the lovely song, Guantanamera - the little girl from Guantanamo. Based on a poem by Jose Marti, the father of Cuban independence, the song is narrated by "an honest man from where the palm tree grows," who speaks of the beauty of Cuba. In stark contrast, the post 9/11 Guantanamo Bay is home to a veritable "concentration camp," in the words of the Cuban government, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Association of Jurists.

More than 600 prisoners have been incarcerated there for nearly two years. They are kept in small cages, with no charges against them, without access to the courts to challenge their confinement.

The United States government illegally occupies that part of Cuba`s territory. It is held under a lease negotiated between Cuba and the U.S., which gave the United States the right to use Guantanamo Bay "exclusively as coaling or naval stations, and for no other purpose." Nowhere does Cuba give the United States the right to utilize this land as a prison or a concentration camp.

President Fidel Castro, who calls the Guantanamo base "a dagger plunged into the heart of Cuban soil," refuses to cash the rent checks the U.S. government sends annually. He says: "An elemental sense of dignity and absolute disagreement with what happens in that portion of our national territory has prevented Cuba from cashing those checks." The United States, according to President Castro, has transformed Guantanamo base into a "horrible prison, one that bears no difference with the Nazi concentration camps." In December, Cuba`s National Assembly decried the Guantanamo "concentration camp," saying: "In the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo naval base, hundreds of foreign prisoners are subjected to indescribable abuses."

Indeed, nearly half the prisoners are interrogated each week in sessions lasting up to 16 hours. A prisoner released in May told Amnesty International that the interrogations "were like torture." Australian lawyer Richard Bourke asserted on ABC Radio that prisoners had been subjected to "good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages." He reported: "One of the detainees had described being taken out and tied to a post and having rubber bullets fired at them. They were being made to kneel cruciform in the sun until they collapsed."

Shortly after September 11, the Cuban government did not oppose housing the U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo: "Although the transfer of foreign war prisoners by the United States government to one of its military facilities - located in a portion of our land over which we have no jurisdiction, as we have been deprived of it - does not abide by the provisions that regulated its inception, we shall not set any obstacles to the development of the operation."

Cuba, which boasts one of the most advanced medical systems in the world, offered to provide medical services and sanitation programs for the Guantanamo prisoners. The Cuban government, in its January 2002 statement, expressed satisfaction at "the public statements made by the U.S. authorities in the sense that prisoners will be accorded an adequate and humane treatment that may be monitored by the International Red Cross."

But the Red Cross, which recently concluded a two-month visit to the Guatanamo camp, "observed a worrying deterioration in the psychological health of a large number of them." The Red Cross reported that "the US authorities have placed the internees in Guantanamo beyond the law. This means that, after more than eighteen months of captivity, the internees still have no idea about their fate, and no means of recourse through any legal mechanism." Indeed, The New York Times reported 32 suicides in 18 months and several detainees being treated for clinical depression as a direct result of the uncertainties of their situations.

The Bush administration has denied these prisoners access to U.S. courts to challenge their detention, disingenuously claiming that the U.S. is not sovereign over Guantanamo Bay. The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which decided last month that U.S. courts do have jurisdiction to hear the prisoners` complaints, said that by employing Guantanamo as a prison camp, "our government has purposely acted in a manner directly inconsistent with the terms of the Lease and the continuing Treaty, [which] ... limit U.S. use of the territory to a naval base and coaling station."

However, the appellate court was perhaps most alarmed at the government`s assertion during oral argument that these prisoners would have no judicial recourse even if they were claiming the government subjected them to acts of torture or summary execution. The Ninth Circuit said: "To our knowledge, prior to the current detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, the U.S. government has never before asserted such a grave and startling proposition." The court said this was "a position so extreme that it raises the gravest concerns under both American and international law." During its present term the Supreme Court will decide whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction over these prisoners.

An editorial in The New York Times described the Guantanamo situation as a "scandal," saying: "Whoever they are, their treatment should be a demonstration of America`s commitment to justice, not the blot on its honor that Guantanamo has become." The United States government must immediately close its concentration camp, and release or try the prisoners in accordance with international norms. It should return Guantanamo Bay to its rightful owner, the Republic of Cuba.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, is executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild. She was recently elected the U.S. representative to the executive council of the American Association of Jurists. A longer version of this article will appear in 76 Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 2004.

© Bernard J. Hibbitts, 2003

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Published on Friday, January 16, 2004 by Newsday / Long Island, NY
O`Neill Has Done His Country a Favor
by Robert B. Reich

Early this week, former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O`Neill sent tongues wagging and Republicans gasping when he claimed, in interviews and in a new book, that President George W. Bush intended to depose Saddam Hussein from the start - seven months before 9/11.

Hence, the whole thing was trumped up, an elaborate pretext. This is an extraordinary indictment.

If O`Neill is correct, America has lost many lives and paid a huge price to get rid of a terrible dictator who posed no direct danger to this nation. The world is better off without him, but at what price? We were directly and intentionally misled.

By coming forward, O`Neill shows once again that sometimes cabinet secretaries - especially former ones - have a higher patriotic duty to their country than blind allegiance to the president they serve.

In the book "The Price of Loyalty," by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ronald Suskind, O`Neill also revealed that Bush knew his tax cuts were mostly for the wealthy; that he and Vice President Dick Cheney were utterly indifferent to ballooning deficits; and that, in general, the president pays remarkably little attention to policy.

The immediate response from the White House has been to mount an investigation into whether O`Neill illegally used classified documents to prepare the book, and to suggest that O`Neill was motivated by sour grapes - since he`d been summarily fired from his cabinet job. By Tuesday, the Karl Rove character-assassination machine had moved into high gear and high dudgeon. On Wednesday, O`Neill was already backing away from some of the bombshells he delivered in interviews. But he obviously couldn`t back away from his own words and documents in the book.

It`s not unusual for former cabinet officers to write memoirs of their time in office, usually ghost-written or "as told to" or "with" a professional writer who can make them halfway interesting to lay readers. The typical motive is to spin history so the cabinet officer appears to be more important or wiser or more prescient than he was in fact. (Disclosure to the contrary: My book, "Locked in the Cabinet," was written entirely by me, and it was about my - and, by implication, most other cabinet members` - foibles and tribulations at the highest reaches of our government.) What sets O`Neill`s book apart is that he reveals such damaging information about President Bush and the coterie around him - and so soon before a re-election contest.

During the time they serve, cabinet officers and key White House aides surely owe the president their undivided loyalty. They shouldn`t (but routinely do) leak their policy differences to the press. They shouldn`t (but often do) stab their colleagues in the back. They shouldn`t (but have been known to) give controversial speeches or make policy decisions without first vetting them with the president or his chief of staff. If they strongly disagree with the president`s policies, they should resign. Otherwise, they should shut up. When he was Treasury secretary, Paul O`Neill didn`t exactly play by these rules. He said what he thought. Presumably, that`s one reason he was fired.

When they leave office, cabinet officers and White House aides are expected to remain loyal. But they have a higher loyalty to the public. If they know of troubling facts or circumstances of which the public should be aware - instances of gross irresponsibility or illegality at the top - they have a duty to reveal them.

There aren`t many books that fit into this particular genre other than O`Neill`s, Reagan administration budget director David Stockman`s and Richard Nixon adviser John Dean`s (such bombshell exposés by former high government officials are more common in Europe), but they are important. Especially now - when one party dominates all branches of government, when the White House imposes an unusual degree of discipline and its official line is so widely parroted by radio and TV talk-show hosts - the public needs to know what`s really going on. To this extent, O`Neill deserves our thanks.

What was O`Neill`s motive? Surely not money; he`s a very wealthy man. Not publicity or status; at his age and after his career, he doesn`t need either. Perhaps sour grapes, as the White House insinuates. After all, O`Neill had been CEO of Alcoa before coming to the Treasury - a no-nonsense, damn-the-torpedoes brand of executive who might have been frustrated by the political constraints a cabinet officer has to endure. But it seems more likely that O`Neill was simply appalled by what he found at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

That`s certainly the tone that comes through the book and in the interviews he gave earlier in the week. There`s a sense of amazement bordering on disgust at a White House that`s captive to a small group of radical conservatives bent on imposing their views, regardless of consequences. O`Neill is no naif. He knew full well that Washington can be a rough city and a cabinet position isn`t for the faint of heart. But he must have believed that facts, reason and common sense would ultimately trump ideology. That`s where he made his biggest mistake.

The central question his book raises isn`t really the loyalty a cabinet officer owes a president. It`s the loyalty a president and his inner circle owe to the country and to its democracy. If O`Neill is telling the truth - and we have no reason to doubt his veracity - there`s serious doubt about the loyalty of this administration to America.

Robert B. Reich, former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, is a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University.

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Dean`s army of storm chasers launch assault for presidency
Suzanne Goldenberg
Saturday January 17, 2004
The Guardian

Carol Haas`s entry into American politics began on the cold dawn of an Ohio morning, with the last of her run of midnight nursing shifts. She got off work and into a waiting car, riding 10 hours across the rolling plains of the midwest before she got a chance to sleep - hungry, on a bunk bed, surrounded by 11 male strangers, in a cabin with no indoor plumbing - at a girl scout camp 20 miles from town.

Ms Haas, a 55-year-old nurse, is beaming. She is kneeling on a floor, stuffing envelopes for Howard Dean in the run-up to the first popular challenge of the eight contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, which takes place in Iowa on Monday.

She is going to spend three days on envelope duty - or knocking on the doors of strangers asking them to come out to vote Dean - before going straight back to her job in Akron, Ohio.

She can barely contain her admiration for Mr Dean. "He brought the power to the people," she says.

In the Des Moines headquarters of Mr Dean, Ms Haas`s single-minded devotion to him is hardly exceptional. For months now, his supporters have been gathering their forces - connecting over the internet and in "meet-ups", the monthly gatherings where supporters write letters and pass on strategy suggestions to paid campaign staff. This weekend, if all goes well, that energy will be channelled into what Dean organisers are calling the "Perfect Storm".

Other developments in Iowa could bring Mr Dean`s political momentum to a stop. Two opinion polls this week put him in a dead heat in a four-way contest against the Missouri congressman and virtual native son, Dick Gephardt, and Senators John Kerry and John Edwards whose campaigns have experienced last-minute surges in support. After weeks in the doldrums, Mr Kerry is drawing huge crowds.

Mr Kerry, a war hero, has his own ground troops drawn from Vietnam vets, and Mr Gephardt has the industrial unions, who have pulled up in large black trucks and matching jackets.

But Mr Dean has the "storm chasers", some 2,500 volunteers who are expected to converge on Iowa at the weekend. Organisers say there has been nothing like it since the heady activist days of the 1960s and 1970s, and that the resulting force field of energy, hope and commitment is going to tip the balance in favour or Mr Dean in Monday`s caucuses.

None of Mr Dean`s opponents can match the scale of his volunteer brigades in their orange knit hats, or the sense of commitment and urgency.

"I have come to believe that this is the most important election of my lifetime," says Jerry Cayford, 46, from Maryland. "We are either going to go some place to be a country I don`t want to live in or something I admire."

Mr Dean`s opponents also cannot compete with the sense of ownership among the volunteers. In most campaigns, volunteers turn up, are directed to the nearest phone bank or pile of envelopes, and are told to keep to a script.

Campaign Dean is an entirely freewheeling operation. Volunteers turn up to make motivational videos, or punch in computer coding, and the centrepiece of their pitch to voters is the "personal story".

"The most effective strategy is honest dialogue," says Ken Saguin, who helped devise the volunteer strategy. "The content of the story is secondary. We would rather have them just communicate sincerely why they are backing Dean rather than rehashing what is put in their mouths by a paid political professional."

The faithful have been straggling in all week from across the country in a mass migration. Many are from the last reliable strongholds of liberalism in the US, with large contingents from Seattle and the San Francisco area, New York and Washington DC. But there is a sizeable group from President George Bush`s home state of Texas, a smattering from Mississippi and the south, and the heartlanders such as Ms Haas from Ohio, Illinois and the states adjoining Iowa.

Freak show


On local television, an attack advert paid for by a Republican supporter has an elderly couple running down the Dean volunteers as alien sophisticates: a leftwing, latte-swilling, Volvo-driving, Hollywood-loving freak show.

But in the Perfect Storm headquarters, the Dean supporters look a lot less exotic. Although Dean strategists say his strength derives from his ability to recruit brand new voters into the political process, the majority of the volunteers seem to be in their 30s, 40s or 50s.

The college students are there as well, along with the newly graduated, but this is overwhelmingly a mid-career, professional crowd. They see themselves as reformers - the vanguard of a revolt against what they say is the sheer blandness of American public life, the carefully processed statements from air-brushed politicians, and the politeness of the Democratic establishment.

Mr Dean, they say, has passion. "I really admired the fact that he staked out some real positions on some controversial issues quite unblinkingly - no waffling," says Chris Finnie. Over the years, Ms Finnie, 53, has voted Republican and Democrat, but never with much enthusiasm. "For 30 years, I walked in a voting booth. I held my nose, and I voted for the guy most likely to beat the most offensive candidate," she says.

That passion has resonated with Democrats, who have grown frustrated with the centrist strategy of the party political establishment. They are itching for a Democratic leader to take on Mr Bush directly - not only on the war with Iraq, but on all issues.

"Moderation is not working any more, and it doesn`t seem as if any of the other candidates realise that," says Eric Elliott, a newly unemployed dotcommer from California who spent three days on the road to get here. Many of the volunteers are motivated by anger - although anger is a word that annoys Dean supporters because they say it makes them sound irrational. But it is not entirely clear why they are angry. There is the conservative Christian ascendancy, the swelling deficit under President Bush, the tax cuts for the rich, and Al Gore`s failure to become president despite winning the popular vote in the 2000 election. Several of the volunteers barely mention the Iraq war as their reason for backing Mr Dean - although he is viewed as the anti-war candidate.

Instead, theirs is a more generalised discontent. It found an outlet in Mr Dean and it transformed the former governor from Vermont from an outsider - dismissed by the US media and pollsters - into a contender.

Last month, Mr Dean achieved a commanding lead in fundraising and in the opinion polls. But some of his supporters in Iowa detect worrying signs of change in him. Is he softening his punches? Is he going to turn into a centrist? "I think he got reined in," says Helena Johnson, 25, from Washington DC.

Part of Mr Dean`s intermittent displays of caution are self-preservation. He has come under constant attack from his opponents and under relentless scrutiny from the press, which exposed the dangers of his frank speaking style. Now, with two of Mr Dean`s opponents - Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards - moving upwards, the plain talker has grown circumspect.

All of this makes the storm chasers nervous. It also makes their mission much more crucial to Mr Dean`s success.

Traditionally, turnout is low at the Iowa caucuses. Instead of swiftly casting a vote, participants must give up an evening, and make their choice in public. In the 2000 Democratic primaries, only 60,000 Iowans bothered to attend local caucuses.

Mr Dean`s strategists are counting on bringing out twice that number - 125,000 caucus-goers - but they need the volunteers to do that. By the time they arrive in Iowa, most of the Perfect Storm people have spent months thinking about Howard Dean. They have gone to meetings and written letters. They may have spoken to his campaign manager in a conference call. The only thing left was to get to Iowa and tell their personal stories.

Andrew Homan`s personal story goes like this. He is 23 and works two part-time jobs in a small town in Indiana. It cost him $500 (£278) for a rental car and food, and by the time his lost earnings are taken into account, the trip to Iowa will have cost him two weeks` pay. His colleagues told him he was crazy.

After getting lost for an hour in the north-western suburbs of Des Moines the other day, he was deposited in a neighbourhood of comfortable looking homes. He had to knock on several doors before he found someone at home. And she was a committed Republican.

Mr Homan finds it hard to contain his enthusiasm, and he can`t understand others who do not share his views.

"I voted for Gore but at the time I wasn`t so opposed to Bush. I thought his father was a decent president," he says. "Bush has done so many things wrong on so many levels. I couldn`t not get involved."

Grassroots democracy

Iowa

Population 2.9m (1% of the US total)
Urban population 61.1%
Rural population 38.9%
Registered voters Democrats 576,765; Republicans 627,520; Independent: 68,747
2000 presidential vote Gore (Dem) 49%; Bush (Rep) 48%; Nader (Green) 2%; Other 1%

The caucuses


These are local meetings of Democrats to decide the proportion of Iowa party supporters backing each presidential hopeful. Almost all the 2,000 `precincts` (local party organisations) in Iowa will have caucuses on Monday. Anyone who will be 18 by November 2 (the date of the presidential election) and is a registered Democrat can vote. Republicans also hold caucuses, but as George Bush is unopposed, there will be no voting.

· Sources: the Almanac of American Politics; the Des Moines Register



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US elections
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The world is watching
Leader
Saturday January 17, 2004
The Guardian

The importance of this year`s US presidential election, which formally gets under way on Monday in Iowa, cannot be over-estimated. George Bush`s presidency, begun amid unprecedented controversy, has only deepened the national divisions that produced the virtual dead-heat with Al Gore in 2000.

Far from trying to bridge this gulf by governing from the centre, Mr Bush has pursued an unapologetically hard-right domestic and foreign policy agenda. Remarkably, he even managed to dissipate the strong sense of national and international solidarity engendered by the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. America`s divisions - political, ideological, religious, social and economic - are more sharply defined than ever. They are reflected in Congress, where Republicans narrowly dominate; and, in the last year, by the schism in public opinion over the Iraq war. It is no exaggeration to say that the US is now two nations, a house that, ignoring Abraham Lincoln, is once again in many crucial ways divided against itself. The principal challenge facing those who would supplant Mr Bush is thus how to put America back together again.

The presidential election matters massively for non-Americans, too. Indeed, given that 50% or more of the US electorate may not bother to vote at all next November, it may be that the outcome will be more closely watched abroad than at home. There is barely a single, dusty corner of our interconnected world that is not directly or indirectly affected by American power and policy. From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the parched fields of Ethiopia, from the Sunni heartlands of Iraq to Korea`s demilitarised zone, from the negotiating tables of Delhi and Jerusalem to world forums such as the UN and WTO, US influence projected through military might, muscular diplomacy, economic clout and bilateral aid is everywhere felt. More than that, it is most usually decisive - and divisive. Long after Boston and on a global scale, here is metaphorical taxation without representation.

A Democrat in the White House would certainly struggle to overcome the domestic divide. From gay rights, abortion, and business and environmental regulation to opportunity, healthcare and faith-based initiatives, issues on which many votes will turn, such weak forms of consensus and mutual tolerance that once existed are all but shattered now. But the US badly needs somebody who at least recognises the problem. A Democrat in the White House would not necessarily radically alter the way the US behaves in the world, especially over national security. But a readiness to pursue a more collective, more respectful, less confrontational, less obviously self-interested approach to global issues would do much to win over the non-voting international electorate as well as those Americans who actually make it to the ballot box.

Where is the candidate, among the Democrats seeking their party`s nomination in the Iowa caucuses and the primaries that rapidly follow, who is equal to this challenge - who can attract the unifying popular support, the national credibility and the funding that is essential if Mr Bush is to be beaten? So far at least, none has clearly emerged from an uninspiring field. In a sense, this is to be expected. After months of sparring, the real boxing match is only just beginning, measured not by pollsters but by real people`s votes. The days of wishful, woolly thinking are at an end. Howard Dean and the rest are about to hammer on an electoral anvil that will make or break them. It will be brutal while it lasts; but it is necessary. If the Democrats are to put up a candidate with the ideas, the strategy and the staying power to go all the way to the White House, they must pull no punches now. They need a winner, not a whinger. For them, for America, and for the watching world, failure is not an option.


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Japan on high alert as first troops leave
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Saturday January 17, 2004
The Guardian

Japan was on a high alert yesterday as an advance unit of about 30 troops left on a controversial humanitarian mission to Iraq.

The troops, who flew out on a commercial airliner, are expected to arrive in Kuwait today, where they will be trained before travelling overland to Samawa, in south-eastern Iraq. A further 600 ground troops are expected to join them by the end of the month, followed by about 400 sailors and air personnel.

"You are the pride of the nation," the defence minister, Shigeru Ishiba, said at a send-off ceremony outside the defence ministry in Tokyo. "Yours is a noble mission. There are people in Iraq hoping you will lend them a helping hand."

Security was stepped up across Japan in response to a threat issued last November, purportedly by an al-Qaida operative, to attack Tokyo as soon as the first Japanese soldiers set foot on Iraqi soil. Police with sniffer dogs patrolled airports, railway stations, government offices and nuclear power plants.

Many Japanese regard the dispatch as a violation of the pacifist constitution, but the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, says they will help to rebuild Iraq`s infrastructure in "safe areas" and "are not there to take part in a war". But many fear the lightly armed troops will be easy targets for insurgents.


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Ayatollah forces US rethink on Iraq poll
With June handover in jeopardy, Bremer flies home to see Bush and seek UN help in deciding election formula

Gary Younge in New York, Jonathan Steele and Ewen MacAskill
Saturday January 17, 2004
The Guardian

The US signalled last night that it was ready to revise its plans for gradually handing self-rule back to Iraqis, following vehement criticism of the process by the country`s most influential Shia cleric.

The US president, George Bush, summoned his top official in Iraq, Paul Bremer, for urgent talks on how to salvage the plan to hand over authority to an interim Iraqi government by June 30.

It was thrown into disarray last weekend when Iraq`s leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, said that unless the government was directly elected by the people violence would get worse.

Mr Bremer emerged later to say that while the June deadline was set in stone, the administration was open to modifying the process by which representatives were chosen.

"There obviously are a number of ways in which these kind of elections can go forward," Mr Bremer said, adding that the nationwide direct elections Ayatollah Sistani favoured would be premature.

Mr Bremer is expected to urge the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, to send a team to Iraq to convince the Shia community that elections were not yet feasible.

The US was meanwhile facing another headache when it emerged yesterday that its commander in Iraq had ordered an investigation into reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Rights groups have accused coalition forces of harsh treatment of some of the 13,000 detainees still being held.

The US idea to transfer power back to Iraqis is for caucuses of the "great and the good" in 18 provinces to choose a transitional government by June 30.

The Shia, who make up 60% of Iraq`s population, want direct elections because they could expect to emerge as the dominant group.

Ayatollah Sistani`s potential to derail the transition process was confirmed on Thursday when tens of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets of Basra chanting, "Yes, yes, to Sistani; no, no to selection!"

"We are neither so stupid nor so reckless as to want to make an enemy of Ali Sistani," a senior US official told the Los Angeles Times.

The Foreign Office signalled yesterday that it was keen to move towards Ayatollah Sistani`s proposals, but only if a workable method of holding a direction election could be found.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, speaking on BBC Radio 4`s World At One, insisted that it was important that in any arrangement the rights of the minority Sunnis were safeguarded. He said: "Across Europe you have got countries like Belgium and Switzerland where you have potential for very significant nationalist rivalries; and yet, by a process of careful drafting and practice of their constitutions, they have been able to balance this.

"The result is, yes, a majority is a majority, but minority rights are protected. Now that is the kind of architecture that has to be developed in Iraq."

As well as seeking the help of the UN, the Bush administration is also considering an appeal to those European nations (notably France, Germany and Russia) it had snubbed for opposing the war, by withdrawing a ban on their right to bid for contracts to rebuild Iraq.

"I`ve heard people back-pedalling all over the government on this," one US official said.

In Paris, the foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, did not rule out sending French troops to Iraq at a later date. "We shall have the opportunity to look in detail at this when a government has been formed in Iraq," he said.

The US climbdown has been prompted by domestic considerations. The transfer of some powers to a transitional government had been scheduled to be completed by July 1, four months before the US presidential election. This has put the UN, which left Baghdad in August after its headquarters was bombed, in a strong bargaining position.

"It`s clear we want the UN involved," an administration official told the New York Times. "It`s clear the Iraqis want them. It`s clear the security situation has improved, and we`re willing to help with their security. But there are many stages we have to go through to get an agreement."

However, the UN is also in a quandary. Mr Annan, who meets Mr Bremer and Iraqi officials on Monday and who agrees that early elections would be premature, is keen to play a political and humanitarian role in the process. But he is reluctant to lend the UN`s imprimatur to what many UN officials believe is a makeshift process owing more to Mr Bush`s re-election than stability and security in Iraq.

"This meeting for us is a step along the way," said an aide to Mr Annan. "We`re going to listen to what they have to say, reflect on what they expect of us, and get more detail on exactly how these caucuses are going to run."


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The $500 billion fire sale
In a shattered postwar Iraq, there are rich pickings to be had - and for US businesses at least, it promises to be a risk-free bonanza. Naomi Klein joins those at a trade show jostling for a stake

Naomi Klein
Saturday January 17, 2004
The Guardian

It`s 8.40am, and the Sheraton Hotel ballroom thunders with the sound of plastic explosives pounding against metal. No, this is not the Sheraton in Baghdad, it`s the one in Arlington, Virginia. And it`s not a real terrorist attack, it`s a hypothetical one. The screen at the front of the room is playing an advertisement for "bomb-resistant waste receptacles" - this trash can is so strong, we`re told, it can contain a C4 blast. And its manufacturer is convinced that, given half a chance, these babies would sell like hot cakes in Baghdad - at bus stations, army barracks and, yes, upscale hotels. Available in Hunter Green, Fortuneberry Purple and Windswept Copper.

This is ReBuilding Iraq 2, a gathering of 400 businesspeople itching to get a piece of the Iraqi reconstruction action. They`re here to meet those doling out the cash, in particular the $18.6bn in contracts to be awarded in the next two months to companies from "coalition partner" countries. The people to meet are from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), its new programme management office, the Army Corps of Engineers, the US Agency for International Development, Halliburton, Bechtel and members of Iraq`s interim governing council. All these players are on the conference programme, and delegates have been promised that they`ll get a chance to corner them at regular "networking breaks".

There have been dozens of similar trade shows on the business opportunities created by Iraq`s decimation, in hotels from London to Amman. By all accounts, the early conferences throbbed with the sort of cash-drunk euphoria not seen since the heady days before the dotcoms crashed. But it soon becomes apparent that something is not right at ReBuilding Iraq 2. Sure, the organisers do the requisite gushing about how "nonmilitary rebuilding costs could near $500bn" and that this is "the largest government reconstruction effort since the US helped to rebuild Germany and Japan after the second world war".

But for the undercaffeinated crowd staring uneasily at exploding garbage cans, the mood is less gold rush than grim determination. Giddy talk of "greenfield" market opportunities has been supplanted by sober discussion of sudden-death insurance; excitement about easy government money has given way to controversy about foreign firms being shut out of the bidding process; exuberance about CPA chief Paul Bremer`s ultraliberal investment laws has been tempered by fears that those laws could be overturned by a directly elected Iraqi government.

At ReBuilding Iraq 2, held last December, it seems finally to have dawned on the investment community that Iraq is not only an "exciting emerging market", it`s also a country on the verge of civil war. As Iraqis protest about layoffs at state agencies and make increasingly vocal demands for general elections, it`s becoming clear that the White House`s prewar conviction that Iraqis would welcome the transformation of their country into a free-market dream state may have been just as off-target as its prediction that US soldiers would be greeted with flowers. I mention to one delegate that fear seems to be dampening the capitalist spirit. "The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground," he assures me.

"Will you be going to Iraq?" I ask.

"Me? No, I couldn`t do that to my family." He was still shaken, it seemed, by the afternoon`s performance by ex-CIAer John MacGaffin, who had harangued the crowd like a Hollywood drill sergeant. "Soft targets are us!" he bellowed. "We are right in the bull`s-eye ... You must put security at the centre of your operation!" Lucky for us, MacGaffin`s own company, AKE Group, offers complete counterterrorism solutions, from body armour to emergency evacuations.

Youssef Sleiman, managing director of Iraq Initiatives for the Harris Corporation, has a similarly entrepreneurial angle on the violence. Yes, helicopters are falling, he says, but "for every helicopter that falls there is going to be replenishment".

I notice that many delegates are sporting a similar look: army-issue brush cuts paired with dark business suits. The guru of this gang is retired Major General Robert Dees, freshly hired out of the military to head Microsoft`s "defence strategies" division. Dees tells the crowd that rebuilding Iraq has special meaning for him because, well, he was one of the people who broke it. "My heart and soul is in this because I was one of the primary planners of the invasion," he says with pride. Microsoft is helping to develop "e-government" in Iraq, which Dees admits is a little ahead of the curve, since there is no g-government in Iraq, not to mention functioning phone lines.

No matter. Microsoft is determined to get in on the ground floor. In fact, it is so tight with Iraq`s governing council that one Microsoft executive, Haythum Auda, was the official translator for the council`s minister of labour and social affairs, Sami Azara al-Ma`jun, at the conference. "There is no hatred against the coalition forces at all," al-Ma`jun says, via Auda. "The destructive forces are very minor and these will end shortly ... Feel confident in rebuilding Iraq!"

The speakers on a panel about managing risks have a very different message, however: feel afraid about rebuilding Iraq, very afraid. Unlike previous presenters, their concern is not the obvious physical risks, but the potential economic ones. These are the insurance brokers, the grim reapers of Iraq`s gold rush.

It turns out that there is a rather significant hitch in Bremer`s bold plan to auction off Iraq while it is still under occupation: the insurance companies aren`t going for it. Until recently, the question of who would insure multinationals in Iraq has not been pressing. The major reconstruction contractors such as Bechtel are covered by USAID for "unusually hazardous risks" encountered in the field. And Halliburton`s pipeline work is covered under a law passed by Bush last May that indemnifies the entire oil industry from "any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process".

But with bidding now starting on Iraq`s state-owned firms, and foreign banks ready to open branches in Baghdad, the insurance issue is suddenly urgent. Many of the speakers admit that the economic risks of going into Iraq without coverage are huge: privatised firms could be renationalised, foreign ownership rules could be reinstated and contracts signed with the CPA could be torn up. Normally, multi-nationals protect themselves against this sort of thing by buying "political risk" insurance. Before he got the top job in Iraq, this was Bremer`s business - selling political risk, expropriation and terrorism insurance at Marsh & McLennan Companies, the largest insurance brokerage firm in the world. Yet, in Iraq, he has overseen the creation of a business climate so volatile that private insurers, including his old colleagues at Marsh & McLennan, are simply unwilling to take the risk. Bremer`s Iraq is, by all accounts, uninsurable.

"The insurance industry has never been up against this kind of exposure before," R Taylor Hoskins, vice-president of Rutherford International insurance company, tells the delegates apologetically. Steven Sadler, managing director and chairman at Marsh Industry Practices, a division of Bremer`s old firm, is even more downbeat: "Don`t look to Iraq to find an insurance solution. Interest is very, very, very limited. There is very limited capacity and interest in the region."

It`s clear that Bremer knew Iraq wasn`t ready to be insured: when he signed Order 39, opening up much of its economy to 100% foreign ownership, the insurance industry was specifically excluded. I ask Sadler, a Bremer clone with slicked-back hair and bright red tie, whether he thinks it`s strange that a former Marsh & McLennan executive could have so overlooked the need for investors to have insurance before they enter a war zone. "Well," he says, "he`s got a lot on his plate." Or maybe he just has better information.

Just when the mood at ReBuilding Iraq 2 couldn`t sink any lower, up to the podium strides Michael Lempres, vice-president of insurance at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (Opic). With a cool confidence absent from the shellshocked proceedings so far, he announces that investors can relax: Uncle Sam will protect them. A US government agency, Opic provides loans and insurance to US companies investing abroad. And while Lempres agrees with earlier speakers that the risks in Iraq are "extraordinary and unusual", he also says that "Opic is different. We do not exist primarily to generate profit." Instead, Opic exists to "support US foreign policy". And since turning Iraq into a free-trade zone is a top Bush policy goal, Opic will be there to help out. Earlier that same day, Bush signed legislation providing "the agency with enhancements to its political risk-insurance programme", according to an Opic press release.

Armed with this clear political mandate, Lempres announces that the agency is now "open for business" in Iraq, and is offering financing and insurance, including the riskiest insurance of all: political risk. "This is a priority for us," he says. "We want to do everything we can to encourage US investment in Iraq." The news, as yet unreported, appears to take even the highest-level delegates by surprise. After his presentation, Lempres is approached by Julie Martin, a political risk specialist at Marsh & McLennan.

"Is it true?" she demands.

Lempres nods. "Our lawyers are ready."

"I`m stunned," says Martin. "You`re ready? No matter who the government is?"

"We`re ready," Lempres replies. "If there`s an expro[priation] on January 3, we`re ready. I don`t know what we`re going to do if someone sinks $1bn into a pipeline and there`s an expro." Lempres doesn`t seem too concerned about these possible "expros", but it`s a serious question. According to its official mandate, Opic works "on a self-sustaining basis at no net cost to taxpayers". But Lempres admits that the political risks in Iraq are "extraordinary". If a new government expropriates and re-regulates across the board, Opic might have to compensate dozens of US firms for billions of dollars in lost investments and revenues, possibly tens of billions. What happens then?

At the Microsoft-sponsored cocktail reception in the Galaxy Ballroom that evening, Dees urges us "to network on behalf of the people of Iraq". I follow orders and ask Lempres what happens if "the people of Iraq" decide to seize back their economy from the US firms he has so generously insured. Who bails out Opic? "In theory," he says, "the US treasury stands behind us." That means the US taxpayer. Yes, them again: the same people who have already paid Halliburton, Bechtel et al to make a killing on Iraq`s reconstruction would have to pay them again, this time in compensation for their losses. While the vast profits being made in Iraq are strictly private, it turns out that the entire risk is being shouldered by the public.

For the non-US firms in the room, Opic`s announcement is anything but reassuring: since only US companies are eligible for its insurance, and the private insurers are sitting it out, how can they compete? The answer is that they likely cannot. Some countries may decide to match Opic`s Iraq programme. But, in the short term, not only has the US government barred companies from non-"coalition partners" from competing for contracts against US firms, it has made sure that the foreign firms that are allowed to compete will do so at a serious disadvantage.

The reconstruction of Iraq has emerged as a vast protectionist racket, a neo-con New Deal that transfers limitless public funds - in contracts, loans and insurance - to private firms, and even gets rid of the foreign competition to boot, under the guise of "national security". Ironically, these firms are being handed this corporate welfare so they can take full advantage of CPA-imposed laws that systematically strip Iraqi industry of all its protections, from import tariffs to limits on foreign ownership. Michael Fleisher, head of private-sector development for the CPA, recently explained to a group of Iraqi businesspeople why these protections had to be removed. "Protected businesses never, never become competitive," he said. Quick, somebody tell Opic and US deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz.

The issue of US double standards comes up again at the conference when a CPA representative takes the podium. A legal adviser to Bremer, Carole Basri has a simple message: reconstruction is being sabotaged by Iraqi corruption. "My fear is that corruption will be the downfall," she says ominously, blaming the problem on "a 35-year gap in knowledge" in Iraq that has made Iraqis "not aware of current accounting standards and ideas on anti-corruption". Foreign investors, she adds, must engage in "education, bring people up to world-class standards". It`s hard to imagine what world-class standards she`s referring to, or who, exactly, will be doing this educating. Halliburton, with its accounting scandals back home and its outrageous overbilling for gasoline in Iraq? The CPA, with its two officers under investigation for bribe-taking and nonexistent fiscal oversight?

On the final day of ReBuilding Iraq 2, the front- page headline in our complimentary copies of the Financial Times (a conference sponsor) is Boeing Linked To Perle Investment Fund. Perhaps Richard Perle, who supported Boeing`s $18bn refuelling-tanker deal and extracted $20m from Boeing for his investment fund, can teach Iraq`s politicians to stop soliciting "commissions" in exchange for contracts.

For the Iraqi expats in the audience, Basri`s is a tough lecture to sit through. "To be honest," says Ed Kubba, a consultant and board member of the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, "I don`t know where the line is between business and corruption." He points to US companies subcontracting huge taxpayer-funded reconstruction jobs for a fraction of what they are getting paid, then pocketing the difference. "If you take $10m from the US government and sub the job out to Iraqi businesses for a quarter-million, is that business, or is that corruption?"

These were the sorts of uncomfortable questions faced by George Sigalos, director of government relations for Halliburton KBR. In the hierarchy of Iraqi reconstruction, Halliburton is king, and Sigalos sits on stage, heavy with jewelled ring and gold cufflinks, playing the part. But the serfs are getting restless, and the room quickly turns into a support group for jilted would-be subcontractors: "Mr Sigalos, what are we going to have to do to get some subcontracts?"

"Mr Sigalos, when are you going to hire some Iraqis in management and leadership?"

"I have a question for Mr Sigalos. I`d like to ask what you would suggest when the army says, `Go to Halliburton`, and there`s no response from Halliburton?"

Sigalos patiently tells them all to register their firms on Halliburton`s website. When they respond that they have already done so and haven`t heard back, he invites them to "approach me afterward".

The scene afterwards is part celebrity autograph session, part riot. Sigalos is swarmed by at least 50 men who elbow each other out of the way to shower the Halliburton VP with CD-roms, business plans and résumés. When Sigalos spots a badge from Volvo, he looks relieved. "Volvo! I know Volvo. Send me something about what you can achieve in the region." But the small, no-name players who have paid their $985 entrance fees, here to hawk portable generators and electrical control panelling, are once again told to "register with our procurement office". There are fortunes being made in Iraq, but it seems they are out of reach for all but the chosen few.

The next session is starting and Sigalos has to run. The serfs wander off through the displays of shatterproof glass and bomb-resistant trash cans, caressing Sigalos`s business card and looking worried

@ Naomi Klein, 2004. A version of this article first appeared in the Nation.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Bush hat ein Zweischenziel erreicht: 501 US-Soldaten sind tod, 96 Soldaten andere Nationen, viele Mitarbeiter von UN und anderen Organisationen, weit über 10 000 irakische Zivilisten und zusätzlich 20 000 irakische Soldaten und das alles in knapp einem Jahr.
Und was ist erreicht?

5 U.S. Service Members Said Killed in Iraq

Saturday January 17, 2004 10:01 AM
vermutlich der selbe Vorfall.

3 U.S. Service Members Die in Iraq Attack

Saturday January 17, 2004 10:46 AM


By PAUL GARWOOD

Associated Press Writer

TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - A roadside bomb detonated north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing three U.S. soldiers and two Iraqi civil defense troopers, a U.S. military spokesman said. The deaths bring to 500 the number of American service members who have died since the Iraq war began.

Two Americans also were wounded in the attack, which occurred when a Bradley Fighting Vehicle struck an explosive device on a road near Taji, about 20 miles north of Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Bill McDonald, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.

The vehicle caught fire, killing the three Americans and two Iraqis who were on joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol, McDonald said.

A U.S. quick reaction force rushed to the area and detained three men fleeing in a white truck, he added. Soldiers found bomb-making material in the vehicle, he added.

CNN reported that the Bradley flipped over and caught fire.

Also Saturday, the military said a U.S. soldier died from a non-hostile gunshot wound south of Baghdad. The incident occurred Friday evening near Diwaniyah south of Baghdad, the command said in a statement. No further details were released.

The deaths bring to 500 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the Iraq conflict began on March 20.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has ordered a criminal investigation into reports of abuse of prisoners at a coalition detention center.

A military statement on Friday gave no indication about the scope of the alleged abuse, saying simply that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez ordered a probe ``into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a coalition forces detention facility.`` The statement did not specify the facility.

``The release of specific information concerning the incidents could hinder the investigation, which is in its early stages,`` the statement said.

In Washington, Lawrence Di Rita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said it is a criminal investigation and that the reports of abuse were deemed ``very serious and credible.``

Di Rita declined to provide any details other than to say the alleged abuse happened at detention centers in Baghdad.

The announcement followed allegations by Amnesty International and former prisoners of harsh treatment of detainees arrested by U.S. and coalition forces since the Iraq war began last March.

The coalition is believed to be holding about 12,800 detainees for various offenses, including attacks on U.S. and allied troops. Earlier this month, three U.S. Army reservists were discharged for abuse of prisoners at the Camp Bucca detention center in southern Iraq.

On the political front, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the country`s most influential Shiite Muslim leader, demanded that members of a new provisional legislature be chosen by voters. The Americans want them selected by regional caucuses.

Doubts over the American plan for transferring power to Iraqi hands by July 1 have loomed over the U.S.-led occupation this week, with the Americans pointing to sporadic violence as evidence the country is not ready for direct elections.

U.S. officials insist al-Sistani`s demand for elections is unfeasible given Iraq`s security situation. Many Shiites suspect the Americans simply want to manipulate the caucuses to make sure favored Iraqis win seats.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, said in Washington that the United States will revise its plan to create self-rule in Iraq, but he rejected postponement of a June 30 deadline for ending the occupation and handing over power.

``The Iraqi people are anxious to get sovereignty back, and we are not anxious to extend our period of occupation,`` Bremer said after meeting with Bush and senior U.S. officials.

Bremer, and an Iraqi delegation led by Adnan Pachachi, current chairman of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, plan to confer with Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday in New York.

A day after the demonstration, al-Sistani`s representative in Basra sent a letter to Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair questioning the sincerity of the power transfer plan.

Shiites comprise about 60 percent of Iraq`s 25 million people.

``Many political analysts are saying that the purpose of the hasty agreement ... was propaganda for your re-election campaign, especially after what your country has suffered because of military losses in Iraq,`` the letter by cleric Ali Abdul Hakim al-Safi said.

In other developments:

- France, a leading opponent of the war, said it wants to help to train Iraq`s next generation of police officers - once power is transferred to a sovereign Iraqi government. But Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Friday that the question of sending in French troops is ``not a current topic.``

- Turkey`s military warned Friday that ``bloody`` internal fighting could erupt in Iraq if political power there is divided up based on ethnicity. Turkey is worried about demands by Iraqi Kurds for greater autonomy in oil-rich northern Iraq, which it fears might bring instability to its own borders.

- An advance team of Japanese soldiers arrived Saturday in Kuwait for training at a U.S. military base before they cross overland to Iraq on a humanitarian mission that puts soldiers from Japan in a combat zone for the first time since World War II.







Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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US launches criminal probe into Iraq abuse claims
By Robert H.Reid, AP
17 January 2004


The commander of American forces in Iraq has ordered a criminal investigation into reports of abuse of prisoners at detention center, US officials said.

A military statement gave no indication of the scope of the reported abuse, saying simply that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ordered a probe "into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a coalition forces detention facility."

"The release of specific information concerning the incidents could hinder the investigation, which is in its early stages," the statement said. "The investigation will be conducted in a thorough and professional manner."

It added that the coalition "is committed to treating all persons under its control with dignity, respect and humanity."

In Washington, Lawrence Di Rita, spokesman for Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said it is a criminal investigation and that the reports of abuse were deemed "very serious and credible."

Mr Di Rita declined to provide any details other than to say the alleged abuse happened at detention centers in Baghdad.

The announcement followed allegations by Amnesty International and former prisoners of harsh treatment of detainees arrested by US and coalition forces since the Iraq war began last March.

Earlier this month, three US Army reservists were discharged for abuse of prisoners at the Camp Bucca, a detention center in southern Iraq where former Baath party members and other "high value" prisoners are held.

In late December, Brigadier General Ennis Whitehead determined that the three had kicked prisoners or encouraged others to do so on May 12.

Lieutenant Colonel Allen B. West, a battalion commander in the 4th Infantry Division, was allowed to resign from the Army after he admitted firing a weapon near a detainee suspected of plotting attacks against American soldiers.

In October, the US military shut down Camp Cropper, a notorious, makeshift prison where hundreds of Iraqis were crowded into tents through Baghdad`s scorching summer.

Released detainees told of overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at Camp Cropper, and they alleged physical abuse by guards. The human rights group Amnesty International protested it "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, banned by international law."

Other former detainees have spoken of systematic abuse, although US authorities insist that conditions are in line with international law.

The coalition is believed to be holding about 12,800 detainees for various actions, including attacks on US and allied troops. US administrator Paul Bremer announced this month that occupation forces would free about 500 of them as part of an amnesty, but it remains unclear how many of them have been freed.

17 January 2004 12:03



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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January 17, 2004
U.S. Officials Try to Trace Illegal Sale of Nuclear Technology
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 — American law enforcement officials said Friday that they were trying to determine whether the Pakistani government was involved in a plot by a South African businessman to export trigger devices that could be used for nuclear weapons.

"That`s one possibility that we`re investigating," said one official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We know these devices went to Pakistan. What we`re still investigating is where exactly they ended up and who was behind it."

Asher Karni, an Israeli who lives in South Africa, was arrested in Denver earlier this month on charges that he had illegally exported the devices to Pakistan without a license. In court documents, the American authorities charge that Mr. Karni, 50, was at the center of a global operation that used front companies and false billing records to route the trigger devices from a private manufacturer in Salem, Mass., to South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and ultimately Pakistan.

The devices, high-speed electrical switches called triggered spark gaps, are typically used in hospitals to break apart kidney stones. But hospitals usually keep only a few on hand — not the 200 that Mr. Karni is accused of ordering from an American supplier, PerkinElmer Optoelectronics, of Salem.

A Pakistani diplomat in Washington said Pakistan would cooperate in the investigation, and that it had no knowledge of the plot that American authorities laid out.

Mr. Karni remains in federal custody in Denver. On Monday, United States Magistrate Judge Michael Watanabe agreed to free him on $75,000 bond and confine him to the home of a rabbi in Potomac, Md., pending his trial.

But the Justice Department objected, saying Mr. Karni is "an extreme flight risk," and the judge agreed to delay his release until a hearing is held next week. Mr. Karni`s attorney could not be reached Friday.

"We are not involved in any proliferation activity," said the Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There`s no basis for this, no question about it."

But American officials said they had come to focus on the possibility that the Pakistani government was involved for several reasons, beginning with the large number of devices that Mr. Karni ordered.

In addition to that, a Pakistani businessman named Humayn Khan who received the trigger devices had ties to the Pakistani military and appears to have been involved in jet fighter production, American officials said.

"This case represents one of the most serious types of export violations imaginable," federal prosecutors said earlier this week in a court filing in Denver. "Karni has exported goods that are capable of detonating nuclear weapons to a person he knows has ties to the Pakistani military."

The government`s filing said: "Although Pakistan`s current leadership has vowed to curb the spread of this technology, that region of the world remains volatile, and Islamic militants in the area have made no secret of their desire to obtain nuclear weapons. The threat that Karni`s conduct posed was real."

The government`s investigation appears to have begun last summer, when investigators with the Commerce Department and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement received information from an anonymous source in South Africa about the possible diversion of American equipment to Pakistan and India, according to court papers.

In an affidavit filed in the case, James R. Brigham, an agent with the Commerce Department, said Mr. Karni tried to buy up to 400 of the trigger devices.

Investigators learned that Mr. Karni, working through a New Jersey contact, placed an order last year with PerkinElmer for 200 triggers at a cost of $89,400, Mr. Brigham said. Mr. Karni told the manufacturer the devices were to be used at a South African hospital, but officials at PerkinElmer said most hospitals would need no more than five or six, Mr. Brigham said.

Working with government officials, the company agreed secretly to disable the first shipment of 66 triggers by closing off the gas in-take lines, the government`s affidavit said. But officials said it was not known if Mr. Karni had succeeded in exporting any other working triggers to Pakistan.

Earlier, Mr. Karni tried to buy triggers in France and have them sent directly to Pakistan, American officials said. But that effort failed when the sales agent told Mr. Karni that he would have to get an American export license, officials said.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Two American soldiers reacted Friday as a bomb exploded in Baghdad. An Iraqi boy was killed as he watched soldiers and policemen try to defuse the device, which was reportedly detonated by remote control.
January 17, 2004
IRAQI MONEY
Lebanese Seize Plane With Billions of Dinars
By NEELA BANERJEE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 16 — Lebanese security officials in Beirut on Thursday seized a plane that had arrived from Baghdad carrying 19.5 billion in new Iraqi dinars, or about $12 million, said Lebanese journalists who spoke to the country`s prosecutor general. The officials then detained three Lebanese businessmen for questioning on possible smuggling charges, the journalists said.

Separately, in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani told worshipers at Friday Prayers that protests would be held if the American-led administration of Iraq refused to hold direct elections as part of its effort to turn over governance of the country to Iraqis by July 1.

One of the men detained in Lebanon, Muhammad Issam Abu Darwish, the scion of a prominent Shiite family from southern Lebanon, told investigators that the money had come from the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and was intended to buy armored cars. Mr. Darwish went to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and opened a private security company, the journalists said the prosecutor`s office had told them.

The old dinars with Mr. Hussein`s likeness were fully phased out on Thursday and replaced with new notes with pictures of Iraqi landmarks. But the value of the dinar has risen considerably against the dollar over the last month, going from 1,600 dinars to the dollar to about 1,200 now, opening ripe opportunities for currency speculation.

Many Iraqis believe that the value of the dinar is rising in large part because of such speculation as well as smuggling, because both activities take money out of circulation. With the dollar weaker, those Iraqis who work for the state and whose salaries are pegged to the dollar have seen their earnings in dinars fall, while prices of goods in dinars have stayed the same.

The Coalition Provisional Authority did not return calls seeking comment on the issue.

In Baghdad, the deputy commander of the Army`s First Armored Division, which has oversight for much of the city, told The Associated Press that there would be fewer patrols by American soldiers and fewer garrisons after his unit turned over security for the city to a new unit arriving over the next few months.

Attacks on Americans and Iraqis still shake Baghdad daily, however. A 15-year-old Iraqi boy who was watching American soldiers and Iraqi policemen trying to defuse a roadside bomb was killed by shrapnel when the device exploded. Five others were wounded, two seriously. The Iraqi police told Agence France-Presse that the bomb had been detonated with a remote-control device.

In Karbala, Sheik Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalai threatened to unleash a campaign against the Americans if they continue to resist direct elections. "In the coming days and months, we`re going to see protests and strikes and civil disobedience, and perhaps confrontations with the occupying force," he said. Protests have already spread through the Shiite south of Iraq, with 30,000 demonstrating in Basra on Thursday.

In Beirut, the prosecutor general, Adnan Adoum, who insisted on speaking only to local journalists, said that the flight carrying the new dinars had not been secret and that the money had not been hidden in the small twin-engine plane. But the shipment lacked proper documentation. Mr. Adoum has asked the Iraqi chargé d`affaires in Beirut to find out from the Coalition Provisional Authority if the money was in fact intended for purchasing armored cars.

The impounded plane was piloted by Mazen Bsat, a prominent Beirut businessman who owns a chain of pharmacies and a company that leases planes for charter flights. With him was Mr. Darwish and Richard Jreissati, who held the portfolio for foreign affairs of the Christian right-wing Lebanese Forces Militia during the country`s civil war. Waiting to meet the plane was Michel Mkattaf, who owns a foreign exchange business and is married to the only daughter of a former Lebanese president, Amin Geymael.

Mr. Bsat, the pilot, was questioned and released Thursday evening. But the other three men remain in custody. Under Lebanese law, they can be held for up to four days for questioning, after which they must be charged with a crime or released.


Susan Sachs contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article and Leena Saidi from Beirut.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 17, 2004
Halliburton wins new Iraq contract
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington


The US Army on Friday awarded Halliburton a contract worth as much as $1.2bn to rebuild Iraq`s oil industry despite allegations that the oil services company overcharged the US government for fuel imports into Iraq.

Halliburton`s Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary received a two-year contract to repair oilfields in southern Iraq from the Army Corps of Engineers.

The company, which was formerly run by vice-president Dick Cheney, has been a lightning rod for criticism of the Bush administration`s handling of postwar Iraq since it received a no-bid contract last March to repair Iraq`s oilfields. Pentagon auditors in December found that Halliburton appeared to have overcharged the US government $61m for fuel imports, prompting President George W. Bush to say that the company would have to repay the government if the allegations were accurate.

Earlier this month, the Army appeared to exonerate Halliburton, which has already received $2.3bn from its Iraq contract, saying the prices charged for fuel imported to Iraq from Kuwait were "fair and reasonable". But the controversy was reignited this week when military auditors asked the Pentagon inspector-general to investigate "suspected irregularities" in the contracts.

Halliburton has denied any wrongdoing. "We believe the award of this contract validates the decision of the Army Corps of Engineers last year," said Dave Lesar, chief executive of Halliburton. "We were chosen because we were the best qualified with a proven track record."

Some procurement lobbyists expressed surprise that Halliburton would be awarded the contract despite the controversy surrounding the Houston-based company`s operations in Iraq. But the army defended the decision. "Under US law, you are innocent until proven guilty," said an Army spokesman. The spokesman said the Army could not eliminate Halliburton based on allegations. But he said the latest contract could be rescinded if Halliburton was found to have overcharged the government.

The Army also awarded a contract to a consortium led by Parsons to rebuild oilfields in northern Iraq. Six companies bid for the contracts, which were restricted to countries that supported the US war in Iraq.

Henry Waxman, the top Democrat on the House reform committee, yesterday said he had been informed by the inspector-general`s staff that a criminal probe had been launched into the overcharging issue. But the Pentagon said the inspector-general was reviewing the matter and had not made an official decision.



© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004.

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"An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth"
Ist einer der Artikel des Spiegels aus dieser Woche aus der NYTimes

DER SPIEGEL 3/2004 - 12. Januar 2004
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,282241,00.html
Auge um Auge, Zahn um Zahn

Mit ihrer Terroristenjagd sorgen die USA für Chaos im Reiseverkehr. Ein Provinzrichter organisiert nun den Widerstand.

In Reiseführern ist Cuiabá zumeist nur wegen seiner Koordinaten eine Erwähnung wert: Die Hauptstadt des brasilianischen Bundesstaats Mato Grosso liegt ziemlich genau in der geografischen Mitte Südamerikas. Ansonsten ist sie noch für einen schmackhaften Fischeintopf bekannt - und für den Richter Julier Sebastião da Silva, 34.

Erst brachte er einen der mächtigsten Drogenbosse des Landes hinter Gitter und verhinderte dann den Bau einer Wasserstraße durch das Naturreservat Pantanal. Jetzt hat er Cuiabá auch politisch ins Zentrum der Welt katapultiert: da Silva fordert die Supermacht USA heraus.

Denn Uncle Sam hat in Lateinamerika nicht den besten Ruf. Stunden-, ja oft tagelang stehen Latinos vor den wenigen US-Konsulaten Schlange, wenn sie eine Reise in den Norden des Kontinents planen. Ohne Interview mit einem der Beamten gibt es kein Visum - und das braucht jeder Lateinamerikaner, selbst wenn er in den USA nur eben mal umsteigen will.

Auch wenn es nur um einen Trip nach Disneyland geht - argentinische, brasilianische und kolumbianische Touristen müssen zuvor Familienverhältnisse und Finanzen offen legen. Denn jeder Einwohner südlich des Rio Grande steht automatisch im Verdacht, dass er illegal im gelobten Land bleiben will.

Geduldig schwitzen Latinos auf den Flughäfen von Miami und New York, während Deutsche, Engländer, Franzosen und andere Bürger aus der Ersten Welt mit einem mitleidigen Lächeln an ihnen vorbeiziehen. Sie reißen sich zusammen, wenn ein schlecht gelaunter Grenzbeamter sie um Nachweise für Geld und Unterkunft fragt, und sie nehmen in Kauf, wenn er unwirsch ihr Gepäck durchwühlt.

Denn wehe, irgendein Detail erweckt Misstrauen: Dann werden sie in ein fensterloses Zimmer gesperrt, müssen sich auch schon mal ausziehen oder werden an einen Stuhl gekettet. Nach sieben bis acht Stunden geht es mit dem nächsten Flieger in die Heimat zurück. Klagen beim Konsulat sind zwecklos: So sei das nun mal seit dem 11. September 2001, lautet der lakonische Kommentar.

Seit kurzem werden Einreisende, die ein Visum benötigen, auch noch fotografiert und gezwungen, ihre Fingerabdrücke abzugeben. Viele empfinden das als Schikane, schließlich brauchen sich die meisten Europäer dieser Prozedur nicht zu unterziehen. Dennoch wagte kaum eine lateinamerikanische Regierung bisher Protest, der große Bruder im Norden gilt als zu stark.

Nicht für Provinzrichter da Silva. Das sei vergleichbar mit den "Gräueltaten der Nazis", grollte er und ordnete an, dass US-Amerikaner ab sofort bei der Einreise ebenfalls fotografiert werden und Klavier spielen müssen - wie das Abnehmen der Fingerabdrücke im Volksmund heißt. Der Richter berief sich auf die diplomatische Regel der gegenseitigen Gleichbehandlung. "Seine Entscheidung ist unanfechtbar", sekundierte die "Fôlha de São Paulo", Brasiliens größte Tageszeitung.

Bei ihrer Ankunft werden US-Bürger nun in einen Extraraum gewinkt, wo sie bis zu acht Stunden auf ihre Abfertigung warten - wie Montag vergangener Woche in Rio geschehen. Denn, sorry, für Hightech-Kontrollen mit digitalen Lesegeräten wie in den USA sind Brasiliens Grenzbeamte nicht gerüstet. Klavierspielen ist hier noch Handarbeit: Ein Beamter öffnet ein Stempelkissen und schmiert alle zehn Finger gleichmäßig mit Tinte ein. Mangels Digitalkameras wurden die Touristen in Rio zunächst mit Polaroid-Geräten fotografiert.

Das ruft zwangsläufig Unmut hervor. "Wir werden behandelt wie Verbrecher", grollte Urlauber Scott Hall aus Boston. "Wollt ihr unsere Dollar nicht, oder was ist los?", fragte ein entnervter Kreuzfahrer, der wegen der Kontrollprozedur den Ausflug zum Zuckerhut verpasste.

Patriotisch gesinnte Urlauber auf dem Kreuzfahrtschiff "Amsterdam", das vergangene Woche mit mehr als 600 US-Amerikanern an Bord den Hafen von Rio anlief, verweigerten wegen der neuen Regelung trotzig den Landgang. Ein älteres Ehepaar kreuzte triumphierend die Finger zum Victory-Zeichen, als es die Gangway hinunterlief: "Wir sind Kanadier!" "Das wäre ich auch gern!", rief ihnen ein US-Bürger hinterher.

Die Szenen aus Rio und São Paulo sind Balsam für die gequälte lateinamerikanische Seele. Von Mexiko bis Feuerland spenden Politiker Beifall. Die verschärften Einreisebestimmungen sollten auf die Nachbarländer Argentinien, Uruguay und Paraguay ausgeweitet werden, forderte ein Senator der brasilianischen Regierungspartei PT.

In Washington wird der erzieherische Effekt von Richter da Silvas Krieg der Fingerprints bislang nicht verstanden. Ein Sprecher von Außenminister Colin Powell bat die Kollegen in Rio vorige Woche dringend um Aufklärung über die "schrecklichen Unannehmlichkeiten" für US-Touristen. Zugleich warnte er die Brasilianer, dass die Verzögerungen bei der Abfertigung Geschäftsleute und Urlauber abschrecken würden; Rio erwartet allein zum Karneval rund 70 000 Besucher aus den USA.

Eine gewisse Entspannung immerhin ist in Sicht: Die brasilianischen Grenzbeamten sind jetzt mit Digitalkameras ausgerüstet. Und für den Fingerabdruck reicht ab sofort der rechte Daumen. JENS GLÜSING

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© DER SPIEGEL 3/2004

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Die Besetzung der höchsten Richterämter ist entscheidend für die Rechtsprechung der Zukunft, und da hat Bush eine absolut kompromisslose Haltung eingenommen mit der Nominierung von Rechtsaußen unter den Richtern. Es sind sehr viele Stellen zu besetzten, da auch unter Clinton es nicht oft zu Einigungen gekommen ist. Nun sind aber auch einige Reps gegen die Auswahl ihres Präsidenten.

January 17, 2004
A Judicial End Run

resident Bush has used the only avenue remaining to him to install Charles Pickering Sr. of Mississippi on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: a recess appointment, which avoids the confirmation process. That recess appointments are a perfectly legal device used by other presidents in the past does not make this appointment any more palatable. Mr. Pickering is absolutely the wrong choice for one of the nation`s most sensitive courts.

Mr. Bush claimed that only a "handful" of senators had opposed Mr. Pickering. The opposition was in fact a good deal broader than that.

Mr. Pickering was rejected in 2002 by the Judiciary Committee when the Senate was still in Democratic hands. When the same committee, in Republican control, approved him last fall, the nomination was blocked by a filibuster. Another attempt on the president`s part to win Senate approval of Mr. Pickering`s nomination would almost certainly have produced the same result.

The reasons are clear enough. Over the years, Mr. Pickering has displayed skepticism toward cases involving civil rights and expressed doubts about well-settled principles like one person one vote. The Senate inquiry into the nomination uncovered troubling questions of judicial ethics. Mr. Pickering took up the case of a man convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple, urging prosecutors to drop a central charge and calling a prosecutor directly. He also seems outside the mainstream on abortion rights.

Mr. Pickering is not the only hard-right candidate Mr. Bush has pushed for high judicial office. But his nomination was among the most troublesome. As Senator Charles Schumer said, Mr. Bush`s decision to bypass the Senate in this manner is "a finger in the eye" for all those seeking fairness in the nomination process.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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"Human beings are headed into the cosmos."
-- George W. Bush

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washingtonpost.com
Iraqi Oil Gets Its Own Police Force
Recruits Defend Against Infrastructure Sabotage

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 17, 2004; Page E01


BAGHDAD -- Until a few weeks ago, the only line of defense at a water-pumping station on an oil pipeline near the northern city of Kirkuk was a burly man named Mohammad, who kept his semi-automatic rifle in a metal safe near the cot where he slept. He had no telephone or radio, and when strangers came by he would shout in Arabic: "Shoo, shoo, go away. Go to Kirkuk."

Dozens of guards now patrol the grounds there, and the shack where Mohammad had been isolated is equipped with the latest communications gear. The security upgrade is part of the new Iraqi Force Protection Service, specifically charged with safeguarding the pipelines and refineries that are the circulatory system of the country`s financial lifeblood.

This northern pipeline and other oil facilities around the country have been the targets of repeated attacks of sabotage during the U.S-led occupation, slowing the one key source of revenue for the country and resulting in fuel shortages that have deepened anger toward and suspicion of the interim government here.

"The vast pipeline network was a vulnerable target," said U.S. Army Col. Tom O`Donnell, who is in charge of setting up the oil police. Nearly 10,000 members of the new police force have been deputized since October, and an additional 4,500 are expected to be in place by the middle of next month.

"Standing up its own oil guard force is a major step forward in the reconstruction effort in Iraq," O`Donnell said. "We are a lot better postured than three months ago to keep the oil flowing." Although attacks on the pipeline have continued, major incidents have fallen sharply, from 16 in October to four last month, he said.

Oil production has been exceeding the more than 2 million barrels per day that the Iraqi Oil Ministry had set as a target for the end of last year, but that is still below the 2.5 million barrels a day that Iraq generated before the U.S.-led war. And in the northern fields, where sabotage has been the worst, production levels are less than 500,000 barrels a day, trailing expectations .

"There`s plenty of crude," Col. Lem DuBose, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers` mission to repair the oil infrastructure, said in a recent interview here. "Crude is not the issue. The issue is getting crude from the field to the refinery. Every time the pipeline gets interrupted by sabotage, the enemy knows it. The enemy wants to destroy our credibility. The crude pipelines have been targeted over and over again."

As head of the oil policing effort, dubbed "Task Force Shield," O`Donnell has been meeting with tribal leaders who were responsible for protecting the oil pipeline for Saddam Hussein. The interim government pays the leaders to watch over the remote stretches of pipe that traverse barren stretches of fields and desert.

O`Donnell also recruits men from the tribes for the police force. The guards go through a one-week training course before being sent out to the field in dark blue uniforms, hand sewn by factory workers here. The force is trained and managed by South African-based Erinys, a private firm founded by former members of the British special forces. The coalition government awarded Erinys a $39.2 million contract in August to set up the force under the direction of the U.S. military. Fifteen firms competed for the contract, which is being paid with Iraqi funds, oil revenue and assets seized from Hussein hideouts. O`Donnell said Erinys "had the best proposal, and, in my opinion, has delivered to date."

To help the security effort, the coalition government also has signed a two-year, $10 million lease with Florida-based AirScan Inc. to provide night air surveillance of the pipeline and oil infrastructure, using low-light television cameras to try to spot and head off saboteurs trying to use the cover of darkness. Under terms of the lease, O`Donnell said, the Iraqi government has the right to buy the equipment after two years and will then use Iraqi pilots.

One of the first sites to receive the new protection was the Daura refinery, just south of Baghdad, which was still operating at less than half its capacity last week because of attacks on the pipelines feeding into it. Several hundred police officers patrol the grounds and perimeter there.

Murtadha Radhee, a 22-year-old student, stood in a cold rain near the entrance to the refinery one recent morning, a rifle slung over his uniform and his official blue cap pulled low, as he watched a half-dozen of his fellow guards swarm a vehicle for inspection before allowing it to enter the complex.

Radhee said he likes the new job but wishes it paid more. He said he makes $95 a month, up from $60 when he started two months earlier. Guards make up to $120 a month.

Since the new force was established, three of the oil police officers have been killed, including one who died in a spray of gunfire near Kirkuk last week. Two other guards were wounded in that incident.

Inside the refinery, two officers stood in a tower overlooking a nearby highway, which has been the source of nightly machine-gun fire. At the request of the U.S. Army, the oil police help patrol the road and hunt for explosive devices.

Erinys is building a firing range on the refinery grounds so the guards can practice shooting. "We train them, and they do well," said Michael Solomon, who runs the central region oil police for Erinys. "They`re keen to learn." Solomon works with Abdul Wahed, a former Iraqi air force pilot who said he will take command of the oil police in this region when the interim government hands control of the force over to the Iraqi Oil Ministry later this year.

At the Huerrya gas station in central Baghdad last week, uniformed oil police officers directed traffic and patrolled the pumps. Shortages last month caused lines two miles long. Last week, drivers said they waited about 30 minutes to fill up their tanks.

Ahmad Muhammed was one of the new guards. A former solider and carpenter by trade, Muhammed said he was unemployed before joining the oil force two months ago. "It is my national duty," he said, explaining why he wanted the job.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Members of the new Iraqi oil police patrol the Daura oil refinery just south of Baghdad. Nearly 10,000 members have been deputized since October. Another 4,500 are expected to soon be in place.

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washingtonpost.com
Clerics Urge Shiites to Protest
Call for Iraqi Elections Carries Hint of Violence

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 17, 2004; Page A01


KARBALA, Iraq, Jan. 16 -- Preachers in Shiite Muslim mosques appealed to their followers Friday to prepare for demonstrations, strikes and possible confrontations with occupation troops to back up demands for elections in advance of a transfer of authority from a U.S.-led administration to Iraqis.

The calls increased pressure on the Bush administration and its handpicked Iraqi Governing Council to satisfy demands by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country`s most influential cleric, for elections. President Bush`s chief administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and top Governing Council leaders are scheduled to meet in New York next week in hopes of enlisting U.N. help in changing Sistani`s mind.

The United States and the council have fashioned a proposal to select a transitional assembly by July 1 through a complex system of regional caucuses. Sistani rejected the plan on the grounds it disenfranchises Iraqis and puts Iraq`s future in the hands of the United States. Sistani`s challenge was sharpened in Shiite mosques throughout Iraq on Friday, and the option of violence was made explicit.

"We should think seriously about the future and for the coming generation, and fashion it to keep our dignity," said Abdel-Madhi Salami, the chief cleric in Karbala, one of two Shiite holy cities in Iraq. "This will happen through serious participation in a peaceful protest, strikes and, as a last resort, possible confrontation with the occupying forces, because they plan to draw up colonial schemes."

Salami is a senior associate of Sistani. A similar appeal was made in the biggest Sunni mosque in Baghdad.

The relative calm that has prevailed among Iraq`s Shiite majority since the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein last spring now hangs in the balance. Shiites, one of two major streams in Islam, make up at least 60 percent of the population. Unlike their Sunni Muslim counterparts, who make up about 20 percent of Iraqis and formed the backbone of support for Hussein, the Shiites largely welcomed the U.S.-led invasion of the country.

But the issue of Iraq`s political future has put the relationship between the Shiites and the occupation authorities in question. Shiites consider Sistani, 73, a marja al-taqlid, or object of emulation, and his followers heed his words not only on religious matters but also on social and political issues. Despite hints of compromise emanating from U.S. and Iraqi officials, Sistani does not appear to be budging.

On Friday, Sistani met with tribal leaders at his offices in the holy city of Najaf, his home base. There were no reports of demonstrations. On Thursday, tens of thousands of Shiites marched in Basra, the country`s second-largest city, to demand elections. Salami said that Basra was a sample of things to come.

"We want to convey to the people the importance of this case. Some people think it will take confrontation. Not for the present, we hope," Salami said in an interview.

Salami also suggested a way to avoid violence, repeating Sistani`s demand for the United Nations to send a fact-finding team to Iraq and judge whether elections can be organized. When Sistani first called for a U.N. visit, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan sent a letter to the Governing Council saying elections could not be arranged properly before July 1.

"It was not correct for Kofi Annan to sit in New York and say it," Salami said. "We feel this was all a maneuver. If the commission came, investigated and said there is no way, then an alternative would have to be found."

He was evasive about whether Sistani would accept a U.N. judgment. "There is a lack of trust," he said.

Salami spoke dismissively of Bremer, with whom Sistani has refused to meet. "It`s a feeling we will not get anything from Bremer. My evaluation is, there is no profit in a meeting with him," he said.

He spoke in his office at the edge of the Imam Hussein mosque, one of a matching pair in Karbala, each topped with a golden dome and gilt minarets set above an enclosure adorned with tiles in floral patterns.

Salami`s appeal for protests was issued to thousands of worshipers gathered under a warm winter sun for Friday prayers. His speech made no mention of the United Nations.

Shiites in Karbala seemed to agree with his words. "There have been too many promises not kept," said Hameed Abu Sajjad, a hotel owner in Karbala. "The United States has lots of experience in organizing elections. Let them organize one for us."

Abdullah Ridha Abdul Mahdi, a plastics goods salesman, said: "Elections would make things clear. We would like it soon."

"I do not think our religious leaders want to cause problems. We just want our rights, which is the reason the Americans said they came here," said Amir Abbas, a retired laborer who was rummaging through a pile of sandals and shoes worshipers had shed before prayers, according to Islamic custom.

Iraqi officials fear that a U.N. commission would take a long time to investigate and would add to the aura of Sistani`s authority, perhaps setting a precedent for clerical review of government decisions. Nonetheless, Adnan Pachachi, current president of the Governing Council under a rotation system, said the council would do what it could to "accommodate" Sistani by providing "transparency and inclusiveness."

But not elections. Pachachi will lead the Governing Council delegation to New York. He warned that the wrangling could derail the transition to Iraqi rule and prolong U.S. military occupation.

Elections would give the majority Shiites and, in all likelihood, the Shiite religious leadership a leg up on political rivals. The mosque is the most organized and well-financed institution in Iraq. The leadership is funded by donations from millions of the faithful.

Beneath the surface of the election dispute lies another issue dear to Sistani: enshrinement of Islam as Iraq`s guiding ideology. Allowing a transitional assembly and government molded by U.S.-selected councils to take power would set Iraq onto a secular road, his followers contend.

"The issue is not just freedom. It is guaranteeing that laws be passed within the rules of Islam," Salami said.

He explained that Shiite leaders see the current situation through the prism of an Arab uprising in 1920 against British colonial rule. Then, Shiite clerics supported the revolt and later rejected a peace solution that involved installation by the British of an Arab monarch in Iraq. Effectively, the Shiites ceded control of Iraq to the minority Sunni population.

This time, the clerics want to ensure they have a deciding say in the creation of an Iraqi government, Salami said. "The people should benefit from the experience of the 1920 revolution. At that time, they lost their rights," he told worshipers at Imam Hussein mosque. "This time, the marja of Najaf is taking care about the transfer of authority from the occupiers. The people should wake up."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
On a Mission to Restore Baghdad`s Foreign Relations


By Nora Boustany

Saturday, January 17, 2004; Page A20


During the summers in Baghdad, families slept on the rooftops under huge white nets -- always a thrill for the children -- to escape the stifling heat and the mosquitoes. It was a golden era in the city of tall palms and fragrant rose and jasmine bushes.

The Rahim family gathered for a meal each Friday at the patriarchal mansion, a place with gardens sloping down to a river in the Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad. Steaming lamb and vegetable stews would be served, as would platters of roasted chicken with spicy saffron rice topped with toasted almonds and raisins.

For Rend Rahim Francke, 54, those obligatory visits to Adhamiya are still a vivid reminder of happy times and of loving, nurturing gatherings of aunts, uncles and boisterous cousins. "I remember family," she said of the weekend celebrations.

Today Rahim Francke is working around the clock in Washington to revive Iraq`s dilapidated embassy at 1801 P St. NW after 14 years of neglect. She not only has to worry about leaking pipes, a nonfunctioning heating system and a tide of contractors` bids, but also about how to bring her native country back into the international fold.

The Iraqi Governing Council named Rahim Francke ambassador-designate. Until the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority hands over power to an Iraqi government, however, she serves as the director of the Iraqi Interests Section, nursing U.S.-Iraq diplomatic ties back to normality under the Bahraini flag. For the first time since 1990, Iraqi diplomats can travel freely around the United States, and the interests section has been authorized to have its own bank account, she said.

Rahim Francke`s upbringing was far from political. She comes from a merchant family. Just after the oil boom of the early 1950s, young businessmen and entrepreneurs, including her father, built up an industrial base of textile plants, spinning mills and oil presses.

At age 15, Rahim Francke was sent to boarding school in England. But as power changed hands and the Baathists took over, her family began to feel the noose tightening. A maternal uncle, a lawyer, was given a 15-year prison term for writing a letter to a friend asking for help getting a U.N. job because of "intolerable" living conditions. An aunt in prison was poisoned with thallium dissolved in a yogurt drink for not divulging where her son was; she died in a hospital. "My family decided to leave in 1978. The writing was on the wall. We chose to make a new life and disengage," Rahim Francke said.

Educated at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, she dabbled in banking jobs in the Persian Gulf region and in New York. She also taught English literature at the American University of Beirut.

She visited Baghdad frequently but was harassed by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. An Iraqi officer in Beirut pressured her to report on fellow Iraqi students and faculty, she said. The man summoned her to the embassy to intimidate her for refusing to spy and sequestered her passport. " `The shoe of the meanest Iraqi is better than you are, you traitor,` he would tell me," she said. "My passport was not a right but a privilege, he said, ordering me to leave." She was 29.

Her family moved to the United States and eventually to Washington in 1980, where she joined them within a year to help out in a real estate business.

After the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988, Iraqis were optimistic that Saddam Hussein had learned his lesson. But on Aug. 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. "This made me snap. It was my psychological watershed," she said. "It was such an act of criminality and disregard for the lives of Iraqis. Hundreds of thousands were dead, the country needed to heal, but he was throwing the country and Iraqis right into the pit of hell."

In 1990, Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, an organization of groups that opposed Hussein`s government from exile, proposed forming the Iraq Foundation to establish a nongovernmental organization that would work alongside a political movement. Rahim Francke became one of the founders and later its executive director.

"There was an almost macabre excitement. Iraqis like me were breaking their silence. Those who had been dissidents in the `80s were being heard, and they interacted with those who had broken their silence. There was great chemistry," she said.

She worked closely with Chalabi, translating and documenting human rights violations and eventually created her own space in Washington and with State Department officials.

Retired ambassador David L. Mack, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the 1960s and `70s, met Rahim Francke in 1991 at a conference organized by Iraqi Americans and Canadians. He was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs and used the forum to express publicly for the first time that Washington was eager to support and work with the Iraqi opposition.

Mack, who calls Rahim Francke "smart, well educated and not afraid to challenge people with different points of view," predicted she would be an effective ambassador because she knows Washington well and has a range of contacts here.

"What I can`t measure, and no one can now, is whether she will have the full confidence of authorities back there," Mack said. "She can be a great asset if they express confidence in her and give her the flexibility to speak out."

Rahim Francke traveled to Iraq with the U.S. military for two 24-hour trips last April 15 and April 28, attending political meetings in Baghdad and Nasiriyah. She later made more extended visits.

After a 25-year absence, she found a country where hospitals lacked life-saving drugs and where sewage and water leaked into the walls of theaters. "It was like leaving the 21st century and arriving in the Middle Ages. It was dismal. Buildings had not been maintained since the mid-`80s," she said. Her grandfather`s house had been razed, as had her parents` home in a different neighborhood.

"During 23 years of war, people lived without any hope for the future but held on by the skin of their teeth," she said. "I went back at that moment when they were like the deep-sea diver emerging to the surface. The pressure was upon them and they were still decompressing.

"Iraqis had been on a roller coaster. One of the things I am most optimistic about is that we have a situation where there is a high measure of political participation, people knowing they can do something. By November, the two most valuable things in Iraq were this sense of freedom and a resurgence of hope for the future."

She worries that early elections could discriminate against minorities, but expressed hope that Shiite spiritual leaders clamoring for early direct elections would compromise. They, too, want to see a smooth transition to sovereignty, she said.

Rahim Francke would not say whether she would give up her U.S. citizenship, as is customary for dual-nationality ambassadors. "We will cross that bridge once we reach it, when Iraq becomes a sovereign state in July and there is a new government," she said. "There is so much else to worry about."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Siehe heutiger NYT Artikel

washingtonpost.com
End Run for Mr. Pickering

Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page B06


PRESIDENT BUSH`S decision Friday to install controversial judicial nominee Charles W. Pickering Sr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit using a recess appointment is yet another unwarranted escalation of the judicial nomination wars. We have lamented some of the attacks on Mr. Pickering, but his record as a federal trial judge is undistinguished and downright disturbing, and Senate Democrats are reasonable to oppose his nomination. Installing him using a constitutional end run around the Senate only inflames passions. The right path is to build consensus that nonpartisanship and excellence are the appropriate criteria for judicial selection.

The recess appointment -- the president`s power to temporarily install federal officers without Senate confirmation -- is a uniquely bad instrument for federal judges. Judges are supposed to be politically independent. Yet Mr. Pickering will be a controversial nominee before the Senate as he considers cases and will lose his job in a year if he is not confirmed. Even his supporters should understand that he will be subject to the political pressures from which judges are supposed to be insulated.

We don`t rule out the recess appointment in all circumstances. At times judges have commanded such uniform support that presidents have used the power to get them in office quickly, leaving the formality of confirmation for later. We supported, moreover, President Bill Clinton`s lame-duck recess appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit of Roger Gregory, who, like Mr. Pickering, was held up in the Senate. But there was a big difference: Mr. Gregory was not controversial. His nomination, in fact, was eventually resubmitted to the Senate by none other than President Bush. It was held up initially because of a long-standing dispute over appointments to that court, not because of any concerns about the nominee himself. There was reason to hope that Mr. Gregory would be confirmed -- as, indeed, he was. In this case, Mr. Bush has used a recess appointment for someone who cannot, on his merits, garner a vote of confidence from the Senate and who has no prospect of confirmation in the current Congress.

We don`t support the filibuster of nominees, but the answer to Democratic obstruction cannot be the appointment or installation of temporary judges who get to hear a few cases over a few months, all the while looking over their shoulders at the senators who oppose them. The great damage the judicial nomination wars threaten over the long term is to erode judicial independence, to make judges constantly aware of how they might have to answer to the Senate for a given opinion. Using the recess appointment to place Mr. Pickering on the 5th Circuit has made that danger into a reality.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Judith Steinberg Dean ist auch Ärztin und führt trotz der politischen Ambitionen ihres Mannes ihren Beruf weiter. Der dritte Weg?

washingtonpost.com
Paging Doctor Steinberg


By Ruth Marcus

Saturday, January 17, 2004; Page A25


Is there a Third Way to be First Lady? The existing models seem anachronistic and unsatisfying. There is the traditional "stand by your man" example -- innocuous pet cause, fixed smile, perhaps a bit of behind-the-scenes astrologizing. And there is the Hillary Clinton "buy one, get one free" approach -- First Lady as First Policymaker. But for a job that serves as something of a national Rorschach test about the proper role of women in society, neither seems particularly well-suited to an age of working wives with independent careers.

Into this feminist muddle comes -- or perhaps more accurately, is dragged -- Judith Steinberg Dean, the wife of the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. The 50-year-old Dean -- she uses Steinberg in the medical practice she once shared with her husband, Dean in private life -- presents the possibility of a different, more up-to-date model. She`s not signed up for baking cookies or making policy.

Since her husband`s unexpected detour from medicine to politics (his political inclinations weren`t evident when they married) and his unanticipated ascension to the governorship, Judith Dean has stayed determinedly outside the political arena. She stopped coming to inaugural events after the first two. She`s so not into the first lady thing that when her husband was head of the National Governors Association, he drafted a fellow governor`s wife to help with those duties.

Other than a cameo appearance in a newly purchased red suit when her husband announced his candidacy, she`s been invisible on the campaign trail and, by both their accounts, rather uninterested in the race that`s consumed him for the better part of two years. "I don`t talk politics with people who aren`t interested in politics," Howard Dean explains. When Al Gore decided to endorse him, Howard Dean didn`t tell his wife for three days, reports Jodi Wilgoren of the New York Times. If her husband is elected president, she vows to continue practicing medicine. "Ike runs the country, I turn the lamb chops," Mamie Eisenhower liked to say. Judith Dean`s version would have her husband running the country while she sees her patients.

In many ways, for women my age (45) and younger, Judith Dean seems like the first potential first lady who would be more like us -- juggling work and family, straining to accommodate two careers, expecting more of our husbands than our mothers did of theirs. To read about Judith Dean racing through the supermarket at 10 p.m. to pick up groceries is to recognize our own overstuffed lives. That Howard Dean does his own laundry during breaks from campaigning earns him -- and his wife -- points in my book.

And so, my chief reaction to Judith Dean is, "You go, Doc." After all, where is it decreed that the political spouse`s career has to be given over to politics? Why can`t the model be: "Buy one, let the other do what she wants?" To have a first lady for whom the role would be merely a descriptive, if rather musty, title, not a full-time job, would represent a logical move into the modern age. Maybe, even, a step toward imagining the prospect of a First Man.

But I must also confess to being somewhat put off by the notion of a First Couple who seem to inhabit such separate spheres, and a wife who seems so disengaged from her husband`s life and passions. If my husband were running for president, I wouldn`t miss out on watching a debate so I could get the wash done. Busy as I might be, I`d like to see, even once, what his life was like on the trail. I`d want to see more of him -- maybe spend New Year`s together, even if it had to be at that pretentious Renaissance Weekend (he went, she didn`t.)

And I suspect that if this is my response, other voters will have similarly conflicted reactions. We may have come a long way, but if Teresa Heinz felt the need to tack on the Kerry name in preparation for her husband`s campaign, I wonder whether the country is quite ready for Judith Steinberg, with or without the Dean.

Indeed, the Dean campaign seems to be recognizing the need to begin introducing her to voters. Witness People magazine`s new "Meet the Deans" spread, which provides such details as their pet names -- she calls him "Howie," he calls her "Sweetie" -- and his most recent birthday gift to her, a rhododendron bush. (Note to candidate: If you`re looking for the women`s vote, you might want to ramp up that gift-giving.)

Howard Dean`s ascendance, if he indeed becomes the Democratic nominee, and even more if he defeats George W. Bush, will probe the parameters of Americans` comfort -- with feminism, with working women, with the varying structures of modern marriage. It will be a test, perhaps more of the electorate than of the candidate and his accidentally political spouse.

The writer is a member of the editorial page staff. Her e-mail address is [e-mail].



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Saturday, January 17, 2004
War News for January 17, 2004 Draft

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Three US soldiers and two Iraqi CDC soldiers killed, two wounded in bomb ambush near Taji.

Bring `em on: Rockets fired at US base near Kirkuk.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi civilians killed by mine near Tikrit.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi insurgents killed after attack on US troops at frontier post in Al-Anbar province.

Bring `em on: Aircraft carrying Georgia`s defense minister receives ground fire at Baghdad airport.

Bring `em on: One Iraqi killed, five wounded by bomb in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Three Iraqi civilians wounded in RPG attack on US troops in Fallujah.

Bring `em on: US patrol under fire in Samarra. (Last paragraph).

Bring `em on: Power lines destroyed by sabotage; Kirkuk without electricity.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqi policemen wounded in attack in Mosul.

Tens of thousands demonstrate against US transition plan in Basra.

Fashion maven L. Paul Bremer plays down Iraqi resistance to transition plan; Sistani threatens general strike over issue.

Aide to Iraq cleric says new transition plan is a "`hasty agreement` aimed at boosting President George W. Bush`s re-election campaign."

Former UN envoy says return to Iraq would be a "terrible mistake." "`The U.N. should not be in Iraq lest it would give legal respectability to the invasion and occupation of the oil-rich Arab country, or further promote the impression that it has collaborated against the Iraqi people,` Halliday told IslamOnline.net in an exclusive interview."

Turkish general says ethnic-based federation in Iraq would be "bloody."

US Army establishes "oil police."

Halliburton bags another deal.

Ethnic tensions remain a problem in Iraq. "`Whatever Iraqi government emerges before the U.S. leaves, is almost certain to be inherently unstable,` wrote Anthony Cordesman, a security strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a recent assessment. `It will not have solved the religious sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq - which are growing as the conflicts and power struggles between Sunni and Shiite become more serious.`"

Commentary

Editorial: In Search of Rescue. "With its strategy for Iraq on the verge of unraveling, the Bush administration has belatedly embraced an idea it should have accepted long ago: that a political transition conducted by the United Nations is more likely to be accepted by Iraqis than one imposed unilaterally by the United States. On Monday U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and the head of the Iraqi Governing Council will meet with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to ask for stronger U.N. backing for the U.S. plan to turn over sovereignty in June to an Iraqi government chosen through regional caucuses…But it may be too late for the U.N. bailout the Bush administration now appears to seek. Mr. Annan is reluctant to put his organization at the service of a predetermined U.S. strategy, and one letter from the secretary general has already failed to change the mind of Mr. Sistani."

Casualty Reports

Local story: California soldier dies in Iraq.


Note to Readers

I didn`t post for the last two days. Frankly, I just needed a break from the news in Iraq. When I started this project I didn`t realize how damn depressing this would be. In the future, I may have to post some kind of schedule.

Eine Bemerkung zu dem Blogger, er ist nach eigenen Aussagen ein Vietnam Veteran, der im State Washington lebt.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:48 AM
Comment (1)

[Joerver]

U.N. Return To Iraq ‘Terrible Mistake’: Former Envoy


"They no longer see the U.N. as a friendly organization. It is a deadly one through their eyes," he said

CAIRO, January 17 (IslamOnline.net) - Former U.N. official Denis Halliday said it would be a "terrible mistake" for the United Nations to return to occupied Iraq, adding the organization should be restructured for the sake of world peace and justice.

"The U.N. should not be in Iraq lest it would give legal respectability to the invasion and occupation of the oil-rich Arab country, or further promote the impression that it has collaborated against the Iraqi people," Halliday told IslamOnline.net in an exclusive interview.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is to meet with an Iraqi delegation and U.S. civil administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer on Monday, January 19, amid reports that the world body is mulling to send a small team to Baghdad within two weeks.

Halliday, a former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, believed the situation is precarious for the step, asserting that ordinary Iraqis feel resentful of – and betrayed by - the United Nations.

"They no longer see the U.N. as a friendly organization. It is a deadly one through their eyes, as they had suffered under the totally bankrupt – if not illegal and immoral - concept of sanctions," he said.

"It had allowed occupation of an independent sovereign country, and Secretary General Kofi Annan did not criticize the U.S. and Britain for their war ambitions sufficiently, Iraqis believe," said the former U.N. envoy.

The U.N. ordered the body`s international staff to leave Iraq in October following two bombings at its Baghdad headquarters, that killed top envoy Sergio Vieira De Mello and at least 16 others.

Halliday said De Mello had been reluctant to take up the new post in Iraq.

Annan admitted that security conditions in Iraq remain too dangerous for international staff to return, but had not ruled sending them back until the scheduled transfer of power to a provisional Iraqi government by June 30.

But he had not the guts to link the return to an end to occupation of the country, said Halliday, who had resigned from his post in protest over the U.N. sanctions.

Halliday said he quitted the U.N. after serving 34 years as diplomat when he found that thousands of Iraqis were dying under the U.N. oil-for-food program.

‘Victim’

Nevertheless, Halliday sees the U.N. rather as a victim to the "U.S. hegemony", saying Annan "takes orders from the Security Council – dominated by five permanent members including Washington".

"The U.N. does not have the aggressive power Washington now has," said the former envoy.

After failing to squeeze a U.N. mandate, the U.S. and Britain invaded the oil-rich Arab country amid fierce opposition by most U.N. members, including the other three permanent members on the Security Council.

He recalled that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell lied on Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction in his speech to the Security Council before the invasion of country.

More than nine months after rolling into Baghdad on April 9, no weapons of mass destruction – the main justification for the invasion – has been found, enhancing accusations that the war was based on false pretexts.

"This is about oil, Israel. It is a stepping stone to the world domination and corporate business," Halliday charged.

He predicted that attacks against U.S. and British forces in Iraq would continue unabated as long as occupation continues.

"Look at the way the Iraqis are detained and dragged into the night. Look how their infrastructure is now heavily damaged," said the former U.N. official.

`Restructured`

Halliday is also the one who is ready to let facts make good story on the structure of the United Nations.

Spending most of his long U.N. career in development and humanitarian assistance-related posts both in New York and overseas, Halliday believe the world body could "work properly" if the five permanent member states of the Security Council relinquished their status.

"And if the General Assembly took more actions for restructuring the apparatuses of the organization," he added.

The former U.N. official called for the South and the Middle East to be "properly represented" in the council, proposing an increase in the number of veto-wielding powers and the participation of civil society groups in having a say in world affairs.

"The Americans believe their country is the most powerful on earth. This has begun to change," the Irish national said, citing a number of related examples.

After the fifth WTO ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003, Brazil, Argentina and Columbia agreed to join forces for punishing the U.S. in return for its protection of cotton industry with market-distorting subsidies.

Europe also forced Washington to retract earlier decisions to impose tariffs on steel imports.

But Halliday warned that preparations should be made to face up to the U.S. "which could crush Europe and China if it can, out of empire-building ambitions".

He noted that countries could work together and force the U.S. to act as a subordinate to the world body instead of controlling it, including those providing the Americans with cheap raw materials and natural riches as oil.

"The Arab world and other raw-material suppliers could have tremendous impact on Washington when it comes to Iraq and political power," he said.

"The world can do it. And this is the way to begin," Halliday said, with a tone of confidence on hopeful expectations.

[Joerver]

16 Jan 2004 16:10

Federal ethnic-based Iraq would be "bloody" - Turk army
By Asli Kandemir and Zerin Elci

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey`s powerful military said on Friday it believed a federation in neighbouring Iraq based on ethnic lines would be "difficult and bloody".

A top Turkish general told reporters the General Staff believed a federation based on geography rather than ethnicity would be more suitable for Iraq.

"If there is a federal structure in Iraq on an ethnic basis, the future will be very difficult and bloody," General Ilker Basbug, the number two at the General Staff, told a rare news conference.

Turkey, like its neighbour Syria, is afraid that any autonomy for the Kurdish population in Iraq`s new political system could stir up similar aspirations among its own Kurdish minority.

The United States has said the decision on a new political framework for the war-torn country rests with the Iraqis.

Turkey has warned it would intervene if Kurds in northern Iraq declared an independent state.

Basbug also said the Turkish military believed the United States was not doing enough to wipe out Turkish Kurd rebels based in the mountains of northern Iraq, who have been waging a separatist war in southeast Turkey since the early 1980s.

He called on the U.S. army to take military action in the near future against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas, who use Iraq as a base for cross-border attacks.

"Our expectation is that the armed identity of the terror group will be wiped out, the terrorists will surrender or will be made to surrender," Basbug said.

"The U.S.`s fight against the PKK is not meeting our expectations in the current situation."

The conflict in southeast Turkey has killed more than 30,000 people, although violence has died down since the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Auch das von vielen Dummpostern so bewunderte US-Pensionsprogramm hat seine Tücken, trotz der anderen Bevölkerungsstruktur der USA.

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Business

Jan. 16, 2004, 3:18AM


Record deficit in pension insurance
Taxpayer bailout may be needed
Associated Press


WASHINGTON — The deficit for the government`s pension insurance program ballooned to a record $11.2 billion last year, more than triple the previous year`s total, and officials are warning that taxpayers could be called on for a bailout.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.`s financial woes are driven by an increasing number of bankrupt pension plans, from such companies as Bethlehem Steel and US Airways, and record-low interest rates, officials said.

The agency`s departing executive director, Steven Kandarian, said it could continue to pay pension benefits to retirees in bankrupt plans "for a number of years." The growing deficit, however, "puts at risk the agency`s ability to continue to protect pensions in the future," he said.

Kandarian urged Congress to act soon to reform the private pension system. It is being squeezed by low interest rates, a subdued stock market and laws that do not require employers to maintain full funding levels in their retirement plans.

About 34.5 million people are covered by 29,500 single-employer pension plans, which can include one business, a group of companies under common control or a pension plan sponsored by unrelated companies that is not collectively bargained.

Underfunding for all pension plans is estimated at more than $350 billion.

The agency`s single-employer program had a $7.6 billion net loss for the financial year that ended Sept. 30; that was on top of a $3.6 billion shortfall in 2002.

The agency took over 152 bankrupt single-employer pension plans last year covering 206,000 people. The majority of participants were in just two plans — Bethlehem Steel and National Steel. In 2002, the agency became trustee of 144 plans with 187,000 participants. It paid a record $2.5 billion in benefits in 2003, an increase of nearly $1 billion from the previous year.

Just two industries — airlines and steel — account for about 40 percent of the $85.5 million in potential liabilities the agency faces in "reasonably possible" exposure from financially weak employers.

If the agency falls further into debt, Kandarian warned that "the taxpayer might be called upon to make those payments" to workers who were promised benefits under traditional pension plans. That is a remedy he said he does not favor.

Officials from agency and the Labor and Treasury departments are working on a proposal to overhaul the private pension system. Kandarian, who announced his departure last week, citing family reasons, said the plan is in its final stages and could be offered to Congress soon.

The agency was created in 1974 to guarantee payment of some benefits earned in traditional pension plans, which are offered by employers and promise workers a set benefit based on salary and years of service. Workers are not required to make contributions as they do in 401(k)s.

The agency gets no taxpayer money. It is financed by insurance premiums paid by companies that sponsor pension plans.

It also guarantees pension benefits earned by the 9.7 million participants in more than 1,600 multiemployer pension plans, which often are collectively bargained by unrelated employers and unions. For the first time in more than 20 years, the agency`s multiemployer program had a deficit: $261 million, its largest.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said the deficit was "startling."

He pledged to work on a comprehensive overhaul this year that would "strengthen the defined benefit system for workers and employers and put PBGC on sound financial footing so that it can protect the pension benefits of American workers who rely on defined benefit plans for their retirement security."

The House has approved nearly $26 billion in temporary relief to companies struggling to keep up with pension plan payments, while lawmakers consider permanent changes. The Senate is expected to take up the measure when Congress returns next week. The White House supports the temporary relief, but it has criticized measures aimed at airlines that would let companies severely cut or halt the payments they are required to contribute to their plans.

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-ducks17…

Trip With Cheney Puts Ethics Spotlight on Scalia
Friends hunt ducks together, even as the justice is set to hear the vice president`s case.
By David G. Savage
Times Staff Writer

January 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck hunting together at a private camp in southern Louisiana just three weeks after the court agreed to take up the vice president`s appeal in lawsuits over his handling of the administration`s energy task force.

While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts about Scalia`s ability to judge the case impartially.

But Scalia rejected that concern Friday, saying, "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned."

Federal law says "any justice or judge shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned." For nearly three years, Cheney has been fighting demands that he reveal whether he met with energy industry officials, including Kenneth L. Lay when he was chairman of Enron, while he was formulating the president`s energy policy.

A lower court ruled that Cheney must turn over documents detailing who met with his task force, but on Dec. 15, the high court announced it would hear his appeal. The justices are due to hear arguments in April in the case of "in re Richard B. Cheney."

In a written response to an inquiry from the Times about the hunting trip, Scalia said: "Cheney was indeed among the party of about nine who hunted from the camp. Social contacts with high-level executive officials (including cabinet officers) have never been thought improper for judges who may have before them cases in which those people are involved in their official capacity, as opposed to their personal capacity. For example, Supreme Court Justices are regularly invited to dine at the White House, whether or not a suit seeking to compel or prevent certain presidential action is pending."

Cheney does not face a personal penalty in the pending lawsuits. He could not be forced to pay damages, for example.

But the suits are not routine disputes about the powers of Cheney`s office. Rather, the plaintiffs — the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch — contend that Cheney and his staff violated an open-government measure known as the Federal Advisory Committee Act by meeting behind closed doors with outside lobbyists for the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor, said Scalia should have skipped going hunting with Cheney this year.

"A judge may have a friendship with a lawyer, and that`s fine. But if the lawyer has a case before the judge, they don`t socialize until it`s over. That shows a proper respect for maintaining the public`s confidence in the integrity of the process," said Gillers, who is an expert on legal ethics. "I think Justice Scalia should have been cognizant of that and avoided contact with the vice president until this was over. And this is not like a dinner with 25 or 30 people. This is a hunting trip where you are together for a few days."

The pair arrived Jan. 5 on Gulfstream jets and were guests of Wallace Carline, the owner of Diamond Services Corp., an oil services company in Amelia, La. The Associated Press in Morgan City, La., reported the trip on the day the vice president and his entourage departed.

"They asked us not to bring cameras out there," said Sheriff David Naquin, who serves St. Mary Parish, about 90 miles southwest of New Orleans, referring to the group`s request for privacy. "The vice president and the justice were there for a relaxing trip, so we backed off."

While the local police were told about Cheney`s trip shortly before his arrival, they were told to keep it a secret, Naquin said.

"The justice had been here several times before. I`m kind of sorry Cheney picked that week because it was a poor shooting week," Naquin said. "There weren`t many ducks here, which is unusual for this time of the year."

Scalia agreed with the sheriff`s assessment.

"The duck hunting was lousy. Our host said that in 35 years of duck hunting on this lease, he had never seen so few ducks," the justice said in his written response to the Times. "I did come back with a few ducks, which tasted swell."

In October, Justice Scalia announced he would not participate in the court`s handling of a case involving the Pledge of Allegiance; that case is due to be heard in March. It stems from a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling two years ago that declared unconstitutional the use of the words "under God" in the Pledge that is recited daily by millions of schoolchildren. These words were added to the Pledge by Congress in 1954, and they amount to an official government promotion of religion, the appeals court said.

Last year, Justice Scalia appeared to criticize that ruling in a speech at a Religious Freedom Day event in Fredericksburg, Va. "We could eliminate `under God` from the Pledge of Allegiance," he said. "That could be democratically done."

But this is contrary to the wishes of most Americans, and it should not be done by judges or courts, he added.

The California school district that was on the losing end in the Pledge case appealed to the Supreme Court last summer.

Its lawyers urged the justices to restore the use of the words "under God."

While the appeal was pending, the Sacramento-area atheist who won the ruling in the 9th Circuit filed a motion suggesting Scalia withdraw from the case. He cited news account of Scalia`s speech and the federal law mandating disqualifications whenever the judge`s impartiality "might reasonably be questioned." When the court announced it would hear the case, Scalia also announced he would not participate.

Steven Lubet, who teaches judicial ethics at Northwestern University Law School, said he was not convinced that Scalia must withdraw from the Cheney case but said the trip raised a number of questions.

"It`s not clear this requires disqualification, but there are not separate rules for longtime friends," he said. "This is not like a lawyer going on a fishing trip with a judge. A lawyer is one step removed. Cheney is the litigant in this case. The question is whether the justice`s hunting partner did something wrong. And the whole purpose of these rules is to ensure the appearance of impartiality in regard to the litigants before the court."

The code of conduct for federal judges sets guidelines for members of the judiciary, but it does not set clear-cut rules. A judge should "act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary," it says. "A judge should not allow family, social or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgments," it says. Nor should a judge "permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge."

In the lower courts, litigants may ask a judge to step aside. And if the request is refused, they may appeal to a higher court.

At the Supreme Court, the justices decide for themselves whether to step aside. On occasion, Justice Sandra Day O`Connor has withdrawn from business cases because she owns stock in one of the companies.

The justices have been reluctant to withdraw from a case simply because a former clerk is handling the dispute, or their son or daughter works at a law firm participating in the case. Last year, for example, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said he did not see a need to withdraw from a pending appeal in the Microsoft antitrust case simply because his son, a lawyer, was working on a related case.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-hubb…
SCIENCE FILE

Noch ein Opfer der Bush Politik!

Hubble Telescope`s Days Numbered, NASA Says
From Associated Press

January 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to degrade and eventually become useless, as NASA changes focus to President Bush`s plans to send humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, officials said Friday.

NASA canceled all space shuttle servicing missions to the Hubble, which has revolutionized the study of astronomy with its striking images of the universe.

John Grunsfeld, NASA`s chief scientist, said NASA administrator Sean O`Keefe made the decision to cancel the fifth space shuttle service mission to the Hubble when it became clear there was not enough time to conduct it before the shuttle is retired. The servicing mission was considered essential to enable the orbiting telescope to continue to operate.

"This is a sad day," said Grunsfeld, but he said the decision "is the best thing for the space community."

He said the decision was influenced by the president`s new space initiative, which calls for NASA to start developing the spacecraft and equipment for voyages to the moon and later to Mars. The president`s plan also called for the space shuttle to be retired by 2010. Virtually all of the shuttle`s remaining flights would be used to complete construction of the international space station.

The shuttle has been grounded since the Columbia disaster nearly a year ago.

Grunsfeld said Bush "directed us to use this precious resource" — the shuttle — toward completing the space station and fulfilling U.S. obligations to the 15 partner nations.

Without servicing missions, he said, the Hubble should continue operating until 2007 or 2008, "as long as we can." NASA already was planning to replace the Hubble with a new, improved version, called the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2011.

The Hubble has revolutionized astronomy.

Using images from the craft, scientists have determined the age of the universe, about 13.7 billion years, and discovered that a mysterious energy, called the dark force, is causing all of the objects in the universe to move apart at an accelerating rate. This force is still poorly understood.

The observatory has ailing gyroscopes that were to be replaced on the servicing mission, which already has been delayed by the Columbia accident.

Grunsfeld said the Hubble had three good gyroscopes and one that was not working well. Software was being developed to work with only two gyroscopes, he said, but the telescope would not have the same capabilities.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

NASA pulling the plug on Hubble / It won`t send another mission to repair prized space telescope
The Hubble telescope captured this image of the gaseous "Cone Nebula" in 1995. NASA Photo
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/17/…

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Three U.S. soldiers among 5 killed in Iraq blast
American death toll rises to 500 since war began

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) --Three U.S. soldiers and two members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps were killed Saturday morning when a roadside bomb detonated north of Baghdad, a American military spokesman said.

A patrol was sweeping the area for improvised explosive devices when the blast occurred on a road west of Taji, about 19 miles (30 kilometers) north of the Iraqi capital, according to a statement from the 4th Infantry Division.

The explosion split open the gun turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle the patrol was traveling in, a 4th Infantry Division spokesman said.

The blast knocked the 26-ton vehicle on its side and started a fire, military sources said. A gunner and commander escaped with injuries, the sources said. The wounded soldiers were taken to a Baghdad hospital, according to the military.

With the latest attack, 500 U.S. troops have been killed in the Iraq war, including 346 in hostile action. Since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations May 1, 361 American forces have been killed, including 231in hostile action.

A quick reaction force immediately secured the area and detained three Iraqis fleeing in a white truck carrying bomb-making materials, the Fourth Infantry Division said.

U.S. to investigate allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commanding general of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, has ordered a criminal investigation into reported incidents of abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops at a detention facility in Iraq, Pentagon officials said Friday.

Officials said the investigation encompasses more than one incident.

The reports came through military channels and are being taken "very seriously," Pentagon officials said.

"These are not rumors," a coalition spokesman said of the reports of abuse. This source said there was "enough concern to the senior military to initiate an investigation."

The abuse included kicking prisoners in the groin and twisting a prisoner`s injured arm.

The number of reports or potential cases of abuse was not made public.

The U.S. Army`s criminal investigative division will participate in the investigation, the spokesman said.

The Army said this month that three soldiers had been discharged from military service for abusing Iraqi prisoners.

The soldiers could have faced a court-martial proceeding but agreed instead to a nonjudicial hearing.

Master Sgt. Lisa Girman, Staff Sgt. Scott McKenzie and Spec. Timothy Canjar were all found guilty of dereliction of duty for failing to safeguard Iraqis under their control, and maltreatment of Iraqi detainees.

In addition to the discharges, two soldiers were demoted, and all three were ordered to forfeit pay for two months.

The soldiers were military police in a unit from Pennsylvania at a southern Iraqi camp when the abuse occurred May 12, according to the Army. An investigation began after other soldiers saw and reported what happened. (Full story)

In December, Lt. Col. Allen West was fined $5,000 over two months after a military hearing on accusations that he used improper methods to force an Iraqi detainee to give up information about a plot to assassinate him with an ambush on a U.S. convoy. (Full story)

There was no indication that Sanchez`s probe is related to those cases.

Bremer, Bush meet
L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, was in Washington on Friday to discuss the country`s political transition with President Bush and his national security team, U.S. officials said.

Bremer sat down with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before conferring with Bush on Friday afternoon at the White House.

Bremer also is set to attend meetings Monday in New York with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that will include members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council; Jeremy Greenstock, Bremer`s British counterpart; and John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Administration sources said the goal is to win a strong statement from Annan backing the transition plan as well as a commitment to send a U.N. team to Iraq to assist with the effort. (Full story)

The administration is debating "refinements" designed to deal with criticism from Iraqi Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, about the proposed methods of choosing the country`s next government.

Sistani has called for direct elections and voiced concerns that the caucus plan is designed to limit Shiite influence. Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraq`s population.

Adnan Pachachi, president of the governing council, warned Thursday that creating procedures for a direct vote would delay the transition to sovereignty. (Full story)

Tens of thousands protested Thursday in the southern city of Basra, and in smaller rallies elsewhere, to call for a direct vote.

Other developments
• A handful of Iraqis who had given the United States information about weapons of mass destruction programs were slain by unknown Iraqi assailants soon thereafter, CNN has learned. The killings began during the early stages of the U.S. occupation last spring. U.S. officials said others were badly injured in attacks after supplying information about the weapons programs. The sources also said computer hard drives believed to contain information about the weapons programs were stolen as U.S. investigators were closing in on them. In one case, officials said, an Iraqi scientist was shot in the back of the head while walking down a street hours after leaving an interview with members of the U.S. Iraq Survey Group, which is searching for weapons of mass destruction.

• Powell said Friday that captured Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has not provided useful information, and instead appears to be a man who is "trying to protect himself and justify his despicable actions during the time that he was the dictator of Iraq." Powell said that, according to the reports he has read, Saddam "is someone who knows the trouble he is in." Saddam was captured December 13 capture in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit.

• A 30-member delegation has left Tokyo for Iraq ahead of the first deployment of Japanese troops, TV Asahi reported. The Japanese contingent of 600 troops will be based in Samawa, in southeastern Iraq. They will be deployed to noncombat areas for humanitarian purposes. (Full story)

• A roadside bomb detonated Friday in Baghdad, wounding three children and an interpreter, according to a U.S. Army major. One of the children was in serious condition, the Army official said. An informant tipped off U.S.-led coalition forces about the bomb`s location, in a residential area of the Iraqi capital, the official said. While the troops tried to secure the area, the bomb detonated -- either by remote control or by timer -- near two U.S. soldiers, the official said. No coalition forces were injured, he said.

• The British Royal Military Police is investigating the death of Sgt. Steven Roberts in March after allegations were raised that he was sent into action without proper body equipment. Roberts, 33, was killed southwest of Basra after being shot in the chest. A Defense Ministry report showed that Roberts was issued specialized body armor but was ordered to give it back because his regiment didn`t have enough. He was given standard armor instead. (Full story)

CNN`s John King, Alphonso Van Marsh, Sheila MacVicar, Karl Penhaul, Robin Oakley and Barbara Starr contributed to this report.




Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/01/17/sprj.nirq.main…

[Joerver]

Richard Reeves: `The decline and fall of the White House press corps`
Posted on Saturday, January 17 @ 09:49:17 EST
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Richard Reeves, Yahoo

WASHINGTON -- The relationship between presidents and the press has never been simple. Presidents quite naturally, in one way or another, want sympathy and control over what is written and said about their administrations and policies.

President Eisenhower cheerfully and deliberately confused reporters. President Kennedy charmed them into seeing things his way. President Nixon tried to destroy them. President Reagan, even more cheerful than Eisenhower, waved them off or pretended not to know what they were asking him. President Carter tried to argue with them, and President Clinton dazzled them with footwork and complicated dialogues with himself. None of them, with the possible exception of Kennedy, actually liked correspondents, but even he told his men to remember that in the end politicians and the press always go their separate ways.

Right now they are both doing just that: The White House is going up and the press is going down.



But -- and this is new -- whatever they thought of the ladies and gentlemen of the press, past presidents all accepted a press role in the democracy. Questions, analysis and commentary -- annoying, of course -- were viewed as informing the public, obviously a legitimate part of democratic governance. The press had an essential role -- checks and balances, yelling that the emperors had no clothes and all that.

Not now. Not under George W. Bush`s administration. And I am not just talking about ignoring phone calls from reporters or classifying every piece of paper they get their hands on. In a remarkable article in the current issue of The New Yorker, Ken Auletta, the resident don of the magazine`s "Annals of Communication," has persuaded President Bush and his media men to articulate the straight skinny: They simply and sincerely, I think, state that they do not accept the "historic role of the press" as surrogate and watchdog of the people. As far as they are concerned, Auletta concludes, the press is simply another "special interest" trying to get something for nothing from government -- salable information in this case.

"You`re making a huge assumption -- that you represent what the public thinks," the president told a reporter who asked him last summer about reports that he did not read newspapers. In case we did not understand what that meant, Andrew Card, the president`s chief of staff, told Auletta: "They (the press) don`t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stand for election. ... I don`t believe you have a check-and-balance function."

Karl Rove, the president`s political director, spelled out the "special interest" perception, saying: "He (Bush) has a cagey respect for them -- the press. ... He understands that their job is to do a job. And that`s not necessarily to report the news. It`s to get a headline or get a story that will make people pay more attention to their magazine, newspaper or television more."

Some have described the president`s relative isolation -- he has held 11 solo press conferences to date, compared with his father`s 73 at the same point back in 1992 -- by calling it "Bush`s problem with the press." That phrase is backward; it is the press that has a Bush problem. White House correspondents have been reduced to stenographers taking dictation from the press office; their real gripe is that there is not enough dictation. Pathetic, but true.

Many correspondents have dealt with that situation by taking it easy on the men in power now, trying to win them over by showing how nice they can be in print or on the air. They don`t get it. The White House is way ahead of them. Bush has figured out that buttering up the press does not guarantee good coverage; quite the opposite.

The press still thinks that buttering up the White House -- particularly in coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan policy -- will get them more favored treatment. Wrong! All the White House press corps is getting from the people they cover is amused and deserved contempt.

Reprinted from Yahoo:
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Ich hatte vor einigen Tagen auf diese Umfrage hingewiesen und cwar erstaunt, dass so gar keine Reaktion gekommen ist. Ich hatte einen AP-Artikel vom 12.01.04 eingestellt über dieses Thema.
Deshalb hier noch einmal das Thema auf Deutsch von Heise.


Die amerikanischen Juden sind eher Bush-Gegner

Florian Rötzer 17.01.2004
Als Anhänger der Demokraten lehnen die meisten amerikanischen Juden den Irak-Krieg ab, stehen jedoch hinter der israelischen US-Politik und sind über den wachsenden Antisemitismus in den USA und vor allem in Europa besorgt

Nach einer aktuellen Umfrage bezeichnen sich die meisten amerikanischen Juden als Demokraten und stehen nicht hinter der Politik der US-Regierung. Gleichwohl ist das Ansehen von US-Präsident Bush gegenüber den letzten Präsidentschaftswahlen stark gestiegen, als ihn nur 19 Prozent, Al Gore hingegen 66 Prozent gewählt hatten. Jetzt würden ihn nach der Umfrage bereits 31 Prozent wählen, wenn der demokratische Präsidentschaftskandidat Howard Dean gegen ihn antreten sollte, für den 60 Prozent stimmen würden. Für Joe Liebermann, den einzigen jüdischen Präsidentschaftskandidaten der Demokraten, würden allerdings 71 Prozent stimmen.

Nach einer Umfrage, die vom American Jewish Committee [1] in Auftrag gegeben wurde, findet die Bush-Regierung bei der Mehrzahl der Juden, die in den USA leben, wenig Unterstützung, Teile von deren Politik, zumal wenn sie mit Israel zusammen hängen, allerdings schon. In den USA leben 5,2 Millionen Juden. Für die Umfrage wurden 1.000 Personen befragt, die von sich selbst sagten, dass sie Juden sind und weiterhin den jüdischen Glauben beibehalten wollen. Über zwei Drittel geben an, dass sie sich Israel nahe fühlen und dass es für einen Juden sehr wichtig ist, sich um Israel zu kümmern. Wichtig ist für fast alle auch die jüdische Identität.

Beunruhigt sind 90 Prozent offenbar über den Antisemitismus, den es auch in den USA gibt, ein Drittel sagt gar, dass dies ein sehr ernstes Problem sei. Auch an den Hochschulen gebe es damit ein Problem. Fast die Hälfte meint, der Antisemitismus in den USA würde in den nächsten Jahren noch zunehmen, dagegen gehen 67 Prozent davon aus, dass er sich in der Welt verstärken wird. Am stärksten antisemitisch eingestellt in den USA sind in ihren Augen nicht nur die Muslime, sondern auch die religiöse Rechte. 96 Prozent betrachten den Antisemitismus in Europa gegenwärtig als Problem, 55 Prozent sogar als sehr ernstes. Das kann vom Antisemitismus, der in arabischen Welt herrscht, kaum mehr übertroffen werden: 97 sehen in ihm ein Problem, 77 Prozent ein ernstes.

Nur 16 Prozent der Befragten bezeichneten sich als Republikaner, dafür aber 51 Prozent als Anhänger der Demokraten und 31 Prozent nannten sich unabhängig. Die meisten betrachten sich als politisch gemäßigt oder als liberal. Von der Mehrzahl abgelehnt wird zwar eine stärkere Förderung von religiösen Organisationen, allerdings soll auch in den Schulen die "Pledge of Alliance" mit dem Ausdruck "unter Gott" beibehalten werden. Dass US-Präsident Bush mit seiner Nahost-Politik nicht unbedingt konform mit den Ansichten der amerikanischen Juden geht, zeigen die Umfrageergebnisse zu diesem Themenbereich. 54 Prozent lehnen den Krieg gegen den Terrorismus und ebenso viele den Irak-Krieg ab. Und 42 Prozent glauben, dass durch die Politik von Bush der Terrorismus zugenommen hat, während 48 Prozent der Meinung sind, dass sich nichts verändert habe. Nur 9 Prozent sagen, er sei weniger geworden.

Für die im Irak-Krieg mit den USA alliierten Staaten haben die amerikanischen Juden dennoch die größten Sympathien, allen voran für Großbritannien und dann Italien, Spanien und Polen. Gleichwohl schätzen sie offenbar auch Russland, der EU und Südafrika sowie den mit Israel verbundenem Indien und der Türkei. Deutschland kommt noch leidlich weg, Frankreich aber liegt noch hinter Ägypten und Jordanien, wenn auch noch vor Saudi-Arabien, Syrien und dem Iran. Die Palästinenser schneiden am schlechtesten ab. Gefragt, welche Regierungen Israel am nächsten stehen, dominiert natürlich die US-Regierung, gefolgt von Großbritannien.

Die Haltung zum israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt ist hingegen relativ eindeutig, was die Unterstützung der Interessen Israels betrifft. 58 Prozent denken, dass man einer Friedenslösung nicht näher gekommen ist, aber 37 Prozent sind pessimistischer als noch ein Jahr zuvor. Von den "Arabern" erwartet man nichts: 81 Prozent der Befragten glauben, dass es diesen nicht um die Rückerlangung der besetzten Gebiete, sondern eigentlich um die Vernichtung Israels geht (aber sie glauben mit überwältigender Mehrheit nicht, dass die Anschläge vom 11.9. etwas mit dem wirklichen Islam zu tun haben). Die meisten stehen prinzipiell hinter der jeweiligen israelischen Regierung, befürworten einen palästinensischen Staat, sind aber auch zumindest für einen teilweisen Rückzug aus den Siedlungen im Westjordanland. Nach der Mauer wurde nicht gefragt.

Selbst wenn die meisten eine führende Rolle der USA in der internationalen Politik fordern, sind sie ebenfalls der Meinung, dass die USA nicht alleine handeln sollten. Im Unterschied zur Praxis der Bush-Regierung sagen auch über zwei Drittel, dass Entscheidungen zusammen mit Europa gefällt werden sollten, selbst wenn sie starke Sorgen über den angeblich in Europa herrschenden Antisemitismus haben.


Links

Telepolis Artikel-URL: http://www.telepolis.de/deutsch/inhalt/co/16508/1.html

http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/Publications.asp?did=1030

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American Terminator
Character flaws: The U. S. can inflict great damage while sustaining none, and is programmed to rebuild itself, but not others. That’s its problem.

Robert King / Polaris for Newsweek
Manpower deficit: U.S. Reserves on patrol in Iraq, already a strain on American forces


By Niall Ferguson
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3606145/

Issues 2004 - The United States is now an empire in all but name—the first case in history of an empire in denial. That may explain why a country which accounts for nearly a third of total world output now has such surprising trouble getting what it wants. The last great Anglophone empire ruled over a quarter of the world’s land surface and population, despite the fact that Britain accounted for less than a tenth of global production. Yet the United States has spent recent months struggling to control just two foreign countries: Afghanistan and Iraq. If it is indeed an empire, it seems a strangely feeble one.


America’s imperial anemia takes some serious explaining; it is not enough simply to blame its troubles on the Bush administration’s alleged diplomatic ineptitude. To understand what has gone wrong this past year, it is necessary to rethink what we mean by power. For all too often we confuse that concept with other, quite different things: wealth and weaponry, influence and appeal. It is quite possible to have a great deal of all these things, yet to have only limited power. That is the American predicament.

The United States has an enormous economy: in current dollar terms, its gross domestic product is 30 times bigger than Russia’s, 20 times bigger than India’s, eight times bigger than China’s, more than two and a half times bigger than Japan’s and 22 percent bigger than the European Union’s. Its military capability is unrivaled: it spends more on its armed forces than the next dozen or more countries combined, and produces weaponry so much better than that of any conceivable competition that talk of “full-spectrum dominance” does not seem exaggerated.

Yet look at the record of recent months. Establishing law and order in Iraq has proved to be beyond the capacity of America’s armed forces, even with British assistance. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein raised hopes that America just might be able to break the deadlock in the Middle East, but by the autumn, Yasir Arafat had reasserted control over the Palestinian administration and Ariel Sharon was building a replica of the Berlin wall around the Palestinians. Meanwhile, a repulsive tin-pot dictator in North Korea was defying American hyperpower with impunity, openly restarting his nuclear-weapons program and threatening to “open the nuclear deterrent to the public as a physical force.”

Some pax Americana. The United States even hesitated before sending a tiny force to the one basket-case country in Africa for which it can be said to have any historical responsibility, Liberia. In August three ships, carrying about 4,500 sailors and Marines, were sent to Liberia after repeated requests for American intervention. In all, 225 Americans went ashore, of whom 50 contracted malaria. Two months later the Americans pulled out. This halfhearted African adventure exemplifies the limits of American power.

But how are we to explain these limits?

The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California offers an important clue to the nature of American power. In his most recent film, “Terminator 3,” Schwarzenegger plays an almost indestructible robot programmed to protect a young man who is destined to save the world. In the climactic scene, the Terminator’s operating system becomes corrupted: instead of saving the future savior, he comes close to killing him. As his original program battles this contradictory command, the word abort flashes in big red lights in his head, finally preventing him from doing anything.

In three distinct ways, “T3” is a perfect metaphor for the deficits that constrain American might. Though he has the body of a man half his age, Schwarzenegger himself is, in fact, just four years short of his 60th birthday. His determination to remain forever Mr. Universe typifies the determination of an entire generation never to grow old, though grow old they must—with important economic consequences. As he contemplates the finances of the state of California, the real Arnold Schwarzenegger now confronts just a fraction of the huge economic deficit that is the first real constraint on American power.

The Terminator is also a very American hero for the simple reason that there is only one of him. In this he personifies the chronic manpower shortage that constrains American nation-building. Above all, the Terminator exemplifies the American attention deficit. Less than a year after the invasion of Iraq, a growing number of Americans have already got that five-letter word flashing in their heads: abort.

Let’s first take a closer look at the fabled $10 trillion U.S. economy. The lion’s share of the annual output of the American economy is, in fact, accounted for by private consumption. That share has risen from about 61 percent in 1967 to 70 percent in 2002. As they have consumed more, so Americans have saved ever less: the savings rate averaged about 10 percent between 1973 and 1983; at its low point, in 1999, it touched 1.6 percent, and it has risen only slightly to 3.6 percent in 2003. The only way that the United States has been able to achieve such rapid economic growth in the past decade has been by financing investment with the savings of foreigners. As a result it has gone from being the world’s banker to being the world’s debtor: the country’s net international-investment position was about 12 percent of GDP in 1980; in 2002 it was close to minus 25 percent.

Foreign lending also underwrites the American government. Some 46 percent of the total federal debt in public hands is now held by foreigners, and the bulk of the most recent purchases have been made by Asian central banks, particularly the Japanese and the Chinese. The fact that the financial stability of the United States today depends on the central bank of the People’s Republic of China is not widely known. Yet the significance is great. A debtor power can’t possibly exert the same leverage as a creditor power, and U.S. deficits look likely to grow as the baby-boom generation approaches retirement, because only a minority will have made adequate provision for the idleness and illness of old age. One recent estimate of the implicit “fiscal imbalance” between future spending and tax revenue arrived at the mind-boggling figure of $45 trillion.

That’s not the only troubling U.S. deficit. As has become obvious in Iraq, the United States does not have an especially large pool of combat-effective troops on which it can draw. With about 130,000 personnel required for active service in postwar Iraq, the Pentagon admits that it is at full stretch. Since the end of the cold war, service-personnel cuts have lowered the number of Americans troops abroad to little more than 200,000 at any one time. The rest are, or expect to be, at home. Foreign postings are expected to last six months, or at most a year.

This manpower deficit is compounded by the attention deficit: to be precise, a reluctance on the part of voters to tolerate prolonged commitments of American forces in hostile territory. It took about three years—from 1965 to 1968—and more than 30,000 men killed in action to reduce popular support for the Vietnam War by 25 percent. Between April and September 2003, by contrast, there was a comparably large drop in the popularity of the war in Iraq. Yet in that five-month period, little more than 300 U.S. service personnel lost their lives, a third of whom were the victims of accidents or sickness. Small wonder the Bush administration has felt compelled to promise the swiftest possible transfer of power to the Iraqi people.

Of the three deficits that eat away at American power, this last is the most serious. The economic deficit need not be fatal. Why shouldn’t the Japanese and Chinese fund American consumption indefinitely if Americans are happy to consume their products rather than those produced by American manufacturers? The manpower deficit may also be solvable. Why shouldn’t the United Nations help the United States create a peacekeeping force big enough to provide an effective constabulary for Iraq?

But the attention deficit is the real source of American weakness. For the creation of stable economic, legal and political institutions in a country like Iraq simply cannot be achieved in a 12-month time frame. The shorter the life of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the more difficult it will be to elicit the collaboration of local elites on which all imperial power must ultimately rely. Why would anyone want to collaborate with foreign occupiers who will soon, by their own admission, be gone?

If the United States is not quite as strong as it looks, the knee-jerk response of “realist” analysts of international relations is to look for signs that another power may be rising. Some point to the European Union. Others point to China. Yet there are good reasons to doubt whether either can be regarded as a credible rival—the EU because it is too economically sclerotic and politically fragmented, China because it is too economically volatile and politically centralized. In any case, the United States, the EU and China have more reasons to cooperate than they have to compete, whether the enemy is terror, AIDS or climate change.

The paradox of globalization is that as the world becomes more integrated, so power becomes more diffuse. The old monopolies on which power was traditionally based—monopolies of wealth, political office and knowledge—have been in large measure broken up. Unfortunately, thanks to the proliferation of modern means of destruction, the power to inflict violence has also become more evenly distributed—so that a poison dwarf like North Korea can resist the will even of the American giant.

Power is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price. It is about being able to get people to perform services or deliver goods they would not ordinarily offer to sell at any price. Yet power diminishes as it is shared. One country with one nuclear bomb is more powerful, if the rest of the world has none, than a country with a thousand nuclear bombs, if everyone else has one. And this brings us to the final respect in which America resembles the Terminator.

The United States has the capability to inflict appalling destruction while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. There is no regime it could not terminate if it wanted to—including North Korea. Such a war might leave South Korea in ruins, but the American Terminator would emerge more or less unscathed. What the Terminator is not programmed to do is to rebuild anyone but himself. If, as seems likely, the United States responds to pressure at home and abroad by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan before their economic reconstruction has been achieved, the scene will not be wholly unfamiliar. The limits of American power will be laid bare when the global Terminator finally admits: “I won’t be back.”

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc

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Published on Saturday, January 17, 2004 by the Boston Globe
Facing Questions, Clark Backs Army School
by Joanna Weiss

CONCORD, N.H. -- Retired General Wesley K. Clark sometimes downplays his Army background, and criticizes the military`s "don`t ask, don`t tell" policy on gays. But there is one military institution he vigorously defends: the controversial academy once known as the US Army School of the Americas.

Opposition to the school, which trains military officers from Latin American countries, has long been a cause celebre among some Democrats and liberal activists, who say the academy has trained some of the most notorious criminals of the region and teaches skills that Latin American armies sometimes use against their own citizenry. Supporters of the school point to reforms from the 1990s, and say its courses teach foreign soldiers about democracy and human rights.

But many critics have not wavered in their opposition, and voters on the campaign trail -- in New Hampshire and elsewhere -- have been questioning Clark about his support.


Clark never headed the school but had dealings with it when he led the US Southern Command from 1996 to 1997. He delivered a graduation speech there in 1996 and has praised the school before Congress. George Bruno, the cochairman of Clark`s New Hampshire campaign and a former ambassador to Belize, was a paid adviser to the school when it reopened with a new charter in 2001.

Now, on the stump, Clark strongly defends the school, without denying that some graduates have committed atrocities in their home countries.

At a retirement home in Concord this month, one woman told Clark that the school`s graduates have been accused of murder. Clark responded that when white-collar criminals are arrested for fraud, nobody faults their alma mater.

"There`s been a lot of rotten people who`ve gone to a lot of rotten schools in the history of the world," Clark said. "And a lot of them went to this school. But a lot of them have gone to Harvard Business School and a lot of other places."

The US Army School of the Americas, created in 1946, has been located since the 1960s in a building at Fort Benning, Ga., and trains 800 to 1,000 Latin American military officers each year, in courses that last from six weeks to one year. Former Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega is a graduate, along with some of the most notorious criminals of Latin America, critics say. Nineteen graduates also were involved in the killings of seven Jesuit priests and two of their coworkers in El Salvador in 1989.

Allegations against the school intensified in 1996, after the Pentagon declassified a report that said manuals used there in the 1980s advocated fighting insurgents with execution, blackmail, kidnapping, and torture.

In 1997, as commander in chief of the US Southern Command, Clark praised the school before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying its mission had changed since the Cold War days. "This school is the best means available to ensure that the armed forces in Latin America and the armies in Latin America understand US values and adopt those values as their own," Clark said at the time.

But some members of Congress, including Massachusetts` late Representative J. Joseph Moakley and former Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, pressed for legislation to close the school. In 2000, Congress did so. Weeks later, a new school -- the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation -- reoponed in the same building.

The new institute has an oversight board that includes members of Congress and academics, said Lee Rials, a spokesman for the school. He said the law also requires the school to offer human rights training and mandates student trips to see US government in action. The school also offers tours to the public.

But opponents insist the school should be shut down, and they continue to gather thousands for annual protests at Fort Benning, organized by a Washington-based group called SOA Watch. Actor Martin Sheen is among those who have been arrested for trespassing there; nuns and priests are often among the arrested, as well.

US Representative James P. McGovern, a Democrat of Worcester, introduced a bill last March to shut down the school, cosponsored by 102 representatives, including Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri -- both candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination this year. Senator John F. Kerry, another candidate, signed on to a Senate bill to shut down the school, introduced in 1998, according to McGovern`s staff.

The school has "become a symbol that represents all of the things we don`t want people to think of us in Latin America," said McGovern, who has endorsed Kerry in the presidential race. "It`s a stain on our human rights record, and it seems to me that at a time when we`re trying to lift up our credibility around the world, especially in the area of human rights, it would be a very powerful statement" to close it.

In New Hamspshire and Wisconsin, Clark has defended the school to questioners. "We are teaching police and military people from Latin America human rights," he said last week in Concord. "And if we didn`t bring them in and teach them human rights, they wouldn`t be able to learn human rights anywhere."

On the stump, Clark tells critics that Bruno will take them to visit the school, although he sometimes misidentifies Bruno as a board member.

"He`s on the board. He`ll be happy to take you down there," Clark told the woman who questioned him in Concord. "If you find anything in that curriculum material or anything that`s taught there that looks in any way remotely connected with human rights abuse or torture, you let me know, and I promise you, we`ll close the School of the Americas when I`m president," he said.

But if "you find nothing wrong [and] you see these officers and noncommissioned officers in there learning about human rights, I`d like you to change your position."

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company
http://www.soaw.org/new/
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1118-12.htm

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January 18, 2004
Iraq Rebels Seen Using More Skill to Down Copters
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 — A classified Army study of the downings of military helicopters in Iraq found that guerrillas have used increasingly sophisticated tactics and weapons — including at least one advanced missile — to attack American aircraft, senior Army officials in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region say.

The insurgents have proved adept at using both rocket-propelled grenades, which are point-and-shoot weapons, and heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, which require greater maintenance and skill, said Army officials familiar with the study.

No type of helicopter is more vulnerable or more protected against the problem, the review found. But the team recommended specific changes to help pilots better evade ground fire, Army officials said. Senior officers declined to elaborate, but changes in the past have included flying more missions at night with lights off to avoid detection.

The study was conducted before the three most recent downings this month, but those incidents in the restive area near Falluja, west of Baghdad, have only reinforced the team`s findings and raised fears that insurgents are closely studying the flight patterns of helicopters and other aircraft, Army officials said.

"The enemy has clearly seen the possibilities from earlier successes," said one senior Army aviator in the Persian Gulf region. "The enemy enjoys a strategic success each time one of our aircraft is shot down. It becomes a major media event, and questions arise as to who is winning. So the enemy sees this as very useful."

It was concern about these attacks that prompted Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, to go beyond the standard review after any crash and order last month a comprehensive study of all downings, Army officials said. The aim was to detect more about the insurgents` techniques and weaponry, and possible weaknesses in the Americans` defensive countermeasures and tactics.

One troubling finding, Army officials said, is that on at least one occasion the insurgents used an SA-16 shoulder-fired missile, which has a guidance system that is harder to thwart than the SA-7 missiles and rocket-propelled grenades that insurgents have used in other attacks.

Since Oct. 25, nine military helicopters have been shot down or have crash-landed after being hit by what the authorities believe was hostile fire, killing a total of 49 soldiers. American military authorities say on Jan. 2, a rocket-propelled grenade or a surface-to-air missile downed an OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter, killing the pilot.

Six days later, another missile, probably either an SA-7 or SA-16, struck a UH-60 Black Hawk medical evacuation helicopter, killing nine crew members and passengers. And on Tuesday, ground fire brought down an AH-64 Apache gunship, but the two crew members survived.

Senior military officials in Iraq emphasized that with the three latest incidents near Falluja still under investigation, it was premature to draw any conclusions about long-term trends. "It`s hard to say whether it`s been a bad couple of weeks or it`s something larger," said one senior officer in Baghdad. "But clearly, that area has us concerned."

The team conducting the review was headed by Col. Stephen Dwyer, a brigade commander at the Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala., and it included about a dozen forensic and weapons experts, crash analysts and helicopter specialists. The team spent about four weeks in Iraq visiting each crash site, taking soil samples for forensic analysis and talking to aviators.

"They went over to look at Army aviation, make an assessment and make recommendations on how to improve it," said Lt. Col. James Bullinger, a spokesman for the Army Aviation Center.

Colonel Bullinger said that even before the team started its work, the Army was adopting lessons from Iraq, teaching pilots to fire their weapons while "running and diving," instead of hovering, when a helicopter is more vulnerable to an attack from the ground.

Senior Army commanders said the assessment team provided several valuable insights for pilots in Iraq, and for the fresh crews preparing to rotate into the country.

"This is a case of our Army coming through quickly with the right expertise at the right place," said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which had as many as 250 helicopters in Iraq.

American intelligence analysts have said that during Saddam Hussein`s rule, Iraq stockpiled at least 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles, and that fewer than a third have been recovered. The missiles are also easy to smuggle across Iraq`s porous borders, as they weigh 30 pounds or less and are under six feet long.

The senior Army aviator added: "No specific aircraft appears more susceptible than others. The team found that RPG`s, SA-7`s, SA-14`s, and an SA-16 were used. The RPG appears to be a fairly effective weapon in a skilled shooter`s hands and given the right parameters, somewhat close to the ground."

Army officials declined to specify which incidents might have involved an SA-16. One senior officer said the Black Hawk that crashed on Jan. 8 might have been shot down by an SA-16, but another senior officer disagreed, saying that parts of an SA-7 warhead had been found in the wreckage. Both missile systems were designed by the Soviet Union.

"It`s unclear just how many SA-16`s are in the theater," the senior Army aviator in the gulf region said, "but it is a worrisome development which both helicopter and fixed-wing forces will have to fully understand and counter."

Army helicopters, like military airplanes, have defensive countermeasures, including flares and a metallic confetti called chaff, that are designed to help defeat infrared and radar-guided missiles. Some helicopters also have infrared jammers.

But these defenses are designed to guard against missiles, not rocket-propelled grenades. So pilots must also rely on evasive tactics. These tactics include flying low and fast, as well as asking passengers and crew members to watch for ground fire.

There are trade-offs in different tactics, Army aviators said. Flying at high altitudes protects aircraft from rocket-propelled grenades, but somewhat increases the likelihood of being spotted and engaged by surface-to-air missiles, one officer said.

Military officials in Iraq say they review pilots` tactics and procedures after every incident, but they never stop flying missions. "We are changing tactics on a daily basis based on the intelligence and the operating patterns that we`re seeing so that we don`t present a steady-state pattern to the enemy," General Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad on Friday.

On a flight last month between Tikrit and Ad Dwar, the village where Mr. Hussein was captured, a visitor aboard a UH-60 Black Hawk was treated to a roller-coaster ride as the pilot banked sharply several times and flew just above treetops at more than 130 miles an hour during a 10-minute trip, to pose a more fleeting target to potential shooters on the ground.

Military officials said a combination of former Iraqi military or security personnel, and possibly foreign fighters, were probably carrying out the attacks against helicopters.

"Many incidents against aircraft are attacks by Iraqi former regime elements and those paid by them," said the senior Army aviator in the gulf region. "It is clearly possible and likely — if not yet, in the future — that foreign fighters will target helicopters, since a successful attack often has strategic effect."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
In Search of Rescue

Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page B06


WITH ITS STRATEGY for Iraq on the verge of unraveling, the Bush administration has belatedly embraced an idea it should have accepted long ago: that a political transition conducted by the United Nations is more likely to be accepted by Iraqis than one imposed unilaterally by the United States. On Monday U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and the head of the Iraqi Governing Council will meet with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to ask for stronger U.N. backing for the U.S. plan to turn over sovereignty in June to an Iraqi government chosen through regional caucuses. The hope is that Mr. Annan can help overcome the objections of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite leader who has been demanding direct democratic elections. It seems unlikely, however, that the Bush administration will rescue its transition without yielding to more changes in its plans.

We have long favored the internationalization of Iraq`s postwar management. But it may be too late for the U.N. bailout the Bush administration now appears to seek. Mr. Annan is reluctant to put his organization at the service of a predetermined U.S. strategy, and one letter from the secretary general has already failed to change the mind of Mr. Sistani. If Mr. Annan`s continuing concerns about security can be satisfied, the organization may prove valuable in helping Iraqis write a constitution and prepare for elections in the coming months and years. But with or without the United Nations, the Bush administration and its Iraqi allies will have to come to terms with Mr. Sistani, whose tenacity in advancing his agenda they have repeatedly underestimated.

The public exchanges between the occupation authority in Baghdad and the Najaf-based cleric have tended to obscure the real issues. In consistently demanding elections, Mr. Sistani seeks to ensure that Iraq quickly comes under the governance of the Shiite majority -- and that the clergy is consulted when key decisions are made about Iraq`s future. Mr. Sistani is widely described as favoring the separation of governmental and religious power, but he has also said that Iraq`s future laws should not contradict Islamic law. It`s unclear whether or for how long he`s prepared to accept a U.S. military presence in Iraq -- but he has said that any deployment agreement must be reached with a new government, not the current Governing Council.

Mr. Bremer has answered that it would be impossible to organize and conduct general elections in time for the scheduled June transfer of power, but the United States -- like Mr. Sistani -- is also weighing issues of control. The indirect caucus procedure favored by the administration and the Governing Council would maximize their chances of preserving influence. Mr. Bremer said Friday that the administration would consider changes to its selection plan, but not the timetable -- a stance that seemed to limit the possibilities for compromise.

All the options in Iraq come with considerable risks. But it seems to us the greatest of these would attach to a decision by the United States to press ahead in choosing a government over the opposition of the Shiite clergy. An Iraqi administration led by followers of Mr. Sistani might prove less amenable to cooperation with Washington, and might alienate the Iraqi Sunni and Kurdish populations. The United States must continue to insist that any government that takes power commit itself to democracy and respect for religious and ethnic minorities and human rights. But a democratically chosen government would at least have a genuine popular mandate and thus a better chance of stabilizing the country. If a democratic choice by Iraqis would produce leaders closer to Mr. Sistani than to the Iraqi Governing Council, then the Bush administration would do better to let such leaders emerge now and to begin looking for ways to work with them.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

Die O`Neill-Geschichten als Zusammenfassung aus dem neuen Spiegel.

DER SPIEGEL 4/2004 - 19. Januar 2004
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,282379,00.html
USA

"Markt für die Wahrheit"

Eine Serie von Enthüllungen offenbart, dass Saddam Hussein zu keiner Zeit eine Bedrohung für die Sicherheit der USA darstellte. Besonders peinlich für George W. Bush: Ein Mitglied seines eigenen Kabinetts entlarvt den Vizepräsidenten als heimlichen Herrscher im Weißen Haus.

Präsident George W. Bush, berichten Vertraute aus dem Weißen Haus, gehe derzeit "wie auf Wolken". Eine zweite Amtszeit? Schon so gut wie sicher. Über den Strategen des kommenden Wahlerfolgs, den Alleskönner, Alleswisser Karl Rove, streuen die Rauner wahre Wunderdinge. Sie nennen ihn halb spöttisch, halb ehrfürchtig: "Master of the Universe".
Und in der Tat scheint der Amtsinhaber neun Monate vor dem Urnengang bestens aufgestellt: Erzfeind Saddam Hussein, buchstäblich aus einem Erdloch gezogen, sitzt hinter Gittern, in seinen Palästen tummeln sich siegreiche US-Soldaten. Die Anschläge im Irak werden zwar nicht weniger blutig, aber weniger zahlreich; die jüngsten Quartalsdaten zur amerikanischen Wirtschaftsentwicklung wecken Freude, Bushs Wahlkampfkasse quillt über.

Schlechte Zeiten also für das Häuflein der acht demokratischen Bewerber um die Präsidentschaft, die nach jüngsten Umfragen allesamt, einer kläglicher als der andere, gegen Bush verlieren würden. Dennoch dürfen die gebeutelten Oppositionspolitiker wieder ein wenig Mut schöpfen. Genau in dem Augenblick, in dem alles klar zu sein schien, musste sich die Regierung gleich gegen eine ganze Serie von Enthüllungen wehren, die alle eines gemeinsam haben: Sie erschüttern die Glaubwürdigkeit des Präsidenten nachhaltig.

Wahre Tiefschläge musste Bush wegstecken: Da veröffentlicht das War College der eigenen Armee eine Studie, in welcher der Feldzug gegen Saddam als "überflüssig" bezeichnet wird. Der vom Präsidenten ausgerufene "Krieg gegen den Terrorismus" sei eine "unrealistische Aufgabenstellung" und berge das Risiko, die USA in Kriege gegen Staaten zu verwickeln, die keine wirkliche Gefahr darstellten.

Auch das Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ein Friedensforschungsinstitut von weltweitem Ruf, geht wenig zimperlich mit dem Präsidenten um. Eine Verbindung zwischen Saddam und der Terrororganisation Qaida habe es nie gegeben, wies die jüngste Studie nach. Und schon gar nicht die Gefahr, dass über eine solche Verbindung Massenvernichtungswaffen in die Hände von Terroristen gelangen könnten.

Der schmerzhafteste Tort für den Präsidenten war jedoch ein Buch über die kurze Regierungskarriere seines ehemaligen Finanzministers Paul O`Neill, das vergangenen Dienstag die Buchläden der Nation erreichte*. Darin bestätigte der erfahrene Washington-Veteran - O`Neill hatte bereits den republikanischen Präsidenten Richard Nixon und Gerald Ford als Haushaltsexperte gedient und war zuletzt Vorstandschef beim Aluminium-Konzern Alcoa -, es sei schon bei Amtsantritt das Ziel der neuen Regierung gewesen, Saddam zu stürzen. Doch erst die Terroranschläge vom 11. September hätten schließlich den Vorwand geliefert, nach dem die Administration monatelang gesucht habe.

Das Weiße Haus ein Hort von Tricksern, die noch nicht einmal davor zurückschrecken, das nationale Trauma des in Schutt und Asche zusammengesunkenen World Trade Center für ihre Zwecke zu instrumentalisieren? Plötzlich stellt sich eine grundlegende Vertrauensfrage: Werden die Amerikaner dem Mann im Weißen Haus noch einmal so leicht folgen, sollte er sie abermals auffordern, eine angeblich drohende Gefahr vorbeugend zu beseitigen? Entgeistert fragte die "New York Times" in einem Kommentar: "Wie konnten die USA so in die Irre geführt werden?"

Es ist die Frage, auf die das Buch über O`Neills Regierungserfahrung eine schlüssige Antwort gibt. Er habe seine Erinnerungen dem Pulitzerpreisträger und ehemaligen Reporter des "Wall Street Journal", Ron Suskind, anvertraut, sagt der 68-Jährige heute, weil er davon überzeugt sei, dass es "im Gegensatz zu der Art, wie wir in diesem Land derzeit Politik betreiben, einen Markt für die Wahrheit" gebe.

O`Neill schildert den Präsidenten als einen eher tumben, leicht zu beeindruckenden Politiker ohne klare eigene Standpunkte. Bush erscheint als Marionette an den Drähten des Beraters Rove und des machtbewussten Vizepräsidenten Dick Cheney. Jeder Versuch, mit dem Präsidenten zu kommunizieren, gleiche der Situation "eines Blinden, der sich in einem Raum voller Gehörloser" befinde.
So sehnt sich O`Neill in die Zeiten von Richard Nixon zurück. Damals, "als Entscheidungsunterlagen nicht bloß aus einem Blatt bestanden", sei es noch um das Abwägen zielgerichteter Lösungswege gegangen. Heute hingegen achteten Cheney und Rove nur noch auf die Absicherung der Macht und die Durchsetzung ideologischer Überzeugungen.

Sein eher klägliches Scheitern im Washington des 43. US-Präsidenten beschreibt O`Neill vornehmlich anhand des Kampfes gegen Bushs Steuersenkungen. Sie bescherten dem Land, das bei seinem Amtsantritt stattliche Haushaltsüberschüsse auswies, in kürzester Zeit Rekorddefizite.

Zum Kronzeugen gegen die Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik des ihm ewig fremden Präsidenten beruft O`Neill einen weiteren Freund, den er damit als ausgesprochenen Bush-Gegner bloßstellt: Alan Greenspan, den mächtigen Chef der amerikanischen Zentralbank, das legendäre Washingtoner Orakel.

Welch ein Gegensatz: Zumindest anfänglich trifft O`Neill beide im Wochenrhythmus. Doch seine Debatten mit Potus (so das Secret-Service-Akronym für den Präsidenten) geraten zu 60 Minuten langen peinsamen Monologen des Ministers. Potus sagt nichts, Potus weiß nichts, Potus scheint überfordert. Immer ratloser beobachtet O`Neill seinen Präsidenten. Offenbar hat der nicht einmal die kurzen Memos gelesen, die er ihm geschickt hat.

Ganz anders dagegen die Treffen mit Freund Greenspan. Beide haben stets die aktuellsten Wirtschaftsdaten parat, beide sind Freunde penibelster Analysen und äußerst skeptisch gegenüber den Steuersenkungen, zu denen Bushs eher ideologische Berater neigen, wann immer sie Missmut bei den Wählern vermuten. "Wir müssen auf unsere Basis achten", ist das oberste Gebot im Weißen Haus.

O`Neill und Greenspan dagegen wollen die anfänglichen Haushaltsüberschüsse nicht für Steuergeschenke verfuttern, sondern planen eine grundlegende Rentenreform, da die Zahlungsunfähigkeit des derzeitigen Systems absehbar ist. Mindestens eine Billion Dollar über einen Zeitraum von zehn Jahren wollen sie für diesen Zweck retten, und Greenspan rät seinem Freund, sie "einfach zu nehmen und in einen Tresor zu stecken".

Doch die beiden haben wenig Chancen. Cheney und die Ideologen verlangen Steuersenkungen und erhalten sie. O`Neill beschwört seinen Präsidenten, das neue Rentensystem auf Kapitalbasis könne jeden versicherten Amerikaner mit 65 Jahren zum Millionär machen - Bush zeigt sich nicht mal interessiert. "Unverantwortliche Finanzpolitik" nennt Greenspan das.

Die beharrliche Opposition kommt O`Neill teuer zu stehen. Plötzlich nennt der auf Spitznamen versessene Präsident seinen Finanzminister nicht mehr "Pablo", sondern "Big O" - was auch als große Null gedeutet werden kann. Ihn selbst zu feuern, findet Bush nicht die Courage. Das muss, im Dezember 2002, die graue Eminenz Cheney erledigen.

O`Neills Enthüllungen über den Irak-Kurs der Regierung sind eher ein Seitenaspekt des Buchs. Kraft seines Amtes ist der Finanzminister auch Mitglied im Nationalen Sicherheitsrat. Schon auf dessen erster Sitzung am 30. Januar 2001, zehn Tage nach der Vereidigung des neuen Präsidenten, vollzog sich ein grundlegender Richtungswechsel amerikanischer Außenpolitik. Präsident Bush gab die Devise aus, sich aus den Unwägbarkeiten des NahostKonflikts rauszuhalten.

Stattdessen, forderte Sicherheitsberaterin Condoleezza Rice, müsse man sich auf Saddam Hussein konzentrieren, der die ganze Region destabilisiere. Nach knapp einer Stunde Diskussion gab Bush Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld den Auftrag, "unsere militärischen Optionen zu prüfen".

Schon bei der zweiten Sitzung des Sicherheitsrats zwei Tage später fand O`Neill unter seinen Papieren (neben einem Dossier der Deutschen Bank zur wirtschaftlichen Lage des Irak) einen "Politisch-Militärischen Plan für die Irak-Krise nach dem Sturz Saddams". Abgestempelt: "Geheim". Und einen Monat später erhielt O`Neill ein Pentagon-Dokument, aus dem hervorging, dass auch der Ölreichtum des Irak längst ins Visier der Amerikaner geraten ist. Das Papier zählt mehr als 30 Länder auf, die Interesse am irakischen Öl gezeigt haben.

Nie hatte O`Neill irgendeinen Zweifel daran, dass es Cheney und den Falken im Pentagon vornehmlich darum ging, durch einen Sturz Saddams anderen unbotmäßigen Staaten klar zu machen, wie riskant ein Konfrontationskurs gegen die einzig verbliebene Supermacht ist. Die Aufgabe war nur noch, so O`Neill, "einen Weg zu finden, es auch zu tun".

Der 11. September löste das Problem. Einen Beweis für eine heimliche Aufrüstung Saddams mit illegalen Waffen hat O`Neill dagegen nie zu Gesicht bekommen: "In den 23 Monaten meiner Amtszeit habe ich nichts gesehen, was ich als Beleg für die Existenz von Massenvernichtungswaffen bezeichnen würde."

Auch die lautstarke Empörung seiner Ex-Kollegen über den angeblichen Verrat kann nicht verdecken, das Bush diesen Beweis bislang schuldig geblieben ist. Doch was in anderen Zeiten zu einer Generalabrechnung mit einer beim Lügen ertappten Regierung führen würde, hat viele Amerikaner noch nicht einmal erreicht. Zwar nutzten die demokratischen Präsidentschaftsbewerber die Enthüllungsflut rasch für ihre Wahlkämpfe, doch Bush schien den Rivalen schon wieder mal einen Schritt voraus zu sein.

Nach dem Sieg über den Wüsten-Despoten, so hatte es Rove seit langem geplant, sollte der Präsident die Expansionsphantasien seiner Landsleute mit einer neuen nationalen Aufgabe beschäftigen. Amerika müsse, so der Präsident am vergangenen Mittwoch, nunmehr den Mond, den Mars und schließlich "unser gesamtes Sonnensystem" auf friedlichem Wege erobern.

Dennoch trafen die Vorwürfe des ehemaligen Finanzministers so schwer, dass seine einstigen Mitarbeiter ein Ermittlungsverfahren wegen Geheimnisverrat gegen ihn eingeleitet haben. Doch vermutlich werden die Untersuchungen schnell beendet sein: Bei den 19 000 Dokumenten, die O`Neill Suskind gab, handelte es sich um jene Unterlagen, die der Behörden-Justiziar dem Gefeuerten zum persönlichen Gebrauch überlassen hatte. Suskind kündigte an, das inkriminierende Material ins Internet zu stellen.

So blieb es ausgerechnet Rumsfeld vorbehalten, seinen Chef Bush gegen den einstigen Freund O`Neill zu verteidigen. Doch auch der Pentagon-Chef konnte die Vorwürfe nicht widerlegen, weshalb ihm nur der etwas klägliche Hinweis blieb, die Pläne für den Sturz von Saddam seien eigentlich eine Erfindung der Regierung Clinton.

Richtig ist: Das Konzept von einem "regime change" in Bagdad tauchte erstmalig unter Clinton auf. Nur: Wenn sich Bush, der Namensgeber einer Doktrin des Präventivkriegs, plötzlich als demütiger Testamentsvollstrecker seines ungeliebten Vorgängers darstellen will, wäre das eine Rolle, die kein überzeugter Republikaner seinem Präsidenten abnehmen kann.

HANS HOYNG


© DER SPIEGEL 4/2004

[Joerver]

January 18, 2004
Workers Assail Night Lock-Ins by Wal-Mart
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Looking back to that night, Michael Rodriguez still has trouble believing the situation he faced when he was stocking shelves on the overnight shift at the Sam`s Club in Corpus Christi, Tex.

It was 3 a.m., Mr. Rodriguez recalled, some heavy machinery had just crushed his ankle, and he had no idea how he would get to the hospital.

The Sam`s Club, a Wal-Mart subsidiary, had locked its overnight workers in, as it always did, to keep robbers out and, as some managers say, to prevent employee theft. As usual, there was no manager with a key to let Mr. Rodriguez out. The fire exit, he said, was hardly an option — management had drummed into the overnight workers that if they ever used that exit for anything but a fire, they would lose their jobs.

"My ankle was crushed," Mr. Rodriguez said, explaining he had been struck by an electronic cart driven by an employee moving merchandise. "I was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that had been hit by a car. Another worker made some phone calls to reach a manager, and it took an hour for someone to get there and unlock the door."

The reason for Mr. Rodriguez`s delayed trip to the hospital was a little-known Wal-Mart policy: the lock-in. For more than 15 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world`s largest retailer, has locked in overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam`s Club stores. It is a policy that many employees say has created disconcerting situations, such as when a worker in Indiana suffered a heart attack, when hurricanes hit in Florida and when workers` wives have gone into labor.

"You could be bleeding to death, and they`ll have you locked in," Mr. Rodriguez said. "Being locked in in an emergency like that, that`s not right."

Mona Williams, Wal-Mart`s vice president for communications, said the company used lock-ins to protect stores and employees in high-crime areas. She said Wal-Mart locked in workers — the company calls them associates — at 10 percent of its stores, a percentage that has declined as Wal-Mart has opened more 24-hour stores.

Ms. Williams said Wal-Mart, with 1.2 million employees in its 3,500 stores nationwide, had recently altered its policy to ensure that every overnight shift at every store has a night manager with a key to let workers out in emergencies.

"Wal-Mart secures these stores just as any other business does that has employees working overnight," Ms. Williams said. "Doors are locked to protect associates and the store from intruders. Fire doors are always accessible for safety, and there will always be at least one manager in the store with a set of keys to unlock the doors."

Ms. Williams said individual store managers, rather than headquarters, decided whether to lockworkers in, depending on the crime rate in their area.

Retailing experts and Wal-Mart`s competitors said the company`s lock-in policy was highly unusual. Officials at Kmart, Sears, Toys "R" Us, Home Depot and Costco, said they did not lock in workers.

Even some retail industry experts questioned the policy. "It`s clearly cause for concern," said Burt Flickinger, who runs a retail consulting concern. "Locking in workers, that`s more of a 19th-century practice than a 20th-century one."

Several Wal-Mart employees said that as recently as a few months ago they had been locked in on some nights without a manager who had a key. Robert Schuster said that until last October, when he left his job at a Sam`s Club in Colorado Springs, workers were locked in every night, and on Friday and Saturday nights there was no one there with a key. One night, he recalled, a worker had been throwing up violently, and no one had a store key to let him out.

"They told us it`s a big fine for the company if we go out the fire door and there`s no fire," Mr. Schuster said. "They gave us a big lecture that if we go out that door, you better make sure it`s an emergency like the place going up on fire."

Augustine Herrera, who worked at the Colorado Springs store for nine years, disputed the company`s assertion that it locked workers in stores in only high-crime areas, largely to protect employees.

"The store is in a perfectly safe area," Mr. Herrera said.

Several employees said Wal-Mart began making sure that there was someone with a key seven nights a week at the Colorado Springs store and other stores starting Jan. 1, shortly after The New York Times began making inquiries about employees` being locked in.

The main reason that Wal-Mart and Sam`s stores lock in workers, several former store managers said, was not to protect employees but to stop "shrinkage" — theft by employees and outsiders.

Tom Lewis, who managed four Sam`s Clubs in Texas and Tennessee, said: "It`s to prevent shrinkage. Wal-Mart is like any other company. They`re concerned about the bottom line, and the bottom line is affected by shrinkage in the store."

Another reason for lock-ins, he said, was to increase efficiency — workers could not sneak outside to smoke a cigarette, get high or make a quick trip home.

Mr. Rodriguez acknowledged that the seemingly obvious thing to have done after breaking his ankle was to leave by the fire door, but he and two dozen other Wal-Mart and Sam`s Club workers said they had repeatedly been warned never to do that unless there was a fire. Leaving for any other reason, they said, could jeopardize the jobs of the offending employee and the night supervisor.

Regarding Mr. Rodriguez, Ms. Williams said, "He was clearly capable of walking out a fire door anytime during the night."

She added: "We tell associates that common sense has to prevail. Fire doors are for emergencies, and by all means use them if you have emergencies. We have no way of knowing what any individual manager said to an associate."

None of the Wal-Mart workers interviewed said they knew anyone who had been fired for violating the fire-exit policy in an emergency, but several said they knew workers who had received official reprimands, the first step toward firing. Several said managers had told them of firing workers for such an offense.

"They let us know they`d fire people for going out the fire door, unless there was a fire." said Farris Cobb, who was a night supervisor at several Sam`s Clubs in Florida. "They instilled in us they had done it before and they would do it again."

Mr. Cobb and several other workers interviewed about lock-ins were plaintiffs in lawsuits accusing Wal-Mart of forcing them to work off the clock, for example working several hours without pay after their shifts ended. Wal-Mart says it tells managers never to let employees work off the clock.

Janet Anderson, who was a night supervisor at a Sam`s Club in Colorado from 1996 to 2002, said that many of her employees were also airmen stationed at a nearby Air Force base. Their commanders sometimes called the store to order them to report to duty immediately, but she said they often had to wait until a manager arrived around 6 a.m. She said one airman received a reprimand from management for leaving by the fire door to report for duty.

Ms. Anderson also told of a 23-year-old worker who had broken his foot one night while using a cardboard box baler and had to wait four hours for someone to open the door. She said the store`s managers had lied to her and the overnight crew, telling them the fire doors could not be physically opened by the workers and that the doors would open automatically when the fire alarm was triggered.

Only after several years as night supervisor did she learn that she could open the fire door from inside, she said, but she was told she faced dismissal if she opened it when there was no fire. One night, she said, she cut her finger badly with a box cutter but dared not go out the fire exit — waiting until morning to get 13 stitches at a hospital.

The federal government and almost all states do not bar locking in workers so long as they have access to an emergency exit. But several longtime Wal-Mart workers recalled that in the late 1980`s and early 1990`s, the fire doors of some Wal-Marts were chained shut.

Wal-Mart officials said they cracked down on that practice after an overnight stocker at a store in Savannah, Ga., collapsed and died in 1988. Paramedics could not get into the store soon enough because the employees inside could not open the fire door or front door, and there was no manager with a key.

"We certainly do not do that now," Ms. Williams said. "It`s not been that way for a long time."

Explaining the policy, she said, "Only about 10 percent of our stores do not allow associates to come and go at will, and these are generally in higher crime areas where the associates` safety is considered an issue."

Mr. Lewis, the former store manager, said he had been willing to get out of bed at any hour to drive back to his store to unlock the door in an emergency. But he said many Sam`s Club managers were not as responsive. "Sometimes you couldn`t get hold of a manager," he said. "The tendency of managers was to sleep through the nights. They let the answering machine pick up."

Mr. Cobb, the overnight supervisor in Florida, said he remembered once when a stocker was deathly sick, throwing up repeatedly. He said he called the store manager at home and told him, " `You need to come let this person out.` He said: `Find one of the mattresses. Have him lay down on the floor.`

"I went into certain situations like that, and I called store managers, and they pretty much told me that they wouldn`t come in to unlock the door. So I would call another manager, and a lot of times they would tell you that they were on their way, when they weren`t."

Mr. Cobb said the Wal-Mart rule that generally prohibits employees from working more than 40 hours a week to avoid paying overtime played out in strange ways for night-shift employees. Mr. Cobb said that on many workers` fifth work day of the week, they would approach the 40-hour mark and then clock out, usually around 1 a.m. They would then have to sit around, napping, playing cards or watching television, until a manager arrived at 6 a.m.

Roy Ellsworth Jr., who was a cashier at a Wal-Mart in Pueblo, Colo., said he was normally scheduled to work until the store closed at 10 p.m., but most nights management locked the front door, at closing time, and did not let workers leave until everyone had straightened up the store.

"They would keep us there for however long they wanted," Mr. Ellsworth said. "It was often for half an hour, and it could be two hours or longer during Christmas season."

One night, shortly after closing time, Mr. Ellsworth had an asthma attack. "My inhaler hardly helped," he said. "I couldn`t breathe. I felt I was going to pass out. I got fuzzy vision. I told the assistant manager I really needed to go to the hospital. He pretty much got in my face and told me not to leave or I`d get fired. I was having trouble standing. When I finally told him I was going to call a lawyer, he finally let me out."

One top Wal-Mart official said: "If those things happened five or six years ago, we`re a very large company with more that 3,000 stores, and individual instances like that could happen. That`s certainly not something Wal-Mart would condone."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

January 17 / 18, 2004

Iron Hammers in Iraq
How to Destroy Democracy
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The name of the celebrated crackdown on Iraqi guerrillas and civilians by US occupation forces is Operation Iron Hammer. One wonders what boneheads conceived it, because it has been a disaster that is destroying the final attempts by some intelligent Americans to get the Iraqi population to move to the side of the invaders. I have just had an email from a person in Iraq that I can`t quote directly because it might give him away. Now this fellow is 100 percent Flag, Patriotism, Army and all that is Good about America. We have been friends for almost twenty years, and never have I known him to be in the slightest fashion critical of any commander-in-chief ; even Clinton, whom I knew he despised. And he wrote me that "Brian, this war sucks . . ."

On 13 November last year, Fox News, the Bush administration`s media outlet, which would be a joke were it not so effective in brainwashing the public, announced on Pentagon cue that occupation troops "launched a planned and coordinated operation codenamed Iron Hammer that targeted pro-Saddam loyalists...Based on intelligence...US infantry set a number of traps all over Baghdad. Several of those traps...were activated almost simultaneously Wednesday night. In the most dramatic action, about a dozen Bradley armored vehicles used 25mm cannons to destroy a warehouse used by anti-US forces in southern Baghdad. A special forces AC-130 Spectre gunship also took part from the air, targeting the warehouse with precise fire. `The facility is a known meeting, planning, storage and rendezvous point for belligerent elements currently conducting attacks on coalition forces and infrastructure,` the Pentagon said."

Baloney. Let`s take it from the top. "A planned and coordinated operation." Well, my goodness, so it was actually planned and coordinated, was it? Do you know what was in the `warehouse` that was riddled dramatically with cannon-shells?

Nothing. It was empty.

And after the Bradleys had a yippee shoot the empty warehouse was attacked by a C-130 firing 105mm shells. This is what in Vietnam we used to call `Puff, the Magic Dragon`. Puff, in early Vietnam days, was an old DC-3 aircraft filled with machine guns, then it morphed to a Hercules transport with much more firepower.

The warehouse was a storage facility, said the Pentagon. But there were no stores. The warehouse was a meeting and planning place, said the Pentagon. But nobody was meeting or planning. The warehouse was a rendezvous point, said the Pentagon. But nobody was rendezvousing. The entire fireworks show was a pointless (and very expensive) farce, and alienated hundreds, perhaps thousands of Iraqis (although some laughed at what they considered an absurd demonstration of petulant impotence. Why not wait until guerrillas were using the building and send in infantry to kill them?). It didn`t kill a single member of the resistance, but at least it didn`t kill people who had nothing to do with guerrilla strikes against occupation troops. Unfortunately, this is what is being done by US soldiers with increasing frequency, and it`s time somebody asked official questions about this type of operation.

We keep being told that shootings of civilians are in accordance with the Rules of Engagement. Here is part of a Reuters` despatch of September 22 : "US troops followed military rules when they fatally shot a Reuters television cameraman last month as he videotaped near a US-run prison in western Baghdad, a military spokesman said Monday. "Although it`s a regrettable incident, the investigation has concluded US forces personnel acted in accordance with the rules of engagement," Lt-Col George Krivo said by telephone from Baghdad...Krivo, spokesman for Lt-Gen Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US-led ground forces in Iraq, said the military was not publicly releasing the report and declined to give details on any of the specific findings. Krivo refused to divulge the rules of engagement that he said [were] followed in Iraq."

So: the army won`t tell anyone how a media representative was killed ; it says the incident was "regrettable" ; and it refuses to give details of the findings of a military tribunal or let anyone know on what basis the shooting was approved. And we are expected to believe that the killing was lawful because we are told it was lawful by the people who did the killing. ("That`s some catch, that Catch-22," [Yossarian] observed. "It`s the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.)

Why no details? It can`t be because of a threat to national security, the usual excuse for refusing to provide information, for there are no national security implications of any sort. It can`t be because relatives of a US soldier might be grieved were it made known what really happened, as no US soldier was killed or wounded. It can`t be because there were `intelligence methods` at risk (another catchall justification for refusing to tell the public what`s going on), as there was no intelligence - in any sense - involved. What are we left with? Just the plain answer that there is something very murky that the Pentagon wants to keep quiet at all costs.

Then there is the more recent case of killing Iraqi civilians as they drove past a convoy last week. You won`t know much about this if you rely on US media (52 words in the Washington Post, for example), so here is the (war-supporting) Daily Telegraph (London) of January 10 on the incident. "For Iraqi drivers...mile-long [US] supply convoys trundling slowly across the immense desert landscape present a frustrating impediment, often doubling journey times. Rather than wait, many attempt to pass the military columns, watching and waiting for a soldier astride a mounted machinegun to wave a casual `OK`. But passing lines of trucks and humvees is always a tense affair, with drivers on both sides fearful of their opposite numbers. "I was in a taxi with four other people including the driver," said Mr Ahmed. "We were stuck behind a US convoy just outside Tikrit when the soldier on the rear vehicle lifted his hand from the trigger of his gun and clearly motioned us to pass. Cautiously we overtook on the right-hand side, then suddenly the gunner on the front vehicle swivelled his gun towards us and started firing." Mr Ahmed said he ducked under the taxi`s dashboard as bullets ripped through the car, killing the driver. When he recovered consciousness the car had careered off the road. In the back seat he found the other passengers, including a mother and her six-year-old son, had also been shot dead. "The soldier just kept firing for five to six seconds, but the convoy didn`t stop for us," said Mr Ahmed. "I was hit in the lung"."

A US army spokeswoman, Major Aberle, said "We would love to get to the bottom of this". Well, why not get to the bottom of it, Major Aberle? You are in the most efficient army in the world, with every space-age device and appliance. You can identify what convoy was at a particular spot within a given time-frame. There are such things as convoy logs, check points, continuous radio communication, and that old-fashioned thing called leadership which when properly applied results in commanders at all levels knowing what is going on in his or her command. Are we seriously saying it is impossible to find out in which convoy a machine gunner killed four people? Is it possible for a soldier to engage a civilian car with a sustained-fire weapon for five seconds (a very long time ; almost 70 rounds of lethal lead), causing the vehicle to crash, without some record being kept of his action?

If the answer is No, then let`s have the explanation. If the answer is Yes, then it is obvious discipline has gone to hell in a handcart. Is it possible that a machine gunner who opened fire on people he suspected of being terrorists did not report the fact that he had done so? ("Hey, I killed four terrorists : a taxi-driver terrorist, and another terrorist and a woman terrorist and her son, a six year-old terrorist.") This was a major incident --- or at least it was to those who were killed, and their families. The car crashed after the machine-gunner`s bullets ripped through the occupants ; is this not worthy of reporting to higher authority? What are the rules of engagement? Could it be that a yippee shoot resulting in the death of civilians can take place without the killings even being notified up the chain of command? If the machine-gunner reported the incident, then what was done about the report?

Are we to believe that a soldier of a country that is proud of democracy and freedom can wipe out four civilians without being taken to task concerning his action? Lt-Col Steve Russell, whose battalion area includes Tikrit (he who is ever-ready with a media comment), pronounced "I believe we have a moral obligation to find out what occurred." Yes indeed, there is a moral obligation. And there is also a legal obligation for the occupying power to abide by Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which states that "Protected persons [i.e., civilians under the control of the occupying power] are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons...They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof . . .".

Unfortunately the Fourth Geneva Convention is irrelevant because there is no declaration by the occupying power of its Rules of Engagement. Do these Rules include permission to kill civilians? We don`t know. But who in America dares ask a question in public about US killings of Iraqi civilians?

Few people in America can or will ask that sort of question, and certainly no such query is being posed by any of the Democrats who want to be selected as their party`s nomination to contest the presidency this year. (And how many US academics have dared declare their opinions about the war on Iraq? How many of them have moved their backbones from the supine to the vertical position? But that`s another story.)

To criticize a US soldier is to court political death. Not one politician (and few academics) in the whole country would dare state, for example, that it is scandalous that three US soldiers should have beaten Iraqi prisoners. These criminals were discharged from the army but suffered no other penalty for their vicious conduct. One of the soldiers, Master Sergeant Girman, "was charged with knocking a prisoner down, repeatedly kicking him, and encouraging her subordinates to do the same." `HER`? Master Sergeant Girman, it seems, is a woman, and there is no doubt she was guilty of disgusting cruelty against a fellow human being. The mind reels. There was no publicity about this squalid affair, but it is a much more important story than the staged propaganda non-rescue of pretty Jessica Lynch.

Operation Iron Hammer, conceived by boneheads, continues to destroy the credibility of the United States day by day. The very title conveys a `them and us` diktat, dividing occupation forces from those whom they were supposed to be liberating. There are few ordinary people in Iraq who now believe that American soldiers are their friends. No wonder. And there are few of us out here who believe the official accounts of US killing of civilians, simply because the evidence of countless incidents of deliberate and accidental mayhem is so compelling.

Occupation troops have killed fifteen civilian police in three botched operations since September, the latest of which was on January 10 when, as Reuters reported, "US soldiers shot and killed two Iraqi policemen embroiled in a family feud after mistaking them for assailants, the US military said Saturday. A military spokesman said soldiers...were sent to respond to reports that two families were fighting. When they arrived they saw two men carrying weapons and wearing long coats firing at a house. "As the soldiers approached the men attempted to flee", said Major Josslyn Aberle..."The soldiers pursued them, shouting warnings and firing warning shots but the men did not respond. They killed one outright and another died before reaching hospital"." So the soldiers shouted warnings. In Arabic? What did they shout? Were the soldiers themselves being threatened? How were the men supposed to respond to "warning shots"? This was a shambles, resulting in crashing morale for the Iraq police and yet even more bitter contempt and loathing for occupation forces.

Flames of hatred are high, and are fed by factual reports that never see the light of day in Britain or the US. Take this one, from Egypt`s Al-Ahram Weekly of 14 January. [Some material has been omitted, for space reasons.]

"It was simply not his day ; Mohamed had no idea what was in store for him as he drove through the Karada area of Baghdad on 7 August. He ran into the usual traffic jam in the main shopping street, but what Mohamed didn`t know was that an American patrol had run into an ambush just two kilometres down the road. Two soldiers had been killed; the perpetrators escaped and the Americans had set up the usual roadblock - hence the traffic jam. Unaware of the situation, Mohamed turned off the main road into a side street, and the trap was sprung. "About half a dozen soldiers rushed towards the car pointing weapons in my face," he recalled. "I was terrified and stayed in the car. Then they dragged me out of the car, threw me to the ground and handcuffed me." In the heat of the moment, while lying on the ground, he shouted the infamous American `f` word at the soldiers. Somebody hit him in the back. He was left lying on the ground with guns pointing at him for about half an hour. His car was searched but no weapons were uncovered...[They found a bottle of Scotch.]

"[He] was taken to the American headquarters in the Sajud Palace, a former residence of Saddam Hussein`s, and was left outside in the tennis court with other recently-arrested for six hours before his first interrogation. During the interview, a US officer questioned him about his relationship with the terrorists. The conversation became quickly heated when Mohamed, who speaks English, noticed that the Lebanese translator was not translating his responses properly. Mohamed was hit from behind on the back of the head and he vomited on the officer`s desktop: the interrogation lasted another two hours.

"Mohamed spent the following 36 days in a camp at the edge of the prison together with 500 prisoners, surrounded by walls, barbed wire and watch towers...Mohamed, the only prisoner who spoke some English, soon became the official camp translator, and he also became friendly with some of the soldiers. "A lot of them were homesick," was how he described their state of mind. One of the soldiers had just lost his father, and the wife of another had given birth; and none of them had the chance to go home. "When I get home," a sergeant told Mohamed, "I will never again vote for George Bush." The same sergeant, by now on friendly terms with Mohamed, checked the computer regularly for any details about his release. And finally the news arrived. "Tomorrow you`re to be released, and you`ll be freer than any US soldier here." "All the best, and sorry for the unpleasant situation," said an officer to Mohamed as he was leaving the prison, adding that, "there was actually no reason for you spending the last month here"." That`s Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The recent and much-heralded (non)release of civilians held captive illegally was a complete disaster and caused untold suffering among thousands of families who have no reason to be grateful for their "liberation". It was spectacularly badly managed, and reflects appallingly on the administrative capabilities of the `Coalition Provisional Authority`, which appears incapable of conducting even the simplest task efficiently. The message getting through to Iraqis is that the occupying power acts with ham-handed incompetence mixed with casual brutality. The current handling of the occupation is not just faulty, it is ineffective to the point of political and administrative chaos. The ever-changing Bush policies on future governance would be laughable were they not so bungled that nobody now knows what is to happen in six months time.

That is not the way to win trust and respect throughout Iraq and the world. Along with the killing of fleeing policemen and the occupants of taxis passing convoys, it has exactly the opposite effect. But perhaps this doesn`t worry Bush and his people. We are only too well aware of the overweening arrogance of those presently in power, and obviously the daily addition of a few thousands to the millions worldwide who detest the condescension and brutality of imperial Washington matters little in their scheme of things. Cicero wrote (in the First Philippic) "Let them hate me so long as they fear me" and this is a fair summation of what Bush zealotry is all about. The Bush administration loves the gun-blazing drama of such stupidly-named operations as Iron Hammer, but Iraqis know the dire results from first-hand experience of monstrous slaughter.

As I end this piece, an item in the New York Times of 13 January has appeared on the screen : ". . . a bomb exploded on the median of Palestine Street after the two Humvees had passed it, said Feras Ali, 42, a resident on the block. The explosion shattered the windows of nearby houses. The Humvees, which witnesses said did not appear to have been damaged, then turned in the wide road, which was slick from a driving rainstorm, they said. Soldiers opened fire on the family in the station wagon traveling behind them, said the witnesses, relatives of the victims, and Lieutenant Ali, the police officer. The station wagon crashed into a wall about 200 feet past where the bomb had exploded, and soldiers soon began pulling bodies out, the witnesses said."

Iron hammer strikes again. It can be concluded only that the secret Rules of Engagement permit this sort of murder. The US has lost all credibility in Iraq, which is facing a bleak future. But how long is random killing of civilians to be permitted to continue? Is there a public figure who will dare question it? Don`t hold your breath.

Brian Cloughley writes about defense issues for CounterPunch, the Nation (Pakistan), the Daily Times of Pakistan and other international publications. His writings are collected on his website: www.briancloughley.com.

He can be reached at: [e-mail]

[Joerver]

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[rv_2011]

Gestern war der US-Vorwahlkampf ,,Thema des Tages" in der FR. Außerdem ein größerer Artikel über Dean.

Hier die Beiräge:
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Wahlkampf in den USA geht in die heiße Phase

Der Wahlkampf in den USA geht mit den ersten Vorwahlen der Demokraten in die heiße Phase. In Iowa beginnt am Montag die Serie von Vorentscheidungen darüber, wer Herausforderer von Präsident George W. Bush wird. Nach dem Rückzug der einzigen Frau in dieser Woche streiten noch acht Männer um die Kandidatur.


Strategie gegen Bush gesucht
Die Chancen des US-Präsidenten auf eine Wiederwahl stehen derzeit gut - seine Konkurrenten sind zerstritten
VON DIETMAR OSTERMANN (WASHINGTON)

Am Anfang eines langen Wahljahres bietet die politische Landschaft in den USA ein widersprüchliches Bild. Da sind zum einen jüngste Umfragen, die Präsident George W. Bush klar im Aufwind sehen: Zehn Monate vor dem Urnengang im November sind sechs von zehn US-Bürger mit Bushs Amtsführung zufrieden. Nach der Festnahme Saddam Husseins halten wieder zwei von drei Befragten die Entscheidung für richtig, gegen Irak Krieg zu führen. Angesichts verbesserter Konjunkturdaten ist zum ersten Mal seit langem auch wieder eine Mehrheit mit der Wirtschaftspolitik des Präsidenten zufrieden.

All das könnte für Bush ein Grund sein, sich gelassen im Oval Office zurückzulehnen - wäre die Stimmung nicht vor wenigen Monaten noch eine ganz andere gewesen. Da dominierten schlechte Nachrichten aus Irak, daheim sorgten wachsende Kriegskosten und die eskalierenden Staatsschulden für Verdruss - und Bushs Umfragewerte waren im Keller. Bei der Sonntagsfrage verlor Bush damals gegen einen namenlosen Kandidaten der Opposition. Jetzt liegt er mit 55 gegen 38 Prozent wieder deutlich vorn.

So erfreulich der jüngste Stimmungswandel also aus Sicht des Präsidenten sein mag: Das Pendel könnte auch schnell zurückschlagen. Der renommierte Politologe Charlie Cook hält daher zwei Faktoren im Wahljahr für entscheidend: die weitere Entwicklung in Irak und die an der Konjunkturfront. Eine gänzlich neue Dynamik könnten zudem neue Terroranschläge in den USA schaffen. Je nach Zeitpunkt, Ausmaß und Umständen, glaubt Cook, würde sich das Volk dann entweder um den Präsidenten scharen - oder die Regierung für etwaige Versäumnisse verantwortlich machen.

Vorläufiges Fazit der meisten Kaffeesatzleser in Washington: Bush steht zehn Monate vor der Wahl gut da und hat alle Chancen, dem Schicksal seines Vaters zu entgehen. Der war 1992 nach einer Amtszeit aus dem Weißen Haus gejagt worden. Nun ist der Sohn den nächsten vier Jahren im Oval Office deutlich näher als jeder Herausforderer der Amtseinführung auf den Stufen des Kapitols.

Wenn trotzdem kaum jemand dem Präsidenten einen allzu deutlichen Wahlsieg zutraut, so ist dies kein Widerspruch. Denn jenseits schwankender Umfragen sehen Demoskopen und Politologen die Nation noch immer in zwei antagonistische Blöcke gespalten. Und zwar, wie schon bei der umstrittenen und äußerst knappen Wahl 2000, weiter nahezu in der Mitte: In Umfragen rechnen sich heute jeweils 45 Prozent der Stimmbürger fest den Republikanern oder Demokraten zu. Es sinkt nicht nur die Zahl der Unentschlossenen in der Mitte, sondern es gibt auch immer weniger Wähler, die bereit sind, aus einem ins andere Lager zu wechseln.

Polarisierte US-Gesellschaft

Der Grund dafür ist eine weitere Polarisierung der US-Gesellschaft. Nach dem 11. September 2001 haben zwar alle die nationale Einheit beschworen. Doch das Gegenteil trat ein. Paradoxerweise dürfte das Gefühl, nichts weniger als das Schicksal des Landes stehe nach den Terrorattacken auf dem Spiel, die politische Atmosphäre eher vergiftet haben: Wo früher oft Gleichgültigkeit war, wallen jetzt große Leidenschaften. "Unter den Demokraten gibt es heute den gleichen Hass auf Präsident Bush, wie man ihn unter Präsident Clinton bei konservativen Republikanern gesehen hat", bilanziert der Politologe Charlie Cook. Erstmals in der Geschichte beruhe der Hass damit auf Gegenseitigkeit. Denn so wie die Demokraten glauben, dass Bushs Politik nicht nur falsch ist, sondern das Land zerstört, haben die Republikaner schon beim Gedanken an einen Machtverlust den nahen Untergang vor Augen.

Dazu beigetragen haben nicht zuletzt die Machtverhältnisse in Washington: So sehr die Bush-Regierung in der Außenpolitik zu Alleingängen neigt, so wenig Grund haben die Republikaner in den vergangenen Jahren gesehen, innenpolitisch auf die Opposition zuzugehen. Schließlich kontrollieren sie erstmals seit einem halben Jahrhundert neben dem Weißen Haus auch beide Kammern des Kongresses. Die üblichen "Checks and Balances" im politischen System, die beide Parteien zu Kompromissen zwingen, sind damit außer Kraft gesetzt.

Schmutziger Lagerwahlkampf?

Den ohnmächtigen und zerstrittenen Demokraten wiederum fehlt noch eine Gegenstrategie. Die anstehende Wahl eines Präsidentschaftskandidaten wird auch zeigen, wie sie Bush Paroli bieten wollen: In der von Clinton einst so virtuos besetzten, inzwischen kaum mehr erkennbaren Mitte. Oder mit klaren Alternativen. Vieles spricht für einen harten, erbitterten und zuweilen schmutzigen Lagerwahlkampf.

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In den USA werden die Präsidentschaftskandidaten der beiden großen Parteien in Vorwahlen ermittelt. Die waren Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts eingeführt worden, um den Einfluss der Parteibosse und ihrer Machtzirkel bei der Nominierung zu reduzieren. Es gibt zwei Arten von Vorwahlen, die "Caucuses" und die "Primaries".

Letztere sind Abstimmungen, bei denen Parteimitglieder in Wahllokalen ihre Stimmzettel in Urnen stecken und dabei entscheiden, welchen Kandidaten die Delegierten ihres Bundesstaates auf dem Nationalkonvent im Sommer unterstützen werden. Einige Bundesstaaten erlauben "offene" Primaries, an denen sich auch Parteilose, seltener Mitglieder anderer Parteien beteiligen können.

Caucuses sind Parteiversammlungen, auf denen die Kandidaten bestimmt werden. Dort ist die Beteiligung oft niedrig. In Iowa, wo am Montag an knapp 2000 Orten die ersten Caucuses abgehalten werden, nahmen vor vier Jahren nur rund 61 000 Demokraten an der Vorwahl teil. ost

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HOWARD DEAN
Vom krassen Außenseiter zum Mann mit Chancen


Howard Dean (ap)

Der ehemalige Gouverneur des liberalen Zwergstaates Vermont, wo Howard Dean von 1991 bis zum vergangenen Jahr regierte, galt zunächst als krasser Außenseiter. Mit seinem frühen Protest gegen den Krieg in Irak sorgte er jedoch für nationales Aufsehen. Inzwischen werden Dean, der in den neunziger Jahren als Zentrist und Mann des Bush-Vorgängers Bill Clinton galt, gute Chancen auf die Nominierung eingeräumt. Dean wird inzwischen vor allem vom linken Parteiflügel der Demokraten unterstützt.

Mit 40 Millionen Dollar an Spenden verfügt Howard Dean über die prallste Wahlkampfkasse aller Kandidaten. Dazu hat vor allem seine innovative Nutzung des Internets für die Spendenakquisition beigetragen.

Unbedachte Äußerungen, heftige Angriffe von Konkurrenten sowie von den Medien ausgesprochen kritisch aufbereitete politische Positionswechsel haben den gelernten Arzt Howard Dean jedoch wiederholt in Schwierigkeiten gebracht. ost

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WESLEY CLARK
Der Mann mit der Militärkarriere


Wesley Clark (ap)

Der ehemalige Oberbefehlshaber der Nato und Kosovo-Feldherr Wesley Clark hat sich lange von seinen Anhängern bitten lassen und erst spät zur Kandidatur um die Präsidentschaft entschlossen. Clark ist erst seit kurzem als Mitglied der Demokratischen Partei registriert.

Im Wahlkampf nutzt er geschickt seine glänzende Militärkarriere, womit er in den USA punkten kann. Er war in der Offiziersschmiede West Point der Beste seiner Klasse, wurde im Vietnam-Krieg verwundet und trug als General vier Sterne.

Clark wirft dem amtierenden Präsidenten George W. Bush vor, in Irak aus ideologischen Gründen einen falschen Krieg geführt zu haben. Nach anfänglichen Stolperern sehen Umfragen den Neu-Politiker im Aufwind.

Wesley Clark hat in Iowa, wo die ersten Vorwahlen stattfinden, keinen Wahlkampf geführt und hofft auf ein gutes Abschneiden in New Hampshire sowie später im Süden der USA, wo er im Bundesstaat Arkansas zu Hause ist. ost

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DENNIS KUCINICH
Ein Parteilinker kämpft für den Rückzug aus Irak


Dennis Kucinich (ap)

Der Kongressabgeordnete Dennis Kucinich aus dem Bundesstaat Ohio vertritt im Kandidatenpulk der Demokraten die äußerste Parteilinke. Er will die Rüstungsausgaben kürzen und das Gesundheitswesen verstaatlichen. Außerdem plädiert er für die Schaffung eines "Ministeriums für den Frieden", das gewaltfreie Konfliktlösungen propagieren soll.

Kucinich war von Anfang an gegen den Irak-Krieg und fordert - als einziger Bewerber - auch jetzt den sofortigen Abzug der US-amerikanischen Truppen aus dem Zweistromland. "Wenn es falsch war, reinzugehen, ist es falsch zu bleiben", argumentiert der Katholik.

Unter dem Motto "Die UN rein, die USA raus" hat Dennis Kucinich den Irak-Rückzug zum Kernpunkt seines Wahlkampfes macht. Chancen auf die Nominierung werden ihm nicht eingeräumt. · ost

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AL SHARPTON
Witziger Prediger für die Interessen der Schwarzen


Al Sharpton (ap)

Der eloquente Schwarzenprediger Al Sharpton aus Harlem hat keine Chance auf die Nominierung. Trotzdem ist Sharpton mit seinem rhetorischen Talent und schnellen Witz mehr als nur der unterhaltsamste Präsidentschaftsbewerber in den TV-Debatten der Kandidaten.

Der frühere Manager des Soulsängers James Brown sorgt dafür, dass seine Mitbewerber die Interessen der Schwarzen, einer wichtigen Wählerklientel der Demokraten, nicht aus den Augen verlieren. Auch will sich Sharpton landesweit als wichtigste Stimme der Schwarzenbewegung etablieren. Er hofft dabei auf Achtungserfolge vor allem in Bundesstaaten mit einem hohen Anteil afroamerikanischer Stimmen.

Umstritten ist Sharpton wegen seiner Rolle bei früheren Rassenunruhen. Kritiker werfen ihm vor, damals Gewalt angestachelt und Antisemitismus geschürt zu haben. ost

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JOHN EDWARDS
Telegener Rechtsanwalt mit politischer Zukunft


John Edwards (ap)

Der erfolgreiche Rechtsanwalt John Edwards aus dem Bundesstaat North Carolina hat es vom Sohn eines Textilarbeiters zum Multimillionär gebracht. Der Jurist gilt seit seiner Wahl in den US-amerikanischen Senat im Jahr 1998 als Mann mit politischer Zukunft. Im Kandidatenfeld ist er mit 50 Jahren der Jüngste.

Telegen und redegewandt, konnte sich Edwards im Wahlkampf bislang jedoch kaum profilieren und eigene Akzente setzen. Vor allem seine geringe Erfahrung in der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, die derzeit die politische Agenda bestimmen, gelten als Handicap. Im Senat stimmte Edwards für die Irak-Kriegsresolution, kritisierte Bush später aber, er habe die Mittel der Diplomatie nicht ausgeschöpft.

Neben Wesley Clark ist Edwards der einzige Bewerber aus dem Süden, der Problemzone der Demokraten. ost

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JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
Offensiver Unterstützer des Irak-Kriegs


Als Befürworter einer robusten Sicherheitspolitik ist Joseph Lieberman der einzige Kandidat, der offensiv seine Unterstützung für den Irak-Krieg verteidigt. ost

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[b]
JOHN KERRY
[/b]Vom Kriegshelden zum Friedens-Aktivisten
[img]http://www.fr-aktuell.de/_img/_cnt/_online/040117_pth_kerry_ap.jpg" />
John Kerry (ap)

Der Senator aus Massachusetts, John Kerry, ist neben dem früheren Nato-Oberbefehlshaber Wesley Clark der einzige Kandidat mit militärischer Erfahrung. Kerry wurde als junger Leutnant im Vietnam-Krieg verwundet und mit Orden behängt. Nach seiner Heimkehr zu Anfang der siebziger Jahre schloss er sich jedoch den Anti-Kriegs-Protesten an.

Mit dieser Vita und seiner Erfahrung in sicherheitspolitischen Fragen empfiehlt er sich als Mann, der George W. Bush in Sachen Terrorbekämpfung die Stirn bieten kann. Auch John Kerry stimmte - wie einige seiner Konkurrenten - erst für die Irak-Resolution und übte später Kritik.

Von den US-Medien zunächst als vermeintlicher Favorit gehandelt, kam Kerry im Wahlkampf nur schwer in Tritt. Jüngste Umfragen sehen ihn im Bundesstaat Iowa im Aufwind. ost

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RICHARD GEPHARDT
Wahlkampf mit der Krankenversicherung


Richard Gephardt (ap)

Der Kongressabgeordnete Richard Gephardt aus Missouri ist der Oldtimer unter den Kandidaten. Gephardt vertritt seit 28 Jahren den Wahlbezirk St. Louis im Capitol und war bis Ende 2002 Fraktionsführer der Demokraten im Repräsentantenhaus. Dort gelang es ihm in fünf Wahlen nicht, die Mehrheit zu erobern.

Bereits 1988 bewarb Gephardt sich um die Präsidentschaftskandidatur, gewann Iowa, brach danach aber ein. Auch jetzt hofft er in Iowa auf ein starkes Abschneiden, dank der allerdings diesmal nicht einhelligen Unterstützung der Gewerkschaften.

Wichtigstes Wahlversprechen ist eine allgemeine Krankenversicherung, die Gephardt durch das Zurückdrehen der Bush`schen Steuersenkungen finanzieren will. Im Kongress war er einer der Mitautoren der Irak-Resolution; jetzt wirft er Bush vor, das Land getäuscht zu haben. ost

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http://www.fr-aktuell.de/ressorts/nachrichten_und_politik/di…

Rebell als Biedermann
Howard Dean hat bei den US-Vorwahlen der Demokraten gute Chancen, aber sein Fanclub garantiert keinen Sieg
VON DIETMAR OSTERMANN (DES MOINES)


Aussichtsreicher Kandidat: Howard Dean (dpa)

Der klebrig-süße Ahornsirup fließt wieder in Strömen. Die Pancakes sind etwas lasch heute und außerdem kalt. Der Kaffee ist dünn. Aber das stört niemanden, denn das Frühstück ist umsonst, und wegen der auf Papptellern gereichten Leckereien ist an diesem Morgen sowieso niemand gekommen. Die rund hundert Frühaufsteher in der Mensa des Central College von Pella kommen ihrer ersten Bürgerpflicht nach: Sie nehmen mal wieder einen Präsidentschaftskandidaten unter die Lupe.

Pella ist ein kleines Städtchen von achttausend Seelen. Es gibt eine historische Windmühle, ein Glockenspiel und ein paar Grachten, als hätte jemand einen Zipfel Holland über den Atlantik getragen. Niederländische Einwanderer sind hier im 19. Jahrhundert hängen geblieben, mitten in der amerikanischen Steppe. Die gehört heute zum Bundesstaat Iowa, und bei Iowa weiß in diesen Tagen jeder US-Amerikaner sofort Bescheid: drei Millionen Menschen, zehn Millionen Schweine. Viele Farmen, viel Wind, viel Schnee. Und jetzt eben gut ein halbes Dutzend Präsidentschaftsbewerber, nebst Heerscharen von Reportern.

Gut für Überraschungen

Alle vier Jahre ist der kleine Agrarstaat im Mittleren Westen für ein paar Wochen so etwas wie der Nabel der politischen Welt. Dann stehen auf Iowas Parteiversammlungen die ersten Vor-Abstimmungen im Nominierungskampf für das Präsidentschaftsrennen an. Für Kandidaten kann Iowa schon das Ende aller Träume sein. Oder ein Sprungbrett auf dem Weg ins Weiße Haus. Nächsten Montag ist es wieder so weit. Iowas Republikaner haben es diesmal leicht: George W. Bush, der Präsident, ist unangefochten. Die Nominierung ist Formsache. Spannend hingegen ist es bei den Demokraten. Auch wenn mit Joe Lieberman und Wesley Clark zwei der acht Möchtegern-Herausforderer in Iowa gar nicht erst antreten, ist das Feld der Bewerber so groß wie unübersichtlich. Es gibt, traut man den Umfragen, keinen sicheren Favoriten. Jedenfalls nicht in Iowa, wo die komplizierten Regeln der "Caucus"-Versammlungen, persönliche Loyalitäten und das wechselhafte Wetter oft für Überraschungen gesorgt haben.

Klar immerhin ist, auf wen sich alle Augen richten werden am 19. Januar. Es ist derselbe Mann, der heute in Pella Pancakes serviert: Howard Dean. Der flamboyante Ex-Gouverneur von Vermont ist bei den Demokraten der Bewerber, der den Vor-Vorwahlkampf der vergangenen Monate dominiert hat. Dean liegt in nationalen Umfragen vorn. Er hat das meiste Geld gesammelt. Er verfügt landesweit über die beste Organisation. Er produziert die meisten Schlagzeilen. "Wenn er in Iowa überzeugend gewinnt und eine Woche später in New Hampshire auch, dann ist er nicht mehr aufzuhalten", prophezeit Peverill Squire, Politikprofessor an der Universität von Iowa: "Die Frage lautet: Wer kann Dean stoppen?"

Die strahlende Aura des sicheren Siegers aber ist es nicht, mit der Howard Dean an diesem Morgen beim "Pfannkuchen-Frühstück für den Wechsel" auf die kleine Bühne im Central College von Pella klettert. Der Kandidat wirkt müde, der Beifall ist freundlich, nicht mehr. Das mag am Menschenschlag hier liegen, der bodenständig ist und bedächtig, oder einfach am Publikum. Denn nicht die " Generation Dean" sitzt da auf den weinroten Kantinenstühlen. Seit Howard Dean sich früh und ohne zu wackeln gegen den Irak-Krieg ausgesprochen hat, wird er von den College- und Universitätsstudenten, der Parteilinken und der visuellen Opposition im Internet geradezu kultisch verehrt, als wäre er ein Popstar.

In Pella aber sind noch Semesterferien, und so sind Kyle Simpson und sein Freund Pete hier so ziemlich die einzigen Studenten im Saal. Der 18-Jährige ist auf Dean abonniert, "wegen dem Krieg". Doch er hat auch Fragen, denn je mehr Irak im Wahlkampf in den Hintergrund rückt, desto mehr wird Kyle klar, dass dieser Howard Dean ein komplizierter Typ ist. Dean will der Haushaltssanierung höchste Priorität einräumen, und das klingt für den Studenten nicht so, als bliebe tatsächlich mehr Geld für Bildung und soziale Programme übrig. Dean will auch höhere Steuern - kein schönes Wahlversprechen. Dean ist gegen strengere Waffengesetze. Kyle dafür. Dean war für den ersten Golf-Krieg und den in Afghanistan. Kyle dagegen.

Das Bild vom pazifistischen Ostküstenliberalen in Birkenstock-Sandalen aus dem elitären "Starbucks-Getto", mit dem republikanische Voraustruppen Dean auch im Iowa-Fernsehen bereits karikieren, muss Kyle erkennen, haftet so sehr an ihm, wie es falsch ist. Für den jungen Mann ist das eher eine Enttäuschung. Ob und wie er wählen geht, will er sich noch mal überlegen.

Dabei braucht Howard Dean Kyles Stimme, und die seiner Kommilitonen auch. Anders als Bill Clinton und zuletzt Al Gore will er die Wahl nicht bei den Wechselwählern der Mitte gewinnen. "Wir müssen jene 50 Prozent erreichen, die nicht mehr wählen gehen, weil sie den Unterschied zwischen Republikanern und Demokraten nicht mehr erkennen", predigt er in Pella. Drei bis vier Millionen politische Abstinenzler, rechnet Dean vor, müssten im Herbst zu den Urnen kommen, um Bush zu schlagen. "Iowa ist auch der erste Test, wie stark Deans neue ,Graswurzel-Bewegung` wirklich ist", glaubt Peverill Squire.


Am Vortag war ein Hauch davon zu spüren, beim Dankeschön-Frühstück im Wahlstab in der tristen Iowa-Hauptstadt Des Moines. Auch da gab es Pancakes mit Ahornsirup. Doch die jungen, meist aus anderen Landesteilen zugereisten Dean-Helfer in Wollpullovern und Badelatschen brauchten nicht erst mit laschem Kaffee aufgeweckt zu werden. Hier tobte der Saal, selbst wenn der Kandidat gar nicht da war, sondern nur am Telefon schön grüßen ließ.

Am besten mit geballter Faust

"Er ist so cool", schwärmt Matthew Winston, der aus Kansas City nach Iowa gekommen ist, "um Amerika zu verändern". Hier kommt die Botschaft vom "People Powered Howard" an, der Schlachtruf von der Macht, die dem Volk gehört, nicht Bush und auch nicht den Apparatschiks der eigenen Partei. Hier predigt der Kandidat zu den Seinen, und hier wissen die Strategen im zweiten Stock auch, dass Dean immer dann am besten ist, wenn er leidenschaftlich und mit geballter Faust das artikuliert, was viele Linke im Land empfinden: heiße Wut über Bush, den sie hassen, wie die Konservativen einst Bill Clinton gehasst haben. Und kalte Wut über die eigene Parteiführung, die in den vergangenen Jahren oft nur halbherzig opponiert hat.

Deans Problem ist freilich, dass er gerade in diesen Momenten bei all jenen die Zweifel bestärkt, die nicht schon zur eingeschworenen Fangemeinde gehören. Wut allein, ahnen sie, wird im November nicht reichen. Vielleicht deshalb präsentiert sich Dean in Pella im grauschwarzen, biederen Anzug und mit gebremster Rhetorik. Er spricht über fehlende Jobs, das Gesundheitswesen und erst dann über den Krieg. Nichts, außer einem Seitenhieb auf das "Establishment" der eigenen Partei, erinnert an den wütenden Rebellen mit hochgerollten Ärmeln und anschwellenden Halsadern aus dem vergangenen Sommer.

Richard McGrath, Physiklehrer am Central College, hat aufmerksam zugehört. Überzeugt ist er nicht: "Ich respektiere Dean, weil er in der Kriegsfrage aufrecht stand. Aber wir brauchen einen Kandidaten, der etwas von nationaler Sicherheit versteht. Sonst spielen die Republikaner im Herbst gnadenlos die Terrorkarte." McGrath will für den Senator und Vietnam-Helden John Kerry stimmen, der in Iowa in Umfragen auf Platz drei liegt. Sein Kollege Phil Weaver widerspricht: "Dean hat doch Recht, wir können nicht ewig den Schwanz einziehen." Dann ist da noch Malvin Bricker, der sein ganzes Leben im Kuhstall verbracht hat. "Dean ", sagt der Bauer im knallgelben Overall der "Huskies", "ist ein aufgeblasener Angeber aus einem kleinen Staat im Osten." Malvin Bricker ist für Dick Gephardt, den Kongressabgeordneten aus Missouri, weil dessen Vater mal hinterm Steuer eines Milchautos saß.

"Die meisten Demokraten suchen nach dem Kandidaten, der die besten Chancen hat, tatsächlich ins Weiße Haus zu kommen", hat Professor Peverill Squire beobachtet: "Das Vertrackte ist nur, dass sie nicht wissen, wer das ist." Läuft es in Irak gut, könnten Kandidaten mit militärischer Erfahrung wie Kerry oder Ex-General Wesley Clark am ehesten Bushs Kriegsherrenbonus ausgleichen. Ist die Wirtschaft Thema Nummer eins, könnte der junge Senator John Edwards punkten, der mit seiner "Kampagne der Hoffnung" zum Bill Clinton des Jahres 2004 werden will. Läuft es schlecht in Irak, wäre Dean der richtige Mann. Das Ergebnis, sagt Squire, "könnte am Montag ein Wahlausgang sein, der keinem wirklich hilft und Dean beschädigt".

Zielscheibe der Konkurrenten

Das freilich könnte schon geschehen sein. Denn im Kampf der Verzweifelten in der zweiten Reihe um Aufmerksamkeit haben sich fast alle darauf verlegt, auf den "Front-runner" zu schießen. In der Hoffnung, dass sich Dean an den Scharmützeln abnutzt, dass etwas Dreck kleben bleibt, dass er stolpert und fällt. Beim Kandidatenforum von Iowas Minderheiten im Kongresszentrum von Des Moines musste der Vermonter mal wieder so einen Kinnhaken einstecken. Da hat ihm der Schwarzenprediger Al Sharpton Scheinheiligkeit vorgeworfen, weil er als Gouverneur von Vermont keinen Afroamerikaner in sein fünfköpfiges Kabinett berufen habe. Dean, der in der Defensive stets schlecht aussieht, hat sich nicht provozieren lassen. Dabei beträgt der Bevölkerungsanteil der Schwarzen in Vermont gerade mal 1,6 Prozent.

Deans Wahlmanager Joe Trippi hat versucht, die Wogen zu glätten. "Der Vorwurf ist absurd, wir haben die Unterstützung vom Sohn von Jesse Jackson, von anderen Bürgerrechtlern", gibt sich Trippi gelassen, als er nach der Debatte die Journalisten bearbeitet, "wir machen uns keine Sorgen, die Umfragen sind gut." Doch am nächsten Tag sind die Zeitungen in Iowa voll mit der Geschichte. Die Stimmen der Schwarzen und Hispanics kann Dean wohl erst mal abschreiben. "Wieder mal super gelaufen", findet Pat Derwine bei der Morgenlektüre im Hotel. Derwine arbeitet nicht für einen Dean-Konkurrenten. Er ist aus Washington angereist, als Späher der Republikaner.

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Alle Daten über PDF-Datei(Javascript kein Link möglich?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/politics/campaigns/18POLL.…

January 18, 2004
Poll Bolsters Bush on Terrorism but Finds Doubts on Economy
By ROBIN TONER and JANET ELDER

President Bush begins his campaign year with Americans voicing strong support for his handling of the war against terrorism, but many doubting his economic and domestic policies, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Fewer than one in five people said their tax burden had been eased by Mr. Bush, who has made tax cuts the centerpiece of his economic program. His latest domestic initiatives, unveiled in the run-up to the State of the Union message on Tuesday, got only a lukewarm response, with 58 percent saying that building a permanent space station on the Moon was not worth the risks and costs.

Moreover, the support Mr. Bush gained after the capture of Saddam Hussein last month has largely dissipated. His overall approval rating now stands at 50 percent, comparable to President Bill Clinton`s 47 percent in January 1996. Mr. Bush remains a polarizing figure in a sharply divided country, with 9 in 10 Republicans approving of his performance, and only 1 in 4 of the Democrats.

Despite those vulnerabilities, which the Democratic presidential candidates are busily trying to exploit, Mr. Bush retains a powerful advantage on national security. Sixty-eight percent, including majorities of both Democrats and independents, gave him high marks for the campaign against terrorism, and 68 percent said the Bush administration`s policies have made the United States safer from terrorist attacks. Sixty-four percent said they considered him a strong leader.

"He demonstrated a maturity after 9/11, responding in a positive and determined way to bring the country onto a steady keel," said George House, a 72-year-old Democrat in Sigourney, Iowa. Mr. House, who was reinterviewed after the poll, added that he still had doubts about the war with Iraq.

Such assessments could set a high bar for Mr. Bush`s Democratic challengers, who are still largely unknown, even among Democratic primary voters, many strategists say. "People wonder whether the Democrats will be as aggressive as Bush in keeping the country safe," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster.

Already, credibility as commander in chief has emerged as a major issue in the battle for the Democratic nomination. Many Democrats in rival campaigns have argued that Howard Dean, who has led in the polls for most of the primary season, is unlikely to pass that test on national security, because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and his lack of foreign policy experience.

The Times/CBS News poll was conducted Monday through Thursday by telephone with 1,022 adults nationwide, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Other polls released last week and conducted earlier than the Times/CBS News poll found Mr. Bush`s job approval rating to be higher. For instance, a Gallup Poll taken Jan. 9 to 11 had a 59 percent job approval rating for Mr. Bush, while an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken Jan. 10 to 12 had a 54 percent approval rating.

While the Times poll was a road map for an intensely divided electorate, it also highlighted Mr. Bush`s strengths. His approval rating is highest among those ages 30 to 44; those younger and older are more divided. Whites approve of his performance by 56 to 41 percent; in contrast, 70 percent of blacks disapprove of the job he is doing, while just 17 percent approve, the poll found.

He also has a big edge among those who say religion is extremely or very important to them; 56 percent of that group say they approve of Mr. Bush and 39 percent say they disapprove.

His approval rating among men and women is about the same, suggesting he is addressing the historic Republican vulnerability of a gender gap. And he has a substantial edge among married women.

One of the president`s signature accomplishments on the domestic front — the passage of a Medicare overhaul with new coverage for prescription drugs — has yet to register much with the voters, the poll suggests. Twenty-nine percent said they thought the administration had made "a lot" or "some" progress on prescription drug relief. Fifty-four percent said the administration had made little or no progress.

For all of Mr. Bush`s strengths, the poll shows the potential for a competitive election. When asked whether Mr. Bush had done more to unite the country or divide it, the public was split — 43 percent said he had brought Americans together, 44 percent said he had divided them.

When given a choice between an unnamed Democrat and Mr. Bush, 43 percent of the registered voters polled said they would vote for Mr. Bush, while 45 percent said they would vote for the Democrat.

The survey found the nation still in an anxious state economically, despite the recent rebound in economic growth and the improvement in the stock market. The economy, jobs and unemployment led the list of most important issues for voters, with health care and education not far behind.

Administration officials argue that by almost every major measure — save jobs — the economy is in a strong recovery, and that employment will soon catch up. In fact, more people now rate the state of the economy as "very" or "fairly" good — 54 percent, compared with 41 percent who gave it that rating a year ago. Similarly, people are more optimistic about where the economy is headed — 34 percent said they believed it was getting better and 26 percent worse, another sharp turnaround from last year.

But many in the poll still worried. "They say unemployment is down, but that`s because a lot of people`s unemployment ran out, so they`re not listed anymore," said Ellen Diliello, a Republican retiree in Preble, N.Y. Thirty-nine percent said they remained worried that they or someone in their household would lose a job in the coming year.

Moreover, many Americans say their own economic circumstances have not improved much. A majority said they were having a hard time keeping up with their bills. Only 19 percent said their tax burden had been eased by the administration`s policies, while 32 percent said their taxes had gone up and 44 percent said the policies had not affected them one way or the other.

Mr. Bush argues that the tax cuts are spurring economic growth and must be made permanent. But only 27 percent in the poll said they believed the tax cuts were good for the economy, while 17 percent said the tax cuts were bad and 51 percent said the cuts had not made much of a difference.

The perception that Mr. Bush`s economic policies favor the affluent and big business remains; 64 percent said they thought "big business" had too much influence on the Bush administration, while 57 percent said the administration`s policies favored the rich, as opposed to the middle class and the poor.

"It`s a Republican theory that if you help large corporations, it should filter down to everyone else, but it takes too long, and sometimes it just doesn`t," said Patricia Domingo, a 58-year-old Democrat in Byron, Calif.

In contrast, Ardis Barton, a Republican businessman in Earth, Texas, argued, "The tax cuts were needed and he got them through. The economy is improving, and that proves he made the right choice on the tax cuts."

Mr. Bush`s proposal to overhaul immigration policies, announced this month, is getting a skeptical response. Two thirds of those polled said immigrants who entered the country illegally should not be allowed to stay and work in the United States for three years, as Mr. Bush proposes. There was little enthusiasm for increasing levels of immigration at all, with a plurality saying immigration should be decreased.

The survey also found divisions over Mr. Bush`s proposal for returning to the Moon by 2020, and eventually using a lunar base as a launching pad to Mars. Forty percent said the nation was spending too much on space exploration programs, while 17 percent said the nation was spending too little. Forty-eight percent said they would favor the United States` sending astronauts to explore Mars, while 47 percent said they would oppose it.

And 58 percent said building a space station on the Moon was not worth the risks and costs, while 35 percent said it was.

Despite the widespread support for Mr. Bush`s handling of terrorism, there are also doubts about his handling of foreign affairs in general. Forty-seven percent in the survey said they approved of the way he was handling foreign affairs, while 45 percent disapproved.

Moreover, half the public said the result of the war in Iraq was not worth the loss of life and other costs. Forty-nine percent said Mr. Bush was too quick to get the United States involved in a war there, while 35 percent said the timing had been about right and 13 percent said the administration was too slow to act.

The public is also divided over Mr. Bush`s current handling of the situation in Iraq, with 48 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving. In addition, 6 in 10 of those polled said the Bush administration had been hiding information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction; only 27 percent said the administration had told the public most of what it knows.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 18, 2004
At Least 18 Killed in Bomb Attack in Baghdad
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

AGHDAD, Iraq, Sunday, Jan. 18 — A large bomb exploded at the main gate of the American occupation headquarters in Baghdad on Sunday morning, killing and wounding people in a crowd gathering to enter the heavvily fortified compound. The attack appeared to be an effort by terrorist bombers to strike as close as they could approach to the heart of American authority in Baghdad.

The bomb killed at least 16 Iraqi civilians and two employees of the U.S. Department of Defense, and wounded at least 25, Reuters reported.

The blast at the Republican Palace was large enough to be heard miles away, and the smell of the smoke quickly spread across the Tigris River and into central Baghdad. Flaming wreckage of several vehicles was strewn about the north gate near the Jumhuriya Bridge and close to the isolated buildings that house the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has governed Iraq since the fall of Baghdad on April 9.

The bodies of the dead and wounded attested to the violence of the explosion as ambulances began to carry dozens of wounded toward nearby hospitals.

The area was quickly sealed off by armored vehicles and American troops sprinting about in full combat gear. Among those wounded or killed were Iraqi civilians, including those arriving for work as the bomb went off shortly after 8 a.m.

There was no word from the authorities about any American military or civilian casualties.

The explosion occurred as L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupying authority, was in the United States for meetings at the White House and a conference with the Kofi Anna, the United Nations secretary general, on Monday.

Violence aimed at the occupying forces and the interim Iraqi government is the main obstacle confronting the Bush administraion as it attempts a rapid transfer of sovereignty to a new Iraqi government by the end of June.

One car exploded as security guards were checking the credentials of visitors, according to witness interviewed by the BBC.

At 8:50, a reporter at a cordon near the perimeter of the gate saw Iraqi fire trucks trying to extinguish flames from the wreckage of at least one mangled white sedan.

Al Jazeera, the Arab televison network, showed film of victims lying in the road near the burning wreckage in front of the gate and in a small park across the street.

Cars can drive to a checkpoint about 50 yards from the gate, announce themselves as visitors and interact with Iraqi and American soldiers.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

An injured Iraqi man lies in the road near burning wreckage after a car bomb attack in Baghdad, January 18, 2004. Sixteen Iraqi civilians and two employees of the U.S. Department of Defense were killed in a car bomb attack outside the main coalition headquarters in Baghdad on Sunday, a U.S. military spokeswoman said.

Suicide Bomb Outside U.S. Baghdad HQ Kills 18
Sun January 18, 2004 04:43 AM ET

By Fiona O`Brien and Andrew Marshall
BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - A suicide bomber blew up his car outside the main U.S. headquarters in Baghdad on Sunday, killing 16 Iraqi civilians and two Defense Department staff in the deadliest attack in Baghdad since the capture of Saddam Hussein.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=15UH5FPI4FMR…

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January 18, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
All the Presidents` Numbers
By ANDREW KOHUT and HARRY CAMPBELL

By most measures prospects for George W. Bush`s re-election look very good. No single indicator guarantees a second term, of course, but on balance the president`s numbers are as good if not better than those of the three presidents who won second terms in recent times. (Click on Graphic: The Presidents` Numbers at the right.)

From a political standpoint, Mr. Bush is strong. His approval ratings are relatively high, as is the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the right track, and alone among recent presidents he saw his party gain seats in the midterm elections.

The economic numbers are also positive. Consumer confidence is high, disposable income is rising and the unemployment rate is lower than that of the three presidents who lost bids for re-election.

Yet the numbers, as always, don`t tell the full story. The effects of partisan polarization, for example, are unpredictable, and it is near an all-time high; Democrats disapprove of Mr. Bush almost as much as Republicans disapproved of President Bill Clinton. What`s more, news that seems to be good — like rising approval ratings — doesn`t always lead to re-election, while news that seems to be bad — like relatively high unemployment — doesn`t necessarily ruin an incumbent`s chances. Just ask Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan.

These statistics have been culled from publicly available sources, including the Gallup Organization, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the University of Michigan, and Congressional Quarterly and other news organizations.


Andrew Kohut is director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Harry Campbell is an illustrator.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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January 18, 2004
Fixing Democracy

The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year`s presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

This is no way to run a democracy.

Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the rest of the world. But the key principle behind it, that our leaders govern with the consent of the governed, requires a process that accurately translates the people`s votes into political power. Too often, the system falls short. Throughout this presidential election year, we will be taking a close look at the mechanics of our democracy and highlighting aspects that cry out for reform. Among the key issues:

Voting Technology An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.

They are right to be concerned. There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check. It is little wonder that last month, Fortune magazine named paperless voting its "worst technology" of 2003.

To address these concerns, electronic voting machines should produce a paper trail — hard-copy receipts that voters can check to ensure that their vote was accurately reported, and that can later be used in a recount. California recently took the lead on this issue, mandating paper trails from its machines by July 2006. A bill introduced by Representative Rush Holt would do the same nationally. Congress should make every effort to put paper trails in place by this fall.

Compounding the technology issues are the political entanglements of voting machine companies. Walden O`Dell, the head of Diebold Inc., has raised large sums for President Bush, and pledged in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004. Diebold is hardly alone among major voting machine manufacturers in contributing to elected officials, who represent virtually their only market. But the public has a right to expect that voting machine companies that run elections will not also seek to influence them.

Internet voting will be allowed in the Michigan caucuses next month and, for the first time, in the general election in a Pentagon-operated pilot program for overseas voters. Internet voting raises all of the security concerns of electronic voting and more. Given that major corporations regularly find their Web sites and databases hacked, and "Trojan horses" can take over home computers, it`s questionable whether any Internet voting can be made completely secure. The Pentagon`s program was adopted with disturbingly little publicity or debate. The public is entitled to know more about how it will work, and how it will be protected.

Voter Participation Our ideal of government with the consent of the governed presumes universal participation in elections, or something close to it. But even in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, a mere 51 percent of voters went to the polls, down from 63 percent in 1960, and far less than in most mature democracies.

We no longer have poll taxes, but there are still significant obstacles to voting. In Florida in 2000, Katherine Harris, then the secretary of state, hired a private company to purge the voting rolls of felons, but ended up purging many nonfelons as well. There will be more voting roll purges this year, and little scrutiny is being given to how secretaries of state, many of whom are highly political, are conducting them. And the Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 debacle, includes new requirements for voter identification that could be used in some states to turn away voters.

More broadly, we need a national commitment to increasing registration and turnout. Seven states allow some form of election-day registration, which appears to raise turnout. Voting by mail, making Election Day a holiday, and similar reforms can also help. And there is a movement to roll back laws denying the vote to nearly five million people with felony convictions, 36 percent of them black males.

Competitive Elections The founders intended the House of Representatives to be the branch most responsive to the passions of the people. But with the rise of partisan gerrymandering, redistricting to favor the party in control of the process, competitive House elections are becoming virtually obsolete. Only four challengers defeated incumbents in the 2002 general elections, a record low, and in the nation`s 435 Congressional districts, there may be no more than 30 this year where the outcome is truly in doubt.

Pennsylvania is a classic case. After the 2000 census, Republicans, who controlled the state legislature, used powerful computers to draw bizarrely shaped districts — which were given names like "upside-down Chinese dragon" — that maximized Republican voting strength. They paired Democratic incumbents in a single district, so they would have to run against each other, and fashioned new districts where Republicans would have an easy ride. As a result, a state with nearly 500,000 more Democrats than Republicans has a Congressional delegation with 12 Republicans and just 7 Democrats.

Partisan gerrymandering takes control of Congress away from the voters, and puts it in the hands of legislative redistricters. It can also profoundly distort the political direction of the country. In four states that are almost precisely evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — Republican legislators drew district lines so that 51 of the 77 seats are Republican, a nearly two-to-one edge.

Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potential landmark case challenging Pennsylvania`s lines. The court could, and should, use it to establish constitutional limits on redistricting for partisan advantage. Another solution states can adopt on their own — although parties in control of state government will have little incentive to — is appointing nonpartisan commissions to draw district lines that will produce competitive races.

Thomas Jefferson advised that "elective government" is "the best permanent corrective of the errors or abuses of those entrusted with power." His faith in democracy was well placed, but for elective government to play this critical role, the elections must be inclusive and fair, and they must use machinery that works.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 18, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
War of Ideas, Part 4
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Let`s not mince words. American policy today toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is insane.

Can anyone look at what is happening — Palestinians, gripped by a collective madness, committing suicide, and Israelis, under a leadership completely adrift, building more settlements so fanatical Jews can live in the heart of Palestinian-populated areas — and not conclude the following: That these two nations are locked in an utterly self-destructive vicious cycle that threatens Israel`s long-term viability, poisons America`s image in the Middle East, undermines any hope for a Palestinian state and weakens pro-American Arab moderates. No, you can`t draw any other conclusion. Yet the Bush team, backed up by certain conservative Jewish and Christian activist groups, believes that the correct policy is to do nothing. Well, that is my definition of insane.

Israel must get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as soon as possible and evacuate most of the settlements. I have long advocated this, but it is now an urgent necessity. Otherwise, the Jewish state is in peril. Ideally, this withdrawal should be negotiated along the Clinton plan. But if necessary, it should be done unilaterally. This can`t happen too soon, and the U.S. should be forcing it.

Why? First, because the Arab-Muslim world, which for so long has been on vacation from globalization, modernization and liberalization, is realizing that vacation is over. There is not enough oil wealth anymore to cushion or employ the huge population growth happening in the region. Every Arab country is going to have to make a wrenching adjustment. Israel needs to get out of the way and reduce its nodes of friction with the Muslim world as it goes through this unstable and at times humiliating catch-up.

Second, three dangerous trends are converging around Israel. One is a massive population explosion across the Arab world. The second is the worst interpersonal violence ever between Israelis and Palestinians. And the third is an explosion of Arab multimedia — from Al Jazeera to the Internet. What`s happening is that this Arab media explosion is feeding the images of this Israeli-Palestinian violence to this Arab population explosion — radicalizing it and melding in the heads of young Arabs and Muslims the notion that the biggest threat to their future is J.I.A. — "Jews, Israel and America."

Israel`s withdrawal is not a cure-all for this. Israel will still be despised. But if it withdraws to an internationally recognized border, it will have the moral high ground, the strategic high ground and the demographic high ground to protect itself. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon, the Hezbollah militia, on the other side, went on hating Israel and harassing the border — but it never tried to launch an invasion. Why? Hezbollah knew it would have no legitimacy — in the world or in Lebanon — for breaching that U.N.-approved border. And if it tried, Israel would be able to use its full military weight to retaliate. Demographically speaking, if Israel does not relinquish the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians will soon outnumber the Jews and Israel will become either an apartheid state or a non-Jewish state.

Moreover, an Israeli withdrawal will strip the worst Arab leaders of an excuse not to reform, it will create more space for the best Arab leaders to move forward and it will give Palestinians something to protect.

In sum, Israel should withdraw from the territories, not because it is weak, but because it must remain strong; not because Israel is wrong, but because Zionism is a just cause that the occupation is undermining; not because the Arabs would warmly embrace a smaller Israel, but because a smaller Israel, in internationally recognized boundaries, will be much more defensible; not because it will eliminate Islamic or European anti-Semitism, but because it will reduce it by reducing the daily friction; not because it would mean giving into an American whim, but because nothing would strengthen America`s influence in the Muslim world, help win the war of ideas and therefore better protect Israel than this.

The Bush team rightly speaks of bringing justice to Iraq. It rightly denounces Palestinian suicide madness. But it says nothing about the injustice of the Israeli land grab in the West Bank. The Bush team destroyed the Iraqi regime in three weeks and has not persuaded Israel to give up one settlement in three years. To think America can practice that sort of hypocrisy and win the war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world is a truly dangerous fantasy.



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January 18, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dudgeons and Dragons
By MAUREEN DOWD

DES MOINES--I went to Iowa hunting Howard Dean. His campaign said he might give me five minutes. On the phone.

At first, five minutes sounded pretty cursory. But I decided to be philosophical. Out of his 15 minutes of angry fame, Howard Dean was willing to devote a third of it to me.

How best to figure out someone who comes out of nowhere and wants to lead the world in five minutes?

I quizzed Tom Harkin, Mr. Iowa, about why he had endorsed Dr. Dean, even though it infuriated his spurned Senate buddy John Kerry and disappointed fellow Midwesterner Dick Gephardt. Senator Harkin didn`t seem especially close to the Vermont governor. At the 2002 Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner here, he twice called the Democrat John Dean (as Martin Sheen did in a speech here last week).

"He`s a fire hydrant," Mr. Harkin said over dinner at Bambino`s in Cumming. "If you kick it, it`s going to hurt you. But it`s stable and secure and there when you need it."

It wasn`t the most glamorous metaphor. But I knew what he meant.

Democrats yearn for somebody tough enough to stand up to the Bush family machine. They`re still smarting that Al Gore lost a presidency he won. They watched even a fellow as gritty as John McCain crumple during the 2000 South Carolina primary, stunned by the sulfurous personal attacks of Bush supporters.

A fire hydrant sprays back.

Dr. Dean has certainly proved he`s tough. The press critiques on him — "hotheaded," "arrogant," "mercurial," "a jerk" — echo the knocks on W., back before "the Roman candle" of the Bush family ran for Texas governor and transformed himself into a disciplined and genial campaigner.

After months of watching Dr. Dean`s neck bulging, face churning, and sleeves rolled up tourniquet-tight, many of my colleagues were longing to ask the pugilistic pol, as one put it: "Do you ever lighten up, dude?"

I decided to use my five minutes to find out if he has the sunny side Americans love in their leaders. I`d ask him what he`d want to do for fun on a Saturday night if he could play hooky. I`d ask him the last time he did something goofy and what made him really laugh.

While I was waiting for him to call, I grew more and more afraid that he`d get angry at me for wasting his time with piffle. I cowered by the phone, jumping when it rang.

I never got the five minutes with him. Which left me five minutes to think about why his candidacy was sputtering.

He has a problem with his mythic arc. Presidential campaigns trace the patterns of mythological adventure, as contenders strive to show they are superior in the knightly virtues of temperance, loyalty and courage.

Once candidates showed that they had completed the "hero-task" by highlighting their war exploits — J.F.K. and PT 109, George Bush senior getting shot down as a young Navy pilot over Chichi Jima.

Candidates in the Vietnam War generation who chose not to go to Vietnam had to find more personal dragons and giants to slay. Bill Clinton told the story of confronting an abusive and alcoholic stepfather; George W. Bush recounted overcoming alcoholism and career drift by embracing Christ.

In Iowa, Mr. Gephardt talks about the transforming experience of his son`s battle against cancer. Mr. Kerry describes the crucible of Vietnam. John Edwards`s arc is going from the son of a millworker to a Grishamesque trial lawyer standing up against corporate malefactors.

Shunning personal storytelling, Dr. Dean has chosen to make his campaign arc about his campaign arc. He brags of facing down the dragon George W. Bush.

As he said at a rally here last week about his Democratic rivals: "They weren`t there when it was time to stand up to the president on the war in Iraq. . . . If you want someone to stand up to George Bush, I`ve done it."

Personal history shouldn`t be a substitute for policy. An overreliance on stories of dramatic heroism and physical suffering can overwhelm a campaign, as it did with Bob Kerrey and Bob Dole, devolving into the politics of self. And yuppie sagas of sin and redemption can become strained with repetition.

But a race rooted mainly in attacking the president may not take Dr. Dean far enough. Voters want someone who`s been through the fire. They care about character. They want to know the evolution of the man, even if it`s a myth.



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Mahlzeit und Guten Appetit

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January 18, 2004
Five Killed in Latest Clash in Afghanistan
By REUTERS

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Jan. 17 (Reuters) — Five people were killed and 13 were wounded on Saturday when suspected Taliban fighters ambushed a convoy of Afghan government military vehicles in the restive southern province of Kandahar, an official said.

"Three Taliban were killed and four of them were wounded in the clash that lasted for 50 minutes," said Khali Pashtuna, a spokesman for the provincial governor. He said two government fighters were killed and nine others were wounded.

About 40 Taliban fighters had attacked the vehicles, which were carrying 13 soldiers near the district of Khakraiz, Mr. Pashtuna said.

Separately, state-run media reported Saturday that at least 16 children had died in an outbreak of whooping cough in a remote part of Afghanistan. The deaths over the past five days in the Khwahan District of northern Badakhshan Province came after snow and freezing weather.

About 70 people have been killed or wounded by fighting in the past two weeks in the Kandahar region, once a stronghold of the country`s former Taliban rulers.

Afghanistan has had a fresh wave of violence since August, in which more than 450 people have been killed and scores wounded, mostly in the southern and eastern areas.

Militants, civilians, aid workers, Afghan troops and more than a dozen foreign soldiers have been among those killed.

A United States-led combat operation of about 12,000 troops is in Afghanistan hunting Taliban remnants, their suspected allies in Al Qaeda and militants loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who has declared a holy war against foreign troops.



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January 18, 2004
THEOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY
The Cleric Spoiling U.S. Plans
By SUSAN SACHS

BAGHDAD, Iraq — The most important political figure in Iraq today is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, an elderly Shiite Muslim cleric. He has not set foot outside his home in six years, yet the white-bearded ayatollah has effectively commandeered the Bush administration`s planning for postwar democracy.

His pronouncement on who may write a new constitution (only Iraqis elected by Iraqis) forced Washington to upend its timetable for granting the country its independence. Last week, the ayatollah rejected the American proposal for choosing an interim legislature through caucuses, immobilizing the transition. His backers took to the streets to support him.

The ayatollah`s influence recalls that of another once-reclusive Shiite cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, who 25 years ago took the helm of the Iranian revolution and created an Islamic republic implacably hostile to the United States.

Ayatollah Sistani, though, is no Khomeini. At least that is what his own background and the recent history of Iraq`s Shiites would indicate. His teachings have always reflected what is often called the quietist school of thought in modern Shiism, one that says that clerics should not run governments. Iran`s system, the diametric opposite, invests clerics with absolute legal and political authority.

The two theories have never been put to the test side by side. But that, perhaps, is about to change.

In Iran, reformers have boldly challenged the Khomeini legacy by demanding that clerics accept truly free elections by giving up their power to disqualify candidates for the coming parliamentary vote. At the same time, in Iraq, where the long-oppressed Shiite majority is clamoring for power, Ayatollah Sistani is being drawn deeper and deeper into the fray.

"Sistani is incredibly sensitive to public opinion and what people say about him," said a Shiite member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "He renounces political power and yet, at the same time, he has to respond to the fact that people are hungry for a leader."

Although most of Iran`s Shiites are of Persian descent and Iraq`s are Arabs, religious teachers and students flowed back and forth between the two countries for centuries. Ayatollah Sistani, for example, was born in Iran but pursued his religious studies in Iraq. Until the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iranian pilgrims came to Iraq in droves to visit the Shiite shrines in Najaf and Karbala.

Ayatollah Khomeini himself spent the 15 years before the revolution in Najaf, and it was there that he refined his theory of "wilayat al-faqih," or the rule of the jurist. The theory, that an eminent Shiite cleric can be the absolute legal authority, is the foundation of Iran`s present political system.

Even then, in his adopted city, his was the minority view. Ayatollah Sistani`s teacher and the highest-ranking cleric in Iraq at the time, Grand Ayatollah Abu al Qassim al-Khoei, firmly believed that even the most learned of Shia scholars have no right to rule.

Still, many religious Iraqi Shiites, denied political power for more than 500 years by the Sunni minority, recall feeling thrilled at the birth of Iran`s Islamic government.

The feeling did not last long. Fearing for his rule, Saddam Hussein intensified his persecution of Iraq`s Shiites, imprisoning and executing anyone suspected of sympathizing with Iran. With the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, the image of Iran`s mullahs was further poisoned.

As a result, many Iraqis say, the Iranian experience with clerical rule never developed a real following, except as a theory.

One of its few supporters among the senior clerics, Ayatollah Muhammad Yacoubi, described the doctrine of rule-by-clergy as an idea whose time has not yet come. "There`s nothing wrong with Khomeini`s theory," he said. "The negative elements came from the implementation. The people can`t absorb and support the theory of an Islamic state. People are not mature enough. Even the Iranians were not mature enough."

Jalaluddin al-Saghir, an official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the Shiite political parties with a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council, said: "It would be a huge mistake to borrow a model from others. We intend to establish a system that reflects the nature and history of our own country. And we live in a multiethnic society."

Ayatollah Sistani, who is 73, has not put forth his own preferences, if he has any, concerning the form or nature of a new Iraqi government. Nor has he said what he would like to see in a new Iraqi constitution, which presumably would clarify whether the Muslim clergy would have a role in vetting or writing laws, as they have in Iran.

In his recent published statement, Ayatollah Sistani limited his political input to insisting on direct elections for the national assembly.

His declaration created a political crisis on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which is supposed to decide on a mechanism for choosing an assembly. Most of its 25 members are Shiites; all have said they are bound by the ayatollah`s opinion, despite the acknowledged difficulty of holding elections without a national census and with the country under occupation.

Ayatollah Sistani`s emphasis on elections, say people close to him, reflects the clergy`s fears that the Shiites could somehow be marginalized, as they were under British rule in the last century.

"We remember that under the British, the national assemblies were based on nominations," said Muhammad Hussein al Hakim, the son of another senior ayatollah in Najaf, Muhammad Said al Hakim. "We never had the proper representation in those parliaments."

Iraqis who have met with the Ayatollah Sistani said that over the past two months, he has displayed an increasingly avid interest in the minutiae of negotiations over the transfer of sovereignty. His aides have called Shiite political leaders to complain about their statements in Iraqi newspapers and on television.

The ayatollah is now said, by those who have spoken with him, to want the opinion of United Nations experts on the question of holding elections quickly. His request will be transmitted this week to Kofi Annan, the general secretary, Iraqi leaders said.

Divining Ayatollah Sistani`s views on such details has become a full-time activity for council members, the American occupation administration and the rest of Iraq. And the ayatollah appears, from all accounts, to thoroughly enjoy the attention. A council member who spoke with Ayatollah Sistani earlier last week described him, with a measure of surprise, as "very eager to express his views."

Some political figures who are not Shiites have started to complain privately that Ayatollah Sistani has begun to exercise a religious veto on political issues, much as the mullahs of Iran do. But his supporters say that he would not cross the line between influencing politics and participating in politics.

"We have political concerns," Mr. Hakim said, "but we don`t have political desires."



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After 10 Months in Iraq, U.S. Marks 500th Military Death
Blast Outside Occupation Headquarters Kills at Least 12

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A17


The U.S. military death toll after 10 months of engagement in Iraq reached 500 yesterday, roughly matching the number of U.S. military personnel who died in the first four years of the U.S. military engagement in Vietnam.

The death toll in Iraq, which had been 497 on Friday, rose by three when a remote-controlled bomb made of two artillery rounds packed with explosives detonated beneath a Bradley Fighting Vehicle carrying five U.S. soldiers and at least two Iraqi civil defense personnel in cane fields north of Baghdad.

Military officials said the blast occurred near the town of Taji during a search for buried land mines and roadside bombs, which previously claimed lives in the area.

In Baghdad early Sunday morning, a car bomb detonated outside the main gate to the U.S. occupation headquarters, killing at least 12 people and setting several vehicles on fire, according to witnesses and a U.S. military spokesman.

The cumulative toll of 500 U.S. deaths was reached in Vietnam in 1965, the year when the U.S. deployment there rose from 23,300 to 184,300 troops. In Iraq, in contrast, the United States is rotating forces with the goal of reducing the total from 130,000 to 105,000 by June and also sharply scaling back its military presence in Baghdad.

Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman in Iraq, dismissed the significance of reaching the threshold of 500 deaths. "I do not believe that any arbitrary . . . figure is going to cause any soldiers to lose their will or their focus," Kimmitt said.

But Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland`s Program on International Policy Attitudes, said the rising death toll eventually could erode the popularity of President Bush and support for his handling of the conflict.

Noting that many Americans polled before the war began said they anticipated about 1,000 combat deaths, Kull said, "There are no signs of the population going toward a Vietnam-style response, in which a large minority or even a majority says, `pull out.` " That goal has steady support among 15 to 17 percent of the public.

He said the public continued to be led by a consensus among elites in support of continued U.S. military engagement in Iraq. "There is a lot of controversy about whether we should have gone in," but even among the Democratic presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) favors a U.S. withdrawal, Kull noted.

Most Americans believe there is little alternative to staying in Iraq, given the risks of creating a breeding ground for terrorism if U.S. troops leave too soon. Nonetheless, he said, the rising death toll has increased the "cost" of the war at the same time its benefits "have gotten muddier" because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or clear Iraqi links to al Qaeda terrorists.

As a result, nearly half of those polled already say the war has not been "worth it," and support for Bush`s handling of the war dropped from 75 percent in April to 47 percent in October; it rose to the mid-50s in December, after the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Kull noted.

The populous states of California, Texas and Pennsylvania have experienced the most deaths of their citizens in Iraq, totaling 123, according to statistics compiled by military officials and news agencies.

But the death toll has been proportionally highest in American Samoa and the lightly populated states of Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Delaware, plus the District of Columbia.

The cities that have lost the most citizens are Los Angeles, Buffalo, Houston and San Diego; the U.S. military base to suffer the highest death toll is Fort Campbell, Ky.

The U.S. military attributes 346 of the U.S. deaths to hostile action and 154 to nonhostile causes. At least 2,497 military personnel have been wounded in Iraq. The casualties remain far lower than those incurred during the 14-year U.S. engagement in Vietnam, when a total of 58,198 troops were killed, including 47,413 combat deaths and 10,785 nonhostile deaths.

Correspondent Daniel Williams in Baghdad and staff researchers Meg Smith and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.



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Diese Einsetzung eines Richters nähert sich einem Verfassungsbruch. Er muß aber innerhalb eines Jahres vom Senat bestätigt werden, sonst ist seine Berufung hinfällig.(Ich bin kein Jurist, also Vorsicht mit dem letzten Satz)

washingtonpost.com
End Run for Mr. Pickering




Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page B06


PRESIDENT BUSH`S decision Friday to install controversial judicial nominee Charles W. Pickering Sr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit using a recess appointment is yet another unwarranted escalation of the judicial nomination wars. We have lamented some of the attacks on Mr. Pickering, but his record as a federal trial judge is undistinguished and downright disturbing, and Senate Democrats are reasonable to oppose his nomination. Installing him using a constitutional end run around the Senate only inflames passions. The right path is to build consensus that nonpartisanship and excellence are the appropriate criteria for judicial selection.

The recess appointment -- the president`s power to temporarily install federal officers without Senate confirmation -- is a uniquely bad instrument for federal judges. Judges are supposed to be politically independent. Yet Mr. Pickering will be a controversial nominee before the Senate as he considers cases and will lose his job in a year if he is not confirmed. Even his supporters should understand that he will be subject to the political pressures from which judges are supposed to be insulated.

We don`t rule out the recess appointment in all circumstances. At times judges have commanded such uniform support that presidents have used the power to get them in office quickly, leaving the formality of confirmation for later. We supported, moreover, President Bill Clinton`s lame-duck recess appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit of Roger Gregory, who, like Mr. Pickering, was held up in the Senate. But there was a big difference: Mr. Gregory was not controversial. His nomination, in fact, was eventually resubmitted to the Senate by none other than President Bush. It was held up initially because of a long-standing dispute over appointments to that court, not because of any concerns about the nominee himself. There was reason to hope that Mr. Gregory would be confirmed -- as, indeed, he was. In this case, Mr. Bush has used a recess appointment for someone who cannot, on his merits, garner a vote of confidence from the Senate and who has no prospect of confirmation in the current Congress.

We don`t support the filibuster of nominees, but the answer to Democratic obstruction cannot be the appointment or installation of temporary judges who get to hear a few cases over a few months, all the while looking over their shoulders at the senators who oppose them. The great damage the judicial nomination wars threaten over the long term is to erode judicial independence, to make judges constantly aware of how they might have to answer to the Senate for a given opinion. Using the recess appointment to place Mr. Pickering on the 5th Circuit has made that danger into a reality.



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Electing Chaos


By Jennifer Bremer

Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page B07


The Bush administration`s timeline for political transition in Iraq, announced only in November, is already in deep trouble. Although the first of its five milestones -- a law defining how to choose constitutional convention delegates -- is still nearly two months away, even administration leaders are sounding doubtful. Will elections lead to a political outcome that is peaceful, democratic and stable, or is it possible the post-election period will find us facing chaos, even civil war?

There are two election scenarios that could lead to disastrous outcomes for the Iraqis and ourselves: (1) the Shiites win and (2) the Shiites lose.

The Shiites` winning seems the most likely outcome, since they account for about 60 percent of the population. But thanks to decades of oppression by Saddam Hussein, the Shiites have never had the chance to develop political skills in leadership and accommodation outside of the mosque.

We are already seeing the emergence of splits within Shiite society as long-suppressed differences -- doctrinal, tribal, political, ideological -- come out in the open. Shiite political positions on such key issues as the relationship between Islam and the state are fluid and ill-defined. Without a capacity for consensus-building, political debate easily turns violent.

We`re already seeing the emergence of militia politics and armed clashes among contending Shiite groups in the south. This disturbing trend is likely to accelerate if U.S. forces do not move decisively with force that Americans find hard to accept and that Iraqis will certainly not welcome. Instead, in a move we will surely regret, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is giving the formation of militias its implicit blessing with a bizarre plan to form a multi-militia security force. Once started, this process could slide into Northern Ireland-style chaos, with each faction forming its own militia for defense against all the other militias.

The only Shiite parties ready to field a solid political alternative to militia politics are the clergy themselves. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani`s ability to to marginalize the handpicked Governing Council shows that the Shiite leaders are no slouches at political infighting. But can they keep the militias in check and transform their political skills into those needed for governance, performing the delicate balancing act necessary to keep peace among themselves while simultaneously reaching out to historical enemies among the Sunnis and Kurds and defining a common national course? We`re not that lucky.

How might these divisions play out in an election? The Shiites have the numbers for an absolute victory, but only if they can pull their factions together into an effective working coalition. A victorious Shiite coalition would likely be achieved only with a substantial Islamist representation.

Would the Sunni Arabs and Kurds accept the victory of such a coalition, with its implicit pledge of an Islamic state? Don`t bet on it. On the contrary, such an outcome could well broaden Sunni unrest beyond its core of disaffected Baathists. Major disruption, even civil war, could not be ruled out.

With the Shiites highly disorganized and fragmented, however, the alternative scenario of a Shiite defeat may actually be the more likely one. The fractious Shiites may well fail to organize into a coalition in the run-up to the election. If Sistani remains dissatisfied with the process, substantial Islamist segments might boycott the election altogether, cutting Shiite influence at the polls. The Sunnis, with even weaker organization, would be hard-pressed to field a solid campaign.

Either way, division of the Shiites could open the path to a truly disastrous outcome: emergence of a Kurdish coalition as the winner, holding a plurality of votes cast.

Compared with the Shiites or Arab Sunnis, the Kurds are political sophisticates. During the post-Persian Gulf War period, the Kurds learned Ben Franklin`s famous lesson that they must hang together or hang separately. After years of civil warfare, the two leading Kurdish factions came together in a coalition that, under U.S protection, proved highly functional, if not always friendly.

If the Kurds can keep this unified front in place and capitalize on their greater political experience to get out their vote, emergence of the Kurdish bloc as the largest vote-getter becomes a real possibility.

And a Kurdish victory would lead straight to civil war. Neither of the other parties would accept a Kurdish-led government. A Kurdish victory would, therefore, increase the pressure on the Kurds to demand greater autonomy, bargaining for a larger share of the oil fields as well. These are outcomes that neither the Arabs nor neighboring Turkey could accept. Moreover, a Kurdish victory would create almost irresistible pressure within Turkey to send troops over the border, and maybe within Syria as well. The aftermath of a Kurdish victory could then slide into civil war, regional war or both.

Given the facts in Iraq, it would be foolish to think that free and fair elections will lead straight to a stable government or put U.S. troops on the home stretch toward graceful withdrawal. Unless and until an Iraqi military is rebuilt with the will and the capacity to hold the country together, U.S. troops may find themselves the only force standing between the Iraqi people and a descent into chaos for a long time to come.

The writer directs the Washington Center of the University of North Carolina`s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. She is no relation to L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq.



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A Dishonest War


By Edward M. Kennedy

Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page B07


Of the many issues competing for attention in this new and defining year, one is of a unique order of magnitude: President Bush`s decision to go to war in Iraq. The facts demonstrate how dishonest that decision was. As former Treasury secretary Paul H. O`Neill recently confirmed, the debate over military action began as soon as President Bush took office. Some felt Saddam Hussein could be contained without war. A month after the inauguration, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said: "We have kept him contained, kept him in his box." The next day, he said tellingly that Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, gave advocates of war the opening they needed. They tried immediately to tie Hussein to al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld created an Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon to analyze the intelligence for war and bypass the traditional screening process. Vice President Cheney relied on intelligence from Iraqi exiles and put pressure on intelligence agencies to produce the desired result.

The war in Afghanistan began in October with overwhelming support in Congress and the country. But the focus on Iraq continued behind the scenes, and President Bush went along. In the Rose Garden on Nov. 26, he said: "Afghanistan is still just the beginning."

Three days later, Cheney publicly began to send signals about attacking Iraq. On Nov. 29 he said: "I don`t think it takes a genius to figure out that this guy [Hussein] is clearly . . . a significant potential problem for the region, for the United States, for everybody with interests in the area." On Dec. 12 he raised the temperature: "If I were Saddam Hussein, I`d be thinking very carefully about the future, and I`d be looking very closely to see what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Next, Karl Rove, in a rare public stumble, made his own role clear, telling the Republican National Committee on Jan. 19, 2002, that the war on terrorism could be used politically. Republicans could "go to the country on this issue," he said.

Ten days later, in his State of the Union address, President Bush invoked the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- and we lost our clear focus on al Qaeda. The address contained 12 paragraphs on Afghanistan and 29 on the war on terrorism, but only one fleeting mention of al Qaeda. It said nothing about the Taliban or Osama bin Laden.

In the following months, although bin Laden was still at large, the drumbeat on Iraq gradually drowned out those who felt Hussein was no imminent threat. On Sept. 12 the president told the United Nations: "Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents and has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." He said Iraq could build a nuclear weapon "within a year" if Hussein obtained such material.

War on Iraq was clearly coming, but why make this statement in September? As White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said, "From a marketing point of view, you don`t introduce new products in August." The 2002 election campaigns were then entering the home stretch. Election politics prevailed over foreign policy and national security. The administration insisted on a vote in Congress to authorize the war before Congress adjourned for the elections. Why? Because the debate would distract attention from the troubled economy and the failed effort to capture bin Laden. The shift in focus to Iraq could help Republicans and divide Democrats.

The tactic worked. Republicans voted almost unanimously for war and kept control of the House in the elections. Democrats were deeply divided and lost their majority in the Senate. The White House could use its control of Congress to get its way on key domestic priorities.

The final step in the march to war was a feint to the United Nations. But Cheney, Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz had convinced the president that war would be a cakewalk, with or without the United Nations, and that our forces would be welcomed as liberators. In March the war began.

Hussein`s brutal regime was not an adequate justification for war, and the administration did not seriously try to make it one until long after the war began and all the false justifications began to fall apart. There was no imminent threat. Hussein had no nuclear weapons, no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons, no connection to Sept. 11 and no plausible link to al Qaeda. We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence.

Vast resources have been spent on the war that should have been spent on priorities at home. Our forces are stretched thin. Precious lives have been lost. The war has made America more hated in the world and made the war on terrorism harder to win. As Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in announcing the latest higher alert: "Al Qaeda`s continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland is perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th."

The most fundamental decision a president ever makes is the decision to go to war. President Bush violated the trust that must exist between government and the people. If Congress and the American people had known the truth, America would never have gone to war in Iraq. No president who does that to our country deserves to be reelected.

The writer is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.




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A Straight Shooter`s Failure to Be Heard


By David S. Broder

Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page B07


Every change of administrations brings a new cast of characters to Washington. I have been through nine such changes, dating back to 1960, and in all that time I have never known a Cabinet official who was more of a straight shooter than Paul O`Neill, the first Treasury secretary in the Bush administration.

I take seriously the point made by an alumnus of a previous Republican White House -- a man who admires O`Neill but says that George W. Bush put him in the wrong job. O`Neill would have made a great secretary of health and human services, this man says, had Bush granted Tommy Thompson, the man he put into that job, his wish to be secretary of transportation.

At HHS, O`Neill could have exercised his managerial talents in a giant bureaucracy and given full expression to his intellectual range as a policy innovator. Treasury secretaries are, by nature, meant to be pillars of reliability and reassurance, and part of that means sticking to the script, as O`Neill`s successor, John Snow, does to the point of being boringly predictable.

O`Neill was totally unscripted -- and immune to "spin." In this view, President Bush was simply correcting his own error -- or, really, Vice President Cheney`s, since it was Cheney who had worked with O`Neill and recommended him for the job -- when he fired O`Neill less than two years after he began.

But the very outspokenness and independence that marked O`Neill`s tenure at Treasury (and earlier as CEO of Alcoa) are what make the newly published volume on his experiences in Washington an important document. Written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O`Neill," draws heavily on the papers and the reminiscences of the former Treasury chief.

While the headlines flowed to O`Neill`s account of an early determination by Bush to remove Saddam Hussein, what I found more persuasive was O`Neill`s account of the futile effort -- in which he says he was joined by Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan -- to restrain Bush`s penchant for tax cutting before it produced the massive deficits the government now faces.

Greenspan disputes one specific quotation Suskind puts in his mouth, saying he never termed Bush`s first big tax cut "irresponsible."

But the public record shows that Greenspan shared O`Neill`s strong belief that the later years of that 10-year tax reduction should be contingent on the achievement of the healthy budget surpluses that were projected when Bush lobbied Congress in 2001 to reduce revenue by $1.6 trillion.

And Greenspan does not dispute that he and O`Neill were meeting privately during the winter and spring of 2001 to counter the arguments Bush heeded from his political staff and from then-economic counselor Larry Lindsey to go for the biggest possible tax cut. O`Neill mourned -- and so, he says, did Greenspan -- when the Senate voted 50-49 against an amendment sponsored by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana that would have halted the tax cuts if the budget surplus failed to materialize.

Instead, Bush chose to add more tax cuts in 2002 and 2003, even as the promised surpluses disappeared and the current massive deficits replaced them.

The country will pay a high price for that failure. And if O`Neill is to be believed, the failure resulted largely from the intellectual passivity of the president himself, combined with a policy process that discouraged the airing of competitive views and lacked the kind of rigorous analysis of probable consequences that such vital decisions demanded.

Bush did not have the "hard factual analysis that allows you to make informed judgments about the worth of various proposals, about what you can reasonably expect, about what is known," O`Neill told the author. "You just can`t balance the competing ideas of how to govern a country this size without that."

Speaking of a meeting of economic and political advisers, where Bush made the fateful decision to go for yet more tax cuts, O`Neill reminisced: "I think of a meeting like that, with so much at stake. It`s like June bugs hopping around on a lake." Considering the source, those are words to weigh carefully in this election year.

•

Philip Geyelin, the former editorial page editor of The Post who died Jan. 9, was a man of courage, grace, wit and wisdom -- a graceful writer, whether of trenchant commentary or brilliantly satirical Gridiron show lyrics. He was an ornament to the profession.

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US stars hail Iraq war whistleblower
GCHQ worker Katharine Gun faces jail for exposing American corruption in the run-up to war on Saddam. Now her celebrity supporters insist it is Bush and Blair who should be in the dock. Martin Bright reports

Martin Bright
Sunday January 18, 2004
The Observer

She was an anonymous junior official toiling away with 4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers and linguists at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

But now Katharine Gun, an unassuming 29-year-old translator, is set to become a transatlantic cause célèbre as the focus of a star-studded solidarity drive that brings together Hollywood actor-director Sean Penn and senior figures from the US media and civil rights movement, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details of a secret US `dirty tricks` operation to spy on UN Security Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty, she faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those who have met her say she would have been happy to remain in the shadows, had she not seen evidence in black and white that her Government was being asked to co-operate in an illegal operation.

The leak has been described as `more timely and potentially more important than The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated whistleblower who leaked papers containing devastating details of the US involvement in Vietnam, in 1971. Ellsberg has been vocal in support of Gun. She was arrested last March, days after The Observer first published evidence of an intelligence `surge` on UN delegations, ordered by the GCHQ`s partner organisation, the National Security Agency.

Legal experts believe that her case is potentially more explosive for the Government than the Hutton inquiry because it could allow her defence team to raise questions about the legality of military intervention in Iraq. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is likely to come under pressure to disclose the legal advice he gave on military intervention - something he has so far refused to do.

At a hearing last November, Gun`s legal team indicated that she would use a defence of `necessity` to argue that she acted to save the lives of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

At the time Gun, who was sacked after her arrest and whose case is funded by legal aid, said in a statement: `Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government who attempted to subvert our own security services; and to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.`

She added: `I have only ever followed my conscience.`

Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson have already signed a statement of support for Gun and a broader campaign will be launched later this year. They are joined by Ellsberg, who is keen to travel to Britain soon to meet Gun.

Other signatories of the statement, to be released in the coming weeks, include Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, and Ramona Ripston of the American Civil Liberties Union, both in their personal capacities.

The statement is a glowing tribute to the publicity-shy GCHQ mole who has avoided all media attention since her arrest: `We honour Katharine Gun as a whistleblower who bravely risked her career and her very liberty to inform the public about illegal spying in support of a war based on deception. In a democracy, she should not be made a scapegoat for exposing the transgressions of others.`

The statement also pays tribute to the transatlantic opposition to the war in Iraq, which it links to historical campaigns against oppression. `There has been much talk in recent months about the "special relationship" between the US and British governments, which led the world to war, but history tells us of another "special relationship" - between people of good will in the United States and Britain who worked together in opposition to slavery and colonialism, and most recently against the push for war on Iraq. It is in the spirit of friendship between our peoples in defence of democracy that we sign this statement.`

The leaked memorandum - dated 31 January 2003 - from Frank Koza, chief of staff of the NSA`s Regional Targets section, requested British intelligence help to discover the voting intentions of the key `swing six` nations at the UN. Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Chile, Mexico and Pakistan were under intense pressure to vote for a second resolution authorising war in Iraq.

The disclosure of the `dirty tricks` memo caused serious diplomatic difficulties for the countries involved and in particular the socialist government in Chile, which demanded an immediate explanation from Britain and America. The Chilean public is deeply sensitive to dirty tricks by the American intelligence services, which are still held responsible for the 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the days that followed the disclosure, the Chilean delegation in New York distanced itself from the draft second resolution, scuppering plans to go down the UN route.

Opposition politicians are already increasing pressure on Tony Blair to release Goldsmith`s legal advice. Parliamentary answers last week to Lord Alexander of Weedon QC, the Tory head of the all-party legal reform group Justice, show that the Government recognises there are precedents for disclosure.

In 1993, government legal advice in the arms-to-Iraq affair was disclosed to the Scott inquiry and advice concerning the 1988 Merchant Shipping Act was disclosed when Spanish fishermen argued that it breached EU law. The government response of Baroness Amos would appear to be an open invitation to Gun`s defence team: `In both cases, disclosure was made for the purposes of judicial proceedings.`

But she continued: `It has been made clear in a number of parliamentary questions that the Attorney General`s detailed advice would not be disclosed in view of a long-standing convention, adhered to by successive governments, that advice of law officers is not publicly disclosed. The purpose of the convention is to enable the Government, like everyone else, to receive full and frank legal advice in confidence.`

A summary of the legal advice published on 17 March last year showed that Goldsmith believed that UN Resolution 678, which authorised force against Iraq to eject it from Kuwait in 1990, could be used to justify the conflict. This position has been fiercely criticised by most experts in international law, who argue that 678 applied specifically to the threat posed to the region by Saddam in 1990. Alexander has accused Goldsmith of `scraping the bottom of the legal barrel` and described the use of 678 as `risible`.

When the details of the GCHQ disclosure were published in The Observer on 2 March last year, there was considerable media speculation that Goldsmith was set to resign over the issue of his legal advice over the war. Foreign Office legal experts were known to be split on the issue.

A key figure could prove to be 54-year-old Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who stepped down on 21 March. Wilmshurst is said to have left her post because she would not agree to Goldmith`s legal advice.

Since leaving her post she has not spoken about the crucial discussions in the Foreign Office last March. Many believe that a second whistleblower could prove fatal to the Government.

· For full details, go to accuracy.org


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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Deadliest Attacks in Iraq War So Far

Saturday January 17, 2004 3:16 PM


By The Associated Press

A look at some of the deadliest days of attacks in Iraq since the war began March 20. President Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

-Jan. 17, 2004: Number of American service members who have died reaches 500 after roadside bomb explodes near Baghdad, killing three U.S. soldiers and two Iraqi civil defense troopers.

-Jan. 9: Bomb explodes as worshippers leave Shiite mosque, killing five people and wounding dozens. Police defuse car bomb outside another nearby mosque.

-Jan. 8: U.S. Black Hawk medevac helicopter apparently shot down, crashes near Fallujah killing all nine soldiers aboard.

-Dec. 31, 2003: Car bomb rips through restaurant holding crowded New Year`s Eve party, killing eight Iraqis, wounding 35.

-Dec. 27: Suicide bombers and assailants with mortars and grenade launchers blast coalition military bases and governor`s office in coordinated attacks in southern city of Karbala, killing 19 people, wounding nearly 200.

-Dec. 14: Suspected suicide bomber detonates explosives in car outside police station west of Baghdad, killing at least 17, wounding 33.

-Nov. 29: Assailants ambush team of Spanish intelligence agents, killing seven. Two Japanese diplomats shot to death after insurgents ambush their car near Tikrit.

-Nov. 22: Attackers strike two police stations with back-to-back car bombings northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 12 Iraqi bystanders.

-Nov. 20: Truck bomb explodes near Kurdish party office in northern oil city of Kirkuk, killing five people, wounding 30. Local officials blame Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaida.

-Nov. 15: Two Black Hawk helicopters collide and crash in Mosul, apparently hit by ground fire, killing 17 American soldiers. U.S. military`s worst single loss of life in Iraq conflict.

-Nov. 12: Suicide truck bomber attacks headquarters of Italy`s paramilitary police in southern city of Nasiriyah, killing more than 30 people - including 19 Italians.

-Nov. 7: Army Black Hawk helicopter apparently downed by rocket-propelled grenade, killing six U.S. soldiers aboard.

-Nov. 2: U.S. Chinook helicopter carrying troops headed for leave is struck by missile and crashes west of Baghdad, killing 15 soldiers, wounding more than 20.

-Oct. 27: Four suicide bombings target International Red Cross headquarters and four Iraqi police stations in Baghdad, killing 40 people, mostly Iraqis.

-Oct. 9: Suicide bomber drives Oldsmobile into police station in Baghdad`s Sadr City district, killing nine bystanders.

-Sept. 12: U.S. forces kill eight Iraqi police and Jordanian security guard, wound nine others. Deadliest friendly fire incident since major combat declared over.

-Aug. 29: Car bomb explodes outside mosque in Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf, killing more than 85 people including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim.

-Aug. 19: Truck bomber strikes United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing 23 people including top U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

-Aug. 7: Car bomb explodes outside Jordanian Embassy, killing 19 people including two children.

-June 24: Firefight kills six British soldiers training police in southern Iraq. Eight others wounded when Iraqis ambush patrol and helicopter.

-April 7: U.S. warplanes strike convoy of allied Kurdish fighters and U.S. Special Forces during northern battle, at least 18 killed, more than 45 wounded.

-April 3: Eleven U.S. soldiers killed in combat or die in accidents. The day before, 10 American soldiers died.

-March 23: Deadliest day for U.S. soldiers, with 28 Americans killed. Toll includes 11 killed when 507th Maintenance Company convoy ambushed in Nasiriyah. Nine wounded and seven captured, including Pvt. Jessica Lynch.

-March 21: Eight British soldiers and four U.S. Marines killed when helicopter crashes in Kuwait.

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Am Dienstag gibt es wieder: Lies, Lies, Lies.....

washingtonpost.com
Address Will Depict Bush as Above Politics


By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A14


A day after the Iowa caucuses reset the Democratic field, President Bush will ignore the campaign as he goes before Congress on Tuesday night to deliver his final State of the Union address before he faces reelection.

White House officials said they hope to use the televised speech, and its audience of more than 60 million, to foster an image of Bush as a wartime visionary who stands above the fray of politics -- the commander in chief, not a candidate.

Bush officials said they hope to extend that packaging to the early engagements of the campaign after the Democratic nominee is clear. They said Bush has no plans to hold an event declaring himself a candidate, even after his campaign begins running ads. President Bill Clinton used the same strategy in 1996.

The officials said that with the address wedged between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Bush will try to draw a contrast with the Democrats -- sniping at him, and at each other -- by sounding forward-looking and emphasizing national triumphs.

According to Bush advisers, this is the gist of his speech, which will have solemn passages with an overall tone of optimism:

We are a nation at war. My bold decisions have made America safer, but we are not yet safe. At home, my administration`s policies have made us better and more prosperous. But I am not satisfied, and Congress must pass more of what I have proposed.

Bush strategists have long been concerned that Americans would become complacent about confronting terrorism and would question whether it is a war. But the war on terrorism is Bush`s justification for deficits, for the attack on Iraq and, to some degree, for his reelection. So skepticism by voters could obviate what his advisers think is one of his paramount advantages.

Bush said in his May 1 speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln that the war on terrorism "is not over, yet it is not endless," and declared, "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide." Now, Bush wants to prepare the public for what one official called "a generational commitment," with the official likening the challenge to the Cold War.

"There are people who almost at times want to treat this as if we are not a nation at war, but we are," a senior White House official said at a briefing Friday. "It`s happening in different cities and caves and countries throughout the world. It`s very much a war."

Officials said the twin themes of the 9 p.m. speech -- which will run 50 minutes or so -- are national and economic security. The address then has modules covering, for example, the renewal of Bush`s drive for workers to have the option to funnel part of their Social Security taxes into private accounts.

Another section covers Bush`s plans to alleviate the rising cost of health care and increasing number of low-income people with no insurance. The Democratic candidates have put uninsured people at the top of their agenda, and the White House and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are eager to neutralize the issue. Among the options that have been debated in the administration are a reintroduction of a tax credit Bush had proposed to help people pay for insurance, and grants to states to help administer what would be billed as universal coverage.

The speech will begin with a tour of the world, including a claim by Bush that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq made the nation safer. Advisers said Bush plans to make a big point, in the speech and during the campaign, of Libya`s decision last month to surrender its chemical and biological weapons. Many in Bush`s circle contend that the decision was spurred by the confrontation with Saddam Hussein, and see the agreement as a prize to compensate for the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Flipping the order of last year`s address, Bush will build from foreign affairs to conclude on domestic matters, which polls show are a higher priority with voters. The economy has lost about 2.3 million jobs since Bush took office, but he will remind listeners about promising indicators, including a falling unemployment rate. He will point to the hurdles of recession, terrorist attacks and corporate scandals, and assert that his policies -- chiefly $1.7 trillion in tax cuts -- helped mitigate their effects.

Bush`s aides said he will not be defensive about the progress in Iraq, where the U.S. death toll has reached 500, adding urgency to administration efforts to enlist help from the United Nations -- which it once shunned -- as the United States prepares to ends its occupation by July 1.

The official said Bush`s speech will show he is "very comfortable with the decision we made" to unseat Hussein, and believes it was "good for the Iraqi people, it`s good for the American people and it`s good for the world."

Bush spent the weekend at Camp David editing the speech with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., longtime confidante Karen Hughes, communications director Dan Bartlett and chief speechwriter Mike Gerson.

Card and Bartlett blanketed the Sunday talk shows before last year`s address. But as part of avoiding the Democratic fracas, White House officials are staying off the programs this year, because they would be on with candidates, and most of the shows are originating in Iowa.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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MILITARY DEATHS

Man sollte nie vergessen, dass es Ehemänner, Väter, Söhne, Brüder, Töchter und Schwestern sind, die getötet werden.


Army Pfc. Jesse D. Mizener, 23; Killed in Mortar Attack
By Jose Cardenas
Times Staff Writer

January 18, 2004

Before Army Pfc. Jesse D. Mizener hung up the phone at his military base near Baghdad on Jan. 7, he promised his wife to "instant message" her on the computer as soon as he got out of the shower.

His 22-year-old wife, Nicole, waited at her home in Auburn, near Sacramento, but the message never came.

Minutes after Mizener`s call, anti-American insurgents fired six mortar rounds into Logistical Base Seitz, killing the 23-year-soldier and injuring 34 others.

Mizener, who was assigned to the 542nd Maintenance Company, 44th Corps Support Battalion, 593rd Corps Support Group at Ft. Lewis, Wash., was buried Friday at Cherokee Memorial Park Cemetery in Lodi, Calif.

"I am saddened by his death, but I am very proud that he died doing what he loved doing," said his mother, Rebecca Mizener of Stockton.

As of Friday, 496 American servicemen and women had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 358 since major fighting ended May 1. Mizener is one of 55 military men and women with ties to California who have died.

Mizener was born in Santa Clara, and moved with his family to Stockton when he was 7. He attended Stockton`s Bear Creek High School, where he played football but did not graduate. Instead, he earned his graduation equivalency diploma and joined the California Conservation Corps, based at its Auburn facility.

In 2000, he met Nicole Mulqueen, then 19, who frequently came to the facility to visit her mother, a supervising cook. The two got to know each other while they volunteered running banquets for veterans and the homeless. "I was pregnant when he met me," Nicole said. "He was a real nice guy." The couple married in May 2001 and Mizener adopted Mulqueen`s child, Gia, now 3. The couple had two children of their own, Eve, 2, and Jesse Jr., 2 months.

Mizener fulfilled a childhood dream by joining the Army in 2002. He was deployed to Iraq last April. He and his wife talked about moving to Washington in April, when he was due home. He wanted to be a highway patrol officer, she said. "He was a very loving man," his wife said.

Mizener also is survived by his father, James; a brother, Brian; a sister, Jennifer; his maternal grandparents, Ernest and Irene Bustamante of San Jose; and his paternal grandparents, Raymond and Peggy Mizener of Lodi.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE NATION




Billy the Kid`s Life and Death May Be Put to the DNA Test
Officials want to exhume the body of the outlaw`s mother to test a Texas man`s claim that he was Bonney. If so, Pat Garrett didn`t kill the Kid.
By Richard Benke
Associated Press Writer

January 18, 2004



ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In a sworn statement, a 72-year-old man says Sheriff Pat Garrett`s widow told him 63 years ago that her husband didn`t kill Billy the Kid — Garrett`s friend — but that Garrett and the Kid shot a drunk in his place.

The affidavit of Homer Overton was offered as evidence for exhuming the body of the Kid`s mother, Catherine Antrim, to compare her DNA with that of a Texas man who claimed until his death in 1950 that he was William Bonney, known in Western lore as Billy the Kid.

A hearing on the exhumation petition is scheduled Jan. 27 in Silver City, where Antrim is buried. City officials there oppose disturbing the grave.

Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan, Deputy Steve Sederwall and DeBaca County Sheriff Gary Graves are asking for the exhumation. They want to know if Antrim`s DNA shows any relationship to Ollie "Brushy Bill" Roberts, a Hico, Texas, man who long claimed to be the Kid.

A coroner`s jury concluded in 1881 that Garrett killed Bonney with a gunshot to the left breast. But according to Overton`s affidavit, Apolonaria Garrett — Pat Garrett`s widow — told Overton, then 9, and his boyhood buddy Bobby Talbert that Garrett and Bonney shot a drunk lying in a Fort Sumner street, putting the bullet in his face to make him unrecognizable so his body could pass for Bonney`s.

Overton lives in Alta Loma, Calif., where he gave the Dec. 27 affidavit filed in court in Silver City a week ago. The affidavit says the boys visited Apolonaria Garrett in the summer of 1940, about 32 years after her husband was fatally shot near Las Cruces.

"I believe what Mrs. Garrett told us that day was the absolute truth…. It made such an impression on me that I have remembered it in detail these 63 years," Overton`s affidavit says.

Sullivan, sheriff in the county where Bonney was convicted of murdering one of Sullivan`s predecessors in the 1870s, has said it is important to determine the truth of such stories.

If Antrim`s DNA is consistent or inconsistent with Roberts`, that would help corroborate either one story or the other, petitioners contend.

"We are on a quest for the truth," said Sherry Tippett, attorney for the sheriffs and the deputy. As for whether Garrett and Bonney conspired to kill a stranger, Tippett said, "it`s a plausible theory," but she declined to draw a conclusion.

Silver City officials oppose exhumation, saying they have a responsibility to avoid disturbing the dead. They said the notion that such a cover-up could have worked "strains credulity."

Stories have persisted for generations of connections between Bonney and Garrett, Tippett said. "It varies from `They just knew each other from a card game` to `They were pals,` " she said.

In oral histories recorded during the 1930s under the federal Works Progress Administration, several interviewees said they doubted that Garrett shot Bonney, she said.

"There are a number of people who believe that. And now that we have the tools to determine the truth, don`t we have the responsibility?" Tippett said.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE MIDWEST




American Dream Finds New Home
Affordable housing, lower labor costs, conservative values drive the renewal.
By Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University. He is writing a history of cities for Modern Library.

January 18, 2004

In a remarkable but largely unpublicized shift, America`s long-struggling heartland is experiencing a renaissance. Driven chiefly by soaring housing costs on the East and West coasts and the growing appeal of traditional values, the region from the Mississippi River to the Rockies has stopped hemorrhaging people and, in some places, even begun to outperform economically some of the much-hyped "cool" cities of the late 1990s boom. Once regarded as backwaters of traditional manufacturing and farming, some states are evolving into prosperous centers of high-end services and information technology.

The region`s renewal also has political implications because its states rank among the critical battlegrounds in the presidential primary and general election campaigns.

Reports on Iowa frequently portray the state as filled with grizzled farmers and hard-boiled industrial workers. In reality, Des Moines and Iowa City boast growing populations of workers in such new-economy industries as information, financial and business services. These industries employ many of the young "knowledge workers" who are making former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Sen. John F. Kerry serious contenders in the Iowa caucuses. In old Iowa, Dean and Kerry would have been an almost impossible sell.

In November, however, President Bush may be the one who benefits most from the region`s economic growth and rising prosperity, felt most heartily in Sioux Falls, S.D.; North Dakota`s Fargo and Bismarck; Omaha; and Kansas City. More and more conservative, family-oriented people, including many migrants from the largely Democratic coastal states, are moving to the suburbs of these cities.

Yet more important than the ephemeral political story is the one of a region that was all but lost but now is being refound. In the 19th century, the heartland epitomized American optimism, hope and egalitarian values; it was the cradle of the national character. "[In the North Dakotan," observed Bishop Cameron Mann of the Episcopal Church in 1902, "one finds a man prompt, generous, speculative, ready to learn each new thing, hard to tie to anything, but, when tried, staunch, sturdy and loyal."

Shortly afterward, things began to go wrong. Farm prices collapsed in the 1920s, drought set in, factory jobs disappeared. Millions fled the Dust Bowl for better job opportunities elsewhere. By the 1930s, the heartland had become increasingly dependent on government handouts and subsidies. "Relief," wrote historian Elwyn Robinson, "became the biggest business" in some states.

Growth of manufacturing sustained some of the region`s larger cities until the 1970s, when the industrial economy began to contract as large companies sought lower-cost locations in the South or abroad. Family farms were abandoned, small towns shrank and cities stagnated. Some prominent academics even proposed that the federal government turn much of the region back into a "buffalo commons."

But even as the decline became conventional wisdom, underlying realities began to change. Out-migration began slowing in the mid-1980s and by the end of the 1990s had virtually ceased. More telling, some heartland cities — notably, less-manufacturing-dependent Kansas City and Minneapolis — were becoming major magnets for college-educated workers. In fact, they were far more successful in terms of percentage net gains among college-educated workers in the "talent hunt game" than Chicago, New York or Los Angeles.

Since the early 1990s, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, these migration patterns may have accelerated as more people left such cities as San Francisco, New York and Chicago. At the same time, many heartland cities began attracting foreign immigrants; in the 1990s, immigrant populations in St. Louis, Kansas City and Minneapolis were more than twice as large as in the 1980s.

Many heartland cities also appear to have weathered the tech and financial busts in the early 2000s better than such new-economy strongholds as Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Boston and New York. Generally speaking, a software engineer has fared better in Fargo than in San Jose or Seattle; a financial analyst or business-service professional has better prospects in Des Moines or Sioux Falls than in New York or Boston.

This remarkable reversal has been driven by several factors. One is housing affordability. U.S. population growth in the 1990s — from 248 million to nearly 300 million — forced up housing costs, particularly on the East and West coasts. In some places, the impact has been so severe that even a prolonged recession has only marginally reduced prices. In New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland and their suburbs, houses are so expensive that barely half of families can afford them.

By contrast, housing costs in the great middle belt of the country — from St. Louis and Omaha to Bismarck — are low enough that, in general, three of four families can afford to buy a home. That gives these communities enormous advantages in retaining and attracting skilled labor, particularly younger workers who used to head for the coasts.

"Some of [the population movement] has to do with what is happening in the major cities on the coasts," says Ernie Goss, a regional economist based at Creighton University in Omaha. "People are coming here to start businesses because they see this as a better place for them to raise their families."

Lower labor costs are usually accompanied by relatively lower office rents and taxes and less severe regulatory environments. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, such considerations were often irrelevant. But in the much tougher business climate of the 2000s — marked by a growing shift of higher-end jobs to China, India and other developing countries — pressure has mounted to relocate where costs are lower.

"In some ways, the middle of the country is doing to the coasts what China and India are doing to America," says Randy Schilling, president of Quilogy, a fast-growing computer firm in St. Charles, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. Schilling says he has little trouble attracting skilled programmers from either coast, though he offers less money. The lure is that lower costs still allow for a higher standard of living.

In addition to economics, social factors have made the heartland more attractive. Since Sept. 11, 2001, says demographer Frey, there has been a "sharp and immediate flight from [population] density." People are looking for safer environments; meanwhile, federal regulators and shareholders have urged companies to move some of their operations to less high-profile areas.

Security concerns are only part of the story, though. The country`s mood, especially among younger people, seems more conservative. Recent surveys of college students, conducted by researchers at UCLA`s Higher Education Research Institute and Harvard`s Institute of Politics, have found them more interested in religion and family and more supportive of the military than their 1990s counterparts.

Similarly, a recent Zogby poll reported a dramatic shift in people`s definition of the American dream. In the 1990s, 33% identified the "dream" with spiritual values; by 2002, 52% said concerns other than material were more important. These attitudinal shifts bode well for the Plains states, where, irrespective of politics, people more openly identify with values of faith, work, community and family than in less-rooted megalopolises.

The rise of the Internet has amplified these trends because it has enabled companies to compete for individuals and opportunities in remote locations. "I have customers all over the country, but our costs are low and our people can afford to live well here," says Thane Paulsen, president of two Sioux Falls business-service firms. "We appeal to a lot of people who want to come here to enjoy the South Dakota lifestyle."

More important, the new American "field of dreams" may reconnect all of us to that part of the country that contributed some of the best features of our national character.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op…


Bases for an Empire
U.S. military power girdles the globe. It is imperialism by another name -- and it incites terrorism.
By Chalmers Johnson
Chalmers Johnson`s latest book is "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." A longer version of this essay appears on www.tomdispatch.com.

January 18, 2004

CARDIFF-BY-THE-SEA — Many Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Our garrisons encircle the planet, and this vast network of U.S. bases, on every continent except Antarctica, constitutes its own form of empire. The Pentagon has remade the map of U.S. territory in a way unlikely to be taught in any high school geography class. But to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations — and the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order — it`s crucial to have a sense of the dimensions of this globe-girdling "Baseworld."

Our military deploys more than half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents and civilian contractors in other nations. It dominates the oceans and seas with a fleet of aircraft carriers. It operates numerous secret bases outside the U.S. to monitor what the people of the world, including our citizens, are saying, faxing or e-mailing to one another.

Our government installations abroad support an even larger web of civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons or provide services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts. These contractors are charged with, among other things, keeping uniformed members of the imperium comfortably housed, well-fed, amused and supplied with enjoyable, affordable leisure and vacation facilities. Whole sectors of the U.S. economy have come to rely on the military for their profits.

It`s not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. According to the Defense Department`s annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon occupies 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and another 6,000 bases in the U.S. and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases — surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic products of most countries. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners.

These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 "Base Structure Report" fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo — even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel built in 1999 and maintained since by Halliburton subsidiary KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root. The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures in these places since Sept. 11, 2001. The Defense Department, which recognizes only 60 overseas sites as full-fledged bases, regards these massive redoubts as temporary installations.

For their occupants, these foreign bases are not necessarily unpleasant. Military service today, which is voluntary, bears almost no relation to that experienced by soldiers during World War II or the Korean and Vietnam wars. Most chores like laundry, KP ("kitchen police"), mail call and latrine cleaning have been subcontracted to private companies. About one-third of the funds recently appropriated for the war in Iraq — roughly $30 billion — are going into private American hands. Where possible, everything is done to make daily existence seem like life at home. The first Burger King has already gone up inside the enormous military base we`ve established at Baghdad`s international airport.

Our armed missionaries live in a self-contained world serviced by its own airline, the Air Mobility Command, whose fleet of long-range aircraft links our outposts from Greenland to Australia. For generals and admirals, the military provides 71 Learjets and other luxury planes to fly them to such spots as the armed forces` ski and vacation center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps or to any of the 234 military golf courses the Pentagon operates worldwide.

Once upon a time, you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up a country`s colonies. America`s version of the colony is the military base. If you examine our "footprint," the remarkably insensitive metaphor used by defense officials to describe our empire of bases, you can see that it does a good job of covering what those officials call the "arc of instability." This wide swath of the world, which extends from the Andean region of South America (read: Colombia) through North Africa and then sweeps across the Middle East to the Philippines and Indonesia, takes in most of what used to be called the Third World — and, perhaps no less crucially, it covers the world`s key oil reserves.

Marine Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commanding our 1,800 troops occupying the old French Foreign Legion base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea, claims that to put preventive war into action, we require a "global presence," by which he means gaining hegemony over any place that is not already under our thumb. According to the American Enterprise Institute, the idea is to create "a global cavalry" that can ride in from "frontier stockades" and shoot up the "bad guys" as soon as we get some intelligence on them.

To put our forces close to every hot spot or danger area in this newly discovered arc of instability, the Pentagon has proposed many new bases, including at least four and perhaps as many as six in Iraq. In addition, we plan to keep under control the whole northern quarter of Kuwait — 1,600 square miles of that country`s 6,900 square miles — that we use to resupply our Iraq legions and as a place for bureaucrats based in central Baghdad to relax.

Other countries mentioned as potential sites for what the U.S. military`s top European commander calls our new "family of bases" include: in the impoverished areas of the "new" Europe, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria; in Asia, Pakistan (where we already have four bases), India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and even, unbelievably, Vietnam; in North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria; and in West Africa, Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Sierra Leone (even though it has been torn by civil war since 1991). The models for all these new installations, according to Pentagon sources, are the string of bases we have built around the Persian Gulf in the last two decades in such anti-democratic autocracies as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Most of these new bases will be what the military, in a switch of metaphors, calls "lily pads," to and from which our troops could jump, like well-armed frogs, depending on where they were needed. The Pentagon justifies this expansion by leaking plans to close many of the huge Cold War military reservations in Europe, South Korea and perhaps Okinawa, Japan. In Europe, plans for giving up our bases include several in Germany, perhaps in part because of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder`s defiance of President Bush over Iraq.

But such plans are unlikely to amount to much. The Pentagon`s planners do not really seem to grasp just how many buildings the 71,702 soldiers and airmen in Germany occupy and how expensive it would be to build bases to house them elsewhere. Lt. Col. Amy Ehmann in Hanau, Germany, has said, "There`s no place to put these people" in Romania, Bulgaria or Djibouti, and she predicts 80% will end up staying in Germany.

While there is every reason to believe that the impulse to create ever more lily pads in the Third World remains unchecked, there are several additional reasons to doubt that some of the more grandiose plans, for either expansion or downsizing, will ever be put into effect. For one thing, Russia is opposed to the expansion of U.S. military power on its borders and is already moving to preclude additional U.S. bases in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

When it comes to downsizing, on the other hand, domestic politics may come into play. By law, the Pentagon`s Base Realignment and Closure Commission must submit to the White House by Sept. 8, 2005, its fifth and final list of domestic bases to be shut down. As an efficiency measure, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he`d like to be rid of at least one-third of domestic Army bases and one-quarter of domestic Air Force bases, which is sure to produce a political firestorm on Capitol Hill. To protect their respective states` bases, the two mother hens of the Senate`s military construction appropriations subcommittee, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), are demanding that the Pentagon close overseas bases first and bring the troops now stationed there home to domestic bases, which would then remain open. Hutchison and Feinstein got included in the Military Appropriations Act of 2004 money for an independent commission to investigate and report on overseas bases that are no longer needed. But in light of the administration`s fervor to expand the U.S. "footprint," the commission is unlikely to have much of an effect.

There is plenty of evidence that our growing military presence abroad incites rather than lessens terrorism. By far the greatest defect in the "global cavalry" strategy is that it accentuates Washington`s impulse to apply irrelevant military remedies to terrorism. As the prominent British military historian Correlli Barnett has observed, the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq only increased the threat from Al Qaeda. From 1993 through the Sept. 11 assaults of 2001, there were five major Al Qaeda attacks worldwide; in the two years since then, there have been 17 such bombings tied to the terrorist organization. As Barnett puts it, "Rather than kicking down front doors and barging into ancient and complex societies with simple nostrums of `freedom and democracy,` we need tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on a profound understanding of the people and cultures we are dealing with — an understanding up till now entirely lacking in the top-level policymakers in Washington, especially in the Pentagon."

But perhaps they understand all too well. The "war on terrorism" is, at best, only a small part of the reason for all this military strategizing. The real reason for constructing this new ring of U.S. bases along the equator is to expand our empire and reinforce our military domination of the world. And in that, the administration seems to be succeeding.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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A Dem the Street might like
Which of the top Democratic candidates does the stock market prefer?
January 16, 2004: 7:00 PM EST
By Alexandra Twin, CNN/Money Staff Writer

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - History shows the stock market does better under Democrats.

A recent study from the University of California at Berkeley, published in the October issue of the Journal of Finance shows that between 1927 and 1998, the stock market returned approximately 11 percent more a year under a Democratic president versus safer, three-month Treasurys. By comparison, the stock market only returned 2 percent more a year versus the T-bills under Republicans.

But all the statistics in the world don`t mean much to the investors who believe that Democrats aren`t as good for business or Wall Street as Republicans. And for those investors, Republican President George Bush`s re-election this year is the best thing for the market, particularly with the Republican-dominated Congress to contend with.

To that end, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street firms have contributed $3.9 million to Bush’s reelection campaign. John Kerry, Wall Street`s favorite Democratic candidate in terms of campaign contributions, has received slightly more than a quarter of that.

Still, with the Iowa caucus only days away and New Hampshire just around the corner, it`s worth looking at how the top Democratic contenders are perceived on the Street and who is seen as the most market friendly.

Assessing the Democratic candidates` potential impact on the stock market during the primaries is difficult, said Leslie Alperstein, political economist and president of Washington Analysis, an independent research firm that used to be connected to investment bank HSBC.

At this time, hardly any of them has a detailed plan on the economy, the budget deficit or taxes, he said. What`s more, candidates from either party tend to shift their platforms closer to the center once the primaries are over and they need to appeal to a broader vote.

A January Money magazine poll of the so-called "investor class" shows that roughly half of those surveyed would vote for Bush. Of the Democrats, the order of preference was Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and then Richard Gephardt.

John Edwards did not rank in the top five in the Money survey, but he is one of the top democratic candidates whose campaign the securities industry has contributed to and he has lately been surging in the polls leading up to the Iowa Caucus.

Here`s a look at what Wall Street perceives to be the pros and cons of the top candidates:

Howard Dean
"The consensus view [is] that the front runner, who seems to be Dean at this moment, combined with a Republican congress, would probably mean more control over spending," said James Lucier, a political analyst at Prudential Financial.

Pros:


Dean has a first-hand understanding of financial markets. He was a stockbroker and an analyst before moving into medicine, and beyond that, quadrupled a $1 million gift from his parents over 20 years of investing in stocks, bonds and mutual funds.
Cons:


Supports outright repeal of Bush Administration`s tax cuts.

Says the federal government has worked for the benefit of large corporations for too long and wants to switch the focus to empowering small business.

Says corporations need to be responsible for more in taxes, and would set up harsher penalties for companies that use foreign tax shelters to avoid paying U.S. taxes and use other tax loopholes.
John Edwards
"The market never met a tax cut it didn`t like and it would not be happy with a complete roll back," said Barry Ritholtz, market strategist at Maxim Group, "but if the economic recovery seems to be full-throated, the market might be willing to accept the rolling back of select tax cuts as a means of reducing the deficit, making John Edwards and John Kerry more appealing."

Pros:


Does not support repeal of all of Bush`s tax cuts, and would create new tax cuts for the middle class.

Would give corporations a 10 percent tax credit for keeping jobs in the United States.
Cons:


Would require expensing of stock options

Wants to pass a "CEO Right to Know" law that would require corporations to tell shareholders how much CEO`s earn.

Would stop companies from using international tax shelters.
Richard Gephardt
"A guy like him has at least been around for a while. He`s a beltway insider," Luskin added.

Pros:


He`s a long-time Washington insider Wall Street might feel comfortable with.
Cons:


He supports an outright repeal of Bush Administration`s tax cuts, cutting back on spending.
John Kerry
Pros:


Does not support repeal of all of Bush`s tax cuts.

Wants to give a tax credit to companies that create U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Cons:


Wants to close tax loopholes for companies that move jobs overseas.

Wants to set a cap on executive pay.
Wesley Clark
"All of the top candidates have said that they want to repeal some or all of the Bush tax cuts, but Clark at least has a specific plan," said Don Luskin, chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics.

Pros:


After a life long military career, he returned to the private sector in 2000 and worked as an investment banker in his home state of Arkansas for three years, before declaring his candidacy for president.

He does not advocate repealing all of Bush Administration`s tax cuts.
Cons:


Wants to close corporate tax loopholes and increase the tax rate on wealthiest Americans.
Joseph Lieberman
"I would say Joe Lieberman (would be perceived as being the most pro-business)," said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. But he also noted that Lieberman "is the least likely of the major candidates to win the nomination."

Pros:


He`s a long-time centrist and is seen as being not as "pro-regulatory" as other candidates.

He supports sustaining some of Bush tax cuts for the middle class.

He has backed the Bush administration as a Senator on some of the more "pro-business" issues brought before Congress in the last three years.
Cons:


Lieberman believes in raising the tax rate for the top income earners.


Find this article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/16/markets/election_demsmarkets…

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Martin Luther King: Terrorist
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com

01.16.04 - Let’s not mince words. Were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. alive today, he would be at risk for being imprisoned indefinitely, without charges or access to legal counsel, as an “enemy combatant.”

He would be decried, by powerful figures inside and outside government, as at worst a domestic terrorist, at best a publicity-seeking menace whose criticisms of America gave comfort to our unseen enemies.

King would not have the opportunity to engage in repeated nonviolent civil disobediences. Media would be quickly bored by the spectacles; a nation accustomed to police violence against protesters yawns at the tanks, rubber bullets, chemical weapons, and “preventative” arrests now commonly used against those who employ the same tactics King himself once used. The felony charges against King would put him away for years -- if he were allowed to stand trial at all.

The powerful black religious networks that produced King and so many other courageous civil rights leaders would be attacked by federal prosecutors as providing financial support for terrorism. Church groups’ tax exemptions would be lifted; records would be seized. Charges would be brought, perhaps under federal RICO statutes or Patriot Act provisions. The FBI harassment that hounded King throughout his career would today be fiercer, and subject to no judicial oversight.

In an era where a federal holiday has served to both commemorate and sanitize the history of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., White America has forgotten just how radical and controversial a figure he was in his time. Many of these charges -- domestic terrorist, commie dupe, publicity hound -- were leveled against King during the 14 long-but-so-short years of his national prominence. The police were violent. The church groups were criticized.

The differences, today, are twofold. First, our government has granted itself enormously greater legal powers to crush dissent. And, secondly, much of the public, taught by years of government rhetoric and media sensationalism to dismiss dissenters as violent and illegitimate, is predisposed to let the government get away with it. Moral appeals by leaders like King would have far less chance of success. We no longer grant presumed moral authority to either religious leaders or to those wronged by the world; in today’s media-saturated, scandal-obsessed age, King’s moral failings (e.g., his various affairs) might well be used to undermine his movement.

Moreover, today, we’ve heard it all before. The world is brought to our doorstep, teeming with suffering, each day. Sadly, as our planet’s woes have become more immediate, and America’s role in its inequalities more obvious to those who would look, many of us have chosen to tune out -- out of fear, or boredom, or despair that we ordinary people can do little to change things.

Ordinary people can change the world, of course -- King is one of our country’s shining examples, still recent enough that many of us were alive during his lifetime. But as his holiday becomes sanitized, and his image becomes lionized beyond all recognition, it has become harder and harder to draw personal inspiration from his story -- or his politics.

This year, even more than in the past, it has become essential to remember that King did far more than have a dream. Along with Mohandas Gandhi, he was one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority. He gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents.

King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. King did far more than have a nice dream. Unfortunately, we don`t hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. Today, as American soldiers fight two major wars on the far side of the world, and the U.S. military wades quietly into a half dozen more -- all in non-white countries -- they’re more timely than ever. But it’s not likely we’ll hear much on the networks of King pronouncing the spiritual death of a country that would spend so much to kill and so little to help people live. That’s a little too touchy nowaways.

The literal whitewashing of King also serves another purpose: to locate American racism as safely in the South and in our historical past. The changes of the past half century are, indeed, remarkable; Jim Crow seems today as unthinkable as slavery itself. But struggles against racial equality happened in every state -- not just Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. As for our progress since then, consider: the persistently huge economic gaps between whites and non-whites; the horrific public health indices in some non-white areas, including the re-emergence of TB and widespread, endemic hunger among often non-white children; the shameful failure of public education in many predominantly non-white school districts; the War on Drugs and its imprisonment of a generation of non-white youth; the race-coded political attacks on welfare and workfare programs; the near-complete dismantling of affirmative action; and the still-striking disparity between how America looks and how its leaders look. We still have a long, long way to go.

If the King of 1955 or 1965 were alive today, he’d be talking about all of this. King would also have something to say about America’s eagerness to consider every human being of a particular shading as a potential terrorist. He would be accused of treason for his pacifism, as he was reviled for "Communism" back in the day. Instead of the FBI trying to bring him down, he, and most of his associates, would be prosecutable under anti-terrorism statutes. And the moral outrage of Americans, that made his work so effective? These days, we prefer denial.

Dr. King, nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by the same political leaders that wage wars and let black children starve.

He deserves better. We all do.

(c) Working Assets Online. All rights reserved.


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16294

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Sunday, January 18, 2004
War News for January 18, 2004 Draft

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: British troops ambushed by roadside bomb in Basra.

Bring `em on: Car bomb kills 23, wounds 95 at CPA headquarters in Baghdad.

Bring `em on: Car bomb targeting US patrol in Tikrit kills two Iraqis.

Bring `em on: Explosion in Basra kills two Iraqis, wounds two British soldiers.

Bring `em on: Honduran troops mortared in barracks near Najaf.

CENTCOM reports on US soldier died from "non-hostile gunshot wounds" in an incident near Ad Diwaniyah.

Iraqi Resistance Report, January 15 - 17, 2004.

Six hundred Iraqi police killed in Bush`s War. "`We have worked out that nearly 600 police officers have been killed since the end of the (March-April 2003) war,` Moshtaq Fadhel, commander of Iraq`s police academy, told reporters."

Iraqi Sunnis seethe at CPA policies.

Analysis: After regime change in Iraq, Bush Middle East policy is hopelessly adrift.

Another former CIA officer blasts Lieutenant AWOL. "The war on terrorism has gone awry, Steele said. `I am a moderate Republican who believes the party has been hijacked,` he said. `We have been lied to, we have been misled. Iraq was a wrong turn.` Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, and for a tenth of the approximately $400 billion the United States has spent on the war in Iraq, it could have caught Osama bin Laden, he said. `We`re pretending to be at war with terrorism, but what this is really about is electing George Bush on an Iraq plank.`"

Some background on Ayatollah Sistani.

If you ever thought those neo-cons who planned (for want of a better word) Bush`s War are loons, read this enlightening anecdote from the Soviet-Afghan War. Now I realize why General Zinni called these clowns a bunch of amateurs who "never had an idea that worked."

Lebanon refuses to return seized dinars. This story sure smells funny.

Congressmen ask Rummy to extend soldiers` R&R reimbursements.

Rail service in Iraq. Only the CPA could make AMTRAK look good.

Army after-action review finds insurgent skills, tactics improving.

More from a newspaper email interview with Major General Eaton.

Eyewitness account of attempted bomb ambush in Tikrit.

US arrests, releases two Iranian journalists in Baghdad.

Commentary

Opinion: Army stretched too thin to be an effective counter-insurgency force in Iraq. "To win Iraqis` cooperation, Mr. Korb said, troops must build a rapport with them. New units must climb the learning curve all over again. Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, told Newsweek last month, `You don`t defeat an insurgency solely with military forces…you win by getting the people to believe they have a stake in the success of the new Iraq.`"

Opinion: Farce to Tragedy. "If the Republicans pursue an ideological campaign and win, the world will change in highly combustible ways. It is one thing for an American administration to depart from traditional policies under stress and for a limited time, but it would be quite another for a president to win an election with a mandate to make that departure permanent."

Editorial: Self-delusional Iraq policy. "L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. chief in Iraq, insists that there`s no way Iraq could be ready for elections this year, and considering that the country is emerging from a history of totalitarian rule, it`s a reasonable point. But devising an arcane and incomprehensible system of caucuses to pick delegates to an assembly - which is the current plan - and then calling it representative government smacks of self-delusion. We call it self-delusion because no one else - most of all the Iraqis - will be fooled into thinking that this isn`t Washington`s way of cooking up the kind of government it wants."

Opinion: A Dishonest War. "The most fundamental decision a president ever makes is the decision to go to war. President Bush violated the trust that must exist between government and the people. If Congress and the American people had known the truth, America would never have gone to war in Iraq. No president who does that to our country deserves to be reelected."

Casualty Reports

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.





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Farce to tragedy in one act of US folly

January 19, 2004

In the structure of a classical play, a problem is presented in Act 1, complications arise in Act 2, and all is resolved in Act 3. In Iraq this northern spring, while much of Europe was still enmeshed in Act 2, George Bush plunged directly into Act 3, without acknowledging the complications or fully considering the consequences.

The result was the most heated year in trans-Atlantic relations since the Suez crisis of 1956. The Iraq war ignited tinder already piled high by clashes over trade, arms control, the Middle East, global warming and the International Criminal Court. By March, when the war in Iraq began, surveys indicated that only a minority of Europeans held a favourable view of America, while in the United States pollsters found unprecedented animosity toward dissident allies France and Germany.

In October I spent three weeks in Europe, and was told, even by normally pro-American officials, that European hostility had grown deeper with no weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq and without any sign of recognition that there had been any merit to Europe`s prewar warnings. To Europeans, Americans appeared simultaneously besotted with power and unnerved by terror, increasingly overbearing, jingoistic and rash.

Europeans appreciated the trauma of the September 11, 2001, attacks, I was told, but were baffled by the idea that an attack on Iraq should be the centrepiece of America`s response. Saddam Hussein was a rotter, they conceded, but no imminent threat - and he was blameless for September 11.

As to current events, the Iraqi rebuilding looks at best like, in the words of the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, "a long, hard slog". Meanwhile Bush is unable to appear at public events for fear of being shouted down by protesters.

The antagonism that has crept into Euro-Atlantic relations must be reversed, because it has the potential to undermine the entire web of institutions and arrangements created after World War II. If the Bush Administration isn`t careful, it will allow Saddam to do what four decades of Soviet leaders could not do: drive a wedge between Europe and the US.

Little would disarm Bush`s domestic critics more than the spectacle of America and Europe once again working together smoothly, combining their diverse talents to combat terrorism, democratise Iraq, stabilise Afghanistan, denuclearise Iran and promote the rule of law.

After America`s recent show of its aggressive and unilateralist capacities, a tilt back toward institution-building and alliance-strengthening would be welcomed in Europe and would probably attract bipartisan support at home. Alas, with elections looming, the Administration seems to be adopting the opposite approach. The first Republican television ads forcefully - and unfairly - accuse Democrats of "attacking the President for attacking terrorists", and the Republican National Committee is urging voters to call their congressmen "to support the President`s policy of pre-emptive self-defence".

Meanwhile, despite almost daily setbacks in Iraq, the Pentagon shows no sign of a serious effort to internationalise the occupation. The Administration seems to have concluded that unilateralism in foreign policy is a strength. If this is, in fact, Bush`s view, this year`s election will constitute a virtual referendum on whether Americans have any desire to continue the trans-Atlantic partnership.

The Republican strategy could play well among those persuaded by the Administration`s implicit claims that the invasion of Iraq was essentially a retaliatory measure for September 11, and that attacking Saddam was simply another way of attacking Osama bin Laden. Although unsupported by the facts this argument casts the war as a moral test and the Germans and French failed this test, those advocates say, essentially deserting under fire.

The spectacle of the lone sheriff facing down the bad guys while the cowardly townspeople tremble in the background has deep resonance for the American electorate.

If the Republicans pursue an ideological campaign and win, the world will change in highly combustible ways. It is one thing for an American administration to depart from traditional policies under stress and for a limited time, but it would be quite another for a president to win an election with a mandate to make that departure permanent.

The Democratic presidential candidates are divided on Iraq, but they`re generally united in challenging the Bush Administration`s unilateralism, its emphasis on pre-emption and its penchant for ignoring international institutions.

The eventual Democratic nominee can be expected to criticise Bush for squandering international support after September 11, for failing to develop a long-term strategy to defeat terrorism and for exposing US troops to unnecessary danger through incoherent planning in Iraq. These arguments may well make sense to an American public increasingly troubled by developments abroad.

If his opponent begins to find traction with such charges, it is possible that Bush will have no choice but to switch gears once again, running for re-election as a born-again internationalist who treasures NATO and reads the UN charter every night before bed. At the moment, however, it appears that in 2004 American voters will be offered a clear choice: reaffirm their country`s strategic alliance with Europe or replace it with a strategy dependent, in the end, on American strength alone.

If so, their choice will be historic, and will go a long way towards determining, once the curtain falls, whether or not Bush`s Act 3 ends up as a tragedy.

Madeleine Albright, author of the best-selling Madam Secretary: A Memoir (Miramax Books, 2003), was secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

The New York Times



This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/18/1074360630485.html

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2004/01/18
http://www.iribnews.com/Full_en.asp?news_id=196735
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600 police died since Saddam`s fall



03:59:43 È.Ù
Baghdad, Jan 18 - Nearly 600 police officers have been killed since the end of the US-led war to oust former dictator Saddam Hussein, turning Iraq into a "terrorist battlefield", a senior Iraqi policeman said Sunday.

"We have worked out that nearly 600 police officers have been killed since the end of the (March-April 2003) war," Moshtaq Fadhel, commander of Iraq`s police academy, told reporters.

"They died in attacks, during patrols or during operations in which they had to arrest criminals," he added.

Asked whether the rate of casualties had increased, he said:" Not at all, because all of Iraq has become a batlefield for terrorists".

Four police officers were among at least 23 people killed in Sunday morning`s suicide bombing outside the US-led coalition headquarters in Baghdad.

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Damned lies and war loot
By Mike Carlton
January 17, 2004

More and more evidence is coming in. The jigsaw pieces are fitting into place. It is becoming appallingly clear that President George Bush is an arrant liar and - as Mark Latham correctly suggested - "the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory".

Two books I read over the summer holidays pointed me in this direction. Both were by Americans. The first was How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? by William D.Hartung, a policy wonk at the New School University in New York.

Hartung gives chapter and verse, sourced and annotated, on the crony capitalism and brazen conflicts of interest which reek from the highest levels of the Bush Administration. His particular bete noir is the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who even while in office receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in "deferred payments" from his old company, Halliburton, a giant oil services conglomerate which now has the lion`s share of (untendered) Pentagon contracts to rebuild Iraq.

But it is not only Cheney. Invoking Dwight D.Eisenhower`s prescient warning of the rise of an American "military-industrial complex", Hartung joins the dots on a web of richly profitable insider dealings by Administration figures - from Donald Rumsfeld to George Bush the First.

The second book was The Great Unravelling, a collection of writing by Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton who turns out regular columns for The New York Times. Witty and irreverent, Krugman has the happy knack of explaining complex economic issues in plain English, rather like our own Ross Gittins. And he does not hold back:

"It is a simple fact that George Bush and Dick Cheney got rich through pretty much the same tricks, albeit on a smaller scale, as those that enriched Enron and other scandal-ridden corporations," he writes. "At a time when we need another Franklin Roosevelt, we are instead led by men who are part of the problem."

Krugman demonstrates with cool logic that Dubya lied through his teeth about massive tax cuts promised equably to all Americans but which, he says, deliver 40 per cent of the benefit to the richest 1 per cent of the people.

It is these tax cuts that helped push the US to a record-shattering budget deficit of $US374.2 billion ($486.03 billion) in the last fiscal year and which, as the International Monetary Fund reported last week, now threaten the stability of the global economy. I ASKED Mark Latham this week if he stood by his "incompetent and dangerous" crack at Bush.

This question will dog him all the way to the election later this year, so he has developed what I suppose is a formula answer: he supports the American alliance but reserves the right for Canberra to differ with Washington if needs be.

Or words to that effect. But he added, firmly enough, that he believes the Iraq war was a mistake.

"It was a war justified primarily to find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction. None were used in the conflict; none have been found since," he said.

"And on that basis [the] war was sustained on a premise that hasn`t been proven and hasn`t been justified. And for that reason you`d have to be worried about the conduct of Australian foreign policy."

The Bush and Howard toadies in the media will use this as a stick to bash Latham as anti-American, a common smear when they are devoid of logical argument.

They would have more difficulty, though, in suggesting the same of Bush`s former treasury secretary, Paul O`Neill, whose recent portrait of his ex-boss as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" was devastating.

Then there was this week`s report from the US Army War College (America`s "most prestigious institution for the education of strategic leaders", says its website) which slammed the invasion of Iraq as "a detour" from the war on terrorism and said the Bush Administration`s attempts to prove a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were a "strategic error of the first order".

Or take these words from Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts in a speech last Wednesday: "No president of the United States should employ misguided ideology and distortion of the truth to take the nation to war. In doing so, the President broke the basic bond of trust between government and the people. If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America would never have gone to war."

Latham is in pretty good company. WHAT on earth happened to ABC television news over the summer holidays? Perhaps they tossed the show to the work experience kids to put together. The flagship 7pm bulletin plunged downmarket to out-tabloid the commercial networks, leading off each evening with a confection of shock horror crime and car crashes.

Weighty stories such as the $180 million foreign exchange disaster at the National Australia Bank, or the Government`s decision to sign up for Star Wars Mk II, were either dumped, perfunctorily, in the middle of the bulletin or, in some cases, ignored altogether.

The cliches buzzed around the reporting like blowflies at a barbecue: sports stars were bundled out; wins were convincing; traffic ground to a halt; police expressed fears; the road toll mounted, blah blah.

Spelling mistakes were common. I enjoyed a graphic over the newsreader`s right ear announcing an apperance [sic] by the British playwright Tom Stoppard.


Crikey! It`s Steve`s big chance

Now the news in sport. Controversial Aussie crocodile hard man Steve Onion says he`s hoping to go gold at the World Crocodile Baiting Championships which get under way at Melanoma Beach in Florida this week.

Onion, 32, will be looking to beat his Australian and Commonwealth record of 8.3 seconds for feeding a child to a crocodile, but admits he`s facing an uphill battle after emerging from under an injury cloud earlier this year.

"A lot depends on the kid," he told reporters. "Crikey, if it struggles you`ve had it. But I`m hoping for at least a podium finish."

Onion impressed selectors with a convincing baby feeding performance at the Australian finals on the Gold Coast last December, demonstrating a convincing wrist action which can flick an anklebiter into a croc`s jaws at lightning speed. But in the US he`s been forced to practise on Florida swamp alligators and says he`s concerned they don`t have the same aggressive hunger as the saltwater crocs he`s accustomed to at home in Queensland.

Meanwhile tennis, and in the Cellulite Women`s Classic in Melbourne Aussie hopeful Nicole Plank has been bundled out in the first round as usual, going down to Hanna Throwalegova of the Czech Republic 6-0, 6-0. The attractive blonde Throwalegova, 24, goes on to meet America`s Monica Appleturnover, fresh after her fighting comeback win over Jana Secondhandrangerover, whose powerful left-hand serve proved too much for Romania`s Dronko Woollypullova at German`s Berchtesgaden Classic last week.

Big interest, though, focuses on tonight`s centre-court clash between Uzbekistan`s Jelena Turkey Leftover and reigning top seed Rollme Overinthecloverova. Back to you, Felicity.

[e-mail]


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/16/1073878031012.html

[Joerver]

January 2004 Issue

It Seems to Me Howard Zinn

The Logic of Withdrawal

http://www.progressive.org/jan04/zinn0104.html

[A note of explanation: In the spring of 1967, my book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was published by Beacon Press. It was the first book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. Many liberals were saying: "Yes, we should leave Vietnam, but President Johnson can`t just do it; it would be very hard to explain to the American people." My response, in the last chapter of my book, was to write a speech for Lyndon Johnson, explaining to the American people why he was ordering the immediate evacuation of American armed forces from Vietnam. No, Johnson did not make that speech, and the war went on. But I am undaunted, and willing to make my second attempt at speech writing. This time, I am writing a speech for whichever candidate emerges as Democratic Party nominee for President. My supposition is that the nation is ready for an all-out challenge to the Bush Administration, for its war policy and its assault on the well-being of the American people. And only such a forthright, courageous approach to the nation can win the election and save us from another four years of an Administration that is reckless with American lives and American values.]


My fellow Americans, I ask for your vote for President because I believe we are at a point in the history of our country where we have a serious decision to make. That decision will deeply affect not only our lives, but also the lives of our children and grandchildren.


At this moment in our nation`s history, we are on a very dangerous course. We can remain on that course, or we can turn onto a bold new path to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, which guarantees everyone an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.


The danger we are in today is that the war--a war without any foreseeable end--is not only taking the lives of our young but exhausting the great wealth of our nation. That wealth could be used to create prosperity for every American but is now being squandered on military interventions abroad that have nothing to do with making us more secure.


We should listen carefully to the men serving in this war.


Tim Predmore is a five-year veteran of the army. He is just finishing his tour of duty in Iraq. He writes: "We have all faced death in Iraq without reason or justification. How many more must die? How many more tears must be shed before Americans awake and demand the return of the men and women whose job it is to protect them rather than their leader`s interest?"


What is national security? This Administration defines national security as sending our young men and women around the world to wage war on country after country--none of them strong enough to threaten us. I define national security as making sure every American has health care, employment, decent housing, a clean environment. I define national security as taking care of our people who are losing jobs, taking care of our senior citizens, taking care of our children.


Our current military budget is $400 billion a year, the largest in our history, larger even than when we were in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And now we will be spending an additional $87 billion for the war in Iraq. At the same time, we are told that the government has cut funds for health care, education, the environment, and even school lunches for children. Most shocking of all is the cut, in billions of dollars, for veterans` benefits.


If I became President, I would immediately begin to use the great wealth of our nation to provide those things, which represent true security.


Immediately on taking office, I would propose to Congress, and use all my power to ensure that this legislation passes, that we institute a brand new health care system, one that builds on the success of our Medicare program, and that has been used effectively in other countries in the world.


I would call it Health Security, because it would guarantee to every man, woman, and child free medical care, including prescription drugs, paid for out of the general treasury, like the free medical care for members of Congress, and for members of our armed services. This would save billions of dollars wasted today in administrative costs, profits for insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms, huge salaries for CEOs of private medical plans. There would be no paperwork for the patient, and no worries about whether any medical condition, any medical emergency, would be covered. No worry that losing your job would mean an end to your medical insurance.


I would do something else immediately on taking office. I would ask Congress for a Full Employment Act, guaranteeing jobs to anyone who is willing to work. We would give the private sector all the opportunity to provide work, but where it fails to do so, the government would become the employer of last resort. We would use as a model the great social programs of the New Deal, when millions of people were given jobs after the private sector had failed to do so.


I would also take steps to reverse the attacks on our environment by the Bush Administration, which has been more concerned for the profits of large corporations than for the air, land, and water we depend on. In December of 2002, it relaxed its pollution standards for antiquated coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, and those emissions cause hundreds of premature deaths each year. It has refused to sign the Kyoto agreement on global warming, though climate change is an enormous peril to the coming generations. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency in January of 2003 refused to order a nuclear reactor closed though its lid had rusted nearly all the way through, because, according to an internal commission report, the agency did not want to impose unnecessary costs on the owner and was reluctant to give the industry a black eye.


This Administration has done nothing to stop the emissions from the chemical plants all over the country, and it has stored chemical weapons in areas where residents have become sick as a result. In April of 2003, Darline Stephens of Anniston, Alabama, told a journalist: "I live five or ten miles from chemical weapons. We`re over there searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we have them here in our hometown."


The Bush Presidency has sacrificed the cause of clean air and clean water because it has ties to the automobile industry, the oil industry, the chemical industry, and other great commercial enterprises. I would insist on regulating those industries in order to save the environment for us, our children, our grandchildren.


A decision must be made, and I promise to make it. We cannot have Health Security, or job security, or a decent environment, unless we decide we will no longer be a nation that sends its military everywhere in the world against nations that pose no threat to us.


We have already lost 400 lives in Iraq. Over 2,000 of our young have been wounded, some of them so seriously that the word "wounded" does not convey the reality.


Robert Acosta is twenty years old. He has lost his right hand and part of his forearm.


Twenty-one-year-old Edward Platt has had his leg amputated above the knee.


The entertainer Cher, visiting the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, called in to a television program, saying, "As I walked into the hospital the first person I ran into was a boy about nineteen or twenty years old who`d lost both of his arms. . . . And when I walked into the hospital and visited all these boys all day long . . . everyone had lost either one arm . . . or two limbs. . . . I just think that if there was no reason for this war, this was the most heinous thing I`d ever seen. . . . I go all over the world and I must say that the news we get in America has nothing to do with the news that you get outside of this country."


The families of those who have died in this war are asking questions which this Administration cannot answer. I read recently about the mother of Captain Tristan Aitken, who was thirty-one years old, and died in combat in Iraq. She said about her son: "He was doing his job. He had no choice, and I`m proud of who he was. But it makes me mad that this whole war was sold to the American public and to the soldiers as something it wasn`t. Our forces have been convinced that Iraqis were responsible for September 11, and that`s not true."


This mother has it right. Americans were led into war, being told again and again by the highest officials of government, including the President, that it was absolutely necessary. But we now know that we were deceived. We were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were a danger to us and the world. These weapons, despite enormous efforts by both an international team and our own government`s investigative body, have not been found.


Virtually every nation in the world, and public opinion all over the planet, believed we should not go to war. Countries much closer to Iraq than ours did not feel threatened, so why should the United States--with its enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons and with its warships on every sea--have felt threatened?


Common sense should have told us that Iraq, devastated by two wars (first with Iran, then with our country) and then ruined by ten years of economic sanctions, could not be a threat sufficient to justify war. But that common sense did not exist in Washington, either in the White House, which demanded war, or in Congress, which rushed to approve war. We now know that decision was wrong and that the President of the United States and the people around him were not telling us the truth.


As a result of believing the President, we went to war in violation of the United Nations Charter, in defiance of public opinion all over the world, and thus in a single move placed ourselves outside the family of nations and destroyed the goodwill that so many people everywhere had toward our country.


On September 11, 2001, a terrorist attack in New York and Washington took close to 3,000 lives. The Bush Administration has used that tragic event as an excuse to go to war, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. But neither war has made us safer from terrorism. The Bush Administration lied to the American people about a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, when even the CIA has not been able to find such a connection.


Indeed, by its killing of thousands of people in both countries, the Bush Administration has inflamed millions of people in the Middle East against us and increased the ranks of the terrorists.


The Iraqi people are happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein, but now they want to be rid of us. They do not want our military to occupy their country. If we believe in self-determination, in the freedom of the Iraqis to choose their own way of life, we should listen to their pleas, leave their country, and allow them to work out their own affairs.


I would, therefore, as President, call for an orderly withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. I would remove our troops from elsewhere in the Middle East. Only the oil interests benefit from that military presence.


I am proposing a fundamental change in the foreign policy of our country. This Administration believes that we, as the most powerful nation in the world, should use that power to establish military bases all over the world, to control the oil of the Middle East, to determine the destinies of other countries.


I believe that we should use our great power not for military purposes but to bring food and medicine to those areas of the world that have been devastated by war, by disease, by hunger. If we took a fraction of our military budget we could combat malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. We could provide clean water for the billion people in the world who don`t have it and would save millions of lives. That would be an accomplishment we could be proud of. But how proud can we be of military victories over weak nations, in which we overthrow dictators but at the same time bomb and kill the people who are the victims of these dictators? And the tyrants we overthrow are very often the ones we have helped stay in power, like the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq.


We are at a turning point in the history of our nation. We can go on being a great military power, engaging in war after war, in which innocent people abroad and our own men and women die or are crippled for life. Or we can become a peaceful nation, always ready to defend ourselves, but not sending our troops and planes all over the world for the benefit of the oil interests and the other great corporations that profit from war.


We can choose to use the wealth of our nation and the talents of our people for war, or we can use that wealth and talent to better the lives of men, women, and children in this country. We can continue being the target of anger and terrorism and indignation by the rest of the world, or we can be a model of what a good society should be like, peaceful in the world, prosperous at home.


The choice will come in the ballot box. I ask you to choose for the peace of the world, and the security of the American people.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Howard Zinn, the author of "A People`s History of the United States," is a columnist for The Progressive.

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Kelly was a liar, not a martyr, says Hoon
From The Sunday Times
19jan04

BRITISH Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has raised the stakes ahead of the release of the Hutton report into the death of David Kelly by claiming the government weapons scientist was "no martyr" and killed himself because he feared exposure as a liar.

Mr Hoon has told friends that Kelly probably killed himself because he was being forced to come clean about the full extent of his unauthorised contacts with journalists.
His views, which are shared by other cabinet ministers, will incense the Kelly family ahead of the much-anticipated publication of Lord Brian Hutton`s report next week.

Mr Hoon is ready to resign if he is strongly criticised in the report, recognising that his continued presence would cause "political difficulty" - but he will not go without forcibly defending his actions.

He is also said to be angry at the effect of the affair on morale in his department.

"Good people ... had their reputations traduced," he told friends last week. "Why? Because of this man`s (Kelly`s) actions."

Kelly apparently killed himself last July after being exposed as the source of a BBC report that claimed Downing Street had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein`s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Hoon is widely expected to be the main government casualty from the Hutton inquiry. The BBC, which is also likely to be criticised, will this week screen an edition of its flagship Panorama program that finds fault with the BBC`s role in the Kelly affair.

Crucially, the program will say the central charge made by reporter Andrew Gilligan - that the dossier was "sexed-up" - was wrong. The BBC gave Panorama unprecedented freedom to investigate its battle with the Government. The report will highlight lax editorial procedures, the failure to flush out inconsistencies in Gilligan`s story and the delay by BBC boss Greg Dyke in realising there was a growing crisis.

Mr Hoon has told friends he believes he will take the flak when the Hutton report is published and that Tony Blair will escape a mauling. Unlike Mr Hoon and at least six other key figures who are likely to be criticised, the Prime Minister was not recalled during the second phase of the inquiry to give further evidence.

Mr Hoon privately rejects the idea of a conspiracy between No 10, the Ministry of Defence and civil servants to name Kelly, but acknowledges that he may be vulnerable to criticism for failing in his duty of care to the scientist.

Kelly had denied to MPs on the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee that he was the source for a report by another BBC journalist, Susan Watts.

It became clear during the inquiry that he was her source. The committee had asked Kelly for a full list of his contacts with journalists and he was working on this on July 17, the day he took his life.



© The Australian

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Bush Proposes Gay Marriage Ban Exception

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

WASHINGTON, DC (IWR News Parody) President Bush today proposed an exception to the ban on gay marriage favored by morally superior conservative Republicans like Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh.
"After having been smitten by my burning desire for a cute young man from Canada, Scott Reid,http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/… I think we should now make an exception to any future amendment banning gay marriage.

I hereby propose that a passionate love between a wealthy older queen like myself or J. Edgar Hoover and a young stud should be able to be consummated under the law.

Senator Santorum, the Senate expert on bestiality, tells me there was already a precedent in ancient Greece for this sort of relationship, and it was considered quite normal back then.

Santorum also says that Greece was the first democracy, it`s funny the things you learn when you fall in love.

Thank you and many hugs and kisses to Scotty Boy," said President Bush.

[Joerver]

Lakes of Sewage

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 18, 2004 - 01:20 PM
Ahmed Abdul Rida points to his tiny, dilapidated water pump which sits quietly on the ground in his small home in Sadr City, Baghdad.

“We have one hour of electricity, then none for 8 hours. This pump is all we have to try to pull some water to our home,” he tells me, “So whenever we get some electricity we try to collect what water we can in this bowl.”

He points to an empty metal bowl that sits near the lifeless pump.

When they do get water, most of the time it is brown water from the Tigris. The volume of flow from the Tigris, due to all of the dams upriver from Baghdad, has dropped from 40 billion cubic meters in the ‘60’s to 16 billion cubic meters today.


Drinking water in Sadr City

When they do get water, most of the time it is brown water from the Tigris. The volume of flow from the Tigris, due to all of the dams upriver from Baghdad, has dropped from 40 billion cubic meters in the ‘60’s to 16 billion cubic meters today.

So the water Ahmed gets for his two and a half hours a day of electricity is a concentrated cocktail of pesticides, fertilizers, heavy metals from ancient piping, and who knows how much Depleted Uranium, raw sewage and other chemicals released from American and Iraqi munitions from the ’91 Gulf War, and the more recent Anglo-American Invasion.

He points to a bottle of the last water they collected to show me a sample of what his family has to drink. It has the color watered down iced tea and smells like a dirty sock.

No wonder he and his family are constantly plagued by diarrhea, with many of them suffering from kidney stones. Yet these are just the most obvious effects from the families in Sadr City who drink the polluted/contaminated water. For heavy metals in their water also damages the liver, brain and other internal organs.

All of the houses I visited today in Sadr City had the same problem-little or no electricity, no running water aside from 2-3 hours a day of the brown smelly liquid that sputters from their pipes when their small pumps function, and raw sewage outside in the streets where the children are playing.

This was on a good day. The last rain was several days ago, and not a big one at that. Ahmed tells me, as do several of the other men I spoke with throughout the poverty-stricken area, that during most rain showers there are literally lakes of raw sewage that fill the streets and the nearby homes.

Geographically, Sadr City is a low point in the region, so most of the water flows towards it, carrying garbage and raw sewage when the rains come.


Children in Sadr City playing near raw sewage

We walk outside and towards another home to see their dismal pipe situation. On the way, children are playing catch with an old piece of black rubber (from a tire?) until it lands in the greenish water standing on the side of the small road between the two houses. A little girl with dirt smeared arms picks up their ‘toy’ and tosses it back to her friend as sewage drips off it.

“Our children are always sick here. We have tried picking up areas so they have somewhere clean to play, but people always throw their garbage there anyway. The government hasn’t done anything to help us yet, and we have asked them,” a neighbor of Ahmed’s tells me.

He goes on to say that they pay the government the monthly electrical bill, even though they lack potable water and average 2.5 hours of electricity per day. There is no sewage system, and pools of it are standing throughout the neighborhood.

The stench makes me pull my kefir up over my nose at times. We walk to the end of a street where a large pond of greenish sewage stands, flies buzzing madly about.

Ahmed says to me,

“The whole area is like this. We have over a million people here, and all of us suffer. Sometimes we have to drink the sewage. Yesterday our water smelled like petrol, because there is a station nearby and we all know the benzene leaks into our water.”


Raw sewage in the street, Sadr City, Baghdad

I drive to another block of Sadr City and get the same news from residents there. Constant diarrhea, nausea, and oftentimes kidney stones.

The usual green and brown streams of sewage line the street, with children walking across it.

As I walk back towards the car a man tells me,

“Nobody from the Council (US Appointed Iraqi Governing Council) cares about us here. We hear that companies are coming here to rebuild, but we haven’t seen anything rebuilt. We know they only came for the oil. Our situation hasn’t changed one bit since the American’s arrived here. We are still suffering just as we did under Saddam. But now it is worse because there are fewer jobs, and it is even more dangerous for us.”

Bechtel signed their infrastructure repair/rehabilitation contract on April 17, 2003. One of the agreements of this contract states that Bechtel is to repair or rehabilitate critical water treatment, pumping, and distribution in 15 urban areas in central and southern Iraq within the first 6 months.

Sadr City, obviously, is not too high on their priority list.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News…

[Joerver]

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

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Conservative groups break with Republican leadership
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published January 16, 2004

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National leaders of six conservative organizations yesterday broke with the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, accusing them of spending like "drunken sailors," and had some strong words for President Bush as well.
"The Republican Congress is spending at twice the rate as under Bill Clinton, and President Bush has yet to issue a single veto," Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Coalitions for America, said at a news briefing with the other five leaders. "I complained about profligate spending during the Clinton years but never thought I`d have to do so with a Republican in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress."
Warning of adverse consequences in the November elections, the leaders said the Senate must reject the latest House-passed omnibus spending bill or Mr. Bush should veto the measure.
"The whole purpose of having a Republican president is to lead the Republican Congress," said Paul Beckner, president of Citizens for a Sound Economy, whose co-chairman is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. "The Constitution gives the president the power to veto legislation, and if Congress won`t act in a fiscally responsible way, the president has to step in -- but he hasn`t done that."
"If the president doesn`t take a stand on this, there`s a real chance the Republicans` voter base will not be enthusiastic about turning out in November, no matter who the Democrats nominate," Mr. Beckner said.
Mr. Weyrich warned that if the Senate passes the omnibus bill and the president fails to veto it, "in all probability the party`s conservative-activist core voters aren`t going to work to help win the election for Bush and the Republicans, and they may well not even vote."
The Heritage Foundation has projected that passage of the bill would "mark the third consecutive year of massive discretionary spending growth" following increases of 13 percent and 12 percent in the previous two years.
"Congress` continued fiscal irresponsibility is clearly exhibited in the thousands of pork projects contained in the bill," the Heritage report noted.
The Heritage report says the omnibus bill will set the stage for discretionary spending to increase by 9 percent in 2004 to $900 billion, not the 3 percent claimed by Congress.
Asked for comment, Christine Iverson, spokeswoman for Republican National Chairman Ed Gillespie, said that while the last Clinton budget "proposed a 15 percent increase for spending unrelated to national defense, homeland security, entitlement programs and interest on the national debt," the first Bush budget "proposed lowering this increase to 6 percent, the second budget to below 5 percent and the latest to 2 percent for next year."
But conservative critics said that Congress opted to spend far more, and Mr. Bush didn`t move to stop it.
Mr. Bush and the Republican lawmakers are expected to face another barrage of criticism next week, this time from some 4,000 activists at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican congressional leaders are slated to speak.
"A lot of Senate Republicans will be speaking at CPAC, and the grass-roots conservatives attending won`t be shy about their displeasure," said Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union.
Citizens Against Government Waste, the Club for Growth and National Taxpayers Union also joined yesterday`s conservative protest of excessive spending.
For more than a year, a rebellion in Republican ranks has been brewing over the spending issue. Conservatives, including some House Republicans, finally revolted openly over the $400 billion prescription-drug benefit passed by Congress and signed by Mr. Bush last year -- which would expand the government with the largest new entitlement in a generation.




Copyright © 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Neck and neck as the big four tackle first hurdle in race for White House
Suzanne Goldenberg on the campaign trail in Iowa

Suzanne Goldenberg
Monday January 19, 2004
The Guardian

John Kerry paces around the circle of chairs laid out in Maquoketa middle school, and stakes his claim to be America`s next president. It is standard political fare: taxes, jobs, healthcare, schools. But then Mr Kerry, who never misses a chance to remind an audience that he is a Vietnam war hero, thunders: "I`m a fighter. That is why this campaign is alive and moving in the state of Iowa because I know how to fight."

That fighting instinct could stand Mr Kerry in good stead in today`s Iowa caucuses, the most wild, unpredictable and savagely fought Democratic party contest in years. All four contenders look to be in a dead heat, although a poll in yesterday`s Des Moines Register newspaper put Mr Kerry ahead of the field with 26% of likely caucus goers.

John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina who was stuck at 5% in Iowa in November, surged to 23%. Howard Dean, once the frontrunner, was on 20%, and Dick Gephardt, a virtual native son here, was last on 18%.

Opinion surveys are notoriously unreliable in Iowa - and polling is especially tricky this year. Forty-seven per cent of respondents told the Register they could change their minds at their caucus meeting. They are complicated three-hour affairs which typically feature a lot of horse-trading.

But the Register`s results are in line with other polls and reinforce a trend. That`s good news for Mr Kerry, who seems to have injected new focus and verve into a sluggish campaign style. One of his strategists says the slow start and late turnaround is typical of Mr Kerry, likening him to a boy who waits until the last minute to do his homework.

It`s even better news for Mr Edwards, who has used his youthful good looks and his niceness in a down-and-dirty campaign, to project himself as a serious alternative.

For Mr Dean, who had been counting on scoring knock-out victories in Iowa and New Hampshire`s primaries next week, the aura of invincibility has gone. The insurgent candidate who symbolised Democratic anger at George Bush and frustration with the party establishment has lost popular momentum, despite gathering the most heavyweight endorsements.

Yesterday, Mr Dean left Iowa to court the Democrats` elder statesman, Jimmy Carter, returning with praise but no firm endorsement. But the appearance could help Mr Dean next week in New Hampshire against a concerted challenge from General Wesley Clark.

For Mr Gephardt, today`s caucuses could be a matter of political survival.

The outcome now depends on whether that late rush of enthusiasm for Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards trumps the far superior organisation of Mr Gephardt and Mr Dean. While Mr Dean has his legions of volunteers, Mr Gephardt has more than 500 professional organisers from the Teamsters and steelworkers.

In the southern industrial belt of Iowa, which provides the backbone of Mr Gephardt`s support, people in union households say they are receiving five or six phone calls a day from his campaign staff asking for their support.

In Des Moines, Mr Dean`s volunteers, who have flooded in from California, Texas and the east coast, are hunting down the "hidden voters" whose views have not turned up in the opinion polls. The volunteer brigades hit the city`s gay and lesbian bars at the weekend, promoting Mr Dean`s support as governor of Vermont for civil unions.

The intensity of the efforts to court just 100,000 to 150,000 caucus goers marks one of the peculiarities of America`s politics - which for a few weeks make this sparsely populated state the sole focus of the primary season.

To the exasperation of America`s celebrity pundits, forced to endure a primary season migration to the chill of a midwestern winter, Iowans are power-mad provincials who exert undue influence on the outcome of presidential elections.

Traditionally, Iowa is the winnowing state. It has nearly always broken those candidates that do not make it into the top tier, and has provided a springboard for political unknowns, starting with Mr Carter, who used it so effectively in 1976.

Iowans take their politics very seriously. Don Beck, who raises hogs near the south-eastern town of Danville (population 1,000), makes it his winter project. He has written or emailed for position papers from all of the candidates, and plotted their responses on a computer spreadsheet. Although he first met Mr Gephardt nearly 20 years ago, he says his support was not automatic.

"We here in Iowa have an extraordinary opportunity to winnow the chaff for the rest of the country to look to Iowa to tell them what to think," he says. "Traditionally, we have done a good job in picking a viable candidate."

This year, that responsibility is greater than before. Democrats in Iowa are extremely partisan, and have a particular hatred of Mr Bush. They want to pick a winner, and that appears to have helped Mr Kerry during his stop at Maquoketa the other day.

"We have to get a Democrat who in the long run can withstand the onslaught that is coming," says Kim Huckstadt, a superintendent of district schools.

The skewed system and the intensity of the contest have forced candidates to travel 500 miles a day in search of a handful of votes. It also means that any Iowan with a fleeting interest in politics has been able to meet national figures face to face - a rarity in American politics which is largely conducted by television ads.

Since the summer, Mr Huckstadt has met Mr Kerry, Mr Gephardt, and Dennis Kucinich, a fringe liberal candidate, because all thought it was worth the trek to a town with a population of 6,000.

What the audiences lack in size, they make up in sophistication. At the Maquoketa meeting, Mr Kerry was grilled on his student loans, campaign strategy and Mr Bush`s education reforms. Chuck Jorgenson, a retired teacher, arrived at the meeting undecided, but after hearing Mr Kerry field questions was leaning towards a decision.

"What impressed me was the fact that he is going to talk to southerners about basic American values," he says.

In part, Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards have Mr Gephardt to thank for their surge in support. Mr Gephardt has run an intense and expensive television campaign of negative ads against Mr Dean, which has helped to take the shine off his campaign.

"I followed Howard Dean because he was gaining momentum and the polls were putting him ahead," Mr Huckstadt says. "But the more I followed him, I thought the opposing party would like Howard Dean to be our candidate because they were going to have a heyday with him."

Sadly for Mr Gephardt, the ads may not have helped his own campaign. He is fighting against an image as yesterday`s man. The Missouri congressman has been scrabbling for campaign funds. If he cannot win in the neighbouring state of Iowa, Mr Gephardt is unlikely to get the money he needs to carry on.

That realisation has propelled Mr Gephardt into a frenetic round of campaign appearances. "This election may be determined by one vote in one precinct. That`s how close it could be," he told a union hall in Burlington, south-east Iowa.

That`s a cliche in politics, but in the vast rolling plains of Iowa, the appeal rings true.

Several among the crowd filtering out of the hall after hearing Mr Gephardt speak say he has always struck them as a decent man. Debbie Bliesener, 54 and a worker at the local phone company, says she is impressed with his stump speech about his out-of-work father, and his son`s battle with cancer.

She has never been involved in a caucus before but felt so guilty under the barrage of calls from Mr Gephardt`s supporters she turned out to hear him speak. "I like the fact that he knows what it is like to be at the bottom," she says.

The problem for Mr Gephardt is that he needs to be seen as a winner tonight, if he is going to make it to the next stages in the primary season.

Key dates

Today Iowa caucuses

January 27 New Hampshire primary

February 3 `Mini Super Tuesday` - primaries in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri, Delaware; caucuses in New Mexico and North Dakota

March 2 `Super Tuesday` - primaries in California, Texas, Georgia, Vermont, Washington, Maryland, Connecticut, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island; caucuses in Minnesota

March 9 Primaries in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi

July 26-29 Democratic national convention, Boston

August 30 - September 2 Republican national convention, New York City

November 2 Election day


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Why the US is running scared of elections in Iraq
Washington`s plan to transfer power without a direct vote is a fraud

Jonathan Steele
Monday January 19, 2004
The Guardian

The occupation of Iraq continues to get worse for George Bush and Tony Blair. The deaths of at least 20 people in a suicide bomb attack outside the coalition headquarters in Baghdad yesterday morning underlines the spiralling unrest in the country. The toll of US casualties since Saddam Hussein`s capture is higher than in the same period before it. Angry protests over unemployment and petrol shortages have erupted in several cities in the south, in areas under British control.

Above all, Washington`s plans for handing power to an unelected group of Iraqis is being strongly challenged by Iraq`s majority Shia community. The occupiers who invaded Iraq in the name (partly) of bringing democracy are being accused of flouting democracy themselves.

Oh yes, and then there`s the small matter of the weapons of mass destruction on which Saddam increasingly appears to be the man who had truth on his side. When he said he had destroyed them years ago, he, rather than Bush and Blair, was the man not lying.

While the Hutton inquiry looms as the main Iraq worry for the prime minister, the primary problem for Bush is the chaos in Iraq. His plans for minimising Iraq as an election issue are in tatters. They relied on three things: the capture of Saddam; a reduction in the toll of US dead and maimed; and the start of a process of handing power to Iraqis.

The first was accomplished in December when the former dictator`s successful eight-month evasion of massive hunting parties came to an end. But instead of it leading to a collapse of resistance, US casualties have gone on growing. Bush`s always dubious argument that Saddam was running the insurgency from various well-hidden quarters has fallen apart.

Baathists who did not want to be seen as defending a hated leader were freed from that image. Other branches of the resistance were never Saddam supporters. It also transpires that Saddam rejected part of the resistance. Although he called for jihad against the occupiers in the tapes slipped out to al-Jazeera and other Arab media, he was writing more careful private notes to his friends. He urged them to beware of the fundamentalists - an ironic sign that even in his months of beleaguered clandestinity, he remained faithful to the secular principles which had made him attractive to western governments in the 1980s, when the main enemy was seen as Iran.

With casualties stubbornly continuing to remain high, the US is now banking on its project for transferring power to Iraqis this summer. This is an acceleration of Washington`s earlier plans. The UN security council resolution it pushed through unanimously last October called on Iraq`s governing council to draw up a timetable for drafting a constitution and holding elections. It also called for the UN "to strengthen its vital role in Iraq".

But the White House has a habit of ignoring the UN resolutions it sponsors. Just as it went to war without a second resolution, after getting unanimity on one which most member states did not feel contained a trigger, the October 2003 resolution was also ignored. A month after it was passed, the US came up with a plan which made no mention of any role for the UN and cobbled together an extraordinary process of "caucuses" to pick a government.

At least in Iowa, the Democratic party caucuses involve elections. Not in the US plan for Iraq. The US is proposing that "notables" in each province attend these caucuses to appoint an assembly which would select a government. Not surprisingly, the Shia leadership smells a rat. After generations of being excluded from power, first by the British occupiers in 1920, and then by successive Sunni governments up to the one led by Saddam, they are angry.

Their spiritual head, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has repeatedly denounced the plan. He wants direct elections. His legitimate fear is that the US wants to control the selection of a government because it thinks the wrong people will win, in particular the Shia. Washington is also worried that Sunni fundamentalists and even some Baathists might do well in the poll.

The other new element in the US plan was that power would be transferred to the new government at the end of June. This would allow Bush to claim mission accomplished. Barely a year after the invasion, Iraqis would have a legitimate government at last. It would invite US troops to stay, but these could gradually be reduced in number or pulled back to bases in Iraq, as new Iraqi security forces were built up. US casualties would fall, the invasion would have been legitimised, and Messrs Dean and Clark would have to shut up.

Now the whole thing is in ruins. Ayatollah Sistani refuses to drop his opposition, and people were out on the street in Basra last week to support his line. Protests may spread to other Shia cities. The latest allegations of US and British torture of detainees will only inflame passions. Worst of all for Washington, Sistani has made it clear that no government which is undemocratically appointed will have the right to ask American troops to stay.

Washington is trying to argue that if there are to be direct elections, the transfer of power will have to be delayed. Sistani rejects that. His supporters say the oil-for-food ration-card lists which covered the whole Iraqi population can easily be used in place of the poll cards which Washington says would take at least a year to prepare. Unlike Afghanistan, with its remote villages and months of snow which make polling stations hard to deploy and staff, Iraq`s geography is no obstacle to quick elections.

The moment of truth for the administration is also one for the United Nations. Having snubbed the UN for so long, the White House is turning to Kofi Annan at a meeting in New York today to bail it out. Like his Shia forebears who refused to meet the British after 1920 for fear of being denounced as stooges and sell-outs, Sistani refuses to talk to Paul Bremer, the top US envoy, or his British colleagues. He meets Iraqis who bring messages from the coalition authorities, and he meets the UN. So Washington is pressing the UN either to go and persuade Sistani that elections are impossible, or to monitor the caucuses and give them its seal of approval.

Annan should resist the poisoned chalice. He should support the concept of direct elections. It need not mean a delay in sovereignty for Iraq. Five months are not too long to prepare a vote. Alternatively, the UN should offer to take over responsibility for the entire transition to Iraqi rule, as many member governments originally hoped.

Washington`s plan for a transfer of power is a facade. The real intent is to get Bush re-elected and continue the occupation by indirect means. The UN should have no part of it.

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Soldier`s shock at surgery claim
Kirsty Scott
Monday January 19, 2004
The Guardian

A soldier whose leg was amputated after he was shot in a friendly fire accident in Iraq has spoken of his horror at claims that he lost his limb because army field surgeons lacked vital equipment.

Sergeant Albert Thomson, 35, of the 1st Battalion Royal Highland Fusiliers, always believed that doctors could do nothing to save his leg after he was seriously wounded in March when a fellow soldier accidentally fired a machine gun.

But it emerged at the weekend that an officer has alleged that Sgt Thomson, from West Lothian, lost his leg because the medics did not have a vascular repair kit available. The equipment, which costs about £50, allows medics to clamp and repair blood vessels without causing further damage.

The claims were made to Mike Hancock, Liberal Democrat MP for Portsmouth South, and a member of the Commons defence select committee, by a senior reservist officer, who has asked to remain anonymous.

In a letter to the select committee the reservist officer said: "The soldier received four bullet wounds into the upper leg. The doctor was particularly angry that if his team had had a vascular repair kit, which they did not have, they would have been able to redeem that young soldier`s leg. As it happened, they had to take his leg off."

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said yesterday that there were no reported shortages of vascular repair kits.

"If such an incident had taken place in theatre such that there was a shortage we are sure an investigation would have been launched by the medical chain of command," the spokesman said.

Sgt Thomson, who left his base in Warminster, Wiltshire, yesterday for a new posting in Germany, said the claims, which he first read about in a newspaper article, had come as a surprise. The family has hired a lawyer.

"It would certainly be a shock if it was true and it is fair to say that I would be upset," he said.


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Gore Vidal: The war against lies
A growing number of Americans see the election as a chance to reclaim the truth
18 January 2004


It is often hard to explain to foreigners what an American presidential election is actually about. We cling to a two-party system in the same way that imperial Rome clung to the republican notion of two consuls as figurehead - to mark off, if nothing else, the years that they held office conjointly. They reigned ceremonially but were not makers of the political weather. Our two official parties have, at times, dedicated themselves to various issues, usually brought to their attention by a new president with a powerful popular mandate - hence the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, which gave, if nothing else, hope to a nation sunk in economic depression.

Later, as he himself folksily put it, "Dr New Deal has been replaced by Dr Win the War". Dr Win the War, whether he calls himself Republican or Democrat, is still providing - in theory - employment and all sorts of other good things for a people who did not emerge from the Depression until 1940, when Roosevelt began a military build-up. Sixty-four years later, like a maddened sorcerer`s apprentice, he continues to churn out ever more expensive weapons built by an ever-shrinking workforce.

Since the US media are controlled by that corporate America which provides us with political candidates, an informed electorate is not possible. What the media do well is not analyse, or even inform, but personalise a series of evil enemies, who accumulate weapons of mass destruction (as we constantly do) to annihilate us in the night out of sheer meanness.

How, then, will a people grown accustomed to being lied to about serious matters behave during an actual presidential election, in which billions of dollars have been raised to give us a generally false view of the state of our - their? - union. Right off, half the electorate will not vote for president. Those who do vote sometimes exhibit unanticipated trends. In all the recent polls (easily, alas, rigged by the way the questions are posed) the conquest of Iraq is more and more regarded as an expensive mistake: the $87bn (£48bn) that the President has now asked for to repair that country and which Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joyously knocked down in order - it now appears - for his colleague, vice-president Dick Cheney`s company Halliburton to rebuild. Americans in general seem to have got the point of the exercise. So during this primary season - a rehearsal for the November election - is anything happening politically? Quite a lot for those who know how to read the Pravda-like Murdochian media.

First, a vast, spontaneous anti-war movement has been holding huge rallies (mostly unreported by the media). I addressed 100,000 people on Hollywood Boulevard. The press pretended no one much was there that day, but a subversive picture editor ran a photo of the missing (in print) 100,000 anti-war protesters, stretching from La Brea to Vine Street and filling up the boulevard. In the Democratic primaries, an obscure governor from Vermont tapped into the anti-war fervour that was building across the country.

I am writing a few days before the first Democratic primary. Although Governor Howard Dean had a strong lead for many weeks (if Murdoch TV is to be trusted), he is currently tied with the Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and Representative Dick Gephardt, each running as anti-war candidates (despite the fact that they both voted to give Bush wartime powers, leaving Dean the most immaculate of the anti-imperial candidates). Should Bush lose (a possibility not even whispered in TV land) it will be entirely due to one of the most ancient reflexes of the American electorate: a dislike of foreign wars in general and imperial wars in particular.

Recall Ulysses S Grant, a great man and a great general but a failed president, reflecting upon our war of aggression against Mexico. As a young lieutenant, recently graduated from West Point, Virginia, he fought dutifully against Mexico in 1846. Later he registered his hatred of that war. To us it was an empire, and one of incalculable value, but it might have been obtained by other means. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war in modern times.

The true American imperialist would find our greatest general and winner of the civil war sentimental! After all, the war that we fought against Mexico gave us California and half a dozen other states. And wasn`t the 1860 civil war about the abolition of slavery? No, it was not, but our historians tend to be cut from the same material as the media. A lie repeated often enough is, plainly, the truth. Bush told us so often that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qa`ida and the 9/11 attack on the US, that 60 per cent of Americans still believe this to be true. Even so, the anti-imperial movement is growing throughout the land; and it now gives unusual substance to the present election.

General Wesley Clark is viewed by some as a potential General Boulanger. But whatever he is or will be, he too is on record as saying that the war in Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place. He is rising in the polls, despite having no discernible gift for American-style politics, as well as attracting numerous hate pieces about him in the press - the work often of jealous, lazy generals.

So the feckless Bush has not only given new meaning to the equally feckless Democratic party but he has, despite the best - that is to say, the worst - efforts of the media, given new meaning to our corrupt political system. The United States, on top of the world - or so it appears to think - is dividing consciously between imperialists eager for us to seize all of the world`s oil resources, and the anti-imperialists who favour peace and renewable sources of energy. The media are furious at this departure from the norm, which is lies and insults about the personalities of the contenders. There is also a certain unease about the essential crookedness of the political system, which is now apparent to nearly everyone.

Perhaps the election after next - should we survive this one - will have as its subject the necessity of a new constitution, obviously a dangerous but inevitable notion. That is when the most eloquent of the presidential candidates this year, Dennis Kucinich, will come into his own. He is already shaping up as a leader of an as-yet-unborn progressive alliance. Naturally, he is branded a leftist, the word used for any thoughtful conservative. Actually, we have never had a left or even a conscious right. We divide between up and down. The downs may now be on the rise.

Gore Vidal`s latest book , `Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson`, is published by Yale University Press
19 January 2004 10:53



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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January 19, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Note to the U.N.: Hands Off Iraqi Politics
By CHIBLI MALLAT

BEIRUT — When members of the Iraqi Governing Council and L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Baghdad, open talks at the United Nations today, nothing short of the future of the region will be at stake. Having come under increasing pressure over its plan to form an Iraqi government without direct elections, the United States is counting on greater United Nations involvement both to help ease the resistance and secure a lasting democracy.

Beyond the involvement of additional stakeholders like France and Germany, can a more determined role on the part of the United Nations translate into government-building? Considering the organization`s dismal record of silence during Saddam Hussein`s 30 years of totalitarian rule, I`m not so sure.

Having visited Iraq last month to meet with the leadership there, I think the better solution already lies within the nation`s borders. To spend a day at the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council headquarters is to learn what all honest people in the Arab world already admit: the most representative of all governments in the Middle East sits in Baghdad. With all its shortcomings and contradictions, the council covers the fullest possible spectrum of Iraqi society, from the Islamists to the Communists, and all the strands in between, including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmens and Christians.

The continued disagreements in the United Nations over the justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and problems with securing postwar peace mask the one major achievement in the new Iraq: within the governing council and outside, freedom reigns supreme. It may sometimes look or sound messy to the rest of the world, but a fledgling democracy often does.

In a heartening sign, no one in Iraq, no matter what side of the debate he is on, is afraid to speak his mind. At the Baghdad airport, for example, an Iraqi employee expressed to me his regret that Saddam Hussein had been caught, and his hope that resistance will survive his arrest.

On the other hand, when I asked Dr. Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, Iraq`s interim oil minister, about criticism by Baathists within his ministry for his close ties to the United States, he shrugged off the possibility of silencing them. This is especially remarkable, given he had lost several family members to Saddam Hussein`s repression.

During my trip, I visited the Bahr al-Uloum home in Najaf, where some 50 tribal leaders from the Middle Euphrates Valley sang of their attachment to Iraq, Shiism and national unity from the mountain to the marsh. The family`s patriarch, Sheikh Muhammad Bahr al-Uloum, a member of the governing council and an old friend, is optimistic about Iraq`s future. But Sheikh Uloum, who like many struggled for decades against Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship, is also upset at what he perceives as mismanagement of his country by the United States. More than eight months after the passing of the ancien régime, the scene is of intermittent electricity and phone service, no airport service and surreal lines for gas in a country with the second largest oil reserves.

But security, despite newspaper headlines, is a fleeting concern. After all, armed resistance to the new democratic order has no chance of success against the new spirit of freedom if basic services are restored, and if the national political process takes root. This is clearly the dual challenge ahead, and Iraqis rightly feel they are in the best position to run their country.

The way forward, then, is simple. The 10 members of the governing council whom I met with agree on this: the council, as a national unity government, should be unconditionally recognized as in charge of Iraq`s destiny, with the support of the United States-led coalition and whoever else wishes to join in a democratic course of reconstruction.

As such, the council would be deemed the official interim government of Iraq — making the United States plan to select a national assembly by July 1 unnecessary. The council would be empowered to draft a constitution and set the parameters for what a new government would look like and when and how it would be elected. In the long term, this would consolidate the whole process of democracy — something Iraqis both in and outside the council want.

Strengthening the power of Iraqis over their own affairs can come with the proviso that any contender who furthers his own political agenda by violent means should be punished by either being banned from a leadership post or being brought to trial by an international court for those crimes. Human rights monitors, supported by the United Nations or the coalition, should be deployed to further ensure international commitment to the cause of democracy and nonviolence.

Today`s meeting at the United Nations provides the perfect opportunity to focus the future of Iraq in the right direction: inward. When I met in Baghdad with Naseer Chaderji, a liberal Sunni Arab who sits on the governing council, he voiced skepticism of of the United States` reaction to a request for an acceleration of Iraqi self-governance. While Paul Bremer was a good listener, Mr. Chaderji explained, he was not following suggestions made by Iraqi leaders.

But after discussing the issue with other council members — including Ahmad Chalabi and Ibrahim Jafari, an Islamist Dawa leader — as well as with American officials committed to Middle East democracy, including Paul Wolfowitz, I am more hopeful. I sense that Iraqis and Americans are far more in agreement on the country`s future than the controversies there suggest. Now that the most dictatorial system in the region has been undone, the rest of the world owes Iraq`s long-ignored victims a commitment to their national unity government.


Chibli Mallat is a law professor at the University of St. Joseph in Beirut and author of a book on the slain Iraqi cleric Mohammad Bakr al-Sadr.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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A doctor attends to Hassan Taher, a police officer critically wounded in the blast, while another doctor talks with Ahmed Ibrahim, right, Iraq`s deputy interior minister. The bombing wounded more than 60 people.
washingtonpost.com
Blood, Bewilderment and Rage


By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Jan. 18 -- At 8 a.m. Sunday, Abdullah Daud was waiting in a long line at a checkpoint outside the U.S. administration headquarters, hoping to be chosen for a day`s construction work inside. By 10 a.m., Daud lay on an emergency room cot, blood seeping through bandages on his head.

"I don`t know what kind of Iraqi could do something like this against other Iraqis, exactly at the time when the checkpost would be most crowded," said Daud, 26, his voice shaking with bewildered rage as he described what he had seen: a pickup truck exploding a few yards away from him as dozens of people filed in to work, women screaming, men rushing to help the wounded, bodies falling, a girl with her feet blown off.

Daud speculated that the suicide bombers must have come from somewhere else, "from Palestine, or from Osama" bin Laden, he said with disgust, "who thinks he is the new Islamic prophet."

Then the wounded man`s anger took another turn. "It`s all the Americans` fault," he said. "They should help us as they promised they would."

All day, on streets near the main U.S. compound entrance and in hospital rooms filled with bloodied patients and weeping relatives, victims and witnesses expressed impotent rage at the attackers and disbelief that Iraqi bombers could have deliberately targeted their fellow citizens.

Some also voiced frustration and bitterness at the massive U.S. military presence in Iraq, which they said had brought on the calamity and failed to protect them. Many Iraqis pointed out that almost all the wounded and dead were Iraqis, and they said that the attackers` motive was to punish or intimidate Iraqis for working with the Americans.

At Yarmouk Hospital, Riadh Jamal Haider, 26, lay recovering from a chest wound with tubes crisscrossing his body. He described how he had been waiting at the checkpost when the bomb exploded and his chest began gushing blood "like water from a faucet," before he fell and lost consciousness. Haider`s brother, hovering beside his bed, suddenly pushed several news photographers away, his voice erupting in anger.

"This incident was not against the Americans. They were very far away. This was against the Iraqis because they were working inside" the U.S. compound, he said. "Please tell me exactly what the Americans are doing here. They ruined everything, and now they are just standing here, unable to do anything. All these civilians are dying, and young people have no support -- that`s why they work at these jobs. If the Americans can`t do anything, let them leave this country."

Some Iraqis who were wounded, or whose cars were damaged in the blast, expressed bitterness that they had suffered while the Americans, including officials sheltered inside the compound and soldiers guarding it, had emerged mostly unscathed. Iraqi civilian employees, police and passersby bore the brunt of the morning rush-hour devastation, which left at least 20 people dead and wounded more than 60.

"This is a sabotage and hatred operation," said Jasim Muhammed Khalidy, 31, a taxi driver who was being treated in a hospital for cuts from flying glass. His cab had been passing the scene when he said he saw the bombers` car "fly up in the air and come down. . . . I saw many wounded people lying on the street," he said. "All this comes down on our heads."

Saad Qasim, a security officer who was on guard near the blast scene, said he survived because he was standing under a tree. He said he believed the bomb was set off by Islamic extremists to stop Iraqis from cooperating with Americans. "What can people do? They have no alternative," Qasim said. "If these Islamic movements don`t want them to work with the Americans, why don`t they take the money they give the suicide bombers and give it to people for jobs instead?"

In the streets surrounding the entrance to the U.S. compound, crowds gathered beyond police and U.S. military barricades during the day. Their mood was angry, and some people shouted hostile comments at Western journalists, saying that the Americans had done little to help Iraq and that all foreigners should leave.

Several witnesses complained that U.S. troops had started firing into the air and pushing back crowds when the blast occurred, adding to the chaos. Television footage of the bombing aftermath showed U.S. troops bringing out stretchers and carrying some of the injured, but also shoving distraught bystanders away from the area.

"Where`s my wife? Where`s my wife?" cried Haider Said, 35, who attempted to drive to the U.S. compound at 1 p.m., expecting to pick his wife up from work. Instead, he found the way blocked, cars in flames and streets swarming with police and soldiers. He rushed from one official to the next, and finally fled the area in tears.

In several hospitals, people frantically searched for survivors among the wounded, going from bed to bed or craning to look at the names hastily scrawled in admission books. Some said their relatives had left in the morning for their jobs as translators or computer operators inside the vast U.S. compound, and never reappeared.

As with most bombings, twists of fate played a role in who became a casualty and who escaped unharmed. One of the wounded was Ali Khalaf, 45, a widower and father of seven who works in the Housing Ministry. The unusually mild winter day had dawned with blue skies, so Khalaf said he had decided to take a bus partway to work and cross the Jumhuriyah Bridge on foot instead of driving as usual.

"I told myself it was a beautiful day and I was early, so I had time to walk," said Khalaf, who was a few yards away from the bomb when it exploded, leaving him with a mangled hand and severed finger. "It felt like someone had thrown me into the air, and then I fell down. There was a big boom and fire. Pieces of glass and metal started flying, and I heard the sound of them hitting walls just like bullets.

"I don`t know what kind of people could do something like this," Khalaf said, lying in a noisy and crowded hospital ward, his long gray tunic stained with blood. "My wife died only three months ago. If I were to die also, who would take care of my children?"

Special correspondents Huda Ahmed and Nasir Nouri contributed to this report.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
`Muslim Refusenik` Incites Furor With Critique of Faith
Canadian`s Book Challenges Treatment of Women Under Islam

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A14


TORONTO -- Irshad Manji remembers receiving a newspaper clipping about a Nigerian girl who had been sentenced by an Islamic court for having sex before marriage. Although seven witnesses backed her testimony that three men had raped her, the court decided she should suffer more punishment -- 180 lashes.

On the clipping, scribbled in red ink, was a note from one of Manji`s colleagues: "Irshad, one of these days you`ll tell me how you reconcile this kind of insanity and female genital mutilation with your Muslim faith."

Manji, 35, who lives in Canada, said she identified with the story as a Muslim woman and because she, too, was born in Africa. But she was also haunted by the injustice. If there was something in Islam that allowed a girl to be punished for being raped, there was something in Islam that needed to be changed, she thought. Soon after, Manji began calling herself a "Muslim refusenik."

It did not mean, she said, that she was refusing to be a Muslim, as she had been raised. "It simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah," she explained.

This new perspective led Manji to write a book titled "The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change." Recently released in the United States, Manji`s book challenges Muslims worldwide to end human rights violations committed against women and religious minorities in the name of Islam. She also calls for an end to anti-Semitism, which she says has no basis in the preaching of the Koran.

Her book has created a firestorm of debate in Canada and Germany, where it was previously released. She has been called the "nonfiction Salman Rushdie," a reference to the Indian-born author whose 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses," provoked death threats and a fatwa, or religious edict, issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, calling on Muslims to kill him. Manji says she also is facing threats on her life.

"Anybody who undertakes a book like this has to be prepared for what comes after it," she said in an interview at a restaurant in Toronto. "I have received concrete death threats. Most are well thought out. . . . I`m not talking about critical e-mails or vitriolic hate -- I get that all the time. I`m talking about messages that threaten my life." She said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have advised her not to discuss the details of the warnings.

She described the book as the result of "a need identified at a deeply cellular level. I needed to write this, having grown up with a thick skin, a big brain and a bigger mouth, a combination that allows me to advocate ideas. . . . I`m morally obliged."

In the book, Manji writes: "I have to be honest with you. Islam is on very thin ice with me. I`m hanging on by my fingernails, in anxiety over what`s coming next from the self-appointed ambassadors of Allah. When I consider all the fatwas being hurled by the brain trust of our faith, I feel utter embarrassment."

In a quick-fire critique, not slowing for apologies, Manji asks questions she says other Muslims are asking in private but dare not ask aloud. "Why are we being held hostage by what`s happening between the Palestinians and the Israelis? What`s with the stubborn streak of anti-Semitism in Islam? Who is the real colonizer of Muslims -- America or Arabia? Why are we squandering the talents of women, fully half of God`s creation?"

She has described herself as a feminist and a lesbian who clings to her religion. "How can we be sure that homosexuals deserve ostracism or death when the Koran states that everything God made is `excellent`?" she wrote. "Of course, the Koran states more than that, but what`s our excuse for reading the Koran literally when it`s so contradictory and ambiguous?"

She recites a list of recent atrocities committed against other Muslims in the name of religion. "I hear from a Saudi friend that his country`s religious police arrest women for wearing red on Valentine`s Day, and I think, `Since when does a merciful God outlaw joy or fun?` " She hears about victims of rape stoned for having "committed adultery" and she says she wonders "how a critical mass of us can stay stone silent."

Manji was born in Uganda, and fled with her family to Canada from Idi Amin`s atrocities in 1972, when she was 4 years old. The family settled in Richmond, a Vancouver suburb. She says she is estranged from her father but in contact with mother and two sisters. "As a Muslim woman, I wake up every morning thanking Allah that I wound up in this part of the world."

She describes her pursuit of freedom as having roots in childhood. At home, her father demanded obedience and was often violent. One night, she says, her father chased her through their house with a knife, and she escaped outside and took refuge on the roof. There, she had an epiphany. "I remember very clearly looking out over the neighborhood of homes. I thought even if my mother is home right now, she couldn`t help me. It is here, in the wider world, I see open-ended possibility."

She attended a madrassa, a Muslim school, when she was 9, and began to question her faith. Every Saturday, she was instructed about Islam. Men and women, she said, entered the mosque by separate doors and prayed divided by a wall. "In the mosque," she writes in the book, "men never had to see women and women never had to be seen. If that isn`t the definition of assigning us small lives, then I`m missing something big."

At 14, she says, she was expelled from the school for asking her teacher for proof that the prophet Muhammad commanded his army to kill the entire Jewish tribe.

Next she stopped going to the mosque because she felt she could not think independently there. Instead, she said, she began praying on her own. After washing her feet, arms and face, she would sit on a velvet rug and turn toward Mecca. Eventually, she stopped this as well, because she did not want to fall "into mindless submission and habitual submissiveness."

Since then, she has been on what she describes as a quest to understand her religion, and says she remains a Muslim. But she says being a Canadian means having permission to think freely. "Lord, I loved this society. I loved that it seemed perpetually unfinished, the final answers not yet known, if ever they would be," she writes in her book. "I loved that in a world under renovation, the contributions of individuals mattered."

In her book, she urges Muslims to take on ijtihad, the Islamic tradition of independent reasoning. One way she says Islam can be reformed is by giving Muslim women worldwide economic power. "Economic development unleashes incentive to think critically of the Koran, giving them resources to start schools, to stand up to their husbands," she said. "I don`t idealize or romanticize how much blood can be spilled on this. Blood is being spilled anyway. The violence is going to happen, then why not risk it happening for the sake of freedom?"

Her critics say the book is simplistic, and that Manji does not have the academic credentials to criticize Islam. "The Trouble with Islam? I think Ms. Manji used the wrong title," said Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, a non-government organization that represents most of the 600,000 Muslims in Canada. "The book should be entitled: the trouble in the life of Irshad Manji. The book is a personal account of a young lady struggling with her religion, which is common among Muslims and non-Muslims. She is not a specialist to advocate Muslims should revise their religion and holy book. It is not credible."

Elmasry said the Canadian Muslim community did not want to overreact. "We did not treat her like the British Muslim community treated Salman Rushdie," he said. "We ignored her book."

Irshad defends her work. She rejects the argument that she is projecting her personal baggage onto Islam. "It has nothing to do with blaming my father`s violence on Islam," she says. "These are distractions at best. People are afraid it will be taken seriously.

"I challenge my critics to answer this: With or without my personal baggage, would women in Iran still have to ask for permission to travel? Would children get hustled into slavery? With or without my father`s violence, would honor killings happen twice a day in Palestine? Answer that."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Morgen hat Bush die Chance mehr Lügen zu erzählen.

washingtonpost.com
Arms Issue Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility Abroad


By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A01


The Bush administration`s inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- after public statements declaring an imminent threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- has begun to harm the credibility abroad of the United States and of American intelligence, according to foreign policy experts in both parties.

In last year`s State of the Union address, President Bush used stark imagery to make the case that military action was necessary. Among other claims, Bush said that Hussein had enough anthrax to "kill several million people," enough botulinum toxin to "subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure" and enough chemical agents to "kill untold thousands."

Now, as the president prepares for this State of the Union address Tuesday, those frightening images of death and destruction have been replaced by a different reality: Few of the many claims made by the administration have been confirmed after months of searching by weapons inspectors.

Within the United States, Bush does not appear to have suffered much political damage from the failure to find weapons, with polls showing high ratings for his handling of the war and little concern that he misrepresented the threat.

But a range of foreign policy experts, including supporters of the war, said the long-term consequences of the administration`s rhetoric could be severe overseas -- especially because the war was waged without the backing of the United Nations and was opposed by large majorities, even in countries run by leaders that supported the invasion.

"The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon`s Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration`s rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush`s doctrine of "preemption," which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat.

The doctrine "rests not just on solid intelligence," Adelman said, but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid."

Already, in the crisis over North Korea`s nuclear ambitions, China has rejected U.S. intelligence that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for use in weapons. China is a key player in resolving the North Korean standoff, but its refusal to embrace the U.S. intelligence has disappointed U.S. officials and could complicate negotiations to eliminate North Korea`s weapons programs.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the same problem could occur if the United States presses for action against alleged weapons programs in Iran and Syria. The solution, he said, is to let international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency take the lead in making the case, as has happened thus far in Iran, and also to be willing to share more of the intelligence with other countries.

The inability to find suspected weapons "has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," said Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. "The result is we`ve made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future."

James Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration who believed there were legitimate concerns about Iraq`s weapons programs, said the failure of the prewar claims to match the postwar reality "add to the general sense of criticism about the U.S., that we will do anything, say anything" to prevail.

Indeed, whenever Powell grants interviews to foreign news organizations, he is often hit with a question about the search for weapons of mass destruction. Last Friday, a British TV reporter asked whether in retirement he would "admit that you had concerns about invading Iraq," and a Dutch reporter asked whether he ever had doubts about the Iraq policy.

"There`s no doubt in my mind that he had the intention, he had the capability," Powell responded. "How many weapons he had or didn`t have, that will be determined."

Some on Capitol Hill believe the issue is so important that they are pressing the president to address the apparent intelligence failure in the State of the Union address and propose ways to fix it.

"I believe that unanswered questions regarding the accuracy and reliability of U.S. intelligence have created a credibility gap and left the nation in a precarious position," Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a speech last week. "The intelligence community seems to be in a state of denial, and the administration seems to have moved on."

Since last year`s State of the Union, the White House has established procedures for handling intelligence in presidential speeches by including a CIA officer in the speechwriting process. The CIA is also conducting an internal review, comparing prewar estimates with postwar findings, and the final report will be finished after inspectors in Iraq complete their work.

But Bush and his aides have largely sought to divert attention from the issue. White House aides have said they expect this year`s State of the Union speech to look ahead -- to the democracy the administration hopes to establish in Iraq -- rather than look back.

Officials also have turned the focus to celebrating Hussein`s capture last month and repeatedly drawing attention to Hussein`s mistreatment of his people. Officials have argued that if Iraq`s stocks of weapons are still unclear, Hussein`s intentions to again possess such weapons are not. Thirteen years ago, when the United States was a backer of Hussein, Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war.

The administration "rid the Iraqi people of a murderous dictator, and rid the world of a menace to our future peace and security," Vice President Cheney said in a speech last week. Cheney -- and other U.S. officials -- increasingly point to Libya`s decision last month to give up its weapons of mass destruction as a direct consequence of challenging Iraq.

Bush, when asked by ABC`s Diane Sawyer why he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when intelligence pointed more to the possibility Hussein would obtain such weapons, dismissed the question: "So, what`s the difference?"

The U.S. team searching for Iraq`s weapons has not issued a report since October, but in recent weeks the gap between administration claims and Iraq`s actual weapons holdings has become increasingly clear. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that U.S. investigators have found no evidence that Iraq had a hidden cache of old chemical or biological weapons, and that its nuclear program had been shattered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A lengthy study issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also concluded the administration shifted the intelligence consensus on Iraq`s weapons in 2002 as officials prepared for war, making it appear more imminent and threatening than was warranted by the evidence.

The report further said that the administration "systematically misrepresented the threat" posed by Iraq, often on purpose, in four ways: one, treating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as a single threat, although each posed different dangers and evidence was particularly thin on Iraq`s nuclear and chemical programs; two, insisting without evidence that Hussein would give his weapons to terrorists; three, often dropping caveats and uncertainties contained in the intelligence assessments when making public statements; and four, misrepresenting inspectors` findings so that minor threats were depicted as emergencies.

Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment and co-author of the report, pointed to one example in a speech delivered by Bush in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. U.N. inspectors had noted that Iraq had failed to account for bacterial growth media that, if used, "could have produced about three times as much" anthrax as Iraq had admitted. But Bush, in his speech, turned a theoretical possibility into a fact.

"The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount," Bush said. "This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions."

Mathews said her research showed the administration repeatedly and frequently took such liberties with the intelligence and inspectors` findings to bolster its cases for immediate action. In the Cincinnati example, "in 35 words, you go from probably to a likelihood to a fact," she said. "With a few little changes in wording, you turn an `if` into a dire biological weapons stockpile. Anyone hearing that must be thinking, `My God, this is an imminent threat.` "

Steinberg, who was privy to the intelligence before President Bill Clinton left office, said that while at the National Security Council he saw no evidence Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, but that there were unresolved questions about Hussein`s chemical and biological weapons programs. "Given his reluctance to address these questions, you had to conclude he was hiding something," he said, adding that given the intelligence he saw, "I certainly expected something would have turned up."

"I think there are [diplomatic] consequences as a result of the president asking these questions [about Iraq`s weapons holdings] and the answer being no" weapons, said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who believes the ouster of Hussein justified the war. "The intelligence could have been better."

Richard Perle, another member of the Defense Advisory Board, said the criticism of the Bush administration is unfair. "Intelligence is not an audit," he said. "It`s the best information you can get in circumstances of uncertainty, and you use it to make the best prudent judgment you can."

He added that presidents in particular tend not to place qualifiers on their statements, especially when they are advocating a particular policy. "Public officials tend to avoid hedging," he said.

Given the stakes involved -- going to war -- Mathews said the standards must be higher for such statements. "The most important call a president can make by a mile is whether to take a country to war," she argued, making the consequences of unwise decisions or misleading statements even greater.

Indeed, she said, the reverberations are still being felt, even as the administration tries to put the problem behind it. A recent CBS poll found that only 16 percent of those surveyed believed the administration lied about Iraq`s weapons. But she said there is intense interest in the report`s findings, with 35,000 copies downloaded from the think tank`s Web site in just five days. "It is too soon to say there was no cost" to the failure to find weapons, she said. "I think there is a huge appetite for learning about this."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
The Risk of Velvet Gloves


By Gian P. Gentile

Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A21


It was April 21, and I was the executive officer for the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division, conducting a relief in place with a Marine reconnaissance battalion in Tikrit, Iraq. For the most part, major combat operations were on the wane as the 4th Infantry Division advanced from Kuwait into Iraq, and the Marines in Tikrit were applying a "velvet glove" to the local Iraqis. Yet as we quickly learned through operations in the Sunni Triangle, the enemy was preparing its insurgency and adapting. The Marines` velvet glove covered some dangerous problems that we were soon to face.

At the direction of their commanding general, the Marines in Tikrit took off their Kevlar helmets and body armor and worked in a friendly manner with the Iraqis. In the spirit of winning the hearts and minds of the locals, they limited checkpoints and patrols during the day and conducted essentially none of these activities at night. As a Marine officer pointed out to me, this approach brought friendly Iraqis over to the American side and at the same time allowed the Marines to isolate former regime members from the population.

When the 1st Brigade assumed control of Tikrit and its surrounding area in the Sunni Triangle, our approach was in some ways very different. While we immediately began the important work of rebuilding infrastructure and institutions, we intentionally took a hard approach toward hunting down former regime members and stopping the looting of weapons and ammunition.

On the first night of operations in Tikrit, the brigade`s infantry battalion sent out a combat patrol into the northern part of the city. It came across some 30 Iraqi terrorists looting military goods such as rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds. The Iraqis opened fire, and a sharp firefight ensued. Fifteen Iraqi terrorists were killed and the looting was stopped.

Was this approach "hard" compared with that of the Marines? Yes. In this case, did it stop the looting and even the potential of remote-controlled mines and rocket-propelled grenades getting into the hands of terrorists trying to kill Americans? Absolutely. Had these kinds of activities by Iraqi terrorists been going on in Tikrit while the Marines were applying their velvet glove? Undoubtedly.

The brigade also started raids in late April against former regime members and other incipient terrorist groups. These military operations, coupled with an aggressive campaign to build an intelligence picture of former regime members operating in the Sunni Triangle, contributed significantly to the capture of Saddam Hussein a few weeks ago.

But the 1st Brigade Combat Team as well as the rest of the Army units operating in the Sunni Triangle and Baghdad have done more than just conduct raids and capture the former Iraqi president. They have, among many other things, rebuilt schools, delivered fuel, increased electrical power capacity and, most important, developed strong relationships with Iraqi Sunnis in the region. This approach has not been perfect, but the progress is steady and significant.

In recent weeks some Marine Corps leaders have criticized Army units operating in the Sunni Triangle for their apparent "get tough" methods for dealing with the Sunni population. They recall that before they left southern Iraq early last summer, their velvet glove was winning the hearts and minds of local Iraqi Shiites, because Marines were able to apply military power only when it was needed and in a precise amount. Their prudent use of military power and their ability to build close ties with the Iraqis in the south was a winning combination that kept Marines from being killed and produced a stable, secure environment. Now these Marine leaders ask: If it worked for us in southern Iraq back in early summer, why can`t it work now in the Sunni Triangle?

Unfortunately, the Sunni Triangle is nothing like southern Iraq or the part of northern Iraq around Mosul. The Sunni Triangle, and especially the Tigris River Valley, which lies in its heart, is where Hussein`s broken regime fled in early April. In this troubled and violent area, the Marines` simplistic solution doesn`t square with conditions on the ground.

In late April, when a Marine battalion moved into a southern Iraqi city to begin post-conflict operations, its senior leaders ordered that its tanks, artillery and armored personnel carriers be sent back to Kuwait. Such large pieces of military hardware, they reasoned, actually attracted attacks and were not needed to deal with remaining insurgents.

This technique may have made sense in southern Iraq in early summer. But it would be foolish and even deadly to apply it in the Sunni Triangle. The resistance by terrorists to raids in the area -- such as the one that captured Hussein -- has been relatively weak, because it`s known that American Army units can bring immediate and overwhelming firepower to bear. Without tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and attack helicopters at the ready for military operations in the Sunni Triangle the United States courts multiple Mogadishus.

It`s possible that U.S. Army units in the Sunni Triangle have at times been too heavy-handed in their approach. This is a potential problem, because Iraq`s Sunnis must be involved in the political future of their country. The simple logic for American forces today in Iraq is to make the insurgents lose so that the coalition and the Iraqi people can win.

Such a goal requires a complex and sophisticated strategy that separates the insurgent forces from the Iraqi people, strengthens the rule of law in Iraq, demonstrates the coalition`s will to win, enhances the political legitimacy of the fledgling Iraqi government and uses military force appropriately. There may be situations, however, in areas such as the Sunni Triangle, that call for stern military measures like barricading a village to prevent terrorist activity and firing artillery on confirmed terrorist locations.

If the velvet glove works in Iraq, the reason probably is that the energy of the insurgency has been spent. But if the insurgency continues, the Marines will find themselves quietly but inexorably resorting to the stern measures that veteran Army units have been using all along.

I truly hope the Marines` velvet glove works, that it saves the lives of Marines and Iraqis, and leads to a stable and secure region. But I also fear that this approach, by dismissing the cultural and tactical differences in the Sunni Triangle, will ignore the hard-won gains of Army units over the past eight months.

The writer, an Army lieutenant colonel, teaches military history at West Point.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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[Joerver]

CPA Bombed-Home Raids

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 18, 2004 - 08:27 PM
Yesterday we get the news of a US military convoy north of Baghdad hit by a huge IED. A US convoy is searching for IED’s, when a huge bomb explodes under a Bradley, killing 3 US soldiers, and 2 Iraqi Civil Defense personnel.

This morning at 8am, a huge blast shakes my hotel, rattling my windows. At least one suicide car bomber with 1000 pounds of explosives has detonated his bomb at the front entrance of the CPA, killing 23 Iraqis, 2 Americans, and wounding at least 180 others.

The entrances to the CPA are extremely fortified…huge barricades of sand bags, razor wire, concrete blocks, machine gunners. But this entrance, in particular, is where many people line up to file through the security checks to go to work inside the compound.

Now there are new checkpoints throughout central Baghdad clogging traffic, and people are weary. The morning fog has burnt off to reveal a beautiful sun.

This helps, as my mood is dark and somber. Having been here 2 months now, I have grown weary of the violence, bombs, chaos and destruction. Before I begin to feel too sorry for myself I feel a deep sadness and respect for the Iraqi people, who have had to live with this for so long. All of the wars, sanctions, a brutal dictator, and now an even more brutal occupation which is attacked daily by a resistance movement that obviously isn’t concerned about taking out innocent civilians, as long as they hit a US soldier or two.

How can people live and work in this environment? When the future doesn’t exactly appear rosy-everyone knows the Americans and British are here for the long haul. And as long as they are here, suicide attacks are sure to continue, along with resistance attacks.

One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve been here is to be weary of the periods of relative calm; for they are inevitably followed by extreme violence in one form or another. Each time I’ve allowed myself to become lulled into a sense of feeling that the resistance is slowing down, there are fewer attacks now, blah blah blah, a terrible strike like this morning occurs to remind me. To remind me that the US has no idea what it has gotten itself into here. That they are swimming as hard as they can just to keep their nose above water.

I walk down the street today and pass a small bus stop. In black spray paint, on one of the walls it reads,

“U.S. Out”

Meanwhile, down in Basra 2 British soldiers and 2 Iraqi police are wounded by a roadside bomb.

Keep in mind that these are only two incidents of the ‘17’ daily attacks that the CPA admits to in Iraq. What about the others? How many Iraqis were killed by IED’s? How many US soldiers were wounded? How many US soldiers now suffer permanent disabilities from these unreported attacks? How will they be compensated by their government when they get home? How much money will that lost leg get them? $8,000 US a year?

I am troubled by the mainstream news I see on the internet in the US-it seems that about the only news from Iraq being reported are the most heinous, high casualty bombings, or demonstrations that surpass the 20,000 protestor level. What isn’t being shown is the terrible living situation for millions of Iraqis, US troops being permanently disabled (physically and/or mentally) on what has become a daily basis, and generations of younger Iraqis being raised with a deep disdain towards the US and British who sanctioned, bombed, invaded and now occupy their country.

There are demonstrations daily in Baghdad-two days ago a large congregation of Sheikhs marched to the gate of the CPA (same one that was bombed this morning) demonstrating for the release of a powerful Sheikh from US jails.

Today a large demonstration marched down Sa’adoun Street in support of women in France being allowed to wear their Hijabs.

A few of us get a report of a house in Al-Adhamiya being searched by the Americans, so we race across Baghdad to check it out. We just missed the search, but we hear the usual story.

On September 23 the home is raided, and two men, ages 31 and 41 are detained. After 8 days they are released after being forced to sign a paper stating they promise not to join the resistance. One month ago the home is searched again, doors kicked in and furniture damaged. Why? The Americans had already released the innocent men.

The family is too afraid to ask for compensation.

Last night at 3am a neighbors house which is attached to the home of the aforementioned men is searched. Two holes are punched through the wall that joins the homes. The small children living next door are terrified. Their father tells me,

“An American soldier came to us last night and apologized for kicking holes in our walls. He said they didn’t know this was a separate house. He told me, ‘This is our job, and we must do it.’ But my children haven’t stopped shaking they are so terrorized. How can we live like this?”

I am told a man has been detained from this house as well, but then released. Another man from across the street, and another from the house on the corner, detained. They too are released. The man I speak with (who asks to remain nameless) tells me he thinks the Americans are trying to intimidate people.

“But they’ve already proven to themselves we are innocent. Why do they keep terrorizing us?” he says holding his hands up to the air.

The home which was searched last night is completely trashed. Broken furniture, smashed windows, holes dug in the earth in the backyard, carpets thrown about.

The family is too afraid to return to their home, even though the man detained several weeks ago during a different raid has since been released.

We drive out of Al-Adhamiyah, passing the walls with the usual graffiti that has become more and more common around Baghdad.

“Americans go Home!”

“US out of Iraq!”



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

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High Noon in America

Philip J. Rappa

01/18/04: (ICH) Cast in the Gary Cooper role in this western drama is the American citizen, all of whom just wish to live the simple life. Unfortunately and unforgivingly, that myth is a bust. Yet, we are all living in a time when frontier- justice rules the day.

With the first vote cast in the Iowa Caucus, the horserace for the presidency begins in earnest. Honestly, even the most pragmatic citizen realizes that whatever the outcome on Election Day, it will be the result of nothing more than a “Hobson’s” choice, in that we are offered a choice of taking what is offered or nothing at all.

Folks, we are not witnessing the re-affirmation of “The Miracle at Philadelphia”. It’s more like being a voyeur to a surreal survival reality American Idol show. I’ve preemptively taken precautions and purchased, and am now donning knee-high boots.

Let me give you fair warning my fellow Americans, for this will be the most vile and contentious election to take place in our Constitutional Republic: A no holds-barred-kiss-your-sister-all out brawl.

A time for choosing with an untenable deficit and a never-ending war against the illusive terrorists; a time for choosing with the marriage of massive tax cuts and a free pass for corporations to move their headquarters off shore; a time for choosing, when the stakes are higher than ever before.

Depending on who can purchase the presidency, we are one or two election cycles away from witnessing the re-establishment of the gold standard. As the dollar plunges, it will be left to the new financial world to decide what currency will become the new standard barer. Depending on who is Coronated the next CEO of American Inc., we are one or two election cycles away from a social upheaval that will tear asunder the fabric that makes us a Constitutional Republic.

It will be a social upheaval so appalling and in many ways comparable to the one that forced Teddy Roosevelt to reign in the corporate behemoths, which resulted in the regulation of their businesses. It was then that we began down the long road of making the workplace equitable for the worker, as well as the corporation. It was also the beginning towards the long road of racial and economic justice.

We are one or two election cycles away from witnessing the citizens of this nation being deceptively divided. Divided by a chasm so great it will make the 60’s pale in comparison. Citizens will be divided by their positions on the war or wars that our president will tell us, “There is no other option but to stay the course”.

Those of you who are students of history are well aware that humanity’s three worst scourges are religious fanaticism, nationalism, and imperialism. Those of you also aware of historical precedent understand societies in the twentieth century consisted of four distinct entities, military, religious, wealth/corporate, and political.

The evidence obtained from history demonstrates that every time there is a combination of any two of these entities the end result is tyranny. As it stands now, the lines of separation seem drawn with invisible ink.

We are living in the shadow of a new, improved Corporate Evangelism. Its mindset is willful, stubborn, and arrogant; its decisions are unilateral, and when it takes action, it is in a prideful and strutting manner. Its mantra is, “The drive for profit has no national loyalties”.

The fourth estate, the media, inclusive of radio, and all the conglomerate owned one-paper towns across America are duplicitous in selling us its latest snake oil. They accomplish this by repetitively informing us and re-enforcing their special brand of propaganda disguised as entertainment, resulting in the corporatization and militarization of our consciousness.

Whether you call it NAFTA, The Free Trade Agreement, Globalization, or out-sourcing, the end result is the same. The American worker, once the envy of the world, has slowly been transformed into nothing more than migrant workers in search of seasonal work without benefit to healthcare or any hope of a retirement package.

Free Trade, not Fair Trade, will change the landscape of America. For as time passes, as far as the eye can see, Hooverville’s will sprout up across America spreading like the poppies that cover Flander’s Field.

The chances of finding a politician or legislator of honesty and selfless-ness is as rare as reaching old age without an infirmity. America’s working-class heroes are in need of a great awakening, the ceremony of innocence was drowned. No longer will self-interest and self-gratification be an adequate replacement for social norms and the common good. There is no time left for those with unexamined lives. It is our responsibility not to make a de-mockery of our democracy. We must understand we must not idly watch this bloodless assassination of our ideals as if it were just entertainment.

In the immortal words of an old cowboy, “This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” R.W. Reagan, 1964.

Bio: Philip J. Rappa is President of Together Forever Changing, Inc.; a national organization created to educate, stimulate, and invigorate the citizenry to the dangers inherent in the US Patriot Acts. He is also an award-winning writer, filmmaker, documentarian, lecturer, and humanitarian. Philip`s Email: [e-mail]

© Philip J. Rappa 2004

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January/February 2004, Volume 60, No. 1, pp. 20-22, 70

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2004/jf04/jf04cavallo.html


Oil: The illusion of plenty
By Alfred Cavallo


One hundred and twelve billion of anything sounds like a limitless quantity. But in terms of barrels of oil, it`s just a drop in the gas tank. The world uses about 27 billion barrels of oil per year, meaning that 112 billion barrels--the proven oil reserves of Iraq, the second largest proven oil reserves in the world--would last a little more than four years at today`s usage rates.

In the future, 112 billion barrels will likely prove even shorter-lived. In the United States, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and larger homes are deemed essential. As the underdeveloped world industrializes, demand for oil by billions of people increases; China and India are building superhighways and automobile factories. Energy demand is expected to rise by about 50 percent over the next 20 years, with about 40 percent of that demand to be supplied by petroleum.

Ever-increasing supplies of low-cost petroleum are thought to be vital to the U.S. and world economies, which is why the invasion of Iraq and the belief that controlling its 112-billion-barrel reserve would give the United States a limitless pipeline to cheap oil were so dangerous. The war in Iraq will definitely have an effect on the U.S. and world economies, but not a positive one. The invasion, occupation, and rebuilding of Iraq will cost the people of the United States both blood and treasure. But more to the point, Iraq could be a fatal distraction from many fundamental and extremely unpleasant facts that actually threaten the United States--one of which is the finite nature of petroleum resources.

Petroleum reserves are limited. Petroleum is not a renewable resource and production cannot continue to increase indefinitely. A day of reckoning will come sometime in the future. The point at which production can no longer keep up with increasing demand will mean a radical and painful readjustment globally to everyday life.

In spite of that indisputable fact, people behave as if the global petroleum supply is unending. Predictions of the exhaustion of oil reserves seem to have lost all credibility. The public assumes that inexpensive oil will be available essentially forever. The idea that petroleum resources are finite and that petroleum production might peak in the near future seems to have vanished from all discussions of energy policy in Congress, in the press, and even among public interest groups.

This surreal situation is due to several factors. One, certainly, is that pessimists have cried wolf too often. Forecasts of imminent shortages of oil, food, and other natural resources are confounded by the enormous display of material goods that envelops consumers in the West. For most people, the market price of any commodity is what signals shortage or plenty. Time and again, collapsing oil prices have succeeded rising oil prices, leading to the belief that oil will always become cheap again. That oil supplies are currently abundant and inexpensive and have been for nearly 20 years, and that the models used to predict peak oil production are not easy to understand, appear to ignore economic factors, and are based on proprietary data, explain to some degree the present feeling of permanent abundance.

In reality, the differential between petroleum production cost and market price is so large that market price cannot be used as a measure of resource depletion. For example, the variation in the average price of oil between 1998 ($10 per barrel) and 2000 ($24 per barrel) had nothing to do with depletion of reserves and everything to do with an attempt to exercise "market discipline" by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

But the most important reason there seems to be an unending supply of oil is the activity of non-OPEC producers. Oil production is immensely lucrative. Large amounts of petroleum have been and will continue to be produced outside the Middle East at costs that are very low, $5-$10 per barrel, compared to the desired OPEC price range of $22-$28 per barrel. The opportunity to realize extraordinary profits provides irresistible pressure to produce as much oil as possible, as soon as possible.

Yet oil is a finite resource, and there are only so many places to look for it. Sooner or later petroleum production will decline, so sooner or later the prophets of depletion will be correct. The question then becomes: Can a peak oil forecast be made that is useful to the petroleum industry and to consumers, one that will alert them to the problems and allow for a redeployment of resources?


Answering that question requires an understanding of why the world`s rising petroleum needs are being met without skyrocketing prices or supply shortages.

Everyone knows that the science and technology underpinning computers, telecommunications, and medicine have advanced dramatically over the last 20 years. The proof is everywhere, from ever more powerful personal computers, to increasingly sophisticated cell phones, to new medical imaging technologies and pharmaceuticals.

Unknown to most people, however, advances in geological sciences and petroleum technologies have been equally profound and dramatic. Since the 1970s, plate tectonics has been providing a uniform framework for understanding the geology of the Earth`s surface (including petroleum formation). Much as X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance tomography examine structures within the human body non-invasively, three-dimensional seismography now allows potential oil-bearing formations to be evaluated in great detail. Nuclear magnetic resonance probes are used to determine porosity and hydrocarbon content as well as to estimate the permeability of these formations. Petroleum deposits are being brought into production on the continental shelves off Texas, Brazil, and West Africa in water up to 8,000 feet deep--areas that were, until recently, inaccessible. Technological advances like sub-sea terminals, directional drilling, and floating production, storage, and offloading ships have been developed to exploit smaller, previously uneconomic or unreachable deposits. Sophisticated science and technology coupled with unparalleled profitability has provided the foundation for the wide availability of oil.

Yet the same advances in geology and engineering that have provided consumers with seemingly limitless petroleum also allow much better estimates to be made of how much oil may ultimately be recovered. After a five-year collaboration with representatives from the petroleum industry and other U.S. government agencies, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed a comprehensive study of oil resources. The "USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000" is the first study to use modern science to estimate ultimate oil resources. [1]

The importance of this assessment is difficult to overstate. Previous world oil resource evaluations have ranged from crude "back-of-the-envelope" calculations to estimates based on proprietary databases, and have often lacked enough detail to allow a comparison between production and estimated reserves. We now have credible, easily accessible long-term production records and science-based resource estimates for all of the important oil producing regions in the world--crucial for understanding how oil production might evolve over time.

The USGS assessment allocates reserves to three separate and distinct categories. The first is "proven reserves," or petroleum that can be produced using current technology. The second category is "undiscovered reserves"--oil deposits that are highly likely to exist based on similar areas already producing oil. The third category is "reserve growth" and represents possible production from extensions of existing fields, application of new technology, and decreased well spacing in existing fields. Oil in this last category can be extracted much less rapidly than oil in the proven and undiscovered categories. (For purposes of determining the approximate year of peak or constant output, the best that can be hoped for is that all proven reserves are produced and all undiscovered reserves are found and produced as rapidly as needed. Petroleum from reserve growth, produced at much lower rates, can be ignored. According to the USGS, it is available only to lengthen the period of peak production or to reduce the decline in a field`s output.)


As of January 1, 1996, OPEC`s proven and undiscovered reserves amounted to about 853 billion barrels, while similar non-OPEC reserves were 769 billion barrels, according to the USGS assessment. Based on actual production patterns in many non-OPEC oil producers, output can increase until there remains between 10 and 20 years of proven plus undiscovered reserves (as determined by the USGS), at which point a production plateau or decline sets in, depending on the reserve growth that is actually available.

Given that non-OPEC production rates are nearly twice as great as OPEC rates, and assuming stable prices and 2 percent per year market growth, non-OPEC production will reach a maximum sometime between 2010 and 2018 based on resource limitations alone (assuming complete cooperation of producers and that all undiscovered oil is actually found and produced as rapidly as needed). [2] Once this happens, OPEC will control the market completely, and it is unlikely that production will increase much longer.

Yet this simplistic analysis is too optimistic. There is no such thing as "non-OPEC oil," but rather U.S. oil, Norwegian oil, and oil produced by various other countries. In particular, about 39 percent of non-OPEC proven plus undiscovered reserves are located in the former Soviet Union. It is only a matter of time before these countries reach an agreement with OPEC on how to divide the oil market, at which point the current illusion of unlimited oil resources will end, not due to resource constraints but to political factors.

Yet the U.S. public, industrial and political leaders, environmentalists, and policy-makers in general do not believe that they need to be concerned with the finite supply of oil and its unfavorable (from the U.S. perspective) geographic distribution. As noted earlier, the overwhelming majority behaves as if inexpensive oil will be readily available far into the distant future.

This attitude is reflected in U.S. policy toward Iraq. One might expect that a major consequence of the U.S. conquest of Iraq would have been full control of Iraqi oil reserves, reducing or eliminating the ability of OPEC to set prices, and giving the United States a permanent--because oil is forever--overwhelming strategic advantage. It would allow the United States to dictate production rates and lower prices, which would serve two important aims. Reduced prices would reward consumers in the West, buying their support for U.S. policies. It would also deprive oil producers of the revenues with which they could challenge the U.S. domination of the Middle East. Oil prices could be expected to drop to between $15 and $20 per barrel once existing Iraqi fields were refurbished and large new deposits were developed.

However, lower prices would stimulate consumption and decrease the incentive to develop more inaccessible reserves, essentially those of the non-OPEC producers. If non-OPEC producers fail to develop those harder-to-get-at reserves, peak oil production will more likely occur earlier, at the front end of the 2010-2018 forecast. So the very success of the current effort to seize control of the Middle East would doom U.S. imperial ambition to failure within the next 10 years, from an oil supply standpoint.

This scenario is now implausible given the bitter Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation, and it is not clear when Iraqi production might reach, much less significantly exceed, its pre-invasion level.


To understand what may unfold, given current levels of sabotage and chaos in Iraq, one must examine how the petroleum marketing system has changed over the past year, and in particular the role that OPEC producers have played.

In 2002, Iraqi oil production averaged two million barrels per day. The United States must have understood that an attack might interrupt production, which would in turn cause a large increase in the price of oil. Since this would have a severe negative impact on the world economy, it would further inflame anti-American sentiment throughout the world and even turn U.S. voters against the enterprise. The conclusion: Lost Iraqi production had to be replaced. Thus, an agreement was reached with OPEC to stabilize the markets by increasing production levels as needed.

In March 2003, the Saudi oil minister reassured the International Energy Agency of Saudi Arabia`s longstanding policy and practice of supplying the oil markets reliably and promptly, and highlighted the collective responsibility that producing countries have shown in addressing the concerns of world oil markets. This was most likely viewed as a temporary measure, as it was assumed that Iraqi production would be restored and expanded rapidly after the United States took charge.

In addition to the impending interruption of Iraqi production, in early 2003 Venezuelan oil production was far below its OPEC quota due to a conflict between populist president Hugo Chavez and the business community; Nigerian production was also depressed by civil strife.

OPEC rose to the occasion (or, more likely, felt compelled to rise to the occasion, given the huge U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf in preparation for war) and increased production by about 3.2 million barrels per day--equivalent to the production of the Norwegian North Sea sector--virtually overnight, more than compensating for lost Iraqi, Venezuelan, and Nigerian production.

About 65 percent of the increase came from just two countries, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; Saudi Arabia alone contributed more than half and probably controls what remains of any spare production capacity.

The critical role that OPEC, in particular Saudi Arabia, plays as the swing producer for the world oil market is clearly evident from this episode, which allows one to quantify the ability of the Saudis to affect the world oil market and the world economy.

The U.S. assault on Iraq has not undermined the power of OPEC and Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, it has if anything enhanced that power. This will not change until Iraqi oil production significantly exceeds its pre-invasion level. Thus, even in the short term, and on the most cynical level, U.S. Iraq policy vis-à-vis oil has been a failure.

Oil supplies are finite and will soon be controlled by a handful of nations; the invasion of Iraq and control of its supplies will do little to change that. One can only hope that an informed electorate and its principled representatives will realize that the facts do matter, and that nature--not military might--will soon dictate the ultimate availability of petroleum.

Alfred Cavallo is an energy consultant based in Princeton, New Jersey.


1. T. Ahlbrandt (project leader), "The USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000." The assessment is available at www.usgs.gov and on compact disc. A detailed analysis using the assessment appears in Alfred Cavallo, "Predicting the Peak in World Oil Production," Natural Resources Research, 2002, vol. 11, pp. 187-195. Production statistics, based on data from the International Energy Agency, are available in a variety of trade publications, including Oil and Gas Journal, World Oil, and Petroleum Economist.

2. The most popular method used to predict a peak in oil production is in M. King Hubbert`s monograph, Energy Resources: A Report to the Committee on Natural Resources, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, Publication 1000-D, December 1962. Hubbert noted that resource production often (but not always) could be described by a logistic growth curve, and used oil production records and estimates of proven oil reserves made by the American Petroleum Institute`s Committee on Petroleum Reserves to estimate the year of U.S. peak production. Hubbert does not discuss the assumptions implicit in his model, among which are stable markets, excellent profitability, and affordable prices for oil. See also Colin Campbell and J. H. Laherrere, "The End of Cheap Oil," Scientific American, March 1998, pp. 78-83. The Oil and Gas Journal has also recently published a series of articles discussing the future of petroleum and its alternatives. See Bob Williams, "Special Report: Debate Over Peak Oil Issue Boiling Over, With Major Implications For Industry, Society," Oil and Gas Journal, July 14, 2003.




© 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-unir…
THE WORLD
Ich stelle mir die Frage, ob es vernünftig ist von der UNO die Aufgaben von der USA zu übernehmen.
Werden sie dadurch nicht noch mehr Partei, sozusagen Erfüllungsgehilfe der USA. Es mag in der Wirklichkeit nicht so sein, aber wie sehen es die Menschen in Asien und Afrika.
Es ist sowieso schon ein Problem für die UNO nichts gegen den Willen der USA durchsetzen zu können.



U.N. in Pivotal, Difficult Iraq Role
In deciding how to aid the political transition, Annan must weigh the risk of being seen as irrelevant against security concerns.
By Sonni Efron
Times Staff Writer

January 19, 2004

NEW YORK — It`s crunch time for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who will come under pressure from the United States and its Iraqi allies today at a meeting to help rescue plans for forming a new Iraqi government by July.

If Annan agrees to send United Nations political and electoral experts back to Iraq in force, they will need extensive security protection from the United States — and the authority to arrange the political transition without being overruled by U.S. occupation authorities, U.N. officials and analysts said. Otherwise, the U.N. risks sharing blame with the U.S. for a failure in the democratic experiment in Iraq.

If Annan declines to play a significant role, either for security reasons or because he feels the U.N. would not have sufficient authority to carry out its mission, he risks the U.N. being branded, as President Bush put it, "irrelevant."

"I don`t think Kofi Annan has the luxury of walking away from this … now that the Bush administration admits that it needs the U.N.," said Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. "It has severe adverse consequences for the U.N. institutionally if they sit this one out." While keenly aware of the stakes, U.N. officials are approaching the situation with caution.

"Nobody wants to see this process fail. Nobody can afford to see Iraq implode," said one U.N. official. "But we want to keep the interests of the Iraqi people at the center of what we do, and we have to be careful in which way we go from here."

The U.N.`s first attempt to play a role in postwar Iraq ended in tragedy. After major combat was over, the world body sent in a large team of political advisors headed by Annan`s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello — but many at the U.N. thought the mission was ill-defined. Vieira de Mello and most of his key staff were killed Aug. 19, when a truck bomb struck U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

It was a huge blow to Annan and the entire U.N. Secretariat, losing close personal friends — and some of the world body`s most respected troubleshooters.

After the bombing, the U.N. withdrew its international staff. Although Annan recently agreed to send in a four-person team under U.S. protection to reassess the security situation, he has hesitated to send staff back to Baghdad without the means to protect them and a mission compelling enough to justify the risk.

"Kofi is angered at himself for letting Sergio go to Baghdad when the conditions weren`t right," said Nancy Soderberg, a former U.S. envoy to the U.N. "He`s just not going to go back unless he feels the political situation is right."

Nevertheless, now that the Bush administration wants the United Nations to play a more prominent political role, U.S. officials say Annan is weighing the consequences of not participating against the security risks.

"They`re very worried about that, but they also realize that this train is leaving the station," a State Department official said. "They have valid security concerns, but the U.N. also operates in many other places in the world that are dangerous…. And you can`t play a role if you`re not on the ground."

The bombing that killed at least 20 people Sunday at the gates of the U.S.-led occupation authority headquarters demonstrated yet again that security can`t be assured in Iraq. Some observers believe U.N. officials will be high-priority targets for insurgents, the more so if they are seen as effective in ushering in a democratic government.

Today`s meeting, called by Annan, will bring together L. Paul Bremer III, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, with Annan and members of the Iraqi Governing Council to discuss how the U.N. might help Iraq.

In a diplomatic game of "you-go-first" leading up to the meeting, Bremer said he was going to New York to hear what the U.N. was willing to do in Iraq, and U.N. officials said they were coming to hear what the Americans and Iraqis wanted them to do.

Unspoken, at least in public, were such touchy questions as whether the members of the Governing Council are in agreement about the U.N.`s role and whether the U.N. considers the U.S.-appointed council the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people.

"When you say the Iraqis want us in there, which Iraqis want us to do what?" the U.N. official said.

Also unclear is whether the White House is willing to cede substantial political authority to the U.N. before June 30, when authority is scheduled to be handed back to the Iraqis.

"The burden is really on the U.S. to define a role for the U.N., but they`ve never understood that the U.N. just can`t be their lapdog to go in and do the tiny little parts they define," Soderberg said. "If they want to create a true partner in the U.N., the U.N. has a lot to offer."

Bremer and other U.S. officials said last week that Washington wants broad U.N. assistance in implementing the handover agreement signed by Bremer and the Governing Council — but is not willing to tinker with the timetable for transferring sovereignty.

The U.S. plans to have caucuses choose the transitional Iraqi government, but that idea is under attack by Iraqi`s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani is demanding direct elections, even though Annan sent him a letter agreeing with the United States that free and fair elections won`t be possible by June 30.

In some ways, the United Nations is uniquely positioned to broker a face-saving compromise among Sistani, other Iraqi factions and the United States, argues Henri Barkey, a specialist in international relations at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The compromise could involve a pledge to begin preparing for U.N.-supervised elections that might be held after the U.S. presidential election this year, Barkey said.

Under the current U.S. plan, popular elections would not be held until 2005.

"It`s a way out for Sistani," Barkey said. "It`s also a way out for Bremer."

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Maggie Farley contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-iran…
THE WORLD




Iran Hard-Liners to Reconsider on Bans
Guardian Council will revisit thousands of electoral candidates` disqualifications.
From Times Wire Services

January 19, 2004

TEHRAN — Iran`s hard-line Guardian Council on Sunday defended its disqualification of candidates for next month`s parliamentary elections but said it was reviewing the cases.

At a rare news conference, a spokesman for the unelected 12-member body of conservative clerics and Islamic jurists moved to play down the crisis sparked by the Guardian Council`s decision to veto more than a third of the 8,200 candidates hoping to stand in next month`s vote. Reformists believe the move was an attempt to skew the elections in favor of conservatives.

"The Guardian Council won`t back down at all," spokesman Ebrahim Azizi said. "Lawmakers whose speech or behavior suggest that they have had no loyalty to Islam or the constitution will remain disqualified."

Nevertheless, he said the council would follow the request of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who last week moved to defuse the political standoff by urging the council to review the cases of those disqualified.

The disqualifications have prompted resignation threats by government officials, a weeklong sit-in at parliament by dozens of lawmakers and a warning by the reformist-run Interior Ministry that it may refuse to hold the election.

Most of those barred are reformists, including about 80 members of parliament. Reformists secured a comfortable majority in the last parliamentary elections in 2000.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Der Wahlkampf ist das Thema

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Fear Trumps Freedom In A Perpetual War
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, January 19, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/19/hsorensen.DTL


As World War II ground to a halt, the United States set out to obliterate Japan. Our B-29s rained terror on Japan`s major cities. Tens of thousands of civilians were blown apart or burned to death in the summer of 1945.

Then, on Aug. 6, came the coup de grace, the atomic bomb ("Little Boy," they called it) dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, before the Japanese had a chance to holler "Uncle!" we followed up with a second A-bomb ("Fat Man") on Nagasaki.

Thus did the war end. Our troop ships, ferrying GIs from Europe to Japan, did U-turns in the middle of the Pacific and headed for home. The Japanese, on Sept. 2, in a ceremony aboard the battleship USS Missouri, agreed to an unconditional surrender.

It was a glorious time for the United States. To get a hint of our involvement, turn to the paid death notices in your local newspaper. Nearly every obituary for a man in his 80s lists his service in World War II. We were all involved, one way or another.

We Americans, never known for our humility, were pumped with our success. We had finally emerged as a world power to be taken seriously. We were not kings of the world, as we imagine ourselves now, but we certainly were crown princes.

It didn`t take us long to flex our newly discovered muscle. When North Korea invaded South Korea in July 1950, we came dashing to the rescue of the South Koreans, overlooking the fact that North Korea was friendly with China. When China sent massive numbers of troops in to reinforce the North Koreans, we were almost blown off the peninsula. We survived, and prevailed, but the experience made us a little more cautious.

Our mentality became that of a barroom brawler or schoolyard bully. Ask any bully why he fights so often, and he`ll tell you he never looks for trouble. Then he`ll add, "But I never back down from a fight, either."

Here`s a list of 23 nations we didn`t back down from since 1945: Japan (1945), China (1945 and 1950), Korea (1950), Guatemala (1954 and 1960), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959), Vietnam (1961), Congo (1964), Laos (1964), Peru (1965), Cambodia (1969), Lebanon (1983), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999v, Afghanistan (2001).

(I took the above list from a Web site and can`t vouch for its accuracy. However, it seems to fit with my memory of events over the years.)

Looking at that list, it would be fair to conclude that we`ve become a warlike nation. Rather than printing "E pluribus unum" on the Great Seal of the United States and on coins, we should consider "Have bombs, will travel."

Fighting limited wars has replaced baseball as our national sport. And we love it. We love the parades, the flag waving, the patriotic songs, the flyovers, the funerals, the memorial services, the "defense" contracts.

Most of us consider ourselves "Christian soldiers, marching as to war," so we`ve declared war on crime, poverty, drugs -- just about anything we consider undesirable.

Now, thanks to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, we`ve talked ourselves into a state of perpetual war, probably the most accurate definition of our culture ever. But, in true 1984 newspeak, we don`t call it that. We call it a war on terrorism. We admit it`ll be a long war, but we`re not yet ready to admit it will never end.

As the Soviets learned during their long period of oppression against organized religion in the U.S.S.R., you cannot defeat an "ism." Isms, like religion, know no boundaries. Trying to defeat an ism is like trying to defeat crime or bad manners or the hiccups. No matter how hard you try, they`ll still pop up in the most unexpected places.

Vice President Dick Cheney was in Los Angeles last week drumming up support for the never-ending war on terrorism. Before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, Cheney reassured a hushed audience, "The use of military force is, for the United States, always the last option in defending ourselves and our interests."

Even on C-SPAN, one could almost hear the united hearts of his listeners thumping in pride at America`s nobility and restraint.

Why, oh, why, one wonders, do the nations of the world so often force us to reluctantly use our last option?

As with all his speeches, Cheney`s talk last week was liberally sprinkled with flattering references to his boss, President George W. Bush. At one point in his speech, he outlined the dangers of terrorism:

"We know, ... from the training manuals we found in Afghanistan and from the interrogations of terrorists we have captured, that they are doing everything they can to gain the ultimate weapon: chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons.

"Should they ever acquire such weapons, they would use them without any constraint of reason or morality. Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives as the result of a single attack, or a set coordinated of attacks."

That danger, he said, requires "a shift in America`s national-security strategy. There are certain moments in history when the gravest threats reveal themselves. And in those moments, the response of our government must be swift, and it must be right."

Cheney, who missed his calling as an undertaker, had his audience exactly where he wanted them: in terror.

The American people, who certainly must love wars, considering how often we fight them, seem also to love fear. The enemy is everywhere and knows no constraints. So we, you and I, look for strong leadership and assurance that everything possible is being done to protect us.

It would be terrible, would it not, if other nations some day did to us what we`ve been doing to them over the years?

So we have agreed to airport searches, and, soon, to government-issued travel documents. We have agreed to let our federal law-enforcement agents scour the world for would-be terrorists and bring them to the Guantánamo U.S. Naval Base, our foothold on Cuba, for indefinite "investigation." We have agreed to secret trials and even to no trials for people Mr. Bush decides are "enemy combatants."

We are now, like Nazi Germany before us, like the old Soviet Union, like Iran in the days of our good buddy, the shah, content to have people "disappear," as long as they have Arabic-sounding names.

Torture has become an acceptable tool of interrogation for us. When we use it ourselves, it`s usually "mere" mental torture, primarily sleep deprivation. If we feel more intensely physical methods are called for, we farm out our interrogations to governments less squeamish than ours.

So, while we`re protecting American lives, we are destroying American values.

This is what Dick Cheney brings us. This is what the boss he slobbers over, George W. Bush, brings us. This is what our cowardly Congress brings us, with its "Patriot" acts. And this is what we bring upon ourselves, by supporting senators and representatives who are willing to sell out our freedoms in the hope of buying a little security.

Our collective cowardice virtually assures George W. Bush a second term.

In 1945, as World War II wound down, we were a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world.

That was then. What are we now?

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

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Iraqi Protesters Demand Polls Ahead of U.N. Meeting
Mon January 19, 2004 07:33 AM ET


By Fiona O`Brien
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Shi`ite Muslims marched through Baghdad on Monday demanding elections in a clear signal to Iraq`s U.S. governor as he prepared to tell the United Nations that any vote is impractical until next year.

Paul Bremer and members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council were to meet UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York later in the day to discuss a plan to hand power back to Iraqis by June, before the U.S. presidential election.

Washington, which defied UN allies to invade last year, hopes to persuade the United Nations to play a role in the hope this will help win over Iraqis, notably majority Shi`ites who want elections to determine who controls a new sovereign Iraq.

The talks come a day after a suicide bomb blast at the gates of the U.S.-led administration compound in Baghdad which killed at least 25 people, according to Iraqi police. U.S. officials said two American contractors were believed to be among those killed in the deadliest attack since Saddam Hussein`s capture.

Underlining the demand for a military presence and U.S. efforts to get allies to share that task, Japanese soldiers entered Iraq, the vanguard for a mission that marks a historic shift from Tokyo`s avoidance of conflict since World War II.

Bremer and the Governing Council are likely to press Annan to send a team of experts to help convince supporters of Iraq`s most revered Shi`ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that his call for direct general elections is not feasible now.

Annan has said safety conditions in Iraq were too dangerous since he ordered out international staff in October, following bloody attacks on UN offices and humanitarian groups in Baghdad.

WANT ELECTIONS LIKE U.S.

Under the U.S. plan, regional caucuses will select a transitional assembly by end-May, and this will in turn pick an interim sovereign government by end-June. Full elections would follow after the writing of a constitution in 2005.

But many Shi`ites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq`s population and were oppressed by Saddam and previous Sunni Muslim rulers, want elections sooner. Many thousands waved banners and shouted slogans in support of Sistani in Baghdad.

"All the people are with you, Sayyed Ali," the crowd chanted. "Yes, yes to unity, yes, yes to elections."

"Just as there are elections in Europe and America there should be elections here," said demonstrator Abu Qarar al-Bahadiri.

"America says it is democratic and brings freedom to countries. Well then it should bring us elections. Especially as we lived through 35 years of darkness, we need to have an election that represents the people."

On Thursday, a similar protest by Sistani`s supporters took to the streets of the mainly Shi`ite second city of Basra.

U.N. WARY

U.N. officials have not ruled out sending a team to Iraq, in addition to one already planned to look at security. But they have given many reasons why the world body should not send a sizeable complement of foreign political staff back to Baghdad.

Security is the main concern. An August 19 suicide attack at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed 22 people, including the mission head, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

But a more telling reason, that has annoyed the United States and Britain for weeks, is reluctance to intervene and validate a process the world body had no role in formulating.

In southern Iraq, an advance team of a few dozen Japanese soldiers entered the country to begin their riskiest and most controversial deployment since World War II. The team will pave the way for the deployment of a force of some 1,000 soldiers in coming months if they report that the area is safe.

Their dispatch marks a historic shift away from Japan`s purely defensive post-war security policy and poses a political risk for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose government could be rocked if there are casualties.

The U.S. military said an American soldier died on Sunday from wounds sustained in a bomb attack in the town of Kerbala on Friday. The death brought to 347 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since the start of the war to oust Saddam Hussein. Including non-combat deaths, the toll stands at 501.

In the Shi`ite holy city of Kerbala, 110 km (70 miles) south of Baghdad, witnesses said one man was killed and 13 were wounded on Sunday night when a hand grenade was hurled at crowd near shrine in the holy city of Kerbala, .

[Joerver]

U.S. eyes space as possible battleground
Sun 18 January, 2004 17:42

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush`s plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld long has pushed for technology that could be used to attack or defend orbiting satellites as well as a costly programme, heavily reliant on space-based sensors, to thwart incoming warheads.

Under a 1996 space policy adopted by then-President Bill Clinton that remains in effect, the United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space "by all nations for peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humanity".

"Peaceful purposes allow defence and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national security and other goals," according to this policy. "Consistent with treaty obligations, the United States will develop, operate and maintain space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space, and if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries."

No country depends on space and satellites as its eyes and ears more than the United States, which accounted for as much as 95 percent of global military space spending in 1999, according to the French space agency CNES.

"Yet the threat to the U.S. and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits from the departments and agencies of the U.S. government charged with national security responsibilities," a congressionally chartered task force headed by Rumsfeld reported 10 days before Bush and he took office in 2001.

Theresa Hitchens of the private Center for Defense Information said the capabilities to conduct space warfare would move out of the realm of science fiction and into reality over the next 20 years or so.

"At the end of the day it will be political choices by governments, not technology, that determines if the nearly 50- year taboo against arming the heavens remains in place," she concluded in a recent study.

Outlining his election-year vision for space exploration last week, Bush called for a permanent base on the moon by 2020 as a launch pad for piloted missions to Mars and beyond.

One unspoken motivation may have been China`s milestone launch in October of its first piloted spaceflight in earth orbit and its announced plan to go to the moon.

"I think the new initiative is driven by a desire to beat the Chinese to the moon," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space policy research group.

Among companies that could cash in on Bush`s space plans are Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which do big business with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as with the Pentagon.

The moon, scientists have said, is a source of potentially unlimited energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope -- a near perfect fuel source: potent, non-polluting and causing virtually no radioactive by-product in a fusion reactor.

"And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn`t have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price of energy was going to be," said Pike.

Gerald Kulcinski of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimated the moon`s helium 3 would have a cash value of perhaps $4 billion (2.23 billion pounds) a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil.

Scientists reckon there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could meet all U.S. electric power needs for a year, Kulcinski said by e-mail.

Bush`s schedule for a U.S. return to the moon matches what experts say may be a dramatic militarisation of space over the next two decades, even if the current ban on weapons holds.

Among other things, the Pentagon expects to spend at least $50 billion over the next five years to develop and field a multi-layered shield against incoming missiles that could deliver nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Ultimately, this shield -- first proposed by President Ronald Reagan and dubbed "Star Wars" by critics -- may include space-based interceptors, the first weapons in space, as opposed to sensors that guide weapons.

Last year, the Pentagon`s Missile Defense Agency obtained $14 million for research on basing three or more missile interceptors in space by the end of the decade for tests.

The plan would field satellites armed with multiple "hit-to-kill" interceptors capable of destroying a ballistic missile through a high-speed collision shortly after its launch, according to Wade Boese, research director of the private Arms Control Association. Such a system could also function as an anti-satellite weapon.

No decision has been made yet to deploy space-based interceptors as part of the U.S. missile defense programme "although we are conducting research and development activities in that area", a Defense Department official said Friday.

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Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Americans need to question their style of democracy

19.01.2004 - COMMENT
In a speech on November 19 last year, President George W. Bush extolled the virtues of democracy.

"We will help the Iraqi people establish a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East," he said. The call for democracy has become so constant that one Gulf-based political analyst, Moghazy al-Badrawy, likens it to a boring, broken record that nobody believes.

But while Arabs are sceptical about America`s motives and its methods of bringing democracy to their world, closer to home few people are querying the supposed base of their society.

Perhaps they should be. It`s not only the growing reality of Fortress America and the increasing level of civil constraints that are causing some Americans to question their democratic basis; the integrity of the electoral system itself is under fire.

Take last year`s November 5 election in Atlanta, Georgia.

Using the new federally mandated electronic voting system, with demographics virtually unchanged since the previous election four years earlier, the state experienced a whopping turnaround from Democrat to Republican.

The reversal of traditional voting patterns was so huge that not a single poll came close to predicting it. Eventually suspicion fell on the integrity of the new electronic voting system.

It turns out that the ATM-like system is owned by Diebold Inc, a company run by one of President Bush`s most lucrative campaign contributors, a man who recently said he`d do whatever it took to deliver the election to his good friend the President.

An article on ww.inthesettimes.com by Mark Lewellen-Biddle explores the backers of a new law that makes e-voting mandatory across the United States and the manufacturers of e-voting machines.

He calls them a "rats` nest of conflicts" that includes major defence contractors, and asks why those companies with the most to gain from a particular electoral outcome are mucking about in the American electoral system.

The November issue of GQ magazine analysed the mechanics of the new system. It reported that several hundred academics, a who`s who of American computer science department heads and associates, had serious concerns.

The experts said the system did not have a voter-verifiable independent audit (paper) trail. There was no room for independent verification, no one was allowed to see source codes except the original programmers and, in the case of the Georgia election, last-minute "on the fly" changes that avoided the rigorous certification process trumpeted by election officials were made to the software.

Then there was the proprietary nature of the voting software and the secrecy, in the name of commercial interest, that shrouded its development and application.

In contrast, Australia has designed a system that addresses and eases these concerns.

With a transparency that should be the gold standard by which all democracies conduct themselves, it made the software running its electoral system completely open to public scrutiny.

Although designed by a private company, drafts as well as the finished software code were posted on the internet for all to see and evaluate.

This ruins one American election official`s comment that no country in the world has the rigorous certification and testing standards used in the US.

Free elections represent democracy in action. It`s absurd that this story, even the suspicion of corruption of the electoral system, is not front-page news across the nation. It`s not. Instead you`ll find it only in the alternative media.

Is this a sign of the hijacking of the media by corporate interest? Or is it a testament to the power of myth, the idea of democracy rather than the reality, a kind of collective amnesia of the American people and evidence of the "disinformation that dominates the information age" (as Noam Chomsky calls it).

Certainly President Bush continues to use the term liberally, inflecting it to mean liberty and freedom, as if that were a state available to all human beings if they just adopted the American way.

But perhaps it would be good to remember that democracy American-style actually means commercialism, competition, free market, industrialism, mercantilism and private enterprise. While not exactly an environment that ensures freedom from poverty, from dictators or even a level playing field, not to mention the right to vote in a government of the people`s choosing, it does make perfect, commercially justified sense, especially for those with the most to gain.

Ultimately, perhaps the concept of democracy is just that; a concept, an opiate for the masses, a sense of freedom unshackled from reality, something administered to make you feel good, like a fine-wool blanket, light and warming, but ultimately smothering.

So is America a democracy in name only?

Over the coming year as the US gears up for its "democratic election", it might be apposite to ponder this question and the strange fact that the bigger the lie, the louder the lie - and the longer the lie is told, the more people will generally believe it.

After all, the Greek philosopher Plato said in The Republic that democracy leads to anarchy. Not exactly the situation that the world`s only remaining superpower, with an entire universe (don`t forget the Moon and Mars) to conquer, is keen to encourage.

©Copyright 2004, NZ Herald

[Joerver]

Monday, January 19, 2004
War News for January 19, 2004

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Bomb wounds thirteen near Shi’ite shrine in Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: US soldier dies from wounds received in previously unreported bomb attack in Samarra on Friday.

Bring ‘em on: Firefight during raid in Baghdad.

Up to 100,000 Iraqis demonstrate in Baghdad demanding direct elections.

The Curious Case of the Smuggled Dinars gets even smellier. “An informed source was cited as saying that it was almost certain that the money intercepted by the Lebanese authorities was ‘black money’ sent by the Iraq-based Americans ‘not just for the purpose of laundering it, but in order to be used by some local (Lebanese) politicians in order to destabilize the situation in Lebanon.’”

It’s starting to look like the CPA is deliberately fudging the numbers on civilian casualties in Iraq.

Detainees in Iraq. “They put me in solitary confinement. I wanted somebody to interrogate me and there wasn`t anybody,” said Ahmad Dulaimi, who says he spent four weeks in jail after a raid that netted 25 men in the restive town of Falluja, west of Baghdad. “Most of the inmates don`t know why they are imprisoned.”

Iraqi Trade Fair in Virginia. “The reconstruction of Iraq has emerged as a vast protectionist racket, a neo-con New Deal that transfers limitless public funds - in contracts, loans and insurance - to private firms, and even gets rid of the foreign competition to boot, under the guise of "national security". Ironically, these firms are being handed this corporate welfare so they can take full advantage of CPA-imposed laws that systematically strip Iraqi industry of all its protections, from import tariffs to limits on foreign ownership.”

Sectarian violence in Iraq.

US troops on campus at Baghdad University. “This week’s series of guest lectures from the U.S. Military Academy turned out to be another example of what the Army considers its good works being misunderstood by those living under its occupation.”

Remember all those rosy pre-war Bush promises that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for reconstruction? “The President`s Office of Management and Budget told Congress last week that oil revenues from Iraq last year were US$3.9 billion and were projected to reach US$13 billion this year, not even enough to cover the Iraqi government`s operating costs for this year, which are forecast to reach US$15.6 billion.” Of course, this is exactly what the experts at the State Department’s “Future of Iraq” assessment team predicted, but since those predictions were contrary to neo-conservative ideology the report was ridiculed and disregarded by the bunglers at Team Bush.

Commentary

Opinion: Bremer has become Iraq’s bankruptcy trustee. “Bremer’s bankrupt Iraq has three main political creditors: the Shiites, the Kurds and the Sunnis. If any one of them presses for unilateral advantage ­ threatens to “call their loans,” so to speak ­ the fragile structure of the new Iraq might crumble. As in a bankruptcy, the creditors can only achieve their goals if they patiently forbear and let the trustee do his job of putting the enterprise back together.”

Opinion: Why Bush is afraid of elections in Iraq. “Annan should resist the poisoned chalice. He should support the concept of direct elections. It need not mean a delay in sovereignty for Iraq. Five months are not too long to prepare a vote. Alternatively, the UN should offer to take over responsibility for the entire transition to Iraqi rule, as many member governments originally hoped. Washington`s plan for a transfer of power is a facade. The real intent is to get Bush re-elected and continue the occupation by indirect means. The UN should have no part of it.”

Opinion: Former CIA officer sounds off on Bush’s serial lying. “Why not ask Scowcroft to lead an inquiry into which government officials and members of Congress were briefed on the full story provided by Kamel, and when? With 500 of our sons and daughters already killed in Iraq, we are due no less.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Florida soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.


Another Note To Readers

I wanted to thank everybody for all the support you`ve expressed in the Comments section. This blog evolved from a summary of the daily war news that I started posting on the Bartcop Forum last year when it became clear that Lieutenant AWOL intended to pursue his vanity war in Iraq. As I watched the US press coverage of the run-up to the war, I realized that the American media is incapable of following a story beyond a 24-hour news cycle, and they will only cover a story if there is dramatic film footage. As a result, the media only covers specific events in a selective fashion. They don`t cover patterns.

Eventually, I realized that posting a daily summary on a forum wasn`t a very good approach so I decided the best place for this stuff was on a consolidated website giving a chronological history of events. At first, I fooled around trying to develop a mission statement so I could focus my objectives and methods (mostly because that`s how I approach most projects) but I soon discarded that approach.

The purpose of this site is to cover all the stories from Iraq that don`t get covered in the US media and to show a pattern of events. I`ve only got two rules. (1) Every soldier killed or wounded gets a specific entry that gives his or her name and something about their lives. When I do my daily news searches, I look for those stories first. (2) Every attack on a US soldier, Iraqi policeman, car bombing, or other act of insurgency gets preceded with "Bring `em on" in memory of the belligerent fool who invited those attacks.

I`m especially flattered by the reviews of this site some of you posted on your own sites. Thanks. As the 2004 elections approach George W. Bush is doing his best to sweep this war, its casualties and consequences under the rug. All the evidence strong suggests that the only reason we went to war was because Karl Rove made a political calculation that Iraq was low-hanging fruit and a victorious little war would help his pet monkey win an election. I don`t intend to let Bush duck the consequences of his folly.

And I`m grateful for the offers of financial help, but the fact of the matter is that this site is free and the only thing this costs me personally is time and effort.

But if you`re determined to part with some of your money, here`s what I suggest: Give it to the Democratic candidate you think most likely to beat Bush. A lot of other bloggers think he`s going to be easy to beat but I`m not so sanguine. He`s got a quarter of a billion dollars to spend, he`s got a superb slime machine and the media is more concerned with Wacko Jacko than they are with elections. Personally, my money is on Clark because I think he`s the guy who can beat Lieutenant AWOL like Gene Krupa could beat a drum.

A lot of people from outside the US read this site. I want to apologize to you. I am truly sorry that you have to deal with George W. Bush. I`m going to do my best to ensure that it won`t happen again.

By the way, according to the site meter sometime early Sunday morning this site received its 100,000th visit. I don`t know what that means since I have no basis for comparison to other blog traffic, except that "Today in Iraq" has received 100,000 visits since June.




# posted by yankeedoodle : 2:38 AM
Comments (14)

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___________________________________________
Supporters of the international environmental organization Greenpeace recreate Pablo Picasso`s `Amnistia` on South Beach in Miami, Florida, January 17, 2004. Some 1,500 people participated in one of the largest living art projects ever. Greenpeace hired John Quigley from Los Angeles, California to reproduce Picasso`s `Amnistia`. (Greenpeace Handout)

[Joerver]

Dieser Artikel passt zwar nicht in meinen Thread, enthält aber einige überdenkenswerte Aussagen. Deshalb stelle ich ihn ein.

Antisemitismus: ein praktischer Leitfaden
von Uri Avnery
uri-avnery.de / ZNet Deutschland 17.01.2004

Ein ungarischer Witz: während des Junikrieges 1967 traf ein Ungar seinen Freund. „Warum siehst du so glücklich aus?“ fragte er. „Ich hörte, dass die Israelis heute sechs in Sowjetrussland hergestellte MiGs abgeschossen haben,“ erwiderte sein Freund. Am nächsten Tag sah sein Freund sogar noch fröhlicher drein. „Die Israelis brachten heute weitere acht MiGs zum Absturz,“ verkündigte er. Am dritten Tag aber ist sein Freund niedergeschlagen. „Was ist los? Haben die Israelis heute keine MiGs heruntergeholt?“ fragte der Mann. „Doch sie haben,“ antwortete der Freund. „Aber heute sagte mir jemand, dass die Israelis Juden sind!“ Das ist die ganze Geschichte in einer Nussschale. Die Antisemiten hassen die Juden, weil sie Juden sind, ganz unabhängig von dem, was sie tun. Juden können gehasst werden, weil sie reich sind und damit prahlen oder weil sie arm sind und im Schmutz leben. Weil sie eine große Rolle in der bolschewistischen Revolution spielten oder weil einige nach dem Kollaps des kommunistischen Regimes unglaublich reich geworden sind. Weil sie Jesus gekreuzigt haben oder weil sie die westliche Kultur mit der „christlichen Mitleidsmoral“ angesteckt haben. Weil sie kein Vaterland haben oder weil sie den Staat Israel geschaffen haben. Das steckt in der Natur aller Arten von Rassismus und Chauvinismus. Man hasst jemanden, weil er ein Jude, ein Araber, eine Frau, ein Schwarzer, ein Inder, ein Muslim, ein Hindu ist. Was der oder die einzelne an persönlichen Eigenschaften hat, was er oder sie tut, was er oder sie leistet, ist unwichtig. Wenn er oder sie zu einer verhassten Rasse, Religion oder dem weiblichen Geschlecht gehört, wird er oder sie gehasst werden.

Die Antworten auf all die Fragen, die mit Antisemitismus zusammenhängen, folgen dieser Grundtatsache. Zum Beispiel:

Ist jeder, der Israel kritisiert, ein Antisemit?

Absolut nicht. Jemand der Israel wegen gewisser Akte kritisiert, kann deswegen nicht des Antisemitismus verklagt werden. Aber jemand der Israel hasst, weil es ein jüdischer Staat ist – so wie der Ungar im oben erzählten Witz - ist ein Antisemit. Es ist nicht immer einfach zwischen diesen beiden Arten zu unterscheiden, weil schlaue Antisemiten vorgeben, bona fide Kritik an Israels Aktionen zu üben. Aber jede Kritik an Israel als Antisemitismus hinzustellen, ist falsch und kontraproduktiv. Es schadet dem Kampf gegen Antisemitismus. Viele Personen mit hohem sittlichen Ernst - die positive Auslese der Menschheit - kritisieren unser Verhalten in den besetzten Gebieten. Es ist dumm, sie des Antisemitismus’ zu verklagen.

Kann jemand ein Anti-Zionist sein, ohne ein Antisemit zu sein?

Absolut ja. Zionismus ist eine politische Ideologie und muss wie jede andere behandelt werden. Man kann ein Anti-Kommunist sein, ohne anti-chinesisch, ein Anti-Kapitalist sein ohne ein Anti-Amerikaner zu sein, ein Antiglobalist, ein Anti- irgendetwas sein ...Doch wieder ist es nicht einfach, eine klare Linie zu ziehen, weil wirkliche Antisemiten behaupten, nur Antizionisten zu sein. Man sollte ihnen nicht helfen, den Unterschied zu verwischen.

Kann jemand ein Antisemit und gleichzeitig pro-zionistisch sein?

Tatsächlich ja. Der Gründer des modernen Zionismus, Theodor Herzl, versuchte schon, die Unterstützung von bekannten russischen Antisemiten zu gewinnen, indem er ihnen versprach, die Juden aus ihrer Gesellschaft zu holen. Vor dem 2.Weltkrieg hat die zionistische Untergrundorganisation IZL (Irgun ) unter der Aufsicht antisemitischer Generäle ( die auch die Juden los sein wollten) militärische Trainingslager in Polen eingerichtet. Heute empfängt die zionistische extreme Rechte ungeheure Unterstützung von den amerikanischen fundamentalistisch eingestellten Christen, die von der Mehrheit der amerikanischen Juden – nach einer in dieser Woche veröffentlichten Umfrage - zu tiefst als antisemitisch betrachtet werden. Ihre Theologie geht davon aus, dass am Vorabend der Wiederkunft Christi alle Juden zum Christentum konvertieren müssen oder sie ausgerottet würden.

Kann ein Jude antisemitisch sein?

Das klingt wie ein Oxymoron – ein Widerspruch in sich selbst. Aber die Geschichte kennt einige Beispiele von Juden, die zu wilden Judenhassern geworden waren. Der spanische Großinquisitor Torquemada war ursprünglich Jude. Karl Marx schrieb ein paar garstige Dinge über Juden, wie auch Otto Weininger, ein bedeutender jüdischer Schriftsteller am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Auch Herzl, sein Zeitgenosse und Wiener Landsmann, schrieb in seinen Tagebüchern einige sehr wenig schmeichelhafte Bemerkungen über Juden.

Wenn jemand Israel mehr kritisiert als andere Länder, die dasselbe tun, ist er dann ein Antisemit?

Nicht unbedingt. Es stimmt, es sollte für alle Länder und Menschen ein und derselbe moralische Maßstab gelten. Die russischen Aktionen in Tschetschenien sind nicht besser als unsere in Nablus, vielleicht sogar schlimmer. Das Problem ist, dass Juden als „das Volk der Opfer“ dargestellt wird, und es sich selbst als solches darstellt und (tatsächlich) ein „Volk der Opfer“ war. Deshalb ist die Welt schockiert, dass die Opfer von gestern die Täter von heute sind. An uns wird ein höherer moralischer Maßstab gelegt als an andere Völker. Und das ist so ganz in Ordnung.

Ist Europa wieder antisemitisch geworden?

Nicht wirklich. Die Zahl der Antisemiten in Europa ist nicht gewachsen, ja, sie ist eher zurück gegangen. Was gewachsen ist, ist das Maß der Kritik an Israels Verhalten gegenüber den Palästinensern, die nun als die „Opfer der Opfer“ erscheinen.
Die Situation in einigen Vororten von Paris, die oft als Beispiel für wachsenden Antisemitismus genannt wird, ist aber eine ganz andere Sache. Wenn nordafrikanische Muslime auf nordafrikanische Juden treffen, dann übertragen sie den israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt auf europäischen Boden. Es ist auch eine Fortsetzung der Fehde zwischen Arabern und Juden, die in Algerien begann, als Juden das französische Regime unterstützten und die Muslime sie als Kollaborateure der verhassten Kolonialherren betrachteten.

Warum hat dann die Mehrheit in den europäischen Staaten bei einer vor kurzer Zeit ausgeführten Umfrage ausgesagt, dass Israel für den Weltfrieden eine größere Gefahr als andere Staaten darstellt?

Da gibt es eine einfache Erklärung. Die Europäer sehen in ihren Fernsehprogrammen jeden Tag, was unsere Soldaten in den besetzten palästinensischen Gebieten tun. Von dieser Konfrontation wird mehr als von jedem anderen Konflikt auf Erden ( mit Ausnahme des augenblicklichen Konfliktes im Irak) berichtet, weil Israel „interessanter“ ist auf Grund der langen Geschichte der Juden in Europa und weil Israel den westlichen Medien näher steht als die muslimischen und afrikanischen Länder. Der palästinensische Widerstand, den Israel „Terrorismus“ nennt, scheint für viele Europäer dem französischen Widerstand unter deutscher Besatzung zu ähneln.

Und wie ist es mit der antisemitischen Manifestation in der arabischen Welt?

Zweifellos sind typisch antisemitische Anzeichen in letzter Zeit in den arabischen Diskurs geraten. Es genügt zu erwähnen, dass die berüchtigten „Protokolle der Weisen von Zion“ auf arabisch veröffentlicht wurden. Das ist ein typisch europäischer Import. Die Protokolle wurden von der Geheimpolizei des zaristischen Russlands erfunden.
Was immer für Unsinnigkeiten von gewissen „Experten“ ausgesprochen werden, so gab es nie einen weit verbreiteten muslimischen Antisemitismus, wie er im christlichen Europa existiert hat. Während seines Machtkampfes hat der Prophet Muhammad auch gegen benachbarte jüdische Stämme gekämpft. So kamen ein paar negative Passagen über Juden in den Koran. Dies kann aber nicht mit den antijüdischen Passagen der neutestamentlichen Geschichte über die Kreuzigung Christi verglichen werden, die die christliche Welt vergiftet und unendliches Leid verursacht haben. Das muslimische Spanien war für die Juden ein Paradies, und niemals gab es in der muslimischen Welt einen jüdischen Holocaust. Selbst Pogrome waren äußerst selten.

Mohammad verfügte, dass die „Völker des Buches“ (Juden und Christen) tolerant behandelt werden sollten; sie wurden zwar Bedingungen unterworfen, die aber unvergleichlich liberaler waren als im Europa der damaligen Zeit. Die Muslime haben ihre Religion nie mit Gewalt Juden und Christen aufgezwungen, was allein die Tatsache belegt, dass fast alle aus dem katholischen Spanien vertriebenen Juden sich in muslimischen Ländern ansiedelten und dort wohl fühlten. Nach Jahrhunderte langer muslimischer Herrschaft sind Griechen und Serben durchaus Christen geblieben.

Wenn Frieden zwischen Israel und der arabischen Welt zustande gebracht wird, werden wahrscheinlich (und hoffentlich ) die giftigen Früchte des Antisemitismus aus der arabischen Welt zum größten Teil verschwinden ( so wie die giftigen Früchte des Araberhasses in unserer Gesellschaft).

Sind die Äußerungen des Ministerpräsidenten von Malaysia, Mahathir bin Muhammad, über die jüdische Weltkontrolle antisemitisch?

Ja und nein. Sicherlich illustrieren sie die Schwierigkeit, den Antisemitismus festzunageln. Von einem sachlichen Standpunkt aus hatte der Mann recht, wenn er behauptet, die Juden hätten einen weit größeren Einfluss als ihr prozentualer Anteil an der Weltbevölkerung dies allein berechtigen würde. Es stimmt, dass die Juden einen großen Einfluss sowohl auf die Politik der Vereinigten Staaten, der einzigen Supermacht, als auch auf die amerikanischen und internationalen Medien ausüben. Man braucht nicht die gefälschten „Protokolle“, um sich diesen Fakten zu stellen und seine Ursachen zu analysieren. Aber der Ton macht die Musik, und Mahathirs Musik klang tatsächlich antisemitisch.

Sollten wir also den Antisemitismus ignorieren?

Ganz sicher nicht. Rassismus ist eine Art Virus, der in jeder Nation und in jedem menschlichen Wesen existiert. Jean-Paul Sartre sagte, wir seien alle Rassisten. Der Unterschied liegt nur darin, dass einige von uns dessen bewusst sind und dagegen ankämpfen, während andere diesem Übel erliegen. In normalen Zeiten gibt es eine kleine Minorität eklatanter Rassisten in jedem Land; aber in Zeiten der Krise kann ihre Zahl plötzlich katastrophal wachsen. Das ist eine ständige Gefahr, und jedes Volk muss gegen die Rassisten in seiner Mitte kämpfen.

Wir Israelis sind wie alle anderen Völker. Jeder von uns kann in sich einen kleinen Rassisten entdecken, wenn er ernsthaft genug danach sucht. Wir haben in unserem Land fanatische Araberhasser, und die historische Konfrontation, die unser Leben beherrscht, lässt ihre Macht und ihren Einfluss noch mehr wachsen. Es ist unsere Pflicht, sie zu bekämpfen. Wir sollten es den Europäern und den Arabern aber selbst überlassen, sich mit ihren eigenen Rassisten zu befassen.





[ Übersetzt von: Ellen Rohlfs | Orginalartikel: "Dieser Artikel ist NICHT auf zmag.org erschienen!" ]

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About Those Neocons: Thinking Again, or Just Wondering?
Mehrere Links:
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article5549.htm
by Karen Kwiatkowski

01/17/04: (LewRockwell.com) The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just published WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications. To paraphrase that lovable old Don Rumsfeld, the report summarizes what we knew, what we said about what we knew, what we imagined, what we said about what we imagined, and most significantly, what we didn’t say but strongly insinuated to the Congress and the American people about what we knew not and only hopefully imagined.

As the academics and politicians relax with after-dinner cigars and drinks, they may peruse at their leisure CEIP’s findings, which track closely with what I saw inside the five-sided asylum in the last two years:

Iraq WMD was not an immediate threat
Inspections were working
Intelligence failed and was misrepresented
Terrorist connection missing
Post-war WMD search ignored key resources
War was not the best – or only – option
Well, who really cares, right? So what if we lied about WMD, misled as to "war on terrorism" objectives, and wasted well over $200 billion we didn’t have, deployed 150,000 troops, and killed over 500 of them (so far and not counting suicides, or the thousands maimed) unnecessarily. Look at the bright side – on March 24, George W. Bush confiscated Iraqi bank and national financial assets, including assets of the oil ministry. On May 22, George W. Bush became the proud new administrator of the Iraqi Development Fund, and future oil sales that would feed it. On August 28, George W. Bush made sure that all additional government and Ba-ath official property be transferred into the Fund. All Iraqi oil sales are back in dollars too. We broke it, we bought it, we switched it back to dollars.

I wonder, in signing these and other executive orders seizing property, if Dubya was reminded of the good old days, when he and his partners "used Arlington’s [municipal] powers to condemn the land for the [Ranger’s] stadium, and relied on taxpayers to repay the bonds sold to build the Ballpark." After the stadium was completed, the increased "value" was pocketed when Bush and partners sold the team for $250 million in 1998 to Tom Hicks, who later merged with another Bush buddy, Lowry Mays to expand the media conglomerate Clear Channel.

I guess some "businessmen" are just more equal than others.

But back to the idea of "Thinking Again." The CEIP also publishes a bi-monthly called Foreign Policy, and it has a regular myth-busting corner called "Think Again." The current issue features my pal, Max Boot, who is thinking again about neocons.

Max says he is a neo-conservative, calls neo-conservatism a movement, and calls neoconservatives "hard-Wilsonians." Max thinks neocons are "targeting" North Korea and Iran next. Targeting for regime change, he means.

Max "knows" that "the Iranian and North Korean peoples want to be free." I am not sure if he means "as free as an Iraqi" or perhaps "as free as a bird." Maybe he means that freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. If so, the Iraqis are getting pretty damn free, given that we own the oil, the government resources, the Ba-ath elite’s resources, and we handpicked their governing council and are denying elections.

Max also thinks that some widely held allegations about neocons are wrong. He says neocons are not "liberals mugged by reality" but are actually just good old American "hawks." Natural born birds of prey, as it were.

Max believes that almost everyone confuses the moniker of "neocon" as "Jew." He says this is done because people are malicious, and then Max proceeds to list the dozens of neocons who are not going to the synagogue. I think this would be even more effective if he would list the number of Jewish neocons who also haven’t seen the inside of a synagogue in a while. Fact is, 80% of American Jews are appalled at the neo-hawkish warmongering emanating from the mouths and pens of neocons. Many significant critics of neo-conservatism are well-studied and ethically minded Jews, including many rabbis. Some of the very best critiques and discussion of neo-conservatism in America, and its impacts in the Middle East, are regularly published by Israeli daily Haaretz. A classic explanation and discussion of the neocon-designed invasion of Iraq is entitled "White Man’s Burden," by Ari Shavit, in Haaretz last April.

Max also thinks it is crazy that a few people – maybe even only Paul Wolfowitz – with only a few impoverished thinktanks behind them (AEI, PNAC, the Olin, Bradley and Smith-Richardson Foundations) can create and control American foreign policy. He says neocons have been "relatively influential" only because their arguments are so good, not their connections. That’s probably why Dick Cheney placed so many previously connected thinktank guys in key positions at the Pentagon, within his own office, and in parts of the State Department so as to more easily roll those who weren’t convinced of the wisdom of those good neo-con arguments.

Funny how there are no female neocons. He mentions Jeanne Kirkpatrick, although she’s written nothing seriously promoting the neocon agenda of imperialism in the past several years. I guess some neocons are also more equal than others.

Max also denies that neocons are unilateralists, or Manichean simpletons who cherish the idea of noble lies and the stealthy practice of electoral politics by other means. Well, of course they aren’t unilateralist or Manichean–if you are with them, then you are certainly not against them.

He mentions the noble lie, Plato’s governing elite, contempt for common people and their choices. Of course, these three are nothing at all like the Iraqi liberation experience, the "Governing Council," and the denial of Iraqi elections and the disregard for the United States Congress. Not at all.

The last issue Max brings up is the success or failure of the war in Iraq. He says the war and occupation are flawed only because neocons were not allowed to be completely in charge of every detail. But alas, there are so few of them! Max says neocons are hankering for an even larger American military and military-industrial complex, and presumably one that is actively engaged in promoting a forward national agenda. How we miss you, General Butler.

Concluding, he says, "The continuing U.S. casualties are lamentable, but the losses so far are low by the standards of guerrilla wars – far fewer than the 500 soldiers the British lost in putting down a previous Iraq insurgency in 1920." Excuse me? Is this a typo?

Lamentable losses, he says.

Neoconservatives in both major political parties are still excited by their Bush-given opportunities, and still cozy in their safe officialdom. They evangelize our Constitution abroad, even as their program demands increasing constitutional breaches at home. Foreign Policy will think again on other subjects. Maybe next time they can challenge the old assumption that crime doesn’t pay.January 17, 2004

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 © 2004 LewRockwell.com

[Joerver]

January 2004

Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of the World’s Oil
By Michael Klare

Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org



When first assuming office in early 2001, President George W. Bush’s top foreign policy priority was not to prevent terrorism or to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction—or any of the other goals he espoused later that year following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rather, it was to increase the flow of petroleum from suppliers abroad to U.S. markets. In the months before he became president, the United States had experienced severe oil and natural gas shortages in many parts of the country, along with periodic electrical power blackouts in California. In addition, oil imports rose to more than 50% of total consumption for the first time in history, provoking great anxiety about the security of the country’s long-term energy supply. Bush asserted that addressing the nation’s “energy crisis” was his most important task as president.

He and his advisers considered the oil supply essential to the health and profitability of leading U.S. industries. They reasoned that any energy shortages could have severe and pervasive economic repercussions on businesses in automobiles, airlines, construction, petrochemicals, trucking, and agriculture. They deemed petroleum especially critical to the economy because it is the source of two-fifths’ of the total U.S. energy supply—more than any other source,—and because it provides most of the nation’s transportation fuel. They also were cognizant of petroleum’s crucial national security role as the power for the vast array of tanks, planes, helicopters, and ships that constitute the backbone of the U.S. war machine.

“America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades,” Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham told a National Energy Summit on March 19, 2001. “The failure to meet this challenge will threaten our nation’s economic prosperity, compromise our national security, and literally alter the way we lead our lives.”

The energy turmoil of 2000-2001 prompted Bush to establish the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), a task force of senior government representatives charged with developing a long-range plan to meet U.S. energy requirements. To head this group, Bush picked his closest political adviser, Vice President Dick Cheney. A Republican Party stalwart and a former secretary of Defense, Cheney had served as chairman and chief executive officer of the Halliburton Co., an oilfield services firm, before joining the Bush campaign in 2000. As such, Cheney availed himself of top executives of energy firms, such as Enron Corp., for advice on major issues.

As the NEPDG began its review of U.S. energy policy, its members saw the United States was faced with a grave choice between two widely diverging paths. It could continue down the road it had long been traveling, consuming increasing amounts of petroleum and—given the irreversible decline in domestic oil production—becoming ever more dependent on imported supplies. Or, it could choose an alternate route of reliance on renewable sources of energy and gradually reducing petroleum use.

Clearly, the outcome of this decision would have profound consequences for society, the economy, and the nation’s security. Following the same path would bind the United States ever more tightly to Persian Gulf suppliers and to other oil-producing countries, with a corresponding impact on U.S. security policy. Pursuing an alternative strategy would require a huge investment in new energy-generation and transportation technologies, resulting in the rise or fall of entire industries. Either way, the public would experience the impact of this choice in everyday life and in the dynamics of the economy as a whole. No one, in the United States or elsewhere, would be left entirely untouched.

The National Energy Policy Development Group wrestled with this dilemma and completed its report during the early months of 2001. After a careful review, Bush anointed the report as the National Energy Policy (NEP) and released it on May 17. At first glance, the NEP, or the Cheney report as it is often called, appeared to reject the path of increased reliance on imported oil in favor of renewable energy. The NEP “reduces demand by promoting innovation and technology to make us the world leader in efficiency and conservation,” the president declared as he released it. However, for all its rhetoric about conservation, the NEP does not propose a reduction in oil consumption. Instead, it proposes to slow the growth in U.S. dependence on imported petroleum by boosting production at home through the exploitation of untapped reserves in protected wilderness areas.

The single most important step proposed in the NRP was increasing domestic oil production by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), an immense, untouched wilderness area in northeastern Alaska. While this proposal has generated enormous controversy in the United States because of its deleterious impact on the environment, it also has allowed the White House to argue that the administration is committed to a policy of energy independence. However, careful examination of the Cheney report leads to an entirely different conclusion. Aside from the ANWR proposal, nothing in the NEP would contribute to a significant decline in U.S. dependence on imported petroleum. In fact, the very opposite is true: The basic goal of the Cheney plan is to find additional external sources of oil for the United States.

In the end, Bush made a clear decision regarding future U.S. energy behavior. Knowing that nothing can reverse the long-term decline in domestic oil production, and unwilling to curb the country’s ever-growing thirst for petroleum products, he elected to continue down the existing path of ever-increasing dependence on foreign oil.



Conservation Initiative: Fact or Fiction?
The fact that the Bush energy plan envisions increased rather than diminished reliance on imported petroleum is not immediately apparent from the president’s public comments on the NEP, or from the first seven chapters of the Cheney report itself. It is only in the eighth and final chapter, “Strengthening Global Alliances,” that the true intent of the administration’s policy becomes fully apparent. Here, the tone of the report changes markedly from a professed concern with conservation and energy efficiency to an explicit emphasis on securing more oil from foreign sources. The chapter begins, “U.S. national energy security depends on sufficient energy supplies to support U.S. and global economic growth.” The report further states, “We can strengthen our own energy security and the shared prosperity of the global economy,” by working with other countries to increase the global production of energy. It is a mandate to “make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy.”

The Cheney report is very guarded about the amount of foreign oil that will be required. The only clue provided by the report is a chart of net U.S. oil consumption and production over time. According to this illustration, domestic oil field production will decline from about 8.5 million barrels per day (mbd) in 2002 to 7.0 mbd in 2020, while consumption will jump from 19.5 mbd to 25.5 mbd. That suggests imports or other sources of petroleum, such as natural gas liquids, will have to rise from 11 mbd to 18.5 mbd. Most of the recommendations in Chapter 8 of the NEP are aimed at procuring this 7.5 mbd increment, equivalent to the total oil consumed by China and India.

One-third of all the recommendations in the report are for ways to obtain access to petroleum sources abroad. Many of the 35 proposals are region- or country-specific, with emphasis on removing political, economic, legal, and logistical obstacles. For example, the NEP calls on the secretaries of Energy, Commerce, and State “to deepen their commercial dialogue with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and other Caspian states to provide a strong, transparent, and stable business climate for energy and related infrastructure projects.”

The Cheney report will have a profound impact on future U.S. foreign and military policy. Officials will have to negotiate for these overseas supplies and arrange for investments that will increase production and exports. They must also take steps to ensure that wars, revolutions or civil disorder do not impede foreign deliveries to the United States. These imperatives will be especially significant for policy toward the Persian Gulf area, the Caspian Sea basin, Africa, and Latin America.

Applying the Cheney energy plan will have major implications for U.S. security and military policy. Countries expected to supply petroleum in the years ahead are torn by internal conflicts, harbor strong anti-American sentiments, or both. Efforts to procure additional oil from foreign sources are almost certain to lead to violent disorder and resistance in many key producing areas. While U.S. officials might prefer to avoid the use of force in such situations, they may conclude that the only way to guarantee the continued flow of energy is to guard the oil fields and pipelines with soldiers.

To add to Washington’s dilemma, troop deployments in the oil-producing areas are likely to cause resentment from inhabitants who fear the revival of colonialism or who object to particular U.S. political positions, such as U.S. support for Israel. Efforts to safeguard the flow of oil could be counter-productive, intensifying rather than diminishing local disorder and violence.



Persian Gulf
The United States currently obtains only about 18% of its imported petroleum from the Persian Gulf area. But Washington perceives a strategic interest in the stability of energy production there because its major allies, including Japan and Western Europe, rely on imports from the region. Also, the gulf’s high export volume has helped to keep world oil prices relatively low, benefiting the U.S. economy. With domestic production in decline, the NEP observes, the Persian Gulf “will remain vital to U.S. interests.”

The United States has played a significant role in Persian Gulf affairs for a very long time. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt forged an agreement with Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi dynasty, to protect the royal family against its internal and external enemies in return for privileged access to Saudi oil. In subsequent years, the United States also agreed to provide security assistance to the Shah of Iran and to the leaders of Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These agreements have led to the delivery of vast quantities of U.S. arms and, in some cases, the deployment of combat forces to these countries. (The U.S. security link with Iran was severed in January 1980, when the Shah was overthrown by militant Islamic forces.)

U.S. policy with regard to the protection of Persian Gulf energy supplies is unambiguous: When a threat arises, the United States will use whatever means are necessary to ensure the continued flow of oil. This principle, known as the Carter Doctrine, was first articulated by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah of Iran. It has remained part of U.S. policy ever since. In accordance with the principle, the United States used force in 1987 and 1988 to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers from Iranian missile and gunboat attacks, and then in 1990 and 1991 to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

In explaining the need to use force on these occasions, U.S. officials have stressed the importance of Persian Gulf oil to domestic economic stability and prosperity. “Our strategic interests in the Persian Gulf region, I think, are well known, but bear repeating,” then-Secretary of Defense Cheney told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 11, 1990, five weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In addition to other security ties to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, he said, “We obviously also have a significant interest because of the energy that is at stake in the gulf.” Iraq possessed 10% of the world’s oil reserves and acquired another 10% by seizing Kuwait, he explained. The occupation of Kuwait also placed Iraqi forces within a few hundred miles of another 25% located in eastern Saudi Arabia. “Once [former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] acquired Kuwait and deployed an army as large as the one he possesses, he was clearly in a position to be able to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy, and that gave him a stranglehold on our economy and on that of most of the other nations of the world as well,” he noted. Cheney insisted that the United States had no choice but to employ military force in the defense of Saudi Arabia and other friendly states in the area.

Once Iraqi forces were driven from Kuwait, the United States adopted a policy of containment of Iraq, enforcing severe economic sanctions and “no-fly” zones over northern and southern Iraq to weaken the Hussein regime and to prevent any new attacks on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Washington substantially expanded its military presence and bases in the Persian Gulf area in order to facilitate future U.S. military operations in the region. Most importantly, the Department of Defense sent vast quantities of munitions to Kuwait and Qatar so that troops could be rushed into combat without waiting weeks or months for the arrival of their heavy equipment.

By early spring of 2002, the Bush administration concluded that the policy of containment was not sufficient to eliminate the threat Hussein posed to U.S. interests and that more aggressive action was required. Although Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction was cited as the main reason for acting in this manner, Cheney gave equal importance to U.S. energy security in his much-quoted speech of Aug. 26, 2002. “Should [Hussein’s] ambitions [to acquire weapons of mass destruction] be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East and the United States,” he told the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat at the top of 10% of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, [and] directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region.”

Officials told the public that oil had nothing to do with the motives for the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. “The only interest the United States has in the region is furthering the cause of peace and stability, not in [Iraq’s] ability to generate oil,” White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said in late 2002. But a closer look at the administration’s planning for the war reveals a very different picture. In a January briefing by an unnamed “senior Defense official” on U.S. plans for protecting Iraqi oil fields in the event of war, the Pentagon leadership revealed that Gen. Tommy Franks and his staff “have crafted strategies that will allow us to secure and protect those fields as rapidly as possible in order to preserve those prior to destruction.”

The senior official, who presumably was Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, indicated that the Bush administration sought to capture Iraq’s oilfields intact to provide a source of revenue for the reconstruction of the country. Under the Hussein regime, Iraq was a major oil supplier to the United States. It provided an average of 566,000 barrels per day in 2002, or 5% of total imports. Many in Washington hope to obtain far more oil from Iraq in the future. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Iraq possesses proven reserves of 112.5 billion barrels, more than any other country except Saudi Arabia, and it is thought to possess another 200 billion barrels in undeveloped fields. Iraq could become a leading oil supplier in the decades ahead, if a stable government is established that opens territory to exploitation by U.S. firms.

Such an outcome is far from assured. Policy makers face the challenge of ensuring that Saudi Arabia and other gulf producers increase oil supplies enough to meet growing U.S. and international demand. Another challenge will be protecting the Saudi regime against internal unrest and insurrection.

The need to increase Saudi production is particularly pressing. With one-fourth of the world’s known oil reserves, an estimated 262 billion barrels, Saudi Arabia is the only country other than Iraq capable of satisfying ever-increasing petroleum demands. According to the Department of Energy, Saudi Arabia’s net petroleum output must grow by 133% over the next 25 years, from 10.2 mbd in 2001 to 23.8 mbd in 2025, in order to meet anticipated world requirements at the end of that period. Expanding Saudi capacity by 13.6 mbd, which is the equivalent of total current production by the United States and Mexico, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It also will create enormous technical and logistical challenges. Western analysts believe the best way to achieve this increase is to persuade the Saudis to allow substantial U.S. oil-company investment. The Cheney report calls for exactly that. However, any effort by Washington to apply pressure on Riyadh is likely to meet with significant resistance from the royal family, who nationalized oil holdings in the 1970s and is fearful of being seen as overly subservient to the United States.

The strong U.S. ties to the Saudi royal family are unpopular with the regime’s many opponents. Additionally, growing numbers of young Saudis have turned against the United States because of its close ties to Israel and what is seen as Washington’s anti-Islamic bias. It was from this milieu that Osama bin Laden recruited many of his followers in the late 1990s and obtained much of his financial support. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Saudi government cracked down on some of these forces, but underground opposition to the regime’s military and economic cooperation with Washington persists. Finding a way to eradicate this opposition while persuading Riyadh to increase its oil deliveries will be one of the most difficult challenges facing U.S. policy makers in the years ahead.



Caspian Sea Basin
Although the United States will remain dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf area for a long time to come, officials seek to minimize this dependency to the greatest degree possible by diversifying the nation’s sources of imported energy. “Diversity is important, not only for energy security but also for national security,” President Bush declared on May 17, 2001. “Over-dependence on any one source of energy, especially a foreign source, leaves us vulnerable to price shocks, supply interruptions, and in the worst case, blackmail.” To prevent this, the administration’s energy plan calls for a substantial U.S. effort to boost production in a number of non-gulf areas, including the Caspian Sea basin, the West Coast of Africa, and Latin America.

The one that is likely to receive greatest attention from policy makers is the Caspian Sea basin, consisting of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and adjacent parts of Iran and Russia. According to the Department of Energy, this area houses proven reserves (defined as 90% probable) of 17 to 33 billion barrels of oil, and possible reserves (defined as 50% probable) of 233 billion barrels. If the amounts were confirmed, they would constitute the second largest untapped reserves after the Persian Gulf area.

To ensure that much of this oil will eventually flow to consumers in the West, the U.S. government has made strenuous efforts to develop the area’s petroleum infrastructure and distribution system. The United States first sought access to the Caspian’s oil supplies during the Clinton administration. Because the Caspian Sea is land-locked, its oil and natural gas must travel by pipeline to other areas. Tapping the resources requires the construction of long-distance export lines.

The administration was reluctant to see Caspian oil flow through Russia on its way to Western Europe, since that would allow Moscow a degree of control over Western energy supplies. Transport through Iran was prohibited by U.S. law because of that country’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. So Clinton threw his support behind a plan to transport oil and gas from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey via Tbilisi in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Before leaving office, he flew to Turkey to preside at the signing ceremony for a regional agreement permitting construction of the $3 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

While concentrating on the legal and logistical aspects of procuring Caspian energy, the Clinton administration also addressed the threat to future oil deliveries posed by instability and conflict in the region. Since many of these states were wracked by ethnic and separatist conflicts, the administration initiated a number of military assistance programs aimed at strengthening their internal security capabilities. This entailed providing arms and training along with conducting joint exercises.

Building on Clinton’s efforts, the Bush administration sought to accelerate the expansion of Caspian production facilities and pipelines. “Foreign investors and technology are critical to rapid development of new commercially viable export routes,” the Cheney report affirms. “Such development will ensure that rising Caspian oil production is effectively integrated into world oil trade.” Particular emphasis is placed on completion of the BTC pipeline and on increasing the participation of U.S. companies in Caspian energy projects. The administration also sought to build an oil and gas pipeline from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on the east shore of the Caspian to Baku on the west shore to channel more energy from Central Asia to the BTC system.

Until September 11, 2001 U.S. involvement in the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia had been restricted mostly to economic, diplomatic, and military aid agreements. To combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan however, the Department of Defense deployed tens of thousands of combat troops in the region and established military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The administration recalled some of these troops but apparently plans to maintain bases and a permanent military presence. This is supposedly intended to assist in the war against terrorism, but it is also to safeguard the flow of petroleum. The administration deployed military instructors to Georgia to provide counter-insurgency training for special units that will eventually guard the Georgian segment of the BTC pipeline.

The White House has high hopes for the development of Caspian Sea energy supplies, but many obstacles remain. Some of these are logistical: Until new pipelines can be built, transport of large quantities of oil to the West will be tough. Other obstacles are political and legal: The authoritarian regimes that predominate in the former Soviet republics are riddled with corruption and reluctant to adopt the legal or tax reforms needed to attract large-scale Western investment. But when all is said and done, the major problem facing the United States is that the Caspian basin is no more stable than the Persian Gulf. Any effort to ensure the safety of energy deliveries will require the same sort of military commitments that the United States has long made to its principal energy suppliers in the gulf.



West Africa
Another area the Bush administration views as a promising source of oil is West Africa. Although African states accounted for only about 10% of global oil production in 2000, the Department of Energy predicts that their share will rise to 25% by 2020. That will add 8.3 mbd to global supplies, welcome news in Washington. “West Africa is expected to be one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the American market,” the Cheney report observes.

The administration expects to concentrate its efforts in Nigeria, its neighboring states in the Gulf of Guinea, and Angola. As in the Caspian region, however, U.S. hopes to obtain additional oil from Africa could be frustrated by political unrest and ethnic warfare. Indeed, much of Nigeria’s production was shut down during the spring of 2003 because of ethnic violence in the Delta region, the site of much of Nigeria’s onshore oil. Local activists have occupied offshore oil facilities to bargain for community project funding. Crime and vandalism have also hampered Nigeria’s efforts to increase oil production.

The United States is not likely to respond to these challenges by deploying troops. That undoubtedly would conjure up images of colonialism, provoking strong opposition at home and abroad. But Washington is willing to step up military aid to friendly regimes in the region. Total U.S. assistance to Angola and Nigeria amounted to some $300 million in fiscal years 2002 through 2004, a significant increase over the previous three-year period. In fiscal 2004, Angola and Nigeria also became eligible to receive surplus arms under the Pentagon’s Excess Defense Articles program. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has begun to secure rights for the establishment of naval bases in the region, most notably in Nigeria and the islands of Sao Tomé e Principe.



Latin America
Finally, the Cheney plan calls for a significant increase in U.S. oil imports from Latin America. The United States already obtains a large share of its imported oil from the region. Venezuela is now the third largest supplier of oil to the United States, after Canada and Saudi Arabia; Mexico is the fourth largest, and Columbia is the seventh. As indicated by Secretary of Energy Abraham, “President Bush recognizes not only the need for an increased supply of energy, but also the critical role the hemisphere will play in the administration’s energy policy.”

In presenting these aspirations to governments in the region, U.S. officials highlight their desire to establish a common framework for energy development. “We intend to stress the enormous potential of greater regional energy cooperation as we look to the future,” Abraham told the Fifth Hemispheric Energy Initiative Ministerial Conference in Mexico City on March 8, 2001. “Our goal [is] to build relationships among our neighbors that will contribute to our shared energy security; to an adequate, reliable, environmentally sound, and affordable access to energy.” However sincere, these comments mask the fact that the “cooperation” is essentially aimed at channeling more and more of the region’s oil supplies to the United States.

The energy plan emphasizes acquisition of additional oil from Mexico and Venezuela. “Mexico is a leading and reliable source of imported oil,” the Cheney report observes. “Its large reserve base, approximately 25% larger than our own proven reserves, makes Mexico a likely source of increased oil production over the next decade.” Venezuela is considered vital because it possesses large reserves of conventional oil and houses vast supplies of so-called heavy oil, a sludge-like material that can be converted to conventional oil through a costly refining process. According to the NEP, “Venezuelan success in making heavy oil deposits commercially viable suggests that they will contribute substantially to the diversity of global energy supply and to our own energy supply mix over the medium to long term.”

But U.S. efforts to tap into abundant Mexican and Venezuelan energy supplies will hit a major snag. Because of a long history of colonial and imperial predation, these two countries have placed their energy reserves under state control, establishing strong legal barriers to foreign involvement in domestic oil production. While they may want to capitalize on the benefits of higher volume exports to the United States, Latin American countries are likely to resist more U.S. participation in their energy industries and any significant increase in oil extraction.

The NEP calls on the secretaries of Commerce, Energy, and State to lobby their Latin American counterparts to eliminate or soften barriers. However, in Mexico, reform bills to ease entry of private oil companies have encountered stiff resistance in Congress. In Venezuela, a new Constitution adopted in 1999 bans foreign investment in the oil sector, and in 2003, President Hugo Chávez fired managers of the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. who favored links with foreign firms.



Bush Energy, Military Plans Linked
In its pursuit of petroleum, the United States is intruding in the affairs of the oil-supplying nations. In the process, it exposes itself to increased risk of involvement in local and regional conflicts. This reality has already influenced U.S. relations with the major oil-producing nations and is sure to have an even greater impact in the future.

At no point does the NEP acknowledge this. Instead, it focuses on the economic and diplomatic dimensions of the energy policy. However, the architects of the Bush-Cheney policy know that ensuring access to some oil sources may prove impossible without the use of military force. The administration’s military strategy takes up the slack with heavy emphasis on bolstering capacity to project firepower to key battlefields abroad. “The United States must retain the capability to send well-armed and logistically supported forces to critical points around the globe, even in the face of enemy opposition,” states its Quadrennial Defense Review.

These critical points would necessarily include areas that are petroleum sources. Whether or not the administration consciously linked energy with its security policy, Bush undeniable prioritized the enhancement of U.S. power projection at the same time he endorsed increased dependence on oil from unstable areas.

As a result, a two-pronged strategy governs U.S. policy toward much of the world. One arm of this strategy is to secure more oil from the rest of the world, and the other is to enhance the capability to intervene. While one of these objectives arises from energy preoccupations and the other from security concerns, the upshot is a single direction for U.S. dominance in the 21st Century. It is this combination of strategies, more than anything else, that will anchor the United States’ international relations for years to come.

Michael T. Klare, author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict and the forthcoming Petropolitics (Metropolis Books, 2004) is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

[Joerver]

The Future of America under the American-led Empire

In every age...the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power:
their idea about what is of most fundamental importance
and may therefore ultimately be worth a war.
-- Evan Luard, International War

By Craig B Hulet?

01/18/04: I was asked recently to make a short, or not so short, statement of what I thought realistically may come about over the next, say, five plus years here on my native soil, America. Actually I am asked this all the time by a specific group of people, call them my circle of interested parties. I have always restricted such comments to very private segments of society as the mass of people, the masses if you will, simply are not ever ready for “reality,” in any form.

My take, for over thirty years, on where my country is headed consists of a two-fold approach: the first approach is to put forward sufficient data, factual information, empirical evidence all in a specific format whereby an individual will understand what may happen, has already happened though they may be unaware, and what ultimately they might do in the face of it; call this my optimistic approach. Or call it my public approach because the public, whenever they hear something never before heard, it sends the herd stampeding if one tells them too much “like it is.” Call it, if you must, not telling all-the-truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth-so-help-me-God! (Or feeding them pap, for those not ready for meat) It is something always practiced by most when speaking (or writing) to the petrified herd.

The other approach is more metaphysical I suppose, conjectural or suppositional. When asked to write about where my personal sense of it truly resides and “tell it like it is,” it is another question altogether. Nobody wants to hear this, believe it’s true and most cannot stomach it. Publicly it just isn’t done. Written? it is literary suicide; spoken? It is verbalcidal. The Question? What is this Empire we speak off? What will America and Americans face under its rule? What will it be, this imperial project? This is what I hope to address here.

"There is Tranquility in Ignorance, but Servitude is its Partner."

The reasons why few will say what they know, are obvious to those who have been involved in the major corporate atmosphere, the U.S. military, intelligence and security fields and even some specialized academia. To speak of what you really know about this regime over the past fifty-five years is to risk your career, your job, your reputation, marriage, family and friends; in its severest reaction to something you might reveal about this newest form of Empire is to be smeared, slandered, banned, your client base asked to cease supporting your work, advertisers are harangued to drop their ads, and yes, even worse: you might actually end up dead. The public will not care that some or all of these things happen to you or anyone else. The progressive-Left will not care unless it is one of their own (and there are only some one million Leftists total in America); the radical-Right will not care unless it is, as well, one of their own (there are some three to five million of these on American soil, and they are largely harmless). The general public will never care what happens to anyone because they’re way too busy having fun, from dawn’s light to setting sun. Indeed, the “public” will not even know you existed. Why?

In America we are dealing with a level of illiteracy downright frightening. Political literacy, on foreign affairs, war and peace issues, we are absolutely a stupefied muddle of illiterate dopes. The entire world holds Americans in, well, shock & awe, if you will: shocked by our stupidity -- awed by our own disbelief in that fact. Americans arrogantly believe they are the smartest, best and most moral people on earth. They are arrogant “because” they are ignorant; the greater the ignorance the more stupid the more stupid the more arrogant. That is why they are arrogant don’t you see. The first implies the other. Don’t believe me, listen to shock-radio, hot-talk, hate-talk, Pacifica Radio Network and Fox-blarney for but a week, and you too “ought“ to be in awe (if you’re not we know why don’t we?)!

Sad to admit, we are a hateful bigoted nation, still. A nation of money-grubbing, manna worshipping, personality cult voyeuristic overweight slobs. Bill Clinton represented the general masses more than any president to date. To put it all in context. The eighty to 100 million which claim to attend church every Sunday, are the same that stare numbly at pornography daily (whether hard-core Internet [still the Internet’s No.#1 viewed $ item] or the highly professionally produced, written, edited Hollywood fanfare called R-rated movies and television programming). They are, as well, the very same ones getting others, or having their own, abortions in the largest (Christian) numbers (do the math for heaven’s sake, it ain’t Lesbian Thespians having abortions!).

That is not the worst part. It is these Volk that will believe everything, anything, no matter how absurdly untrue, George Bush the Smaller says. Many if not most on the Christian right think what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan have biblical overtones. Some, let us guess about half that figure, even believe “this is the END TIMES” and they will come out of all this secular war-making sitting to the right, that would be the very far-right, hand of God. The most hypocritical of these choose to believe they will remain here on the present planet justified in righteousness, with all their stuff, homes, cars and toys, in what they call “Stewardship” of the earth (meaning their stuff).

Given I am no prude, no fundamentalist church-going dispensationalist Christian, and in fact a bit of an anarchist about most things cultural and social, I‘ll not be tolerated long by that crowd. (Put another way: I don’t give a damn what you do on your own time, in your own home, it is none of my business, period.) Politically I am quite neutral about everything except what “is.” Not what ought to be, as I do have my personal philosophical notions; ideas which I keep to myself. About what may just have happened politically, I understand the why of it, and the whom it happened to, and all that too was always predictable given sufficient data. Thus regarding what will happen, I do have a sense of it all, but you likely won’t like it one bit. It isn’t pessimistic though it seems so. It is realistic, if you are without dogma: set-in-stone Left-leaning or Right-reeling; both really reeling from listening to their own intoxicated blather. And the two extremes do so love to hear themselves go on. And then, of course, I may simply be dead wrong, making a fool of myself, something I do quite naturally.

My sense of it, this Empire: The Strategy of Interdependence

Right then, that out of the way, I will spell out what I get from my 55-some years of adult participation in the great American political delusion. While it is all a shame, and I am ashamed often to admit being an American these days, I know America’s light must not go out: so goes America, as the foundation of liberty, so shall go the world. If democracy (not the lunatic-Left’s version) disappears here, it is lost to the world in a matter of time; if the idea of freedom which founded America (not the rabid-Right’s version) disappears here, it shall be lost for at least a full generation, if not two; if the hope for world peace in some section of the world, like the Middle East (not the radical-Rabbinical version in Israel) is lost on the world, it shall not return until the newest high-tech dark-ages have run its course.

And this I fear is my sense of it. I only speak to my fellow country-men, Americans and those which have chosen to emigrate to this soil and try to live free for maybe the first time. That is how almost every single one of us, or our forefathers, came to abide on this section of global landscape. In the hope of finding freedom; the hope of ensnaring that intangible, justifiable joke called justice; the hope for a future.

Instead we are, nearly every man, woman and child, throwing it all away. Affluence, money, both in-and-of-itself and the incessant dream of more of it, has obliterated the soul of nearly each and every one of us. Including the children. Since 9/11, our leader has lied to everyone regularly; not to mistaken him for a “truly” elected president, (not the nonsense that the Republicans stole the last Presidential election, that is just stupid) instead meaning that, by and large, absolutely nobody even voted, with the exception of those dogmatic Republicans and Democrats voting for their long-held jobs in federal, state and local government (do the math). This funny little fantastic Fuhrer has pursued policies, passed executive orders and Kowtowed both Houses of Congress into obscene obedience; he has, in short, set course for a level of tyranny not seen since our last four “leaders,” Clinton, Carter, Reagan and Bush the Larger (not one so pernicious as this present presence in our midst) when each obediently served the very same masters!

Empire isn’t built in a day, they, each in their own way, their own rhetoric, their own methods built upon each other’s site. From foundation, mortar, frame and roof, they all built this global regime. Using blueprints laid forth in the immediate aftermath of World War II, refined and redrawn as technology evolved, they used a strategic foil, the strategy of “interdependence.” That is what it was called for many decades: a global regime of economic interdependence: a strategy of interdependence. The blueprints drawn-up in the smoke-filled rooms of the secretive citadels of non-governmental organizations (NGO) where future leaders are trained-up, tuned-up and their thoughts molded and shaped to serve the interests of this emerging regime: Empire.

But not a Roman Empire, as the Roman people shared in its booty; its triumphs were their triumphs. This newest regime, is global, this newest regime is authoritarian, but this newest regime is not American. Thus, it will only serve its masters as all Empire’s do, but Americans will see no benefits and neither share in its triumphs nor its vision, its wealth nor its prosperity. You will share, many of you worse than others, minorities, the poor, the weak, only in this regime’s cruelty and wrath. This newest metamorphosis and evolution to Empire and imperial vision is a corporate regime, American-led, but really Western-led; elite ruled and Western/Northern in its corporate reach. The global regime is Corporazioni. Corporatism is its ideology. Materialism its power and wealth; money its God: The “U.S. Dollar,” but in its coming conversion to raw electronic funds transfer at the point of sale (EFT/POS) in real time. As former CEO of CitiBank, Winston Lord once wrote a decade ago, “under this new financial regime, there is no place to hide.”

When I say it is a corporate regime I mean just that: i.e., corporations, multinational and conglomerate, monopoly and cartelized in an ever-shrinking merger of one after another multinational firm into a centralized monolithic structure which will dominate every aspect of everyone’s lives. And there is nothing more totalitarian than a monopoly corporation. It is these masters of industries, who have grown from mere Captains to Rulers of kingdoms, the size of which old Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan did not even dream of. Of the 100 largest economies in the world 51 are corporations. Did I call these corporate cretins “masters?” I must be an obscure right-wing conspiracy theorist to have suggested this. Well, only to the disingenuous faux progressive-Leftists whose operations are regularly financed by these very same masters’ trusts and foundations.

Yes, there are masters. There is an elite. Since the dawn of time there has always been an elite for Christ’s sake, where have you been? Stuck over there with your itching ears plugged into Pacifica Radio’s rabid racists on the Left? The phony academics that tell you to ignore the persons that personify their office of power and instead, supposedly wisely, “understand the ‘problematic’ of the ‘institutional dynamics’ which evolve within the vast ‘methodological substratum’ of ‘empirical research.’” (And why have a method when you can have a methodology?) All this supposedly understandable only within this great noesphere of professorial wisdom. And of course only this wise and chaste vanguard can supply you with “The Truth,” -- i.e., Chomskyism’s select. (Sounds like a Safeway brand of big fat sausages.)

Or have you rushed to judgment of those such as myself, following along with Rush Limbaugh’s mimicked Hannityism, in your joyful judgmental bias against everyone not a cigar-smoking Republican gerbil? Or are you so desperately foolish to factor O’Reilly in?

The Empire: State within a State: Imperium in Imperio

Although I shall never give-up the good fight, I was born to it, and shall continue to spew forth my richly textured empirical analysis in some forum far or near, I must give up the truth if asked. America must go the way of all regimes, all governments, specifically all democracies, all empires and all imperial projects. We too shall pass into darkness and hell. Our shabby democracy has not been put through a shredder by enemies of liberty, so much as we did it to ourselves. Whether you are the one-issue orientated voter that never sees the bigger picture, or the apathetic, non-issue, could give a damn about anything but yourself, non-voter, or the “I always vote” Republican, Green or Democrat, no matter who is running and how foul their stench (often literally), ... we all have lost the race. The elite, who may pose as this or that, R) or D) after the state from which they hail, masked and veiled as liberals or conservatives, it is they who have won. And now known to all what I have argued for over twenty years, “they are the very same men that rotate in and out of government and return to the real power, the multinational monopoly corporate system. Bush Senior has been our best example, who returned to real power for these past ten years. But so too were the Clintons masked and veiled, vile to the core; and now comes a White House Cabinet of elitists so vicious and dangerous as to defy the very foundation of liberty. The key to understanding these new and ruthless demigods is one word: monopoly.

Monopoly, for the dogmatic howlers on the Left, repudiates free enterprise right along with you Leftists!... Corporatists, and its ideology Corporatism, for the self-righteous on the right, repudiates both full socialism and true free enterprise, while you still, amazingly, think GE is for free enterprise and Bush the Smaller is an American patriot! With this much blind stupidity of “activists,” insufferable insanity of the masses, democracy had no chance. Never mind that nobody votes at all any more.

Look out at what we have: A corporate state that will send every job worth having, blue-collar and white, overseas as the corporate leaders successfully formulate their personal financial objectives through their government policy making appointed positions. They are, in nearly every administration now, the same guys by name. Left-fascists “used” to call you a right-wing conspiracy theorist for stating this baldly some 15 years ago; they are quite silent on the point now because of the clear truth of the matter, that is to say, its obviousness. This goes on whether R)s or D)s are holding office. This will go on whether it be Lady Hillary of WalMart or Little King George, Lord Kerry or Sir Gore. How desperate have the Democrats become? They would place an American Four Star General on this throne just to remove any Republican! Amazingly, the Democrats are even blinder now than before Clinton! Never mind that nobody votes at all any more.

Look at where we presently are: Patriot Act I & II, Homeland Security under the newly positioned cabinet level office, stamped almost 100% approved by both Houses of Congress. DARPA, and the global surveillance system already operational with both the CIA and NSA operating domestically: Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 historiography. The U.S. Department of Defense merely Empire’s foreign legions for foreign occupation of select foreigner’s lands for commercial acquisitions. And every Empire is commercial! Never mind that nobody votes at all any more.

Look at who we are: In every corner of America nearly everyone is on some drug, something to make them happy,...no happier, just to get by. They think they are heroes because they suffer a little stress. The film industry shoves their peculiar dishonest and defiled culture down everyone’s throat then wonders in stupefaction that they are both held in worshipful esteem (by those who share their malignant narcissism) as little Princesses and simultaneously hated (by those who disagree with it, but they too still stare numbly at the damn tube). Never mind that nobody gets to vote on this “programming” of the masses.

You cannot have Empire without nihilism

As it happens, unfortunate wanderers often put to the test the halls of safety, bringing to light by their mere presence the values that have been cultivated in these, and revealing whether those who are prosperous have learned that the outcasts` misfortune commands their care. For he who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth should be the first to know its value... --Homer

You ask what we can do about it? Part and parcel of Empire is that the masses must be ignorant, naive and or stupid. It is a given by the elite that “we the people” are a combination of all three. “Liberty can not be preserved without general knowledge among people.” -- John Adams (August 1765)

Try to understand this newest form of Empire. Take a map of the world, lay it out flat on the table. Circle each major city, each major port, each major airport, all in red. Now circle each region where strategic raw materials rest: oil, natural gas, chromium, phosphate, coal, iron ore, magnesium and the major bodies of water, each in blue. Now overlay this map with a clear acetate film. Mark in black every major monopoly corporation’s significant operations except retail: manufacturing, mining, oil and gas exploration, and major overseas expansions like in China. Now in purple (the color of Royalty) mark the flow of foreign direct investment globally from the richest western nation’s headquarters of the monopoly merchant bankers: the now (for the first time) China’s entrance into the new world at the top of foreign direct investment will reveal itself. But understand this, America as America has no part in any of this. America as America is merely one political tool of this regime, a commercial banking and industrial regime which needs America only as government to build the new order in its legal apparatuses. The new global regimes of power and governance are the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and GATT; The World Bank; The Bank for International Settlements; the UN, NATO, Group of Eight, International Monetary Fund, and on and on ad nauseam. It is these regimes of power and governance that, so it is intended, will govern all that matters in the world of finance, manufacturing and production. These organs are made-up of the same corporate elite that negotiate and orchestrate the rules that shall govern all that matters.

Remember the map you set out on your table. If you look closely, squint your eyes a bit, you will see that the names of nations disappear. Only the names of cities, areas of resources, waterways and the regimes of governance named above remain. It is these that are set to become but city-states in a borderless world. There is no America, China, Great Britain or France; there is no Iraq or Afghanistan, but regions where the people must be brought to heal. Just as the Los Angeles Police Department has its headquarters and decentralized precincts, whereby they send in their troops to quell a riot in a disgruntled part of its fiefdom, so too shall Empire settle matters in its regions where Empire needs peace. Peace, so as to exploit the resources of the region in its behalf. Not in America’s American’s behalf (as Rome did for Roman’s). But to quell a region and control its people and things (resources, rivers and waterways, airports, roads and financial institutions). I have called this process worldwide Global Triage (Triage: from the French term for choosing who in emergency room treatment gets treated and who is allowed to die); it applies quite well: this regime will decide who lives and dies globally in every region that matters. And for precisely the reasons outlined:

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing. (Source: From “Parameters” " http://carlisle-www.army.mil" , Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: US Army War College)

Each and every area of life, of commerce, modified and synthesized, organized according to western GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Procedures) methods by the WTO, IMF, the World Bank, ExIm Bank and the host of hosts, Empire’s foreign legions, the Pentagon. Just as the LAPD, supported by the U.S. Marines, silenced dissent during the L.A. Riots, so too does Empire police these small cities of unruly ruffians in Baghdad and Kabul. Soon enough, Damascus and Jerusalem. But you get the point, wherever Empire needs to exert itself for control of resources, waterways, whether there be diamonds or iron ore, rice and beans, trees or bamboo...if it matters to Empire, all will succumb: triage.

Americans, do dare to understand this, America doesn’t matter anymore to Empire. America is a mere cog in the wheel whose subject’s living standards must come down. Jobs Americans thought were theirs will be theirs only if they speak Farsi, Hindi, etc.; accept living in India, Pakistan or Malaysia. Soon, very soon indeed, companies like Boeing will not just move their headquarters to Chicago from Seattle and Everett, Washington State, previously known as one of the fifty states of America, but to Beijing, in what was famously known in the past as the Peoples Republic of China. These feudalistic monopoly corporations will, one and all, go where the wages are very low and the local Junta will enforce a non-union labor force receiving little or no benefits.

I recently heard an argument that India was sending its surplus population to America and they were filling American high-tech jobs at three times less pay. The wrong thinking here is this: There are no more Americans nor Indians, so there is no surplus Indian population doing anything. In a borderless world we are, every single one of us, global workers; therefore the Indians that follow ITT from America today on to Malaysia next, going where the jobs are going, are fulfilling their destiny under Empire. If Americans will not learn the language of foreign lands and take the jobs offered therein, they will remain here in what was once called America and live in a steadily declining job market, a steadily declining standard of living. I guarantee Bush the Smaller (or Lady Hillary of WalMart) will not stop steadily spending your earnings! I did not state above “citizens” either; citizens of Empire are either serfs or subjects, subject to Empire’s dictate, that is why they are called subjects. Serfs are the ones that cannot or will not adjust to Empire’s new demands. Their kingdom destined to be serfdom. A hi-tech feudalism is implied in global Empire; it is especially applicable when Empire’s masters, our rulers, are of Corporazioni’s ilk.

This is the future. Borders already do not matter, you just have not felt the weight of what this means. When borders no longer matter, then being American doesn’t either, as what was known as America simply no longer exists. Put plainly -- when borders no longer matter neither do you.

It is certainly not just myself, deluding myself, that what we have here is Empire in its rawest form, its religious form, as all Empire‘s tend towards a sense of the divine. Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, recently wrote an intriguing piece titled “Practice to Deceive: Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario--it’s their plan.” He argues that the neo-conservatives have a vision for what they want to do in the Middle East and deception has always been part of their ideological make-up. In one telling paragraph he captures the argument when he wrote that the current crop of neo-conservative hawks have a vision for the world, a vision not “unlike,” but “exactly like” a religious epiphany. Regarding the present plan for the entire Middle East, not just Iraq, he stated it this way:

The hawks’ [other] response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. ‘We need to be more assertive,’ argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, ‘and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.’ Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States ‘occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.’...What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there`s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics. (emphasis added, The Washington Monthly, 2003.)

Understand this as well. It doesn’t matter that all Empires fall, every imperial vision comes to an end. This will be cold comfort when it is pressed forward at your expense, your children’s expense, if not their lives, your future. It never matters that the Empire will fail, it is always that “it will try.” Bush the Smaller, a Four Star General, or Lady Hillary of WalMart, will, each of them in their own way, their own speed of endeavor, their own stratagems will continue to try. Try as you might, face nothing else, but face this fundamental fact. It is in their trying that your future holds such bleakness.

Therefore, what can we do about America evolving, and now evolving very rapidly indeed, into Empire? Well, exactly nothing. Nobody can do anything about this; nothing, nada, nyet. One can join the elite (though the doors are mostly closed now), work for them (though they need fewer and fewer every year), or try as you might to “become” one of their minions, monopoly corporate dupes, lobbyists, or elected D)s or R)s. Or you will either learn to live with it, or die; live within it, and survive (and only those which truly understand all this will have any chance at all for that). And survive meaning just that and no more, scratching out a living as your standard of living slides ever closer to the rawest form of poverty. Or live on Empire’s fringe, outside of affluence, in a moderate poverty, outside of the system, outside of its laws... “outlaws,” that is to say. That is what Homeland Security is really for. To protect the homeland, the Empire’s roots, its body politic from the likes of you.

What must happen

Look at what will have to happen, eventually, for the Empire to succeed. This future is clear to some. Empire and the imperial ambitions that go along with it mean specific things: Greater governmental spending, higher taxes, lowered standard of living for the masses, greater burdens on the working man and woman. Universal service and sacrifice of all the subjects of Empire. Everyone must pull their weight, tote that barge...the youth will see imperial service selectively; drafted...if not a year or so after the next election is won by Sir George the Smaller then certainly soon enough thereafter. It would go down easier with a Democrat in the White House of course, and should that miraculously take place (which the odds are something like winning the lotto) the designated white Democrat in the White House will act even more swiftly to enact this selective service for the country. It would go down so much easier with Lady Hillary of WalMart signing-off on it. Why? Because liberals and D)s cannot find the courage it takes to take on one of their, supposedly, own. What if this decision were taken by a Four Star General? You know the Democrats could not then bring themselves to even a furrowed brow, a frown.

One thing that always amazes me is how pragmatic Democrats can be; they will endorse anything, anyone, that might defeat a Republican in the White House. For decades the Democrats have led the anti-war movements (often late in the game); they have been the leaders in denouncing the military. Now, because their line-up to take on Mr. Bush is so weak and the nation’s masses have war-fever, they are considering a man whose sole credentials are his four stars and his vast array of contacts with defense firms. Defense contractors, the bugbear of every liberal for decades. Now that the regime has Homeland Security, Patriot Acts I & II, the CIA and NSA can operate domestically and all this vast centralization is under direct control of the White House with its new cabinet post...give it over to a Four Star General...there’s some bright thinking.

It’s inescapable. One way or another you are going to support this Empire. Whether through capitulation and submission, or through raw cowardice; the latter revealing itself more each day in more and more subjects as Lord Bush passes imperial decree after executive decree and our leaders fall silent in a cowardly spectacle. Watch Bush the Smaller as he ratchets-up the fear-mongering so effectively with the silly colored terrorist alerts: yellow, red, etc.; what blarney, bullocks, what hubris this child of an elitist carries in his breast!

Muslims persecuted by the thousands, mild-mannered peace activists barred from flying on the airlines, individuals arrested at airports for joking they have “a bomb in their wallet,” as others, even the elderly, are strip-searched while in a wheelchair, still others declared “illegal combatants” (a term not even found in American jurisprudence, another indication America is no more). Because they once upon a time traveled to a far off land? America has become a nation of cowards. But we have seen all this before:

“Finally, the German nationalists, the right-wing conservatives, who venerated “honor” and “heroism” as the central characteristics of their program. Oh God, what infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward! One might at least have expected that, once their claim in January proved illusory--that they had “tamed” the Nazis and “rendered them harmless“-- they would act as a “brake” and “prevent the worst.” Not a bit of it. They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews, the persecution of Christians. They were not even bothered when their own party was prohibited, and their own members were arrested.” (Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler, FSG, p.131)

We cannot see what Mr. Bush and his most vile crop of neo-conservatives plan and execute before our befuddled eyes. Lord Bush the Smaller is already thinking what Bill Clinton had already proposed during early 2003: running for a third (and fourth?) term in office after his second term begins to wind-down. He can simply claim national emergency (it has precedent). Only after the election is won will Bush contemplate the already proposed universal draft of the youth for reasons never spoken. We will be told we have to “go it alone,” the great nation that we are, to bring justice and democracy to Iraq, to set the course for liberty in the Middle East, to end the death of American soldiers beleaguered in war zones afar. This is why Lord Bush is brow-beating an unwieldy United Nations to throw their troops in the fray. He knows full well Germany, France, China and Russia (and a hundred others) opposed the war resolution at the same UN, oppose it still. Why would they (then) bail out an arrogant U.S. president who has lied all along, along with Tony Blair, to get “US” in the war in the first place? They will not, and Bush knows this. But with their refusal he can later berate them one and all to the American people as “the reason“ we must go it alone. And we love it so to hate the French and Germans. And along with his cohort of media whores at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox “factors this in” he can convince American mothers to send their children to die. And this can be so easily accomplished, all so easily, legally. We have seen all this before:

“Constitutional lawyers define it as a change of constitution by means not foreseen therein. By this definition the Nazi revolution of March 1933 was not a revolution. Everything went strictly “by the book,” using means that were permitted by the constitution. At first there were “emergency decrees” by the president of the Reich, and later a bill was passed by a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag giving the government unlimited legislative powers, perfectly in accordance with the rules for changing the constitution.” (Haffner, Ibid., p. 124)

Americans have made their politics their religion

The truly ignorant or naive American may be forgiven if they think, along with their historical counterparts of Germany, circa, 1933, that, “All this was still something one only read about in the press. You did not see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone before. There were brown SA uniforms on the streets...but otherwise it was “business as usual.” (Ibid., p. 109) They could not see the brown shirts who were the “media representatives” of the 1933 Reich, then pamphleteering, stumping, soap-box rants; at once browbeating, then slandering opponents, shouting them down, then beating them for real if need be. We have our own regime enforcers as “media representatives,” of Amerika, “Media Brown Shirts,”... pamphleteering, stumping, soap-box rants; at once browbeating, then slandering opponents, shouting them down, then beating them for real if need be. The beatings some critics have taken have utterly silenced them, and we have seen many a critic banned, fired, ruined financially. Is it less an act of violence to ban, silence and slander than to whack ‘em over the head with a black-jack or night-stick? Isn’t it interesting that in Amerika the night-stick is called a baton, as though wielded by a short-skirted adolescent in a parade? Just as Mr. Bush Junior did at Yale as head cheerleader.

it did not begin with Empire acting in its divine capacity that Empire took on religious overtones. Americans have long made their politics religion rather than a secular act primed to escort our means of governance. All sides have made politics their religion which is why it has the flavor of carnival, a spectacle, just as it was in the Germany Haffner witnessed. The feminist dominated Greens, the corporate Democrats and certainly the symbiotic relationship of the present crop of Republicans with fundamentalism’s dispensationalists bears witness once again that yet another democracy has lost its way. And this one lost its way to evolve into an American-led corporate empire. Not a spoken of, thousand-year Reich; not spoken of that is, and that’s all.

And if the term Empire still doesn’t sit well with the present reader, the reader needs to grow-up. And Americans hate to grow-up these days. If the term Empire bothers some change the definition, fine, words and their terms of usage change all the time as knowledge and reality sinks in and the truth can only be understood by the new terms and phrases of the day. But Empire, an American-led empire, a corporate empire, “is” what the current administration is all about. Not only in the Middle East do we make war, but the world over if necessary. As the tenacious John Pilger recently wrote while sitting in on a meeting of journalists and aid workers in Iraq,... “It was as though we were disconnected from the world outside: a world of rampant, rapacious power and great crimes committed in our name by our government and its foreign master. Iraq is the ‘test case’, says the Bush regime, which every day sails closer to Mussolini’s definition of fascism: the merger of a militarist state with corporate power. Iraq is a test case for western liberals, too. As the suffering mounts in that stricken country, with Red Cross doctors describing ‘incredible’ levels of civilian casualties, the choice of the next conquest, Syria or Iran, is ‘debated’ on the BBC, as if it were a World Cup venue.” (Independent.com, 2003)

The fact that a man with so little political sense, a total lack of every intellectual attribute needed for secular political governance was endorsed by the “gray men” for Governor of California on the sole basis of “name recognition,” and the bizarre truth is that Californians, (being a bit odd themselves according to some) might just vote for him to win, is a shame on us the U.S. We know “who” by “name” will rule California even if Noam cannot bring himself to “personalize the problematic.” What, then is our future?

High Tech Corporate Feudalism

Of course, one can always argue differently. I shall make my own point, as I said, “my sense of it.” The major U.S. monopoly multinationals with their ongoing mergers and acquisitions globally will continue apace. Not even Arnold can stop the economic attrition in California wearing out the workers, blue collar and white; jobs sent overseas following entire operations already operating, moved to markets more amenable to profit and fewer benefits. Not even Arnold can address the sheer enormity of tax dollars slipped into the hands of GE, Bechtel and Halliburton, Brown & Root. Not even the Terminator can rid the planet of the high-tech feudalism this monopolistic oligarchy brings to the land. Indeed, they own Arnold. Why else would a Captain of industries (Bechtel, Boeing, etc.), Herr Schultz, endorse this bad-actor for the position, the input, unless he can control the output?

What democrat could alter the landscape, even if he or she would, when each and every one is bought and paid for by precisely the same Corporatism which presently owns both Houses of Congress, the White House and white presidents? Lady Hillary of WalMart? Please!

Empire may mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Again, it may even be difficult to define today (so I’ve been told) for some. But I may have less of a problem with it than most and not because I am so darn smart. Simply because I have little allegiance to anything except liberty and I concern myself only about what “is.”

Where we will be in a few years is just not that difficult to imagine, not that hard to figure. The debt and deficits alone are staggering; never has the trade deficit and the federal monetary deficit been as high as a percentage of GDP, and nearly equal. Total obligations of the enormous federal crime families is a robust 44 trillion dollars. My calculator doesn’t have that many zeros! Never has personal individual debt been quite so enormous, nearly every working man, woman and child is presently bankrupt by any rational mathematical standard applied, which of course logically explains record personal bankruptcies. Corporate debt is at record levels, which of course logically explains record business bankruptcies. Unemployment figures have never been so manipulated by a system of mathematical make-believe to make us believe we have a recovery in progress without the productive participation of some 30 to 40 million workers. Workers not looking for work is why they are not counted. As though the fact that they have given-up looking for that job, where there are 700 applicants for every meager-paying service job, makes them less jobless! Workers working only part time and often only a few hours a week are not unemployed by the reckoning of our masters, they are simply “marginal.”

GDP means Gross Domestic Product and it is indeed gross to claim we have any worthwhile products produced domestically any longer. The only thing America can be said to actually produce is more debt. That is the future story one day writ large. Made in America my a posteriori.

What of the stock market one naively asks, thinking “it” has some relationship to the domestic economy being prosperous or in a recovery for the many? The reality? An ever growing process of overseas investment in unproductive acquisitions. The very same process that little dark magician and his crew performed on the world stage for the Clinton myth is in for a repeat performance, a slick kind of ... “come on Alan, take a bow!” One more time we print the cash to pay the diabolical debts and raise taxes to re-collect what was spent on defense and foreign infrastructures where empire wants to expand. We are to rebuild Iraq but we cannot fix the roads in America? We can bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan as it slips away here in America and America’s children cannot find a decent education? And the little dark magician keeps conjuring-up his mystical magical manna.

This is done to the glee of the raw speculator in stocks; stocks again so overpriced as to defy even the little magician. Yet another day of reckoning is in the future. Another round of false millionaires, each as logically mathematically bankrupt as the former, each shall find their dreams dashed in the coming market “correction.” Don’t you love the language we are taught to use... a “correction.” Sort of like a typo -- just a little white-out in the old days, replaced now by Microsoft “Works” program spell checker -- and what a hoot, it wasn’t that bad.

Except for those that cannot find a job after they have lost everything, and at fifty-five years old find themselves working non-union in the Garden Center at Lady Hillary’s WalMart. But this may not happen for a few more years, certainly interest rates will not rise significantly “before” Bush the Smaller gets re-elected! Bush the Senior will not have it. And again, Bush the Larger has been back in power for ten years, not, like so many democrats wrongly hoped and believed, sidelined like some aging running back for the Dallas Cowboys. No, the “must happen” correction, must be held off until after that little stage play the mad magician performs is in curtain call. Nobody the wiser still.

And what will we hear in the very near term? “Nothing any different from what has gone before.” But what will in fact happen must happen. More smaller business failures as the trickle-down from Corporatism’s domestic economic attrition in affect effects one and all; more unemployment not less. The IRS has targeted small businesses as the audit of choice. Of course they have, the smaller large companies and the smaller small businessmen cannot afford the Big Eight to do battle with this manna collecting monstrosity. An evil so great some few Libertarians have called it the “eternal revenue system.” That sucking sound wasn’t just jobs going overseas Ross, it is the whooshing sound of the collective toilet flushing individual taxpayers into the general system’s septic-tank where the biggest curds float to the top, the rest sink quietly out of site. “All this [was] still something one only read about in the press. You did not see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone before.”

What are we to do with the aging demographic in America? Soon enough those retired, or the older unemployed or, unemployable is the new term, those on the many doles will simply out number the youth working and being taxed to pay for the retired Volk. Given everything else noted above, add even greater unemployment among minorities and young people, add further domestic economic attrition through corporate expansion overseas, what is a tyrant to do? Draft the little buggers is but the only real world solution; none too few other analysts have suggested this as one such future solution. When we see adults, between twenty-three to thirty-five scooting about on mountain bikes, decked-out in childish garb, out having fun like the nine year-olds the bikes were originally meant for, how can an honest broker of thought not endorse another military draft? We have a nation of grown men acting as children, with no thought of the future with the sole exception of “having more time off,” having “more fun,” and escaping further into a neurotic festival of mutual exhibitionism. The worst? the ones strutting about like John Wayne, sunglasses perched on their proboscis, acting bad-to-the-bone...for attention, over the fact that he has a new shiny truck with a still newer ATV in the back! Draft the buggers does come to mind if there is to be any hope for this state of affairs whose affairs are in a terrible state. While I cannot say I approve of this solution, because I do not approve of just about anything the American-led Empire is doing, it is a solution I can state categorically “they” are looking at.

Alas, what I sense is not going to affect me too much with the exception of my beleaguered compassionate-side; this darkness coming over the land shall be the ruin of so many an innocent. Those enlightened self-interested greedy little malevolent monkeys, the nihilistic narcissists and dead-beat creatures that personally gain by all this, the politicians, the monopoly corporate cretins, the mob lined-up at the various troughs, bleeding one and all, every “other,” well, I don’t much care for them. But you could have guessed that right off. The fact that this coming corporate feudalism will bear little resemblance to tyrannies of the past is little comfort. That it is high-tech, well lighted, air conditioned and instantly gratifying in such a gratuitous fashion, will make it seem, to many, a benign kind of tyranny. A kind of benevolent beast. These four horsemen will seemingly come bearing new gifts for all, SUVs and home mortgages with little or no interest rates “for sixteen months with no payments until September.” We’ve all heard the call. It is the stuff which imprisons the soul.

The Things That Matter

The only way Empire, even American-led as it is, can and will mend its profligate ways domestically? Taxes must be raised; therefore the masses must be razed, put to work and taxed too. Oil and gas must be raised, from mother earth; therefore the Middle East must be razed to protect American interests. Whose interests? Not mine. Not most of you. But we know whose interests are being looked after, explored and protected. Don’t we? Interest rates must be raised, to protect that flimsy piece of medium we exchange for things; things whose cost continues to rise effortlessly, ah, the almighty dollar, and inflation is the most secretive of all the razing to come.

No, the charade must come to an end, the correction must happen, the wars will not end, the expansion overseas and the global military “footprint” will enlarge to encompass everything “that matters.” And everything that matters will come under an absolutist feudal corporate control. Things that “don’t matter,” like what you watch on TV; your desperate need for yet another new pair of shoes; the need to strut before your crowd with your stuff exposed; the need to “get ahead” of your neighbor, your sibling, yourself. That invisible treadmill so many cannot bring themselves to get off because “it is all they are,” all they have. Things that “don’t matter,” like who you have sex with and for heaven’s sake “why”... all will be allowed you, as these things don’t matter to Empire. Indeed, it is the “stuff of Empire” which is meant to enslave! If you learn no other expression learn these two: The “things that matter” (Empire will control absolutely) “things that don’t matter,” (you know) are yours to keep. Even your life is yours to fritter away as so many have in America before you.

What matters to Empire? You will work. You will pay. And pay until it hurts, you will pay and you will obey. The future is clear to some. Ignore it at your own risk. What can you do? You? You actually mean “you?” I haven’t got a clue. That is, well, up to you isn’t it?

Mr. Craig B Hulet: Security, Military Affairs & International Relations Expert (Author: The Hydra of Carnage: Bush’s Imperial War-making and the Rule of Law: An Analysis of the Objectives and Delusions of Empire. Available @ www.kcandassociates.org); Hulet was Special Assistant for Special Projects to Congressman Jack Metcalf (Ret.) www.craigbhulet.com Hulet can be reached at: [e-mail]
Copyright 2003 The Artful Nuance and Craig B Hulet

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Die Zahlen:
http://www.washingtonpost.com//wp-srv/politics/polls/vault/s…

washingtonpost.com
Americans Dissatisfied With Bush`s Domestic Agenda
Poll Shows Country Still Backs President on Security Matters

By Richard Morin and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 19, 2004; 5:15 PM


President Bush delivers his State of the Union Address Tuesday night to an American public that has become broadly dissatisfied with his domestic agenda, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that, on the eve of his annual address to Congress, Bush continues to enjoy a huge advantage over Democrats on matters of national security, besting them by two to one in the fight against terrorism and by nearly as broad a margin on his handling of the conflict in Iraq. But while Bush retains the support of nearly six in 10 Americans, the public believes Democrats would do a better job on a full range of domestic issues, such as the economy, prescription drugs for the elderly, health insurance, Medicare, the budget deficit, immigration and taxes. And Bush has lost the advantage on education policy he once enjoyed.

As a result, Bush finds himself in a statistical dead heat with the opposition nine months before the election. When matched against a generic Democratic presidential candidate -- the party is holding its first nominating contest tonight in Iowa -- Bush narrowly wins, 48 percent to 46 percent. On the question of who is trusted to handle the nation`s major problems, Bush is roughly even with Democrats, 45 percent to 44 percent -- down from an 18-point advantage Bush enjoyed nine months ago.

The president`s speech will address this anxiety by giving greatest emphasis to Bush`s domestic proposals. Aides said the president will reverse the order of his annual address from last year -- when he closed with the case for war in Iraq -- to put his closing emphasis on domestic issues such as health care, the economy, Social Security and immigration.

That election-year emphasis closely follows the public`s wishes. The poll found that worries about domestic issues have increased in the past year while concerns about terrorism, Iraq and the economy have dipped. More Americans want Bush to discuss domestic programs (40 percent) than want to hear him discuss the campaign against terrorism (15).

Overall, the poll found support for Bush remains healthy and essentially unchanged at 58 percent, in the same range it has been since July. At the same time, the number of people who strongly disapprove of his presidency reached 30 percent. That`s the highest level of strong disapproval ever recorded in his presidency, and a clear sign of the intensifying dislike with which Bush is viewed by his political opponents.

The poll makes clear that neither Bush nor Democrats in Congress have been given a clear mandate by Americans to lead. It suggests that the fall presidential campaign may be driven by whether voters prefer a war president, in which case Bush has a prohibitive advantage, or one focused on the domestic concerns that favor Democrats.

As a whole, the survey findings portray Bush as a popular president who is championing unpopular programs. He has gained no advantage from the recent Republican-led success in providing a prescription drug benefit to senior citizens. And his call last week to establish a manned base on the moon and eventually send American astronauts to Mars is broadly unpopular.

Bush aides said his speech tonight will seek to remind the public about his national security achievements before laying out his bona fides on domestic matters. "He`s going to speak at length about the actions we have taken over the course of last year and the path we`re on of assuring that the country and our world is a safer, more peaceful place to live," a senior administration official said.

On Iraq, Bush`s ratings have retreated from the surge he experienced after the capture of Saddam Hussein. A majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- continue to approve of the job Bush is doing handling the situation in Iraq, down from 60 percent one month ago but still higher than at any time in the fall.

Aides said Bush will talk about the U.S. move to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis this summer, which may sooth Americans anxious about the cost of the war. A clear majority of the public -- 56 percent -- continues to say the war with Iraq was the right thing to do, down slightly from last month. The proportion who say current casualty levels are unacceptable ticked up after dropping immediately after Hussein was captured last month. But six in 10 agree with Bush`s claim that the war with Iraq has helped to make the United States at least somewhat safer and more secure.

Bush appears to be well positioned on broader matters of terrorism. The heightened terror alerts over the holidays, rather than raising doubts, seem to have given Americans more confidence in the government`s ability to defend the country against terrorist attacks. Fifty-six percent now say they are confident that the government can prevent further terrorist attacks in this country, up from 45 percent in September and the highest level of confidence in two years.

As White House officials described it, Bush will take a more defensive position on domestic policies, touting a proposal for more job-training funds. The economy has lost about 2.3 million jobs since Bush took office, a budget surplus has turned into a large deficit, and Americans are divided about his main remedy for the economy: $1.7 trillion in tax cuts.

"We are an economy that is going through great change," one official said. "I think he`ll demonstrate that he`s not satisfied with the progress that we`ve made, and he`ll speak directly to those issues related to jobs."

There is reason not to be satisfied. Although the public has clearly noted an uptick in the economy -- 51 percent approve of the job Bush is doing managing the economy -- four in 10 Americans still believe the economy is in recession, the poll found. By 58 percent to 39 percent they rate the economy and not terrorism as the bigger problem facing the country. And when asked who they would prefer handling the nation`s economy, more Americans favored Democrats in Congress (50 percent) than preferred Bush (43 percent), the first time in more than two years that Bush has failed to best the Democrats on this key issue.

Bush also plans tonight to discuss the high cost of health care, his proposal to allow more immigrants to earn legal status, and his proposals to have private Social Security accounts -- all issues on which the public has concerns about his leadership. For example, four in 10 approve of the way that Bush is handling the issue of prescription drugs for seniors -- six percentage points lower than his rating less than a year ago.

Overall, while 55 percent were generally positive when asked how they felt about Bush`s policies, only 12 percent said they were enthusiastic about them and 43 percent described themselves as "satisfied but not enthusiastic." Another 15 percent said Bush made them "angry." Even among Republicans, fewer than one in four Republicans -- 23 percent -- said they were enthusiastic about Bush`s policies.

A total of 1,036 randomly selected adults were interviewed Jan. 15 to 18 for this survey. Margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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January 20, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
Shattering Iowa Myths
By TODD S. PURDUM
Candidate Results* %
X - John Kerry 1,128 37.7%

John Edwards 957 31.9%

Howard Dean 543 18.1%

Dick Gephardt 318 10.5%

Dennis Kucinich 39 1.3%

Wesley Clark 3 0.1%

Joe Lieberman 0 0%

Carol Moseley Braun 0 0%

Al Sharpton 0 0%

Uncommitted 15 0.5%

DES MOINES, Jan. 19 — For Iowa Democrats, Senator John Kerry showed himself to be what he has argued all along he was: the reassuring establishment candidate with the war hero`s record, solid policy positions and broad experience in government to be a strong challenger to President Bush. He shattered conventional Iowa wisdom that organization is all.

But the race for the nomination has just begun. The surprise second-place showing by Senator John Edwards of North Carolina reflected similar judgments about how he would stand against Mr. Bush, and makes him a fresh force to contend with, especially in South Carolina, which votes two weeks from Tuesday. With little organization or name recognition in Iowa, the Edwards campaign caught fire in the last 10 days — a surge the senator attributed to his more optimistic message.

The third-place finish of Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, evaporated the aura of inevitability he once sought here, and his fiery concession contrasted sharply with Mr. Kerry`s husky, "Iowa, I love you," and Mr. Edwards`s soft, smiling speech.

Yet Dr. Dean still has more money than any rival, a strong operation in New Hampshire, which votes next week, and legions of supporters who are sure to join him in fighting back.

Tradition holds that a victory in Iowa can be worth percentage points in New Hampshire. But the two states have chosen different winners in all but 3 of the 13 competitive nominating contests since 1972.

Perhaps the only definitive development here was Representative Richard A. Gephardt`s distant fourth-place finish, which spelled the end of his quest for the White House and probably his political career. He comes from Missouri, he won the Iowa caucuses in 1988 only to run out of money, and he had staked everything on winning again.

Instead, it was Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, fighting 1,300 miles from his home base in Boston, who came back from the cold Monday night. Now he heads to his neighboring state of New Hampshire, where he had struggled for months against Dr. Dean, then Gen. Wesley K. Clark, as the man with the wind in his sails.

General Clark, who entered the race late and made a calculated decision to skip Iowa, may live to regret his choice. Mr. Kerry`s victory forces General Clark to fight for the same patch of ground — strength on national security affairs — and it sharply shifts the rationale for his own candidacy, which had been predicated on being the Democrats` best anti-Dean choice. General Clark has led Mr. Kerry in recent New Hampshire polls, and if Mr. Kerry now comes on strong, he will face trouble.

In the end, Iowa did what its defenders say it does best: It tested the candidates, over many months, first in small settings and then in a media glare, and revealed weaknesses that were not initially clear and strengths that only gradually became apparent. Whether Dr. Dean`s candidacy can be revived remains to be seen, but he was unbowed in defeat. Until now, he had defied expectations at every turn.

Mr. Kerry came here by hard necessity, hoping for a miracle. In his final weeks of frantic campaigning, aided by volunteer support from fellow veterans, he managed to change the subject from perceived doubts about his own personality — often caricatured as cold and uncomfortable — and his will to win into questions about whether Dr. Dean`s temperament was too hot to make him electable. At his post-caucus rally Monday night, Dr. Dean looked more like Howard Beale, the angry anchor in "Network," than "Marcus Welby, M.D.," while Mr. Kerry was every inch the veteran senator he is.

"John Kerry is the one who has that presidential way about him," said Artelle Payne, a retired liquor wholesaler in Waukee, echoing the words of Mr. Kerry`s own stump speech and scores of voters interview on their way into caucuses. "He`s the one who can walk right in there on Day 1 and do it."

Dr. Dean, whose thousands of enthusiastic out-of-state volunteers initially seemed to make him a strong favorite in a caucus system that favors shoe leather and turnout, is far from politically dead. But Mr. Kerry`s showing, and Mr. Edwards`s rise, complicate Dr. Dean`s job enormously and time is short. A campaign that began as a meandering marathon a year ago has been transformed into a mad eight-day dash to New Hampshire — and to the seven states, from South Carolina to Arizona, that vote on Feb. 3.

"New Hampshire is not going to be the end of this thing," said the New Hampshire Democratic chairwoman, Kathleen Sullivan. "New Hampshire is not last in the nation, we`re first in the nation. It`s not over in New Hampshire. It goes on."

Since 1972, no nominee has finished lower than second in New Hampshire, and only Bill Clinton has finished below third in Iowa; he did not compete here in 1992, because Senator Tom Harkin was running as a favorite son.

Judy Reardon, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry in New Hampshire, could not hide her enthusiasm. "We`re as ready as can be," she said in a telephone interview even before the results were in. "Starting tomorrow, our world here is going to be turned upside down."

Ms. Sullivan praised Mr. Kerry`s effort. "He really rolled the dice by going to Iowa and fighting there. What a brilliant strategy. He`s come roaring back so hard."

Mr. Edwards, too, vowed to fight on in New Hampshire, and told his supporters: "Tonight started a movement to change this country that will sweep across America."

Both Mr. Kerry, who has relied partly on his family`s fortune, and Mr. Edwards, who is a millionaire former trial lawyer, will need to raise fresh cash quickly to stay competitive. But in the final days here, even their rivals conceded that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards had the momentum.

For now, all that trumped Dr. Dean`s organization. But New Hampshire`s motto is "Live Free or Die," and its voters are famously independent.

"They`re likely to notice Iowa, and then do what they want anyway," said Dudley Dudley, a longtime New Hampshire Democrat now backing General Clark. "It remains its own place."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 20, 2004
DIPLOMACY
Annan Signals He`ll Agree to Send U.N. Experts to Iraq
By WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 19 — Secretary General Kofi Annan gave strong indications on Monday that he would accept a request to send United Nations experts to Iraq, in a move that could help end the stalemate over how to turn over authority to an Iraqi-led government.

Mr. Annan met Monday with top American, British and Iraqi officials from Baghdad. The meeting came after months of ill will between the United States and the United Nations, which refused to authorize the Bush administration`s decision to use military action. Last fall, after a fatal bombing at its Baghdad headquarters, the United Nations pulled out of Iraq, citing security concerns and a lack of clarity about its role.

Striking a stance that was at once cooperative and cautious, Mr. Annan told a news conference that he understood the urgency of the issue but that "further discussions should take place at the technical level." Those discussions began almost immediately, with United Nations election experts being briefed on the complicated political plans by which the occupation authority hopes to transfer power to Iraqis on June 30.

Diplomats said that despite Mr. Annan`s careful public statements, it appeared likely that he would decide quickly to approve the request. A European diplomat who took part in the meeting said, "In my experience at the United Nations, when you say you`ll consider something, you`ve already put your foot on the slope."

The occupation authorities had largely shunned the United Nations in their political planning but have suddenly turned to it now that the most revered cleric among Iraq`s majority Shiite Muslims, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has objected to the American plans for a transition and has instead called for direct elections. Thousands of his followers have staged demonstrations backing his plea. A march on Monday in Baghdad drew 100,000. [Page A10.]

According to participants in the meeting on Monday, a representative of the ayatollah gave assurances that he would accept the conclusions of the United Nations experts. The United States has maintained that there is not enough time to organize direct elections.

Emerging from the meeting, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, pronounced it "a very good, open and candid exchange" and declared, "The encouraging news from today is that the secretary general agreed to consider this request very seriously."

A senior United States diplomat reported that Mr. Annan asked many questions about current conditions in Iraq but appeared interested in finding ways to take up the offer. "We didn`t get a yes answer, definitely not, but my sense of the meeting was that he was forward leaning," the diplomat said.

Last month, Mr. Annan sent a letter to Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the associate who was at the meeting on Monday, saying direct elections might not be manageable in the short time before the June 30 transfer date under current conditions in Iraq.

Ayatollah Sistani is reported to have dismissed that letter as one written under pressure from the Americans but also to have said that he might change his mind if a United Nations team came to Iraq and verified the judgment that holding direct elections was unreasonable in the time frame.

On one crucial point for Mr. Annan, he said that while any United Nations activities would be constrained by security considerations, the occupation authorities had promised to do all they could to protect workers.

The occupation authorities` invitation to Mr. Annan represented an apparent admission that the United Nations has a role to play in Iraq immediately, not just one after the transfer of sovereignty this summer, a point that Mr. Annan had been seeking to make.

Attending the meeeting in addition to Mr. Bremer were Sir Jeremy Greenstock of Britain, the No. 2 official at the Coalition Provisional Authority; John D. Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations; and three other American officials, William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs; Kim Holmes, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations; and Robert Blackwill, who is coordinating Iraq issues for the National Security Council; as well as eight members of the Iraqi Governing Council.

In confronting the request for assistance from Iraq`s occupation powers, Mr. Annan faced a quandary.

The Security Council refused to approve military action last year, and the United Nations has been excluded by the United States from the political planning that was set last November in an agreement that made no mention of any role for the world organization. Mr. Annan is consequently eager not to appear to be validating a process he had no role in formulating.

Mr. Annan removed international staff from Iraq in October after attacks on relief workers and the bombing of the United Nations` headquarters in Baghdad in August that killed 22 people.

The suicide bomb blast on Sunday at the gates of the United States administrators` compound in Baghdad, which killed at least 24 people, underscored the instability on the ground and reminded officials in New York that their people would probably be targets if they went back and associated themselves with the occupying forces.

But if he resisted the invitation to expand the world organization`s presence and enhance its role in Iraq, Mr. Annan could end up fulfilling the frequent prediction of President Bush`s that the United Nations risks becoming "irrelevant" and going the way of the League of Nations.

He is said by aides to be unforgiving of himself for having sent the original United Nations mission to Baghdad without better preparation for its security. Among the 16 staff members killed was the mission chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The date of the bombing, Aug. 19, is still a fresh one for people in the East River headquarters, many of whom counted the victims in Baghdad among their friends.

As for what duties United Nations people would have in Iraq, Mr. Annan is concerned that they be assigned to specific areas where they could have impact and not be used just to bring a degree of international legitimacy to the occupation.

Mr. Annan has set three broad conditions for the United Nations` return: "clarity" on the scope of the organization`s role, security assurances and guarantees that the responsibility would be commensurate with the risk.

The mission to study the election process is a relatively limited one in that context, but Mr. Annan cautioned people on Monday against thinking that a "massive" United Nations presence in Iraq was under consideration now.

Late on Monday, the Security Council heard a closed-session report from Adnan Pachachi, this month`s chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, on the situation in Iraq.

At a preceding lunch with Security Council members, Mr. Annan was asked by one of the ambassadors whether he intended to make his decision on the mission to Iraq "sooner or later," according to one of the participants.

He replied, "Sooner."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

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January 20, 2004
Bush to Portray Libya as an Example
By DAVID E. SANGER and NEIL MacFARQUHAR

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 — Two years after President Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" — perhaps the signature phrase of his presidency — his foreign policy aides contend that his uncompromising language and willingness to use military force have changed the behavior of potential enemies.

But that change has come at a cost, government officials from Asia to the Islamic world say, as resistance to Mr. Bush`s calls for reform and democratization has hardened in some places.

Mr. Bush plans to return to the theme of reform in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, his aides say, though he will not repeat the phrase that prompted an outcry from his critics and allies alike.

Iraq, with its long record of defying the United Nations, was the first to absorb the Bush administration`s wrath. But the decision to invade Iraq 14 months after the president`s speech changed the diplomatic landscape.

With Iran and North Korea, the administration has so far pursued diplomacy, and administration officials acknowledge that military force would be far riskier to use against either country.

In the State of the Union speech, which is to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern time, Mr. Bush will urge countries to follow the example of Libya, which recently announced that it would dismantle its nascent nuclear weapons program, a step the administration attributes to Mr. Bush`s confrontational stance toward nations seeking chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Administration officials say Iran, Sudan and to some extent Syria appear to be doing what they can to avoid confrontation with the United States.

Iran`s reluctant agreement to let international inspectors explore nuclear facilities kept secret for 18 years seems at least partly driven by the fear of attack. Syria has embraced a pragmatic approach, and its border with Iraq is no longer viewed as a passage for militants seeking to attack American forces in Iraq.

North Korea remains the stubborn outlier. Last week, its foreign minister boasted to a delegation of visiting Americans that the more time Mr. Bush spent trying to build pressure on the country to disarm, the more time North Korea had to add to its nuclear arsenal.

The C.I.A. believes that North Korea has done exactly that, producing the fuel for two or three more bombs while Mr. Bush was focused on Iraq.

Across the Islamic world, reformists from Iran to Egypt say Mr. Bush`s words and style have made it easier for their opponents to tar them as lackeys of Washington.

On issues from political reform to rewriting school curriculums, those pushing for democracy or expanded rights for women find themselves facing vociferous accusations that they are pursuing an American agenda, or American dictums.

Administration officials respond that over time Mr. Bush`s pressure will aid those reform movements, not hurt them. "I cannot see how being truthful about the nature of regimes is harmful to those who want to change those regimes," Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush`s national security adviser, said in an interview from Camp David, where she was editing the last drafts of the State of the Union speech that the president will deliver on Tuesday.

"When Ronald Reagan spoke out against the Soviet Union," she said, "it stimulated those inside, who saw they had friends around the world, and they were able to speak out. It will be easier, not harder, for democratic forces to prevail."

Ms. Rice is among the most passionate advocates of the position that Mr. Bush changed the landscape when he uttered the phrase two years ago, though she and others say it will not appear in this year`s speech. It was not repeated in last year`s State of the Union address either.

She insisted that despite the criticism directed at Mr. Bush after the speech two years ago — that there was no axis, and that Mr. Bush hurt America`s cause by labeling certain states as outlaws — the approach had been vindicated. "It really challenged the international community to get serious about this class of states pursuing weapons of mass destruction," she said.

Ms. Rice cited Mr. Bush`s Proliferation Security Initiative, in which a dozen or so countries have begun to intercept suspected weapons shipments, as an example of how the White House had motivated allies to act.

A senior defense official said: "What he did was get the whole world`s attention. It`s had an effect beyond the three nations, and whether that was accidental or calculated, in retrospect I think it was a smart thing to do."

Whether it was smart or not, Muslim scholars and officials have acknowledged in interviews that Mr. Bush fundamentally altered the way the United States dealt with the Islamic world once he spoke in such stark terms.

"It changed the status quo in the region for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran," says Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, a Saudi columnist and former editor of the pan-Arab daily Al Sharq al Awsat published in London.

"Did Bush scare people?" Mr. Rashed said. "In my opinion, yes, he did scare every single regime. Was that positive? It shows some positive elements, except in the street: it was perceived in the street as arrogance."

The administration and its supporters say the evidence that Mr. Bush`s combination of stark language and willingness to use force had the greatest effect on countries like Syria, which has softened its tone and heeded warnings to patrol its border with Iraq.

But when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell suggested Friday that Syria should follow Libya`s example and give up its unconventional weapons, the country`s state-run news organizations shot back that Israel should first give up its nuclear program.

Around the same time as the Iraq invasion, Iran began to concede that it had been secretly working to enrich uranium, though it denied that it was planning to use the material for an atomic bomb.

Reluctantly, it allowed international inspectors into the country and turned over documents detailing 18 years of surreptitious activities. It signed an accord allowing more intrusive inspections, all steps that Saddam Hussein refused to take.

Ms. Rice and others see a direct connection between Iran`s new tone and Mr. Bush`s approach, even while noting that the United States has pursued a far less confrontational strategy with Iran and North Korea than it did with Iraq. Yet even reformist members of Iran`s Parliament like Ali Shakourirad said the administration overstated its own influence.

"Bush`s `axis of evil` speech did not have much effect on our policies," he said in a recent interview, "except it made efforts for the détente policy with the U.S. worse." Mr. Shakourirad argued that pressure from the far more soft-spoken Europeans and the International Atomic Energy Agency had more to do with Iran`s decisions. "The pressure from the U.S. was not that effective," he said.

In Libya, the country`s mercurial leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, apparently worried about sharing Mr. Hussein`s fate, began negotiations with the United States and Britain to destroy his own unconventional weapons the week before the Iraq war began. He did not make concessions, though, until a ship full of centrifuge parts headed for its ports was intercepted in October.

"Libya came to the United States and Great Britain to do it," Ms. Rice argued. "That said something about who was enforcing the world`s demands."

But a longtime Republican adviser to Mr. Bush suggested last week that the impact of Mr. Bush`s speech and subsequent actions was "dramatically overblown," and that Colonel Qaddafi had begun moving to end his isolation several years ago, when he turned over suspects in the Lockerbie airplane bombing case.

Whatever the source of the concessions, the example of force used against Iraq has become part of the public mindset.

Western diplomats report that at a recent soccer match involving Saadi el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi`s soccer-playing son, fans from the opposing side chanted "Saadi, Saadi, son of the ruler, your fate will be the fate of Uday." The phrase — it rhymes in Arabic — refers to one of the sons of Mr. Hussein who was killed in an American raid.

On the Democratic campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Bush`s "axis of evil" speech is often cited as an example of how he needlessly alienated other nations.

"I think it was one of the braggadocio moments for the administration that invites scorn and ridicule," Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said in a recent interview in New Hampshire. "I was surprised that he would base a foreign policy on it."

In fact, by all accounts it began as a speechwriter`s turn of phrase, meant to signal that the president planned to deal with far more than just Al Qaeda in a post-Sept. 11 world. Two people close to the White House said Andrew H. Card, the White House chief of staff, had raised the question of whether its inclusion would so overwhelm news coverage of the 2002 State of the Union address that it would drown out the rest of the president`s message.

"No one seemed that concerned," one official reported. But Mr. Bush has not repeated the wording in more than a year.

Perhaps the reason, some American and Arab officials say, is that Mr. Bush has come to see that there has been far less progress than he hoped in encouraging wider adoption of democracy in the Islamic world by promoting the examples of emerging movements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That initiative, which Mr. Bush touched on in his 2002 address and amplified last fall, is often viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility.

Syrians bridle at the idea that the Americans can teach others about democracy, making the argument, often heard throughout the Arab world, that civil rights have eroded in the United States itself since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But they concede that they have no choice but to try to work with the Bush administration.

In an interview in late November, Syria`s president, Bashar al-Assad, insisted that the critical issue was whether the United States was using its power to act as a force for stability in the region or whether its attitude was promoting instability.

"The issue here is whether the United States has a vision to solve problems in Iraq, in the region, in the Middle East, or whether the United States doesn`t have that vision," he said. "I hope we can make better steps toward democracy in our country, but that takes time.

"No one in Syria, or maybe in the region if I want to exaggerate a little bit, asks for help from any country to have his own democracy." He added later that most Arabs now believed that the Iraq example, even if it had rid the Middle East of a leader whom many feared, was "a bad example of bringing democracy."

In the Tuesday night speech, Mr. Bush has the opportunity, officials say, to move the debate beyond the "axis of evil" phraseology. In the Middle East, Iraq has faded from the headlines somewhat. But the public zeal to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute has not, and even those pursuing the kind of reform agenda Mr. Bush would applaud say American pressure has been counterproductive.

"We are not yielding to the American threat," said Aziz Shukri, the dean of the school of international relations at the University of Kalamoon, one of Syria`s new private universities, its creation an innovation in a country where the state has dominated every institution.

"The whole world is witnessing a new era of American hegemony, American dominance," he said, "so we have to coexist with it. It doesn`t mean we like it."


David E. Sanger reported from Washington for this article and Neil MacFarquhar from Cairo.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 20, 2004
The Iowa Surprise

A great many people were caught off guard by the Iowa caucus results, including, of course, supporters of Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt. But high up on the list of bad guessers were all the political theorists who believed that the Democrats who are angry at George Bush wanted the presidential candidate who best channeled their outrage. Yesterday, at least, being angry at Mr. Bush meant wanting to find a candidate who could beat him.

John Kerry, who came in first last night, and John Edwards, who scored a surprising second, appeared to be the men voters thought looked most electable. That throws cold water, at least temporarily, on the long-held theory that primary voters favor candidates who are too far to the left or right to win in the fall. In this era of attack-dog politics, it`s nice to have a moment of pragmatism.

The fact that the two senators did so well in Iowa is, however, no proof that either would be the best Democratic nominee. Neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Edwards has yet gone through the kind of withering scrutiny that Dr. Dean endured in Iowa. Senator Kerry has at least demonstrated that he knows how to take some knocks and stage a comeback. The early months of his candidacy were a disaster of disorganization and a message void. But he regrouped and convinced Iowa voters that he had the military record and foreign affairs background necessary to take on President Bush. Senator Edwards, who once seemed doomed to spend the entire election season smiling sunnily and being ignored, is now going to find himself near the front of the pack, a place that Dr. Dean and Representative Gephardt found extremely uncomfortable.

Mr. Gephardt`s candidacy seemed over after his dismal showing. But Dr. Dean will have plenty of opportunity to rebound in New Hampshire. He can show that, like Mr. Kerry, he knows how to pull himself out of a bad patch and come back stronger.

It is always possible, of course, to invest too much meaning into something as narrow and less-than-democratic as the Iowa caucus. One of the best things about Monday night`s outcome is that the race for the nomination is likely to go on beyond New Hampshire, giving voters in more populous and diverse states a chance to have a say.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 20, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Going for Broke
By PAUL KRUGMAN

According to advance reports, George Bush will use tonight`s State of the Union speech to portray himself as a visionary leader who stands above the political fray. But that act is losing its effectiveness. Mr. Bush`s relentless partisanship has depleted much of the immense good will he enjoyed after 9/11. He is still adored by his base, but he is deeply distrusted by much of the nation.

Mr. Bush may not understand this; indeed, he still seems to think that he`s another Lincoln or F.D.R. "No president has done more for human rights than I have," he told Ken Auletta.

But his political handlers seem to have decided on a go-for-broke strategy: confuse the middle one last time, energize the base and grab enough power that the consequences don`t matter.

What do I mean by confusing the middle? The striking thing about the "visionary" proposals floated in advance of the State of the Union is their transparent cynicism and lack of realism. Mr. Bush has, of course, literally promised us the Moon — and Mars, too. And the ever-deferential media have managed to keep a straight face.

But that`s just the most dramatic example of an array of policy proposals that don`t withstand even minimal scrutiny. Mr. Bush has already pushed through an expensive new Medicare benefit — without any visible source of financing. Reports say that tonight he`ll propose additional, and even more expensive, new initiatives, like partial Social Security privatization — which all by itself would require at least $1 trillion in extra funds over the next decade. Where is all this money going to come from?

Judging from the latest CBS/New York Times Poll, these promises of something for nothing aren`t likely to convince many people. It`s not just that the bounce from Saddam`s capture has already gone away. Unfavorable views of Mr. Bush as a person have reached record levels for his presidency. It seems fair to say that many Americans, like most of the rest of the world, simply don`t trust him anymore.

But some Americans will respond to upbeat messages, no matter how unrealistic. And that may be enough for Mr. Bush, because while he poses as someone above the fray, he is continuing to solidify his base.

The most sinister example was the recess appointment of Charles Pickering Sr., with his segregationist past and questionable record on voting rights, to the federal appeals court — the day after Martin Luther King`s actual birthday. Was this careless timing? Don`t be silly: it was a deliberate, if subtle, gesture of sympathy with a part of the Republican coalition that never gets mentioned in public.

A less objectionable but equally calculated gesture will be Mr. Bush`s demand that his tax cuts be made permanent. Realistically, this can`t make any difference to the economy now, and it makes no sense, given the array of new spending plans he will simultaneously unveil. But it`s a signal to the base that any seeming moderation needn`t be taken seriously, and that the administration`s hard-right turn will continue.

Meanwhile, the lying has already begun, with the Republican National Committee`s willful misrepresentation of Wesley Clark`s prewar statements. (Why are news organizations letting them get away with this?)

The question we should ask is, Where is all this leading?

Some cynical pundits think that Mr. Bush`s advisers plan to leave the hard work of dealing with the mess he`s made to future presidents. But I don`t think that`s right. I can`t see how the budget can continue along its current path through a second Bush term — financial markets won`t stand for it.

And what about the growing military crisis? The mess in Iraq has placed our volunteer military, a magnificent but fragile institution, under immense strain. National Guard and Reserve members find themselves effectively drafted as full-time soldiers. More than 40,000 soldiers whose enlistment terms have expired have been kept from leaving under "stop loss" orders. This can`t go on for four more years.

Karl Rove and other insiders must know all this. So they must figure that once they have won the election, they will have such a complete lock on power that they can break many of their promises with impunity.

What will they do with that lock on power? Their election strategy — confuse the middle, but feed the base — suggests the answer.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Gephardt`s Poor Iowa Showing Ends White House Bid
Tue January 20, 2004 12:41 AM ET


By Thomas Ferraro
DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Richard Gephardt`s poor showing in the Iowa caucuses on Monday brought an abrupt end to his White House bid and pushed the longtime U.S. lawmaker toward an earlier-than-hoped political retirement.

"Well, this didn`t come out like we wanted," Gephardt, who finished fourth with just 11 percent of the vote, told a tearful gathering of about 200 supporters, many of them from 21 international unions that had endorsed his populist bid.

"Tonight I congratulate the other candidates for their strong campaigns here in Iowa," Gephardt said. "One of them will wind up carrying the banner of the great Democratic Party in this election, and they will have earned it, and I will support that candidate in any way that I can."

Gephardt, 62, a 14-term U.S. congressman and former Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives from neighboring Missouri, won the Iowa caucuses in 1988 at the start of his first White House bid, which soon fizzled out.

Gephardt has gone for political broke this time. He stepped aside as House Democratic leader last year and announced he would not seek reelection to the House this year.

"This is his last campaign," an aide said. "And it is over."

Iowa`s Democratic caucuses -- public meetings across the state where residents publicly declared who they favored to be the party`s nominee to challenge Republican President Bush in November -- seemed perfectly fitted for Gephardt, who boasted a large get-out-the-vote operation aided by labor.

"You can`t blame labor. If it wasn`t for labor he would have done worse," said Jeff Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. "I think there is just a sense that Dick Gephardt`s time has come and gone."

Gephardt and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean had been running out front for months in Iowa, but U.S. Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina caught them in the polls last week and passed them in Monday`s caucuses.

FRESH FACE, NEW ENERGY

"Iowa knows and likes Dick Gephardt, but I think they are looking for a fresh face and new energy," said Stu Rothenberg of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report.

Gephardt had hoped to win Iowa, the first battle for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, and then go on to New Hampshire, which will hold the second contest next week.

Yet with initial returns showing Gephardt losing big, he canceled the trip to New Hampshire and decided instead to head home to St. Louis where he plans to hold a news conference on Tuesday.

Gephardt, the son of a Teamster truck driver, had adopted a turtle as the mascot for his second White House bid -- slow and steady wins the race.

So do bold ideas. So he offered sweeping proposals to expand health care, upgrade education, move toward energy independence and protect American jobs from unfair trade.

Gephardt campaigned largely on his Washington experience, saying he was ready and able to serve. But traditionally Americans do not turn to members of Congress to be president.

In fact, the last sitting member of the U.S. House elected to the White House was James Garfield in 1880. The last sitting Senate member was John F. Kennedy in 1960.

In addressing backers on Monday night, Gephardt said: "Life will go on because this campaign was never about me. It was about all of us. It was about our future, and it was about our children, and the America ahead of us."

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Grocery clerk Lorena Felipe, 22, of Los Angeles pickets outside a Ralphs supermarket in Los Angeles in October. More than 70,000 supermarket workers have been on strike or locked out, mainly over health insurance coverage, at Southern California Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons stores.
washingtonpost.com
No End in Sight for California Grocery Workers` Strike


By Kimberly Edds
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A03


LOS ANGELES -- For more than three months, the cluster of a dozen or so striking clerks and baggers have maintained a vigil on the broken sidewalk outside the Vons supermarket on Santa Monica Boulevard. For the first couple of days, it was almost fun. Supporters drove by and honked. Some brought food. Almost everyone was pleasant. But no one expected it to go on this long.

The Southern California grocery workers` strike, which has 70,000 workers on the street, continues to drag on with seemingly no end in sight. Four days of secret talks between the two sides broke up Jan. 11 with only "limited progress" being made, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers union`s Web site.

As the strike lengthens, it has become an important battle for organized labor, which is struggling to remain relevant in one of the few remaining industries in which workers with limited education can earn a respectable living with medical benefits.

The grocery chains recognize the importance of the fight as well: When the union struck Safeway Inc.`s Vons and Pavilions stores Oct. 11., the supermarkets clamped down. Kroger Co.`s Ralphs chain and Albertsons Inc., which bargain jointly with Safeway, locked their employees out the following day. Replacement workers were hired in droves, and stores attempted to maintain business as usual.

The chains insist the industry won`t be able to withstand the onslaught of nonunion warehouse stores unless workers start paying a portion of their health insurance. They argue that lower wages for new hires will help keep them competitive with stores such as Wal-Mart, which pay their employees just above minimum wage and provide few benefits. The supermarkets want to put a cap on how much they contribute to their workers` medical benefits -- a move that would force employees to fill in the gaps for any future fee hikes -- or see a reduction in coverage.

Union leaders say the industry is actually expanding and accuse the supermarkets of trying to squeeze more out of workers to increase profits. They want a say in what medical plan would be bought with store and worker contributions, and they want the supermarkets to pick up any unexpected increases in the workers` coverage.

"This is an employer offensive against the unions. They are determined to use this opportunity that Wal-Mart superstores are taking over to substantially weaken union wages and benefits," said Lowell Turner, a professor at Cornell University`s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. "It`s a strike and lockout aimed at the extraordinary inequality that has developed in American society."

The striking and locked-out workers -- mostly women and minorities -- say they can`t give up the fight. Giving in means saying goodbye to the middle-class existence that the grocery industry has provided to workers across the country for decades.

"If we don`t get what we`re fighting for, the whole health care for American workers is going to go down," strike captain Sue Beauregard said as she shifted her picket sign from one shoulder to another outside the Vons on Santa Monica Boulevard.

It isn`t an easy battle. Money is tight. Health care benefits are gone. Babysitters have to be hired. Some picketers drive 50 miles a day to their store -- a commute that made sense when they were collecting a regular paycheck but for many isn`t worth it for the $40 in picket money the union hands out for a six-hour shift.

When produce clerk Adelina Machado couldn`t make her car payment, the dealer had the vehicle repossessed. At home her lights are still on and the gas stove still works, but she said probably not for long. The utility companies want a deposit. And she doesn`t have it.

She can`t get another job. She knows if she puts down her last position on the job application, she`ll be turned down. She said no one wants to take a chance on a striking worker. Machado hopes the strike will be over soon.

But it`s not likely.

Barbara Maynard, spokeswoman for UFCW Local 770, which represents nearly 20,000 workers in Los Angeles, said union leaders were disappointed with the outcome of last week`s informal discussions.

"Unfortunately, they are holding firm to their desire to cut health benefits by 50 percent," Maynard said. "We went into the talks with flexibility. They came in with none. The ball is in their court now."

A federal mediator hopes to bring the two sides back to the table by the end of the month, Maynard said. Repeated calls to negotiators for the supermarket chains were not returned.

The strikers were on the picket line Christmas Eve, standing in the rain, clutching cups of coffee. They heard the angry shouts of frustrated shoppers. They waved to supporters and ignore hecklers. They collected their strike pay and handed some of it right back to the union, for dues. Still, they come back the next day.

"When we first got out here, everyone was gung-ho," Beauregard said. "I still think people feel that way, but when you don`t have money coming in on a regular basis other than from the picket fund, it causes a lot of stress and depression."

To make ends meet, Beauregard has had to take on babysitting jobs, watching children while she walks the picket line. Leticia Mendoza`s husband has been putting in more hours on the job as a plumber. Their three kids know there isn`t enough money to go to the mall.

As the standoff continues, workers aren`t the only ones feeling the pinch -- losses at more than 800 grocery stores across Southern California are mounting. With many customers unwilling to cross picket lines, fruit and vegetables are rotting on the shelves. Loaves of bread are going stale. And T-bone steaks and fresh fish can be had for a fraction of their normal price as managers try to hustle them out the door before their expiration date.

And when the strike does finally end, the supermarkets are going to have to come to grips with the fact that some customers might not come back -- having gotten used to shopping at specialty grocery and warehouse stores during the strike as a show of support for the striking and locked-out workers.

Doni Heyn-Lamb doesn`t mind having to stop at several different stores to get all the things she used to get at Vons. Milk is bought at one store, bread at another. She said the inconvenience isn`t enough to make her cross the picket lines. She returned to shopping at Ralphs only after the union removed the picket lines from Ralphs stores Oct. 31 to give shoppers an option and put pressure on Vons and Albertsons stores to settle. Late last week, the union announced that pickets will be returning to some Ralphs stores.

"Health care is one of the most important things that can be provided for workers. Companies in America should be ashamed of themselves for trying to cut workers out of affordable good health care," Heyn-Lamb, 50, said outside a Ralphs store in Pasadena. "If the pickets come back, I guess I`ll have to find somewhere else to shop."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Schöne Neue Welt, Amerika du hast es besser!

washingtonpost.com
New Kinds of Drug Tests Weighed for Federal Workers
Bush Administration Considers Sampling Hair, Saliva, Sweat

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A17


Federal workers who submit to drug screening soon may have their saliva, sweat or hair tested as the Bush administration increases efforts to deter and detect illegal drug use among 1.6 million civilian employees.

Officials have relied on urine samples alone in the federal government`s nearly two-decade-old drug-testing program, begun in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order declaring that the federal workplace be drug-free. Bush administration officials want to give agencies the option of using the alternative tests to catch drug use that urine tests may miss because of masking agents or because an employee took the drugs weeks earlier.

The main goal is to drive home the message to federal workers that it is not worth risking your job to take drugs, officials said.

"This isn`t a `gotcha` kind of system," said Robert L. Stephenson II, director of the division of workplace programs in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, sets guidelines and oversees drug-testing programs at federal agencies. "This is a fair, objective, scientifically defensible program that is aimed at deterrence and in having everybody believe that if you actually use [drugs], we`ll be able to detect it."

The division plans to publish proposed revisions to federal mandatory drug-testing guidelines in the Federal Register as soon as this month, Stephenson said.

The public will have 90 days to comment. After a final rule is adopted, it will take at least six months to implement in most federal workplaces, Stephenson said. Moreover, the screening labs that work under contract to federal agencies would have to demonstrate that they can perform the new tests.

The proposal was first reported last week by the Associated Press.

Officials of federal employee unions said they will study the proposals closely.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said her union previously has opposed sweat tests on the grounds that scientific studies have shown them to be unreliable. Her staff plans to review the track record of saliva and hair tests as well.

Mark Roth, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union fought successful court battles in the 1980s to force the government to narrow its broad drug-testing program to workers in "safety-sensitive" jobs.

"To the extent that they are not talking about expanding the scope of employees under the program, . . . we probably would not have any vehement objections to what they are doing, so long as it`s limited to the more accurate and less intrusive forms of testing," he said.

Federal drug-testing efforts focus on about 400,000 federal employees who have security clearances, carry firearms, deal with public safety or national security, or are presidential appointees. Such employees are routinely tested when they apply for jobs, and many are subject to random drug tests throughout their careers.

Other civilian workers typically would only be tested if they were involved in a workplace accident or displayed signs of possible drug use on the job, officials said.

In fiscal 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available, drug tests were performed on 106,493 workers at 118 agencies at a cost of $6.1 million. The number who test positive hovers consistently at about one-half of 1 percent, he said.

Urine tests cost about $20 to $50 each, and the prices of saliva and sweat tests are similar, Stephenson said. Hair tests cost more but are expected to become cheaper as they become more widely used, he said.

Agencies could pick the test that best fits their needs, he said. For example, a hair test, which can show drug use from months earlier, might be used to screen job applicants. But an employee involved in an accident might have an oral swab to determine whether drugs were in his system.

Some employee advocates complain that the new tests are not as accurate as a urine test. Hair tests in particular can come back positive simply because a person -- a police officer, say -- was in a room where drugs were used, they say.

"There`s a lot of things not to like [about urine testing], but at least we`ve reached a stage where you don`t see a lot of false positives when you use the right labs," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit employee rights group. "Sweat and saliva testing have potential, but they aren`t ready for prime time. . . . Hair testing is junk science."

Federal workers aren`t the only ones with a stake in the proposed changes. If the government adopts alternative tests, many private employers are likely to follow suit, officials at testing companies said.

William M. Greenblatt, chief executive of New York-based Sterling Testing Systems Inc., said: "An argument can be made that `Would the government accept it if it wasn`t an accurate science?` " The company performs half a million tests a year, most of them urine tests, for such clients as Con Edison, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and The Washington Post, he said.

J. Michael Walsh, a former HHS official who helped design the federal drug-testing program in the 1980s, said the testing industry has been pressing the government to adopt the alternative tests. Still, scientific advances mean it is "very reasonable" for federal officials to examine whether such tests are worth using, said Walsh, now a consultant on substance abuse policy whose clients include The Post.

"The industry sort of believes that once this thing hits the Federal Register that things are going to happen quickly," he said. "I don`t think that`s true. My experience has been that change comes very slowly in this whole workplace arena. It`s such a litigious area. I think these big corporations are very happy with what they are doing. And unless there is some huge economic incentive to change, change is not going to come rapidly."



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
A Raid in Iraq, And a Glimpse Into the World Of Infiltrators
Foreign Arab Fighters Had Posed as Merchants

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A15


BAGHDAD, Jan. 19 -- After midnight Monday, Ardashees Mherian heard the pitter-patter of footsteps on his roof and rushed upstairs to see what was going on.

The footsteps quickly turned into the rat-a-tat of automatic rifle fire, the bangs of exploding grenades, angry shouts and awful moans. His little house in far southeast Baghdad was caught in a raid by U.S. soldiers on suspected foreign fighters who lived around the corner.

"I was surprised. I did not know such people lived here," he said. "On the other hand, this is Baghdad. We`re used to shooting and explosions. Life here is one big war."

The raid took the lives of two men from Yemen and one from Syria, U.S. officials said. Grenades and automatic rifle fire damaged the house where they lived, and blood stained the floor and walls in an interior courtyard. When Mherian ventured onto his roof at dawn, he found the corpse of one of the Arabs in a pool of blood.

The raid and its results provided a rare glimpse into the opaque world of foreign Arabs who U.S. and Iraqi officials say have infiltrated Iraq to fight U.S.-led occupation forces.

Although U.S. officials declined to provide details of the raid or the means they used to locate the house in the Hay Reasa district of Baghdad, Iraqi officials described it as a terrorist safe house. "They clearly knew what house they wanted," said Adnan Abdul Hamid, who lives across the street. "Loudspeakers told those people to surrender and warned everyone else to stay in their homes."

After the raid, U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police carried off boxes of dynamite and grenades, residents said, as well as notebooks. Besides the men, three women and three children lived in the house in a nondescript neighborhood of modest tan, walled-in homes. One man was captured and one of the women was also detained. The two other women and the children were permitted to stay.

Neighbors said they had been reluctant to query the foreign residents about their origins or interests. They say they did not know what the men were up to, although some suspected they were not the second-hand clothing merchants they claimed to be.

"They were not very friendly. They left the house early and came back late," said Salah Abdul Kadam, who lived next door. "Only one spoke to anyone. The women wore black veils. We were curious, but people keep to themselves here."

The tenants rented the house in July from its owner, Ali Sharat, who everyone said had not been seen in the neighborhood lately. Neighbors noted that they drove in and out in a car painted orange and white, the characteristic colors of Iraqi taxis. They would load the car with cartons of clothes, though residents now suspect that the apparel hid explosives and weapons. "When they carried things out, it always took two men to do it. It looked heavier than clothing," said Abdul Hamid.

The raid began with the loudspeaker announcements telling the tenants to surrender, witnesses said. Fifteen minutes later, shots rang out from inside the house. Soldiers ferried in by Humvee began firing rifles and grenades at the two-story structure. Helicopters circled overhead but did not fire rockets in the neighborhood, residents said.

The shooting continued for about three hours. The grenade blasts shattered windows in nearby homes. At the Mherian home, first a soldier and then one of the Arabs took up positions on his roof. The Arab had clambered across rooftops two houses away to reach the home of the Mherians, who are of Armenian descent.

By dawn, when silence had returned to the neighborhood, Mherian`s high-school-aged daughter discovered the body lying in a corner of the roof. There was a crater, evidently from a grenade that sprayed shrapnel all over and killed the Arab. His nationality was not clear to the Mherians.

Ardashees Mherian, a computer salesman, rushed to the street and told the soldiers, "There`s a body on my roof."

They quickly carried the dead man away, but the Mherians have been unable to remove all the blood that stained their roof.



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Hashem Awadi, center, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, told the crowd that Iraqis want "direct elections and a constitution that ensures justice and equality for everyone."
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Shiites March for Elections in Iraq
Protest in Baghdad Is Largest Since Hussein`s Fall

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A01


BAGHDAD, Jan. 19 -- Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims marched through Baghdad on Monday in the largest protest since the occupation of Iraq began 10 months ago, demanding that U.S. authorities organize direct elections to choose a new government.

The peaceful demonstration sent, in numbers and message, a clear signal that the demands of Iraq`s emboldened Shiite majority could not be ignored by U.S. and Iraqi officials, who met Monday with Secretary General Kofi Annan and other U.N. leaders in New York to seek a greater U.N. role in the troubled plan to transfer power to Iraqis by this summer.

Under the plan unveiled in November, the U.S. administration in Iraq wants to hold 18 regional caucuses across the country in May that would choose a transitional assembly. That assembly would select a provisional government that would take power by June 30, formally ending the U.S. occupation. But the country`s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has insisted on direct, nationwide elections -- a process that U.S. officials say would be impossible to organize quickly and unpredictable in its outcome.

"The sons of the Iraqi people want a political system based on direct elections and a constitution that ensures justice and equality for everyone," Hashem Awadi, a representative of Sistani, told the crowd at one of Baghdad`s main universities.

The protest, which followed a large demonstration in the southern city of Basra last week, was the most visible display so far of Shiite empowerment and delivered what may pose the greatest challenge to U.S. plans.

Ten months after the fall of President Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials are struggling to cope with a persistent guerrilla campaign in areas dominated by Iraq`s Sunni Muslims, a minority that gave Hussein most of his support. Although Hussein was captured in December, the insurgency continues to demonstrate its grim potency -- on Sunday, a suicide bombing at the gate of the heavily fortified U.S. occupation headquarters killed at least 31 people and wounded about 120.

In addition, Iraq`s ethnic Kurds -- long the most ardent U.S. allies in the country -- have pressed in recent weeks for a greater degree of autonomy than U.S. officials envisioned.

But Shiite Muslims, who make up an estimated 60 percent of Iraq`s 25 million people, hold the key to Iraq`s stability, and their religious leadership has steadily escalated demands for power commensurate with their rights as a majority.

In addition to the demand for direct elections to choose a transitional assembly, Sistani has also said that only an elected body can approve the prolonged presence of U.S. troops in the country and ratify a basic law that will serve until a constitution is ratified in 2005.

"We gave the Americans a chance, and there was no use," said Udai Ghali, 23, a Baghdad University student. "The Americans have acted too slowly."

The protest movement has gained momentum since Sistani`s call last month for elections. U.S. officials have acknowledged that they do not know what, if any, concessions short of elections would mollify the demands. They are hampered, in part, by a lack of direct communication with the reclusive, 73-year-old Sistani, who has not left his home in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in nearly a year.

The impasse has left the conservative clergy, who are blunt in their demands for the imposition of Islamic law, as the most vociferous proponents of democratic elections in the face of U.S. objections -- an irony that was not lost on some at the demonstration.

"We want the Americans to comply with their promises of democracy," Rahim Abu Raghif, a cleric in a black turban, said as he watched the flag-waving crowd pass.

After talks at the United Nations on Monday, the civilian administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the United States intervened there to topple a dictator and allow Iraqis to participate in democracy. "One of the beauties of democracy is freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. The demonstrations are actually, in my view, a healthy sign. They are peaceful demonstrations," Bremer told reporters.

Unlike the Shiite clergy in neighboring Iran, who have been largely discredited during 25 years of theocratic rule, Iraq`s religious authorities -- while divided among themselves -- still enjoy a great degree of loyalty. To many, they stand as an independent representative of the community, which sees Hussein`s fall and the wrangling over a new government as an opportunity to end centuries of disenfranchisement.

Many also voice respect for the clergy`s sacrifices. Hundreds of clerics were arrested and executed under Hussein`s rule, a record that resonates in Shiite Islam`s narrative of suffering and martyrdom.

That loyalty was evidenced by the discipline of the protest Monday. The clergy leading the demonstration from a bridge spanning a six-lane street ordered the crowds to limit their chants to those approved by religious leaders. Calls to attend the march, which took two hours to pass under the bridge, went out at mosques and Shiite community centers on Sunday.

The protest moved seamlessly between religious symbolism -- chants of fealty to Shiite saints -- and political demands.

"Yes, yes to elections, no, no to appointment," the crowd chanted. Others shouted, "No, no to conspiracies. No, no to occupation."

"God hopes the Americans will agree with us," said Ahmed Zubeidi, a 41-year-old cleric standing on the bridge. "If they don`t, the clergy will force them to agree."

For now at least, the protest papered over divisions within the clergy`s ranks. For months, a militant cleric, Moqtada Sadr, sought to rally his substantial support in the street with calls for an end to the U.S. occupation, angering the American administration. At the same time, Shiite political parties, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, preached patience with the U.S. administration and took part in the American-appointed Governing Council. For much of the past year, despite criticism by some followers, Sistani delivered important edicts but remained largely in the background, content with a spiritual role.

Monday`s protest brought out followers from virtually all Shiite factions and signaled that Sistani would play a crucial if not preeminent role in any political transition.

"All the people are with you, Sayyid Ali," the crowd chanted.

"The Americans did us a favor in getting rid of Saddam. But they promised us stability, freedom and democracy, and until now, there`s nothing," said Ammar Saadi, 25, a Baghdad resident. "We`ve lost trust in them."

Some religious leaders have warned of a confrontation with the occupation authorities if their demands are not met, and a handful of banners invoked the memory of a largely Shiite uprising in 1920 against the British occupation that followed World War I.

But Monday`s protest was peaceful, and participants as well as clerics leading the march were careful to avoid what might be perceived as inflammatory rhetoric. Throughout the protest, two U.S. helicopters passed overhead. A small convoy of U.S. military vehicles -- three Humvees and an armored personnel carrier -- moved down the broad avenue toward the protest, but turned around before meeting the crowd.

"We want to take our rights peacefully," said one marcher, Hassan Musawi, 50. "If each person here had one bullet and one Kalashnikov, they would end the occupation today. There would be no occupiers left in Iraq."

Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.



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After Iowa




Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A18


FOR MONTHS before last night`s voting, the view of the Iowa caucuses was that they would serve a winnowing function in the crowded Democratic field, separating the viable candidates from those without a chance, and perhaps a cementing one, ensconcing former Vermont governor Howard Dean as the likely nominee. Instead, Iowa offered astonishingly strong first- and second-place showings by Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and John Edwards (N.C.), and a straggling third-place finish by Mr. Dean. The upshot is not so much that the field has been narrowed or a single candidate ratified, but that several contenders have been empowered.

This is an outcome that ought to be resoundingly cheered. Last night`s tally -- and the tightening polls in New Hampshire, which holds its primary a week from today -- undermined the onetime conventional wisdom that Mr. Dean had the nomination locked up before a single vote was cast. Mr. Dean`s hopes for an Iowa Perfect Storm -- his camp`s slogan for the final weekend of campaigning -- turned into a Messy Blizzard. In the end, Mr. Kerry staged an astounding political comeback to win the caucuses, and Mr. Edwards pulled off a feat nearly as impressive, emerging from single digits a few weeks back to a strong second-place finish. That Mr. Dean didn`t win was in the end less surprising than that he ran so far behind the top two; the stakes for him in New Hampshire, where his once-dominant lead in the polls has been steadily eroding, now become even higher.

For Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), who won Iowa in 1988, the night was nothing short of disastrous, and after a long and honorable political career, he seems to be on his way out of the race. The field now decamps en masse to New Hampshire, where two other candidates -- retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) -- have more or less had the state to themselves in recent weeks. Polls show Mr. Clark gaining there, yet Mr. Kerry`s win in Iowa could take a good deal of wind out of the Clark campaign`s sails.

Whatever one`s political affiliation, last night offered much to applaud. The caucus system is subject to legitimate criticism that it doesn`t offer as direct a test of voter preferences as a primary. But the near-record turnout -- even if it represented a small slice of the electorate -- was a sign of robust, vibrant political debate. And though it had seemed for months that Mr. Dean was the sole Democratic candidate with the ability to excite voters, the closing days proved otherwise.

There are disturbing aspects of the Iowa experience as well. Two candidates -- Mr. Dean and Mr. Kerry -- competed under different, looser rules than the rest of the field. They were not subject to the state spending cap that constrained their rivals, because they have opted out of the federal campaign financing system -- a situation that created a distressingly unequal playing field. As impressive as Mr. Kerry`s win was, he was able to obtain that outcome only because of his capacity to reach into his deep pockets and lend his campaign more than $6 million. It`s not healthy for democracy for a candidate`s shot at the presidency to depend on his personal wealth.

This is a primary season that was deliberately front-loaded in hopes of picking an early nominee, unbloodied by internecine fights and, so the thinking of party bosses went, better able to compete against President Bush. To the extent that voters aren`t dutifully complying, that`s all for the best. The more voters who get their say, the longer the candidates are tested in the crucible of the primaries, the more time voters have to assess more candidates, the better it will be -- for the eventual nominee, for the Democratic Party and, ultimately, for the system as a whole.



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An Absence of Legitimacy


By Fareed Zakaria

Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A19


There really should be no contest.

On one side is history`s most awesome superpower, victorious in war, ruling Iraq with nearly 150,000 troops and funding its reconstruction to the tune of $20 billion this year. On the other side is an aging cleric with no formal authority, no troops and little money, who is unwilling to even speak in public. Yet last June, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made it known that he didn`t like the U.S. proposal to transfer power to Iraqis, the plan collapsed. And last week, when Sistani announced that he is still unhappy with the new U.S. proposal, L. Paul Bremer rushed to Washington for consultations. What does this man have that the United States doesn`t?

Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein`s reign. "During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility," says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites.

The United States fears that he will brand it as colonialist and the new transition government as a puppet regime. American officials know these few words could derail their plans. The occupation can survive an insurgency, but it cannot survive 10 countrywide protest marches with thousands chanting, "Colonialists go home!"

From the start, the Pentagon planners (or non-planners) believed the United States would have no legitimacy problems in Iraq. "We will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney famously predicted. When urged after the war to transfer some authority to the United Nations to gain legitimacy, administration officials were dismissive in public and scathing in private. "We have far more legitimacy than the U.N.," one senior official told me last June. To discredit the idea of internationalization, Defense Department officials kept insisting that their goal was to transfer power not to the United Nations but to the Iraqis. "No foreigners can be in charge of [determining how elections will be held]," Paul Wolfowitz said.

Well, the Iraqis heard these speeches, too. The Iraqi Governing Council, many of whose members have little chance of winning an election, said, "Transfer power to us now!" The Shiite leaders said, "Hold elections now!" knowing that they were the only politically organized force in the country. So the administration has decided that the United Nations has legitimacy after all. Along with its allies on the Governing Council, Washington is asking Kofi Annan to give the United Nations` blessings to its plan, explain that elections cannot be held precipitously and get involved in the entire political process. Columnist William Safire, who has long ridiculed the need for a U.N. role, is now sheepishly asking whether Annan could do us a favor, please. The foreigners are being invited in. It may be too little, too late.

A power struggle has begun in Iraq, as could have been predicted -- and indeed was predicted. Sistani is becoming more vocal and political because he faces a challenge to his leadership from the more activist cleric Moqtada Sadr. "Al-Sadr does not have Sistani`s reputation or training as a scholar and thus presents himself as a populist leader who will look after Shia political interests," Nakash says. It`s turning into a contest to see who can stand up to the Americans more vociferously and appeal to Shiite fears. The Iraqi Shiites are deeply suspicious that the United States will betray them, as it did in 1992 after the Persian Gulf War, or that it will foist favored exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi upon them. Sistani recently told Iraq`s tribal leaders that they should take power, not "those who came from abroad."

The tragedy is that while Sistani`s fears are understandable, Washington`s phased transition makes great sense. It allows for time to build institutions, form political parties and reform the agencies of government. An immediate transfer would ensure that the political contest will overwhelm all this institutional reform. But Washington lacks the basic tool it needs to negotiate with the locals: legitimacy. (This is something well understood by anyone who has studied the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor.) Belatedly it recognizes that the United Nations can arbitrate political problems without being accused of being a colonizer.

U.S. policymakers made two grave mistakes after the war. The first was to occupy the country with too few troops, creating a security vacuum. This image of weakness was reinforced when Washington caved to Sistani`s objections last June, junked its original transition plan and sped things up to coincide with the U.S. elections. The second mistake was to dismiss from the start the need for allies and international institutions. As it turns out, Washington now has the worst of both worlds. It has neither enough power nor enough legitimacy.

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Nimmt man Abschied von Bush?

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Presidential Scorekeeping


By Robert J. Samuelson

Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A19


In 1962 Emmet John Hughes published a memoir of the Eisenhower presidency called "The Ordeal of Power." Hughes, a prominent journalist who had served Eisenhower as a speechwriter, admired the president as a person and for his role as the commanding general in Europe during World War II. Still, the portrait of Eisenhower was unflattering because it depicted a leader ill-suited for the White House. Eisenhower, Hughes believed, never mastered the political skills needed to create a vigorous presidency.

Even now, Hughes`s elegantly written book is a wonderful read. But historians generally dissent from its central conclusion. They increasingly think that Eisenhower was more politically deft than people believed and that, in his basic judgments and policies, he conducted a successful presidency. In a recent ranking by historians conducted by C-SPAN, Eisenhower is listed ninth, ahead of Lyndon Johnson (10), Ronald Reagan (11), John Adams (16), Bill Clinton (21) and Jimmy Carter (22).

What recalls all this is the fuss stirred by "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O`Neill," written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind. Based on extensive interviews with the former Treasury secretary, the book purports to provide an insider`s view of the administration. Its revelations briefly dominated the news because they echoed the most damaging anti-Bush views: that he`s a semi-dunce bored by policy discussions ("a blind man in a room full of deaf people," says O`Neill); that the administration was dishonest because it plotted to get rid of Saddam Hussein from the start (the first National Security Council meeting focused on Iraq); and that policies are driven mostly by politics ("Reagan proved deficits don`t matter," Vice President Cheney tells O`Neill).

We ought to be skeptical; that`s the lesson from the past. Presidential scorekeeping is an inevitable part of politics and democracy, but when it slides into instant history -- pretending to determine the character and significance of a presidency in progress or just ended -- the conclusions often have pitifully short half-lives. Witness Hughes`s book as a useful reminder.

Or consider Truman. In 1948, almost no one expected him to win, as David McCullough notes in his biography. A month before the vote, Newsweek polled 50 top political writers. The verdict was unanimous: 50 to 0 against Truman. In editorials, the Los Angeles Times called him a "blunderer," and the Chicago Tribune labeled him "an incompetent." The Baltimore Sun professed affection for him but said his election "would be a tragedy for the country and the world." Well, Truman now ranks fifth on the C-SPAN historians` list behind Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Washington and Theodore Roosevelt.

Some pitfalls of instant history are obvious. Even the deepest insider -- and O`Neill wasn`t one -- has only a partial view of events. Some juicy allegations in Suskind`s book suffer from this defect: for example, the early resolve to dispose of Hussein. Aside from that first NSC meeting, Suskind provides little supporting evidence. Another danger is political ax-grinding. Suskind`s book is being marketed as a rabid anti-Bush treatise. It "depicts an administration in which personal loyalty to the president trumps loyalty to the truth," says the publisher`s press release. O`Neill himself is uneasy with the spin. Interviewed on "Today," he repudiated some incendiary accusations, and when asked whether he would vote for Bush, said: "Probably. I don`t see anybody [who] strikes me as better prepared or more capable." Read the book, he says. If you do, you discover that it`s tedious and boring. All the controversy is packed into the six-page press release.

But these are small matters. The real problem is that we can`t know the future. Presidents are not ultimately judged on everything that happens while they`re in office but on a few large issues where their decisions are critical. Lincoln is not revered because the Homestead Act -- which transferred 10 percent of the country`s land to settlers -- passed in 1862. He`s worshiped for his dogged determination to hold the country together and for abolishing slavery; another man might have done differently. Truman`s many problems, including charges of cronyism, are now largely forgotten because his instincts at the start of the Cold War (leading to the Marshall Plan and NATO) were sound. Eisenhower`s reputation has risen because his quiet achievements -- keeping the country out of war, striving for balanced budgets, maintaining low inflation -- eluded his successors. And all these men projected a basic decency.

Bush`s reputation won`t rest on whether there`s more oil drilling in Alaska or a tax cut on dividends -- or many of the issues that now stir partisan passions. These controversies are mostly political noise. It will rest on a few big matters (terrorism and the war in Iraq, possibly the budget and economy, perhaps something we can`t now imagine) where his judgment altered events and where the outcomes are now unclear -- and also on a detached view of his character. History`s tests are harsh; Bush`s grades remain incomplete.



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Iraq`s Halting Progress


By David Ignatius

Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A19


BAGHDAD -- How are things going in Iraq, six months before the planned handover of power to the Iraqi people? The honest answer is "not very well." Despite many improvements in Iraqi life, the American-led occupiers haven`t yet found a way to put Iraq back together -- politically, economically or socially.

That`s why the Bush administration`s decision to seek assistance from the United Nations made sense. The administration doesn`t have a lot of good alternatives left.

The most worrisome sign of the deteriorating situation is that many Iraqis are quietly preparing for civil strife. People are talking about ways to get out of the country; they are drawing closer to their ethnic and religious communities. They don`t want U.S. troops to leave, but they are afraid of the stigma of collaborating with them. That fear is likely to increase after Sunday`s devastating bombing that killed or wounded many Iraqis waiting to go to work at U.S. coalition headquarters.

The paradox of Iraq is that the security situation is actually getting a bit better, even as the political path remains blocked. The capture of Saddam Hussein in December weakened the Iraqi resistance: Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall military commander here, said Friday that the number of attacks against coalition forces has fallen from an average of about 40 a day before Hussein`s capture to about 15.

"A large portion of the population realizes that this is the time to embrace the future," Sanchez said.

Yes, but what future? That`s where the U.S. plan remains muddled. No Iraqi political leadership has emerged that can rally the country; Iraq`s economy is still a shambles because nobody will make big investments until security is better; and while the Iraqis are slowly building their own army and police, they will need American help for months and perhaps years to maintain order.

The worst may be yet to come. Each of the main stakeholders in Iraq`s future -- the Shiite Muslims, the Sunni Muslims and the Kurds -- has been battling to lock in its own gains, at the expense of the nation as a whole. Even senior U.S. officials talk about the danger that Iraq may be slipping toward civil war.

A survey of about 1,200 Iraqis taken in December by a new Baghdad polling group called the Independent Institute for Administration and Society Studies illustrates the country`s confused mood: Only 28 percent expressed confidence that coalition forces could improve the situation; yet 57 percent said they would feel less safe if those forces left immediately.

No political leader has captured much of a following. Asked what living Iraqi they would vote for as president, 55 percent answered: "none."

Iraqis want U.S.-style freedoms. The right to criticize the government was supported by 95 percent, and freedom of religion was backed by 86 percent. But working with the Americans to gain these freedoms is seen as dangerous. Asked whether they or their family would be in danger if they worked with coalition forces, 74 percent said yes.

What Iraqis want are the basics: security and jobs. Asked what sort of party they might support, 49 percent said one that provided "more government jobs." And 80 percent said the institution that could most improve things was the police.

Traveling around Baghdad`s neighborhoods, you see small signs of progress. Recruits from the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps guard a long line of cars at a gas station near Mansour Square; they man the checkpoint at a housing complex in Qadisiya, where some members of the Iraqi Governing Council live.

One unlikely sign of law and order came as I was preparing to leave Iraq at 3 a.m. last weekend. Suddenly in a whirl of blue lights, five Baghdad police cars surrounded my vehicle. They were out patrolling for looters and terrorists.

Many people are unemployed, but everyone has a hustle -- from buying beat-up cars to use as taxis to fencing stolen goods. Rising real estate prices suggest some confidence in the future -- they`re up fivefold in some neighborhoods from prewar levels. And people are rushing to buy new cellular phones, with service in Baghdad set to start this week.

But the city looks dowdy. Last fall`s cleanliness drive has faltered, and trash is piling up again in back alleys. Makeshift roadblocks are back, too, as people try to guard their streets from looters. And the electricity still isn`t working normally -- it`s often on two hours, then off for four.

The Baghdad airport defines the nation`s paradox: Logistically, it`s almost back to normal, with bright lights and luggage arriving on conveyor belts. The problem is that almost no commercial flights land here because of fear that insurgents will shoot missiles at them.


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Lawless in Guantanamo


By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A19


If you are around my age, you grew up on combat movies in which some American POW told an enemy interrogator that he would supply only his name, rank and serial number. In the next breath, the American would cite the Geneva Convention in demanding fair treatment of prisoners. To someone like me in the movie theater, that sounded as American as apple pie. Now we`re getting that pie in our face.

The reason, of course, is that the United States continues to hold hundreds of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda fighters at a special military prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. I emphasize the word "suspected," because more than 80 of the original 660 detainees have been released -- a few to be jailed in their home countries, most just to go free.

It`s not clear whether the Geneva Convention applies -- or can apply -- to detainees who are not conventional prisoners of war. After all, al Qaeda is a terrorist organization, not a state, and it is not likely that it will sign an armistice agreement ending hostilities. It`s hard to believe that an al Qaeda fighter, freed from Guantanamo, would simply collect some doughnuts from the Red Cross and go home. The nature of war has changed.

But not, I would hope, the nature of the United States. Yet for more than two years now, the United States has been holding detainees without the benefit of counsel when, the law of averages says, some of them are bound to be innocent. One of the innocent might be David Hicks, a 28-year-old Australian who was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001. It was only last month that Hicks was visited by his lawyer -- the first time any Guantanamo detainee had gotten to see a lawyer.

It could be that Hicks, like some of the other detainees, was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It also could be that he`s a coldblooded killer, an Islamic militant and a zealous America-hater. Whatever the case, this is where lawyers prove useful -- and why defendants in the United States are guaranteed the right to counsel. Given enough time and enough pressure, even the innocent will confess to something -- anything just to end the isolation and deprivation.

From all accounts, Guantanamo is not a particularly harsh place. U.S. authorities don`t go in for physical torture and all the Muslims are allowed to pray. But the isolation, the sheer hopelessness of the situation, has taken its toll. Vanity Fair magazine reported last month that 20 percent of the detainees are on anti-depressants and that by the end of the year, 32 of them had attempted suicide. In the end, jail is jail.

In any sort of sweep such as the kind the United States and its allies conducted in Afghanistan, the innocent are bound to be found among the guilty. That`s a mathematical truth -- especially when Afghan warlords were given bounties for captured Taliban adherents. What did they care if they hauled in some innocent characters? It is these people, the innocent or the merely deluded, who are bound to be in Guantanamo -- and have been for at least two years now.

To an amazing degree, the word Guantanamo has become shorthand throughout the world for American arrogance and unilateralism. We insist that our POWs and others be treated by universally accepted rules -- the Geneva Convention, for instance. But when we capture some people, we say the old rules don`t apply.

No one better articulated American arrogance than Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who, when asked in January 2002 why the Geneva Convention did not apply to the detainees, replied that he did not have "the slightest concern" about their treatment after what they had done. The Economist magazine, hardly an anti-American newsweekly, called Rumsfeld`s remarks "unworthy of a nation which has cherished the rule of law from its very birth."

My own education in this matter came last October, when I went to visit the former president of Germany, Richard von Weizsaecker, at his home in Berlin. Weizsaecker -- both pro-American and adamant in insisting that Germany face its past -- answered all my questions but then brought up one himself: Guantanamo. "What is the rule of law and what is a human right?" he asked.

These are excellent questions -- directed not at me, but at the president and Congress. Both have been awfully slow to respond. To Weizsaecker, Guantanamo represents an America that has turned its back on its values. Anyone who watched the old war movies can only agree.


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George W Bush and the real state of the Union
Today the President gives his annual address. As the election battle begins, how does his first term add up?
20 January 2004


232: Number of American combat deaths in Iraq between May 2003 and January 2004

501: Number of American servicemen to die in Iraq from the beginning of the war - so far

0: Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender to the Allies in May 1945

0: Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed to be photographed

0: Number of funerals or memorials that President Bush has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq

100: Number of fund-raisers attended by Bush or Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003

13: Number of meetings between Bush and Tony Blair since he became President

10 million: Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, setting an all-time record for simultaneous protest

2: Number of nations that Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into the White House

9.2: Average number of American soldiers wounded in Iraq each day since the invasion in March last year

1.6: Average number of American soldiers killed in Iraq per day since hostilities began

16,000: Approximate number of Iraqis killed since the start of war

10,000: Approximate number of Iraqi cililians killed since the beginning of the conflict

$100 billion: Estimated cost of the war in Iraq to American citizens by the end of 2003

$13 billion: Amount other countries have committed towards rebuilding Iraq (much of it in loans) as of 24 October

36%: Increase in the number of desertions from the US army since 1999

92%: Percentage of Iraq`s urban areas that had access to drinkable water a year ago

60%: Percentage of Iraq`s urban areas that have access to drinkable water today

32%: Percentage of the bombs dropped on Iraq this year that were not precision-guided

1983: The year in which Donald Rumsfeld gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs

45%: Percentage of Americans who believed in early March 2003 that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks on the US

$127 billion: Amount of US budget surplus in the year that Bush became President in 2001

$374 billion: Amount of US budget deficit in the fiscal year for 2003

1st: This year`s deficit is on course to be the biggest in United States history

$1.58 billion: Average amount by which the US national debt increases each day

$23,920: Amount of each US citizen`s share of the national debt as of 19 January 2004

1st: The record for the most bankruptcies filed in a single year (1.57 million) was set in 2002

10: Number of solo press conferences that Bush has held since beginning his term. His father had managed 61 at this point in his administration, and Bill Clinton 33

1st: Rank of the US worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions per capita

$113 million: Total sum raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, setting a record in American electoral history

$130 million: Amount raised for Bush`s re-election campaign so far

$200m: Amount that the Bush-Cheney campaign is expected to raise in 2004

$40m: Amount that Howard Dean, the top fund-raiser among the nine Democratic presidential hopefuls, amassed in 2003

28: Number of days holiday that Bush took last August, the second longest holiday of any president in US history (Recordholder: Richard Nixon)

13: Number of vacation days the average American worker receives each year

3: Number of children convicted of capital offences executed in the US in 2002. America is only country openly to acknowledge executing children

1st: As Governor of Texas, George Bush executed more prisoners (152) than any governor in modern US history

2.4 million: Number of Americans who have lost their jobs during the three years of the Bush administration

221,000: Number of jobs per month created since Bush`s tax cuts took effect. He promised the measure would add 306,000

1,000: Number of new jobs created in the entire country in December. Analysts had expected a gain of 130,000

1st: This administration is on its way to becoming the first since 1929 (Herbert Hoover) to preside over an overall loss of jobs during its complete term in office

9 million: Number of US workers unemployed in September 2003

80%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce now unemployed

55%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce unemployed before the war

43.6 million: Number of Americans without health insurance in 2002

130: Number of countries (out of total of 191 recognised by the United Nations) with an American military presence

40%: Percentage of the world`s military spending for which the US is responsible

$10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush`s original 16-person cabinet

88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes

$42,000: Average savings members of Bush`s cabinet are expected to enjoy this year as a result in the cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes

$42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001

$116,000: Amount Vice-President Cheney is expected to save each year in taxes

44%: Percentage of Americans who believe the President`s economic growth plan will mostly benefit the wealthy

700: Number of people from around the world the US has incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

1st: George W Bush became the first American president to ignore the Geneva Conventions by refusing to allow inspectors access to US-held prisoners of war

+6%: Percentage change since 2001 in the number of US families in poverty

1951: Last year in which a quarterly rise in US military spending was greater than the one the previous spring

54%: Percentage of US citizens who believe Bush was legitimately elected to his post

1st: First president to execute a federal prisoner in the past 40 years. Executions are typically ordered by separate states and not at federal level

9: Number of members of Bush`s defence policy board who also sit on the corporate board of, or advise, at least one defence contractor

35: Number of countries to which US has suspended military assistance after they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court

$300 million: Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes

$1 billion: Amount of new US military aid promised Israel in April 2003 to offset the "burdens" of the US war on Iraq

58 million: Number of acres of public lands Bush has opened to road building, logging and drilling

200: Number of public-health and environmental laws Bush has attempted to downgrade or weaken

29,000: Number of American troops - which is close to the total of a whole army division - to have either been killed, wounded, injured or become so ill as to require evacuation from Iraq, according to the Pentagon

90%: Percentage of American citizens who said they approved of the way George Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 26 September, 2001

53%: Percentage of American citizens who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 16 January, 2004
20 January 2004 13:24


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Widow`s anger after talks with Hoon
January 20: Minister should `consider quitting` over soldier`s death.

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Iraq`s Ex-U.N. Envoy: U.S. Sowing Chaos

Tuesday January 20, 2004 11:16 AM


By RAWYA RAGEH

Associated Press Writer

AJMAN, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Saddam Hussein`s former U.N. envoy accused the United States of deliberately sowing chaos in Iraq to prevent democracy from taking hold.

In interviews with The Associated Press on Saturday and Monday, former Iraqi U.N. envoy Mohammed al-Douri denounced a U.S. plan to create an appointed legislative body in Iraq and demanded free, direct elections instead.

He accused the United States of creating chaos in occupied Iraq as an excuse to avoid direct elections of a new government because that vote could lead to the United States losing control of Iraq`s oil wealth and strategic location.

Al-Douri said democratic elections would be preferable to an appointed body no matter who wins - even if his Sunni Muslim minority, which held favor during Saddam`s rule, is defeated by Iraq`s Shiite Muslim majority.

``For me what is important is Iraq, not the majority or minority. I`ll accept anyone who is elected - a Shiite or even a Kurd, if that is the people`s choice,`` al-Douri said. ``The important thing is that the (Iraqi) people elect, and not have individuals appointed by foreign entities like the United States.``

The United States has insisted it wants elections in Iraq, but says they are too complicated to organize immediately. Al-Douri - speaking in his chic, book-lined Ajman apartment with a panoramic view of the Gulf - disputed that claim.

``Elections pose a big threat to the future of America`s presence in Iraq, and the Americans sense this,`` al-Douri said. The United States, he said, ``fears that Iraqis would elect people who are against the American presence in Iraq.``

Free elections should be held now, he said, ``because the Iraqi people are really thirsty for democracy.``

Such words may seem unusual coming from al-Douri, whose role as U.N. ambassador required that he defend Iraqi policies to the world. Saddam`s government never held free elections and killed at least 300,000 Iraqis believed to oppose its rule.

But al-Douri was not a hard-core member of Saddam`s Baath Party and is not wanted by U.S. authorities. He repeatedly describes himself as an academic.

Al-Douri was an international law professor for 30 years before Saddam appointed him to his first diplomatic post in 1999, and he said he never considered himself a politician.

He said he strived to defend his country, not his president, as Iraq`s ambassador to the United Nations in New York from 2001 until the regime was overthrown in April.

``What concerned me was Iraq, my country, not Saddam,`` he said. ``I was very worried, but Saddam seemed to think the war would never start.``

Al-Douri - who is not related to the most-wanted Iraqi still at large, former Saddam deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri - warned against what he said was an attempt by Sunni Muslims to unify ``to face the so-called Shiite threat.``

``If the Sunnis try to unify themselves as a power to face the Shiites, they will only fall in the trap the United States has built for us ... the trap of dividing Iraq,`` he said.

Al-Douri said he hopes Saddam will be ``tried anywhere in a fair trial,`` though he is doubtful the trial will ever happen because of fears the former Iraqi dictator would publicly air too many secrets of his neighbors and the United States.

He said Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led occupation is ``only normal`` and will continue until America pulls out. But he said it is based on feelings of nationalism, not any ties to Saddam`s Baath Party.

``I do not think there is anyone now who defends Saddam as a former leader,`` he said. ``I am not convinced that there are such Saddam loyalists. Saddam has ended.``

Al-Douri said he has no contacts with the resistance or Baath Party members.

After Baghdad`s fall, al-Douri accepted a loose agreement with Al-Arabiya television station under which he came to the United Arab Emirates and appeared on the network to comment on Iraqi affairs. The arrangement ended in November.

He has settled along the beachfront of one of the smallest and quietest of the emirates. He also has written a book titled ``The Game is Over`` - his famous statement acknowledging Iraq`s defeat in April. He said it should be published soon.

Al-Douri said he has nothing to fear in Iraq, but it is not a ``suitable time from all perspectives`` for him to return home. He hopes that time will come soon, saying any truly democratic Iraqi authority should not oppose his return.

During the first interview Saturday, al-Douri had his television tuned to a political show discussing corruption in Lebanon in an open manner.

``If only such freedom existed in the Arab world a long time ago, we would not have fallen into these crises now,`` he said.







Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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IBM speeds up its recruiting
Computer giant IBM is to hire 15,000 new employees in key areas such as software development, it has announced.
The company, which last week reported a doubling in profits, said 4,500 of the new positions would be in the US.

IBM expects demand for computers to grow in 2004 for the first time in three years.

The recruitment drive will increase the firm`s employee headcount to 330,000, its highest level since 1991, said IBM director Randy McDonald.


Home and abroad

Most of the new positions will be created in developing economies such as China and India, where the company is already exporting 3,000 US jobs in an effort to cut costs.

But IBM stressed it was not turning its back on the US.

"We are going to hire more in the US than we shift overseas," said Mr MacDonald, senior vice president for human resources.

The 15,000 new jobs will come in what IBM has described as "hot" sectors - software for doing business over the internet, services to support wireless technology, and the growing Linux operating system, an alternative to Microsoft`s Windows product.

Last week, IBM reported its that fourth-quarter earnings more than doubled, beating Wall Street expectations.

Confidence

In the last three months of 2003, IBM earned $2.7bn, on revenues of $25.9bn.

The firm believes that the information technology sector is poised to recover after three years of sluggish growth.

"We`re bullish on the whole IT market in 2004," said Garrett Walker, the group`s director of strategic resource management.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/3409033.stm

Published: 2004/01/19 10:11:16 GMT

© BBC MMIV

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[Joerver]

Der Grand Canyon des Mars, aufgenommen von der europäischen Sonde «Mars Express».
Das sollte nicht ganz vergessen werden

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-steinbe…
Mal was anderes von der Strasse der Ölsardien(Monterey)zu den Früchten des Zorns. Von der Cannery Row ist nichts mehr übrig als ein Touristeneldorade und eins oder das größte Aquarium der Welt.


Scientific, Literary Team to Re-Create Steinbeck`s Voyage
By Kenneth R. Weiss
Times Staff Writer

January 20, 2004

MONTEREY, Calif. — Weary from writing "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck set sail from here in 1940 with his pal, Edward F. Ricketts, on a sardine boat that ferried them on a six-week scientific and literary adventure around the Baja California peninsula.

The expedition, made famous by Steinbeck`s account, "The Log From the Sea of Cortez," has long made scientists and armchair adventurers dream of re-creating the seafaring voyage of the novelist and the marine biologist who was the model for the character Doc in the novel "Cannery Row."

"People have talked about doing this for decades," said Edward F. Ricketts Jr., the octogenarian son of Monterey`s famous marine biologist, who died in 1948. "But it`s never been done."

Until now.

On March 11, 64 years to the day after Steinbeck and Ricketts set off in a chartered fishing vessel, four men and one woman plan to board a remarkably similar wooden fishing boat in Monterey and trace the same 4,000-mile route to the Sea of Cortes and back again.

The two-month trip will be chronicled by a Steinbeck Fellow, an academic position at San Jose State University held by freelance writer Jon Christensen. He plans to write a book about the expedition and create a daily Web log on the Internet for schoolchildren and others to follow.

The chief scientist will be William F. Gilly, a Stanford professor of marine science based at the Hopkins Marine Laboratory in Monterey.

As in the first expedition, Gilly and other scientists plan to survey the shallows for the 550 types of marine life listed by Ricketts in the original book he co-wrote with Steinbeck: "Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research."

Using a recently rediscovered copy of Ricketts` notes from the trip, the scientists plan to trace the precise route and make the same stops.

The idea is to compare their observations and freshly collected species of marine life with those plucked from the sea and logged 64 years ago.

They want to measure what has happened to the body of water — once so rich in marine life that explorer Jacques Cousteau called it the "aquarium of the world," but one that has suffered from decades of excessive fishing and pressure from unchecked tourist development around Cabo San Lucas.

"What do I hope to get out of it?" Gilly asked. "I hope we will learn what has stayed the same, what has been lost.

"I also hope it will be an odyssey," he said, explaining his yearning to get out of the lab and into the field for exploration and discovery.

"Everything down there is mysterious and has many truths to reveal," Gilly said. "I don`t know exactly where to look, so I want to look everywhere, especially around that next rocky point."

The scientific survey will be more systematic than Ricketts` original investigation and is to include two extra weeks to look for species, such as the jumbo Humboldt squid, not mentioned by Ricketts or Steinbeck. The squid, which can reach 100 pounds and 6 to 9 feet in length, now are the target of a major fishery in the Gulf of California, the formal name of the Sea of Cortes.

Gilly, a neurobiologist who has been studying squid, plans to go to spots in the Gulf of California where sperm whales congregate to feed on those mysterious tentacled creatures, which can change colors from white to deep red.

Unlike most modern-day scientific expeditions, this one will be operated on a shoestring budget. Yet like many adventures, it was conceived "over some beers" one evening, Gilly said.

He has been thinking about duplicating the voyage since the mid-1980s, but the idea took shape only after he linked up with Frank Donahue, a semiretired shrimp fishermen with a boat and, as he puts it, "nothing better to do."

The boat, docked in Morro Bay, is more functional than fancy. "It`s like going to a picnic in a dump truck," Donahue said, greeting all comers with a barrage of jokes. He lives aboard the 73-foot Gus D, named after his late father, and is proud of the sturdy vessel he has taken all over the Pacific. "She can go 12,000 miles on a tank of gas. That would get you to Indonesia."

Donahue has the diesel engine torn apart, pieces scattered everywhere in the midst of an overhaul. Other members of the expedition have been making regular trips to Morro Bay to help out, cleaning, painting and organizing. The boat needs to be hauled out of the water to have barnacles and algae scraped from its bottom before it motors up to Monterey to begin the trip.

Donahue expects everything to be ship-shape by the departure date. He also predicts the cruise will be easy for him — at least easier than fishing. "I don`t have to catch fish or sell `em. Or try to make a living. All I have to do is keep the ship running."

With the trip`s $90,000 basic costs covered by grants from private donors and nonprofit groups, Gilly is trying to line up sponsors for food and amenities. North Coast Brewing Co. in Mendocino has pledged 50 to 70 cases of beer in keeping with the spirit of the original trip. The log mentions considerable sampling of cerveza, or beer, in Spanish.

Christensen, meanwhile, is working with the San Diego Natural History Museum`s binational education program to design a guide for teachers to help their students understand the significance of the trip and follow along. Christensen plans to produce a daily log of the trip and use a satellite hookup to post it in English and in Spanish on http://www.seaofcortez.org or http://www.mardecortes.org .

The scientists also plan to bring groups of schoolchildren from La Paz, Loreto and Santa Rosalia on the Baja Peninsula to help them collect specimens, and perhaps learn a greater appreciation for marine life and the ocean.

Again, the idea is modeled after an experience by Ricketts and Steinbeck. In a passage from the log, Steinbeck wrote about boys who danced around them, quizzing them about what they were searching for in the tidal flats near La Paz.

"Once they know you are generally curious, they bring amazing things," Steinbeck wrote. "Small boys were the best collectors in the world."

With sharp eyes, the boys came up with ingenious ways to collect shrimp and other creatures without having their fingers pinched, he wrote. "[T]hen ten-centavo pieces began running out, and an increasing cloud of little boys brought us specimens."

The expedition`s regular members plan to pick up visiting scientists for portions of the trip. But joining Gilly, Christensen and Donahue for the entire voyage will be Chuck Baxter, a retired Stanford University lecturer of marine science, and Nancy Burnett, a photographer and video documentary maker who co-founded the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Although the expedition would be the first to follow in the historic wake of Steinbeck and Ricketts, the idea of another Sea of Cortes adventure surfaced in the original log.

"We have concluded," Steinbeck wrote, "that all collecting trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice: once to make mistakes and once to correct them."


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD


Fractured Iraq Offers Smugglers an Opening
Law enforcement officials say they are underequipped to battle the traffickers, who deal in everything from oil to alcohol to livestock.
By Ann M. Simmons
Times Staff Writer

January 20, 2004

BASRA, Iraq — A smile spreads across the face of Lt. Col. Abdulameer Mohammed, a customs police official in this southeastern port city, as he gives an accounting of his staff`s recent bonanza: One hundred and seventy-two cases of Johnnie Walker Red Label whiskey. Six hundred premium sheep. Four cases of new Iraqi dinar bank notes, worth more than $500,000.

The contraband was intercepted as smugglers tried to transport it across the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. Such traffic, in both directions, is common as criminals take advantage of the chaotic aftermath of the war that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"It`s a serious problem," said Mohammed, who runs the southern regional headquarters of Iraq`s new Customs Police Department. "Since the collapse of the regime, everything has collapsed."

Smugglers are stealing everything from alcohol, livestock and scrap metal to the new Hussein-free currency. Other popular items, banned for export by the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, include antiques and foodstuffs such as tea, sugar and milk, and the shoots of the country`s valuable date palms.

But of all the contraband seeping across Iraq`s porous borders, oil has proved to be the most profitable — and the most difficult to curtail.

Iraq holds the world`s second-largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. CPA officials estimate that Iraqi smugglers steal up to $200,000 worth of oil a day.

Some smugglers simply punch a hole in a remote pipeline and fill up their tankers. Others buy fuel from corrupt gas station attendants.

A highly organized, well-funded smuggling racket was in full swing under Hussein as his regime tried to circumvent international trade sanctions, coalition officials said. The network is still at least partially in place, the officials added.

The smugglers use cars, trucks, tankers and boats to transport their booty. British naval forces, stationed in Basra, are helping to retrain Iraq`s formerly disbanded river police into a sort of coast guard, whose task it is to patrol the Shatt al Arab waterway that meanders 120 miles along the border with Iran.

A Frustrating Fight

Local law enforcement officials grumble that progress in tackling smuggling is too slow. They complain that their agencies lack adequate weapons and equipment to challenge smugglers, who have access to high-tech artillery and sophisticated means of communication.

"British troops are taking a long time to control the borders," said Brig. Mohammed Kadhim Ali, commander of the Basra police department, which has been handed greater responsibility for dealing with smuggling. "During this time, our economy will be destroyed."

Ali said his department has been confiscating at least $1 million a day in smuggled dinars. It is unclear why thieves would want to steal a currency that cannot be converted or used outside Iraq. But Ali speculated that they are saboteurs who plan to save the funds and then later flood the Iraqi market in hopes of devaluing the currency.

Some critics argue that the CPA is cutting would-be smugglers too much slack as it sets up a new border patrol system. Customs police are part of the border patrol and work alongside traditional customs agents.

Because of a moratorium on imposing customs duties until the border enforcement authority is fully in place, the job of customs officials these days is primarily to search for weapons and drugs and other illegal goods, as opposed to exacting fines.

Hindi Jabber, the assistant manager for the Abu Floos port, about nine miles south of Basra, said the customs regulations make his agency feel toothless.

"Before, our authority started at the gate to the port," Jabber said. "We controlled everything. [Now] we are suffering from the fact that the customs authority is not playing its real role. The coalition troops are not giving us the real authority we need."

Coalition officials acknowledged that some disarray was inevitable as the new border enforcement authority is established and the power of certain offices and departments is redistributed. The responsibility of some Hussein-era customs officers is being pared down and they will eventually be laid off, the officials say.

The establishment of proper diplomatic relations and international commercial trade agreements between Iraq and other countries would also help reduce smuggling, coalition officials said. Without such agreements, captains piloting barges with smuggled goods could simply travel into other nations` waters to avoid capture by Iraqi authorities.

"What we`re trying to do is get the Iraqi system to stand on its own feet," British Maj. Tim Smith said. "Otherwise, what can happen is you create a kind of dependency system."

Emphasis on Security

Coalition officials have emphasized handing back responsibility for security as one of the key elements to ensuring that Iraq fully regains its sovereignty.

That includes revamping the Iraqi judiciary to ensure that criminals are punished.

"The old regime was very strict and [even] they were not able to completely stop them," said Mohammed, the customs police official. "What about under these circumstances? It`s impossible to stop them."

Ali, the Basra police commander, agreed: "Now we don`t have punishment, we don`t have proper law, we don`t have anyone controlling [the situation]."

Under Hussein, unauthorized smugglers could face the death penalty, Mohammed said. So smugglers would rarely surrender. They would either fight to the death, or simply abandon the loot and flee.

Today, arrests and confiscations haven`t made much of a dent in the smuggling trade. The sheep and currency thieves, apprehended by Mohammed`s men in November, were still awaiting a verdict in early January.

The criminals who were trying to smuggle the whiskey bolted before they could be caught.

The Scotch will be destroyed, the sheep sold, and the money funneled back into the local government`s coffers — with an undetermined percentage possibly awarded to the squad involved in the catch, said a visibly content Mohammed.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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THE WORLD


U.S. Kills 11 Villagers in Air Raid, Afghan Officials Say
American military sources, however, report that five insurgents were killed in the attack.
From Associated Press

January 20, 2004

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A U.S. air raid in southern Afghanistan killed 11 villagers, including four children, Afghan officials said, but the American military said it killed five militants in the weekend raid in Oruzgan province.

Abdul Rahman, chief of the Char Chino district in Oruzgan, said Monday that the attack occurred Sunday night in Saghatho, a village where he said U.S. forces had searched for insurgents and made several arrests.

The victims were outside a house, and a helicopter was hovering nearby when "a big plane came and dropped bombs."

"They were simple villagers. They were not Taliban. I don`t know why the U.S. bombed this home," Rahman said by telephone.

The provincial governor, Jan Mohammed Khan, confirmed Rahman`s account that four men, four children and three women were killed in the American attack. He said U.S. authorities told him they found ammunition in a search of the village. During the search, "the people were afraid, they started running," Khan said.

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman, said that a warplane killed five armed militants north of Deh Rawood, a Oruzgan town where the American military has a base, but that he had no more information on the exact location or time of the incident and no word of civilian casualties. Saghatho is 25 miles north of Deh Rawood.

Hilferty said an AC-130 gunship attacked the men when they left a house frequented by insurgents. "They were running away from a known bad-guy site," Hilferty said.

The attack brought to more than 50 the toll of violent deaths since the ratification of a post-Taliban constitution Jan. 4, most of them civilians.

The constitution is to help rebuild a state shattered by war and bolster President Hamid Karzai, the only declared candidate in the summer election.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer2…
COMMENTARY



Give Iraqis the Election They Want
Despite Bush`s rhetoric, the U.S. is opposing true democratic voting.
Robert Scheer

January 20, 2004

Proving again that Martin Luther King Jr. had the right idea, the peaceful demonstrations by thousands of Iraqi Shiites demanding direct elections have been a far more effective challenge to the arrogance of the U.S. occupation than the months of guerrilla violence undertaken by a Sunni-led insurgency.

Led by clerics demanding real democracy, the protests have strongly raised this question: What right does the United States have to tell people that they cannot be allowed to rule themselves?

With the stated reasons for the U.S. invasion — the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction and his ties to Al Qaeda — now a proven fraud, the Bush administration was left with one defense: It was bringing democracy to this corner of the Mideast. If we now fail to promptly return full sovereignty to the Iraqis, inconvenient as that outcome may be, the invasion will stand exposed as nothing more than old-fashioned imperial plunder of the region`s oil riches — and the continued occupation could devolve into civil war.

The Shiites do not require divine revelation to see through the U.S. plan to perpetuate its influence through an opaque process of caucuses designed, implemented and run by Washington and its Iraqi appointees. It is just colonial politics as usual. That`s why the conservative Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the revered cleric of Iraq`s Shiites (who make up 60% of the country), is requesting a transparent one-person, one-vote election.

The U.S., however, has not agreed. And a top Sistani aide recently suggested that President Bush`s opposition to a universal ballot election stemmed from a fear that his own reelection efforts could be hurt if the invasion he launched resulted in another Mideast country where ayatollahs played a major political role. Or, perhaps worse from the president`s point of view, an independent government might be so bold as to ask the U.S. to pull out its troops, hand back control of its oil and dismiss billions in reconstruction contracts with corporations like Halliburton.

The White House now says that a free election is impossible because no census has been taken. Is it naive to ask why this hasn`t been done? After all, we`ve been in control of the country for nearly a year now. Couldn`t we have spent some of those billions in taxpayer dollars dedicated to Iraq to employ a few thousand Iraqis to go door-to-door with clipboards? We also are told that key Iraqis signed off on the caucus plan, yet the Washington Post writes that "there is no precise equivalent in Arabic for `caucus` nor any history of caucuses in the Arab world, U.S. officials say." Perhaps a format Iraqis might better understand could have been generated by, say, Iraqis?

The fact is, history teaches us that when foreigners forcibly intervene in another country`s affairs it is a terribly messy business that usually fails miserably. And in Iraq, which is an artificial construct of previous colonial intervention, "nation-building" is a flat-out nightmare.

Our most trusted local allies, the Kurds in the north, are loudly seeking an autonomous state in a federation; the Sunni minority has grown used to a vastly disproportionate degree of power that it will not easily relinquish; and the much poorer Shiites are clearly ready to enjoy some fruits of majority rule.

Yet all this was ignored by the Pentagon intellectuals, who so cavalierly dismissed the warnings of the French and Germans — not to mention many millions of protesters at home and abroad — while convincing themselves that bringing peace and stability to Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Now, the top U.S. general in Iraq tells us that the Iraqis "don`t want us to stay, but they don`t want us to go," which is as good a definition of quagmire as any.

There is, of course, no guarantee that a freely elected Iraqi government would prove efficient or enlightened. But at least under a representative government, decisions would be made by the people who have to live with the consequences, rather than by self-interested foreigners. After all, isn`t that the radical idea upon which our own country was founded?


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Let Judy be Judith
Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/20/EDGQC4C2I91.DTL


JUDY DEAN, Dr. Judith Steinberg, Mrs. Howard Brush Dean III -- whatever you call her -- you can also call her the smartest woman in politics. Steinberg, a practicing internist, knows enough to want out.

Note how Steinberg has managed to navigate this grueling presidential campaign having appeared next to hubby Howard Dean only twice -- including Sunday`s Iowa romp. She probably figures those were two days too many.

No slight meant to those hearty spouses who have slogged through Iowa stumping for their lesser halves, but what woman in her right mind would want to endure the thankless grind of a presidential campaign?

The men -- the candidates are all men now that Carol Moseley Braun has dropped out -- get to do all the talking. The wives are stuck nodding, waving, gazing in adoration, smiling and looking as if they are paying attention.

And for what? For the chance to be America`s usually vilified first lady.

Some women are naturals at the role: Think of Laura Bush or Jackie O. Others are not, and for them the White House is no picnic. If they are political and get involved, presidents` wives are cast into the role of dragon lady. Read: Nancy Reagan or Hillary Clinton. When they`re not politically helpful, even if they helped their husbands win the White House, they`re dismissed as neurotic. Read: Mary Todd Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Thus it was appealing that Howard Dean spared his wife from the ordeals of the campaign. For one thing, the fact that Dean married a politico-phobe --

she only attended two of four inaugural balls when he was Vermont`s governor -- was proof he hadn`t intended to run for the White House since childhood. Mrs. D`s absence also showed that her husband respected his wife for who she is. It spoke well of the marriage that he didn`t try to change her.

In fact, the nicest thing Howard Dean said through this whole messy race was: "Her goal is to be a good doctor and a good mom, and I think that is a pretty good goal. I do not intend to drag her around because I think I need her as a prop on the campaign trail."

Until Dean used Steinberg as a prop Sunday, there was reason to believe that there were things Howard Dean would not stoop to in order to win the election.

This "surprise" Iowa visit shows how easy the Dean Team is to sway. First, some Iowans ask where Judy Dean is. Then New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes a column chiding the Deans for the wife`s absence. Insiders such as pollster John Zogby join the chorus. Then Dean stumbles in the polls -- because of Dean himself, not because of his wife -- and his staff shifts into damage-control mode. Judy Dean then steps, as a veritable domina ex machina, from a campaign plane.

The whole thing was so choreographed that the campaign staff made it be known that Sen. Tom Harkin`s wife, Ruth, had started the push to get Judy Dean on the hustings.

"I wanted to come here today and say thank you to the people of Iowa for being so kind and gracious to my husband, Howard Dean," Judy Dean announced.

But the look in her eyes said: "Please don`t eat me."

Before Sunday, the Dean campaign was unpredictable: Husband campaigns solo; wife takes care of business at home; kids avoid the slimelight.

But if the distaff doctor stays on the campaign trail, it seems highly predictable, if unfair, that her next stop will be for a makeover.

Dowd, after all, took shots at Steinberg for looking "like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled." After the Iowa "surprise," a Democratic strategist quipped that Steinberg looks like Marilyn Quayle. Everyone will have an opinion as to how J.S.D. -- a.k.a. Judith Steinberg, a.k.a. Judy Dean -- should look.

By the time the campaign machinery is through with The Little Woman, it will have cranked out a regular Democratic Stepford wife -- face-peeled, pearl-accessoried, blow-dried and career-suited. Deaniacs, who volunteered because Dean is "the only real person out there," as one young woman told CNN, will be scratching their heads and wondering where the real people went.

Instead, the Dean Team should use Judith Steinberg`s reticence as a selling point. An apolitical wife, after all, means no repeats of some of the Dems` most painful campaign moments. Steinberg, the Dean Team could promise, won`t go on "60 Minutes" to present a feminist`s glossing over of her husband`s philandering, a la Hillary Clinton. There will be no staged make-out at a Democratic National Committee convention, a la Al and Tipper Gore. The Dean Team instead can offer a Howard Dean who loves his wife too much to sacrifice her on the altar of the campaign gods.

That would be different.

E-mail Debra J. Saunders at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/157243_bush20.html

George W. Bush a divider after all
Tuesday, January 20, 2004

THE INDEPENDENT
EDITORIAL COMMENTARY

When President Bush mounts the podium in the U.S. Congress tonight to deliver this year`s State of the Union address, it will be the last time that he formally accounts to American voters before they deliver their verdict on him at elections in November.

Judiciously leaked hints suggest he intends to focus on the war with Iraq, on his role as commander in chief and on his determination to make, and keep, the United States secure from enemy attack.

This is probably a wise course for the White House. The patriotic card has served Bush exceptionally well since 9/11 and it continues to do so. Despite the rising number of U.S. casualties in Iraq and the accumulating evidence of how desperately the aftermath of the war has been mismanaged, Bush continues to draw high ratings for his conduct of the war. This is an unfortunate fact of U.S. politics, and one that neither we, as interested observers from across the Atlantic, still less his Democrat challengers, can afford to neglect.

Remove the patriotic card, however, and Bush`s hand looks, as indeed it should, utterly unwinnable. When Dick Gephardt, one of the less fancied contenders for the Democratic nomination, condemned Bush recently as the worst of the five presidents he had served under, it was easy for the White House to ignore his remarks as mere internal Democrat positioning. Bush`s record in office, however, shows that Gephardt may have been too complimentary. George W. Bush may be not only the worst of America`s last five presidents, but one of the worst, if not actually the worst, ever.

Bush fails not only on our terms -- according to what we would like to see in a U.S. president -- but in his own terms as well, as judged by the aspirations he expressed for the United States during his election campaign.

The candidate who advertised himself as "a uniter, not a divider" has failed to narrow any of his country`s glaring social and racial divisions.

The gaps are wider now than when he came to office. His stewardship of the mighty U.S. economy has been disastrous. He has accomplished the stunning feat of transforming the record budget surplus bequeathed to him by President Clinton into a record deficit. The strong dollar has grown weak; the trade deficit has ballooned; unemployment is up. The only beneficiaries of what hardly deserves to be called an economic policy are his pals in the multimillionaire class, which includes many in his Cabinet.

Bush has failed to extend his "compassionate conservatism" much further than his immediate circle. He has attended no military funerals and has banned photographs of the coffins of dead soldiers returning home.

The divisions he has sown extend abroad. The United States is more reviled than it has been since the Vietnam War. He has burnt many of the country`s longest-standing, most reliable bridges, including those with Europe. The alliances that remain, with Britain, for example, have only shallow foundations in public opinion. On top of all this, Bush has done nothing to reduce U.S. standing as the world`s No. 1 polluter, arrogantly shunning international efforts against global warming.

As Bush embarks on his re-election campaign, it is this vast catalogue of failure that constitutes the true state of the Union. Four years ago, Clinton reported to Congress, triumphantly, that the state of the union was "stronger than it has ever been." No wonder his successor intends to trade on a war that a majority of Americans apparently still see as short, successful and, on balance, conducive to their safety.

The biggest challenge for the Democrats is to force Bush to fight on his record, his whole record, not the laurel-wreathed warrior version. We must hope that whoever emerges from the primaries has the strength and conviction to unify the party and give U.S. voters the choice they deserve.



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The Independent is published in Great Britain.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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A False U.S. Recovery
by Seth Sandronsky
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 17, 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Sandronsky0117.htm

One thousand. That is the total number of new jobs the U.S. economy created in December, the Labor Department reported.

On average, 65,000 new jobs were created each of the three previous months.

Then in December there was a sharp stop in U.S. job creation.

Officially, the American economy is in a recovery mode. It is growing since the recession that began in March 2001 ended eight months later.

But recovering is not what the 309,000 people who left the U.S. work force in December are doing. These hapless and nameless souls are surely struggling to survive as best they can.

Recall that one assumption of the Bush administration (minus Paul O’Neill, former treasury secretary) has been that tax cuts would create jobs and growth. There have been three such cuts that favor the affluent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The American economy grew during the second half of 2003. Such growth in part has come from the blood, sweat and tears of U.S. workers.

They have been increasing their productivity, or output of goods and services per hour of work, without a corresponding rise in hiring. Call it increased intensification of work.

So it goes for wage workers in the U.S. Not all who labor productively, however, are on the radar screen of the nation’s economy.

What some have called “women’s work” is not counted in the official measure of a nation’s output, or gross domestic product. Therefore, the essential work that millions of women do, from the rearing of kids to the caring for elders, is not part of the government’s statistics.

Last December, last year and years before then, there has been joblessness in the U.S. Unemployment is a key part of a capitalist economy, writes Michael D. Yates in Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2003). [See a review of this book]

In 2004, people seeking paid work will feel the pain from budget cuts by state and local governments as joblessness increases. This trend further depresses the wages of the employed by weakening their buying power.

Working people in the U.S. are already awash in debt. “American households’ debt service ratio ­ the share of required debt payments to after-tax household income ­ has remained at or near historically high levels since the fourth quarter of 2001,” according to the Financial Markets Center.

In short, working folks in the U.S. are being battered by growth with few new jobs under the Bush White House. Curiously, its increased military spending to occupy Iraq and wage a world war against terrorism is not much stimulating business to expand payrolls.

When weapons contractors cheer new government contracts, new jobs do not appear on Main Street. It is facing a mean jobs crisis as the political system appears unable to respond in a way that improves the lives of working people.

Presumably, such folks must be patient for a recovery with new jobs. Yet the hiring boom that is just around the corner appears more distant as 2004 begins.

In the meantime, the season of a presidential election is gathering steam.

What President Bush does and does not say about the jobless recovery during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, January 20 may prove instructive.

As will be the responses of those with an alternative vision of society.

From my armchair, the U.S. anti-war movement is organizationally positioned to articulate the views of a true recovery, one that puts people first.

Seth Sandronsky is a member of Peace Action and co-editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive paper. He can be reached at: ssandron@hotmail

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Tuesday, January 20, 2004
War News for January 20, 2004 Draft

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi police killed, one wounded in attack at checkpoint near Balad.

CPA announces sudden plan to create 50,000 new jobs in Iraq. “The US-led coalition unveiled a series of multi-billion-dollar reconstruction schemes yesterday to create 50,000 jobs across war-battered Iraq in the wake of violent demonstrations by the country`s disaffected unemployed.” Now you know how to get Bremer`s attention.

A murder in Baghdad.

Analysis: Bush’s lies on WMD now affecting US credibility abroad according to experts in both parties. “‘The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious,’ said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon`s Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration`s rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush`s doctrine of ‘preemption…’ Already, in the crisis over North Korea`s nuclear ambitions, China has rejected US intelligence that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for use in weapons. China has a key role in resolving the North Korean standoff, but its refusal to embrace the US intelligence has disappointed American officials and could complicate negotiations to eliminate North Korea`s weapons programs.”

Moqtada Sadr urges Iraqi Shi`ites to oppose US transition plans.

Demonstrations continue in Baghdad.

Canadian NGO releases report on Iraqi detainees.

US troops begin new counter-insurgency campaign in Baghdad.

Commentary

Editorial: Bush is a divider, not a uniter. “The divisions he has sown extend abroad. The United States is more reviled than it has been since the Vietnam War. He has burnt many of the country`s longest-standing, most reliable bridges, including those with Europe. The alliances that remain, with Britain, for example, have only shallow foundations in public opinion. On top of all this, Bush has done nothing to reduce U.S. standing as the world`s No. 1 polluter, arrogantly shunning international efforts against global warming.”

Opinion: How are things going in Iraq? “The worst may be yet to come. Each of the main stakeholders in Iraq`s future -- the Shiite Muslims, the Sunni Muslims and the Kurds -- has been battling to lock in its own gains, at the expense of the nation as a whole. Even senior U.S. officials talk about the danger that Iraq may be slipping toward civil war.”

Opinion: Legitimacy and lack thereof. “From the start, the Pentagon planners (or non-planners) believed the United States would have no legitimacy problems in Iraq. ‘We will be greeted as liberators,’ Vice President Cheney famously predicted. When urged after the war to transfer some authority to the United Nations to gain legitimacy, administration officials were dismissive in public and scathing in private. ‘We have far more legitimacy than the U.N.,’ one senior official told me last June. To discredit the idea of internationalization, Defense Department officials kept insisting that their goal was to transfer power not to the United Nations but to the Iraqis. ‘No foreigners can be in charge of [determining how elections will be held],’ Paul Wolfowitz said.”

Opinion: Bush’s State of Disunion. “In his State of the Union address tonight, President Bush will speak of the nightmare he has created in Iraq as if it is a dream come true. Yet the contrary facts of the American misadventure have begun to speak for themselves. When the awful story of the Iraq war is written, the two weeks just past may be recognized as a time when the deception and disarray of Bush`s policy were made more clear than ever.”

Opinion: The neo-con dream becomes a nightmare. “If the Bush administration is beginning to realise that not all in the garden is rosy when it comes to Iraq, neo-con ideologues Richard Perle and David Frum, joint authors of a book entitled An End to Evil: How to win the war on terror, are undeterred. In this hate-filled tone, the two former members of the Bush administration urge the US government to reject the jurisdiction of the UN Charter, subject Muslims to special scrutiny by US law enforcement, and force European countries to choose between Paris - considered an enemy - and Washington.”

Editorial: The Bushies don’t understand the consequences of their own policies. “If Bush is rushing the date for turnover so he can claim victory in time for the November elections, chaos could well follow -- with or without United Nations help. The administration must proceed with extreme caution, listen with urgency to all of Iraq`s factions, and find a compromise. Otherwise, the political situation could deteriorate into violence. If that happens, many more American soldiers will die.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Idaho Marine wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Minnesota soldier wounded in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:22 AM
Comment (1)

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2004-01-20
Sadr followers protest against US, Governing Council
Sea of Sadr`s followers demonstrate in Baghdad, Karbala against federalism, Saddam`s status of prisoner of war.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=8569
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BAGHDAD - Thousands of followers of young firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr rose up in protest Tuesday against the US plans for Iraq as a tide of discontent swept the country`s Shiite majority.
In Baghdad and the southern city of Karbala, a sea of Sadr followers lashed out against the Pentagon`s designation of Saddam Hussein as a war criminal and the US-chosen interim Governing Council`s plans to endorse federalism in the basic law to rule the country through 2005.

Sadr, who appeals to the young and disenfranchised, made an appeal for a wave of popular protest at last Friday`s afternoon prayers in Kufa, 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Baghdad.

The incendiary cleric, who since the summer has called on American forces to leave Iraq, had been quiet in recent months after the US military brought pressure to bear on him after his supporters killed a US soldier in an October street battle in Baghdad.

But galvanised by the senior cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani`s criticism of US plans to transfer power to an unelected government in June, Sadr has fired off a new barrage of bellicose rhetoric.

Sistani`s followers have already mounted two major protests against the US handover of sovereignty since last Thursday, the first in the southern port of Basra and the other Monday in the nation`s capital.

In central Baghdad, Sadr`s followers chanted: "We are against those who want to divide the country and separate us."

The slogan was a swipe at Iraq`s Kurdish minority and the Governing Council which had agreed behind closed doors to adopt federalism in the fundamental law that will rule the country until 2005.

The council has granted virtual autonomy to the Kurds in the north as it looks to finish writing the fundamental law by March 1 according to the timeframe set by the US-led coalition to grant Iraq sovereignty at the end of June.

Federalism envisions the dividing of Iraq into zones where the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites would rule themselves with little interference from the other under the umbrella of a national government.

"We are marching against federalism. We have seen what federalism gave Yugoslavia. It is an Israeli idea to divide us. We want one nation, one country, one land, one religion," said Hassan al-Zergani.

The protestors also denounced the US decision to name Saddam Hussein a prisoner of war, although the privilege should have little effect on plans to try the ousted leader in Iraq possibly as soon as June.

"Saddam is not a prisoner of war. He is a criminal," people shouted, adding: "Kill Saddam. Kill Saddam."

Similar scenes were on display in Karbala, 110 kilometres (68 miles) south of Baghdad, where about 3,000 Sadr supporters gathered to reject federalism and Saddam`s prisoner of war status.

"No to America, Yes, yes to Islam. No to division, yes to national unity," they shouted.

[Joerver]

JAMES CARROLL
Addressing Bush`s state of disunion
By James Carroll, 1/20/2004

IN HIS STATE of the Union address tonight, President Bush will speak of the nightmare he has created in Iraq as if it is a dream come true. Yet the contrary facts of the American misadventure have begun to speak for themselves. When the awful story of the Iraq war is written, the two weeks just past may be recognized as a time when the deception and disarray of Bush`s policy were made more clear than ever. These are events to which the president will not refer tonight, yet taken together, they reveal the true state of his disunion:

On Jan. 4, the tape of a belligerent voice claiming to be Osama bin Laden was broadcast on Al Jazeera television. The next day the CIA confirmed that it was bin Laden, and that, made recently, the tape showed he is still alive.

On Jan. 8, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace rebutted major Bush claims on Iraq, concluding that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq WMD and ballistic missile programs."

On Jan. 11, on television, former Treasury Secretary Paul O`Neill confirmed reports in Ron Suskind`s "The Price of Loyalty" that the Bush administration planned war against Iraq before 9/11, "from the very beginning."

On Jan. 12, a paper published at the Army War College described the war on terrorism as "strategically unfocused." The assessment from within the military itself blasted the Bush-led effort because it "promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate US military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

On Jan. 13, the Bush administration reversed itself to announce that Canada could participate in contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq. Washington`s punitive rejection of countries that had opposed the war was not working.

On Jan. 14, Human Rights Watch issued a report that held some US tactics in Iraq to be in violation of the Geneva Conventions, including home demolitions that "did not meet the test of military necessity." The report accused the army of arresting and holding Iraqi civilians simply because they were relatives of fugitives.

On Jan. 14, it was reported that the captured Saddam Hussein was in possession of a letter he had written instructing his followers not to throw in with foreign fighters, further puncturing the myth that Hussein was in active alliance with Al Qaeda.

On Jan. 14, a secret study conducted by the US Army Command in Baghdad was published. It faulted the army`s tactics in Iraq as needlessly confrontational, and it asserted -- against the claims of the Bush administration -- that "the capture of Saddam will have nominal effect within Iraqi borders."

On Jan. 15, responding to Shi`ite leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani, 30,000 Iraqis took to the streets to protest American plans for transition to Iraqi rule, making even more unlikely Washington`s fantasy that Iraq will not join Iran as a Shi`ite dominated state. Will that put Iraq back on the axis of evil?

On Jan. 15, the Bush administration was reported to be considering opening Iraq reconstruction contracts to France, Germany, and Russia, as it had to Canada. Washington is scrambling.

By Jan. 19, yesterday, the Bush administration had reversed itself to press at the United Nations for urgent help with the transition to Iraqi self-government, the clearest sign yet that Washington`s go-it-alone policy had failed.

In the days before the State of the Union address one year ago, the Bush administration denigrated UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, dismissing the inspections and containment strategy favored at the United Nations. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld mocked what he called "old Europe." Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to provide compelling evidence of Saddam Hussein`s imminent threat. The State Department published an indictment of Saddam entitled "Apparatus of Lies."

In the State of the Union address itself, President Bush bragged that he had "liberated" Afghanistan -- a country which today, except for a small zone around Kabul, belongs to warlords. He boasted that "one by one terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice" -- thinking, perhaps, of the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, where American justice is mocked.

Bush detailed a long list of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction. He said that Iraq had obtained "uranium from Africa," and he referred to certain metal tubes to suggest a nuclear weapons program. He said that Saddam Hussein "aids and protects" Al Qaeda, and, projecting into the future, he linked the 9/11 hijackers with Saddam. He promised that Colin Powell would provide evidence of the link between Saddam and the terrorists.

The president set a rigorous standard last year, constructing an apparatus of lies it will be hard to match tonight. One bald falsehood not even he will dare repeat: "We seek peace," Bush said a year ago, "We strive for peace."

James Carroll`s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Top 11 reasons to invade Mars.
http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/

11. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz believe our forces will be greeted with flowers when they arrive.

10. Once we kick the ass of the mythological god of war, the rest of the planets in the solar system will fall peacefully in line.

9. Running out of places to not find bin Laden, Anthrax killer, CIA agent name-leaker, etc..

8. Secret video shown Saturday morning reveals that Marvin the Martian is a brutal military dictator.

7. Owes Gore a Coke on the whole "global warming" thing.

6. If there was water on Mars, their might have been life. If there was life on Mars, then there must be dead things. If there are dead things, there might be fossil fuels.

5. The invasion will pay for itself through the sale of Mars` ample reserves of Mars bars.

4. Mars is the front line in the war on imaginary, interplanetary terror (Mars Attacks! (1996), Clinton failed to respond).

3. As with Iraq, Halliburton pitched the invasion (see Salon.com).

2. Mars itself is an intermediate goal, the ultimate prize is the natural gas of Uranus.

1. As Condi said, "We don`t want the smoking gun to be the earth shattering ka-boom of the Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com/

11. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz believe our forces will be greeted with flowers when they arrive.

10. Once we kick the ass of the mythological god of war, the rest of the planets in the solar system will fall peacefully in line.

9. Running out of places to not find bin Laden, Anthrax killer, CIA agent name-leaker, etc..

8. Secret video shown Saturday morning reveals that Marvin the Martian is a brutal military dictator.

7. Owes Gore a Coke on the whole "global warming" thing.

6. If there was water on Mars, their might have been life. If there was life on Mars, then there must be dead things. If there are dead things, there might be fossil fuels.

5. The invasion will pay for itself through the sale of Mars` ample reserves of Mars bars.

4. Mars is the front line in the war on imaginary, interplanetary terror (Mars Attacks! (1996), Clinton failed to respond).

3. As with Iraq, Halliburton pitched the invasion (see Salon.com).

2. Mars itself is an intermediate goal, the ultimate prize is the natural gas of Uranus.

1. As Condi said, "We don`t want the smoking gun to be the earth shattering ka-boom of the Illudium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator."


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US Ambassador: Our troops in Georgia forever
January 19, 2004 Posted: 16:18 Moscow time (12:18 GMT)


TBILISI - US troops in Georgia will remain there forever, said US Ambassador to Georgia Richard Miles, Channel One reported.

According to Mr. Miles, the presence of American troops is necessary to provide security for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline project. At the same time, Mr. Miles expressed regret that Russia created obstacles to an American presence in Georgia.

However, this contradicts the statement made by the newly-elected Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Mr. Saakashvili said at a press conference on January 12 that Georgia would not allow the United States to build military bases in Georgia.

Perhaps, Georgia’s policy change was due to Washington’s readiness to allocate $164m in aid to the country. The news was announced by Georgian Foreign Minister Tedo Dzhaparidze last week. He said the US aid would not be limited to this package, as several private American funds also expressed readiness to help Georgia.

RosBusinessConsulting

Source URL: http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=421…

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JAN 19, 2004
Terror manual from Al-Qaeda published online
LONDON - Al-Qaeda has published a terrorist manual online in its latest call to arms for recruits who have gone unnoticed by security agencies.

In the manual, Osama bin Laden wrote: `After Iraq and Afghanistan will come the Crusader invasion of Saudi Arabia. All fighters all over the world must be ready.`

London`s Observer newspaper said the manual was masterminded by Saif al-Adel, the organisation`s third most senior man and the only terrorist other than Osama and his partner Ayman Al-Zawahiri to have a US$25-million (S$42.5-million) reward on his head.

Writers in The Base Of The Vanguard - which include Al-Zawahiri and Osama - encourage the use of weapons of mass destruction.

The internal Al-Qaeda document is aimed at new volunteers who have escaped detection by counter-terrorist authorities and cannot break cover to undergo more formal terrorist training.

Reports include the account of a `martyred` suicide bomber and pages of technical advice on physical training, security counter-measures for operational terrorist cells and the use of light weapons.

`All that is needed to open the ideas of the zealous youthful Muslims to the techniques of our fighters,` a preface explained.

Contributor Al-Adel, 39, warned operatives not to believe mainstream media.

`They will try and wear down your morale by publishing false reports about the arrest of other cells,` he wrote.

Another author is Abdul Aziz al-Mukran, who is also known as Abu Hajjer and is one of the most wanted Al-Qaeda suspects in Saudi Arabia.

In his contribution, entitled The War Of Nerves, he listed the use of weapons of mass destruction, specifically biological and nuclear arms, as a potential tactic in the `ongoing war`.

The appearance of the manual - the January issue of what promises to be a monthly publication - is a major boost to Al-Qaeda`s propaganda effort.

`Though it shows that we have taken down a lot of the training infrastructure and made it hard for Al-Qaeda to operate, it is very worrying in that it implies that there are a lot of recruits around who we have yet to pick up,` one British senior police counter-terrorist officer told The Observer.


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Copyright @ 2003 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

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John Kerry: Criminal Hypocrisy. A History Repeated

Vietnam Veterans Against the War

Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations

April 23, 1971

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the Winter Soldier Investigation. The term Winter Soldier is a play on words of Thomas Paine`s in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriots and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out....

In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn`t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn`t lose, and we couldn`t retreat, and because it didn`t matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn`t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can`t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won`t be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?.... We are here in Washington to say that the problem of this war is not just a question of war and diplomacy. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of racism which is rampant in the military, and so many other questions such as the use of weapons; the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage at the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.

An American Indian friend of mine who lives in the Indian Nation of Alcatraz put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said, "my God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people," and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say, that we think this thing has to end.

We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We`re here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick, and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They`ve left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission - to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

This text is made available by the Sixties Project, sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

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Walking the Streets of Baghdad

Weblog: Dahr / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 20, 2004 - 05:03 PM
After being in Iraq nearly two months now, it struck me how much people
can adapt to even the most trying situations. In Baghdad, a place that is the front line of a low-grade guerrilla war between insurgents and the occupation forces, daily life for 6 million Iraqis goes on.

When I first arrived here, my head spun with the inherent security dangers. Suicide car bombs, resistance attacks on occupation troops in the streets, mines, bombs-a bit of a departure from my life in Anchorage, Alaska. My biggest concerns there are icy roads, avoiding moose on the roads and whether or not my car will start after a night of minus 30 degree temperatures when I’m going to meet some friends for coffee.

And it dawned on me, while walking from my hotel to meet a friend to discuss writing a story about the work being done by her peace organization, how odd it is that I`ve grown accustomed to this dangerous situation. Going about business in this situation is a stressful proposition, to say the least. For it is not just about business when every walk down the street can be about life and death.

Yet this has become normal to me now, and I worry about that as this cannot possibly be good on my psyche. It is not without concern about what this has done to my danger threshold that I feel relatively comfortable walking around the streets of Baghdad.

I`ve learned to avoid the loose dirt and garbage piles that are so abundant along the noisy, congested streets of central Baghdad. It is always better to walk along concrete, rather than tromping across loose bricks or piles of rubbish, as these are
often places where the powerful Improvised Explosive Devices, are hidden.

The sound of a rumbling bus behind me has come to mean a US Humvee
Patrol, with soldiers manning large machine guns perched on top, scanning the buildings for potential attackers. I try to avoid these when possible, as the civilian casualties from an IED explosion and then the return fire of the American`s often outnumber that of the intended targets.

I walk up to a bank to exchange some of my US dollars for the new Saddam-free Iraqi Dinars, and without thinking automatically raise my arms and turn around to be frisked for weapons. With the usual utterance of Shukran (Thank you in Arabic), I stroll inside to do my business amongst more armed guards.

Carrying on down the street, I pass a petrol station with the usual long line of mostly beat up orange and white Passats parked along the road, awaiting their ration of fuel. Razor wire spirals across the ground in front of the filling station, while armed Iraqi police monitor the entry, allowing a car with an empty tank in every so often.

On the corner I smile at the usual congregation of what I think are Iraqi secret service personnel...plain clothed men, and one woman with ear pieces for communication and satellite phones, closely watching all the traffic which passes by.

200 meters past this is the Sheraton and Palestine hotel complex. The two tan monoliths, each with chunks blasted out of their exterior by rocket attacks, loom over a perimeter of concrete blocks stood on end to deter suicide car bombers. Mangy dogs walk past them, pawing small garbage piles where they can reach past the security razor wire.

I am searched for bombs or weapons by the Iraqi security guards at the first gate and again to enter the compound. US soldiers stand by, their nervous eyes watching every person who approaches.

The approach takes me down another row of tall concrete blocks, shielding me from potential suicide bombers, as well as a view of the muddy waters of the Tigris River. The barrel of a large M1 American tank is the last deterrent, as I turn left and enter the lobby of the Palestine Hotel.

Once inside, it is a surreal experience. I take a seat in a plush chair to wait for my friend as soft music fills the lobby, echoing off the marble floor. Press personnel stroll by with their flack jackets and helmets, walking from the elevators out the front door past the guards. Meanwhile I see several journalists in one of the bars. This seems a common coping mechanism, for many of the journalists in my own hotel tend to congregate in one of the rooms to toss back the drinks while discussing the goings on of another day in occupied Baghdad. Booze is obviously not too difficult to come by in Baghdad these days, for westerners and soldiers alike are spotted purchasing it secretly around the city. I know this by walking by a small bar near my hotel when I go to pick up my bottled water every few days.

The visits I make to visit people about the stories I write are limited to the daytime, for everyone knows the streets are dangerous after 9pm, and not just from looters and criminals. Just last week a journalist friend of mine was robbed by Iraqi Police just a few blocks from our hotel.

But life goes on here, all of us adapting to this most curious situation, whether we like it or not.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article comes from Truth Justice Peace
http://www.humanshields.org/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.humanshields.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News…

[Joerver]

Lynne Howard, left, seemed to be less involved in the debate than some of her fellow citizens at this caucus in Waukee, Iowa.

Ein Wort zu den Vorgängen auf den Caucuses. Man darf sich nicht vorstellen, dass dies Wahlen sind, das sind Parteiversmmlungen(daher der Name) bei dene diskutiert wird und auch versucht wird den einen oder anderen noch für einen Kandidaten zu überzeugen.
Nach dem wird zum Schluß eine Abstimmung durchgeführt, bei der dann durchgezählt wird durch handhochheben, wer für die einzelnen Kandidaten. Also eine ziemlich zwanglose Veranstaltung.
Deshalb auch die Danziger Karikatur.
Bei einer Primary ist das anders.


01/19/04 IA Democratic Caucus
01/27/04 NH Democratic Primary



02/03/04 AZ Democratic Primary
02/03/04 DE Democratic Primary
02/03/04 MO Democratic Primary
02/03/04 NM Democratic Caucus
02/03/04 ND Democratic Caucus
02/03/04 OK Democratic Primary
02/03/04 SC Democratic Primary

January 20, 2004
CHOOSING DELEGATES
At One Caucus, Sorting Out Rules and Brokering Deals
By RICK LYMAN

AUKEE, Iowa, Jan. 19 — The first to arrive at the Precinct 2 caucus in the Waukee City Hall council chambers were three white-haired women from the housing complex for the elderly in a former cornfield nearby. They lugged a stack of John Kerry posters under their arms.

The women immediately began to rearrange a dozen red chairs into a circle in the back of the room, taping the posters to the chairs. Shortly after 6 p.m., the caucus`s temporary chairwoman, Jody Chambers, came into the hall.

A cluster of Kerry people arrived, then several John Edwards supporters, two very committed Howard Dean supporters and three generations of a Des Moines family. Just before the official caucus starting time at 6:30 p.m., several dozen people entered in a steady stream.

Lynne Howard sat in the front row, knitting a shawl, while her daughter, Brynne, stood beside her, fresh off a three-hour drive from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., just so she could take part. "I always have to keep myself busy at these things," Ms. Howard said as the knitting needles clacked.

Mother and daughter were both firmly for Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio. "I know he`s on the edge of things but he pushed the debate and brings up things that need to be said," Lynne Howard said.

At 6:30 p.m., Ms. Chambers cleared her throat and, with hands and voice shaking, called the meeting to order. All the seats were filled and a half-dozen stood at the sides. "I`m just a little nervous," Ms. Chambers said. "It`s a big responsibility."

At the side of the room, William Terrell, an acupuncturist, studied the map of Waukee, which is the fastest-growing city in Iowa, caught in the tide of the Des Moines westward expansion. Farmers mixed with suburbanites at the caucus. Huge apartment complexes rise along both sides of Highway 6, the main commercial strip, with the last few corn farms fighting for space in between them.

At 7:05 p.m., Ms. Chambers conducted the official count. Four years ago, Waukee had only one precinct caucus, and about 70 people assembled to choose between Vice President Al Gore and former Senator Bill Bradley. This year, because of the area`s growth, there were four precinct caucuses, though each was a bit smaller. The final Precinct 2 tally was 53 people.

The task of the caucusgoers was to choose just 4 delegates, so in the weird world of caucus math, that meant that a candidate needed 9 supporters to be "viable," to qualify for at least one delegate.

"The Kerry women have already set up in the back," Ms. Chambers said, "So we can keep them there. Any Dean supporters? How about you go up in this corner. Gephardt, can we put you over there? Kucinich people, right there in the front. If there are any Clark supporters, they can go back by the water cooler. The Edwards people, oh, how about over here on the side?"

The two biggest groups were those for Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the chair circles eating up the back half of the chambers. At the front, five supporters for Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, tried desperately to make a deal with the eight for Mr. Kucinich.

"I like Howard Dean`s values," said Elizabeth Terrell, Mr. Terrell`s wife, like her husband an acupuncturist and a Dean supporter. "Look, with eight of you and five of us, we don`t have anything," she told the Kucinich base. "But if we go together, we can have a delegate."

Tim Broderick, who owns the farm just across the street from City Hall, was deputized by the Kerry team to try to talk the Gephardt supporters into their camp. He managed to break loose three of five of them, then a fourth.

With five minutes left, the Dean people were well short of the count they needed for a delegate. "Maybe we`ve got time to approach the Gephardt folks," Mr. Terrell said. But then, almost on cue, Dorothy Taylor, the last of the Gephardt supporters, moved over to the Kerry circle to great whoops of delight.

The Dean supporters were getting desperate. Finally, to stop the Kucinich people from bleeding into the Edwards camp, three Dean supporters, including Mr. Terrell, huddled together and sadly decided to support Mr. Kucinich.

The final result: Mr. Kerry had 22 supporters, Mr. Edwards 18 and Mr. Kucinich 9, with the rest undecided. By the vagaries of caucus math, this meant two of the precinct`s four delegates went to Mr. Kerry, one each to Mr. Edwards and Mr. Kucinich. Dr. Dean came away empty-handed.

"When I walked in here, I was afraid we wouldn`t be viable," said Mike Miller, a high school teacher and supporter of Mr. Kusinich, grinning happily. "But Dennis Kucinich has a delegate!"

Who is that delegate? Brynne Howard, 18, who will drive down from St. Olaf again for the March 15 Democratic county convention.

The disappointed Terrells left quickly. "Where were all the young people they said would turn out?" asked Ms. Terrell, eyes red.

"I`m in the dog house," Mr. Terrell said. His wife had stayed firm for Dr. Dean.

"He`s driving," Ms. Terrell said. "I`m crying."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

We hate to sound like your parents, but people must take responsibility for their actions.

Steal from the grocery store, go to jail.

Double park, pay the ticket.

But why doesn`t this simple principle apply to corporations and their executives?

As of this writing, of all of the corporate crimes committed that have cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars over the past couple of years, only two top level executives are in prison.

That`s it -- two.

Now, ask yourself, if working class people committed crimes that cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars -- inconceivable as it is -- how many would be in prison? The whole lot of them.

So, how is it that corporations and their executives get away with it? It`s the nature of the beast.

And perhaps that`s why we should consider doing away with it -- the corporation that is.

After all, if a corporation means a legal structure to allow human beings to get away with wrongdoing without paying a price, then it`s a machine that produces injustice.

Let`s say that a corporation is caught fixing its books, committing in effect a $2.7 billion fraud. That would be a case very similar to the case of HealthSouth.

Under U.S. federal law, if a health care corporation is convicted of a serious crime, that company can no longer do business with the government, in this case the Medicare and Medicaid program. And in HealthSouth`s case, that means life and death.

So, the company hires one of the nation`s best corporate crime defense attorneys -- Bob Bennett and says to him, "Save us from the corporate death penalty."

And Bob goes to the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case and says, "Hey, look, we blew it, here`s my phone number, we`ll give you everything you want. Just don`t indict us. Please don`t indict us."

And the U.S. Attorney indicts 16 top executives. And the company is on the road to getting off scot free.

That`s one way a corporation morphs to get out of accepting responsibility for its sins -- blame the human beings.

But sometimes, the corporate executives say, "Hey, we don`t have to take the heat. Let`s cough up a defunct subsidiary to plead guilty -- and the government can ban that unit from doing business with Medicare. Who cares about a defunct subsidiary? That unit never did business with Medicare anyway."

So, there`s a guilty plea, there`s a corporate fine, there is a touch of adverse publicity -- but nobody`s hurt. Crime without punishment.

Or let`s say that the corporation wants to plea to a lesser offense, but not draw any publicity to the case. This too happens. The corporate lawyer can go to the Justice Department and cut a deal where the Department will agree not to put out a press release about the case. A number of criminal defense lawyers have told us they have done this.

The Justice Department issued a memo earlier this year titled "Federal Prosecution of Business Organization."

The memo gives prosecutors discretion to grant corporations immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

These immunity agreements, known as deferred prosecution agreements, or pre-trial diversion, were previously reserved for minor street crimes.

They were never intended for major corporate crimes.

In fact, the U.S. Attorneys` Manual explicitly states that a major objective of pretrial diversion is to "save prosecutive and judicial resources for concentration on major cases."

Since the memo was issued, there have been a rash of deferred prosecution agreements in cases involving large corporations, including a settlement with a Puerto Rican bank on money laundering charges and a Pittsburgh bank on securities law charges.

And some corporate crime defense attorneys believe that it is possible to enter these agreements with the Justice Department so as to avoid any publicity.

"This is a favorable change for companies," said Alan Vinegrad, a partner at Covington & Burling in New York. "The memo now explicitly says that pre-trial diversion, which had been reserved for small, individual, minor crimes, is now available for corporations."

Vinegrad said that while there have been a handful of publicized pre-trial diversion cases by corporations, it is conceivable that the Justice Department can cut these kind of deals with companies without filing a public document -- and therefore without any publicity to the case.

Harry Glasbeek is a professor of criminal law at York University in Toronto. He has studied corporate crime and written a book about it called Wealth By Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy.

Glasbeek says that the creation of the corporation allowed for this "fungibility of responsibility."

"Sometimes the executives plead the corporation to relieve the executives from responsibility," Glasbeek told us recently. "Sometimes the corporation causes the executives to plead, a couple of people take the fall. And it is very difficult. We have created a separate entity with separate property. So, you have multiple personalities with different legal duties and rights that the actors are allowed to take on at any one time. That allows a shifting of responsibility that we cannot control."

We call it Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder (MCPD).

Glasbeek says this disorder undermines our notion of responsibility, which "supposedly depends on the individual taking responsibility for his or her own actions."

"What we have designed is a creature that allows that responsibility to be shifted at the whim of those people who are actually operating that system," Glasbeek said. "That`s an endemic design flaw."

Glasbeek has no illusions that criminal prosecution will bring corporate criminals to justice.

"My notion of prosecuting more often is to bring attention to this embedded difficulty -- it is not because I believe that this will actually change the situation in and of itself," he said.

We believe that justice can be done -- and must be done. But only two things work in bringing justice to corporations.

One is to criminally convict the corporate criminals and apply the death penalty in cases of serious wrongdoing.

And the other is to criminally prosecute high-ranking corporate executives who commit serious crimes and throw them in prison.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of `Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy` (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

###

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Wann wird über Nazi-Vergleiche gejammert?
Bei Fox News nur, wenn Republikaner betroffen sind
von FAIR
FAIR / ZNet 18.01.2004

Die Online-Aktivisten-Gruppe MoveOn.org hat einen Anti-Bush- Anzeigenwettbewerb gestartet. In zwei der eingegangenen Beiträge wird George Bush mit Adolf Hitler verglichen. Die (nachfolgende) Kontroverse über den Vergleich sagt allerdings weniger etwas über den Zustand der linken Debatte aus, als über die Doppelmoral des Nachrichtenkonzerns News Corporation, der Rupert Murdoch gehört. Am 4. Januar startete die Kontroverse - im Fox News Channel der News Corp - der Kanal sendete eine Beschwerde des Vorsitzenden des Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, bezüglich des Bush-Hitler-Vergleichs. “Das ist diese Art Taktik, die wir heute bei den Linken sehen, wenn es darum geht, die Präsidentschaftskandidaten der Demokraten zu unterstützen”, so Gillespies Anklage. Seiner Meinung nach eine “ekelerregende” Taktik. Tags darauf (5. Januar 2004) ist die Sache den ganzen Tag Hauptstory auf Fox News Channel.

John Gibson fragt: “Was ist mit dieser Hass-auf-Bush-Bewegung, diesem MoveOn.org und George Soros, der Beiträge sponsert, in denen Bush mit Hitler verglichen wird?” Gibson wird daraufhin korrigiert, die Beiträge seien nicht von MoveOn finanziert (auch nicht von Soros, der MoveOn finanziell unterstützt). Außerdem wurden die beiden Beiträge aufgrund von Beschwerden mittlerweile abgesetzt. Sean Hannity beschuldigt einen Gast: “Ihr Jungs auf der Linken überzieht aber mächtig. Ihr vergleicht den Präsidenten mit Adolf Hitler”. Die Republikanische Meinungsforscherin Kellyanne Conway in der Hannity-Show: “Dies ist jene gehässige, ätzende Rhetorik, aus der die Demokratische Partei Howard Deans hervorging”. Und Bill O’Reilly zitiert die (beiden) Beiträge, um zu beweisen, dass “genau in diesem Moment in Amerika die Demokratische Partei Geisel der extremen, extremen Linken ist”.

So überzogen der Vergleich auch sein mag, man muss darauf hinweisen, dass Hitler/Faschismus-Vergleiche in der amerikanischen Politik durchaus nichts Neues sind. So bezeichnet Rush Limbaugh die VerfechterInnen der Frauenrechte regelmäßig als “Femi-Nazis”. Und Bezeichnungen wie “Hitlery Clinton” sind fester Bestandteil der rechten Radio-Talks. Auf NPR verglich der Republikanische Powerbroker Grover Norquist am 2. Oktober 2003 die Erbschaftssteuer mit dem ‘Holocaust’.

Aber kommen wir auf die Verwandtschaft der Fox News zu sprechen. Genau an jenem Tag, als Gibson, Hannity und O’Reilly über den Hitler/Bush-Vergleich debattierten - als Beweis für den Extremismus der Linken - wurde einer der Demokratischen Präsidentschaftskandidaten, Howard Dean, in einer Kolumne der New York Post als Gefolgsmann Josef Göbbels bezeichnet. “Herr Howie” wurde beschuldigt, “nach seiner Lenie Riefenstahl Ausschau zu halten”. Deans Unterstützer seien eine “Internet-Gestapo” - der Autor vergleicht sie mit “Hitlers Braunhemden”. Übrigens gehört die New York Post zur News Corporation - Rupert Murdochs konservativem Medienimperium - ebenso wie der Fox News Channel. Die New York Post hat obigen Artikel keineswegs im Rahmen eines Wettbewerbs auf ihre Website gestellt, vielmehr stammt er aus der Feder eines ihrer rechten Kommentatoren, Ralph Peters, der regelmäßig auf den Seiten der Post schreibt. Die Post-Redakteure hatten den Artikel eigenhändig für die Op-ed-Seite ausgewählt. Peinlich, peinlich - die himmelschreienden Nazi-Vergleiche der Post, während gleichzeitig ein verwandtes Konzern-Produkt derlei Vergleiche als Zeichen geistiger Umnachtung abkanzelt. Und was tut die Murdoch-Organisation? Scheint so, als will Fox die Nazi-Analogien der New York Post komplett ignorieren. In den Transkripten des Kabelkanals jedenfalls lässt sich absolut keine Anspielung auf die Kolumne finden. Die New York Post selbst hat den Peters-Artikel, wie’s aussieht, inzwischen in der Versenkung verschwinden lassen. Wer auf das Linkzeichen klickt, das eigentlich zur Peters-Story führen sollte, liest: ‘Page not found’ (Seite nicht gefunden). Auch in der Nexis- Medien-Database ist der Text unauffindbar. (Und ironischerweise wird genau in der Kolumne, die auf so Orwell’sche Weise verschwand, Howard Dean mit Big Brother verglichen).

In dem Interview, das das ganze Bohai auslöste, wurde RNC-Gillespie übrigens gefragt, ob er sich auch gegen die Attacken wehren würde, beträfen sie Demokraten. Seine Antwort: “Falls man sich zu dieser Art verabscheuungswürdiger Taktik herablässt, einen Kandidaten zu Adolf Hitler zu machen, ja, dann absolut, das sage ich Ihnen hier vor offenem Mikrofon. Laden Sie mich wieder ein, falls irgendeine Organisation so verfährt, ich würde es zurückweisen”. Genau die Organisation, die Gillespie interviewt, tat dies nur einen Tag später - in einem anderen ihrer Medien. Bislang allerdings hat Fox News Gillespie noch nicht wieder eingeladen - auf dass er über die New York Post herzieht.

ACTION: Bitte richten Sie an die New York Post die Frage, ob sie zu der von ihr veröffentlichten Kolumne steht, in der Howard Dean als Nazi bezeichnet wird. Fragen Sie diese Leute, ob sie Dean nicht vielmehr eine Entschuldigung schulden. Und stellen Sie Fox News Channel bitte die Frage, weshalb die Kolumne nicht kritisiert wurde, obgleich verschiedene Fox-Hosts derartige Vergleiche (mehrfach) verurteilten (als sie George Bush betrafen) - genau an dem Tag, als die Kolumne erschien.

Adressen:

Fox News Channel: 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036
Telefon: (USA)1-888-369-4762
E-mail: [e-mail]

New York Post
1211 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10036
Telefon: (USA)1-212-930-8000
E-mail: [e-mail]

Sie können die beiden MoveOn.org-Beiträge (Hitler/Bush-Vergleich) einsehen unter: www.thememoryhole.org/pol/bush-hitler-ads.htm

Der Artikel der New York Post mit dem Dean-Nazi-Vergleich nachzulesen unter: www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/4965.htm

Der vorliegende Artikel ist ein ‘Action Alert’ - in Umlauf gebracht durch FAIRListServe.
Sie können uns abonnieren unter: www.fair.org
Sie können an uns spenden unter: www.fair.org/donate.html





[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: "When Are Nazi Comparisons Deplorable?" ]

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Nicht täuschen lassen, er ist es.

washingtonpost.com
Bush to Wrap Reelection Themes Into State of the Union



The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; 6:04 PM


President Bush, wrapping the themes of his re-election campaign in an upbeat State of the Union address, will say Tuesday night that America is still a nation at war and must not "falter and leave our work unfinished."

Bush said he was optimistic about the reviving economy and urged Congress to take steps to make sure the recovery lasts. "We must respond by helping more Americans gain the skills to find good jobs in our new economy," the president said.

Excerpts of his address were released in advance by the White House.

"America this evening is a nation called to great responsibilities," the president said. "And we are rising to meet them. ... We have not come all this way -- through tragedy and trial and war -- only to falter and leave our work unfinished."

Bush’s speech was designed to cast him as the commander in chief, grappling with the nation’s problems and above politics, while Democratic rivals for his office race around the campaign trail trading charges.

"America is on the offensive against the terrorists," Bush said.

"Our greatest responsibility is the active defense of the American people. Twenty-eight months have passed since Sept. 11, 2001 -- over two years without an attack on American soil -- and it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false."

He said his administration was confronting nations that harbor and support terrorists and can supply them with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. "Because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better," Bush said.

The president defended his decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. "The work of building a new Iraq is hard and it is right," he said. "And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right."

On the domestic front, Bush said America’s economy was being transformed by technology that makes workers more productive but requires new skills. He called for new job-training grants channeled through community colleges.

Bush also urged Congress to address the rising costs of health care with tax-free savings accounts for medical expenses, tax credits to pay for insurance and ceilings on medical malpractice damage awards.

Reaching back to his political speeches, Bush spoke of values important to many Americans -- courage and compassion, reverence and integrity, respect for differences of faith and race. "The values we try to live by never change," he said.

The president was expected to repeat his belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman but stop short of seeking a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.

"All of us -- parents, schools, government -- must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture and to send the right messages to our children," he said.


© 2004 The Associated Press

[Joerver]

January 20, 2004
Text of Bush`s Speech

Following is a transcript of President Bush`s State of the Union address as recorded by The New York Times.

Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens:

America this evening is a nation called to great responsibilities. And we are rising to meet them.

As we gather tonight, hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to the violent, they are making America more secure.

Each day, law enforcement personnel and intelligence officers are tracking terrorist threats; analysts are examining airline passenger lists; the men and women of our new Homeland Security Department are patrolling our coasts and borders. And their vigilance is protecting America.

Americans are proving once again to be the hardest working people in the world. The American economy is growing stronger. The tax relief you passed is working.

Tonight, Members of Congress can take pride in the great works of compassion and reform that skeptics had thought impossible. You`re raising the standards of our public schools; and you`re giving our senior citizens prescription drug coverage under Medicare.

We have faced serious challenges together - and now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence and resolve - or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us. We can press on with economic growth, and reforms in education and Medicare - or we can turn back to old policies and old divisions.

We have not come all this way - through tragedy, and trial and war - only to falter and leave our work unfinished. Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same from us. In their efforts, their enterprise, and their character, the American people are showing that the state of our union is confident and strong.

Our greatest responsibility is the active defense of the American people. Twenty-eight months have passed since September the 11th, 2001 - over two years without an attack on American soil - and it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting - and false. The killing has continued in Bali, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Mombassa, Jerusalem, Istanbul and Baghdad. The terrorists continue to plot against America and the civilized world. And by our will and courage, this danger will be defeated.

Inside the United States, where the war began, we must continue to give homeland security and law enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend us. And one of those essential tools is the Patriot Act, which allows Federal law enforcement to better share information, to track terrorists, to disrupt their cells, and to seize their assets. For years, we have used similar provisions to catch embezzlers and drug traffickers. If these methods are good for hunting criminals, they are even more important for hunting terrorists. Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year. The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule. Our law enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our citizens - you need to renew the Patriot Act.

America is on the offensive against the terrorists who started this war. Last March, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a mastermind of September the11th, awoke to find himself in the custody of U.S. and Pakistani authorities. Last August the 11th brought the capture of the terrorist Hambali, who was a key player in the attack in Indonesia that killed over 200 people. We`re tracking Al Qaeda around the world - and nearly two-thirds of their known leaders have now been captured or killed. Thousands of very skilled and determined military personnel are on the manhunt, going after the remaining killers who hide in cities and caves - and, one by one, we will bring the terrorists to justice.

As part of the offensive against terror, we are also confronting the regimes that harbor and support terrorists, and could supply them with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The United States and our allies are determined: We refuse to live in the shadow of this ultimate danger.

The first to see our determination were the Taliban, who made Afghanistan the primary training base of Al Qaeda killers. As of this month, that country has a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women. Businesses are opening, health care centers are being established, and the boys and girls of Afghanistan are back in school. With the help from the new Afghan army, our coalition is leading aggressive raids against surviving members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The men and women of Afghanistan are building a nation that is free, and proud and fighting terror - and America is honored to be their friend.

Since we last met in this chamber, combat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations, ended the rule of Saddam Hussein - and the people of Iraq are free. Having broken the Baathist regime, we face a remnant of violent Saddam supporters. Men who ran away from our troops in battle are now dispersed and attack from the shadows.

These killers, joined by foreign terrorists, are a serious, continuing danger. Yet we`re making progress against them. The once all-powerful ruler of Iraq was found in a hole, and now sits in a prison cell. Of the top 55 officials of the former regime, we have captured or killed 45. Our forces are on the offensive, leading over 1,600 patrols a day, and conducting an average of 180 raids every a week. We are dealing with these thugs in Iraq, just as surely as we dealt with Saddam Hussein`s evil regime.

The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right. And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right. Last January, Iraq`s only law was the whim of one brutal man. Today our coalition is working with the Iraqi Governing Council to draft a basic law, with a bill of rights. We`re working with Iraqis and the United Nations to prepare for a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty by the end of June. As democracy takes hold in Iraq, the enemies of freedom will do all in their power to spread violence and fear. They are trying to shake the will of our country and our friends - but the United States of America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom.

Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future. And tonight we are honored to welcome one of Iraq`s most respected leaders: the current President of the Iraqi Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi. Sir, America stands with you and the Iraqi people as you build a free and peaceful nation.

Because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better. Last month, the leader of Libya voluntarily pledged to disclose and dismantle all of his regime`s weapons of mass destruction programs, including a uranium enrichment project for nuclear weapons. Colonel Qadhafi correctly judged that his country would be better off, and far more secure, without weapons of mass murder. Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible - and no one can now doubt the word of America.

Different threats require different strategies. Along with nations in the region, we`re insisting that North Korea eliminate its nuclear program. America and the international community are demanding that Iran meet its commitments and not develop nuclear weapons. America is committed to keeping the world`s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.

When I came to this rostrum on September the 20th, 2001, I brought the police shield of a fallen officer, my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end. I gave to you and to all Americans my complete commitment to securing our country and defeating our enemies. And this pledge, given by one, has been kept by many. You in the Congress have provided the resources for our defense, and cast the difficult votes of war and peace. Our closest allies have been unwavering. America`s intelligence personnel and diplomats have been skilled and tireless.

And the men and women of the American military - they have taken the hardest duty. We`ve seen their skill and courage in armored charges, and midnight raids, and lonely hours on faithful watch. We have seen the joy when they return, and felt the sorrow when one is lost. I have had the honor of meeting our servicemen and women at many posts, from the deck of a carrier in the Pacific, to a mess hall in Baghdad. Many of our troops are listening tonight. And I want you and your families to know: America is proud of you. And my Administration, and this Congress, will give you the resources you need to fight and win the war on terror.

I know that some people question if America is really in a war at all. They view terrorism more as a crime - a problem to be solved mainly with law enforcement and indictments. After the World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, some of the guilty were indicted, and tried, and convicted, and sent to prison. But the matter was not settled. The terrorists were still training and plotting in other nations, and drawing up more ambitious plans. After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States - and war is what they got.

Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq. Objections to war often come from principled motives. But let us be candid about the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We`re seeking all the facts - already the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator`s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day. Had we failed to act, Security Council resolutions on Iraq would have been revealed as empty threats, weakening the United Nations and encouraging defiance by dictators around the world. Iraq`s torture chambers would still be filled with victims - terrified and innocent. The killing fields of Iraq - where hundreds of thousands of men, and women and children vanished into the sands - would still be known only to the killers. For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein`s regime is a better and safer place.

Some critics have said our duties in Iraq must be internationalized. This particular criticism is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands, Norway, El Salvador, and the 17 other countries that have committed troops to Iraq. As we debate at home, we must never ignore the vital contributions of our international partners, or dismiss their sacrifices. From the beginning, America has sought international support for our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we have gained much support. There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations, and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.

As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny, and despair, and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. So America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East. We will challenge the enemies of reform, confront the allies of terror, and expect a higher standard from our friends. To cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda, the Voice of America and other broadcast services are expanding their programming in Arabic and Persian - and soon, a new television service will begin providing reliable news and information across the region. I will send you a proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labor unions in the Middle East. And above all, we will finish the historic work of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, so those nations can light the way for others, and help transform a troubled part of the world.

America is a nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom.

In the last three years, adversity has also revealed the fundamental strengths of the American economy. We have come through recession, and terrorist attack, and corporate scandals, and the uncertainties of war. And because you acted to stimulate our economy with tax relief, this economy is strong, and growing stronger.

You have doubled the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000, reduced the marriage penalty, begun to phase out the death tax, reduced taxes on capital gains and stock dividends, cut taxes on small businesses, and you have lowered taxes for every American who pays income taxes.

Americans took those dollars and put them to work, driving this economy forward. The pace of economic growth in the third quarter of 2003 was the fastest in nearly 20 years. New home construction: the highest in almost 20 years. Home ownership rates: the highest ever. Manufacturing activity is increasing. Inflation is low. Interest rates are low. Exports are growing. Productivity is high. And jobs are on the rise.

These numbers confirm that the American people are using their money far better than government would have - and you were right to return it.

America`s growing economy is also a changing economy. As technology transforms the way almost every job is done, America becomes more productive, and workers need new skills. Much of our job growth will be found in high-skilled fields like health care and biotechnology. So we must respond by helping more Americans gain the skills to find good jobs in our new economy.

All skills begin with the basics of reading and math, which are supposed to be learned in the early grades of our schools. Yet for too long, for too many children, those skills were never mastered. By passing the No Child Left Behind Act, you have made the expectation of literacy the law of our country. We are providing more funding for our schools - a 36 percent increase since 2001. We`re requiring higher standards. We are regularly testing every child on the fundamentals. We are reporting results to parents, and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing. We are making progress toward excellence for every child in America.

But the status quo always has defenders. Some want to undermine the No Child Left Behind Act by weakening standards and accountability. Yet the results we require are really a matter of common sense: We expect third graders to read and do math at the third-grade level - and that`s not asking too much. Testing is the only way to identify and help students who are falling behind.

This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics. I refuse to give up on any child - and the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all of America`s children.

At the same time, we must ensure that older students and adults can gain the skills they need to find work now. Many of the fastest-growing occupations require strong math and science preparation, and training beyond the high school level. So tonight I propose a series of measures called Jobs for the 21st Century. This program will provide extra help to middle- and high school students who fall behind in reading and math, expand advanced placement programs in low-income schools, and invite math and science professionals from the private sector to teach part-time in our high schools. I propose larger Pell grants for students who prepare for college with demanding courses in high school. I propose increasing our support for America`s fine community colleges, I do so so they can train workers for the industries that are creating the most new jobs. By all these actions, we`ll help more and more Americans to join in the growing prosperity of our country.

Job training is important, and so is job creation. We must continue to pursue an aggressive, pro-growth economic agenda.

Congress has some unfinished business on the issue of taxes. The tax reductions you passed are set to expire. Unless you act, unless you act, unless you act, the unfair tax on marriage will go back up. Unless you act, millions of families will be charged $300 more in federal taxes for every child. Unless you act, small businesses will pay higher taxes. Unless you act, the death tax will eventually come back to life. Unless you act, Americans face a tax increase. What the Congress has given, the Congress should not take away: For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent.

Our agenda for jobs and growth must help small business owners and employees with relief from needless federal regulation, and protect them from junk and frivolous lawsuits. Consumers and businesses need reliable supplies of energy to make our economy run - so I urge you to pass legislation to modernize our electricity system, promote conservation, and make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy. My administration is promoting free and fair trade, to open up new markets for America`s entrepreneurs, and manufacturers, and farmers, to create jobs for American workers. Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account. We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people.

And we should limit the burden of government on this economy by acting as good stewards of taxpayer dollars. In two weeks, I will send you a budget that funds the war, protects the homeland, and meets important domestic needs, while limiting the growth in discretionary spending to less than 4 percent. This will require that Congress focus on priorities, cut wasteful spending, and be wise with the people`s money. By doing so, we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years.

Tonight I also ask you to reform our immigration laws, so they reflect our values and benefit our economy. I propose a new temporary worker program to match willing foreign workers with willing employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the job. This reform will be good for our economy - because employers will find needed workers in an honest and orderly system. A temporary worker program will help protect our homeland - allowing border patrol and law enforcement to focus on true threats to our national security. I oppose amnesty, because it would encourage further illegal immigration, and unfairly reward those who break our laws. My temporary worker program will preserve the citizenship path for those who respect the law, while bringing millions of hardworking men and women out from the shadows of American life.

Our nation`s health care system, like our economy, is also in a time of change. Amazing medical technologies are improving and saving lives. This dramatic progress has brought its own challenge, in the rising costs of medical care and health insurance. Members of Congress, we must work together to help control those costs and extend the benefits of modern medicine throughout our country.

Meeting these goals requires bipartisan effort - and two months ago, you showed the way. By strengthening Medicare and adding a prescription drug benefit, you kept a basic commitment to our seniors: You are giving them the modern medicine they deserve.

Starting this year, under the law you passed, seniors can choose to receive a drug discount card, saving them 10 to 25 percent off the retail price of most prescription drugs - and millions of low-income seniors can get an additional $600 to buy medicine. Beginning next year, seniors will have new coverage for preventive screenings against diabetes and heart disease, and seniors just entering Medicare can receive wellness exams.

In January of 2006, seniors can get prescription drug coverage under Medicare. For a monthly premium of about $35, most seniors who do not have that coverage today can expect to see their drug bills cut roughly in half. Under this reform, senior citizens will be able to keep their Medicare just as it is, or they can choose a Medicare plan that fits them best - just as you, as members of Congress, can choose an insurance plan that meets your needs. And starting this year, millions of Americans will be able to save money tax-free for their medical expenses, in a health savings account.

I signed this measure proudly, and any attempt to limit the choices of our seniors, or to take away their prescription drug coverage under Medicare, will meet my veto.

On the critical issue of health care, our goal is to ensure that Americans can choose and afford private health care coverage that best fits their individual needs. To make insurance more affordable, Congress must act to address rapidly rising health care costs. Small businesses should be able to band together and negotiate for lower insurance rates, so they can cover more workers with health insurance - I urge you to pass Association Health Plans. I ask you to give lower-income Americans a refundable tax credit that would allow millions to buy their own basic health insurance. By computerizing health records, we can avoid dangerous medical mistakes, reduce costs, and improve care. To protect the doctor-patient relationship, and keep good doctors doing good work, we must eliminate wasteful and frivolous medical lawsuits. And tonight I propose that individuals who buy catastrophic health care coverage, as part of our new health savings accounts, be allowed to deduct 100 percent of the premiums from their taxes.

A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription. By keeping costs under control, expanding access, and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America`s health care the best in the world.

We are living in a time of great change - in our world, in our economy, in science and medicine. Yet some things endure - courage and compassion, reverence and integrity, respect for differences of faith and race. The values we try to live by never change. And they are instilled in us by fundamental institutions, such as families, and schools, and religious congregations. These institutions - these unseen pillars of civilization - must remain strong in America, and we will defend them.

We must stand with our families to help them raise healthy, responsible children. When it comes to helping children make right choices, there is work for all of us to do.

One of the worst decisions our children can make is to gamble their lives and futures on drugs. Our government is helping parents confront this problem, with aggressive education, treatment, and law enforcement. Drug use in high school has declined by 11 percent over the last two years. Four hundred thousand fewer young people are using illegal drugs than in the year 2001. In my budget, I have proposed new funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to reduce demand for illegal drugs. Drug testing in our schools has proven to be an effective part of this effort. So tonight I propose an additional 23 millions for schools that want to use drug testing as a tool to save children`s lives. The aim here is not to punish children, but to send them this message: We love you, and we do not want to lose you.

To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message - that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.

To encourage right choices, we must be willing to confront the dangers young people face - even when they`re difficult to talk about. Each year, about three million teenagers contract sexually transmitted diseases that can harm them, or kill them, or prevent them from ever becoming parents. In my budget, I propose a grassroots campaign to help inform families about these medical risks. We will double federal funding for abstinence programs, so schools can teach this fact of life: Abstinence for young people is the only certain way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Decisions children now make can affect their health and character for the rest of their lives. All of us - parents, schools, government - must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture, and to send the right messages to our children.

A strong America must also value the institution of marriage. I believe we should respect individuals as we take a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization. Congress has already taken a stand on this issue by passing the Defense of Marriage Act, signed in 1996 by President Clinton. That statute protects marriage under federal law as the union of a man and a woman, and declares that one state may not redefine marriage for other states. Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people`s voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.

The outcome of this debate is important - and so is the way we conduct it. The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God`s sight.

It is also important to strengthen our communities by unleashing the compassion of America`s religious institutions. Religious charities of every creed are doing some of the most vital work in our country - mentoring children, feeding the hungry, taking the hand of the lonely. Yet government has often denied social service grants and contracts to these groups, just because they have a cross or a Star of David or a crescent on the wall. By executive order, I have opened billions of dollars in grant money to competition that includes faith-based charities. Tonight I ask you to codify this into law, so people of faith can know that the law will never discriminate against them again.

In the past, we`ve worked together to bring mentors to the children of prisoners, and provide treatment for the addicted, and help for the homeless. Tonight I ask you to consider another group of Americans in need of help. This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into society. We know from long experience that if they can`t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison. So tonight, I propose a four-year, 300 million dollar Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups. America is the land of second chance - and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

For all Americans, the last three years have brought tests we did not ask for, and achievements shared by all. By our actions, we have shown what kind of nation we are. In grief, we have found the grace to go on. In challenge, we rediscovered the courage and daring of a free people. In victory, we have shown the noble aims and good heart of America. And having come this far, we sense that we live in a time set apart.

I`ve been a witness to the character of the American people, who`ve shown calm in times of danger, compassion for one another, and toughness for the long haul. All of us have been partners in a great enterprise. And even some of the youngest understand that we are living in historic times. Last month a girl in Lincoln, Rhode Island, sent me a letter. It began, ``Dear George W. Bush.`` ``If there is anything you know, I Ashley Pearson age 10 can do to help anyone, please send me a letter and tell me what I can do to save our country.`` She added this P.S.: ``If you can send a letter to the troops - please put, `Ashley Pearson believes in you.```

Tonight, Ashley, your message to our troops has just been conveyed. And yes, you have some duties yourself. Study hard in school, listen to your mom or dad, help someone in need, and when you and your friends see a man or woman in uniform, say, ``Thank you.`` And, Ashley, while you do your part, all of us here in this great chamber will do our best to keep you and the rest of America safe and free.

My fellow citizens, we now move forward, with confidence and faith. Our nation is strong and steadfast. The cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind. The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable - and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that his purposes are just and true.

May God continue to bless America.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

____________________
January 21, 2004
In Speech, President Casts Himself as a Steady Commander in Chief
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 — President Bush warned Americans on Tuesday night that there could still be a terrorist attack on the United States and then presented a choice between his continued leadership and a return to the "dangerous illusion" that the threat had ended.

In a 54-minute State of the Union address, Mr. Bush showcased the extent to which he will use his administration`s fight against terrorism in his re-election campaign. He then moved on to a variety of domestic issues and forcefully questioned court cases that have opened the door to same-sex marriage.

The president said that if activist judges pressed the issue, "the only alternative" would be a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a move that would endear him to his conservative supporters. "Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage," Mr. Bush said.

Addressing the central domestic issue this election year, Mr. Bush said that the economy was "growing stronger" and that his recipe of permanent tax cuts, trade promotion and added oil and gas drilling would further strengthen the recovery.

"We have not come all this way, through tragedy and trial and war, only to falter and leave our work unfinished," he said. "Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same from us."

Mr. Bush offered a panoply of smaller domestic proposals like promoting sexual abstinence among teenagers, increased financing for drug testing in schools and a call for athletes to stop using steroids.

Reflecting the restrictions imposed on him by the growing budget deficit, many of the proposals carried relatively little or no cost. He never discussed one of his most potentially costly new proposals, his declaration last week that Americans would return to the Moon by 2020 and use that as a launching pad to Mars.

Mr. Bush cast himself as the steady commander in chief of what he portrayed as a nation at war, seeming to suggest that changing the leader midbattle was risky.

"Twenty-eight months have passed since Sept. 11, 2001, over two years without an attack on American soil, and it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us," he said in the somber tones he reserves for his most important speeches. "That hope is understandable, comforting and false."

Mr. Bush put forth no major new foreign policy or domestic initiatives in an address that was as much about political drama as substance and that served as the president`s grandest stage until his party`s nominating convention in New York in September. Speaking to an estimated audience of 60 million people in an address that the White House scheduled a day after the caucuses in Iowa and a week before the primary in New Hampshire, Mr. Bush defended himself against the attacks by the Democratic presidential candidates on a wide range of foreign and domestic matters like tax cuts, Iraq and whether the war on terrorism is, as he put it, "a war at all." Mr. Bush most directly took on his critics over Iraq and the question of banned weapons.

"Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq," Mr. Bush said. "Objections to war often come from principled motives. But let us be candid about the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power."

Had his administration failed to act, Mr. Bush said, "the dictator`s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."

Mr. Bush did not mention that American inspectors had found no unconventional weapons, the major stated reason that the administration went to war with Iraq.

There was an excited mood in the chamber of the House of Representatives, as there almost always is when a president delivers a State of the Union address. But the response to the remarks reflected the deep divisions between the two parties. Democrats sat silently at many points, particularly when Mr. Bush discussed the economy and his domestic initiatives.

The audience applauded 71 times, including sustained applause for one of Mr. Bush`s guests, Adnan Pachachi, president of the American-selected Iraqi Governing Council. A year ago, Mr. Bush used his State of the Union address to make the case for military action against Iraq and devoted large sections of that speech to "a serious and mounting threat to our country" posed by Mr. Hussein`s illicit weapons.

This year, Mr. Bush only briefly mentioned the continuing search by David Kay, the chief American weapons inspector in Iraq, but did not promise, as he had in the past, that the weapons would eventually be found.

The president began his talk with a discourse on what he called his administration`s achievements in national security, an area where polls show that he has an enormous advantage over the Democrats. Mr. Bush cited as a prime accomplishment Mr. Hussein`s capture in December. "The once all-powerful ruler of Iraq was found in a hole and now sits in a prison cell," Mr. Bush said, prompting one of the biggest rounds of applause of the evening.

He devoted the second half of his speech to an area where he is far more vulnerable, the economy, which has lost 2.5 million jobs since he took office.

In contrast to the celebratory partisan energy generated by speeches on Monday night by Senators John Kerry and John Edwards in Iowa, Mr. Bush`s demeanor was one of sober gravitas as he sought to portray a mature, experienced leader who had guided the nation through the 9/11 attacks — an accomplishment that no Democratic would be able to claim.

In a chamber missing the three senators who are seeking the Democratic nomination for president — Mr. Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Edwards of North Carolina and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who were all in New Hampshire — Mr. Bush made no mention of the Democratic races that were consuming the nation and his own political advisers. His goal, his aides said, was to portray himself as so immersed in the serious business of running the nation that he was little concerned with the Democratic fistfights playing out in a frigid corner of the Northeast.

On health care, an issue that has become a centerpiece of the Democratic campaigns, Mr. Bush offered an expansion and repackaging of plans that he has previously introduced, tax credits to help pay for insurance and health savings accounts that would encourage people to set aside money tax free for unreimbursed medical expenses.

"Our goal," he said, "is to ensure that Americans can choose and afford private health care coverage that best fits their individual needs."

Democrats said the proposals fell far short of what was needed to help the 43 million Americans who lacked insurance and the additional millions whose household budgets were strained by health costs.

On immigration, Mr. Bush repeated his proposal to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrant workers, a plan that the White House hopes will appeal to Hispanic voters critical to Mr. Bush`s re-election.

Mr. Bush repeatedly stressed that he had signed into law a new Medicare bill that provides a prescription drug benefit for retirees, a step that his party hopes will neutralize a traditional Democratic advantage. Similarly, Mr. Bush appealed to the political center by reminding the nation that he had signed a broad overhaul of education policy, the No Child Left Behind Act.

Mr. Bush`s State of the Union address last year focused heavily on the impending Iraq war. In making his case for why Mr. Hussein posed a threat, the president said Iraq had failed to account for large stocks of biological and chemical weapons and appeared to be pursuing a nuclear weapons program. To bolster his case last Jan. 28, Mr. Bush uttered these 16 words that haunted him for months: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Last summer, the White House acknowledged that intelligence behind the assertion was flawed, exposing Mr. Bush to criticism that he had deliberately exaggerated the threat.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Bush offered no specific evidence to back up his more general and much less disputed statement that "terrorists continue to plot against America and the civilized world."

Mr. Bush said criticism about unilateral action in Iraq was misplaced, noting that at least 34 nations had contributed assistance to the United States. He mentioned in passing that the United Nations was participating in his efforts to restore sovereignty to Iraq. But he also made clear that there were limits to the United States` willingness to await international approval for military action against terrorists and nations that help them.

"America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush called for added spending on programs to help promote democracy in the Mideast, but did not mention his stalled plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

In a Democratic rebuttal, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota attacked Mr. Bush on foreign and domestic policy. Ms. Pelosi, the House minority leader, said Mr. Bush had pursued "a go-it-alone foreign policy that leaves us isolated abroad and that steals the resources we need for education and health care here at home."

Mr. Daschle, the Senate minority leader, said the "massive" tax cuts championed by Mr. Bush had not created the jobs the administration promised and had "instead led to an economic exodus."

Mr. Bush appeared well prepared for what is sure to be a year of intense partisan warfare. Alluding to the presidential race, Mr. Bush drew a distinction between his stewardship and his challengers.

"We have faced serious challenges together, and now we face a choice," Mr. Bush said. "We can go forward with confidence and resolve or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us. We can press on with economic growth and reforms in education and Medicare or we can turn back to old policies and old divisions."

With many crucial provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire on Dec. 31, 2005, Mr. Bush stepped into a potential minefield by calling for renewal of the law. Attorney General John Ashcroft has been leading the charge for the act as it has come under increasing attack from liberals and conservatives, who say it impinges on civil liberties. Democrats have promised to oppose renewing many important sections of the law, particularly those broadening government surveillance powers. Some critics in Congress applauded enthusiastically on Tuesday night when Mr. Bush noted that the law was scheduled to expire.

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January 21, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
In Position for the `04 Race
By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 — Three years to the day after taking the oath of office, President Bush began his re-election campaign Tuesday night with a State of the Union address that blended potent reminders of his role as commander in chief of a nation at war with pledges to confront the domestic issues that his Democratic rivals hope may keep him from winning a second term.

With Saddam Hussein in captivity, Afghanistan beginning to build a new government and the United States on the offensive against terror around the world, Mr. Bush opened his address recounting his record on national security, ground where polls show he is politically strongest. He used the word "war" at least 10 times and asserted, "Because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better."

But he quickly turned to his own backyard, where polls show voters far less sure about his leadership, and there he used his speech to sketch out what amounted to a blueprint of a two-tiered campaign strategy that balanced compassionate appeals to swing voters on issues like the economy, health care and education with other issues popular with the conservative base he wants to rally.

"The values we try to live by never change, and they are instilled in us by fundamental institutions, such as families and schools and religious congregations," Mr. Bush said, portraying himself as the national paterfamilias, fighting to protect the American way. "These institutions, these unseen pillars of civilization, must remain strong in America, and we will defend them."

Accordingly, he vowed to fight efforts by "activist judges" to define marriage as anything but the union of a man and a woman, and he called for new legislation barring discrimination in the awarding of federal grants and contracts to religion-based institutions that provide social services. He pledged a doubling of federal money for abstinence education in schools and modest new amounts for school drug testing "as a tool to save children`s lives."

The White House was so eager to highlight these passages that the president`s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, telephoned social conservative groups on Tuesday to make sure they would be watching the speech. Afterward, leaders of some such groups expressed delight.

"I am thrilled, and our public is thrilled," said the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. "While you have most of the Democratic candidates not supporting marriage in this emphatic way, it really leaves them on the wrong side of the issue."

Gary L. Bauer, a longtime conservative activist who sought the Republican presidential nomination against Mr. Bush in 2000, said: "I don`t think he wants history to record that on his watch the fundamental definition of marriage was changed. I think it`ll send a strong signal not only to his base, which of course feels strongly, but I think swing voters will, from the evidence, come closer to the Republican position. I think this is a plus all the way around."

Mr. Bush broke little new substantive ground on policy, instead highlighting his record of tax cuts and Medicare overhaul, declaring that a nascent economic recovery confirmed that "the American people are using their money far better than government would have," vowing that any effort to repeal his new prescription drug coverage under Medicare "will meet my veto.". He offered little in the way of money for proposed new programs, and indeed pledged to limit growth in "discretionary spending" while acknowledging that his efforts to fight terror and increase domestic security would require continuing costs.

Above all, in the splendor of the Capitol, Mr. Bush portrayed himself as the best defender of American interests, from tax cuts at home to terrorism abroad. And he reminded his listeners, and his Democratic rivals, that he begins this election year conspicuously atop the political equivalent of Everest, while the men who would replace him are scrambling in the foothills of the White Mountains. Mr. Bush spoke like a man who is headed to the Moon and Mars, while the Democrats are headed to Manchester, N.H.

The president`s very prominence also makes him a target, and the closely contested Iowa caucuses on Monday and next Tuesday`s New Hampshire primary show widespread sentiment for unseating Mr. Bush in a both Midwestern swing state that Al Gore barely carried in 2000, and a New England one that Mr. Bush narrowly won. If this is a moment of some triumph for the president, it is also a time of potential peril.

The nation remains sharply divided over Mr. Bush and his policies, especially his handling of domestic issues like the economy, education and health care, and largely opposed to his grand goals for space exploration. The situation in Iraq remains unsettled, and the public sentiment remains mixed over whether the American invasion was worth the cost in lives and treasure.

"The country is closely divided," a senior Bush campaign adviser acknowledged in Iowa on Monday. "That`s a reality. It`s not something to worry about. It`s something to deal with. Ultimately, you talk about your policies and project a positive optimism for the country."

That is what Mr. Bush sought to do Tuesday night.

In his first State of the Union message two years ago, Mr. Bush set the nation on a course of confrontation with the "axis of evil," or Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and last year he laid out his case against Mr. Hussein, citing what later turned out to be sharply disputed British intelligence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger, in West Africa, and the threat of chemical and biological weapons that inspectors have yet to find. Both speeches had dark themes at their heart.

This year, Mr. Bush sounded continued warnings, noting that while 28 months had passed since Sept. 11, 2001, without further attacks on American soil, dangers remain.

But with his administration struggling to win broader international support for rebuilding Iraq, and United Nations backing for its efforts to create a new interim government there, Mr. Bush was also upbeat, insisting: "The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right. And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right."

He concluded by closely echoing the words Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote on the day he died, April 12, 1945, declaring: "My fellow citizens, we now move forward with confidence and faith."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 21, 2004
THE VOTERS
Floridians and Oregonians Offer Mixed Reaction to Words on War and the Economy
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and SARAH KERSHAW

MIAMI, Jan. 20 — In the perennial swing state that is Florida, there was little unanimity among several groups watching the State of the Union address.

In Oregon, meanwhile, the high unemployment rate colored the reactions of viewers watching the speech.

An immigration lawyer in Miami Beach rained scorn on President Bush`s defense of the war on Iraq. Retirees in Winter Park, outside Orlando, praised Mr. Bush`s every word, saying he had made the world safer, while college students watching from a bookstore here perked up only at his education proposals.

The lawyer, David Shahoulian, noted with irritation that Mr. Bush had made little mention of his original reasons for going to war.

"He started and ended with `Life is better without Saddam,` and no one can argue with that," Mr. Shahoulian, 32, said as he watched the speech in a friend`s living room in South Beach. "But the reasons we went to war — the guy`s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda — he just kind of stuck that in the middle."

But at Winter Park Towers, an apartment complex for retirees in a wealthy suburb of Orlando, Roland Lee, a retired civil engineer who is 80, applauded Mr. Bush`s urging that the Patriot Act be renewed.

Mary Danielson, 80, a former nurse, added, "It would be more dangerous than ever if Saddam was still in power."

In Oregon, where the unemployment rate was at 7.3 percent in November, the economy weighed heavily on voters interviewed. In 2000, the state`s voters split 47 percent to 47 percent for George W. Bush and Al Gore, with 5 percent voting for Ralph Nader.

Oregon`s outcome was almost as close as Florida`s, which required a recount that lasted weeks and determined that Mr. Bush won the state by just 537 votes.

Richard L. Johnston, 73, a retired civil engineer for Southern Pacific Railroad and a Korean War veteran, watched the speech in his living room in northeast Portland with his wife and his dog, a chocolate Lab named Mocha. Twenty-five minutes into the speech, when Mr. Bush was still discussing Iraq, the war on terror and various foreign policy threats, Mr. Johnston sounded irritated, saying, "Let`s get to the economy here."

When the president did turn to the economy and talked about economic growth, Mr. Johnston was skeptical. "You won`t convince anybody in Oregon it`s better," he said.

While he was critical of Mr. Bush on the economy, Mr. Johnston said he agreed with the president`s approach on security.

"I go along with him on the home security and so forth," he said, "some of these things we should have been doing before."

Sam and Linda Dahan, also residents of Portland and both unemployed, had a similar reaction to the time Mr. Bush spent on foreign policy versus the economy.

"It`s been a jobless recovery and he didn`t address that in my mind," said Mr. Dahan, 49, who was laid off last year from a high-technology firm, Electro Scientific Industries. "I hear that the economy is going up, but I don`t see it for me."

Ms. Dahan, 53, was laid off in 2001, from the Portland marketing department of Enron. "I`m not a Bush basher," she said, "but I felt like it was just a pep rally."

Ms. Dahan said she was torn in 2000 between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore, ultimately voting for Mr. Gore. Mr. Dahan, an immigrant from Morocco, is not yet an American citizen and thus could not vote, but he said he would have voted for Mr. Gore.

Mr. Dahan said he was disturbed by the president`s prominent and early discussion of the Patriot Act.

"I really regret that we`ve lost some of our freedoms," he said. "It echoes through history that when freedoms are taken away they are very hard to bring back."

Jim Burns, 64, a retired cherry and apple farmer from Milton-Freewater, in northeast Oregon, is a registered Republican who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 and said he agreed with his assertion that it was America`s role to pursue the "thugs" and "killers" of the world.

"I`m a believer in the war on terror," he said. "I think we have to clean the world up and we`re the only ones who can do it."

Mr. Burns, however, was critical of Mr. Bush`s plan to grant temporary work permits to millions of undocumented workers.

"I oppose amnesty," he said, adding that other farmers in the Walla Walla River Valley, where migrant workers — including several who worked for him — pick the Bing cherries and Red Delicious apples during their harvests, agreed.

During the address, Mr. Burns said that the plan was still too vague for him to understand it. "When he said, `no amnesty,` that helped, but really, he didn`t expound on it so much that I know a heck of a lot more than I knew about it before."

Mr. Burns said that while he recognized the importance of immigrant labor to the nation`s economy, he opposed citizenship for those who entered the country illegally.

In Miami, Mr. Shahoulian, the immigration lawyer, said Mr. Bush`s plan for immigration reform was not nearly as strong as two other sets of proposals that came earlier, which he feared would now be shelved. The main problem with Mr. Bush`s plan, he said, was that it provided no path to permanent citizenship.

Mr. Shahoulian also cringed at Mr. Bush`s mention of tax cuts, saying that they were not justifiable. "We had a giant surplus when he passed them, but all the surplus has disappeared," he said. "And now he wants to make the tax cuts permanent?"

At a bookstore on the campus of Florida International University in Miami, most of Mr. Bush`s talk about tax cuts and the economy meant nothing to the handful of students watching the speech. But Grisell Gomez, 23, was struck by Mr. Bush`s statement that the deficit would be cut in half over the next five years. She wondered how he could do it without reversing his tax cuts.

In Winter Park, however, John Hailand, 86, a former research executive, was of a different mind. "The tax cuts did a great deal to get us back on our feet," he said.

Suzanna Sharkey, who watched the speech with Mr. Shahoulian in her South Beach apartment, said the president`s emphasis on national security and the war in Iraq made her sick with frustration. A teacher at a school for juvenile offenders, Ms. Sharkey, 35, said Mr. Bush should invest less in the military and more in education.

"He`s spending what, $84 billion on this war?" she said. "And I have kids coming to school who can`t even afford health care and don`t have enough money to buy lunch."


Abby Goodnough reported from Miami and Sarah Kershaw from Seattle. Reporting was also contributed by Dennis Blank in Winter Park, Fla., Brian Libby in Portland and Matthew Preusch in Seattle.



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January 21, 2004
State of the Union Abroad

Last night President Bush surveyed the state of his foreign policy over the past year and, unsurprisingly, gave himself high marks. In truth, while there have been achievements, the last year of war in Iraq and stubborn unilateralism on issues ranging from the use of military force to environmental policy and trade have dominated and strained America`s relationships with most of the rest of the world.

While it is too early to draw final conclusions about the ultimate success of military operations in Iraq, the fact is that Mr. Bush`s decision to engage American forces so heavily without reliable intelligence, real international backing, legitimate United Nations authority or serious postwar planning has exacted a high price, for which he did not account in the rather glossy assessment in his State of the Union address. In last year`s speech, Mr. Bush made frightening allusions to Iraqi unconventional weapons presumably available for immediate use, almost all of them subsequently discredited. A pale echo of those inflated claims appeared last night as cryptic references to Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

It was fitting that Iraq figured prominently in Mr. Bush`s speech. No decent person regrets the toppling of a heinous dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and Mr. Bush can claim credit for his capture. Libya`s decision to end its nuclear and other weapons programs and allow inspections was welcome. And Afghanistan is showing the first buds of a democratic government.

But at this point, Mr. Bush`s optimistic talk of a "new Iraq" that is free and stable is anything but assured. Iraq`s Shiite majority and Sunni and Kurdish minorities are grappling for advantage against an essentially arbitrary American deadline for turning over sovereignty to an interim government. American war deaths now stand at over 500, and combat is continuing. Washington is finally asking the U.N. to help smooth the transition to democracy and ensure international legitimacy. But that decision, however welcome it was, followed nearly a year of rudely ignoring U.N. procedures, undermining the authority of the U.N. and ignoring some of America`s most important allies.

The burdens of occupying Iraq for what looks certain to be many months to come have severely strained the long-term capacity of American ground forces, both regular Army and reserves. And while the White House has focused its attention on Iraq, other compelling and dangerous crises have been more or less put on hold, at potentially grave risk. By abruptly shifting its attention to Saddam Hussein before fully consolidating peace in Afghanistan, Washington has contributed to a situation where the Afghan central government rules little more than Kabul. While Mr. Bush talked of the Afghans "building a nation that is free, and proud, and fighting terror," the Taliban have re-emerged as a serious force barely two years after what seemed a crushing military defeat. Afghan warlords, at best a fractious bunch and at worst a mortal threat to Afghanistan`s democracy, have armies that dwarf the national government`s forces. The border with Pakistan remains porous to members of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

In the past year, North Korea has proceeded incrementally toward assembling a nuclear arsenal. Israeli-Palestinian relations have frozen into a seemingly intractable standoff, which poisons Arab attitudes toward the United States, yet the Bush administration is now making virtually no serious effort to push the hostile camps toward negotiations. And Mr. Bush`s policies have badly damaged America`s alliances with its most important economic and military allies in Europe. Latin American governments are more estranged from the United States than they have been for a long time. Washington was also centrally responsible for the collapse of trade talks that were aimed at ending the crushing unfairness of the rich nations` subsidies for crops that cannot compete on the open market.

Mr. Bush`s one-sided emphasis on Iraq is not the only explanation for these multiple reverses, but it figures in all of them. That may explain why Mr. Bush largely passed over them last night.



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January 21, 2004
State of the Union at Home

When the president delivers his State of the Union address, we like to listen respectfully and respond politely. It is always easy to find things worth applauding. Last night, for instance, President Bush mentioned job retraining, immigration law reform and programs to help newly released prisoners re-enter society. The impulse is always to split the difference — to decry the ideas we disagree with and then note the ones we like. This time, such evenhandedness seems impossible. The president`s domestic policy comes down to one disastrous fact: his insistence on huge tax cuts for the wealthy has robbed the country of the money it needs to address its problems and has threatened its long-term economic security. Everything else is beside the point.

Mindful that American voters seem more concerned about their personal fortunes than Iraq`s, Mr. Bush highlighted the domestic side of his agenda. His only look backward at the fiscal mess he created was to call on Congress to make his $1.7 trillion in tax cuts permanent. The cuts have been wedged into the budget temporarily to give the illusion that the books will come somewhere near balance over the long run. Chiseling them into stone will do nothing to spark the current economy, and if some future president feels the need to stimulate business, he or she will find precious few ways left to do it.

The idea that the cuts are a rough tool to shrink the federal government seems increasingly ludicrous, given the Republican Congress`s determination to pork up every bill with new spending plans. There are only two reasons why Mr. Bush could be so determined to do the wrong thing: because his Congressional majorities mean that he probably can, and because the wealthy donors helping to underwrite his campaign expect that he will.

President Bill Clinton always pleased the public when he stuffed his State of the Union address with lots and lots of proposals, many small and symbolic. Mr. Bush, who devoted an entire paragraph to decrying the use of steroids in sports, stands second to nobody when it comes to tiny symbolic gestures. Many of his larger thoughts, meanwhile, were vague to the point of meaninglessness. (His references to energy and the environment took up less time than the anti-steroid agenda.) Among his proposals aimed at social conservatives, the bow to a constitutional amendment against gay marriage was the most disheartening.

It is actually a cruel hoax to pretend that Washington can afford to do anything new, even with the modest grab bag of small new initiatives and familiar retreads suggested by the president. In that context, his decision last night to re-endorse the Social Security overhaul plan from his last campaign was terrifying.

Mr. Bush has long advocated that younger workers be allowed to set aside part of their Social Security tax payments for private investments in stocks or bonds. He has never explained how he would pay for such a plan. The Social Security taxes that come in are used to pay for the benefits of those already retired. If part of the current workers` money is redirected without corresponding tax increases, the difference would have to be made up through budget cuts or — far more likely — a disastrous addition to the amount of debt the government continues to roll up every day.

With such ideas floating in the speech, the prospect of community college tuition grants or computer training for the unemployed rings hollow.



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Thousands of Iraqis marched again to demand that Washington hand over Saddam Hussein for trial. In Baghdad, above, the demonstration focused on a pedestal where his statue once stood.
January 21, 2004
Iraqis Again Seek Elections and a Local Trial for Hussein
By NEELA BANERJEE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 20 — Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated again on Tuesday in four major cities, demanding that the United States turn over Saddam Hussein to stand trial here and renewing calls for direct elections as the first step toward self-rule.

The protesters, mainly Shiite Muslims, gathered in central Baghdad, at a square where a towering statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down by jubilant Iraqis in April; in Basra, in the south; and in Najaf and Kerbala, two Shiite holy cities.

On Monday as many as 100,000 Shiites flowed through the main arteries of the capital echoing the call of their most respected leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for direct elections of the Iraqi government, which is to take over from the American-led civil administration by July 1.

The spate of demonstrations and a suicide-bomb attack in central Baghdad on Sunday that killed 25 people have heightened the sense of combustibility. On Tuesday night, a mortar shell landed inside the civil administration`s compound, exploding in the parking lot of a building that houses many offices and some soldiers.

As many as 5,000 people in Baghdad called Tuesday for Mr. Hussein to be handed over quickly to Iraq to stand trial as a war criminal. The United States is now holding him as a prisoner of war, and L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the civil administration here, reiterated in an interview on Tuesday with CNN in Washington that Mr. Hussein would be transferred to Iraqi authorities in the future.

That standing pledge failed to convince the marchers in Baghdad, many of them followers of Moktada al-Sadr, a young cleric and harsh critic of American policies in Iraq. Some protesters called for Mr. Hussein`s execution.

The broader issue, however, remained the mechanism by which the Americans plan to turn over authority. The civil administration now plans to relinquish power to a government chosen by caucuses in Iraq`s 18 provinces. The Americans argue that the timetable is too short for valid elections.

Long denied power under successive imperial and native governments, Iraq`s Shiites, about 60 percent of the population, want direct elections, which they believe would tilt authority to them.

Against the backdrop of such political tensions, Iraq`s external debt was reduced on Tuesday when the United Arab Emirates said it would forgive most of the $3.8 billion debt owed by Iraq, The Associated Press reported. The announcement, made by Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates, followed a recent visit by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who has been appointed by the Bush administration to persuade countries to forgive Iraq`s prodigious debts.

Iraq owes a total of about $120 billion. Arab countries hold about $80 billion of the debt, and the so-called Paris Club of industrial nations the remaining $40 billion.



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January 21, 2004
Pakistan Bars Its Nuclear Scientists From Traveling Abroad
By SALMAN MASOOD and DAVID ROHDE

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 20 — Pakistan on Tuesday barred all scientists working on its nuclear weapons program from leaving the country, as the government intensified its inquiry into allegations that nuclear technology had been shared with Iran.

At the same time, a senior intelligence official said a former army commander had approved the transfer of technology to Iran.

The official said the scientist who had led the effort to build an atomic bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had told investigators that any sharing of nuclear technology with Iran had the approval of Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the commander of Pakistan`s army from 1988 to 1991. The official said aides to Dr. Khan had told investigators the same thing.

It is not known if investigators have questioned General Beg, who is retired. While army chief, General Beg publicly advocated a strategic partnership between Iran and Pakistan. But in an interview in November, the general said he had not approved the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran or any other country.

"I was privy to the nuclear policy," he said. "There was a policy of nuclear restraint."

American officials say they believe that Pakistan has shared nuclear technology with Iran, North Korea and Libya. Pakistani officials have said that no technology was given to Libya, that no technology is currently going to North Korea and that the allegations about Iran are being aggressively investigated.

They have said that individuals may have leaked technology to Iran in the late 1980`s and early 1990`s, but that the government never authorized such a move.

In a speech to Parliament on Saturday, President Pervez Musharraf, a general who seized power in a coup in 1999, said Pakistan had to prove to the international community that it was a responsible nuclear power.

Within hours, eight former and current officials were taken into custody for questioning, government officials said. Three scientists had already been detained for questioning in November and December.

The aggressiveness of the inquiry has provoked protests across the political spectrum and accusations that the Musharraf government is reacting to pressure from Washington.

On Monday an alliance of hard-line Islamic parties, the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, or United Action Front, announced that it would begin nationwide street demonstrations.

Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the acting head of the religious alliance, which holds the third-largest number of seats in Parliament, called the inquiry the "worst kind of victimization of national heroes to please the Bush administration."

Secular, pro-Western political parties and analysts, as well as the families of the scientists, also criticized the government, saying scientists lauded as national heroes weeks ago were now being humiliated. They said senior army and government officials were scapegoating scientists to increase their own credibility with Western leaders.

Khwaja Asif, a member of Parliament for the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), a secular party, said it was doubtful that individuals could secretly transfer technology without the military knowing.

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan Khan, a military spokesman, called the new travel restriction a security precaution. "Until the time investigations are completed," he said, "the government has to ensure that the scientists are present here."

Government officials said eight current and former officials in the nuclear program, including two retired brigadiers, a retired major and at least three scientists, were undergoing voluntary questioning and were able to contact their families. They emphasized that no one had been accused of wrongdoing so far.

Families of the officials give an entirely different account. They put the number of people being questioned at 20 to 25. They also said those being held were forcibly detained and had not contacted their families while in custody.

Two of three scientists known to have been detained in December have been allowed to return to their families, relatives said. Most of the others have not contacted their families, including one scientist taken into custody at the end of November, the families say.

All of the officials being questioned appear to have been employed at the Khan Research Laboratories, the country`s main nuclear weapons development facility in Kahuta. All are believed to be close aides to Dr. Khan, who is himself being questioned.

Saima Adil, the eldest daughter of Dr. Nazir Ahmed, a chief engineer at the Kahuta labs, said 8 to 10 unidentified men surrounded the family`s house on Saturday evening.

"They took our father away," she said, "and till now we don`t have no idea about his whereabouts or his condition.

"Such a treatment is tantamount to terrorizing those scientists who have given their lives to serve their country."


Salman Masood reported from Islamabad for this article and David Rohde from New Delhi.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Für alle Verehrer der Neocons, hier die geistvollen Ausführungen von Perle und Frum!

January 21, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Big Test for the Contenders
By DAVID FRUM and RICHARD PERLE

The results of the Iowa caucuses are being hailed as a victory for the tough-minded wing of the Democratic Party. But how tough really are the Iowa winners? Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, the top two finishers, may have shunned the wild rhetoric of Howard Dean. But they share their party`s general unwillingness to think hard or realistically about the war on terrorism.

In a December speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Senator Kerry promised to treat the United Nations as a "full partner" in the war on terrorism — despite that organization`s inability even to define terrorism, let alone fight it.

The lamentable truth about the United Nations is that with a panzer-led blitzkrieg fresh in the minds of its founders, it was set up to organize a collective response to aggression across national borders. But that is not the threat we face six decades later. Today the threat is terrorism, possibly carried out with weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands in a single attack. The United Nations is more likely to restrain us than help us in our war against terrorism.

Senator Edwards, for his part, has said some reassuring things about increasing domestic security. But as a free society, we can`t win this war by building ourselves a better Maginot Line. We have to be prepared to take the war to the enemy — and when it comes to offense, too many of today`s Democrats are hesitant and vague. They hide behind excuses about "international good will" — the approbation we earn by subsiding into innocuousness — or offer unrealistic promises to mobilize our often reluctant allies to do our fighting for us.

When President Bush said on 9/11 that we would not distinguish between the terrorists and the states that harbor them, he changed a longstanding American policy of treating terrorism as a criminal act best dealt with by the institutions of law enforcement. This is a point Mr. Bush has held steadfastly to from that awful September day through last night`s State of the Union address. And he is right: no longer can we afford to hunt down individual terrorists while leaving the states that sheltered them unmolested.

We should ask the would-be presidents this: Why did the Taliban regime invite Osama bin Laden to bring his terrorist organization to Afghanistan? At the time, the United States was Afghanistan`s single largest contributor of humanitarian aid; harboring terrorists could only put the Taliban regime itself in harm`s way. Or could it? In the end, the Taliban was emboldened by the fact that the Clinton administration never did challenge it, never forced it to pay a substantial price for harboring terrorists.

Would a new Democratic administration revert to the policy of the last one? Senators Kerry and Edwards should be asked whether they support the policy of taking the war against terrorism to the terrorists, whether they agree with President Bush that we cannot win unless we can deny them sanctuary and drive them into spider holes and distant caves.

Cutting the terrorists off from the states that shelter them — that facilitate their recruitment, training, planning and arming is essential. But doing so will embroil us in diplomatic disputes. Are the Democratic candidates ready for that?

The involvement of Saudi citizens in 9/11 and revelations about Saudi financing of extremist groups has made policy toward the kingdom a campaign issue. Both Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards acknowledge that the Saudi government has condoned — or perhaps worse — extremist activities against the United States. Both senators have said in speeches that they want to rethink the relationship with the Saudis. But that`s where they stop. They have given us no inkling of what a new relationship with the Saudis would look like.

Among the other leading contenders, Gen. Wesley Clark has actually proposed creating a joint Saudi-American military unit — in other words, treating the Saudis as the kind of allies that the other Democrats correctly note they are not. Howard Dean emphasizes energy conservation as the answer to the problem. But, useful as energy conservation would be to a prosperous America, it is no answer to our Saudi problem.

Saudi Arabia provides about 10 percent of the 80 million barrels of oil the world burns every day, and earns about $63 billion a year. If we were to cut our oil consumption by some heroic amount, say 10 percent, it would be a drop in the barrel. Assuming everything else remained equal, the Saudis would still take in $57 billion a year. That can pay for a lot more of the extremist ideology they have been buying.

Rather, we must prevail on the Saudis to stop financing the extremism that breeds holy warriors, young men willing to die in order to realize their vision of an Islamist universe. The United States is the main obstacle to this extremist vision, which is why we are engaged in a war on terrorism.

If the Democrats are serious about their stated analyses of the terrorist threat, then they need to tell America their plan to destroy the terrorists and change the policies — or, if necessary, the regimes — of the states that support them. In addition, they need to propose a policy toward Saudi Arabia equal to the magnitude of the Saudi problem. Such a policy would be based on this direct challenge: either the Saudis put an end to the direct flow of money from the kingdom to extremist organizations or else the United States will no longer have an interest in the continued tenure of the present regime.

Can the Democrats credibly convey this message to the Saudis? Will they fight terrorism rather than chase terrorists? These are tests that they have thus far refused to take.


David Frum and Richard Perle are resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and co-authors of "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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SUFFER THE FRENCH SCHOOLCHILDREN

Hatred Bush Hath Wrought
CARQUEFOU, FRANCE--Why do they hate us? And where do they get their hatred from?

These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after grisly panel depicted the United States, George Bush and those ubiquitous symbols of American commercial culture--McDonald`s and Coke--as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious. Obese Uncle Sams chopping up Iraqi children with a knife, their blood gushing across construction paper. A leering Statue of Liberty holding a hamburger in one hand while firing missiles at dying Afghan civilians across the ocean. The American flag, its bars transformed into prisons for the child inmates of Guantánamo. A baseball bat painted red, white and blue poised to smash a ball--which is a globe. The juxtaposition between the artwork`s ferociously angry imagery and the childish drawing styles of the third graders would disturb the most jaded reader.

I didn`t see a single positive portrayal of the U.S.

Organizers of Carquefou`s annual cartoon art festival had invited four American artists--Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic, David Horsey of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Kal of The Baltimore Sun and yours truly--to this industrial town in conservative western France to discuss the deteriorated state of Franco-American relations. We`ve all used our cartoons to convey our dim opinion of the Bush Administration`s domestic and foreign policy agenda. We oppose the war in Iraq. We despise the French bashing ("freedom fries," wine boycotts, high schools that have stopped teaching French) that has arisen since the Chirac government threatened to veto Bush`s Iraq war resolution in the U.N. I even have dual French-American citizenship. We`re a pretty liberal group; that`s probably why they chose us.

We don`t take issue with most of the cartoons` messages. They see Bush as a vicious, thoughtless warmonger with fascist tendencies, Americans as arrogant brutes who don`t give a passing thought to the innocent people who die at the hands of their government and rapacious corporations as hegemonic steamrollers that crush cultural distinctiveness and independence in their ceaseless quest for the almighty dollar. They can`t believe that we feel more entitled to use military force than Luxembourg or Monaco.

What must Palestinian kids think of us?

It would be nice to see these opinions expressed with more subtlety and nuance. But their opinions are more right than wrong. Americans believe they`re exceptional. A Republican is someone who believes that we were right to invade Iraq. A Democrat is one who thinks we should have gone into Rwanda.

Still, walking past those drawings these past few days felt like getting slugged in the stomach. Part of it was the sheer scale--there were more than 700 pieces on display. But the level of rage and vitriol against America and everything related to it (one kid even trashed Tropicana orange juice) surpassed prewar propaganda in Saddam`s Iraqi press. And these are kids. What a difference a hundred years makes: the Statue of Liberty, France`s second great gift to America after freeing it from England, was funded by millions of centimes collected by French schoolchildren.

We repeatedly explained that there`s more to the United States than George Bush. We pointed out that most voters supported Gore in the last election, that hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against the war. We argued that Americans are kind, big-hearted people. French attendees listened politely, and we were treated with the utmost kindness and hospitality, but their kids` cartoons screamed: we hate you. That hurt.

Children get their politics from their parents and teachers, who form their impressions from the media. The European media has covered a different war than the one you`ve seen on CNN and Fox News. A 14-year-old Iraqi boy, shot by U.S. troops in Baghdad, was interviewed for five minutes on the evening news. "They did it on purpose," he said. "They were laughing." The bloody corpses of Iraqi civilians are standard TV fare here. The Bush Administration is routinely portrayed as greedy, stupid and mean.

Americans can find the truth about our nasty, unwinnable oil war, but they have to dig a little deeper. "The United States is using excessive power," Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, a moderate, pro-American member of the Iraqi Governing Council, told The New York Times Magazine on January 11. "They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam? They are demolishing houses [of insurgents` family members] now. They say they want to teach a lesson to the people. But when Timothy McVeigh was convicted in the bombing in Oklahoma City, was his family`s home destroyed?"

It`s striking that al-Yawar knows McVeigh`s name. How many Americans can identify any Iraqi other than Saddam Hussein? Most foreigners know more about us than we know about them. Hell, they know more about what we`re doing in Iraq than we do ourselves.

Of course, many of us don`t give a damn whether French schoolchildren or anyone else think Bush`s United States is a land of butchers and thugs. Whether or not we care, however, it matters.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America`s best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL

RALL 1/20/04

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washingtonpost.com
A Reactive Tone Shows His Ears Have Been Burning


By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2004; Page A01


President Bush`s State of the Union speech showed just how closely he and his staff have been following the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, and how conscious they are of the opposition`s emerging campaign themes 10 long months before Election Day.

From Iraq to taxes, from the USA Patriot Act to school funding, from foreign policy to deficit spending, Bush responded to criticisms that his would-be challengers are still working to formulate. Sometimes, incumbents act as if they have not heard what their critics are saying about them. Bush`s father, for example, seemed not to register Bill Clinton`s attacks on his economic policies until fairly late in the 1992 campaign.

Clearly, the current president`s ears have been burning.

Bush has heard what the Democrats have been saying about him in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere: that the war on terrorism is lagging, that he has squandered international goodwill with his actions in Iraq, that he misled the public into war, that his tax cuts have plunged the country into deficit, that he has failed to deliver education reform, that he has put millions out of work, and so on. These charges, and other campaign imperatives, gave shape to a speech that was otherwise rather loosely tied together, where it was tied at all.

Never mentioned by name, the Democrats nonetheless populated and propelled the speech, appearing as "some people," "some critics" and "defenders" of "the status quo." The specter of the challengers lent some credence to the frequent statements by Bush and his advisers that they expect a very close election this fall. There was a caution to it that Bush has not displayed in recent years, the caution, perhaps, of a man who has seen public opinion -- as in the most recent Washington Post poll -- souring on many of his policies, even as his job approval rides high.

The man who told Congress a year ago he was headed to war arrived this year with a proposal for halfway houses for released inmates, and an appeal to athletes to stop popping steroids. The big plan floated a week ago -- to settle the moon and strike out for Mars -- never came up, having bombed in the polls and on both sides of the congressional aisle.

The hovering Democrats also gave Bush`s speech a distinctly reactive tone. A White House strategist acknowledged as much after reading the final draft. "To an extent rare for him in a speech, he took the arguments of the critics and dealt with them," the aide said. "Most of the time, a president makes assertions, not arguments. But this speech, more than most, takes on the arguments of the critics."

"Some people question" the war on terrorism, Bush noted, before answering that "nearly two-thirds of [al Qaeda`s] known leaders have now been captured or killed."

"Some critics have said" U.S. foreign policy is too unilateral, Bush allowed, before ticking off a list of 17 countries with troops in Iraq and citing his teamwork with "the international community" to contain threats in North Korea and Iran.

Battered by charges that he hyped the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Bush tried a bit of rhetorical judo. Because he made good on the ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, he asserted, "no one can now doubt the word of America."

On the tax issue, Bush argued that economic growth, new home construction, low inflation and interest rates prove that "the American people are using their money far better than government would have."

He dismissed critics of his education budgets, saying that "the status quo always has its defenders." Although the main criticism of the president is that he is not spending enough to raise standards, Bush charged that his detractors "want to weaken the No Child Left Behind Act by weakening standards and accountability."

On the jobs issue, Bush parried with a mixed bag of training initiatives that he called "Jobs for the 21st Century."

The emerging Democratic critique might even explain topics that Bush left out of the speech. Apart from a few broad generalizations, the leading candidates to take on Bush have not mounted a sharp attack on the Bush environmental record; Bush apparently felt no need to defend himself, and he gave not a word to the subject.

Billed as a State of the Union, Bush`s speech was more like the raw stone from which a campaign stump speech will be chiseled. Officials at the Bush reelection campaign and inside the Republican Party were frank about their desire to confine the speech, as much as possible, to topics where Bush is either broadly popular or believes he can win support. The result was a series of notable omissions, from the space initiative to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- which aides view as intractable and, thus, potentially damaging to Bush`s image as an effective leader.

It also bore the marks of symbolic straddling that signal a general election campaign speech. With no primary challenger of his own, Bush was able to give mere nods to his conservative base, stopping short of any real red meat.

For example, after more than 90 House Republicans had asked him to propose specific cuts to offset his new expenditures, he promised fiscal conservatives that he would "be wise with the people`s money."

He gestured to a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages "if judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people." A leading supporter of the amendment, the Family Research Council, complained that he should have called for action now.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) certainly heard it as a campaign speech. "He was saying one thing to the public in an election year while he is doing something else in his policies," he said.

No doubt that will be part of the next round of criticisms from the Democrats in a campaign that is now sharply joined.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Chaplain Puts Green Beret Past to Use With Troops
Exploits Inspire `Awe Factor` in Iraqi Thicket

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 21, 2004; Page A01


VOLTURNO BASE, Iraq -- By day, this military camp is a self-contained American bubble in a bizarre setting. Off-duty soldiers listen to country music, watch big-screen basketball, eat grilled steaks, read e-mail from home and jog around an artificial lake, built on a landscaped former resort for Saddam Hussein`s cronies and loyalists.

By night, the base becomes a launching pad for forays into another world that is equally surreal but far more dangerous. Lightless convoys rumble into the nearby city of Fallujah, where troops hop out and creep through deserted streets, searching houses for enemies and weapons. Then they rapidly withdraw, listening for the crack of gunfire and praying they will make it back to the base without a bomb exploding in their path.

On most missions, the raiders of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment are accompanied by Dan Knight, a strapping captain with a shaved head, an aw-shucks drawl and an awesome résumé: 12-year Green Beret, Persian Gulf War combat veteran, Special Forces company commander, demolitions expert, high-altitude jumper and deep-sea scuba diver.

Knight carries no weapon, though he mightily wishes he could. Instead, tucked in his rucksack is a book covered in camouflage canvas that says "Army of the Lord."

Knight is the regimental chaplain, a soldier`s soldier who switched gears in mid-career, spent two years at a Louisiana seminary and reappeared in Afghanistan and Iraq carrying a military-issue Bible.

"Being a noncombatant is not exactly my cup of tea, but if it`s what God wants me to do, I`ll abide," said Knight, 37, whose duties are to nurture the living, comfort the wounded and honor the dead. "I don`t crave combat, but I fight to get on every mission I can. There`s nothing more rewarding to me than being on the battlefield, praying with a wounded man."

Knight spends little time in his quarters, a makeshift wooden chapel with an attached bunk room, built on the ruins of a lakefront cafe at the Hussein-era "Dreamland" resort that was bombed by U.S. forces last April. On Sunday mornings he leads a simple Protestant service, but attendance is usually sparse.

Last Sunday, the service drew fewer than a dozen of the 800 troops at Volturno, about one-third of whom wear dog tags stamped "no religious preference." Knight readily acknowledged it`s hard to drum up enthusiasm among men who are often out on raids until 3 a.m.

Out in the field, though, the soldiers` appreciation for his presence is clear. When the commando chaplain jumps into an armored Humvee bound for Fallujah, the nervous jokes stop and a sense of calm seems to pervade the soldiers gripping their rifles in the back of the vulnerable, open vehicle.

"With Dan, there`s a bit of an awe factor at work," said 1st Sgt. Chris Dunn, a close friend and fellow Army Ranger who is also with the 82nd Airborne Division. "He can relate to any soldier because he`s done everything, and he automatically commands their respect. He`s just got an extra chain of command than the rest of us do."

Knight, a native of Mississippi, was reticent about what motivated his extraordinary leap from survivalist to seminarian. Last weekend, while showing off snapshots of his wife and three children, he hinted at a hell-raising, extreme-sports past that nearly cost him his marriage. Later, he mentioned the autobiography of James D. Johnson, a combat chaplain in the Vietnam War, as a source of inspiration.

But Johnson`s book, which Knight has heavily highlighted, is hardly the portrayal of a gung-ho patriot-priest. Instead, the author describes confronting the intimate moral dilemmas of war: agonizing over whether to destroy some girlie photos among the home-bound effects of a dead, and married, GI; wishing he could comfort the screaming children of a Vietnamese man shot by U.S. troops; having to lie to a frightened patient whose leg would have to be amputated.

Knight`s mission in Iraq has involved similarly difficult moments, especially after the regiment`s most painful episode since being deployed here in August. On Oct. 20, a team from Volturno was heading into Fallujah to organize distribution of school supplies. As they paused on the highway to search for mines, unseen hands detonated a powerful explosive device. Eight soldiers were wounded, and the squad`s popular commander, Staff Sgt. Paul Johnson, 29, was killed.

Afterward, Johnson`s men were wracked with conflicting emotions: anger, grief, guilt that they had survived, worry that they had somehow contributed to Johnson`s death. According to several squad members, Knight helped them absorb and accept what had happened, both through private counseling and at a formal memorial service.

"We were all in shock," said Sgt. Michael Clay, 35. "I kept wondering if I had done everything I could have, if we had taken every precaution." For days the squad members were scattered, recovering in various clinics and barracks, but Knight "helped us see the bigger picture" and "mend as a group," Clay said.

There`s another, more paradoxical aspect to Knight`s role. In some ways, his main function is to help inexperienced troops reconcile their duty to kill with their respect for human life, and to help them cling to a sense of liberating mission in a country where people are increasingly hostile to the U.S. military presence.

In Fallujah, a city about 35 miles west of Baghdad that has been a hotbed of Sunni Muslim resistance to the U.S. occupation for months, the regiment`s mission embodies both civilian outreach and military punishment. One day the troops are handing out book bags to children, the next night they are putting hoods over the heads of handcuffed men kneeling in the streets.

The regiment`s commander, Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine, euphemistically described the situation in Fallujah as "fluid and dynamic," with a murky mix of tribal chiefs, wealthy former members of Hussein`s Baath Party, jobless youths and Islamic extremists. He said the regiment has worked hard to rebuild the city and reorganize local government, but he acknowledged the battle has been uphill.

"We`ve spent over half a million dollars on projects, and only 2 percent of the population is anti-coalition, but the Baathists and extremists use a lot of propaganda against us," Drinkwine said. When his troops conduct raids, they regularly encounter gunfire, rockets or explosives like the one that killed Johnson in October.

Even during goodwill missions, hostile crowds sometimes gather and residents sometimes shrink from the U.S. troops. One day, Knight said, he tried to hand a book bag to a woman on the street, but she quickly pulled her daughter away. "You could see the terror in her eyes," he said.

Knight said he harbors no religious enmity toward Muslims, although he believes that Islam and democracy may be fundamentally incompatible. Yet he professes an unshakable, holy warrior`s conviction in the rightness of the U.S. mission and its long-term benefits for Iraqi society. By the same token, he seems to have no trouble reconciling his dual identity as soldier and spiritual guide to an occupying force.

"I believe in the nobility of what we`re doing. It`s not an occupation or an invasion, it`s a classic battle between good and evil," he said Friday evening, sitting on his bunk before heading out on a midnight raid. "No one enjoys killing, but it can be a necessary evil to defend liberty." After all, Knight added, the army chaplains` Latin motto is "Pro Deo Et Patria" -- For God and Country.

An hour later he jumped into a crowded Humvee, waiting for the signal to move out. In the cab, an irreverent officer began insulting Knight`s taste in "garbage" Christian music. But in back, a young soldier timidly inquired about training for the Special Forces, and everyone listened in admiration as Knight described surviving in the Georgia wilderness with little food or water.

Soon the convoy was moving through the silent, shuttered streets of Fallujah, passing ornate mosques and being chased by barking dogs. Knight hunkered down with the medics in an abandoned building while several squads fanned out, looking for Hussein loyalists and hidden weapons.

As eager for the hunt as any soldier, Knight listened to muffled radio commands and scanned the starry sky while invisible reconnaissance choppers droned overhead. Banned from carrying a gun under Geneva Convention rules, he wore fatigues, boots and night-vision binoculars that made the landscape glow bright green. When the raiders discovered a stash of grenade launchers in one suspect`s house, there were high-fives all around.

Back on base, though, Knight`s routine generally involves less drama and more mundane, morale-boosting efforts, such as distributing holiday gifts, delivering cocoa to camp sentinels, supervising construction of a Ping-Pong and library tent and sympathizing over news from home of a grandparent`s death or a wife`s unfaithfulness.

"I`m not a missionary looking for battlefield conversions," he asserted with a disarming grin. "I`m here to let the men know I care about them, and that God does, too."

Knight`s bunk room behind the chapel reflects his calling: a shelf of religious books, a pile of Christian-flavored country music discs and a DVD collection that features "We Were Soldiers," starring Mel Gibson as an air cavalry officer from the Vietnam era who prays with his children before bed and his men before battle.

Yet Knight`s approach to ministry is low-key, drawing more on military metaphors than Scriptures to reach his uniformed flock. Last Sunday he offered communion while dressed in camouflage fatigues, and closed with a powerful image from his daredevil exploits. "I`ve made 150 [high-altitude free-fall] jumps, and every one was an act of faith," he said quietly.

For some young troops at Volturno, the example seems to resonate. Andrew Jones, 26, a baby-faced specialist from West Virginia who joined the Army just weeks before he was deployed five months ago, said he arrived in the Iraqi war zone psychologically unprepared and morally torn.

"I`ve been a Christian all my life, but this is the first time I`ve been a Christian with a machine gun," Jones confided after chapel last Sunday. "This can be an ungodly profession at times, and you need to hold onto your inner values and still do your job." After spending some time under Knight`s wing, he said, "I was able to call my parents and tell them I`d be okay."




© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
State of the Platform




Wednesday, January 21, 2004; Page A26


PRESIDENT BUSH offered less a description of the state of the union last night than an opening pitch for reelection. The president claimed progress in combating terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, pledged to stay the course in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said his tax cuts and new spending programs had helped revive the economy and address urgent social problems. He disparaged unnamed opponents who had opposed the war or played down the terrorist threat. "We have not come all this way -- through tragedy, and trial, and war -- only to falter and leave our work unfinished," he said. He was speaking of his policies and programs, but the larger message was about his presidency.

Mr. Bush took due credit for removing the regime of Saddam Hussein and for an ambitious agenda to transform the greater Middle East. Yet as often before, Mr. Bush skated past the challenges that lie ahead in Iraq and made no mention of the likely cost of overcoming them. And, as before, he proposed to spend still more and tax still less despite the government`s rapidly mounting debts. It was hard not to be struck by the small-bore nature of some of Mr. Bush`s proposals, by the clear political cast of others and, most of all, by the failure to grapple with some of the serious issues facing the country.

Mr. Bush offered deserved tribute to the sacrifices of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq. But he provided no accounting of his mistaken or exaggerated allegations about Iraq`s weapons in his State of the Union address one year ago. Instead he tried to cover the gap between what he described and what has been found with a brief and tortured reference to "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities." He underlined his intention to transfer sovereignty to an Iraqi administration by the end of June, but he failed to explain how he will overcome political obstacles to that plan or how many troops and how much spending may be needed in Iraq beyond this year.

In the face of record deficits, a costly new prescription drug program, and mounting costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was as breathtaking as it was unsurprising that Mr. Bush repeated his call to make the tax cuts permanent. We would welcome a responsible national debate about putting Social Security on a sustainable financial path, but Mr. Bush`s breezy revival of his 2000 campaign push for private accounts failed to confront the complexities and costs of such a change. He devoted twice as much time to rallying professional athletes to "get rid of steroids now" as he did to Social Security reform.

To his supporters, Mr. Bush proffered political bouquets -- doubled funding for teenage abstinence programs, a nod to the possible need for a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage. To his opponents, Mr. Bush signaled that he is not about to cede any campaign ground. Whatever the Democratic candidates for president have seen as potential fodder -- the anti-terrorism Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind legislation, even his controversial visit to an aircraft carrier -- Mr. Bush defended and embraced. Making the rounds of fundraisers in recent months, Mr. Bush has been fond of saying that the "political season is going to come in its own time." That time, it would seem, arrived last night.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Haben nur die eigenen Anhänger die Rede gehört? Eine Zahl wieviel Leute zugesehen haben liegt mir noch nicht vor.

POLL ANALYSES
January 21, 2004


Speech Watchers React Positively to Bush`s Message
But lower ratings than last year


by David W. Moore
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- An instant-reaction poll of State of the Union speech watchers last night, the plurality of whom were Republicans, found President George W. Bush receiving high marks for his address, although his ratings are lower than last year. The speech appears to have persuaded some viewers to view the president more positively on several issues, compared to what they felt in a pre-speech survey, especially on healthcare and Social Security. But the speech appears to have had little effect on viewers` voting intentions next November. And Bush`s overall policy rating, about the same as last year, is much lower than what he received after his first two State of the Union speeches and lower than what President Bill Clinton received in his first-term speeches.

The major findings of the CNN/USA Today/Gallup instant-reaction poll are as follows:

Overall, 76% of speech watchers say their reaction to the speech is positive, with 45% saying "very" positive.
Last year, 84% said positive, with 50% very positive.
Two years ago, 94% were positive, with 74% very positive.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr040121.asp

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Dan Spillane: ``Black Hole`` Found in US Economy
Wednesday, 21 January 2004, 2:06 pm
Opinion: Dan Spillane

"Black Hole" Found in US Economy

Hiding costs and "energy eating" cycle started in Reagan/Bush I Era
By Dan Spillane
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
(SEATTLE) - In a troubling sign that accounting problems have grown beyond corporate balance sheets, two of the main economic gauges used by Wall Street, banks, and in the calculation of Social Security payments have been found to contain serious problems. The makeup or "weightings" of the gauges have been set and modified recently so they hide real inflation. Also, a complicated "circular" cycle--much like a "black hole"--has been found within one of the gauges, which not only places the US financial system at risk, but "eats energy", resulting in dramatic and permanent increases in demand for energy, at a time when our soldiers are dying overseas because of energy-related tensions (1) (2) (3).

The problems were identified in the Consumer Price Index(CPI) and Producer Price Index(PPI), by examining contents of tables provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics(BLS), and comparing weightings for the most recent years against each other, and against independent statistics which account for the same costs.

According to official BLS tables, in the energy category, several changes were put in to reduce energy cost weightings in the indices recently, including one which reduces importance of “housing fuels and utilities”in the overall CPI index by a whopping ten percent(4), and another which pushes winter energy cost calculations into summer(5). Also, in the housing category, the weighting of “hotels and motels” was increased (against the backdrop of post-Sept 11th falls in hotel costs), while at the same time, “housing at school” got less weighting. In the education category, the weighting of college, elementary tuition, and childcare was recently reduced.

Going back many years, the costs of running large energy-consuming homes (like categories related to energy, gas, and utilities for the home) have been slowly and mysteriously removed from the CPI inflation index, starting in the late 1980s, under Reagan/Bush I, and now, the same trend has picked up anew under Bush II. This change is unexplainable in light of census data compilations (and thermodynamics) over the same period--which would call for the opposite from a demand model. Energy costs and demand are "hidden" as a result of the Reagan/Bush I and Bush II changes, even though we are all paying them. Of particular concern are changes made recently under Bush II to hide energy costs in the CPI index. Yet, the problem traces way back to 1983--the source of the black hole is changes made to the CPI under Reagan, which are now interacting dangerously with low interest rates(11).

Disturbingly, in the most recent table which rates relative importance of health insurance, cost is placed below other categories such as “Recreational Reading Materials”, “Pets”, and “Toys.” Health insurance accounting for the most recent table is off by a significant factor of fifteen--and is set to a level below that in 1995 (6).

Taken together, these problems shed light on why consumers and domestic businesses are under severe pressure, whereas multi-national companies--who operate largely overseas or outsource overseas--are reaping huge benefits(7). Considering corporations have recently engaged in widespread malfeasance--which has gone largely unpunished(and to the contrary, they seem to have benefited with recent tax breaks)--fundamental issues of justice are raised. Stated simply, the true picture in the US is an inflationary environment where Americans pay more and don`t have jobs, but shoddy accounting for inflation makes these costs "disappear"--as far as banks, financial markets, and Social Security payments are concerned.

Moreover, the longer-term trend in some statistics shows changes that hide real costs which have increased--in contrast to reports recently from the administration claiming a healthy economy with low inflation. Retirees, for example, would have received smaller Social Security checks due to these "improved" CPI calculations, and many US banks may have made loans without properly accounting for risk related to consumer budgetary liabilities. The findings also extend those of a recent CNN article which didn`t get much publicity.

Indeed, there is serious question as to how domestic companies can hire in the US under conditions of increasing cost. In fact, outsourcing abroad has exploded, according to several recent reports. In an unexpected twist, persistent low interest rates may be hindering job gains since they are so dramatically increasing inflation in the US (8) (9).

Problems with the inflation figures can be attributed to several causes. In usage, the CPI is commonly used as a basis for cost of living (for instance, indirectly, by banks in lending)--even though the CPI is not constructed as such. Next, the figures trail the economy by several years. In fact, the current weightings are based on a very questionable period (1999-2000)--a period in which the economy was fully affected by corporate accounting problems. However, none of these accounts fully for the long term trends.

A source within the US BLS explained shifts in the makeup of the inflation numbers are based on the result of paper surveys--but could provide no further details. No source of independent review for the BLS inflation statistics nor their weightings was identified. Examination of a recent report from the US Federal Reserve shows they failed to identify any impacts or dangers whatsover related to persistent low rates, such as the black hole(10).

What`s certain for all of us, is the future does not bode well for homeowners nor domestic businesses, given this major "oops" by the Federal Reserve. The last time such an oversight occurred, we had a stock market crash, caused by corporate misdeeds which we are still piecing through.


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Contact: Dan Spillane [e-mail] Citizens for Corporate Accountability http://www.libertywhistle.us/

Footnotes:

(1) "While U.S. Households Contract, Homes Expand" (AmeriStat, March 2003) The average size of new single-family homes increased from 1,500 square feet to over 2,200 square feet between 1970 and 2000. Energy consumption is related to square footage--thus, super-low interest rates, which are leading to ever-larger homes, creates increased and permanent demand for energy. But this cost is masked by the broken inflation statistics.

See Homes Expand

(2) See Fuel Economy hits 22 year low New York Times, 05/23/2003. Independently, recent GDP statistics show the recent so-called "economic recovery" consists largely of vehicle sales. The recent tax cut package allows the rich to deduct costs such as SUVs. Moreover, super-low interest rates, which push huge SUVs out on the streets, add to unprecedented and recurring demand for oil. But this cost is masked by the broken inflation statistics.

(3) See mid-article reference to "circular" problem CNN article

(4) ”Relative Importance” ”Housing Fuels and Utilities” et al, US Bureau of Labor Statistics table, www.bls.gov, entry CPI 4.934(2001) vs. 4.469(2002)-- representing a reduction of ten percent in the weighting. Significantly, in the face of rising costs and well-documented increases in housing-related energy demand (footnote(1)).

(5) 2003 Inflation Data Hacked ---------------------------- CHRISTMAS ENERGY COSTS MOVED TO SUMMER!

Seasonal weightings changed in producer price index in 2003 vs. 2002. It also looks like there is significant hacking starting in 2001 (what politics have changed since 2000?) Category WPS055 UTILITY NATURAL GAS

2002 WPS 0555 106.4 104.1 101.4 98.9 100.0 98.0 97.9 94.6 94.6 96.4 102.4 104.5 2003 WPS 0555 105.7 103.5 100.9 98.5 100.1 98.7 97.0 96.8 96.7 97.3 101.9 102.5 -.7 -.6 -.5 +.7 -.9 +2.2 +2.1 -.5 -2.0

Net change 2002 to 2003 (Cold months)Dec-Jan-Feb-Mar -4.3 weighting (Warm months)Jun-Jul-Aug-Sept +4.1 weighting --> Christmas in JULY

See graph where prices of natural gas are higher in general recently, and more so during cold months. In addition, it was recently reported that oil prices are at multi-decade highs (oil econ. alt. to nat gas).

No similar change to move winter costs into summer was found in any tables--the first time was in 2003.

(6) Based on statistics from the American Medical Association, recent health insurance costs paid by the individual represent an amount approximately fifteen times greater than that represented in the published CPI. Employer portions have a similar rise, but are not accounted for in the CPI. See AMA Report Approx. (2K premium / 40K income, US Census) = 5 percent, but BLS CPI says far less than 1 pct (.315 pct in 2002 CPI). This means there is a big black hole in the economy, esp. considering unemployed and retired must pay ENTIRE premium, which can increase weighting another factor of ten.

(7) See Fast Growth for Profits which shows a disproportionate benefit to corporations.

(8) Widespread. See Jobs To Move/Goldman Sachs

(9) Anecdotal. See Alcoa Cuts US Jobs Due to Inflation, published since the original date of this article.

(10) US Federal Reserve December 2002, section "Economic Analysis of Refinancing." They make no reference to risks in the report. See Fed Report on Mortgages. Note disturbingly large cash-out figures listed in this report.

(11) See BLS Manual which talks about a major Reagan change--accounting for home costs--that is now leading to the circular cycle. Note that houses are indeed "consumed" when people refi cash-out against them, which is disturbingly at odds with the justification for the accounting change.

Citizens For Corporate Accountability is a `Think Tank` non-profit, dedicated to public interest and the detection of corruption which endangers the basics of democratic society. It was founded in 2003 by Dan Spillane. The first major issue identified by Mr. Spillane, Electronic Voting Reform, has gotten significant national media attention subsequent to Mr. Spillane raising concerns to Congress and a number of activists since the summer of 2002. It was recently revealed that significant problems exist nationwide in this area--as a result, several new bills are pending for the 2004 Congress.




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In search of a candidate
Generic Democrat could beat Bush. But it`s one of the four actual contestants that has to be chosen

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday January 21, 2004
The Guardian

There is one man who can beat George Bush. Send out a search party: his name is Generic Democrat. Latest polls show that when Americans choose between the current president and a hypothetical figure known only as "the Democratic candidate", the two end up in a statistical tie. Some surveys have even shown our friend Generic Democrat with a slight edge.

The trouble is, Generic cannot be on the ballot paper in November. The Democrats need to have chosen an actual person to take on the president by then, and that task just got a lot more complicated.

For while Bush was putting the finishing touches to the State of the Union address he gave last night, the Democrats were slugging it out in what is now a genuine four-way contest. That is good news for Bush, as yesterday`s breakfast TV in America testified. Footage from Iowa showed four exhausted, sweaty Democrats physically punching the air or rhetorically jabbing each other while a White House photograph captured a contemplative Bush preparing for last night`s speech. Not-so-subliminal message: Let these guys squabble in the playground; I am presidential.

True, Bush`s ideal outcome from Iowa`s Democratic contest, the first of the 2004 campaign, would have been a knockout victory for Howard Dean. White House planners, led by chief strategist Karl Rove, have been drooling for a year at the prospect of running against the former Vermont governor, who they reckon could be easily lampooned as the latest in a long line of anti-war liberals from the American north-east (think George McGovern and Michael Dukakis). But Bush will take as a consolation prize a drawn-out, rancorous internal battle that keeps Democrats` fire trained on each other rather than on him.

And this could be very drawn out. A few weeks back, the Washington consensus was that Dean was unstoppable in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that victories there would wrap up the nomination. Now, though, 2004 threatens to be a re-run of the 1988 Democratic contest when it took months for a winner to emerge. If that happens again, the eventual nominee will be too battered and bruised to give Bush much of a fight in November.

So who is likeliest to come through the long hard slog? Dean cannot be counted out just yet, though his third place in Iowa was a grievous disappointment. He still has substantial assets, starting with the $40m war chest he accumulated in 2003. He retains a devoted following, volunteer "Deaniacs" who have built a strong organisation in New Hampshire, which votes next Tuesday. And he has some big-cheese endorsements, from Al Gore and (almost) Jimmy Carter.

But he has been deeply damaged and will struggle to regain the winner`s aura he had until a few weeks ago. What once was passion now sounds shrill and angry: hoarse and red-faced, he came on like a man possessed at his post- result event in Iowa. That footage, in which Dean was shown all but screaming, could prove to be his Sheffield rally, as wounding as Neil Kinnock`s "Awwwright!!" in 1992. Pundits will ask if he is sufficiently presidential; viewers may conclude that Dean is too mean.

Iowa also suggests that Dean is struggling to reach past his hard-core, anti-war base, and that his phenomenal network of internet-recruited supporters does not translate easily into a more old-fashioned get-out-the-vote machine. More worrying was the exit polling which showed that even those Democrats who agreed with him on his core issue - the Iraq war - did not let that question determine their vote: one in three anti-war Iowans backed Kerry, who supported the war. It could be that, especially since the capture of Saddam, Iraq is losing its political sting in the US: only 14% of Iowans rated it as the most important issue. That could change, especially if there is a sharp rise in US casualties. But one should never underestimate the American urge to "move on", and Americans may be doing that now. (The contrast with Britain, where the Hutton report could determine the fate of the government, is clear.) If so, Dean needs to find a new song to sing.

Unproven, because he sat out Iowa, but polling well in New Hampshire is the retired general Wesley Clark. He has a dream CV, especially in an election in which national security is likely to loom large. But those who have seen him in action say the soldier is not making a smooth transition to politics. Away from the script, he is not fluent and his demeanour can seem too stiff, too military.

John Edwards, the fresh-faced senator from North Carolina, has some advantages: he brings a Clintonian message of hope and optimism and has avoided rottweiler attacks on his rivals. His stump speech is effective too, speaking of "two Americas", one of affluence and security, the other getting by on the minimum wage and with no health insurance. He even talks about the poor, who don`t vote and therefore rarely arouse candidates` interest, and the rest of the world. He says there are "two images of America": the old one, in which the US was admired as a beacon of freedom, and the current one, of America "acting on its own, unilaterally, ignoring and disrespecting its allies". In other words, Edwards gets the Iraq issue even if he does not bang on about it.

That leaves the victor of Iowa, John Kerry. He now has that precious electoral commodity, momentum. A decorated war hero in Vietnam, he has Clark`s ability to take on Bush as a future commander in chief. What`s more, Kerry seems to prove that enough time has passed for Vietnam to have faded as a divisive issue in US politics. It is becoming a matter of sentiment, even nostalgia: witness the emotion stirred a few days ago as Kerry was reunited with the soldier whose life he had saved in Vietnam. A veteran who became an anti-war activist, Kerry wins both sides of that once toxic battle in American life.

His drawbacks are personal. He is a New England patrician who cannot do folksy, a solid, stolid campaigner who verges on the dull. He has a bad case of Al Gore syndrome.

Yet it will be one of these men who takes on George Bush in November. Do any of them frighten him? Probably Kerry and Clark, a little bit. He must worry too about what Americans are calling the jobless recovery: economic numbers rising, but a paltry 1,000 new jobs created last month. Still, as last night`s speech illustrated, Bush already has his campaign themes in place: a president who stood strong after 9/11 and lifted the economy by cutting taxes. Add the images of Saddam in captivity and of Bush serving Thanksgiving turkey to the troops, plus a plan to turn illegal immigrants into citizens (popular with Hispanic voters) and a dream of another moon landing, and you have a man who will be very hard to beat. The Democrats know that - but it won`t stop them trying.

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Kurds turn against US after losing control over oil-rich land
Kurdish community claims it had more autonomy under Saddam
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
21 January 2004


Iraqi Kurds, the one Iraqi community that has broadly supported the American occupation, are expressing growing anger at the failure of the United States and its allies to give them full control of their own affairs and allow the Kurds to expel Arabs placed in Kurdistan by Saddam Hussein.

Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, told The Independent in an interview that the Kurds had been offered less autonomy "than we had agreed in 1974 with the regime of Saddam Hussein".

The Kurds, the main Iraqi victors of the war last year, want, in effect, to keep the mini-state in northern Iraq they ruled after Saddam withdrew his army in 1991. They also want the US and the Iraqi Governing Council to recognise the Kurdish identity of the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other districts from which Kurds were forced to flee by the deposed dictator and his predecessors.

Mr Barzani, a neatly dressed, rather intense man who fought for decades against the old regime, was in Baghdad to seek to persuade the US-appointed governing council, of which he is a member, to recognise the federal autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sitting in a gloomy house in Saddam`s old palace complex, Mr Barzani said it was important for the Kurdish right to home rule to be enshrined in the Iraqi Basic Law that is now being drawn up.

But he is caustic about the governing council. "Their main priority seems to be travelling abroad," he said, and added that many members of the council were formerly part of the Iraqi opposition who had committed themselves again and again over the years to a federal solution for the Iraqi Kurds and should not now abandon their old promises.

But Mr Barzani confirmed that "we all believe the Kurdish issue should be resolved within Iraq itself". The Kurds of Iraq know that if they did opt for independence that would precipitate a Turkish invasion, probably aided by Syria and Iran. All three countries have large Kurdish minorities. He said: "They should be grateful to us because it is only the Kurdish issue which brings them together."

The Iraqi Kurds were extraordinarily fortunate during the brief war to overthrow Saddam last year. Before the war, Washington intended to invade Iraq from the north using Turkish bases and accompanied by a Turkish army. The Kurds were told by the US to keep quiet, though they protested furiously. In the event, the Turkish parliament rejected the US demand. The Americans were compelled to rely on the Kurds to create a northern front against Saddam. As the regime in Baghdad collapsed, Kurdish forces swept into the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. The Kurds saw that as a first step towards reversing ethnic cleansing which pre-dates Saddam`s regime.

"Kurds have been very patient, but it is impossible to wait another 10 or 15 years. This would lead to major problems," Mr Barzani said.

He said the Kurdish leaders could have acted opportunistically by sending back Kurdish refugees and expelling Arabs in the immediate aftermath of liberation. Instead they waited.

"We are not happy with the process. We are disappointed. Some Arabs who left have now returned. We are not against Arabs who have always lived there but those who came because of Arabisation must go back," Mr Barzani said.

There are the seeds here for a savage ethnic conflict. The Arabs and Turkomans in Kirkuk are frightened. Many of the Arab settlers have been there for more than a generation and it is not clear where they would go. The last year has seen a number of small-scale but bloody clashes.

Mr Barzani emphasised that the Kurds were giving up control over defence, foreign and fiscal policy to central government. At the moment, that is not a great sacrifice as there is no Iraqi army, the Foreign Minister is the very able Kurdish leader Hoshyar Zebari and fiscal policy is not a topic on which most Kurds feel strongly. The Kurdish position is, for the moment, very strong since the Kurds are well organised and their peshmerga fighters are the largest Iraqi military force in the country. But they fear that their current superiority may not last and their gains over the past year will be chipped away as the face of the country changes.

The US cannot afford to alienate the Kurds, but the Kurds also need to keep their alliance with America. It is US air power that allowed the Iraqi Kurds to achieve de facto independence after 1991. And it is the US that keeps Turkey out of northern Iraq.

The problem for the Kurds is that the best guarantee for their autonomy is to play a central role in a new Iraqi government. But Kurdish control of Kirkuk and the reversal of Arabisation may lead to constant friction between Kurdish and Iraqi Arab leaders in future.

* George Bush stepped up efforts to calm the dispute over transition to self rule in Iraq, calling in the Iraqi Governing Council president, Adnan Pachachi, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shia member of the council who is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, for talks in Washington.

Last night, there were reports that the British and US governments were looking at running direct elections in time for the handover of power to Iraqis by 1 July. The Guardian reported that unnamed British officials said the Government had been swayed by the Shia argument. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said it had been studying using dyes on voters` hands as a means of working without an electoral roll.
21 January 2004 12:35

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Volle Kraft voraus in den Totalitarismus....



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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-kroc21j…
THE NATION

Vielleicht schmeckt der Hamburger nun besser.



Joan Kroc`s Estate Gives Salvation Army $1.5 Billion
The group will use the money to build as many as 30 community centers in poor neighborhoods.
By Tony Perry
Times Staff Writer

January 21, 2004

SAN DIEGO — In one of the largest donations ever to a single charity, the estate of the late philanthropist Joan B. Kroc announced plans Tuesday to donate an estimated $1.5 billion to the Salvation Army to build 25 to 30 community centers in struggling neighborhoods around the nation.

Kroc, widow of McDonald`s restaurant magnate Ray Kroc, died of brain cancer Oct. 12 at her home in Rancho Santa Fe. She was 75.

During her lifetime, she stealthily donated hundreds of millions of dollars to programs promoting education, health care, African famine relief, the arts, the pursuit of peace and nuclear nonproliferation.

Following terms of her will, Kroc`s estate has given $200 million to National Public Radio, $50 million each to peace institutes at Notre Dame University and the University of San Diego, $20 million to the San Diego Hospice, $10 million to the San Diego Opera, $5 million to build a Catholic school in Chula Vista, and $1 million to San Diego`s Children`s Hospital.

The roughly $1.5-billion gift to the Salvation Army would catapult Kroc to the top of an elite group of charitable benefactors, which includes the likes of Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Walter Annenberg and Eli Broad.

Officials at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University said the Kroc bequest appears to be the largest ever given by an individual to a single charity. There have been larger gifts, such as the $6 billion given by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Gates to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but those donations were given to foundations for the upkeep of multiple charities and causes.

"Her passion for children and families and her hope for community peace will live on forever through this incredible gift," said Commissioner W. Todd Bassett, national commander of the Salvation Army.

Salvation Army officials said the exact amount of the bequest will not be determined until after the estate is settled, probably later this year. At her death, Kroc`s worth was estimated at up to $1.7 billion.

Although specific locations have not yet been selected, Salvation Army officials said the centers would be spread evenly throughout the organization`s four regions in the U.S. With a budget of more than $2.5 billion, the Salvation Army provides services to more than 42 million people.

"Mrs. Kroc was very specific: She wanted these centers to be in working-class neighborhoods, places where kids might otherwise not have these opportunities," said Maj. George Hood, director of community relations for the Salvation Army.

Former San Diego Mayor Maureen O`Connor, a close friend, said Kroc had a vision that the community centers could help transform neighborhoods, much like libraries funded by steel baron Andrew Carnegie.

Kroc provided $92 million in the 1990s to the Salvation Army to build and operate a center in a racially diverse blue-collar neighborhood of San Diego. It will serve as a model for the other centers.

The San Diego center was built in the Rolando neighborhood in what had been a nearly abandoned shopping center. City officials say the center, which opened in June 2002, is helping to revitalize the neighborhood by boosting property values and acting as a magnet for new businesses.

The $1.5-billion bequest is to be spread over several years and split evenly between construction costs and an endowment to help with operating costs. None of the money can be used for existing programs or administrative overhead. A similar arrangement was made for the San Diego center.

The 12-acre center here includes an ice arena, basketball courts, a 50,000-square-foot gymnasium, a 600-seat theater, a kitchen, a performing arts center, a worship center, an Internet-based library, and rooms for child-care and nutrition classes. In its first year of operation, more than 420,000 people used the facilities and programs.

Just weeks before her death, Kroc visited the center to inspect a recent gift: a large outdoor sculpture by artist Henry Moore valued at $2.5 million.

Of her many charities, Kroc had particular fondness for the Salvation Army. She allowed the San Diego center to be named the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center to honor her late husband. Ray Kroc, who died in 1984, was also a benefactor of the Salvation Army and acted as a "bell-ringer" during the Christmas season in the 1950s and `60s.

Maj. Cindy Foley, co-administrator of the center here, said Kroc was elated when she learned that youngsters who had gotten skating instruction at the center were rapidly becoming champions, besting students from more affluent areas.

"She wanted everything to be the best here, to help support the dreams of others," Foley said. "She saw no reason these kids couldn`t become Olympic champions."

The daughter of a railroad worker in Minneapolis, Kroc remembered the impact of having a skating rink in her neighborhood as a child. She specifically asked that a skating rink, built to National Hockey League specifications, be included in the San Diego center.

Philanthropy expert Paul G. Schervish, director of the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College, called Kroc an "entrepreneurial philanthropist" who wanted both a personal connection to the charities she chose and to donate enough money to see results.

"Mrs. Kroc chose her charities not just because there was a need," Schervish said, "but because there was a need that got under her skin and into her heart."

Unlike many philanthropists, Kroc did not form a foundation and had no official board of advisors. A small staff works in an unmarked office in San Diego; the address and phone number are closely held secrets. Kroc disdained bureaucracy and paperwork.

"That`s why she closed the [Kroc] foundation after Ray died," said Catholic Msgr. Joseph Carroll, director of a downtown homeless program that Kroc supported. "She didn`t want to be told what, when and how. That was too much like a job. She thought giving away money should be fun."

Kroc chose her charities by herself, with the help of close friends.

The decision to donate money to the Salvation Army for a community center in San Diego started when she asked O`Connor to give her a driving tour of some of the city`s less-prosperous neighborhoods.

There was no official application process to receive money from Kroc. Often the genesis of her donations was a chance meeting or a newspaper story about people in need. Her initial contact with the San Diego Hospice project came after she met a woman on a flight to Chicago; the woman was a doctor interested in starting a hospice in San Diego.

The in-flight conversation with Dr. Doris Howell, now director-emeritus of the San Diego Hospice, led to an $18.5-million donation in 1985 to build a state-of-the-art hospice with a panoramic view of Mission Valley and the Pacific Ocean.

Two characteristics of Kroc`s charity were spontaneity and anonymity. When the Red River flooded the upper Midwest in 1997, Kroc flew unannounced to the region and began handing out checks. In all, she donated $15 million to flood victims. Her largess might never have been known except for an enterprising newspaper reporter who traced the tail number on her jet.

When the San Diego Chargers traded place-kicker Rolf Benirschke, Kroc was moved by a tearful interview Benirschke gave to local television about being sad to leave San Diego. Benirschke had started "Kicks for Critters," in which people would donate money to the San Diego Zoo for every field goal he kicked.

Kroc called the zoo and pledged $100,000.

"She said: `Tell Rolf that`s to help wipe away his tears,` " said Chuck Bieler, onetime development director at the zoo. "She was an impulsive person, a wonderfully, wonderfully impulsive person."

She donated $3.3 million to the San Diego Zoo in the 1980s to establish the Tiger River, an exhibit for tigers, birds and reptiles.

She once wrote 64 checks for $250,000 each to the Ronald McDonald House Program for gravely ill children.

"Her methodology was simple: `I want to make it happen. I don`t want to wait a long time,` " said David Gillig, senior vice president of the Children`s Hospital Foundation.

"Joan didn`t want to be part of a campaign; she wanted to be the campaign."

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Anti-war protesters hold signs outside the Capitol during the President Bush`s State of the Union address.
(AP)January 20, 2004

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-dpt-union21jan21,1,3…

Bush speech draws mixed local reviews
The area`s Republican congressmen praise the president`s State of the Union address, but a councilman says it was short on domestic issues.
Deepa Bharath
Daily Pilot

January 21, 2004

NEWPORT-MESA — Local officials said they saw President Bush set the stage for his re-election campaign during his State of the Union address on Tuesday by strongly asserting that the nation is succeeding in its war against terrorism and strengthening its economy.

The president also proposed a 36% increase in funding for schools, job training for high school graduates, support for community colleges and a rehabilitation program for prisoners. He urged Congress to make tax cuts permanent.

Bush also touched on sensitive issues, stating clearly his opposition to same-sex marriage and that he is against granting asylum to illegal immigrants.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher called the president`s speech "finely crafted."

"The speech reflected the two sides of George Bush," he said. "It showed his tough side, when he exhibited a firm stand against terrorism, clearly jabbing some of the Democrats who had been backbiting and nitpicking about some of those issues. He was able to do all that while maintaining his presidential aura."

Bush also showed a "softer, caring side" when he talked about protecting young people from drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, Rohrabacher said.

"I was particularly impressed with his proposal to put programs in place to rehabilitate released prisoners," he said.

A large portion of Bush`s speech, however, was dedicated to issues of national security. Bush emphasized that it would be unwise to believe that the nation is immune from terrorist attacks.

"Our greatest responsibility is the active defense of the American people," he said. "Twenty-eight months have passed since Sept. 11, 2001 — over two years without an attack on American soil — and it is tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false."

Addressing soldiers who were watching a broadcast of the speech, he said, "My administration and this Congress will give you the resources to fight this war on terror."

It`s not enough "to serve our enemies with legal papers," the president said.

Newport Beach Mayor Tod Ridgeway said he would have liked to see Bush cut short his repetitive remarks about the war on terrorism and devote more time to issues such as the economy and education.

"He said the same thing over and over again," he said. "He could`ve moved on at some point."

Although Ridgeway said he was happy to hear about more funds for education, he does not support the proposed tax cuts.

"It`s all nice talk during election, but when the tire hits the road, it`s a different story," he said. "I don`t want to bankrupt the country."

Rep. Chris Cox said Bush made it clear that "domestically, his first priority is to [ward off] the biggest tax increase in the nation`s history."

"If Congress does nothing, we`ll have the largest tax increase ever," he said.

Cox said he believed the president "took the opportunity to speak not only to the nation but the world."

"I don`t think it was a campaign speech," he said. "If it were, he would`ve focused on our current economic growth, which is the best it has been in 20 years."

Cox said he was also impressed with the president`s leadership in the area of lawsuit reform.

"He`s not choosing an easy fight there," he said.

Doing away with frivolous lawsuits is important to maintain the integrity of the country`s healthcare system, Cox said.

Newport-Mesa School Board President Martha Fluor said she thought the president`s speech was "terrific."

"I`m very happy to hear about the funding for schools," she said. "I would like to see the president support local control of those funds, so we get what we`re promised and we make sure nothing gets lost in the bureaucracy."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• DEEPA BHARATH covers public safety and courts. She may be reached at [phone] or by e-mail at [e-mail].



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schlesi…
COMMENTARY
State of the `Vision Thing`
The presidency, FDR said, `is predominantly a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clari
By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

January 21, 2004

The president of the United States, wrote Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, "resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek."

The Constitution awards presidents the helm, but creative presidents must possess and communicate the direction in which they propose to take the country. The port they seek is what the first President Bush dismissively called "the vision thing."

Let us interview another president on this point. Franklin D. Roosevelt was by common consent one of the great presidents of the United States. The presidency, FDR said, "is not merely an administrative office. That`s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is predominantly a place of moral leadership. All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified." In other words, they were possessed by their visions.

So, FDR continued, Washington personified the idea of federal union. Jefferson typified the theory of democracy, which Jackson reaffirmed. Lincoln, by condemning slavery and secession, put two great principles of government forever beyond question. Cleveland embodied rugged honesty in a corrupt age. Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson were both moral leaders using the presidency as a pulpit. "Without leadership alert and sensitive to change," FDR wrote, "we are bogged up or lose our way,"

But a vision per se is not necessarily a good thing. Adolf Hitler had a vision. Josef Stalin had a vision. Especially when visions harden into dogmatic ideologies, they become inhuman, cruel and dangerous. Bush the elder was generally held to have a vision deficit, but that`s not the same as having a defective vision. Bush the elder was a moderate as president, and he did not harm the republic.

Bush the younger is another matter. In his State of the Union address, he presented a medley of visions. Is it reasonable to suppose that the son feels that his father committed two fatal errors, which he is determined not to repeat? One might be the folly of alienating the ideological right. The other — the absence of a vision.

Born again, Bush the younger has a messianic tinge about him. He thinks big and wants to make his mark on history. Four hours of interviews left Bob Woodward with the impression, as he wrote in "Bush at War," that "the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God`s master plan."

His grand vision told Bush that American troops invading Iraq would be hailed as liberators, not hated as occupiers, and that the transformation of Iraq under American sponsorship into a Jeffersonian democracy would have a domino effect in democratizing the entire Islamic world.

That dream has waned, and so has the vision that lies behind it. It turns out that the president`s vision-free father had a much more accurate forecast of what an American war against Iraq would bring. Bush the elder wrote, defending (with Gen. Brent Scowcroft) his decision not to advance to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War, "Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs…. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

The United States is today an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. In a couple of years, Bush the younger has succeeded in turning the international wave of sympathy that engulfed the U.S. after 9/11 into worldwide dislike, distrust and even hatred. With his Iraq vision collapsing around him, Bush is trying to dump his self-created mess on the United Nations, heretofore an object of contempt in his administration. And he is trying out a new vision — the moon and Mars.

In this respect he is following the example of President Kennedy, who sought to repair American self-confidence after the Bay of Pigs by proposing to send men to the moon and return them safely to Earth "before this decade is out." A difference is that the preventive war against Iraq was an essential part of the Bush vision, but the Bay of Pigs was not part of the JFK vision. It was a CIA vision inherited from the Eisenhower administration.

I was appalled by Bush`s preventive war against Iraq, as I was appalled in the Kennedy White House by the Bay of Pigs. And as I applauded JFK`s vision of landing men on the moon, so I applaud Bush`s vision of landing men on Mars.

It has been almost a third of a century since human beings took a step on the moon — rather as if no intrepid mariner had bothered after 1492 to follow up on Christopher Columbus. Yet 500 years from now (if humans have not blown up the planet), the 20th century will be remembered, if at all, as the century in which man began the exploration of space.

Some visions are intelligent and benign. Other visions are stupid and malevolent. "Where there is no vision … the people perish," the Good Book says. Where there is a defective vision, people perish too. In a democracy, it is up to the people themselves to make the fateful choice.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a special assistant to the president in the Kennedy White House, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His most recent book is "A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings" (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Da kann sich Bild noch ein Stück von abschneiden. Mirror Titelseiten:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12043…

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Bush Introduces Faith Based Ventriloquism
In State of the Union Address

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WASHINGTON, DC (IWR News Parody) President Bush last night in his State of the Union address introduced a new faith based initiative promoting ventriloquism to help the working poor and unemployed of America.
"I have included in my 2004 budget one billion dollars for this new faith based ventriloquism initiative to help those in need in the great country of ours.

Ventriloquists funded by this program will entertain the poor, while they shop at Wal-Mart, as they collect Coke cans from trash bins to supplement their meager incomes or while they stand in line for food stamps.

In addition, these ventriloquists of infinite compassion will offer the age old crutch of religion as a alternative to meaningful wages, unemployment and health care benefits, just as our aristocratic ancestors did during the Dark Ages," said the President to standing ovation by Republicans.

ventriloquism = Bauchreden

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COMMENTARY
A defiant Bush stands his ground
He claims his foreign policies are succeeding
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/21/MNGTF4E9GN1.DTL



In his State of the Union address, President Bush boldly claimed success for his most controversial foreign policy ventures, casting the invasion of Iraq as a moral triumph and defiantly asserting that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction -- despite the lack of supporting evidence.

The assertions on Iraq underscored the president`s characteristic don`t- give-an-inch stance when it comes to public utterances on the fight against terrorism.

Other politicians in the same situation might have quailed before the failure to find prohibited weapons in Iraq -- the president`s central justification for the war -- but Bush simply asserted the contrary.

In Tuesday`s speech, he said U.S. weapons inspectors have "identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator`s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."

In fact, chief U.S. inspector David Kay has reported that no actual banned weapons or active weapons programs have been found, despite months of searching by thousands of military experts.

Bush`s hopes of re-election depend in large part on whether his campaign in Iraq is perceived by voters as a success, and Tuesday`s speech suggested that he will ram home his opinion that it has been just that.

The president cast the chief American foreign-policy challenges of his term, from the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Libya, as part of "the active defense of the American people." Far from shying away from the messy subject of Iraq, as many analysts had expected, he embraced it, downplaying the strife and guerrilla violence that have caused the combat deaths of more than 500 soldiers.

Many of Bush`s remarks are sure to cause controversy, yet none appeared incontrovertibly false -- as his claim in last year`s State of the Union speech that Hussein had tried to import nuclear-weapons material from Africa turned out to be.

The president also recast his well-documented defiance of the United Nations when it comes to Iraq, saying his decision to invade despite the opposition of most Security Council members was in fact a kind of loyalty to the world body.

"Since we last met in this chamber, combat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland, and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations, ended the rule of Saddam Hussein -- and the people of Iraq are free," Bush said.

In recent weeks, reports by the U.S. Army War College and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have sharply criticized the invasion of Iraq, saying it diverted resources from the search for Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda terrorist network and employed distorted U.S. intelligence findings to justify the desire to topple Hussein.

Bush also claimed credit for Libya`s decision earlier this month to give up its nuclear weapons programs, suggesting that Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy was cowed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Many analysts say that pressure from European nations, who have long refused to back Washington`s tough line against Khadafy and have given him an economic lifeline, gave the dictator an overwhelming reason to back down.

In recent months, Khadafy has settled claims with relatives of victims in the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, of Pan Am Flight 103, a process that was carefully started and tended by the Clinton administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Bush did not mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has festered while U.S. officials have put peace negotiations on the back burner. Nor did he mention bin Laden, who has long eluded capture and whose terrorist followers have reportedly flocked to Iraq after the U.S. victory there.

Bush acknowledged difficulties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. "The men and women in Afghanistan are building a nation that is free and proud and fighting terror," he said, adding that the task of building a new Iraq "is hard and it is right."

The U.S.-led occupation authorities are planning to hand over power to a new Iraqi government by June 30, but the plan is opposed bitterly by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq`s most popular religious leader, who is demanding full national elections.

In Afghanistan, a two-year transition plan is also scheduled to culminate in June with the nation`s first democratic elections. But guerrilla violence from Taliban extremists and al Qaeda remnants continues unabated, leading U.S. officials to concede that elections may be limited to the presidency, with voting for a parliament delayed until 2005.

Bush`s strong defense of his conduct of the war on terror effectively wraps his re-election candidacy in the American flag, forcing his Democratic opponents to choose between criticizing the commander-in-chief or turning a blind eye to his stretching of the facts.

In recent weeks, many of the leading Democratic presidential contenders have downplayed Iraq and other foreign problems on the campaign trail, apparently calculating that their critiques are not resonating with the voting public. For example, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who rose to prominence because of his strong opposition to the Iraq invasion, has made little mention of the subject in recent days, focusing instead on economic issues.

E-mail Robert Collier at [e-mail].

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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State of the Union`s finances run amok
Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/21/EDGRN4DVR71.DTL


Austin, Texas -- MY FELLOW Americans, the State of the Union`s finances is enough to make an Enron accountant gag. When George W. Bush took office as president, he was handed a going concern. Projected annual surpluses from 2002 to 2011 were $5.6 trillion. In its most recent projection, the Congressional Budget Office says it expects $1.4 trillion in total deficits from 2004 to 2013. Bush`s new future spending proposals -- including everything from the goofy manned- flight-to-Mars to the promotion of marriage -- already total an additional $2 trillion.

When Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion. Today, the debt is $7 trillion. According of the CBO, the deficit is currently $480 billion. Bush plans to cut biomedical research, health care, job training and veterans` funding, and that leaves a projected deficit of $450 billion.

Under Bill Clinton, the economy gained an average of 236,000 jobs every month. Under Bush, the economy has lost an average of 66,000 jobs a month. Nor is the news getting better. Last month, the economy, supposedly in full recovery, added 1,000 jobs. The economy needs to generate 150,000 jobs a month just to absorb new workers.

Not only are the 2 million jobs we have already lost not coming back, but the trend will continue. The lead story in Monday`s Wall Street Journal is about IBM`s plan to shift 3,000 high-paying jobs overseas, known as "off- shoring." We are not just hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs. As the Journal reports, "This `off-shoring` process has raised fears that even high-skill jobs that were supposed to represent the U.S.`s future are being lost to countries that have already taken over low-skill factory work."

There are, of course, some jobs that cannot be exported -- farms cannot be moved to another country, nor can restaurants. So the president proposes a giant new bracero program to import foreign workers legally to fill those jobs.

In another sign of how deeply Bush cares about workers, the plan to end overtime pay for millions of workers is back. You may recall this little charmer from last year, the Bush proposal to "update" the Fair Labor Standards Act. Both the House and the Senate nixed the idea by passing an amendment proposed by Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, but in the magic way of the Republican- run Congress, the amendment was later dropped from a spending bill after heavy pressure from the White House.

Now, in another move typical of the Bush administration, they plan to bypass Congress altogether and issue the new regulations as an "administrative rules change," to go into effect in March. Another great deal for the corporations -- they get to cut overtime for a lot of higher-paid workers and only have to add a few lower-paid workers. Do you really have any doubts about whom this administration is being run for?

It`s not about trust, it`s about money.


©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

[Deep Thought]

a propos " Flying to the MARS" ...


DEUTSCHES ÄRZTEBLATT ONLINE

USA: Krankenversicherungs-Report sorgt für Schlagzeilen
WASHINGTON. Ein einflussreiches Expertengremium hat die US-amerikanische Regierung aufgefordert, dafür zu sorgen, dass die gesamte Bevölkerung bis spätestens 2010 krankenversichert ist. „Es ist nicht akzeptabel, dass viele Millionen US-Bürger über keinerlei Absicherung im Krankheitsfall verfügen“, stellten die 16 Mitglieder der „Institutes of Medicine“ (IOM) der „National Academy of Sciences“ in einem Report fest.

Die Veröffentlichung der Untersuchung sorgt in den USA für gesundheitspolitische Schlagzeilen. Bislang hatten sich derart bedeutende Experten nie für ein komplett reformiertes Gesundheitswesen eingesetzt. Laut Gesundheitsministerium in Washington sind derzeit rund 43 Millionen Menschen in den USA ohne Krankenversicherung. Die Zahl der Nicht-Versicherten steige seit Jahren.

Die Regierung Bush reagierte auf den Report mit der Feststellung, dass das Problem erkannt sei. Die Regierung sei bemüht, es zum Beispiel durch steuerliche Vergünstigungen mehr Menschen zu ermöglichen, eine private Krankenversicherung abzuschließen.

Laut IOM ist die Reform des Krankenversicherungssystems eine gesundheitspolitische Priorität. Das IOM beschäftigte sich mehr als drei Jahre mit dem Thema „Krankenversicherungen“, bevor es seinen Report vorlegte. /KT (20.01.2004)

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January 21, 2004|8:16 PM


What’s Bush Hiding From 9/11 Commission?
by Joe Conason


In an election year, a Republican President seeking his second term can be expected to propose more tax cuts and, in this era of right-wing profligacy, considerably more spending as well. Informed critics calculate the costs of George W. Bush’s latest proposals in the trillions of dollars—a vague yet substantial sum that will come due sometime during what budgetary jargon denotes as "the out years," meaning long after Mr. Bush has departed the White House.

Excessive spending and tax breaks always elicit more applause than controversies over the global "Axis of Evil," Niger’s phantom yellowcake and Iraq’s weapons of mass disappearance. So do such perennially popular topics as improved health care, the protection of heterosexual marriage and, in the immortal words of the President’s father, jobs, jobs, jobs. Estimates of future deficits depend on whether the President actually tries to send astronauts to live on Mars and the moon, or abandons that vision in deference to disapproving poll numbers. In short, bread and maybe circuses.

What Mr. Bush understandably chose not to highlight, however, is his administration’s continuing determination to undermine, restrict and censor the investigation of the most significant event of his Presidency: the attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001.

The President is fortunate that until now, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has received far less attention than controversies over the design for a World Trade Center memorial. At every step, from his opposition to its creation, to his abortive appointment of Henry Kissinger as its chair, to his refusal to provide it with adequate funding and cooperation, Mr. Bush has treated the commission and its essential work with contempt.

In the latest development, the President’s aides refused additional time for the 9/11 commission to complete its report. Although the original deadline in the enabling legislation is May 27, the commissioners recently asked for a few more months to ensure that their product will be "thorough and credible."

Earlier this month, Thomas Kean—the former New Jersey governor who has chaired the commission since Mr. Kissinger recused himself—explained why the commission needs more time. As the genial Republican told The New York Times, he is only permitted to read the most important classified documents concerning 9/11 in a little closet known as a "sensitive compartmented information facility" (or SCIF). He cannot photocopy the documents, and if he takes notes about them, he must leave the notes in the SCIF when he leaves.

Other recent statements by Mr. Kean, which he subsequently modified, suggest that the White House has ample reason to worry about what the commission’s report will say. In December, he told CBS News that he believes the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented—and that incompetent officials were at fault for the failure to uncover and frustrate the plot.

Following the creation and staffing of the commission, many months passed before the administration agreed to let Mr. Kean look at any of those crucial documents. The commission still has hundreds of interviews to conduct, and millions of pages to examine, before its members begin to draft their conclusions.

But the President’s political advisers, concerned about the political impact of the commission’s report, are unsympathetic to its requests for additional time—and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who would have to approve an extension, is perfectly obedient to his masters in the White House. According to Newsweek, the administration offered Mr. Kean a choice: Either keep to the May deadline, or postpone release of the report until December, when its findings cannot affect the election.

Mr. Bush doesn’t want his re-election subject to any informed judgment about the disaster that reshaped the nation and his Presidency. But why should such crucial facts be withheld from the voters? What does the President fear?

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Kean provided a clue to the answers in his Times interview. Asked whether he thinks the disaster "did not have to happen," he replied, "Yes, there is a good chance that 9/11 could have been prevented by any number of people along the way. Everybody pretty well agrees our intelligence agencies were not set up to deal with domestic terrorism …. They were not ready for an internal attack." Then, asked whether "anyone in the Bush administration [had] any idea that an attack was being planned," he replied: "That is why we are looking at the internal papers. I can’t talk about what’s classified. [The] President’s daily briefings are classified. If I told you what was in them, I would go to jail."

But the commission’s final report may well indicate what the President was told in his daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, when he was sunning himself in Crawford, Tex.—as well as the many warnings he and his associates were given by the previous administration. That kind of information could send him back to Crawford for a permanent vacation.

You may reach Joe Conason via email at: [e-mail].

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Wednesday, January 21, 2004
War News for January 21, 2004

Jede Meldung ein Link:
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers wounded by roadside bomb in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi policeman killed in attack in Mosul.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi cabinet minister survives assassination attempt in Karbala.

Bring ‘em on: Rocket attack on Rashid Hotel in Baghdad wounds one US soldier.

Bring ‘em on: Attempted assassination of city councilman in Kirkuk leaves two Iraqi guards wounded.

Iraqi police major killed by guards from British private security company in Kirkuk.

Kurds turning against US in northern Iraq. “There are the seeds here for a savage ethnic conflict. The Arabs and Turkomans in Kirkuk are frightened. Many of the Arab settlers have been there for more than a generation and it is not clear where they would go. The last year has seen a number of small-scale but bloody clashes.”

Election protests reported in Baghdad, Basra, Najaf and Karbala.

Election protests reported in Samawa.

Operation Lieutenant AWOL Cuts and Runs. “A shift in plans for elections follows a series of abrupt policy changes made by the coalition over the last few months, mainly forced by events on the ground, and will add to the sense of disarray in the CPA.”

Iraqis want Saddam’s former US supporters put on trial. I think they`re talking about you, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

Some want to prosecute WaPo, too. “In the lead-up to this year`s U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, The Washington Post`s op-ed page beat the drum for war as loudly as any daily U.S. newspaper. It published editorials on a weekly basis promoting a military assault on Iraq. At the same time, it published on a daily basis the gung-ho columns of such rightwing and neoconservative luminaries as Charles Krauthammer, David Ignatius, George Will, Jim Hoagland and Michael Kelly (who was killed earlier this year [2003] while in bed with the U.S. military in Iraq).”

Post-war veterans’ suicides not reported. “A soldier who served in Iraq apparently hung himself with a bedsheet last week at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but the Pentagon did not count that death two days later when it announced "a very small increase" in the suicide rate from Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Protestors read names of soldiers killed in Bush’s War during State of the Union address. “As the nation`s political leaders applauded the president in the Capitol, more than 300 people cocooned in hats, blankets and heavy jackets against the 24-degree weather joined to read the names of those killed since the invasion of Iraq began.” Yeah, but Lieutenant AWOL says Saddam was found hiding in a spider hole!

Bush’s War on Terror fails to stop terrorist financing. “Many of the financial investigators are scanning bank records around the world for transactions that may look fishy, but some say that may not be the best way to fight this flank in the "war on terror". Experts say that the bulk of the terrorists` financial moves are made in cash through runners, smugglers and underground markets. Now, new questions are being asked in the US Senate Finance Committee, if the Bush administration`s efforts to stem the tide of terrorist finances are actually working.”

From the "Help is on the Way" Files

Bush’s War is breaking the US military. “Buried within this huge rotation is one deployment that has quietly alarmed some military experts. Some 8,000 troops from the two Hawaii-based brigades of the 25th Infantry Division, the famed Tropic Lightning Division, are being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. These troops are the cavalry for the Pacific Command -- they are the men and women who are designated to rush first into battle in case of a war in Korea.”

Retention crisis in the Army Reserve and National Guard. "The head of the Army Reserve said yesterday that the 205,000-soldier force must guard against a potential crisis in its ability to retain troops, saying serious problems are being "masked" temporarily because reservists are barred from leaving the military while their units are mobilized in Iraq."

A patriotic Army officer sounds off. "Lt. Gen. John M. Riggs, a decorated Vietnam veteran who is in charge of building an Army for the future, said the force of 480,000 must grow even beyond the 10,000-soldier increase that was endorsed by the Senate last year but failed to win full congressional approval...The three-star general said he came to his conclusion over the past year while studying the Pentagon`s military strategy requirements, which call for assisting in homeland security, deterring potential foes, engaging in major combat and carrying out peacekeeping operations...Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army`s chief of staff, have repeatedly told lawmakers that such increases are not necessary now, contending they would be costly and time-consuming. Instead, both are working on a variety of plans to reduce the stress on the Army. One would shift thousands of soldiers performing essentially civilian jobs - such as food services or accounting - and return them to military tasks. Rumsfeld and his aides have become well known within the military for dealing harshly with dissenters. Last year, he fired Army Secretary Thomas E. White, who had been at odds with him over modernizing weapons systems. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, then Army chief of staff, told a Senate hearing last February that it would take "several hundred thousand" U.S. troops to occupy Iraq, he was quickly slapped down by Rumsfeld, who called that estimate `far from the mark.`" Emphasis added. This officer is a patriot and possesses brass balls.

Casualty Reports

Local story: Colorado soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Connecticut soldier injured in Iraq.

State of The Union

Reader Navy Wife sounds off:

Dear President Bush,

I chose not to listen to the SOTU last night, but read the transcript this morning. An interesting read, to say the least.

It`s nice to hear that you`re proud of the military. And it`s always nice to hear that you appreciate the sacrifice military families are making these days. And, it`s good to know that you will spend the money to get the troops the resources needed to win the war.

Forgive me if I don`t believe you. I must see 2 or 3 Hummers driven around my town every day. But then I hear that troops in Iraq don`t have the trucks they need to complete their missions. And I hear about parents scraping together $600 to purchase protective equiptment for their 21 year old Army Reservist child to protect them on their nightly rounds through the Sunni Triange. Maybe if we weren`t subsidizing Cheney`s pals at Halliburton, we really could give our troops whatever they need to win the war.

Would it have been so hard for you to really mention last night the true price being paid by this country to defeat terrorism and win the war? We`ve lost 100 people in Afghanistan and over 500 in Iraq. And that`s just the dead. There are thousands of wounded, both physically and mentally. We have hundreds of young men and women who went to war with 4 limbs and now have only 2 or 3. Showing your support for the troops and their families should be more than flying onto an aircraft carrier or taking a midnight ride to Baghdad.

It`s been almost a year since you proposed the GWOT medals for people who served in the war. Demand that the Pentagon finalize the criteria for those awards and get them to the troops today. Stop any investigation into the closing of DoD schools right now. Tell Congress to find the money for R&R trips home, so that soldiers have a completely free ride from Baghdad to Mom`s house.

And tell Karl Rove that the next time a flight comes into Dover Airport that you plan to be there, and that you want all of the networks to provide a cameraman to welcome those fallen countrymen and women home for the last time.

Don`t spend your days finding new tax cuts for millionaires. Investigating steroid use in major league sports can wait. Billions for marriage training can be spent in better places, namely Afghanistan and Iraq. Win the battles we have now: defeat the Taliban, find Osama, win the battle against the insurgents in Iraq, get rid of arbitrary deadlines in the push for Iraqi democracy and spend the time needed to get it right.

Good luck. It`s going to be a long, hard slog, a decades long fight. I`ll be sending my husband off to the battle again in a few months and here`s hoping that you`ll have a real plan for success by then.

Navy Wife



I was busy scribbling a rant about Lieutenant AWOL`s State of the Union address when I checked checked the Reader Comments. Navy Wife said everything I wanted to say better.

So I`ll just post Yankeedoodle`s Short Synopsis of Lieutenant AWOL`s SOTU: "I have nothing to offer but blood, fear, hate, and deficits. But my buddies get a tax cut."





# posted by yankeedoodle : 1:44 AM
Comments (5)

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Iraqis Want Saddam`s Old U.S. Friends on Trial
Tue Jan 20,10:46 AM ET Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - If Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein on trial, they want his former American allies shackled beside him.

"Saddam should not be the only one who is put on trial. The Americans backed him when he was killing Iraqis so they should be prosecuted," said Ali Mahdi, a builder.


"If the Americans escape justice they will face God`s justice. They must be stoned in hell."


The United States continued to feel the backlash of its move to give Saddam prisoner of war status Tuesday as thousands of Iraqi protesters called for his execution.


Washington`s move has thrown some doubt over his fate after Iraq `s U.S.-backed Governing Council had said Saddam would be tried in a special tribunal by Iraqi judges.


His POW status means the former dictator, accused of sending thousands of Iraqis to mass graves, could have more rights than a war criminal.


In street interviews, Iraqis said Saddam must be tried by an Iraqi court prepared to hand down the death penalty and examine his ties to past U.S. governments.


The United States backed Saddam in his war with Iran in the 1980s. During that time, he also gassed an estimated 5,000 Kurds to death in the village of Halabja.


A few years later Washington began branding Saddam a tyrant and an enemy after his troops invaded oil-rich Kuwait in 1990.


"Saddam was a top graduate of the American school of politics," said Assad al-Saadi, standing with friends in the slum of Sadr city, formerly called Saddam City, a Shi`ite Muslim area oppressed by Saddam`s security agents.


"My brother was an army officer who was executed. Saddam is a criminal and the Americans were his friends. We need justice so that we can forget the past."


Saddam was captured on December 13 hiding in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit. A month later the United States declared him a prisoner of war.


But his new POW status has only added to skepticism about American promises after toppling Saddam in April.


"The Americans and Saddam should face justice. Do you really think the Americans are going to put themselves on trial?" said Ali, a U.S.-trained policeman.


"Of course we hope the Americans and Saddam will face trial. But will it ever happen? I doubt it."

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Dilemmas of Colonialism: The Democracy Problem

Rene L. Gonzalez Berrios

01/21/04: (ICH) Being an empire is not so easy these days, as the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters are beginning to see. The problem with empire-building in the modern age is that, in order to partake in it, you have to get by this silly, bothersome, internationally-accepted concept: democracy.

Let`s examine the current Iraqi situation. Various arguments exist for justifying the war on Iraq, only a few were publicly stated. First came the argument that Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction (presumably the remnants of its 1980s, U.S. client-state days) were too terrible a national security threat for the United States, that the internationally-recognized logic of "pre-emption" was applicable (designed to only apply in cases in which a nation had foreknowledge of an immediately imminent attack on the part of another nation, like during Israel`s Six Day War). The problem with this justifying theory was that the historical record did not support this theory. Common knowledge among foreign policy experts was that Iraq did not have the delivery systems (a.k.a. missiles) to be able to credibly threaten the United States. It barely had a weak deterrent force of limited small-range Scud missiles, which could possibly only threaten close neighbors. For the record, these neighbors (with the exception of Israel, who had vested interests in an American invasion of an enemy Arab state) were totally opposed to the WMD theory and found Iraq to be no threat to them (in fact, the record shows that most Arab countries were attempting a reconciliation with the radical Arab state). The WMD theory was weakened also by two equally important assertions: that the very WMD Iraq was accused of possessing were given by the United States and other powers during the 1980s and that the possession of WMDs (and the past history of using them). The first assertion illuminated the hypocrisy of accusing another country of possessing WMD that were perfectly acceptable for that nation to have when it was the pet of the United States against fundamentalist Iran in the 1980s. The other assertion illuminated the hypocrisy of demanding WMD removal on the grounds that Iraq had used them against civilians and opposing armies, when the accusing nation (the U.S.) had been the only country to detonate atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (also during a war) and killing vastly more civilians in those terrorist attacks (by the State Department definition). In essence, the question was: what gives the U.S. the right to invade another country for having and using WMD that the U.S. had accumulated as well and had used in its own history? The WMD logic just didn`t make sense, except in the uncritical minds of a fearful American public. History would demand that we condemn American justifications of invading Iraq on WMD grounds as complete hypocritical nonsense, but then again, history has never been a popular subject in American society (to very clear consequences for its own society and the world).

The other more far-fetched theory was that somehow, a secular socialist Baathist regime, which had exhibited disdain for Islamic fundamentalism all throughout its history, would now join an "alliance of convenience" with radical Al-Qaeda fanatics. The theory continued that Saddam would provide the weapons and Al-Qaeda would deliver them to its enemies in the West. Again, common knowledge among foreign policy experts was that if Saddam had WMD, he would only use them if threatened with an invasion, not before. If this was so, why did the Al-Qaeda Connection theories gain so much traction among mostly American journalistic circles and some isolated pockets of right-wing thought among the world? It certainly wasn`t a product of rational thought or common consensus among foreign policy experts. Quite the contrary. The common consensus in foreign policy circles was that Saddam would never enter to such alliances under normal situations, and would only consider them if his regime was threatened. How prophetic were the criticisms of the Left. The current Resistance is now composed largely of ex-Baathist military leaders, regular Iraqi disaffected nationalists, and some Islamic fundamentalists. The alliance the Bush administration was so fearful of had come true, not from leaving Saddam alone, but of attacking him. The Left was right. And Bush had made America less secure because of it.

This "Al-Qaeda connection" accusation was never stated in such blatant terms, but the administration (in the form of many of its public officials, including the President) were ambiguously sending out this theory in its many public speeches. The effect was to be expected: a fearful and gullible American public bought the lie, hook, line, and sinker. Over 50% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9-11 terrorist attack, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and the fact that all hijackers were Saudis (in fact, to this date, no major terrorist "suspect" has been of Iraqi descent. Almost all have been from other, more religiously fundamentalist countries). This theory was discounted from the beginning by critics from the Left, and was confirmed recently by a public confession by Secretary of State Colin Powell that indeed there was NO connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. The President would later admit as much in another interview.

In the light of these faltering justification, two others remained in the shadows, to be used when the principle ones were discarded under the weight of rational scrutinity: deposing a human-rights violator and bringing democracy to Iraq. The two were not used prominently for very obvious reasons (or as prominently as the others). The claim that the United States was stepping in to fulfill a noble goal by liberating Iraqis from a horrendous and tyrannical regime was made hollow by the historical fact that the United States was the prime financial, diplomatic, and military benefactor of Iraq during the 1980s and during the times that Saddam Hussein`s worst atrocities were committed. Given that historical truth, human rights could not be the justification. It would be politically naive to assume that a state that had such a history of supporting horrendous and brutal regimes (Somoza, Duvalier, Pinochet, Hussein, etc.) would somehow change its ways out of some altruistic higher calling. The obvious question would be: what prompted the change? And was it rationally to assume that this "change" was due to moral, higher law, altruistic motives? Is it rational to actually believe this unproved theory (actually, disproved, with massive evidence of U.S. collusion with dictatorships, to the contrary), and discount the more conceivable and documented theories that the Iraq War was an opportunist election strategy combined with a resource grab of oil? To the average American, the "noble goals" theory might be comforting, but hardly useful for explaining U.S. foreign policy in Iraq. The logic of hypocritical history is too illuminating a light to attempt to hide in the shadows of fighting for "human-rights", when one was once the prime benefactor of the violator himself. To believe such nonsense is to ignore the past and delude only oneself.

Which leaves the theory of "democracy"; one that has been discredited on various grounds. Some have stated it is impossible to "bring democracy" to a land without a cultural experience in its practice. Others have argued that democracy is not really what the United States want, rather just another rehash of the 1920s British policy of an "Arab facade", a system of loyal Iraqi elites, who repress their people, serve their real masters (the U.S. and private corporations), and hold periodic (and perhaps rigged) elections to justify their rule. In Iraq, this is what was planned. Now, things have gotten ugly.

For courageous Leftists like I, the American occupation has been blatant colonization from the beginning. This is also the majority opinion in the world, if not the U.S. However, whatever shred of legitimacy that has stayed the wrath of a shocked American public is beginning to unravel. The colonization of Iraq depended greatly on the assumed support of the American "nation-building" project by the Kurds and Shiite Muslims of Iraq. These two groups, strongly repressed by Saddam Hussein`s Sunni minority, were assumed to rally automatically to the American side, in support of everything Washington was to do in Iraq. The worst scenario (which has occurred) was that these groups would not violently oppose the colonization of Iraq, under the misguided hope that the Americans` plans included genuine, popular democracy. The Kurds to the north have remained supportive of the coalition and its long-term stated goals, but not of the current colonization. Their pre-eminent concerns have been with Kurdish autonomy and protection from central control in Baghdad. The Shiites have been wary of American plans as well, constantly qualifying their "passive" support of the Coalition`s efforts to an eventual development of a genuinely elected democracy. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest Shiite Muslim figure in Iraq, has led this "passive" support (or resistance, choose your preference).

The dilemma of colonialism has presented itself: proclaiming democracy (or civilization, or upliftment, or whatever other high-noble is given to the venture) while the "liberated" subjects denounce your noble actions. For the Shiites under Sistani`s leadership, the colonization`s plans are no longer viable. The American plan is to institute a provisional government, elected by a "caucus" system in which regional "notables" will speak for the Iraqi public and elect the provisional government. For Sistani and the Shiites, this is not acceptable. In accordance with elementary democratic belief, a citizenry has the right to transmit its sovereignty to representatives through direct election, one man-one vote. The American plan of "caucus" elections is simply not good enough to be considered a legitimate democratic election. Sistani has drawn a line in the sand, and if he sticks with it, he will win the public opinion of the world. For if the United States democratic claims are true (which they are obviously not), it would have to cede this demand, lest its colonization be recognized as such: an unabashed dash to colonize the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world and use Iraq as a test-case of imperial might for the rest of the world to see. The Americans have tried to discount this "direct-election" demand on the argument that it is impossible to conduct such elections between 5-6 months, but those arguments have been discredited by the articles I source at the bottom of this article.

In vulgar terms, Sistani has Bush`s balls in his hands, and should the Americans attempt to humiliate, belittle, or weaken Sistani`s democratic stance or his reputation, he can issue a "fatwa" or religious edict, and "squeeze" them in the form of Shiite insurrection against the Coalition (an act that would render the entire Iraq war devoid of any legitimate justifications and display it in all its raw colonialism). Hence, the unusual respect and diplomatic forms of expression that emanate from the mouths of American officials these days, regarding Sistani`s demands and/or his credentials. In any other situation, Sistani would be nothing more than some Muslim dissident, to be squashed by the Empire of the day. But, ever the pragmatists, the Americans know Sistani commands the loyalty of the 60% Shiite majority in Iraq and don`t want to risk the dissolution of its carefully-crafted (or, better stated, inadequately planned) post-invasion colonial strategy. For the White House, a Saigon-like withdrawal is still a distinct possibility (and one to be avoided all costs, including perhaps scrapping long-term plans of preventing a Shiite-majority government in Iraq).

Which leads me to my message to you, the reader. Of the four justifications for war (WMD, Al-Qaeda connection, human-rights, and democracy building), three have been discredited: WMD (none found, initially given by the U.S. and other Western powers during the 1980s), Al-Qaeda connection (admitted to be false by Colin Powell and other administration officials), and human-rights (rendered hypocritical by U.S. funding and military support during the times of the worst Hussein atrocities). The final one is beginning to unravel with every Shiite who joins official protest rallies in Iraq, and because of the successful, largely Sunni Resistance against the Coalition troops.

The task for the average citizen of the United States (and for anyone truly concerned with truth, justice, and democracy in the world) is to scrutinize the events that occur from this day on. The Bush administration must be forced to accede to Sistani`s demands for direct elections. It is the only legitimate form of transfer of sovereignty back to the Iraqis. If he does not, he must be held accountable for waging an illegal and unnecessary war and instituting an illegal colonial occupation without any legitimate justification. In the gaze of history, the blame won`t remain on him, a complete buffoon at the service of radical neoconservative ideologues. It will be on the American people, who refused to take their heads out of the sand (if not a worse, darker nether region), while a radical President waged this colonial war.

Rene L. Gonzalez Berrios <[e-mail]> M.A. Political Science
University of Massachusetts

SOURCES:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040126-…
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/Sto…
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scheer2…

[Joerver]

Tue, January 20, 2004

5 million on terrorism list

Canuck: U.S. on the lookout for `potential problem`
By TOM GODFREY, TORONTO SUN

U.S. security agents have a master list of five million people worldwide thought to be potential terrorists or criminals, officials say. "The U.S. lookout index contains some five million names of known terrorists and other persons representing a potential problem," Brian Davis, a senior Canadian immigration official in Paris, said in a confidential document obtained by the Sun.

Names on the list are compared against those applying for visas or on flights travelling to the U.S.

Anyone whose name is on the list is questioned or banned from entering the U.S. -- as passengers were on two British Airways flights to Los Angeles two weeks ago.

The master list was revealed by U.S. embassy officials to a Canadian standing immigration committee in April 2002. Its existence was revealed in Davis` document, obtained by Montreal lawyer Richard Kurland through an Access to Information request.

Davis said Canadian visa officers abroad do not keep an extensive list like the U.S. because terrorists can use bogus documents and change their identities.

"We examine each application according to profiles," he said. "(We) apply experience and knowledge gained from a variety of sources. Canada`s approach to identifying persons who may pose a danger was as sound as possible."

CSIS agents in Paris send a "brief" to Ottawa for cases that require more in-depth investigation.

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Scalia und Thomas sind von Bush ins Amt gebrachte rechte Richter. Es ist von Bush immer wieder versucht worden gegen den Willen der Demos Ultrarechte ins Amt zu bringen.
Als letzten hat er einen Rassisten ind Amt gehievt unter Umgehung des Senats, in dem er einen Ausnahmetatbestand ausnutze, um diese vorübergehend einzusetzen.

January 21, 2004
Supreme Court Backs E.P.A. on Anti-Pollution Rules
By DAVID STOUT

ASHINGTON, Jan. 21 — The Supreme Court upheld the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency today, ruling that it was within its authority when it overruled Alaska regulators in a dispute involving a zinc and lead mine.

The 5-to-4 ruling, which could affect some E.P.A. disagreements with other state regulators as well, was a defeat for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, which had sued the E.P.A.

The Alaska agency had wanted to allow the operators of the mine to use cheaper and perhaps less effective antipollution technology. The Red Dog Mine is a big employer in an isolated region of Alaska.

Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, which was central to the dispute decided today, state officials have some leeway on regulating pollution within their borders. But the justices said that the E.P.A. was right in enforcing a specific section of the act meant to insure that air that has been made clean is not allowed to deteriorate again. (This highly technical portion of the act is known as the Prevention of Significant Deterioration program.)

"Congress vested E.P.A. with explicit and sweeping authority to enforce C.A.A. requirements relating to the construction and modification of sources under the P.S.D. program," the majority held today.

The Clean Air Act is sufficiently complex that there is room for plenty of disagreement between state and federal regulators, and today`s ruling does not suggest that the E.P.A. will always win. But the ruling is nevertheless a significant defeat for Alaska regulators, and it is likely to cause hard feelings in a state that is noted for its resentment of federal power.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion, which upheld a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which is based in San Francisco. She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O`Connor, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote a dissent and was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

"E.P.A.`s distrust of state agencies is inconsistent with the act`s clear mandate that states bear the primary role in controlling pollution," the dissenters wrote.

The case is State of Alaska v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 02-658.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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[Joerver]

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004
DEMOCRACY NOW! SPECIAL: Behind Bush`s State of the Union


Watch 256k stream http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2004/jan/256/d…
Modem und ISDN:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/21/1625252
5 Teile siehe unten. Mit Transcipt.
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In the third State of the Union address of his term, President Bush defended the war on Iraq, called for the renewal of the Patriot Act, praised the improving economy and called for a ban on gay marriage. We spend the hour listening to responses to Bush`s address that paint a different picture of the State of the Union.
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In his State of the Union address last night President Bush defended the war on Iraq, called for the renewal of the Patriot and reached out to the conservative Christian wing of the Republican Party by calling for a ban on gay marriage.
Despite the loss of 2.5 million jobs since he took office, Bush also rigorously praised the improving economy and called for Congress to make last year`s tax cuts permanent.

The address was deliberately scheduled to take place a night after the Iowa caucus in an attempt to push the Democratic presidential contenders from the news spotlight. Although Bush never mentioned the election, the speech was seen by many as the start of Bush`s re-election campaign. It came three years to the day after he took the oath of the office.

On Iraq, Bush claimed if the US did not invade Iraq, "the dictator`s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." But he did not acknowledge that U.S. inspectors have uncovered no unconventional weapons.

A year ago at the 2003 State of the Union, Bush made the case for war by claiming that Iraq had 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tones of sarin, mustard and VX nerve gas and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents.

After 10 months of weapons searches, none of this has been uncovered.

On foreign policy, Bush defended his unilateralist approach saying "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people." Later in the Democratic response, Nancy Pelosi said "a go-it-alone foreign policy that leaves us isolated abroad and that steals the resources we need for education and health care at home."

We spend the hour listening to responses to Bush`s address from award-winning Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy, former head of the UN mission to Iraq Hans Von Sponeck, the Institute for Public Accuracy`s Norman Solomon, Leslie Cagan of the United for Peace and Justice, the ACLU`s Anthony Romero, TransAfrica President Bill Fletcher and gay community organizer Brendan Fay.


Arundhati Roy, Hans Von Sponeck Respond to Bush`s State of the Union on Iraq
A Look at Bush`s Iraq Lies in the State of the Union and Truth-Telling In the Media
Bush Calls For Renewal of Patriot Act in State of the Union
No Mention of Africa in Bush`s State of the Union
Bush Denounces Gay Marriage in State of the Union
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 [phone].








TODAY`S STORIES

Headlines For January 21, 2004

DEMOCRACY NOW! SPECIAL: Behind Bush`s State of the Union

1 Arundhati Roy, Hans Von Sponeck Respond to Bush`s State of the Union on Iraq

2 A Look at Bush`s Iraq Lies in the State of the Union and Truth-Telling In the Media

3 Bush Calls For Renewal of Patriot Act in State of the Union

4 No Mention of Africa in Bush`s State of the Union

5 Bush Denounces Gay Marriage in State of the Union

[Joerver]

Bush May Seek Billions for Iraq After Election
Wed January 21, 2004 04:37 PM ET


By Adam Entous
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush may seek an additional $40 billion or more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year -- on top of the $400-billion military budget he will send to Congress next month, congressional sources and budget analysts said on Wednesday.

But Bush is unlikely to send the request to Congress until after the November presidential election to minimize any political damage, the sources said.

Bush`s Democratic challengers have criticized the high cost of the war in Iraq and its chaotic aftermath. They say Iraq has cost $120 billion so far despite initial administration assurances that it would be "an affordable endeavor."

White House budget officials said it is premature to speculate about an emergency war supplemental for the 2005 fiscal year starting Oct. 1.

But congressional sources said preliminary planning is underway and a request would be send to Congress in late 2004 or early 2005.

"Every presidential contender is going to be subject to political demands. But no matter who wins (the election), we`re going to see a request," one congressional aide said.

Its size could vary widely depending on the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, budget analysts and congressional aides said.

If the administration can reduce the number of troops there from more than 100,000 to 75,000, about another $25 billion would be needed in fiscal 2005 to supplement the military`s regular budget, said Steven Kosiak, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere could add another $15 billion. Kosiak said the emergency request could total $40 billion to $50 billion.

Other analysts and congressional aides said it could be closer to $75 billion or $100 billion. U.S. military plans hinge on a smooth hand-over of political power by June 30 and rebuilding the Iraqi Army.

"They`re playing it week by week because they don`t know ... Things could go worse than expected or they could go better than expected," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy research group.

A senior congressional aide attributed the push for additional funds to concerns that Bush`s "new budget contains little or no money for Iraq`s shadow rulers after June 30."

TOPPING OFF

Bush won approval from Congress last year for two war supplementals -- one for $79 billion and another for $87.5 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"It`s a little early to be speculating about the deployment (in Iraq) for October and beyond," an administration official said on Wednesday.

Bush has been under pressure from his conservative Republican base to rein in record budget deficits, expected to hit $500 billion this fiscal year alone.

In his $2.3 trillion budget for fiscal 2005, to be sent to Congress on Feb. 2, Bush wants to limit growth in discretionary spending to less than 4 percent. The Defense Department is expected to receive more than $400 billion, a modest increase.

That would cover normal Pentagon activities -- not peacekeeping or combat operations, which would be funded through an emergency request.

"It is uncertain what level of resources will be required and it`s uncertain when they will need it. But they will need to have to come to ask for additional money at some point in fiscal 2005," said Kosiak.

Others said the administration would need up to $100 billion on top of the Pentagon`s normal budget, and the only issue was timing.

"From a budget standpoint, I don`t think they have to put in another (supplemental) this year," Pike said.

Proposing it before the election would only "give the Democrats an opportunity to stage another food fight on the president`s Iraq policy," Pike added.

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ROBERT KUTTNER
Will voters focus on Bush details?
By Robert Kuttner, Globe Columnist, 1/21/2004

PRESIDENT BUSH`S major speeches are a combination of high-blown rhetoric, paltry particulars, and calculated cynicism. They need to be carefully scrutinized, both in terms of what they actually deliver and who their real audience is. Bush`s reelection will hinge on whether voters pay attention to the rhetoric or the details. For instance, Bush`s call to broaden the availability of health insurance and rein in costs falls apart on close inspection, just like his Medicare drug insurance legislation. Most people who can`t afford good insurance don`t get enough subsidy from Bush`s proposal. A patchwork approach, built on tax credits and big out-of-pocket costs, doesn`t solve the problem. It only enriches private insurers and drug companies -- the proposal`s true audience.

Will the voters focus on the details? Bush, shrewdly and cynically, set the start date of his drug legislation for 2006. So nobody will have first-hand experience by November of just how bad the plan is.

In yesterday`s State of the Union address, Bush also proposed to allow younger voters to partly shift from government-guaranteed Social Security to private investment accounts. This is part of his "ownership society" -- the vision of every American as a capitalist.

All of us want to accumulate nest eggs. The trouble is that life throws us curves. Unlike an investment account, Social Security pays a guaranteed monthly check as long as you live, no matter how bad your luck or timing. Individual accounts can hit downdrafts of bear markets, and people can be gulled by bad investment advice. The audience? Wall Street investment firms who manage individual accounts and naive younger voters pursuing easy riches. The more that people take the trouble to study this plan, the better Social Security looks. But will they take the trouble?

Or take Bush`s proposed guest-worker program. It would create a permanent class of noncitizen workers. Bush assumes, heroically, that creation of this new category would reduce illegal immigration. But the number of slots is capped, and students of migration patterns have demonstrated that enlarged networks of immigrants attract still larger flows of extended family members and neighbors. Imagine what will happen to permanent legal residents making a too-low $7 or $8 an hour when there`s a whole new workforce with limited rights willing to work for $5.

The stated goal is improving the lives of immigrants and relations with Mexico. But the actual target audience is corporate employers seeking low-wage, docile employees and Hispanic voters with undocumented relatives. In fact, every major Hispanic group opposes the plan. Bush is counting on individual voters not to read the fine print.

And why is the president promising America the moon at a time when deficits are already sky high? Although the American public loves grand plans, polls suggest that many Americans are skeptical of an expanded space program. But there`s a narrower audience here: the aerospace industry and a few key counties around Cape Canaveral, which happens to be located in swing-state Florida.

Bush also wants to make his huge, upwardly tilted tax cuts permanent. However, when you add the local property tax hikes made necessary by cuts in federal aid, your net tax load is probably higher than in 2000. In the 1990s, President Clinton hired investment banker Robert Rubin, who explained that budget discipline was necessary to produce lower interest rates and economic recovery. Thus far, this logic has not caught up with President Bush. His deficits are far worse than Reagan`s or those that Bill Clinton inherited. But for the moment, Wall Street is enjoying the tax breaks and the stock market boom, and interest rates are still low.A serious reckoning will come, but will it come by November? And will voters pay attention to benefits and risks? Will voters notice that smaller and fairer tax cuts would leave more money to pay for good health insurance? If ever there were an election where the details mattered and cynical slogans needed to be discounted, it is this one. In Iowa on Monday, something hopeful happened. The primary voters rejected two candidates who got into an unfortunate pattern of disparaging each other and rewarded two who talked more positively about the substance of issues.

Iowa is, of course, a small state, and the voters were mostly Democrats. But if this is truly the mood of the electorate -- a willingness to do the work of citizenship and pay attention to the real details -- it doesn`t bode well for Bush.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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An Iraqi cycled Wednesday past a wall in Sadr City, a Shiite district of Baghdad, bearing graffiti calling for direct election of a new government.
January 22, 2004
Security Seen as Greatest Obstacle to Holding Direct Elections in Iraq by June 30
By EDWARD WONG and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 21 — For months, the Bush administration has resisted Iraqi calls for direct elections by June 30, citing the need for a census to compile voter rolls and other measures to ensure fair voting but too cumbersome to complete in time.

But some experts say that many of these conditions could be met. Another obstacle, perhaps greater and largely unacknowledged, according to the military, the United Nations and outside election experts, is the continuing violence in Iraq. To argue that security is a serious impediment, however, would be to admit that American forces are unable to quell the running war with the insurgents.

Some American generals now say privately that the continuing attacks, especially those against Iraqi civilians, present a daunting obstacle to holding the direct elections demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country`s most powerful cleric among the majority Shiites.

Even those outside experts who say that there are practical ways to hold a quick vote say that turnout could be suppressed by violence, and that protecting the polls with soldiers or policemen, too, may keep people away.

"I guess you could devise mechanisms to make it possible, security permitting," said Joost R. Hiltermann, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization, who visited Iraq this week to research the prospects for elections here. "But `security permitting` is a big if. The risk is that if you go ahead, the results could be seriously skewed, even dangerously skewed."

If bombings or other attacks like those that occurred this week in Baghdad, Karbala and Mosul take place in one section of the country or another during balloting, the resulting disparities in security might badly reduce turnout in certain areas and render the election unfair, election experts say. Iraq`s ethnic divisions, mirrored imperfectly in its politics, tend to follow rough geographic lines that define the largely Kurdish north, the central Sunni Arab heartland and the overwhelmingly Shiite Arab south.
An Iraqi displayed a food ration card in Baghdad Wednesday.

It would be especially dangerous if security is weak in Sunni Arab areas and consequently depressed turnout among that group, which makes up a fifth of the country`s 25 million people. Sunnis formed the core of Saddam Hussein`s government, and it is in the so-called Sunni Triangle that violence against the American military is fiercest. Many Sunnis already feel disenfranchised, and their anger will only grow if security problems keep them from voting and skew the election results, Mr. Hiltermann said.

Under the current plan, a transitional assembly — several hundred Iraqis from every region and social sector — will be chosen in caucus-style elections from the country`s 18 provinces. That assembly is to choose an interim government in June, and that indirectly elected interim government is to draft a constitution.

But shortly after the November agreement, Ayatollah Sistani came out against the caucus plan and for direct balloting. A direct ballot would give the Shiites, who account for 60 percent of the population, a clear advantage, while the caucus plan is more likely to give moderate politicians a leg up.

On Monday, 100,000 supporters of Ayatollah Sistani marched through Baghdad protesting the coalition`s plans. Because the issue of violence would lend weight to the arguments of those who oppose a direct election, the ayatollah`s supporters generally avoid the issue of security.

"Grand Ayatollah Sistani insisted on direct elections, and it`s a sort of obligation," said Muhammad Alaaowi al-Shameri, a representative of Ayatollah Sistani at the Khadimiya mosque in Baghdad, in an interview this week. "It must be done. The picture of real democracy will not be achieved unless we have direct elections."

The military, though, which has sustained hundreds of casualties in the past few months, sees democracy following security, not the other way around.

"Regarding elections, the concerns one in the military would have are security, and how the votes are represented and counted, given right now there`s no polling data," a United States Army general based in central Iraq said in an interview on Wednesday.

Iraqi army and police forces would have to guard the polls, because a highly visible presence of American soldiers at voting booths could be seen as intimidation, the general said. But there are not even enough policemen right now to fight crime and battle insurgents, he said.

Other experts agree that the practical and technical obstacles to cobbling together a direct election swiftly could be overcome if the American-led occupation truly wanted to hold an early vote. Optimistic internal reports have also been written by Iraqi officials and by experienced hands at the United Nations.

Ibrahim al-Jafari, a Shiite member of the American-picked Iraqi Governing Council, said on Wednesday that he supported elections and even suggested that militias already organized by some Iraqi parties might play a role in helping to provide security. But that, too, could raise questions of intimidation, as the handful of parties with well-developed militias, like the two big Kurdish ones, would undoubtedly field candidates during an election.

The call for elections was repeated in Washington today by another member of the Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, this month`s chairman, who asked again for the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, to send a team of experts of Iraq to determine whether direct elections can be held before June 30.

"In principle, we are all in favor of elections," Mr. Pachachi said in a luncheon speech. "The problem is that of time. Can we have proper elections in the next three months?"

An electoral assessment team from the United Nations visited Iraq for two weeks over the summer and concluded that it was possible to set up mechanisms for direct elections within six months, according to an official who worked out of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.

Their findings were summed up in an internal report written by Carina Perelli, the head of the electoral assistance division of the United Nations, who had met with Iraqi officials and leaders of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The report, the existence of which was first mentioned in Time magazine this week, was never circulated and is now considered outdated by United Nations officials in New York precisely because the security situation has deteriorated so much that the findings are obsolete. A bombing in August drove the United Nations out of Iraq, along with many other international organizations.

Mr. Annan is sending a four-member team of military and security experts to Iraq this week to assess potential dangers here before deciding whether to send in an electoral assessment team that would look again at the feasibility of direct elections.

In addition to the formidable security issue, American and Iraqi officials are debating whether ration cards issued to households under the United Nations oil-for-food program can be used to build voter rolls in the absence of a census. The proponents of this plan say the computerized list of households and their members is fairly comprehensive. But its detractors, including coalition officials, say the oil-for-food rolls are likely to be inaccurate, especially given how Mr. Hussein sometimes manipulated them for his own political purposes.

Supporters of direct elections say there are other ways to avoid a time-consuming census. Voter cards, for example, could be issued to individuals when they show up to vote. Some have suggested setting up regional civil affairs offices to locate voters and record their addresses, letting them register on the basis of whatever form of identification card they may already possess or issuing a standard identity card to all who register to vote.

Bremer to Miss Talks

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 21 (Reuters) — The American administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, will not attend the current World Economic Forum here in this Swiss ski resort, a spokesman for the organizers said Wednesday.

The spokesman said he did not know why Mr. Bremer had canceled the trip. He said he expected another member of the American administration to come instead.


Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 21, 2004
Q&A: Bush`s State of the Union

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 21, 2004

Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior State Department official, says that he was struck by the emphasis on multilateralism in foreign policy in President Bush`s January 20 State of the Union speech. Haass also noted the omission of any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, and says that the president`s remarks on North Korea and Iran reflect the administration`s desire to "energize diplomacy" with those two "axis of evil" countries and avoid confrontation.

Currently attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Haass says he detects a slackening of anti-Americanism. "One doesn`t encounter the same kind of intensity or the same amount of anti-Americanism as one did, say, a year ago," he says.

Haass was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on January 21, 2004.

Did you think that President Bush`s State of the Union address broke new ground on the administration`s foreign policy or national security concerns?

I didn`t think this was a speech designed particularly to break new ground. Rather, it was a speech meant to put things in perspective. So it tried to make the case that going into Iraq was the right thing to do. It essentially argued that things in Afghanistan and Iraq are heading in the right direction. It argued that we are winning the war on terror. Most of the speech was aimed at presenting that perspective, rather than introducing some foreign policy departure.

On North Korea and Iran, his remarks were fairly modest, compared to two years ago when he lumped them with Iraq in the famous "axis of evil" comment.

Sure. It reflected, I think, the strategic reality that the United States is extended quite far, and, long before this speech, [that] no one has been trying to provoke confrontation. To the contrary, for some time now, people have been trying to energize diplomacy in dealing with North Korea and Iran. This speech just reinforces the tendency.

Do you have much sense of the reaction of non-Americans you have met at the Davos conference?

Nothing systematic. I don`t think people see in this speech any fundamental departures. It tends to reinforce the slightly greater emphasis on diplomacy that we`ve seen in recent months with North Korea and Iran. But it doesn`t show any self-questioning about either the correctness of going to war in Iraq or the trajectory of events in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

Do you find that the United States is still as unpopular as ever?

Some of the heat seems to have gone out of things. One doesn`t encounter the same kind of intensity or the same amount of anti-Americanism as one did, say, a year ago. I think that is in part because a lot of these debates have played out, and also because most situations--what`s going on in the war on terror or the situation in Iraq--are not black and white. People are seeing some areas of progress, so that is muting some of the criticisms.

Do you think the decision to turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis by mid-year has improved the United States` standing in public opinion?

Somewhat, only because the United States has staked it out as a commitment; indeed, one doesn`t hear that much debate about Iraq now. Everybody, just about, wants to see a transfer of authority. Everybody wants the security situation to improve. The problem is, it is going to be hard to do these things. But there is not a debate along ideological lines. It is simply that everybody is confronting some very hard barriers to accomplishing tasks in Iraq.

Many of the pundits say that foreign policy was really not such a big factor in the Iowa caucuses, that domestic matters turned out to be more important to the voters. Did you get much feedback in Davos on the Democrats?

No. I don`t get the sense that people have focused all that closely on this or that candidate. To the extent they had, [former Vermont Governor] Howard Dean had received the lion`s share of the attention. Suddenly, the perception is that he has faded, and people just don`t know that much about [senators] John Kerry [of Massachusetts] or John Edwards [of North Carolina].

On the treatment of Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction in the president`s speech, do you think the president did the best he could on that issue?

Yes. He didn`t dwell on it. And he made the best case he could on that, but I thought the thrust--quite rightly--was more on moving forward than on rehashing the past.

Do you look upon what he said in the speech as largely his foreign policy platform for this year?

It makes the argument that we`ve gained ground in the war on terrorism, a point that I agree with. By the way, I think he was both right and wise to point out that no one should assume this war has ended or that we`re not going to be the victim of future attacks. He was basically making the case that our investments in Iraq and Afghanistan are paying off, not only in those two countries, but more broadly for example, with Libya. So, yes. I would think that would be the thrust of his approach over the next year when it comes to foreign policy.

Did you hear any other points you thought were particularly interesting?

I thought there were a couple of things that were interesting, four things in particular that he mentioned, and one that he did not mention.

One was his comment that different threats require different strategies. That to me was Bush essentially saying that Iraq should not necessarily be viewed as a template. I thought that was an interesting statement, also his commitment to working with the United Nations in Iraq, and his emphasis that what we`ve done and are doing in Iraq is not unilateral. So, if you add all that up, he was essentially arguing that U.S. policy is more multilateral than its critics grant, and also more multidimensional in the sense that it is not necessarily just military. So I thought it was interesting that he made all those arguments.

I was struck, watching the speech in Davos on television, that one of the strongest reactions, in a positive way, was to his argument that the United States will never seek a "permission slip" to act. What that said to me was that the statement was not just "red meat" for a domestic audience, but it was a reminder that while the United States will try to work with the United Nations, it can`t accept the vetoes of others if the United States believes its vital national interests are at stake.

And lastly, I thought the most interesting omission was any reference to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. That has gotten a lot of attention over here because you have a large representation from the Arab and Muslim worlds but also because, in Europe, one of the principal areas where Europeans disagree with American foreign policy is over the perceived lack of American effort to bring about progress there.

Do you think he omitted it because he just doesn`t want to get into it in an election year?

I`m not going to ascribe motives. I will simply say that, for whatever reason, it is the one omission that`s gotten the most attention here.

Should any significance be given to the fact that about half of the State of the Union address was on foreign policy and related security issues?

That`s quite a lot, heading into an election year. I once did a content analysis on Bill Clinton`s State of the Union addresses and on his Saturday radio talks. The percentage was closer to 10 to 15 percent on foreign issues. So when you say it is almost half, that to me is a remarkable change from the evidence, say, a decade ago. This shows that in post-9/11, post-Iraq America, foreign policy has become far more of a priority than it was 12 years ago. There has been a sea change there.

You`re right. In 1992, Bill Clinton`s advisers were saying, "It`s the economy, stupid."

To use that analogy, even if the Democratic candidate this year runs with a campaign platform that emphasizes domestic issues like the economy or health care, there won`t be any language that puts foreign policy and national security on the back burner. Again, it is just a very different context. Put another way, the post-9/11 context is seen fundamentally differently from the post-Cold War context.

Or the post-Persian Gulf War context?

Exactly--even though people now want to put a greater emphasis on the domestic, but again, it is without putting the foreign policy or national security stuff on the back burner.



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January 22, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
War of Ideas, Part 5
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

God bless the Democratic Party`s primary voters in Iowa. They may have rescued our chances of succeeding in Iraq and even winning the war of ideas within the Arab-Muslim world. Go Hawkeyes!

How so? Well, it seems to me that Iowa Democrats, in opting for John Kerry and John Edwards over Howard Dean, signaled (among other things) that they want a presidential candidate who is serious about fighting the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies.

"It was a good night for the [Tony] Blair Democrats in Iowa," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. By "Blair Democrats," Mr. Marshall was referring to those Democrats who voted for the Iraq war, and conveyed "a toughness and resolve to face down America`s enemies," but who believe the Bush team has mismanaged the project. This is so important because there has been no credible opposition to the Bush foreign policy since the Iraq war. Democrats have been intimidated either by Mr. Bush or by Mr. Dean.

Mr. Bush`s lightning victory in Iraq intimidated those who favored the war but had reservations about the Bush approach. And then, when things started to go sour in Iraq, Mr. Dean`s outspoken opposition to the war — and the eager reception it received from some Democratic activists — got those Democrats who did vote for the war tied into pretzels, trying to simultaneously justify their war vote and distance themselves from it.

Without a serious Democratic critique of the war — and I define "serious" as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team`s — Mr. Bush has gotten away with being sloppy and unprepared for postwar Iraq.

My hope is that Iowa will embolden the Blair Democrats to shuck off their intimidation, by Mr. Bush and Mr. Dean, and press their case. It is the only way to build a national consensus for what`s going to be a long cold-war-like struggle to strengthen the forces of moderation and weaken the forces of violent intolerance within the Arab-Muslim world — which is what the real war on terrorism is about. To be successful, Democrats will need a candidate who understands three things (which Messrs. Kerry, Lieberman, Clark and Edwards do):

First, this notion, put forward by Mr. Dean and Al Gore, that the war in Iraq has diverted us from the real war on "terrorists" is just wrong. There is no war on "terrorism" that does not address the misgovernance and pervasive sense of humiliation in the Muslim world. Sure, Al Qaeda and Saddam pose different threats, Mr. Marshall notes, "but they emerge from the same pathology of widespread repression, economic stagnation and fear of cultural decline." Building a decent Iraq is very much part of the war on terrorism.

Second, sometimes smashing someone in the face is necessary to signal others that they will be held accountable for the intolerance they incubate. Removing the Taliban and Saddam sent that message to every government in the area.

Third, the Iraq war may have created more hatred of the U.S., but it has also triggered a hugely important dialogue among Arabs and Muslims about the necessity of reform.

A serious Democratic candidate, I hope, will force the Bush team to accept the fact that it has failed to create a stable political transition in Iraq and must urgently change course in two ways: (1) It can`t succeed in Iraq without forging a rapprochement with Iran, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, they will ensure that we fail. If Iraq works, that will create its own reform pressures around the region. (2) The Bush team has to scrap the complicated caucus system it has devised for choosing an interim Iraqi government. It won`t work. The Shiites` demand, though, for immediate elections also won`t work.

The U.S. should beg the U.N. to find an Afghan-style solution for Iraq: expand the Governing Council from 25 to 75 people, bring in all strands and make it the interim government — in return for the U.S. dropping its approach and the Shiites dropping theirs. It is the only way out of this impasse — the only way to create a decent Iraq that can help us win the war of ideas in the region.

Democrats haven`t been able to hold the Bush team accountable because their party couldn`t offer a credible alternative. Well, here`s hoping that the credible Democratic opposition was just reborn, re-energized and "de-intimidated" by the people of Iowa. Lord knows we need it.



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January 22, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Riding the Crazy Train
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — Whoa! That was quite the steroid-infused performance. Who`s the guy`s political consultant — Russell Crowe? He was so in-your-face, smirking his trademark smirk, it was disturbing to think of him in charge of the military. It`s a good thing he stopped drinking and started talking about God.

You wonder how many votes he scared off with that testosterone festival: the taunting message, the self-righteous geographic litany of support? The Philippines. Thailand. Italy. Spain. Poland. Denmark. Bulgaria. Ukraine. Romania. The Netherlands. Norway. El Salvador.

Can you believe President Bush is still pushing the cockamamie claim that we went to war in Iraq with a real coalition rather than a gaggle of poodles and lackeys?

His State of the Union address took his swaggering sheriff routine to new heights. "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country," he vowed.

Translation: Hey, we don`t need no stinking piece of paper to bring it on in other countries. If it feels good, we`ll do it, and we`ll decide later why we did it. You lookin` at me?

Sure, Howard Dean was also over the top when he uttered the squeal heard round the world. With one guttural primary primal scream, he went from Internet deity to World Wide Wacko and remix victim, with the scream mixed in on Web sites to punctuate Ozzy Osbourne`s "Crazy Train."

Yes, Howard, you know you`re in trouble when Chris Matthews says you make him look like Jim Lehrer; when David Letterman compares you to a hockey dad; when The New York Post suggests you have a "God complex." (As Alec Baldwin`s twisted doctor said in "Malice": "You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I am God.")

Once Michael Dukakis got in trouble when he failed to get angry when asked how he would react if his wife were raped and murdered.

But Dr. Dean`s snarly, teeth-baring Iowa finale was so Ross-Perot-scare-off-the-women-and-horses crazy that some Democrats on Capitol Hill, already anxious about the tightly wound doctor, confessed they could not imagine that jabbing finger anywhere near The Button.

But Republicans were thrilled when Mr. Bush strutted up onstage on Tuesday night to basically tell the country that if you don`t vote for him in November, you`re giving up in the war on terrorism. "We`ve not come all this way — through tragedy, and trial and war — only to falter and leave our work unfinished," he asserted, as if all those Democrats racing from Iowa to New Hampshire in the middle of the night were crying out to the voters: "Falter! Falter!"

Dr. Dean`s poll numbers are diving because people freezing in New Hampshire think he`s too hot.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are better at looking cool. But their dissing the U.N. — that palace of permission slips — and their doctrine of pre-emption are just as hot, and so was Mr. Bush`s cocky implicit defense of the idea that if you whack one Middle East dictator, the rest will fall in line. "Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not," he said. "For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America."

Maybe he`s right, but what about Bill Clinton`s line that unless we want to occupy every country in the world, maybe our policy should also concentrate on making friends instead of targets? The president and vice president like to present a calm, experienced demeanor, but their foreign policy is right out of the let`s-out-crazy-the-bad-guys style of Mel Gibson`s cop in "Lethal Weapon" movies.

For proof of how intemperate their policy has been, compare this year`s State of the Union with last year`s. Last year it was all about Iraq`s frightening weapons. This year the only reference was to "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations."

Would Americans have supported a war to go get "program activities?" What is a program activity? Where is the White House speechwriters` ombudsman?



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A boy walks toward Faleh and Saleh Abbas`s farmhouse near Kut. Iraqi farmers are nervous about the new order imposed by the U.S.-led occupation authority.

washingtonpost.com
Iraqis Face Tough Transition to Market-Based Agriculture


By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A01


KUT, Iraq -- The Americans came in the summer with suitcases full of dollars and bought the wheat harvest from miles around. Farmer Faleh Abbas walked away from the sale pleased with the price and pleased that his hard work would help feed his people.

But very little of the wheat he and his colleagues grew ended up as food.

Some was stored in silos, some was processed as feed for livestock. The rest was trucked away to be burned and buried.

Officials of the U.S.-led occupation authority said they felt they had to buy the Iraqi wheat because the nation`s 5 million agricultural workers, roughly half the labor force, had come to expect such help after decades of living in a largely socialist state. But the officials worried that some of the grain was of such low quality that it would gum up the mills and couldn`t be used for bread. So they destroyed it.

The gap in the food supply was made up with $190 million worth of wheat from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, courtesy of the U.S. government.

How food will be produced and distributed in the new Iraq is among the biggest challenges the interim authority faces as it tries to reform the slew of state-run or state-subsidized industries that existed under the previous government.

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis depended on subsidies and handouts as a way of life. The Coalition Provisional Authority is determined to change that and create a capitalist economy where the state provides little, if any, support, except to the neediest.

As security has continued to be a problem, the authority has had to back away from some of its earlier plans. It gave seeds to farmers as it had hoped not to, and delayed a plan to replace monthly food rations with credits. But it continues to maintain that laissez faire is the future of the country.

"It`s been hugely paternalistic here based on the misguided belief that if you [subsidize] them, farmers would produce. But when you give everything for nothing, people don`t appreciate it," said Trevor Flugge, an Australian who until recently was the authority`s senior civil administrator for agriculture.

In the old Iraq, the state provided seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, sprinklers, tractors and other necessities to farmers at a low cost, often a third or even a fourth of the market price. It leased land for 1 cent per donam, about six-tenths of an acre, a year. It bought the country`s main crops, wheat and barley, at a fixed price, whether they were usable or not. And it ground up the grain and handed it out as flour to the people free. Each month, every family received a basket of flour, sugar, tea and other necessities.

Occupation authority officials are debating whether the subsidies to Iraqi farmers will continue and, if so, for how long. Much of the argument, one agriculture adviser said, is between the "the economists" and "the military," with the economists wanting laissez faire as soon as possible and the military worried that yanking subsidies too soon could lead to social unrest, which would further destabilize the country.

Since the end of the war, the United Nations has taken the lead on food, and the system remained pretty much the same. But in November, it transferred to the CPA control of the program that allowed Iraq to exchange oil for food and other essential supplies when sanctions were in effect.

The authority inherited $3 billion from the program. What it does with the money will be closely watched by the rest of the world because the United States and Australia, the two countries taking the lead on rehabilitating the Iraqi agriculture sector, are also the two leading exporters of wheat. Their farmers could benefit from the shape of Iraq`s agricultural industry.

Abbas is a farmer just like his father and his father`s father, going back as far as anyone can remember. He lives on a 30-donam plot southeast of Baghdad in the country`s heartland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a place of winter wheat and date palms, where lines of cows and sheep wander as they please.

The land is legendary for its bounty, the subject of passages in the Koran and countless poems. Oil may have been the muscle behind Iraq`s economy, but agriculture, while accounting for only about 6 percent of the gross national product, was the country`s soul.

So it was especially painful for farmers when Hussein`s government cut down trees and drained the swamps a dozen years ago after the Persian Gulf War. It invested little in irrigation, and the network fell into disrepair, leaving the already salty land even saltier.

That was part of the reason Iraq, which as recently as the 1950s was self-sufficient in agriculture, was forced to import more and more food. The sanctions imposed after the 1991 war meant that Iraq had to import more than half its food supply.

But farmers were all but guaranteed a comfortable, if not luxurious, life. Even the smallest farms could produce an income of $3,000 a year. Many government workers, soldiers and teachers made less than $100 a year.

A single season`s harvest was plenty to support Abbas, 30, his wife and three children; his brother, Saleh Abbas, 39, his wife and their three children; and his father and mother.

"People were making so much money that the incentive to work harder, to increase production -- it wasn`t there," said Salam Iskender, the new head of the agriculture section for the Wasit governorate, which includes Kut.

As a result, the yield in some regions plummeted from one ton of wheat per donam to a third of that and, particularly in the past two years, a large percentage of the crop came up "black," meaning it couldn`t be eaten.

Of the 1.25 million tons, or $118 million worth, of wheat the occupation authority purchased last summer, a third was inedible, according to a U.N. report.

The CPA hopes to break the cycle of dependence. The idea is that reducing subsidies will force farmers to invest more of their own money and have more of a stake in the outcome of their crops, providing the foundation for a capitalist economy the authority hopes will blossom after it departs in July.

"In fixing electricity, you can build a powerhouse and the problem is solved. But in agriculture you have to change the culture, and you don`t do that overnight," Flugge said.

Abbas and other farmers say they are somewhat baffled by what they have heard about the coming free economy.

When he first visited the agriculture office for his governorate after the 2003 war, he found the doors smashed and the windows in pieces. The staff was gone. All the tractors, plows, chemicals and other materials that had been stored for the next planting season had disappeared.

Abbas managed to cobble together enough money to buy what he needed to harvest the summer wheat and take it to the state silo. To his relief, the authorities agreed to buy it, but it was only a temporarily reprieve.

In October, he heard from fellow farmers that the U.S.-led administration would provide only a small amount of fertilizer and pesticides this year -- and nothing else. (The occupation authority later decided it would also give seeds to farmers.) And in the near future, the government would provide no subsidies at all and it wouldn`t promise to buy all the wheat.

"We are afraid of the free economy. We don`t understand it. If we grow crops, who will help us and who will buy it?" Abbas said.

Mohammed Abdul Hussein, director of the Kut chapter of the General Federation of Iraqi Farmers, said reduction of subsidies will force people to abandon agriculture. "If the government will not supply seeds and fertilizer, the farmers, they will not farm," he said

CPA officials say they are confident that won`t happen. In fact, they say they have a plan to make life even better for farmers.

The U.S. Agency for International Development awarded a contract, worth as much as $40 million, in October to Bethesda-based Development Alternatives Inc. It is designed to revitalize the agriculture sector by providing training in marketing and food processing, and by offering micro-loans.

The target is an increase of at least 20 percent in the production of grains, a 50 percent increase in profits for 1,000 commercial companies and a doubling of productivity for 30,000 farm families.

Flugge said the strategy that aid groups have used for years -- providing farmers with supplies -- is all wrong. He said the new government instead will provide help in the form of technology and education and that "the market" will take care of the rest. His goal is a farming sector modeled after the American one, which is subsidized on outputs, rather than inputs.

To that end, the authority will stop paying for supplies, but will pay more for wheat. "We are trying to redirect support for agriculture," said Lloyd Harbert, an American who is a senior CPA adviser assigned to the ministry of agriculture.

The ministry of agriculture has recommended a price of $140 a ton for the next harvest, up from $105 a ton. The idea is to encourage farmers to increase the quality and yields of their crops so they`ll make more money.

Even those who understand and believe in the CPA`s vision of a capitalist market for agriculture worry that if there truly is an open market, the local family farmers who dominate the sector here will not be able to compete. Foreign agribusinesses that mass-produce commodities such as wheat will dominate, they fear.

Before the war, Iraq was Australia`s third-largest market for wheat. Iraq also imported grains from India and Russia. The CPA agreed to honor the contracts signed by the Hussein regime.

The fact that the authority imported U.S. wheat after the war as it destroyed Iraqi wheat has made some question potential conflicts of interest facing those trying to help Iraq. "Will U.S. and Australians coming help develop and improve agriculture or create competition?" said Ahmed Hayder Zubaidi, the dean of the College of Agriculture at Baghdad University.

Esmail Hussain Ahmed, the head of the farmers union in Kurdistan, which was semi-independent and whose farming was less subsidized, said he`s optimistic about capitalism in agriculture. But he believes the CPA is moving too quickly and that small farmers are not prepared for the global politics.

"We are like a child which stage by stage needs to grow up. . . . We need time," before becoming mature enough to compete with the rest of the world, Ahmed said.

As officials in Baghdad, Washington, Canberra and elsewhere debate issues that may determine his economic fate, Abbas worried about something simpler: when the rains will come.

As the planting season for wheat neared in November, Abbas was ready. He gathered some seeds left over from last year and used his rickety 1985 tractor to prepare the land. He purchased some fertilizer from the government -- at double the price he paid the year before -- and some more on the black market. Then he began the delicate process of planting 18 donams of wheat, five with onions, two with garlic and the rest with other vegetables. Now that he awaits the spring harvest, all there is left to do is pray.

Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.



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An Address Worthy of Enron


By Richard Cohen

Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A25


In the gallery at President Bush`s State of the Union address the other night I saw Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots; Adnan Pachachi, the current head of the Iraqi Governing Council; and a bunch of other people -- all there to personify something Bush was saying. When he got to Iraq, I had my own man for the gallery. I pictured a smiling Ken Lay.

The former Enron chairman presided over a company that was going under while continuing to report a nifty profit. Whether Lay knew what was going on we have yet to learn. But the fact remains that he officiated over a sham, giving investors an accounting that was not at all true.

It was the same Tuesday night with Bush when it came to the war in Iraq. In last year`s address, he was quite specific about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein`s regime. He talked about "a serious and mounting threat to our country." He cited an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, a biological weapons program, a chemical weapons program and, of course, links to Sept. 11 and al Qaeda. "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda," Bush told the nation and the world.

None of that has turned out to be true. Maybe that`s because the intelligence services indulged in what Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, calls "groupthink." Or maybe White House aides and the Pentagon, intent on war no matter what, hyped the findings. Whatever the case, I find it hard to believe that Bush purposely lied to the nation.

But this year`s State of the Union address, while not quite a lie, was clearly deceptive. I didn`t feel Bush had an obligation to tick off everything that had gone wrong about Iraq, but I didn`t expect him to pretend that somehow the WMD allegations had been substantiated. He cited the report of chief weapons inspector David Kay as if it vindicated the original charges, when in fact it did not. And then, in a rhetorical sleight of hand, he talked as if the aim of the war had been simply to remove a thug from office -- when that was always supposed to be a byproduct.

The trouble is that just about everything Bush said a year ago has turned out not to be true. Yet Bush not only whistled past that particular graveyard, he acted as if he had been right all along. "Had we failed to act, the dictator`s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day," he said. Yes, and Enron would still be reporting earnings.

After last year`s State of the Union, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal whom conservatives most like to hate, said he was unconvinced. He said he wanted Bush to "come back to Congress and present convincing evidence of an imminent threat before we send troops to war in Iraq." For that remark, both courageous and prescient, Kennedy was ruthlessly Murdoched by right-wing media. It was considered more mushy thinking by a mushy liberal -- a redundancy on talk radio and Fox TV.

I cheer the removal of Hussein. I think, as Bush has argued, that the use of American force has (temporarily) had a salutary effect in the Middle East. Iran has welcomed U.N. nuclear inspectors, and Libya has done the same -- although Moammar Gaddafi was already showing signs of accommodation in admitting responsibility for various terrorist acts, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland. No doubt, force can add emphasis to diplomacy.

But within the Bush White House lies an ugly beast that never gets acknowledged: The administration misled the American people, either purposely or out of incompetence. This is not a minor matter, because war, with all its unforeseen consequences, is not itself a minor matter -- nor is the loss of some 500 American lives. Hussein is gone, and that is all well and good, but gone too is the confidence of the American people that this administration levels with them. Bush certainly did not do that Tuesday night.

This State of the Union address was as rhetorically flat as it was intellectually dishonest -- a political pitch designed to obscure uncomfortable facts and to solidify the conservative Republican base. Thus we got Bush`s pledge to support the institution of marriage (think Britney Spears) and to ban gays from enjoying it (think Britney Spears again) and the promise to trifle with the Constitution so that love will not, as we are told, triumph. For each and every pledge there was someone in the gallery, but for Iraq you had to use your imagination.

It was a beaming Ken Lay. Take a bow, Ken.

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Two Visions of America


By David S. Broder

Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A25


The difference between the perspective of President Bush and that of the Democrats seeking to replace him has never been plainer than it was on Tuesday night after he delivered his State of the Union address.

Barely 30 seconds into his speech, Bush defined the nation in terms of "the war on terror" that he has made his primary mission since Sept. 11, 2001. His top priority is "making America more secure," and the first specific action he requested of Congress was an extension of the Patriot Act, the expansion of surveillance power enacted in the first weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As it happens, that piece of legislation has become a favorite target of the Democratic presidential candidates. Even those who originally voted for it now claim (along with many libertarian conservatives) that it has been used in ways that threaten civil liberties and the invasion of privacy.

But the debate between the president and his opponents runs much deeper than this particular bill.

In this first month of the long campaign, the Democrats as a group have decided that the principal challenges facing the nation are right here at home -- jobs, education, health care, the environment -- while Bush is profoundly convinced that the most serious threats lie abroad.

"I know that some people question if America is really in a war at all," Bush said. "They view terrorism more as a crime, a problem to be solved mainly with law enforcement and indictments. . . . [But] after the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got."

And war is what they will get if Bush is reelected. While Democrats talk earnestly of "internationalizing" the rebuilding of Iraq and enlisting the United Nations and reluctant allies in a revived coalition against terrorist states, Bush argues that as long as he is president, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people."

This fundamental disagreement about national priorities -- really, about the nature of the world, the state of the nation and the priorities of government -- is what makes the stakes in the coming election much larger than usual.

To be sure, Bush fleshed out the back half of his speech with a compendium of domestic initiatives, seeking to revive his 2000 campaign claim of being a "compassionate conservative."

And to be sure, all the Democrats vow to maintain the strength of the armed forces and protect national security.

But do not be misled. Bush believes he deserves reelection, not because of No Child Left Behind or Medicare prescription drug coverage but because -- as he reminded the television audience -- he has averted another terrorist attack on this country for 28 months and has signaled nations around the world, by his preemptive war on Saddam Hussein, that he will take the offensive against security threats wherever he finds them.

The leading Democratic candidates -- Howard Dean, John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- believe Bush deserves defeat, not because they differ with his handling of postwar Iraq but because, as Edwards puts it, his domestic policies have separated America into two nations, with the privileged and prosperous on one side and the struggling majority of families on the other.

A dispassionate observer could well argue that both are correct, that America is a nation at war but also a country facing growing inequality and lagging in its obligations to children, displaced workers and the needy.

But when budgets are passed, even with deficits of the size politicians of both parties seem heedlessly willing to entertain, priorities must be set. And that is where the two parties fundamentally diverge.

The voters themselves are ambivalent. When they talk about their concerns, they tend to focus on down-home matters: strained household budgets, worries about layoffs and outsourcing, medical bills, the pressures on their school-age youngsters, and the rising costs of college.

But security as Bush defines it is also on their minds, symbolized by concern over friends and family serving in Iraq, but also flashing back to that terrible September morning when their TV sets showed the horror of the World Trade Center`s destruction.

It is, to some extent, a mind vs. heart battle. And it makes this an election like no other I have ever seen.

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Next stop Syria?
Washington`s post-9/11 war on terror is finished. But another has only just begun

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian

So that`s it: Washington is no longer at war. But didn`t President Bush just tell us the exact opposite in his state of the union address? He did. He said most emphatically that the war goes on - and showed that it`s over. The war on terror, September 11 2001 to January 20 2004. RIP.

I don`t mean by this that fighting international terrorism, rogue states and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction won`t remain near the top of the United States` foreign policy agenda for some time to come. They probably will. I don`t mean that Bush won`t try to fight the election as the commander-in-chief of a nation at war. He probably will. I mean that the real psychological sense of being at war has faded even in Washington, where it was strongest, and, unless there is another major terrorist attack on the American homeland, will further fade. "The killing has continued," Bush said, "in Bali, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Mombasa, Jerusalem, Istanbul and Baghdad." Well, better not go on holiday there.

Accordingly, foreign policy is slipping back down the American agenda to its usual second, third or fourth place. America`s real war this year will be the election war, and that will be won or lost on the economy, education, healthcare and family values. Iraq, with American soldiers being killed almost every day, is not such an election- winning triumph. Flimsy evidence of "weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities" (an early entrant for weasel words of the year) will hardly make voters` flesh crawl. Democrats and Republicans will agree on the need to hang tough in the fight against international terrorism. If the Democrats field the Vietnam veteran John Kerry, or General Wesley Clark, they can look almost as credible on matters of national security.

One giveaway is the order of the speech. Last year`s state of the union address, which was a preparation for war on Iraq, started with several pages on the economy, education and health, then turned to the real business of war. This one starts with a resounding statement that "hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror", and goes on for three pages about national security, but then turns to health, education and the economy. The most important part comes last.

It was always difficult to imagine how the war on terror would end. There could hardly be a moment when the president would don pilot`s gear, descend on to an aircraft carrier and declare that major combat operations were over, as he did after the toppling of Saddam. You can`t do that with a worldwide, open-ended war on an abstract noun. You can`t capture an abstract noun. You can`t shoot fear. But now we know how the war on terror ends: with the president loudly proclaiming that it continues. The war in Iraq continued when it was declared over; the war on terror ends when it`s proclaimed to be continuing.

Obviously I`m using war on terror in a rather special sense, to mean the central, organising principle of a White House agenda. But then, that`s the only clear, concrete meaning the phrase has ever had. It`s never been anything like the second world war against Hitler`s Germany, or the cold war against the Soviet Union. Where does terror live? What is its capital? Who commands its army? The 2001 terrorist attacks have changed for ever the way governments think about many problems in the world. They have heightened our sense of insecurity, our security measures, and, more patchily, our commitment to addressing the underlying causes of that insecurity. (Causes such as the lack of an equitable peace settlement between Israel and Palestine - notably absent from this election-year presidential address.) But will the first decade of world history in the 21st century be remembered as that of the war on terror? I suspect not. Rather, I think there`ll be a chapter in the history of the United States entitled war on terror, and the dates future historians add in brackets may well be 2001-04.

This is a risky prognosis, to be sure; another major terrorist attack on the American homeland, and it could look very silly. But we always have to operate on informed guesswork. Now if this guess is right, one interesting question is: where would it leave the rest of us, especially us in Europe? The awkward answer might be: holding the bawling baby. I have never thought that the greatest danger from American policy under George Bush was that it would go storming around the world, deposing dictator after dictator, occupying country after country, in pursuit of a neo-conservative programme of revolution from above. The greater danger was always that the United States would start intervening, and then retreat into its own vast carelessness, preoccupied with domestic issues, leaving the job abroad half-done.

For some two years after the 9/11 attacks, America quite understandably went ape. This frightened the hell out of terrorists and dictators, but also out of many of America`s allies and friends. The neo-cons enjoyed a brief, heady moment of agenda-setting supremacy. But that`s over. Next stop Syria is not a message heard much these days. In Iraq, the US is looking for what Bush called "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty" by the end of June.

Where does that leave the wider Middle East? Still in a mess. Who`s most directly affected by this mess? Europe. Not that America will simply turn away; things are never that clear-cut. In the middle of the state of the union address there was a short passage reinforcing the message that Bush delivered at the Banqueting House in London last November. The US, he repeated, would pursue a "forward strategy of freedom" in the Middle East. However, he added one specific proposal: to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy and refocus it on developing "free elections, free markets, free press and free labour unions in the Middle East". This is dynamite.

I`ve seen the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy, together with our own Westminster Foundation for Democracy and other semi- and wholly non-governmental organisations in eastern Europe and the Balkans. Without their work, Slobodan Milosevic might not have been toppled by a revolution in Serbia. Add the clear message that corrupt, oil-bloated Arab elites no longer enjoy Washington`s unconditional support, and we could see some fireworks. Not laser-guided American military fireworks from the sky, but emancipatory Arab fireworks from the ground. The fact that this support for would-be democrats is tainted by its association with the United States, the neo-imperialist occupier of Arab lands, will, I suspect, dampen but not extinguish the fuse.

We in Europe need urgently to work out for ourselves how we stand to this unpredictable, but in principle hugely welcome, process. America may light the fuse, but we will feel the heat - not least, through our own Muslim populations. At the end of the day, we also have most to gain. Washington`s war on terror, as it began on September 11 2001, may be over. The campaign for freedom in the Middle East has only just begun.

· Timothy Garton Ash`s book The Free World is published by Penguin in June

· He returns to his fortnightly column

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Killing the king
Kerry is sitting on top of his party, but will he be knocked off when he arrives in New Hampshire?

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian

One year ago the congressional Democratic party gathered to applaud George Bush`s state of the union address, a call to arms in Iraq. Having just lost the Senate - its patriotism impugned - the party was disoriented, dispirited and disjointed. It was against that tableau that the feisty former Vermont governor Howard Dean began his ascent as the anti-war, anti-Washington Democrats, and generally anti-Bush candidate. He had this vast unpopulated territory to himself. In Iowa, where congressman Richard Gephardt from Missouri was always the favourite, Dean pulled ahead - as he did nationally. But then his march veered on to a murder-and-suicide scene.

No sitting member of the lower House of Representatives has ever been elected to the presidency. Gephardt`s earnest manner, measured flat speech and universally acknowledged decency belied his loudly ticking ambition.

His early distinction came in the aftermath of the 1984 Reagan landslide, when he became the first head of the newly founded Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group created in reaction to Walter Mondale`s dependence on the unions. But in 1988 Gephardt ran for the presidential nomination as the champion of trade protectionism and aggrieved industrial labour, winning the Iowa caucuses. But his candidacy soon collapsed.

In the first year of Bill Clinton`s administration, Gephardt rancorously split the Democrats by opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement, and that division contributed to the party losing the Congress in 1994 for the first time in two generations.

Gephardt planned his 2004 campaign as a reprise of Iowa in 1988, but the labour federation as a whole refused to endorse him and he was left with a handful of unions and little else. His last hurrah was a last stand. His message was reduced to the nub of raw protectionism and he devoted himself to tearing down Dean, attacking him as a conservative wolf in liberal sheep`s clothing.

The other candidates similarly leapt on the new frontrunner. And the media predictably trained its harsh glare on Dean, putting him in the spotlight of a series of absurd pseudo-scandals.

Dean`s campaign was a stroke of innovation, using the internet to create a new form of democratic political organisation. But in the heat he began to melt. His temperament began to overshadow his message. He demeaned his rivals as "cockroaches" and declared: "I`m going after everybody because I`m tired of being a pincushion here."

After Al Gore`s surprise endorsement, others flooded in, and Dean clutched them like shields. Overnight, the insurgent appeared defensively crouched. In the fury, Dean reiterated his anti-war position, but forgot to mention that - as the only governor in the field - he had proven experience on the domestic issues that voters most cared about.

But as Gephardt and Dean slashed away, the door sprang open for senators John Kerry and John Edwards. Kerry, from Massachusetts, has a sparkling CV as a Vietnam war hero who also led protests against the war. He has a far more liberal record than anyone else, including Dean. But as the early frontrunner, his candidacy imploded through constant indecision, a Capitol Hill-run campaign, and a vote for the Iraq war that he could not adequately explain. Edwards, a first-term senator from North Carolina, had no record to speak of but was smooth and energetic. With attention riveted on Dean`s floundering fortunes, they both seized upon the anti-Bush theme. Kerry appended it to his CV. Edwards, a millionaire trial lawyer, presented himself as the modern upholder of the old economic populism, and the "son of a mill worker".

In the Iowa caucuses, Dean was damaged while Gephardt`s support disintegrated, most of that drifting to Edwards. Kerry, rejecting his previous position on the Iraq war as best he could, soared as the figure of experience. Edwards called Bush the president of the "privileged few". Kerry mocked Bush`s bravado: "Bring it on! Just don`t let the door hit you on the way out!" While evading the distorting media gaze, they learned from Dean and became pointedly anti-Bush, the sine qua non for legitimacy among Democrats.

But the dynamic that has lifted them up is only beginning to unfold. Political geography is now destiny. While Iowa puts a premium on niceness, New Hampshire prides itself on flintiness. Iowa instinctively wants to reward the worthy; New Hampshire habitually wants to kill the king. Iowa tries to reach a consensus in the caucus in front of the neighbours; in the privacy of the voting booth, New Hampshire wants to assert individuality. Iowa wants to cast a considered ballot; New Hampshire wants to, as its state motto proclaims, "live free or die". Will Dean recover? Will Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman, absent from Iowa, galvanise support or play assassins? Is there a new king and will he survive?

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars.

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Japanese leader under fire over troops for Iraq
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian

Japan`s main opposition leader yesterday called for the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to resign during a heated parliamentary debate on the deployment of Japanese ground troops to Iraq.

Naoto Kan, leader of the Democratic Party, said sending troops to a war zone, even on a supposedly peaceful mission, violated Japan`s constitution, which renounces use of force to settle international disputes.

Mr Koizumi replied that troops would carry out their humanitarian mission only in "safe" areas. But he added that they would be entitled to use weapons if attacked by rebels.

The debate descended into a slanging match as opposition MPs accused the prime minister of dodging questions and refused to end the session. Divisions over Japan`s support for the US-led war in Iraq have deepened since an advance unit of about 30 ground troops arrived in Samawah, in Iraq`s south-east, on Monday.

According to Japanese newspaper reports, by the end of March, about 1,000 soldiers, sailors and air force personnel could be in Iraq taking part in Japan`s biggest overseas military deployment since the second world war.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party`s coalition partner, the Buddhist-backed New Komeito, will meet next Monday to discuss the troop dispatch. Despite opposition to the deployment among New Komeito MPs, the party leader, Takenori Kanzaki, is expected to signal approval at a meeting with Mr Koizumi later that day.


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Occupational hazards
Leader
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian

It is not just the Shias. Iraqis of all political, ethnic and religious persuasions want their country back. Most are glad that the dictator has gone. Most want an end to the US-led occupation. There is no contradiction in this. That Iraqis now see direct elections as the best way to regain control of their affairs is an entirely welcome development. That the US and Britain are increasingly seen as the main obstacle is potentially very dangerous for both occupiers and occupied.

Looked at in the round, this Iraqi perception is in fact incorrect. Both governments support full, free elections at some point. The crucial difference lies in the question of timing and, to a lesser degree, practicability. Yet on that spike, in a very combustible environment, may hang Iraq`s future. The prize is a broadly acceptable, orderly transition to restored sovereignty and credible self-government, bringing in its train the wholehearted international assistance that has so far been withheld.

The penalty for failure could be far more widespread, violent opposition to coalition forces than has yet been seen, amid a general political and territorial disintegration. This is no over-statement of the position. Despite George Bush`s claim in his state of the union address that "democracy is taking hold" and that the handover will be complete by the end of June, the reality is that the president`s entire Iraq project remains inherently fragile. More mis-steps now may bring the whole pack of cards showering down about his head, with untold, negative consequences for the region, for Israel, for the "war on terror", and even for his re-election chances.

It is this latter consideration that lies at the heart of the dispute over timing. Last November, concerned at rising US casualties and the incompetence of the US-appointed Iraq governing council, Mr Bush arbitrarily imposed the June 30 handover deadline. It was clear then, as it is now, that the White House wanted to declare mission accomplished before America`s autumn hustings. It craves media images of transition ceremonies, popular celebrations and the fluttering flag of a free Iraq. Plans are already afoot for a large US troop withdrawal in September. You can write the script now: "They fought and won freedom`s fight; today, our boys are coming home."

The basic problem with this scenario is that any transitional government taking charge on July 1 must enjoy the confidence if not the support of all Iraqis. The current US plan cannot deliver that. It calls for nominated 15-member committees to select caucus members in each of Iraq`s 18 governates who, in turn, will select delegates to a provisional legislature who, in turn, will select a provisional government. Genuine national elections may, or may not, follow next year. This labyrinthine process will create an oligarchy, not a democracy, as the Shia leadership rightly points out. Anarchy may be its consequent result. Those who maintain that the US is trying to have it both ways, by trying to manipulate the complexion of Iraq`s future government for its own ends, while ostensibly letting go the reins, have a strong case.

Another rethink is required before it is too late. As we have said before, direct, democratic elections must be held as swiftly as is feasible. If the UN concludes that practical problems truly prevent that happening by June (for such problems, while significant, have been exaggerated), then Mr Bush`s self-serving timeline must be altered accordingly. He has often pledged, after all, to see the job through, however lengthy, to "do what it takes for what is right". He started it; he must finish it, not cut and run. There is no good reason why, if more time is needed to ensure a legitimate process and to avoid chaotic alternatives, Iraq should not aim for a national poll this autumn. In the US itself, November 2 is thought to be a good day for an election.


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Talk time: Jeremy Botter
Jeremy Botter is a serving member of the US army, based in Tikrit, Iraq. He writes Letters from Iraq, a daily blog from the frontline

Interviewed by Sean Dodson
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian

Who are you?

I`m a medic with Apache Troop of the 1-10 Cavalry. Our mission is to do the things that no other unit wants to do or can do. Our unit has been instrumental in capturing 10 of the people on the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards, including Saddam Hussein.

How do you post your blog?

We have an internet cafe, which is a little tent. I bought a laptop before coming here - it`s been a blessing - and I compose most of my messages offline while getting ready for bed or during our increasingly scarce downtime. I usually go through an editing process after I`ve finished, making sure everything is cohesive. I`ll post them when I connect to the web, usually at night. I use Blogger Pro`s journal software to write and then upload the website to my server. At first I simply wanted a place to post my thoughts and daily journal, but after the Operation Red Dawn story got so much publicity, it has morphed into a little community. I upload pictures with Gallery Remote, a free tool that connects to my photo album and allows me to manage it easily.

Why are you writing Letters from Iraq?

I wanted a way to remember what I`ve done over here, because much of it has been life-changing and some of it has been downright historic. I love photography and there are really interesting things over here. Everyone wants to see pictures that aren`t in magazines or newspapers, and I`ve been able to provide that.

What is the attitude of your senior officers towards it?

A lot think it`s cool the website is getting so much attention for our unit. Everyone likes to keep a journal, and I`m basically doing the same thing... albeit with a twist in that mine is available to the world.

And your buddies?

They are all excited it is getting noticed. We all take pictures, and it`s nice to have a visual and textual reference of everything we`ve done. They are all excited about the possibility of a book deal that will serve as a record of what we`ve done in Iraq. It gives everyone a little place in the history books, however small.

Do you abide by military censorship?

I haven`t run into any. Obviously, we have to maintain what`s called "operational security", but if I have questions about things that might affect "opsec", I ask my superiors and our public affairs office for clarification. The only time that`s needed to happen was the Operation Red Dawn story; I wanted to make sure I wasn`t giving out anything classified. I want our unit to get recognition for things we`ve done, but not jeopardise the safety of those around me.

Does the net bring you closer to home?

Definitely. There`s something comforting about seeing your loved one`s screen name on your buddy list when you are in a different world. It brings you back to some semblance of reality, and that`s nice when you deal with the craziness we have to deal with.


See: www.jeremybotter.com


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Two American Soldiers Killed in Iraq

Thursday January 22, 2004 11:01 AM


TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - Insurgents fired mortars at an American military encampment in central Iraq, killing two soldiers and critically wounding another, the military said Thursday.

The attack happened Wednesday night on a forward operating base in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, military spokeswoman Maj. Josslyn Aberle said.

The wounded soldier was evacuated to a support hospital, where he is in critical but stable condition, she said.

The three soldiers were standing outside the tactical operations center when a series of mortars and rockets hit, she said. The attack also damaged vehicles.

U.S. forces launched a counterattack but there was no indication the insurgents sustained casualties, she said.

In the south, an unidentified gunman shot and killed the son of a fugitive former member of Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party, police said.

Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad is in the so-called Sunni Triangle stronghold of the supporters of Saddam, whose regime was ousted by U.S.-led forces in April.

Former Baath Party members and other Saddam supporters have been carrying out a guerrilla war against the U.S.-led coalition forces, often targeting Iraqi civilians in a bid to prevent them from cooperating with the United States.
Four Iraqis Working for Coalition Killed

Thursday January 22, 2004 10:46 AM


BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Unidentified assailants gunned down three Iraqi women and a driver working for the U.S.-led coalition forces in a central city, police said Thursday.

In the south, an unidentified gunman shot and killed the son of a fugitive former member of Saddam Hussein`s Baath Party, police said.

The women were attacked late Wednesday in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, when assailants opened fire at the car in which they were riding, police officer Taha al-Falahi said. A fourth woman in the car was wounded, he said.

The women worked as cleaners at a nearby U.S. military base, al-Falahi said.

Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad is in the so-called Sunni Triangle stronghold of the supporters of Saddam, whose regime was ousted by U.S.-led forces in April.

Former Baath Party members and other Saddam supporters have been carrying out a guerrilla war against the U.S.-led coalition forces, often targeting Iraqi civilians in a bid to prevent them from cooperating with the United States.

The violence has diminished in intensity since Saddam was captured Dec. 13.

Wednesday`s attack was believed to be the first time that women have been specifically targeted, although many have been killed in suicide car bombings and roadside bombs.

In Basra, an unidentified gunman shot and killed Ghassan Adnan, 23, outside his college Thursday, police said.

Adnan was shot three times on a busy road in front of the Basra Teachers` Institute, where he was scheduled to take an exam, said police Lt. Ali Mohammed. The attacker escaped in the alleys, he said.

Adnan was the son of Adnan Jassim, a former senior security official in Basra who has been on the run since April.

Basra, Iraq`s second-largest city 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, is predominantly Shiite Muslim. Saddam`s government was dominated by the minority Sunni Muslims, who brutally suppressed the Shiites.

On Wednesday night, unidentified assailants attacked an Iraqi police patrol in the northern city of Kirkuk, triggering a gunfight in which one policeman and one attacker were wounded, police said.

Police later arrested six attackers, police Gen. Turhan Youssef said.

Also Wednesday, a rocket hit a building used by U.S. military police in Kirkuk but no there were no causalities, Youssef said.



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Kelly told the BBC Saddam would take days to launch WMD
Scientist`s view of Iraqi threat broadcast for first time as BBC programme criticises corporation`s handling of dossier story
By Kim Sengupta and Mary Dejevsky
22 January 2004


The weapons expert David Kelly believed Saddam Hussein was less of a threat before the Iraq invasion last year than he was 10 years ago, and could only use his supposed weapons of mass destruction in "days or weeks``, rather than 45 minutes as the Government has claimed.

Dr Kelly`s views were revealed yesterday in a hitherto unshown interview with BBC`s Panorama, which took place just a month after Tony Blair made the 45-minute assertion in his dossier last September.

Meanwhile, the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) has commissioned an independent authority to review its assessment of Iraq`s military capability before the US and British went to war.

The IISS report on Iraq, published less than two weeks before the Government`s dossier of 24 September, forecast Saddam Hussein would be prepared to use chemical weapons against an invader, and canvassed the likelihood that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Dr Kelly, who allegedly killed himself after being revealed as the source for Andrew Gilligan`s report that the Government had "sexed up" the dossier, believed Iraq was a real threat. But he also maintained British intelligence had major gaps in knowledge about the country`s WMD, and that Saddam would only use them if he was attacked as a last resort.

Questioned by Panorama, Dr Kelly said: "Iraq`s intrinsic capability has been reduced since 1990-91.`` Speaking about Saddam`s supposed WMD arsenal, he continued: "Even if they are not actually filled and deployed today, the capability exists to get them filled and deployed within a matter of days or weeks.``

Asked how Iraq might launch a chemical or biological attack, Dr Kelly said: "The actual form, we don`t really know.He`d have been planning to develop them and have better and more effective systems and those we are completely unsighted of, and we are also unsighted as to whether that work has continued since 1991 to this very day.``

The scientist also suggested Saddam might have only used those weapons in self-defence. "I think he`d use them. Of course, what is more difficult to answer is how and under what circumstances he would use them,`` he said.

Dr Kelly also stated Iraq`s neighbours, such as Iran and Israel, were a threat.The September dossier implied British bases in Cyprus were within the range of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons.

Panorama accused Gilligan of inaccuracies in his report about Dr Kelly, and criticised the BBC management for standing by him without carrying out an internal investigation.

The programme maintained Gilligan did not have enough evidence to back up his charge that the Government had deliberately inserted the false 45-minute threat. Instead, it concluded that John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, tasked with drawing up the dossier, had acquiesced too readily to pressure from Downing Street.

The Panorama special was broadcast a week before Lord Hutton presents his report. John Ware, the veteran investigative reporter who presented the programme, said the scheduling was decided by Lorraine Heggessey, the controller of BBC1. But, according to some reports, Greg Dyke, the director general of the corporation, was said to have been "surprised`` by the peak-time airing.

Mr Ware attacked senior managers for failing to check Gilligan`s notes, which were the basis for accusing Alastair Campbell, then the Prime Minister`s communication chief, and Downing Street of doctoring the dossier. He concluded: "The director general and his senior executives bet the farm on a shaky foundation.``

The BBC said it had passed on tapes of the interview to the Hutton inquiry but no reference was made to it during the proceedings. Filmed on 29 October 2002, it was never broadcast.

The shadow Foreign Secretary, Michael Ancram, said last night: "It is a great shame that Dr Kelly`s remarks on this matter were not presented publicly as evidence to the Hutton inquiry. His comments do place his views at odds with those presented in the Government`s September dossier.``
22 January 2004 12:21


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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"Who will give us back our health?"

Articles / Iraq related stories
Date: Jan 21, 2004 - 07:48 PM
Back in the 1980’s, nuclear armed Israel carried out a pre-emptive bombing of Iraq’s Al-Tuetha nuclear power station which is located just south of Baghdad. While Saddam Hussein didn’t posses nuclear weapons, his nuclear power station which was being constructed still had much radioactive waste stored in two large warehouses. The waste, stored mostly in large metal drums, sat dormant for many years.

After the Anglo-American Invasion last spring the warehouses were looted, and many of the barrels containing radioactive material were carted away to be washed out in the small stream which separates the tiny rural village from Al-Tuetha. After being cleaned in the water supply for the area, the barrels were then sold to uneducated people in the village to be used for storing their drinking water. Thus, the water and now food of the entire village is contaminated with radioactive material.

The health problems experienced by the people in the village are too numerous to track. Stories abound of strange tumors, rashes and illnesses.

I had come here today to visit a family with a baby who was born with a huge tumor growing out of his back, caused by his mother being radiated by the village drinking water and probably by eating contaminated food as well. The baby had since died from cancer, and the father was away at work in the village which has over 70% unemployment.

Just outside of this home, a man drives up in a beat up old maroon Volkswagen Beetle, and asks us if he can help with anything.

Adel Mhomoud, a 44 year old bee-keeper, invites us to his home. Driving down the bumpy dirt road, dust swirls about the beautiful rural countryside. Vegetable fields are lined with palm trees and small modest homes dot the area. To our right just a stones throw away is the bombed out Al-Tuetha nuclear station, now guarded by a few American soldiers, who weren’t there to stop the looting in April. I wonder why they guard it now, too little, and most certainly too late.

A small, dirty stream which is the contaminated water source for the village runs between the dirt road and the fence of the nuclear storage buildings. The stream is the only water in this area.

After several minutes Adel pulls over near his home, and limps over to greet us into his home.

“I have cancer, and I know I’m dying. My white blood cell count is 14,000, and I don’t have enough red blood cells. We are all sick; our joints ache, my hips are killing me, and my blood is bad. But nobody will help us here.”

He has had hundreds of reporters come to record his story. He asked many of them to take samples of his honey to test for radiation, but nobody has returned him the results.

We follow the kind and soft spoken man down a dirt path lined with palm trees to where he keeps his bees. As we pass his home there are stacks of white bee boxes on his porch, dusty and unused.

We stand in the sun under the palms, talking. Adel tells us he used to keep 300 boxes of bees, and now he is down to 70, and each of these is only half full, with lethargic bees.

“Right after the invasion my bees went crazy. I never saw them so aggressive and strong in 20 years; this was when they were first contaminated. Then shortly after that they all began to die, and now this is all I have left, and as you can see they are very weak. I don’t think they will live until the Spring.”

He puts on his protective head cover and pulls out a tray about 30% covered with bees. Several begin to lazily fly about.

His bees used to produce one ton of honey per year. Now, they have yet produced enough for him to take to market.

Adel has a wife and two daughters, 14 and 19 years old. He fought in the Iraq/Iran War, and pulls up his leg to show me several gashes and indentations from injuries sustained.

“Everyone here is hurt or sick from something. You can see this in the village. Our water, land, food, and now all the people…we are all contaminated.”

One of his young dogs died recently.

He thanks us for writing a story and filming a documentary about his situation. He wants the truth to get out about the plight of his family, his friends, his village. He says,

“I welcome anyone who comes to tell the truth-it will help us sleep better at night.”

I apologize to him meekly for his situation. I tell him I hope people will read or watch his story, and try to help him and his people in some way. My friend asks Adel what he will do about his situation…is there anything else he can do, or that we can do to help him?

Adel says,

“We are all going to die. It just depends on if you are killed, or if you die naturally.”

We stand talking with his family awhile as he shows us his loom. His wife brings out a handmade carpet and he offers it to us as a gift, and invites us back to his home anytime, Insh ‘allah (if God wills it).

Insh’allah, Adel. Insh’allah...




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Probe into `Government war crimes` Jan 20 2004



The Government could face an international trial for war crimes following the invasion of Iraq.

A report drawn up by a panel of top lawyers is being handed to the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor in the Hague, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, over the use of cluster bombs and weapons using depleted uranium.

He will now decide whether to launch a formal investigation. The report was written after eight international lawyers heard evidence at a "war crimes inquiry" in London, last November. The inquiry was staged by Peacerights, a UK-based non-governmental organisation.

The lawyers said there was enough evidence for the ICC prosecutor to investigate members of the Government for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the conflict and occupation.

They said he should investigate the use of cluster bombs in urban areas and if attacks were launched on non-military targets.

They also want him to look into attacks on media targets and whether weapons were used that caused excessive loss of life or injury to civilians.

The US would not face a similar probe because it is not a party to the ICC statute.

Phil Shiner, of Peacerights, said: "It is critically important for those who lost their lives and for future generations facing future wars that the leaders of governments waging war are fully accountable for war crimes committed.

"There should now be a full and proper investigation and serious consideration given to prosecuting those with ultimate responsibility."

http://icberkshire.icnetwork.co.uk/

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs22jan22,1,6130442.…
THE NATION
Low-Pay Sectors Dominate U.S. and State Job Growth
In California, industries that are hiring pay 40% less than those that are shrinking, a study finds.
By Nancy Cleeland
Times Staff Writer

January 22, 2004

California is being hit hard by a recent nationwide shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying sectors such as retail sales and tourism, a trend that doesn`t bode well for the economy, according to a report released Wednesday.

The report by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute paints a picture of a state and national economy in which employment growth is being driven largely by low-skilled service jobs.

In Los Angeles, according to the preliminary results of another study, the shift is particularly pronounced because so many new jobs are in the "underground" cash economy of laborers who aren`t counted in government statistics. These very low-wage workers — people who do yardwork or clean houses or wash dishes — might account for as much as 15% of all jobs in the metropolitan area, said Dan Flaming of the Economic Round Table, which is conducting its study for the city.

"It`s really scary," Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said of the long-term implications. An economy increasingly dependent on lower-wage jobs will have a smaller tax base and see less consumer spending, checking economic growth and reducing the quality of public services and infrastructure, Kyser said.

Statewide, since the national recession officially ended in November 2001, the jobs that have been created are in industries that pay an average of 40% less than do those in which jobs have disappeared, the Economic Policy Institute said.

The institute describes itself as focusing on "the economic condition of low- and middle-income Americans and their families" and has been critical of the Bush administration`s depiction of the economy.

By the institute`s measure, only three other states — Delaware, Massachusetts and Wyoming — fared as badly or worse than California. Only two states, Nevada and Nebraska, saw wages in industries with job growth exceeding wages in sectors with job losses.

"We`re losing important manufacturing jobs that have been available to support families, and gaining jobs that don`t provide that opportunity," said Jeff Chapman, an economic analyst with the institute. "Now we see that the trend is worsening, even in the middle of a recovery."

For each state, researchers divided industries into those that were gaining in share of jobs and those that were losing share. They then compared average wages between the growing and shrinking industries.

Chapman said California lost 127,000 manufacturing jobs and 55,000 jobs in the information sector from November 2001 to November 2003. Meanwhile, the leisure and hospitality sector gained 48,000 jobs, retail trade grew by 32,000 and health and education, which includes day-care teachers and low-wage hospital crews, grew by 65,000.

Understanding the differences among states will take more analysis, said Michael Ettlinger, an economist who coauthored the report. What it clearly shows, he said, is that job quality is diminishing across the country. "These trends are real and anybody who looks at this data will see that this is happening," he said.

Ron Bird, an economist with the Employment Policy Foundation, an employer-funded research group in Washington, offered a different assessment of the numbers. He divides job growth by broad categories of occupation — such as manager or production worker — instead of by sector, as the Economic Policy Institute did.

By his measure, Bird said, the growth appeared to favor higher-paying jobs. He said the highest growth was in office and administrative jobs and in installation, maintenance and repair jobs, both of which pay higher-than-average wages.

"The jobs where the growth was had higher average earnings," said Bird, whose analysis looked only at full-time jobs and did not break down the data by state. "It`s a matter of looking at the glass as half empty or more than half full."

For Joely Gardener of Carlsbad, a laid-off executive from the high-tech field, there`s no question about which way to view the job market. She has been scanning employment postings since losing her post as a research director at France Telecom in Silicon Valley in August. After searching in California for five months, she recently expanded her job quest nationwide. Still, Gardener, who has a doctorate and is a licensed psychologist, doesn`t have a single hot lead.

"I`ve been having a hell of a time finding the right job," she said. "I`m seeing an upswing in lower-level jobs in my field; they tend to be entry-level positions. I know other people in the same boat. What we`re finding is that because of the glut of qualified professionals on the market, companies are being incredibly restrictive in how they look at people."

Her story is familiar to researchers focused on improving the local and state economies.

"Our industries are changing very rapidly," said Kyser of the L.A. County Economic Development Corp. "You see it in the papers every day, but we look at the headlines and tend not to think much about it."

Kyser said each local economy was unique, and that California had "special issues" such as runaway film production and high worker compensation costs that have driven away many good-paying jobs. Those need to be addressed in specific ways, he said. "This type of report starts the dialogue," he said.

The jobs picture may be improving in California, he added, as jobs in aerospace and export industries grow.

At the Economic Policy Institute, Ettlinger said unless the low-wage job shift identified by the institute was reversed, the nation`s wage base would shrink and individual workers would have an increasingly difficult time finding quality jobs.

"That means a declining standard of living," he said. "People rely on wages for their quality of life. If the nation`s drifting into having lower wage levels, that`s disturbing for everyone."

The trend could be slowed or reversed through changes in public policy, Ettlinger said, suggesting raising the minimum wage, attaching labor standards to trade agreements to discourage outsourcing of manufacturing jobs or encouraging unionization in low-paying sectors.

"Public investment could also increase productivity, which should boost wages," he said.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-iraqcri…
COLUMN ONE
Back Into Baghdad`s Streets
With police visibility increasing and murders declining, Iraqis seem to be steeling themselves and venturing out in defiance of danger.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

January 22, 2004

BAGHDAD — The desert moon is a thumbprint in the sky and Safa abu Ahmed has watches in his window again on Sadoon Street.

Alleys are tangled with vendors and shoppers; the fruit juice stands and the money-changers are busy. Women in black stroll past the flames of chicken roasters in the dusk. The robbers and the carjackers are not around — at least not now — and life on the sidewalks, despite the U.S. tank on the corner, moves with the brisk nonchalance of normality.

"There is a big difference from a few months ago," Ahmed said. "I used to close my shop at 1 p.m. because of thieves and bandits. My window used to be like a theater — I would see people get robbed right on the street. But now police patrols are passing and I`ve put my watches back in the front window."

Crime in Baghdad is vicious and difficult to gauge, but perceptions of Ahmed and other shopkeepers suggest Iraqis feel safer these days.

The capital`s police force — patrolling in blue-and-white cars with stenciled numbers — has grown to 7,000 officers. That is less than half what it was before the war, but increased police visibility in recent months has brought a sense of calm to places such as Sadoon Street, once a strip bristling with criminal gangs and gunfire.

Interviews with police officers around this city of 5 million people indicate that crime overall has tapered slightly. Their assessment, however, is more sobering than Ahmed`s. And it reflects the dual dangers that Iraqis live with: crime fueled by poverty and retribution, and opportunism played out against an unfinished war — punctuated by suicide bombers and rocket-propelled grenades — between insurgents and U.S. troops.

Navigating such violent currents has led to months of psychological trauma. This is a nation, after all, where sandbag bunkers and high walls protect police stations from attackers. A place where former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein emptied his jails of nearly 30,000 criminals before losing power, and where a conversation on a street corner or a meal in a restaurant could end in an armed robbery or an insurgent attack. Skeins of barbed wire have become as common as date palms, and explosions flare like match strikes in the night.

"It`s getting a little better, but you never know when a bandit will get you or a car bomb will go off," said Siham Hussein, who the other day wore an embroidered head scarf and shopped for cameras off Sadoon Street. "The Iraqi feels as if his soul is in a glass bottle. We don`t know who will break the glass and take our lives."

There are no accurate statistics on robberies, kidnappings and other crimes — the police department is only now computerizing its files. The murder rate has dropped significantly since summer but remains 16 times higher than in the months before the U.S. invasion in March. According to the Baghdad morgue, 518 people were killed by firearms in August. That number fell to 258 in November and climbed to 336 in December.

"I want to be optimistic, but when I am, the rate goes up again," said Dr. Faik Amin Bakr, the city`s director of forensic medicine.

Despite such fragility, Iraqis seem to be steeling themselves against crime, venturing into the streets in defiance of danger. Neighborhoods are no longer ghostly at dusk; children stray farther from their mothers. People are putting more trust in the U.S.-trained police force, which under Hussein was rife with corruption and incompetence. There is still talk of officers on the take, but mostly Iraqis are happy to see a flash of blue lights and hear whistles in the traffic.

"There is more tranquillity these days," said Mohammed Ali, owner of a photo shop on Tahrir Square off Sadoon Street. "There are more police in the streets. There is a strengthening bond between the police and the people. I used to close at 4 p.m. Now, I stay open until 8 p.m."

Ali`s neighbor Rashid Qasim Esmail runs a closet-sized camera shop near shoeshine boys. His curious take on crime epitomizes how many Iraqis have come to rationalize the contradictions of life in a perilous land. Rough experience is often tempered by the will to believe that circumstances will improve.

"I feel crime is coming down," he said. "Five months ago, you`d see robberies in the morning, noon and evening. But police are making efforts." He paused. "Ten days ago, I saw two men pull a knife and rob a man right in front of my window. They took his money and his jacket. I didn`t report it to the police because I am afraid of retaliation from these gangs."

Esmail`s door opened. In stepped Abdullah Ali Mohammed, a raconteur with a high-pitched voice and a lot of time on his hands. Mohammed`s store was looted and burned during the war. "April 9, 2003," he said. "I had had it since the 1970s."

The other day he was mugged. "I was hailing a taxicab," he said. "A man stumbled by, pretending to be drunk, and then he stopped and said, `Give me your money.` He had a gun. He took my money but left me 2,000 dinars for the cab…. Police are getting a little better, but still there is trouble."

Across town in the Bayaa district, workmen with bricks and mortar were repairing a police station. Eleven police officers were killed there in late October, when a car bomb exploded, leaving a crater and scattering shrapnel through the neighborhood. The 128 policemen and office staff had nowhere else to go, so they continued working out of a headquarters with shattered walls and no electricity or running water.

Lt. Umar Tariq was happy, though.

Hours earlier, he had shot the leader of a kidnapping gang twice in the leg. It was a small victory for a unit otherwise besieged by criminals and insurgents.

"Gradually, maybe things are getting better," said Maj. Abbas Abidali, who directs the detectives in the community of 600,000. "In June, we sometimes investigated 12 or 13 murders a day. In December, we had six or seven murders the whole month. A lot of them are retaliations against former Hussein loyalists and Baath Party members."

"Only murders are decreasing," said Ali Tahseen, a senior investigator who sat next to Abidali beneath a kerosene lamp. "Robberies and carjackings are almost the same. The police are weak. We don`t have enough supplies. The public is still afraid to cooperate with us. They fear tribalism and retribution."

A file plunked on the desk.

"Look," said Tariq, a stocky man with thick hands and a smooth face. "A guy was killed today in the public market. He was shot four times in the head. He has no identification. We don`t know who he is. The killing happened in a big market, and no one called police to report it. Our traffic police found him."

The detectives in the Bayaa district say that crime has fallen noticeably in the center of Baghdad — near the area known as the "green zone" patrolled heavily by U.S. troops. The criminals, they say, especially gangs of carjackers and bandits, have migrated to outlying neighborhoods. Several police officers said they were stunned by a string of recent attempted bank robberies, a phenomenon that rarely occurred when Hussein`s security and intelligences forces were in power.

"How can I say there is security and safety?" said appliance store owner Amer Abdeen, who carries a Browning pistol on his waist and has hired four guards with Kalashnikovs.

"A gang kidnapped my worker three days ago and wants a $200,000 ransom…. The lack of a regime and stable government has put us in this chaotic situation."

Maj. Ali Adnan of the police internal affairs unit said some crimes are declining because of changing dynamics as Iraqi society opens up to the wider world. The carjacking trend has faded a bit, he said, because cheap cars from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are flooding the market.

"I cannot say the average Iraqi is 100% safe, though," Adnan said.

"There are broken links in the security chain. If you`re waiting in line for hours to buy gas, you get angry. Then you go home to a house with no electricity and your family is complaining. Your hospital is in bad shape. You don`t have a job. All this is building pressure and contributing to our crime."

On Sadoon Street, neon hums in the dusk and boys with trays ferry sugared tea to shop owners. The spice dealers, the chicken roaster and the man selling leather purses and shoes are tending to customers. Music drifts from open windows. The sidewalks are crowded with the poor and the rich, and no one seems in a hurry to go home.

Taha Shariff sits at a small wooden desk scattered with sunflower seeds and a calculator. A money-changer, he is attuned to the street`s changing rhythms.

"It`s 90% better than before," he said.

"I deal in money, and I know that eyes are always on me. But these days I feel safe…. It`s better than the days of Saddam`s regime. If I changed money back then, I`d have had my hands cut off."

*


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Samir Zedan of The Times` Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-speech2…

Es soll ein nicht geliebter Anwärter fertig gemacht werden.

Ich kann nicht finden, das dies ein Wutausbruch ist.

Es ist eine vorschworene Gemeinschaft, die sich gegen Dean verbündet hat, denn er scheint der Einzige zu sein, der etwas ändern will.

Alle anderen sind nichts anderes als die andere Seite einer Madaille.

Obwohl alle, auch Lieberman (demoNeocon), noch besser sind als Bush.

In wie weit die USA änderbar ist, kann ich nicht entscheiden, aber die eingschränkten demokratischen Möglichkeiten des System, scheinen mir keine Möglichkeit zu geben eine grundlegende Änderung der politischen Verhältnisse zu erlauben.

Dabei wollten Ende der 30er in den USA die Gesetzesorgane einmal die 40 Std.-Woche gesetzlich vorschreiben.

Es wird nichts anderes übrig bleiben, den bitteren Weg bis zum Ende mitzugehen, denn keine Mittelmachr hat die Chance sich aus der Verstrickung mit den USA herauszulösen.

Bis dahin lass uns feiern und abräumen, was abzuräumen ist.

Am 30.Mai ist der Weltuntergang, wir leben nicht mehr lang, wie es ein Kölner Philosoph einmal so treffend formuliert hat.

Gottseidank hat er nicht gesagt, welchen 30.Mai er meint.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-dean19-vid…


THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Dean`s Late-Night Battle Cry May Have Damaged Campaign
By Mark Z. Barabak and Faye Fiore
Times Staff Writers

January 22, 2004

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Howard Dean`s overheated concession speech in Iowa may have inflicted irreparable harm on his campaign, intensifying concerns that Vermont`s former governor is prone to outbursts and fits of pique that make him unqualified to be president, analysts said Wednesday.

The image of Dean repeatedly punching the air in a performance some likened to an emotional meltdown has played endlessly on cable news networks and offered instant fodder for late-night comedy monologues.

"He`s a very rational, pleasant human being, but he looked like a rabid dog," said Charlie Cook, publisher of a nonpartisan Washington political newsletter. "To say he appeared unpresidential is an understatement."

The damage was immediately quantifiable. Surveys showed a fall in Dean`s approval ratings and a tightening race in New Hampshire — where he faces a major test Tuesday, when the state hosts the nation`s first presidential primary.

Adding further insult, the medium that had been the most powerful force for delivering his campaign message was being used to mock him Wednesday as samples of his Iowa speech were turned into shrieking soundtracks on the Internet.

Dean, who has been criticized for his peevish personality since his days as Vermont governor, abruptly shifted his style to a more measured approach since arriving here after his third-place finish in Iowa.

Conducting a series of television interviews from Burlington, Vt., Wednesday, the former governor was asked repeatedly about his caucus night speech. Dean defended his tenor, saying he was reaching out to his tireless volunteers.

"There were 3,500 screaming kids in that room who`d worked their hearts out for me in Iowa, all of them waving an American flag," Dean told KWTV in Oklahoma City. "I thought I owed it to them to buck up their spirits and I was pleased that I did."

But the price could be one of those frozen-in-time moments that forever defines his campaign. The round-the-clock broadcasts of that isolated appearance come at a time when many voters nationwide are just tuning in to the election now that the balloting has actually started.

Republicans were delighted, characterizing Dean`s manic performance as everything from wild-eyed to mentally unstable.

"It was hard to watch that scene replayed over and over and not conclude in fact he is an angry guy who may be border-line psychotic," said Don Sipple, a GOP media strategist, foreshadowing a likely Republican line of attack in the fall should Dean emerge as the Democrats` nominee.

"It was one of those defining moments — in a bad way."

Some Dean supporters seemed less upset about his disappointing Iowa finish than his over-caffeinated response afterward. "I am concerned for our candidate. Had he been drinking before he went on stage?" read one posting on his campaign Web log, which has served as both bulletin board and rallying point during his rise from insurgent to leader of the Democratic pack.



Even unfazed loyalists were forced to defend their candidate, as the mood of some campaign supporters plunged from exuberance to shock and dismay.

Indeed, the speech seemed to play well within the fevered confines of the retro disco ballroom of a West Des Moines hotel where Dean spoke soon after the results were known. Some in attendance said they felt the candidate resorted to shouts to be heard over the roar of the crowd.

"Anyone who thinks Dean was over the top last night obviously wasn`t there," wrote one website supporter who was.

But when carried on worldwide television, the speech seemed to cross an invisible line from passion to self-parody.

"If it were a closed room with no cameras and no press, just him and his sort of rambunctious supporters, it would have been totally appropriate," said Cook. "But television is a hot medium, and you can`t do that. I think he badly, badly damaged himself."

There have been other stumbles as Dean has made the transition, sometimes awkwardly, from longshot to leader of the Democratic field. His opponents have seized on several statements in an attempt to question his judgment and leadership capacity — such as his suggestion that Osama bin Laden should not be pre-judged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Dean also appeared to hurt himself with attempts to remake his image to seem more like a standard-issue presidential candidate.

When his lack of public religious faith became an issue, Dean began talking about the Bible, embarrassing himself in the process by mixing up the Old and New Testaments.

When questions arose about the absence of his wife from the campaign trail, Dean first insisted she had her own career as a physician and would never be used as a prop. Then, she was promptly whisked across the country for a cameo appearance on Sunday after the Des Moines Register`s Iowa Poll showed his campaign sinking to third place behind the eventual top finishers, Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina.

During the final days of Iowa campaigning, he traded his suit and tie for an ensemble of sweaters in an attempt to soften his image — contrary to his appeal as the sort of rough-edged candidate who refused to bow to popular whims.

"The guy was presenting himself as unvarnished and it appeared manipulative … it looked like a contrived response," said Dave Nagle, a former Iowa congressman and prominent Dean supporter. "It was a complete change. He started looking like someone dressing up. Or dressing down."

But all of that paled as the image of a screeching Dean became an instant pop culture phenomenon.

By Wednesday, he was a staple of stand-up comedy; a doctored Dean, with his head exploding, made the David Letterman show. Re-mastered versions of his remarks, set to a techno-dance beat — "YEAGH!! WE`RE GOIN` TO CALIFORNIA!" — were circulating worldwide on the Internet.

History is full of presidential candidates sunk by such defining moments, from Michigan Gov. George Romney`s assertion he was brainwashed into supporting the Vietnam War to Edmund Muskie apparently shedding tears over a campaign attack on his wife here, to Bob Dole`s snarling challenge to George H.W. Bush to "stop lying about my record" after losing the 1988 New Hampshire primary.

Dean`s reputation for a volatile temper preceded his White House run. As governor of Vermont, he was known to call into radio talk shows to assail his critics, once taking on a mother on welfare. An aide was finally assigned to sooth the hurt feelings Dean often left behind.

Now, badly in need of a win in New Hampshire to steady his campaign, the question is whether Dean can recover.

"The reaction is emotional with people. It makes them uncomfortable," said Dick Bennett, a Manchester public opinion researcher who has conducted nightly polls that have found Dean`s support slipping in the state.

"Nobody saw Bill Clinton with Gennifer Flowers," he said, referring to allegations of an extramarital affair that nearly sunk Clinton`s 1992 campaign. "But everybody saw or heard Howard Dean. And if they haven`t, they will."

A bit of self-deprecation might go a long way. Clinton recovered from a marathon speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention by lampooning himself on a "Tonight Show" appearance. Former Vice President Al Gore made jokes about the Macarena dance a staple of his stump speeches.

But gleeful Republicans suggested Dean`s image was damaged beyond repair.

"He`ll melt and melt and melt until there is no more Howard Dean," said Sipple, the GOP media strategist.

*


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Times staff writer Matea Gold and researcher Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.



Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL
One Case Scalia Should Skip

January 22, 2004

The federal rules on how U.S. judges should behave are straightforward and reasonable: "A judge should not allow family, social or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment" or "permit others to convey the impression that they are in a special position to influence the judge." Antonin Scalia scoffs at the idea that his hunting trip with friend Dick Cheney might bias the Supreme Court justice when he hears the vice president`s appeal to keep the details of his 2001 energy task-force meetings secret. Scalia may be able to separate friendship from his judicial duty to be fair and impartial. But the appearance of impropriety is no less important, and the duck shoot leaves a dreadful impression.

To be sure, no justice works in a vacuum in Washington; friendship with presidents helped many get appointed to the court. Such personal loyalties were as important in 1801 — when John Adams named his longtime lieutenant, John Marshall, as chief justice — as they are today. Once confirmed, justices serve for decades, deepening their network of rich, powerful friends over White House dinners and on private golf courses. There`s added skepticism, of course, about the independence of this court since its majority put George W. Bush in office with a controversial ruling in Bush vs. Gore.

Inevitably, justices` friends or the presidents who put them on the bench are parties to a pending case. That`s why the highest court — like every other — calls on its members to recuse themselves in instances of conflict of interest or its appearance. Jurists recognize that taking this simple step is their vital responsibility to keep the courts` integrity above reproach. Justice Sandra Day O`Connor, for example, has withdrawn from business cases because she owns stock in a firm. Scalia is properly recusing himself from a Pledge of Allegiance case this term because he appeared to criticize a lower-court ruling on the issue in a speech last year.

His friendship should prompt him to do the same in the Cheney case. On Jan. 5, just three weeks after the court agreed to hear the suit, the two pals hunted ducks for a few days at a private Louisiana camp, as Times staffer David G. Savage reported. It`s worth noting that if Scalia, in misguided fashion, hears this case in April, he will be part of a court that decides whether Cheney violated an open-government law by meeting behind closed doors with lobbyists for the oil, gas, nuclear and coal industries while formulating national energy policy. Scalia bristles at the notion that "my impartiality could reasonably be questioned," but he is smart enough to see that others could conclude otherwise. For the court`s credibility, he should duck out of this case.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Letter from America
Home of the Free survives in spirit of American people
Jan Morris
Sunday, January 18, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/18/INGOO48DT51.DTL



"America thou half-brother," is how the poet Philip Bailey apostrophized the United States in the 1920s, "with something good or bad from every land." Could he say the same today? Something good and bad perhaps, but half-brother? In the first years of the 21st century it has often seemed that America, for so long the glory and the exemplar of humanity, the pride of all the family, has alienated itself even from its most devoted and envious relatives.

Remembering the poet`s words, remembering too my own lifelong affection for the USA, remembering the almost familial welcome that American presidents used to receive around the world and contrasting them with the receptions that George Bush II recently got even in Britain and Australia - contemplating all this, I arrived in the United States at the start of another year wondering how much I would love it still. They talk a lot, the Americans, about hearts and minds. How would my mind, and my heart, respond to the America of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay? "Art thou still there, O my America?" as Bailey, or more probably Walt Whitman, might have cried, if either of them had survived until 2003.

As it happened, the very moment I landed on American soil, at San Francisco International Airport, on a benignly Californian afternoon, an episode occurred which made me wonder if there really had been some organic change in the American Way.

The aircraft stopped on the tarmac, but we were told to stay in our seats, and when the doors opened a posse of large uniformed policemen, heavy with muscle and revolvers, lumbered down the aisle. Without a word of explanation they ordered a fairly unnoticeable couple sitting directly in front of me to collect their hand luggage and go at once with them. The couple looked bewildered -- why us? they seemed to be saying -- and so indeed did everyone else. The episode seemed Stalinist in its speed and mystery, and as the couple were whisked off, hung all about with their hastily assembled possessions, a woman said to me in an undertone: "In this country nowadays, they keep tags on us all."

The Land of the Brave, the Home of the Free? Today`s America is understandably nervous, as the prime enemy of the inchoate forces of terrorism, but there is no escaping the sensation that the interests of the state now command higher priorities than the liberties of the individual.

For me it is no more than a sensation, but it is disturbing all the same to feel that the American republic, that old champion of all our rights, is ready to stand above the law in the pursuit of its policies. Internments without trial, deportations to countries that might oblige with torture as an instrument of interrogation, phone-tapping as a commonplace - all these are part of the stuff of American life today, and the worst of it is the horror of Guantanamo Bay. It would have beggared my belief, 10 years ago, that an American government would be holding prisoners indefinitely, without legal status or representation, without charges, without possibility of appeal in a prison camp in a foreign country.

But then this is now a state that nobody can challenge, and unlimited national power breeds atavistic patriotism. Its images are ugly and unremitting, and very different from the signals that came to us from the cheerful GIs of old. Then when an American soldier gave a child a bar of chocolate, we accepted it as an honest gesture of benevolent intent, on behalf of a nation that was essentially honest and benevolent. Now, when we see on television sinisterly helmeted and gun-heavy American soldiers doing just the same thing in Iraq, we instantly assume it to be a posed incident for the television cameras. And when we see a row of American generals at some function, dear God, how unlovely they look - those paunchy figures festooned with medal ribbons, those heavy unsmiling faces, and behind them on the stage that vast Stars and Stripes to legitimize their style.

They are proper representatives of the American super-state at the apex of its power. In the past this has seemed to me one of the few states whose public character truly matched the character of its people. God knows corruption has been rampant in American public life always, but nevertheless I always felt that in essence the Great Republic genuinely represented the instincts of its people - it truly seemed to me a government of the people, on the whole doing its best to honor the principles of its Constitution and the values of its Founding Fathers.

What has shocked me now is the feeling that the values of the people and the values of the state have grown sadly apart - and that the state has become so nearly synonymous with the very biggest of big business, in unholy alliance with evangelicalism.

Yet the people are the same. Whatever my mind tells me, in my heart I know it. Wherever I have been in America, I have found just the same general kindliness, simplicity and good nature that I have always found. Citizens are as ready as ever they were to express their views freely and frankly.

If it is true that critics of today`s American policies are in a minority, it must be a very substantial minority, because in all parts of the country the press seems perfectly ready to disagree. I was afraid that plain loyalty might have united all Americans behind the values of President Bush, but it has not been so, and I suspect the nation as a whole has never been more divided in its responses to a national crisis.

As always, it is healthily disturbed too in its attitudes to many another public issue. Here are a few subjects of debate that I heard vociferously pursued during my visit: single-sex marriages, fetal abortion, forest protection, capital punishment, religion and the Constitution, the sovereign rights of Native American tribes, whether obesity is a disease or just weakness of character, God, the salaries of football players, the religious convictions of the administration - all endlessly discussed, dissected and argued about.

"This is not a democracy," said a flyer I saw in Concord, Mass., where the American Revolution began, "it`s a corporacy."

This diversity of views, this unceasing clash of opinions, is America`s truest claim to democratic primacy, but of course it does not all spring from intellectual conviction. It has multifarious roots. Ethnicity is one, sectarianism another and the generational gap is inescapable. But at least behind them all is the ineradicable belief, unbroken since the first days of the republic, that speech and belief must be free. "My country right or wrong" was an unworthy American mantra of long ago, and I really do doubt if many Americans, even the most antediluvianly rigid of loyalty, would seriously subscribe to it now.

I write only out of instinct, and from personal experience. But my intuitions tell me that although this unique assembly of people is now more confused and uncertain than I have ever known it, and less confident about its place in the world at large, it is no less generally decent in its values.

When I see Americans place their hands on their hearts to salute the flag, I see no arrogance in the gesture: on the contrary, I find it slightly pathetic -- a token of beliefs and aspirations instilled in every one of them since childhood, or at least since their naturalization inductions -- and I am convinced that the vast majority believe as truly and simply in those values as their predecessors before them, come hell or high water, Saigon or Baghdad or George W. Bush himself.

The American philosopher George Santayana once expressed his opinion about that previous dominatrix of the world, the British Empire. "Never in history," he said, "has the world had such a sweet, just and boyish master." It is hard to see the masters of the Pax Americana in such a light, but this I would say, even now, even in the days of the generals and Guantanamo Bay: Whatever American governments may do, the world is never likely to see a ruling people more genuinely anxious to do the right thing and truly anxious to be loved.

But there is a third corporeal reaction profounder than either the heart`s or the head`s: the reaction of one`s guts. My guts have told me, as I have wandered around the United States, that at once weighed down by its responsibilities and inflated by its self-esteem, this great country has grown old. The visceral excitements I used to get here fail to thrill me now. Other countries feel younger, fitter, more invigorating. The staggering size of it, the wealth, the marvelous confidence and the bravado, now all too often seem overgrown and blowsy - gross in fact.

There is grossly too much of almost everything. There is too much money, too much food, too much choice, too much power, too much capitalism, too much spam on the e-mail, too much consumption. Wal-Mart employs more than a million people, and on one day announced the opening of 43 new stores. Eighty- three TV channels were available in one of my motel rooms. The supermarket Shaw`s in Boston stocks 432 different cheeses. It is has all gone, my entrails tell me, too far. Has capitalist democracy itself gone too far? The archetype of the ideology, this world, this realm, this America, strikes me now as being tired, bloated and a bit bewildered.

Time passes, though. History shifts.

Fifty years ago, when America seemed irredeemably degraded by the odious McCarthy hearings, Judge Felix Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court assured me that the political pendulum would eventually swing, and the republic would recover its old liberal tolerance. He was proved right, and perhaps if not in our own time, then in our grandchildren`s, the Great Republic will once again revert to kind and to principle. Then, please God, we shall once more be able to admire it with our minds, love it with our hearts, and welcome it back to its rightful place in the family of peoples.

America, half-brother, hurry home!

Jan Morris is a noted travel writer and the author of "Pax Britannica: Climax of an Empire." A version of this piece appeared in the Times of London.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

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Thursday, January 22, 2004
War News for January 22, 2004

http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqi policemen killed in attack on police station Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Two US soldiers killed, one wounded in mortar attack near Baquba.

Bring ‘em on: Four Iraqi civilians working for US forces killed in ambush near Fallujah.

Bring ‘em on: Spanish police commander wounded in assassination attempt in Diwaniya.

Bring ‘em on: Iraqi civilian killed by roadside bomb near Kirkuk.

South Africa firm withdraws from Iraqi reconstruction. “Mechem managing director Braam Rossouw said on Wednesday that while ‘landmines will be a problem for a long time to come’, the company decided not to renew its contract after the war ‘because it is currently too dangerous in the country and because of the politically unstable situation.’”

Free market competition in Iraq. “Rival tribes are at loggerheads to secure lucrative contracts for defending a key oil pipeline in northern Iraq, seen as economic salvation in a country where jobs are few and far between.”

CIA report says Iraq is heading toward civil war. “Yesterday`s warning starkly contradicts the upbeat assessment given by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address earlier this week.”

Report from Planet Cheney. “Cheney also said that he’s confident that there was a relationship between al-Qaida and ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration, however, has said in the past that there is no evidence that Saddam was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Commentary

Opinion: Lieutenant AWOL’s patriotic rhetoric. “Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities? Well, no wonder we couldn`t wait for the weapons inspectors to do their job. No wonder hundreds of Americans had to lose their lives. It is just like the Bush administration has said from day one: Saddam was harboring weapons of mass destruction -related program activities, and we cannot allow related program activities to fall into the wrong hands...Bush also threatened to put a heterosexual-only definition of marriage in the Constitution. This is a historic idea, since it would be the first time something was added to the Constitution in order to advance discrimination rather than stop it.”

Casualty Reports

Local story: Washington State soldier wounded in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.






# posted by yankeedoodle : 8:24 AM
Comment (1)

[Joerver]

Published on Thursday, January 22, 2004 by Knight-Ridder
CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush`s Optimism
by Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay

WASHINGTON - CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers` bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq`s Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned.

Meanwhile, Iraq`s Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now`s their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don`t get what they want now, they`ll probably never get it. Both of them feel they`ve been betrayed by the United States before."

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity.

Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren`t confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council.

Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit strategy after concluding that Iraq`s most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for elections for an interim assembly that would choose an interim government by June 30.

Bremer would then hand over power to the interim government.

The CIA hasn`t yet put its officers` warnings about a potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior official said he expected a formal report "momentarily."

"In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days, several very bad possibilities have been outlined," he said.

Bush, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, insisted that an insurgency against the U.S. occupation, conducted primarily by minority Sunni Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein, "will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom."

"Month by month, Iraqis are assuming more responsibility for their own security and their own future," the president said.

Bush didn`t directly address the crisis over the Shiites` political demands.

Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south to the borders of Kuwait and Iran, comprise some 60 percent of Iraq`s 25 million people.

Several U.S. officials acknowledged that Sistani is unlikely to be "rolled," as one put it, and as a result Bremer`s plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty and ending the U.S. occupation by June 30 is in peril.

The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council, calls for caucuses in each of Iraq`s 18 provinces to choose the interim national assembly, which would in turn select Iraq`s first post-Saddam government.

The first direct elections wouldn`t be held until the end of 2005.

In an interview with Knight Ridder on Wednesday, a top cleric in the Shiite holy city of Najaf appeared to confirm the fears of potential civil war.

"Everything has its own time, but we are saying that we don`t accept the occupiers getting involved with the Iraqis` affairs," said Sheikh Ali Najafi, whose father, Grand Ayatollah Bashir al Najafi, is, along with Sistani, one of the four most senior clerics. "I don`t trust the Americans - not even for one blink."

If the United States went ahead with the caucus plan and ended the military occupation, the interim government wouldn`t last long, he said.

"The Iraqi people would know how to deal with those people," he said, smiling. "They would kick them out."

U.S. and British officials hinted Wednesday that they might bow to the demand for some kind of elections, after saying for weeks that holding free and fair elections in time for the handover of sovereignty would be impossible.

"We`ve always favored elections," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said after he and other top Bush aides briefed senators. "The only question is - the tension was, if your goal is to get sovereignty passed to the Iraqis so that they feel they have a stake in their future, can you do it faster with caucuses or can you do it faster with elections?"

Rumsfeld was responding to comments by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who opened the door Wednesday to elections in Iraq earlier than planned.

"The discussion, which has been stimulated by Ayatollah Sistani, is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process," Straw said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"We have to work with great respect for him and similar leaders," he said. "We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them."

Shiite clerics have become more forceful in their denunciation of the caucus plan and have organized increasingly large, albeit peaceful, demonstrations demanding elections.

State Department officials said no changes to the Bremer plan are being formally considered. They said much depends on the findings of a U.N. assessment team that the Bush administration has asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send to examine the feasibility of elections.

One option being informally discussed is to delay the transfer of power until later in 2004, which might give the United Nations time to organize some sort of elections, said one official.

But that is almost certain to be opposed by White House political aides who want the occupation over and many U.S. troops gone by this summer to bolster Bush`s re-election chances, the official said.

"It`s all politics right now," he said.

Other options are to go ahead with the June 30 turnover as planned, whatever the fallout, or to accelerate it by handing over power to the Iraqi Governing Council in March or April, he said.

Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondents Tom Lasseter in Najaf, Iraq, and Joseph L. Galloway and John Walcott in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Knight-Ridder

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Released: January 20, 2004
As Democrats Vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, President Bush Looks Vulnerable in Both His Re-Elect and Face-Off with Generic Democrat; Bush’s Job Performance 49% Positive, 50% Negative; Democrats Lead Over Republicans in Congressional Generic, New Zogby International Poll Reveals



President George W. Bush’s job performance has dropped since mid- December, while his vulnerability increases when matched against an unnamed Democrat or when respondents are asked if he should be re-elected.

The most recent Zogby America poll of 1000 likely voters chosen at random was conducted January 15-18, 2004 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.2 percentage points. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, and gender to more accurately reflect the voting population.Margins are higher in sub-groups.

http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=786

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Lord of the Rings Flash animation. It deserves to win an award


http://flash.bushrecall.org/

"President Bush gave his State of the Union speech. I think he is getting a little cocky. Instead of playing Hail to the Chief, he was lowered to the podium to `We are the Champions.`" —Craig Kilborn

"Earlier tonight, all of the television networks covered President Bush`s annual State of the Union address. It was a real crowd pleaser; Bush promised 16 new contracts to Halliburton." —David Letterman

[Bodin1]

Pr. Bush..........der Mann kann singen


http://www.radio-relax.cz/redakce/vdisk/files/BushBlair.mpg

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Bedrohliches Defizit (Demokraten), tolerables Defizit (Republikaner)
von Edward S. Herman
ZNet Kommentar 16.01.2004

Eines der beredtesten Beispiele, wenn es um die Macht geht, die die Unternehmergemeinde über Politik und Medien hat, ist der unterschiedliche Umgang mit von Demokraten produzierten Defiziten und von Republikanern produzierten. Die Unternehmergemeinde misstraut den Demokraten denn die Wählerschaft der Demokraten liegt zu einem großen Teil außerhalb der Geschäftswelt - dabei sind die Demokraten zunehmend aufseiten der Unternehmer, sie legen sich mächtig ins Zeug, der Geschäftswelt ihre Verlässlichkeit in wichtigen Business-Fragen unter Beweis zu stellen. In der Vergangenheit haben die Demokraten Dinge geleistet, die ihrer sozialen Unterstützer-Basis (sehr zu unterscheiden von ihrer finanziellen Basis) zugutekamen - manchmal tun sie es sogar noch heute. Aufgrund dessen haftet den Demokraten das Etikett ‘Steuern und Ausgaben’ an. Ständig stehen sie unter Druck, die Ausgaben für die Masse ihrer Wählerschaft einzuschränken. Aus diesem Grund werden Defizite, die durch die Partei der unsicheren Kantonisten (Demokraten) produziert werden, als bedrohlich betrachtet - man fürchtet aus dem Ruder laufende Haushalte und Inflation.

Die Republikaner hingegen sind die Ur-Partei der Geschäftswelt. Ihnen traut die Unternehmergemeinde zu, ihre Interessen zu vertreten. Produzieren Republikaner an der Macht fiskalische Defizite, dann mit ziemlicher Sicherheit durch regressiv wirkende Steuersenkungen und vermehrte Ausgaben im Interesse der Unternehmen - siehe Militärausgaben, die zu hohen Einnahmen für Lockheed und Konsorten führen und siehe Imperialkriege, die Türen für Märkte öffnen und Ressourcen erobern, die die Privilegierten ausbeuten können, Kriege, die auch ablenken von einer Innenpolitik, die sich auf die Mehrheit verheerend auswirkt. Republikanische Defizite gelten als tolerierbar - es bestehe keine Gefahr, dass Haushalte aus dem Ruder laufen oder die Inflation ansteigt. Der Mainstream etikettiert die Republikaner nicht als Partei, ‘die fette Katzen füttert, Steuern streicht und das Defizit aufbläht’ - jedenfalls nicht vernehmbar. 1988 hat der CEO (Geschäftsführer) von Citicorp, Walter Wriston, das gewaltige Defizit der Reagan-Jahre heruntergespielt - ein Defizit, das die Staatsverschuldung während Ronald Reagans Amtszeit verdreifachte. Wriston argumentierte: Man muss unterscheiden zwischen einem Kapitalbudget und dem laufenden Haushalt. Normale Haushalte würden das (eigene) Haus ja auch nicht als laufende Ausgabe behandeln. Also bestehe kein Grund zur Sorge, das “laufende Budget ist ja fast ausgeglichen”. Ganz anders 1978, als der Demokrat Jimmy Carter Präsident war. Damals war Wriston der Meinung, dass Staatsdefizite zustandekommen, weil “vorhandenes Kapital dem produktiven privaten Investitionsbereich vorenthalten wird, um damit öffentliche Ausgaben zu finanzieren. Dieser Trend ist nur durch eine Reduktion des Staatsdefizits umkehrbar”. Bei Demokraten spielt der Unterschied zwischen Kapitalbudget und laufendem Haushalt also keine Rolle! Die Ironie: Zum einen war das Haushaltsdefizit Jimmy Carters relativ gering, zum andern war Reagans Defizit unter anderem dadurch zustandegekommen, dass er Steuersenkungen und Militärausgaben finanzierte - zu Lasten sowohl des öffentlichen als auch des privaten Kapitalwachstums; beides wurde in den Reagan-Jahren gebremst.

‘Steuern-und-Ausgaben’-Demokraten wie Carter und Clinton standen unter beständigem Druck, ihre Ausgaben zu beschränken und das Haushaltsdefizit so gering wie möglich zu halten bzw. ein Defizit ganz zu vermeiden, hatten sie der Geschäfts- und Finanzwelt doch zu beweisen, dass sie nicht den populistischen Weg gehen und im Interesse der Allgemeinheit der Bürger handeln - anstatt in gefährliche, gigantische Verschwendervorhaben wie ‘Star Wars’ zu investieren bzw. in ähnlich militärisch-imperiale Projekte. Paul Krugman schrieb: “Wenn Konservative über “aus dem Ruder laufende Regierungsausgaben” lästern, sprechen sie, im Falle Kaliforniens, von dem Versuch, ein paar mehr Lehrer einzustellen und heruntergekommene Schulgebäude zu reparieren”. Was den ‘Steuer-und-Ausgaben’-Demokraten zudem Sorgen bereitete, war die neue Macht der Finanzgemeinde - mächtig genug, Dollarflucht zu begehen, mit all den negativen Folgen bezüglich Inflation und Zinsen. Reagan, Bush 1 und Bush 2 hingegen hatten in dieser Hinsicht wenig zu befürchten. Man vertraute ihnen. Also konnten sie gewaltige Defizite anhäufen, um in Unproduktives (und Destruktives) zu investieren bzw. um Steuerkürzungen für ihre finanziellen Unterstützer durchzuziehen, und das furchtlos und ohne nennenswert angegriffen zu werden. Interessant mitanzusehen, wie es “Konservativen” à la Reagan und Bush 2 möglich war, wie die Verrückten in Militärprojekte zu investieren und dabei immense Defizite zu produzieren, während Clinton die Ausgaben kürzte und im Prinzip drei Jahre einen Haushaltsüberschuss vorweisen konnte, ohne dass sich die Sicht des Mainstream dadurch. Demokraten - das waren nunmal die Verschwender, die unverantwortlich mit Steuergeldern umgehen, die Republikaner hingegen die Steuer-Konservativen. Hier zeigt sich übrigens eine Parallele zur Akzeptanz Bushs des Zweiten als Superprotektor der nationalen Sicherheit der USA. Dabei ist Bush primärverantwortlich für die Sicherheitslücke des 11. September bzw. dafür, dass wir heute mit jedem Tag unsicherer leben. Diese Orwell’sche Sicht der Dinge hängt mit den Diensten zusammen, die Bush 2 - und vor ihm Reagan - für wichtige Leute und wichtige Interessen leistet/leistete. Clintons Schwerpunkt lag auf Haushaltskonsolidierung - noch bevor er ins Amt kam. Von seiner Agenda, “die Menschen in den Mittelpunkt stellen” (putting people first) rückte er ab, befürchtend, jede populistische Handlung würde durch die Aktienhändler bestraft - und das zu einem Zeitpunkt, als das Land gerade mühsam dem Rezessionsloch entkroch. Clinton handelte konträr zu einer vernünftigen Fiskalpolitik. Diese hätte bei dieser Ausgangslage nach mehr Staatsausgaben verlangt, nach Steuererleichterungen und einem größeren Defizit. Aber Clinton hatte Glück. Andere Faktoren retteten ihn. Die Rezession lief aus, es kam zu einer Expansion. (Zu diesen Faktoren) zählten Lohnstabilität, aufgrund einer geschwächten Arbeiterbewegung (und Clinton scheiterte daran, sie zu stärken), relativ ‘leichtes Geld’ von Alan Greenspan - was wahrscheinlich mit der damaligen Blase am Aktienmarkt zusammenhing, die seinen Freunden sehr nützte. Auf der Strecke blieben - “die Menschen”; Clinton kürzte die Staatsausgaben im Bereich Bildung und Armutsbekämpfung. Und er verzichetete auf dringend nötige Ausgaben im Bereich Umwelt und der Infrastruktur zugunsten eines ausgeglichenen Haushalts. Clinton und seine Mitstreiter - die ‘New Democrats’ - waren so verliebt in einen ausgeglichenen Haushalt und eine Reduktion der Schulden, dass Clinton und Gore sogar schworen, die Staatsschulden auf Null zurückzufahren - ein gegen die Menschen gerichtetes Ziel und makropolitisch eine Eselei, aber immerhin war es ihnen so möglich, der Finanzwelt zu beweisen, dass die ‘New Democrats’ keine Populisten sind.

Auf den ersten Blick könnte man meinen, Bush 2 habe zu Beginn makropolitisch die traditionellen Keynes-Regeln befolgt, indem er derart massiv Steuern senkte - mitten in einer Rezession. Dem war allerdings nicht so. Der Großteil seiner Steuerkürzungen war operativ (laufend), mit einer Verzögerung, die die Kürzungen zu einem untauglichen Mittel zur Bekämpfung der herrschenden Rezession machte. Mit den Steuersenkungen wurde ganz klar die Absicht verfolgt, den überwiegend reichen Leuten, die von ihnen profitieren zu nützen und das neue rechte und reaktionäre Ziel, nämlich den Staat zurückzudrängen (natürlich nur im zivilen Bereich - nicht, was seine militärischen und polizeilichen Funktionen angeht) zu befördern. Sowohl Reagan als auch Bush 2 produzierten massiv strukturelle Defizite - Defizite, an denen sich auch bei Vollbeschäftigung nichts ändern wird. Die Staatsverschuldung wird kontinuierlich weiterwachsen. Offensichtlich bestünde die Kur in einer Erhöhung der Steuern, um die Wirkung der schon erfolgten - unverantwortlichen und reaktionären - Steuersenkungen (Bush 2 hat uns drei davon beschert) zu neutralisieren. Aber die maßgeblichen Leute - die Geschäfts- und Finanzwelt - die von den Steuerkürzungen profitierten, opponieren gegen Steuererhöhungen. Viele von ihnen sehen es zudem ganz gern, wenn der Haushalt der Zivilgesellschaft weiter zusammengestrichen wird. So kommt es, dass die Option ‘Steuererhöhung’ für die Konzernmedien und die ‘New Democrats’ keine ist. Übrig bleiben weitere Kürzungen - Kürzungen zu Lasten der Zivilgesellschaft. Bei den Schwächsten fängt man an (schwarze Mütter auf Sozialhilfe), und macht von da weiter.

Man kann sagen, der sogenannte “Konservative” Bush verwandelte einen $230 Milliarden Überschuss der Clinton-Ära (Etikett: ‘Steuern und Ausgaben’) in ein $450 Milliardenloch. Zudem baute Bush in das fiskalische System ein gewaltiges Defizit ein und zwar strukturell. Dieses Defizit wird bezüglich der Staatsausgaben zu einem langfristigen Haushaltsloch von rund 25% führen. Laut jüngsten Schätzungen des Kongress-‘Budget-Office’ würde eine Fortsetzung der Bush-Politik die nationale Verschuldung bis Ende Fiskaljahr 2013 auf das Dreifache - auf 10 Billionen Dollar - hochtreiben, wie unter dem “Konservativen” Ronald Reagan. Ein Großteil dieses Anstiegs wäre Steuerkürzungen geschuldet - Steuerkürzungen, die im wesentlichen zum Vorteil der oberen Einkommensbezieher und der Unternehmen sind. Und natürlich geht ein großer Batzen der defizit-fördernden Ausgaben an jene Instrumente des Todes, in die unsere Schutz-des-Lebens-Regierung so verliebt ist. Das Finanz-Desaster - Bushs Werk - ist derart krass und bedrohlich, dass selbst viele Konservative - nicht zu verwechseln mit reaktionären Republikanern, die nur auf das schnelle Geld aus sind -, inzwischen gequält aufschreien (siehe Cato, die ‘Concord Coalition’) - auch maßgebliche Leute der Mainstream-Medien übrigens. Manche von ihnen verlieren inzwischen mehr Worte darüber als die Demokraten. Deren Feigheit scheint einfach grenzenlos. Aber angesichts der Dimension der Bedrohung fällt dieser Aufschrei zu gering aus - viel zu gering, um auf die Politik durchzuschlagen.

Wenn uns die Krise erreicht, wird die “konservative” Seite darauf drängen, die Sozial- und Krankenversicherung anzugreifen, Medicaid (medizinische Hilfe für Bedürftige) sowie jede andere Form der Hilfe für Arme, die noch geblieben ist. Folge: noch mehr ernsthafte politische Probleme. Da ist etwa die Mittelklasse. Schon jetzt schmerzhaft betroffen von Downsizing und Kürzungen, vom zunehmenden Outsourcing der White-Collar-Jobs und der bedrohten Situation der betrieblichen Renten- und Krankenkassen -, könnte sie politisch alarmiert und wütend werden. Soziale Instabilität ist eine weitere wahrscheinliche Folge der Politik Bushs und der Konzerne. Es besteht die definitive Möglichkeit, dass der globale Geldmarkt das Vertrauen in ein solventes Amerika verliert und dollarflüchtig wird - mit allen ernstzunehmenden Konsequenzen im Hinblick auf Zinsen und die Stabilität der Makroökonomie. Natürlich applaudiert der “Markt” Bushs ständigen mutigen Bemühungen zu seinem Nutzen - das heißt kurzfristig. Langfristig könnte der “Markt” Bushs aggressive Imperial-Strategie und seine geisteskranke innenpolitische Steuer- und Ausgabenpolitik (Schwachsinn finanzieren, während man Dienstleistungen für die Menschen kürzt) und seine Defizit-Politik jedoch als unerträglich empfinden. An diesem Punkt könnte es zu einer Entscheidung kommen: Entweder, man schafft einen Polizeistaat, mit allem was dazugehört, der “Stabilität” gewährleitstet - oder man enteignet die geisteskranke herrschende Clique.





[ Übersetzt von: Andrea Noll | Orginalartikel: " Deficits that Menace (Democratic) and Deficits That Are Tolerable (Republican)" ]

[Joerver]

Published on Thursday, January 22, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
State of the Union 2004 Myth and Reality
by Rahul Mahajan

Viele Links:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0122-02.htm

George W. Bush`s most recent state of the union address didn`t contain the caliber of bald-faced, smoking-gun lies that we have come to expect from him, like the "sixteen words" in the last one (about Iraq supposedly seeking uranium from "Africa"), but it was certainly replete with dishonesty and misrepresentation.

Disclaimer: The author in no way undertakes to assure that the examples of dishonesty presented below constitute an exhaustive list.

Bush said:

As we gather tonight, hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to the violent, they are making America more secure.

Response:

Interesting phrasing. "Delivering justice to the violent." It reminds me of Bush`s epitaph on Uday and Qusay Hussein, that "their violent careers ended in justice" a remark that prompted commentators all over the world to add, "Yes, Texas justice." Assassination, search-and-destroy missions, a new global Gulag Archipelago, and war, whatever else they may be, are not exactly synonymous with "justice."

Bush said:

Americans are proving once again to be the hardest working people in the world.

Response:

There are many hard-working people in the world. But it is indisputably true that Americans are working harder than before. And this administration last year spearheaded attempted legislation that, according to the Economic Policy Institute, would deprive eight million workers of their right to overtime pay (http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/briefingpapers_flsa_jun03)… That legislation didn`t go through and the administration is now pushing a new plan that has similar problems. They are also advising employers on how to avoid paying overtime to employees who would qualify for it under the new legislation (http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/politics/story/1104741p-7727826…

Bush said:

The first to see our determination were the Taliban, who made Afghanistan the primary training base of al-Qaida killers. As of this month, that country has a new constitution, guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women. Businesses are opening, health care centers are being established, and the boys and girls of Afghanistan are back in school. With help from the new Afghan Army, our coalition is leading aggressive raids against surviving members of the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The truth:

The 15 children killed in a single U.S. bombing incident in November and the numerous others killed in "search-and-destroy" missions are not in school. And, contrary to the impression he wishes to give, the United States has done virtually nothing to reconstruct Afghanistan (http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1084772,0…

Bush said:

Since we last met in this chamber, combat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations, ended the rule of Saddam Hussein - and the people of Iraq are free. Having broken the Baathist regime, we face a remnant of violent Saddam supporters. Men who ran away from our troops in battle are now dispersed and attack from the shadows.

The truth:

There is no U.N. resolution calling for "regime change" in Iraq. There is also no U.N. resolution authorizing the war.

Tariq Ali quotes Iraqi sources as saying there are over 40 factions in the Iraqi resistance, only a few of them Ba`athist or Saddam loyalist (http://www.counterpunch.org/ali11042003.html).

Bush said:

Our forces are on the offensive, leading over 1,600 patrols a day, and conducting an average of 180 raids every week. We are dealing with these thugs in Iraq, just as surely as we dealt with Saddam Hussein`s evil regime.

Response:

These 180 raids per week make enemies of at least 1000 Iraqi families every week. Instead of knocking on the door and asking for a suspect, as would be standard in police operations, they start by breaking down the door. Then they raid the house, violate people`s (especially women`s) privacy, throw people down on the ground and humiliate them, and, according to Iraqi human rights workers, in virtually every raid they steal money and jewelry. Numerous eyewitness accounts of cases where people were shot when their homes were raided indicate that soldiers don`t even offer them medical attention until after they have searched the house.

Bush said:

The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right. And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right.

The truth:

In Baghdad, at least, there is no "building a new Iraq." After the much greater destruction of the Gulf War, under sanctions so that no foreign parts were available, the government of Iraq restored power and telecommunications in three to four months. Here, after nine months of occupation, no one has even swept up the rubble from bombed-out buildings in Baghdad. Electricity is at prewar capacity, in a country crippled by twelve years of sanctions and constant cannibalization of parts. Doctors at several hospitals that we visited had no hesitation in characterizing the situation as significantly worse than it was under Saddam and the sanctions. They also said that they are still getting the Saddam-era medical stocks; no new supplies are being disbursed. There are shortages of basic antibiotics, operations have to be cancelled because of a lack of oxygen, and for lack of a few thousand dollars worth of equipment, doctors at Kadhimiyya Teaching Hospital often have sewage backing up on the floors of their operating theatre.

Bush said:

Last January, Iraq`s only law was the whim of one brutal man. Today our coalition is working with the Iraqi Governing Council to draft a basic law, with a bill of rights.

Response:

One of the laws of the "brutal man" involved extremely light sentences for so-called "honor killings." The incidence of these killings has increased since the war, but the CPA has not changed this law, so there is basically no prosecution of these crimes. It`s not because the CPA is shy about changing laws with a stroke of his pen, Bremer bestowed the flat tax on Iraq. Liberating women just isn`t one of his priorities.

Bush said:

We are working with Iraqis and the United Nations to prepare for a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty by the end of June. As democracy takes hold in Iraq, the enemies of freedom will do all in their power to spread violence and fear.

The truth:

The so-called "transfer of sovereignty" has been described by many political analysts in Iraq as a "transfer from the right pocket to the left pocket." The CPA is giving no power and no resources to the current interim Iraqi government, which shows how serious it is about that transfer. The Iraqi police, beyond being used as "human shields" by coalition forces, have no discernible function. When we met with the Baghdad chief of police, who had just returned from two weeks in Tunisia, there was not a single piece of paper on his desk, nor even empty "in" and "out" boxes for files and memos. After two weeks gone from his post, he had nothing better to do than meet with us for an hour and we terminated the interview. The Iraqi Minister of Electricity has said on national TV that he has no money with which to fix the electrical power problem.

Bush said:

Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible - and no one can now doubt the word of America.

The truth:

Because of the sanctions and inspections, Iraq disarmed. In fact, it`s likely that after 1991 it had no WMD worth mentioning (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60340-2004Jan6). Libya had been moving toward a rapprochement with the United States for years (see, e.g., The Colonel in His Labyrinth, Milton Viorst, Foreign Affairs, March, 1999 / April, 1999, p. 60) and this deal could easily have been attained by an offer to lift the U.N. and U.S. sanctions on Libya without need of a war on Iraq. Libya`s situation was desperate; among other things, its oil pumping capacity had fallen by a factor of two because of a lack of investment.

Nobody now doubts the threats of America. For a bully, perhaps there is no difference between that and the word of America. The latter is doubted severely. An interesting example when Turkey was haggling with the United States over the price of cooperation in the war on Iraq (this was before the parliament decided not to ratify the agreement). After turning town $26 billion over several years, Turkey agreed to $15 billion mostly up-front as Paul Krugman pointed out ("Threats, Promises, and Lies," February 25, 2003, New York Times, (http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0225-02.htm), the reason is that the Turks, seeing the administration`s unkept promises on other things like AIDS spending, didn`t trust in anything but cash on the barrelhead. And Turkey has been a close ally of the United States for nearly 60 years.

And let`s not even talk about the "word of America" when it comes to lies about Iraq`s WMD.

Bush said:

America is committed to keeping the world`s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world`s most dangerous regimes.

Response:

Iraq, Iran, and North Korea haven`t invaded anyone in a long time. Unfortunately, we are not committed to keeping "the world`s most dangerous weapons" out of the hands of the most genuinely dangerous regime, which has fought two wars in the past three years, in addition to minor things like trying to topple the elected leader of Venezuela.

Bush said:

We are seeking all the facts - already the Kay report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.

The truth:

Bush`s weasel words, like "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities," tell the whole story here. Kay`s Iraq Survey Group has found no weapons and Kay has apparently quit in disgust (http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNe… In fact, the United States has concealed more about Iraq`s weapons programs from the U.N. than Iraq did remember the 12,000-page report Iraq submitted on December 7, 2002, which was carefully pruned down to under 4000 pages before the administration allowed everyone to see it?

Perhaps the most naked display of unilateral arrogance, even more so than the war on Iraq itself, was the fact that, after the war, the United States violated UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which had been passed at its own behest, by preventing U.N. weapons inspectors from returning to Iraq to finish the job. No explanation was ever given for substituting a U.S. team, under the control of the U.S. military, for the existing UNMOVIC and IAEA teams.

Bush said:

From the beginning, America has sought international support for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we have gained much support. There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.

The truth:

Yes, the United States sought international support, according to the famous doctrine revealed in 1994 by Madeleine Albright "We will act multilaterally when we can, unilaterally as we must" and again in 2001 by Donald Rumsfeld "the mission determines the coalition and we must not let the coalition determine the mission." In other words, the United States decided what is to be done and tries to browbeat others into acquiescence or agreement. And, of course, the implication that most of the world was with us, with a handful of exceptions (read France), is just the opposite of the truth only four countries sent troops to the war, and of them, Poland and Australia were definitely acting against the will of a majority of their people. Worldwide, opinion was almost uniform in condemning the war as an imperialist adventure.

Bush said:

I will send you a proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, free markets, free press and free labor unions in the Middle East.

Response:

This is not exactly what the NED does. In fact, it is involved with the subversion and manipulation of free elections and the replacement of free labor unions with corporate ones. In recent years, the NED manipulated the 2000 elections in Yugoslavia with roughly $20 million, a huge amount by Yugoslav standards and far more than the minuscule contributions from China that caused such a huge furor in 1996 in the United States; and spent $877,000 to bring coup plotters in Venezuela together, leading to the April 11, 2002, attempted coup against the democratically elected Hugo Chavez.

Bush said:

And jobs are on the rise.

Response:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in December 2003, 1,000 new jobs were created. The unemployment rate fell because 309,000 people, discouraged by the almost total lack of prospects, gave up on searching for jobs. Over 2 million jobs have been lost under Bush.

Bush said:

To protect the doctor-patient relationship, and keep good doctors doing good work, we must eliminate wasteful and frivolous medical lawsuits.

Response:

Taking advantage of the catastrophic state of health care in the United States to once again push the corporate impunity program known as "tort reform." The objective is not to reduce the financial load on doctors, but to reduce the load on insurance companies.

Bush said:

So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough and to get rid of steroids now.

Response:

Finally. The truly important issues. Imagine the courage involved in taking such a controversial stand.

Bush said:

This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into society. We know from long experience that if they can`t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit more crimes and return to prison. So tonight, I propose a four-year, $300 million Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative to expand job training and placement services, to provide transitional housing, and to help newly released prisoners get mentoring, including from faith-based groups. America is the land of the second chance - and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

Response:

This is truly brilliant. I can`t remember the last time a Democratic presidential candidate (except for Kucinich and Sharpton) actually talked about the crying need to rehabilitate ex-prisoners. At one stroke, Bush paints himself as far more liberal, and compassionate, than the Democratic mainstream. Just three little problems: First, he seems to want to use government money to put ex-prisoners at the mercy of "faith-based groups." I suppose that`s one way to recruit for the Christian Coalition. Second, with the economy shedding jobs like there`s no tomorrow, how exactly is he going to get work for ex-prisoners? Third, does anyone really believe this will happen? Does anyone remember the Freedom Corps, inaugurated with such stirring words in the 2002 SOU address?

Rahul Mahajan is an author and antiwar activist. His most recent book, "Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond," has been called "essential for those who wish to continue to fight against empire." He has just started to publish Empire Notes, http://www.empirenotes.org, which will provide up-to-date commentary on the American Empire and related issues. He can be reached at [e-mail]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

The Real State of the Union

So what’s the good news George? Homelessness increased 50% in three years, poverty increased again in 2003, and more children are going hungry. 502 soldiers died in Iraq, and 100 soldiers have now died in Afghanistan. Is there any good news?

By Jay Shaft

01/22/04: (Coalition For Free Thought In Media) George Bush went on TV Tuesday night and told us all how good it is in America thanks to all the things he has done. He painted a rosy picture of economic recovery, renewed prosperity, new job growth, and many victories in the war on terror.

The facts he presented to America did not even remotely resemble the true facts behind the greatest crisis America has ever faced. No matter how he described the current situation in America, nothing he said came close to the truth about the real state of the union.

The facts Bush used to show how great we are doing are just so many more lies and deceptions on top of an already long list of betrayals and deceits that he has committed against the country as a whole.

Let’s forget for a moment any myths the current administration is trying to get us to swallow. Let’s instead look at the real facts and figures that every American should be aware of. Let’s look at the current poverty rate, job situation, economic forecast, rise in the homeless population, and decline of our whole system of government.

I am going to present the true facts from both government and private organizations. I will let you be the judge of the current state of the union after you have seen the stark, cold facts of how bad it really has become in our great nation.

Poverty Rates Soar Under Bush

Let’s start with the increase in the poverty levels in the first three years of the Bush administration. Since 2001 there has been at least an 8% rise in the number of families living in poverty. Since 2001 many social service agencies and government agencies have reported a 25-30% increase in the amount of families reporting their income as being within borderline poverty levels.

According to federal guidelines the poverty level for a family of four is income under $18,400 a year. For a single person the poverty level is income under $8,980 a year. For a single parent with one child the poverty level is $12,120. Federal guidelines state that borderline poverty levels are an average income of within $200 a month of the poverty level.

With the economic downturn of the past few years, unemployment and underemployment are higher than they have been in nearly a decade. The number of children living in low-income families is going up every month.

Low income is defined as up to twice the federal poverty level, or $36,800 for a family of four.

There are at least 26.5 million children living in low-income families. Children represent a disproportionate share of the poor in the United States; they are 25.6% of the total population, but 36.9% of the poor population.

As low-income families increase their earnings, they rapidly lose eligibility for assistance such as childcare subsidies and health benefits. It is not until a two-parent family of four reaches roughly $36,500 a year in income that parents can provide the basic necessities for their children. That’s double the federal poverty level.

There is a very in-depth report called Parental Employment in Low-Income Families that was released by the National Center for Children in Poverty - http://www.nccp.org/pub_pel04.html#note1. This report has a breakdown of income levels, work records, and some solutions to the problem of children living in low-income families.

The poverty rate in 2000 was 11.3%, but there was a huge gap between minority and non-minority incomes. The poverty rate for African-Americans was 23.6% compared to 7.7% for whites, with an overall rate for minorities that was three times higher on a national average. The 2000 figures were the lowest in recorded history and indicated the trend of yearly decreases in poverty starting in 1993.

In 2001 the poverty rate went up to 11.7%, with a general decrease in median income for the first time in 8 years. In 2001 there were 32.9 million people in poverty, an increase of 1.3 million from 2000.

At first this small rise in poverty did not get much notice, but it affected large segments of the population, regardless of race, or economic class. In 2001 there were 6.8 million families living in poverty. There were 13.4 million people living in severe poverty, which means they make less than half of the federal poverty level.

This was just the first sign of the looming economic crisis under the Bush administration. It was initially blamed on an economic slowdown that began under Bill Clinton. The actual recession did not start until March of 2001.

The poverty rate went up to 12.1% in 2002, with 1.7 million new cases equaling 34.6 million people living in poverty. In 2002 there were 7.2 million families living in poverty. There were 14.1 million people living in severe poverty. There were an additional 12.5 million people living just above the borderline of poverty in 2002, the same amount as in 2001. http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/poverty02/pov02hi.html

The poverty rate increased in the Midwest in 2002, accounting for all the increase in cases of poverty. The poverty rates for the rest of the country did not increase in 2002. The Midwest has been the hardest hit by the poverty increases of the last three years

There were over 14 million children living in poverty in 2002. Estimates for 2003 put the amount of children in poverty at over 15.5 million. There were at least another one million children who slipped into poverty in 2003. Official government figures have not been released yet, but many private agency reports and surveys have been.

There are no exact figures for the poverty increase in 2003, but initial reports have pointed to a 13-13.5% rate of poverty for 2003. The government figures will not be out until September 2004, but many private agencies have complied shocking figures when it comes to new cases of poverty.

Many agencies I spoke to are estimating between 13-13.5% poverty rates for 2003. Figures for the first six months of 2003 have already shown that the poverty rate is at least 12.5-13%.

It certainly looks like these figures are accurate. While unemployment has not risen, many people are now working for temporary employment agencies or for day labor agencies. After losing full time employment many workers turn to temp agencies and day labors when they are not able to find another full time job.

Social service agencies and agencies that provide aid to the poor and low income reported a 20% or greater increase in requests for services in 2003. The homeless rate went up by 17-22% in all reporting cities this year, and the growth rate of poverty usually reflects any increase in homelessness.

In 2003 41% of households with children reported one or more of the three targeted housing problems: crowded housing, physically inadequate housing, or paying more than 30% of the household income for rent, mortgage, or housing costs. In 2003 6.9 million low income households paid more than 50% of their household income towards rent or house payments. US HUD has stated that a household should not have housing costs that exceed 30% of total household income. (US Housing and Urban Development)

I have contacted social service agencies in 15 major US cities. All have recorded an increase in the amount of children with families reporting their income as being below the poverty level.

Every agency I spoke to stated that there was at least a 20% increase in the amount of families reporting their income as below poverty level. Some of the agencies I talked to have charted a 40-50% increase in clients reporting poverty and low income levels since 2002. Every agency had at least a 20% increase in requests for services by families and adults who claimed to be in poverty or at the borderline of poverty.

From the figures I recently collected it appears that 20% of the nations children live in poverty, and another 40% of children live at the borderline of poverty or in low income families. The rise in unemployment, lack of full time work, higher debts due to lack of employment, decrease in salary, and rental or mortgage increases were the main reasons many people gave for slipping closer to the poverty line.

2003 saw the biggest increase in people reporting their income as being at the borderline poverty level. 2003 also saw the biggest increase in families reporting their earnings at low-income levels.

Unemployment and under-employment still a major crisis

At least 2.6 million workers have lost their jobs under the Bush administration.

The Bush administration is the only one in 70 years which has had a decline in private sector jobs. http://jec.senate.gov/democrats/charts/ber_allcharts.pdf

The total unemployment rate is at 6.3% for 2003. 9.1 million (adjusted figures) Americans are unemployed and that does not include the millions who have stopped collecting unemployment benefits or did not register as unemployed.

According to a July 2003 survey 70% of workers used up all their unemployment benefits before finding another job. If you count the workers who are not receiving any unemployment benefits, but are still without a job, the actual figure of those unemployed could be as high as 14 million.

House Republicans have refused to extend federal unemployment insurance benefits to those who exhaust their current benefits and remain unemployed. The White House has also refused to endorse significant federal aid to the states, even though tax increases and service cuts at the state level will fall most heavily on lower-income and minority populations.

If you look at the official Department of Labor Statistics figures, they claim that the unemployment figure is 8,774,000 (unadjusted figures) for 2003. Many private groups are saying these figures are way too low.

The National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty has stated that the surveys typically miss at least one million unemployed workers who decline to give any information. Some workers rights groups have said that the government surveys might not include up to three million people who don’t have year round employment, or those who are self employed and may not always have steady work, but are still counted as employed.

African-Americans have a phenomenally high unemployment rate of 11.2%, almost twice that of the nation as a whole. African-American teenagers have an especially high unemployment rate of 28.2%, twice that of the total national average for teenage unemployment.

Many middle class workers have also been recently affected by the layoffs in the high tech fields and skilled labor markets. Many high tech and skilled service support jobs have been moved overseas to foreign trade zones.

The biggest increase in workers losing jobs last year was among the middle class. Many former white collar workers have been forced to take low paying jobs in the restaurant and service industries, after failing to find employment in their former job fields.

Many workers are forced to work for a temp agency or day labor while looking for full time employment.

Due to the general economic slowdown, the temporary agencies and day labors have not had as many jobs available. In a recent survey among temp agency workers, 62% reported that they have had trouble finding work everyday, or had been unable to find long term temp work.

The number of high tech and factory jobs has declined while the service industry and restaurant industry have been the only job markets that have shown any significant increase in hiring.

Millions of Americans are being forced into low paying jobs without benefits due to the loss of higher paying jobs with benefits. Many workers have no other choice but to work two or three part time jobs with no benefits when they fail to find full time employment.

67% of workers who had managed to find some form of new employment said that the job they found did not meet their adequate income requirements. They stated that their new jobs did not pay enough to meet housing demands, electric costs, food costs, and other household expenses.

85% had taken a pay cut of at least 15%, and 61% said they had taken a pay cut of over 25% when accepting new employment. 37% had taken a new job that paid less than 50% of their former salary.

86% said the their new jobs provided less benefits such as health care, sick leave, and insurance. 61% said they had had been forced to take new jobs that provided little or no benefits. 47% of all US workers do not have health care benefits or any form of health insurance coverage. (US Department of Labor Statistics and the Urban Institute)

69% of low-income workers reported being unable to pay electric bills, rent or mortgage payments, doctor and medical bills, or health insurance payments at some point in 2003. The main reasons for being unable to pay their bills were low pay, high rent or electric bills, loss of full time work, pay cuts, and temporary loss of employment.

54% of low-income workers reported that they were chronically late in the payments of household rental and mortgage expenses, and utilities. Chronically late in payments means that they have been unable to fully pay their bills for a period of three months or more. (Urban Institute)



The latest report form the US Dept. of Labor stated that 277,000 eligible workers had stopped looking for employment after more than a year of being unemployed. More than two million people have been out of work for at least six months, the highest level in twenty years. The average job search lasted 19 weeks, up from 12 weeks in 2001.

All these facts and figures show that US labor market is far from the recovery George Bush has pronounced. The economic prosperity and bright future he promises seem a long way off for the millions of workers struggling to pay the bills after job losses and economic setbacks. Millions of people most affected by the current economy would disagree with George on how good it is right now.

Homelessness and hunger increase again in 2003

Since the year 2000, the homeless population in America has increased by approximately 50%. In 2003 the homeless population increased by approximately 15% on a national average. Every year since 1999 the homeless population has increased by 10-15%. While it is hard to track the total number of homeless, each year at least 5.5 million people experience homelessness at some point.

Since 2000 every major US city has reported an increase in homelessness of between 35-50%. Most cities are not able to keep up with the increased demand for services from the increases in the homeless and hungry. Due to budget shortfalls many cities have had to cut back on necessary services such as homeless shelters and housing programs for low-income families, and emergency food centers.

The average wait to get in to public assisted housing was 22-26 months in 2003. Most low-income families have been on the waiting lists for an average of 14 months and are still waiting for adequate housing to become available. It is estimated that an additional 2.3 million people applied for public housing in 2003.

60% of all new cases of homelessness are single women with children. 15% of all new homeless cases are families with children. Homeless families comprise 40% of the total homeless population. 41% of the homeless population are single men, 14% are single women, and 5% are unaccompanied minors.

The National Council of Mayors conducts a yearly survey on homelessness and hunger in the US. In 2003 there was a 17% increase in requests for emergency food and a 13% increase in requests for shelter. 84% of reporting cities said they had been unable to meet requests for shelter from families due to lack of resources, and had to turn them away.

You can view the US Council of Mayors report and the press release at http://usmayors.org/uscm/news/press_releases/documents/hunge…

In 2003 the average length of time a person remained homeless increased. The length of time spent on the streets averaged five months. Lack of affordable housing, low wages and low paying jobs, loss of employment, and mental illness were the leading causes of homelessness.

The amount of people experiencing long term homelessness of more than one year also increased in the last year. 45% of the homeless people surveyed said they had been homeless for more than six months. 20% said they had been homeless for over a year. (Urban Institute)

In 2003 the number of so called "precariously housed" has also gone up. The government uses the term to define those who do not have permanent stable housing. Those who are considered precariously housed include people who are sleeping on someone’s couch or floor, or spend part of the month living in a motel room or temporary residence. Often those who work for day labors or temporary agencies fall into this category.

Many day labor and temp workers don’t always get out to work, so they may only be able to afford a motel room for a few nights a week. There are millions of people on Social Security and VA pensions who can also be considered to be precariously housed.

Many receive a monthly check that is not enough to cover the whole months rent and food cost. They usually stay in a motel or rent a room for a few weeks at a time. Most will spend at least part of the month living outdoors, but they are not counted as being homeless on most surveys.

At least 5.3 million people described themselves as precariously housed when applying for food stamps and other forms of public assistance in 2003.

In 2003 hunger and borderline starvation was a rapidly growing problem. The demand for emergency food often could not be met by food banks and hunger relief agencies. Many food banks have reported a 30-60% increase in emergency food requests.

I have spoken to many agencies that said they had at least a 25% increase in emergency food requests for 2003, with the biggest demand being in the first six months of the year. Many agencies have reported donations being down 15-20%, while the increased demand for food forced them to cut back on the amount of food given out.

The government has a nice little term for those facing hunger and malnutrition. They refer to it as being ‘food insecure’. America’s Second Harvest says that 35 million Americans are now considered ‘food insecure’ in 2003. This is an increase of two million from 2002. More than 13 million children are now considered "food insecure".

In 2003 one in every four people eating at soup kitchens and feeding centers were children. 25% of all children experienced hunger at some point during 2003. One in every five children missed at least one meal a day for a significant portion of the year.

61% of low-income households reported that their children had gone hungry at some point in the year. They often reported having a choice between paying for utilities and rent or having money to buy food.

This is the third year in a row that the number of people facing hunger has increased according to the US Department of Agriculture. The requests for food stamps also increased in 2003 by 23% or 3.3 million new applications.

The Council of Mayors also found a nationwide increase in hunger and requests for emergency food assistance. 20 of the surveyed cities reported that the increased need for food assistance resulted from lack of good jobs in their local economy. 11 of the 25 surveyed cities cited the high cost of housing as being directly related to hunger.

The 25 surveyed cites reported an average 17% increase in requests for emergency food. 59% of those requesting emergency food were families. 39% requesting food reported that they were employed. More and more workers facing budget shortfalls are forced to look for emergency food assistance.

"This survey underscores the impact the economy has had on everyday Americans," said Conference of Mayors President and Hempstead (NY) Mayor James A. Garner.

56% of surveyed cities reported having to turn away people in need due to lack of resources. Additionally 15% of requests for food by families went unmet. 88% of cities expect that the demand for emergency food will rise in 2004. 91% expect the requests for food by families to increase. 88% expect requests for emergency shelter to increase, with 80% expecting increased requests for shelter by homeless families.

"These are not simply statistics," said Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell, who co-chairs the Conference`s Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness. "These are real people who are hungry and homeless in our cities."

President Bush claimed that his FY2004 budget "helps America meet its goals both at home and overseas." Yet, upon examination of the budget numbers, the goals of many Americans appear not to have been included.

At a time when unprecedented numbers of families and individuals are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, the President proposed no new resources to meet their needs. His budget maintains funding levels for most homeless assistance programs; levels so woefully inadequate that each year record numbers of people are turned away from life-sustaining services.

In releasing his FY2004 budget, President Bush claimed "human compassion cannot be summarized in dollars and cents." Neither, can the untold suffering of the millions of children whose lives will be disrupted by loss of housing and health care this year. You can’t summarize the sorrow of their parents, who struggle against the odds to provide stability and hope. There is also no summarizing the frustration and pain of those who work but cannot afford housing or enough food to avoid hunger.

Winning the "War on Terror" and bringing freedom to Iraq? $187 Billion destined for Iraq, $120 Billion already spent for Iraq, over $70 billion spent or destined to be spent in Afghanistan.

Bush did not even come close to reality when he talked about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. He barely mentioned the increased military budget and bleeding of billions into long term occupation of two countries. He did not even mention the fact that 602 soldiers have died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

502 soldiers have died in Iraq. 100 have died in Afghanistan. Over 6000 Afghani civilians and over 16,000 Iraqi civilians have died since US invasions started. The guerilla attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan show no signs of letting up in the near future. The intensity and planning of the attacks has increased in the last few months. Bigger bombs and better planned attacks have taken hundreds of lives in the last few months.

The US has already spent over $120 BILLION on the Iraq war and occupation. Congress has passed the bill to provide an additional $187 BILLION for the reconstruction and rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure. Forget the fact that US attacks caused the majority of the damage that must be repaired. Forget the fact that US companies are making billions in profits from the reconstruction contracts.

Don’t think about the fact that billions of dollars needed in the US to solve our problems are being funneled away to enrich huge corporations working overseas. Forget all about how much that money could actually benefit the American people if it were spent here to fix our problems.

Bush hopes you will forget those facts and the fact that no WMDs have been found and none ever will be found. Unless of course the US plants some right before the election. I see it coming already, just when Bush needs it the most. Of course some will accuse me of believing in conspiracies, but just watch what happens.

Bush also tried to infer that we would be out of Iraq in a short time. If you need to figure out what a short amount of time means to the Bush administration, just look at Afghanistan. Two years later and the soldiers still keep dying and getting wounded, the Taliban is back in force, and guerilla attacks are on the rise again.

Bush claimed success in Afghanistan but failed to mention the high cost of invasion and continued occupation. At least $50 billion has already been spent in Afghanistan with at least another $20 billion just in occupation costs for the next year. Bush would like everyone to believe that we will be out of Afghanistan real soon. The military has said that it will be another two years or more before Afghanistan will be considered stabilized.

Of course Bush wants you to forget about the fact that American companies have made billions building US military bases and installations. It’s no surprise that Bechtel and Halliburton, along with their combined subsidiaries have won the majority of contracts in Afghanistan. Many of the other companies that have recently received contracts in Iraq have also profited enormously in Afghanistan.

The projected military budget for 2004 is over $400 BILLION. The US military budget could actually cost over $450 billion when the hidden costs of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan are factored in. Currently the US is spending over $7 billion a month in Iraq and $2 billion a month in Afghanistan.

US Citizens continue to suffer while billions sent overseas- a few solutions and conclusions

While the Bush administration wastes resources and expends billions over seas, our own citizens continue to sink further into debt and poverty. Bush presented a very positive analysis of the situation in the US.

The actual situation you see from examining all the facts is much dimmer and darker. In no way does it resemble any facts Bush expects you to believe about the current state of the union.

If the US spent just three months occupation costs, we could wipe out hunger and homelessness completely for ten years. However, it does not seem like feeding and sheltering our own citizens has a very high priority.

If the US took just 25% of their annual military budget, it could go a long way to wiping out hunger and homelessness around the world. Just 10% of our military budget spent yearly on America`s children could give every high school graduate a college education for four years.

It seems like it is not a priority to protect our children from starvation and living on the streets. Our education system is crumbling and the child welfare programs are being slashed mercilessly.

Increasingly in America, private foundations and organizations are stepping in to take up the slack that the government fails to adjust for. Most charities are reporting budget shortfalls due to the government cutting programs that provide their funding and resources.

If this crisis continues, we are in danger of actually having worse hunger and homelessness than some third world countries. The military expansion and occupation must stop so that we can salvage our future. We must do this before it is too late to stop the landslide of poor and starving.

We must put our priorities in line with the welfare of all our citizens. We cannot afford to neglect our people any longer. There must be a call of reckoning to stop this depriving of anyone their basic needs to exist.

I don’t know where Bush got the idea that everything was going great here in America. He obviously gets his facts from a different source than the rest of us.

The true State of the Union shows a nation in crisis with growing poverty, hunger, homelessness, and lack of decent jobs that pay enough to support a family. Our children are the ones that seem to be paying the highest price with 60% living in poverty or low-income situations.

How much longer can we ignore these growing problems before it is too late to fix them? Can we really afford to ignore them for even another day?

Jay Shaft- Editor, Coalition For Free Thought In Media
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia

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US frailty doesn`t just exist in the European imagination
America needs the outside world as much as it needs America

Martin Woollacott
Friday January 23, 2004
The Guardian

Try this exercise: imagine that Britain had joined France and Germany in refusing to support the war on Iraq. Where would we be today? We would still have had a war, since it was never a convincing argument that British support was a necessary condition for American action. But what else would have been the same, and what else different?

Certainly, Tony Blair would not have been in the kind of trouble he is in, although the Conservatives would no doubt have been galvanised by a government they could have attacked as both anti-American and pro-European. David Kelly would still be alive, as would Sergeant Steven Roberts of the Royal Tank Regiment, and a judge called Hutton would not have become suddenly famous.

And we can guess that President George Bush would have given a rather different state of the union address than the one he in fact delivered this week. Perhaps he would have railed against the United Nations and Europe or argued that the paths of the Old World and the New had decisively diverged. Or perhaps he would have been calling, in whatever coded terms, for a rapprochement, since a different war might have produced almost a mirror image of what most people deem the situation today, which is a strong America and a weak Europe.

For the European Union would undoubtedly have been strengthened if there had been a united front of Chirac, Schröder and Blair against the war. It is likely that the Polish, Spanish, Italian and other governments that supported the United States would have been much more muted, since they were emboldened in that course by the British position.

An anti-Iraq-war triad would have struck a great blow for the joint European foreign and security policy so often honoured in the breach. It might have been followed by other joint decisions - on the Middle East, for example - and by a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin`s Russia. Any move toward creating a separate defence structure would also have had a much greater impact, since Nato would have been rocked by a clear-cut transatlantic division on Iraq. What in the real course of events has been tolerated by the United States might in the alternate path have deepened a trans-atlantic crisis.

We can guess that the momentum might well have carried over into the EU`s internal politics, that we would have a European constitution today instead of a messy disagreement and that a British referendum on the euro would not be far away - and would have gone Blair`s way.

As for the campaign against terror, one can wonder about what al-Qaida might have done or said. What if it had declared that Europe would be a jihad-free zone? That would have really embittered relations with America. In any case, the thinktanks and the conferences would have been talking about the transatlantic divide, as they are now, but in terms of European unity and American disunity, not of the reverse.

For, if America had gone into Iraq entirely alone, and was as embroiled as it is today, perhaps American politics would not have contained the issue in the way it seems to have done. Maybe the message from Iowa would not have been that Americans do not want their next presidential election to be dominated by the question of whether it was right or wrong to go to war.

The further you sail the boat of speculation into the alternative future, the more it veers toward the shoals of unbelievability. Much of this picture seems implausible, because while it is possible to imagine Britain or France or the United States making different decisions, it is hard to envisage them being entirely different societies and states.

That is why the alternative future only begins to ring true again if you argue that a Britain that had gone against America on Iraq would now be striving to lead the other Europeans into a reconciliation with the United States, and that the others would be far from reluctant to follow. That is the point where the alternative path intersects with the path we actually followed. But the distorting mirror of the counterfactual can show us some truths, and one of them is that the image of a weak America - and even that of a strong Europe - is not without basis.

In his real state of the union address, the president argued, for instance, that the demonstration effect of the Iraq war, and of Afghanistan before it, had led to welcome changes in Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan. Some would add to the list of good consequences of recent American policy the resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan, and even China`s readiness to support America over North Korea.

But a closer examination reveals a more complicated story, which is of a world reacting both to the new security threat to all that September 11 dramatised and to American behaviour, including eccentric and inconsistent behaviour. The roots of all the changes that are put down to the Iraq effect go back to long before the war.

Muammar Gadafy`s desire to wipe the slate clean goes back to his first concessions after the Pan Am 103 outrage. Syria`s tentative shift, of course, has much to do with Bashir Assad`s succession, and Iran`s acceptance of inspections relates as much to its economic need for better relations with Europe as it does to any perceived threat from the United States.

The Indo-Pakistani changes equally have their own logic, as does the Chinese takeover of the North Korean crisis. China is not assisting the United States in the attempt to end nuclear proliferation in East Asia. It is more the other way round.

This last is a clue to what may really be happening, which is not that the United States is compelling other societies to do things, but that these other societies are taking matters into their own hands. This is a truth that might be reflected in a different way when Condoleezza Rice claims that the axis of evil formulation "really challenged the international community to get serious about that class of states pursuing weapons of mass destruction".

America`s military strength has been stretched to the limit by Iraq, and its economic prospects are conditioned by the choices of Japanese, Chinese, and European bondholders and investors. Its need for Europe and the United Nations, in Iraq and elsewhere, grows more evident all the time. What the counterfactual helps us to understand is that the truth about the times may lie somewhere between the idea that the United States is managing and sometimes manhandling the world and the idea that the world is managing the United States.
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First Beagle failed to call home from Mars. Now US lander falls silent
Tim Radford, science editor
Friday January 23, 2004
The Guardian

Spirit, the six-wheeled rover that 19 days ago made a triumphant touchdown on Mars, has fallen mysteriously silent.

Late last night, the robot geologist had failed to transmit any coherent message for more than 24 hours. Nor could Nasa`s mission controllers in Pasadena make it respond to commands.

The only "noise" from the lander since Wednesday has been sporadic, meaningless data transmitted across 100m miles of space.

"This is a serious problem. This is an extremely serious anomaly," project manager Pete Theisinger told Associated Press.

Communication is at the heart of every space mission: if it fails, then to all practical purposes, the mission is lost.

In the past 40 years there have been 36 attempts to explore the red planet. Ultimately, two out of three have failed. Some missions perished on the launch pad, some were lost in space, some fell silent as they neared their destination. In one fateful 10-week period in 1999, Nasa lost all four of its spacecraft over the arid deserts of Mars.

British scientists still hope to hear from their baby, Beagle 2 - the tiny lander reached Mars on Christmas Day but since then has failed to send a message home - although the chances must by now be small. They have, at least, been able to cheer Beagle`s European mothership Mars Express, which has settled into a polar orbit around Mars and begun to return the first of what they hope will be dramatic new data about the landscape, mineral makeup and atmosphere of the Earth`s smaller, colder neighbour.

Spirit was the first part of an ambitious $820m (£450m) US mission to take a close look at the stony landscape of Mars. It landed in the Gusev crater, a large rocky basin south of the Martian equator, with a set of geological tools, a stereoscopic camera at roughly human eye level, and a remit to look for evidence of vanished seas, lakes or rivers.

A second identical rover, Opportunity, is to touch down on Sunday on a plain called Meridiani, a region rich in the mineral haematite, linked on Earth to water deposits. If Mars once had flowing water, it must also have supported a denser atmosphere - and even perhaps life. Both the Beagle and Spirit landers were part of a systematic, international search for life on Mars.

Spirit made what seemed a textbook landing on January 4, sending pictures and data promptly back to jubilant controllers on Earth. But the joy may prove shortlived. On Wednesday morning, the rover had been preparing to examine its first Martian rock, a sharply angled piece of stone a few yards from its landing platform. Since then, it has sent back a few beeps and default signals.

Scientists worked through Wednesday night and yesterday, checking the possibility of a major power failure, a software fault or a memory corruption. If the software is awry, Nasa can fix it from Earth by beaming patches across more than 100m miles of space. But if the problem lies with the rover`s hardware, the situation would be far more grave.

"Yes, something could break, something certainly could fail. That`s a concern we have - that`s quite a serious event," Dr Theisinger said.

They were pinning their hopes on yet another attempt to contact the rover at 4.30am this morning. But they could offer no explanation for the loss of contact with Spirit.


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January 23, 2004
Democrats Vow to Battle Bush on Social Issues
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

GOFFSTOWN, N.H., Jan. 22 — In their final debate before the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic presidential candidates declared on Thursday that they could withstand election-year attacks from President Bush on social values and tax cuts, as they sought to allay concerns among Democrats about the party`s hopes of winning back the White House this fall.

Looking weary and subdued after three weeks of nonstop campaigning, the seven Democrats insisted in a two-hour televised debate that they could easily defend themselves against the kind of attacks on social, military and economic issues that Republicans have used effectively against Democrats in presidential elections for 20 years.

"That`s a fight I look forward to," Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said when asked if he feared that the White House would label him a tax-and-spend Democrat because he and his rivals want to repeal at least some of Mr. Bush`s tax cuts.

"That`s a fight we will win," he said.

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, said he had no fear of challenging Mr. Bush on social issues. Dr. Dean noted his own opposition to some forms of gun control and his advocacy of balanced budgets as governor.

"I`d challenge this president on values any day," Dr. Dean said.

And Senator John Edwards of North Carolina reminded the audience that he had beaten as tough a Republican opponent as the one in this White House.

"Remember, I didn`t get to the Senate by accident," Mr. Edwards said. "I actually defeated an incumbent Republican senator who was part of the Jesse Helms political machine in North Carolina."

The debate was relentlessly civil, a striking development given the fact that the candidates are five days away from the most competitive Democratic primary here since 1992. But the high stakes reinforced the candidates` efforts to be cautious.

Again and again they bypassed opportunities to attack one another, leading one moderator to brand the session a "happy debate." And there were far fewer of the so-called rapid-response e-mail messages and leaflets that the campaigns have routinely fired off during debates to try to discredit opponents.

The tone at the debate, held on the grounds of St. Anselm College outside Manchester, was testimony to the extent to which Mr. Edwards`s showing in Iowa, after running a campaign in which he presented himself as the most positive candidate, had set parameters for the intense contest in New Hampshire.

Not incidentally, the candidate who has often been the most aggressive in this contest, Dr. Dean, was under self-imposed restraints after giving an unruly concession speech in Iowa that many have seized upon to question his temperament.

This dynamic was clearly a matter of frustration to the questioners at the debate, which was sponsored by Fox News, ABC News, WMUR and The Manchester Union Leader.

At one point, Peter Jennings of ABC News tried to push Senator Joseph I. Lieberman to criticize his opponents, asking whether he believed that "Governor Dean and Senator Kerry have been hesitant, or would be hesitant, to take on George Bush successfully on the question of social values."

Mr. Lieberman chuckled, but would not take the bait.

"Let me put it this way: This is a time to be affirmative," he said. "I`d say, nice try."

The debate had been eagerly anticipated by many Democrats, given that the vote is just five days away and the contest is, by any measure, volatile. It was viewed by strategists as particularly important for Dr. Dean, after his difficult week, and for Mr. Kerry, who Democrats and some polls suggested had jumped to the lead, and thus was presumably being watched closely by voters here.

Dr. Dean, at the first opportunity, raised the matter that has clouded his candidacy this week: his loud and rowdy concession speech in Iowa on Monday night, an episode that his own aides say has threatened the viability of his campaign.

"You may notice that my voice is a little hoarse," he said. "It`s not because I was whooping and hollering at my third-place finish in Iowa. It`s because I have a cold."

Dr. Dean, speaking softly and with reserve, returned to the issue again a few minutes later.

"You know, I`m not a perfect person," he said. "I think a lot of people have had a lot of fun at my expense over the Iowa hooting and hollering, and that`s justified. But one thing I can tell you is that I`m not kidding about what I say."

The Rev. Al Sharpton offered condolences to Dr. Dean, up to a point. "I wanted to say to Governor Dean, don`t be hard on yourself about hooting and hollering," he said. "If I had spent the money you did and got 18 percent, I`d still be in Iowa hooting and hollering."

Dr. Dean managed a grin as the audience erupted in laughter.

The debate featured a smaller cast than in the past, with Carol Moseley Braun and Richard A. Gephardt now out of the race.

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio asserted that energy was the most important environmental issue facing the country.

"In the same way that President John F. Kennedy decided to bring the academic and spiritual resources of this country to have the United States reach the Moon some day, I intend to have a very infinitely interesting journey to planet Earth," he said. "And that journey will be about sustainable and renewable energy."

General Wesley K. Clark repeatedly defended his Democratic credentials, as he explained why he had voted for Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And he declined to disavow a remark made by Michael Moore, the filmmaker, who at a rally in which he appeared with General Clark had described the president as a deserter.

"Michael Moore has the right to say whatever he feels about this," General Clark said. "I don`t know whether this is supported by the facts or not. I`ve never looked at it."

Mr. Clark said Mr. Moore was "not the only person who said that," even while admitting that he had not taken the time to check the facts of Mr. Bush`s attendance record with the National Guard in Texas.

General Clark read from notes at one point as he discussed the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, seeking to clarify his earlier statement that he would support allowing women to have an abortion up until the ninth month.

"As much as I respect the opinion of the Catholic Church, in this case, I don`t support it," he replied. "It`s that simple.".

General Clark sharply criticized Mr. Bush, saying he had failed to take adequate measures to protect the nation from the attacks on the the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Before 9/11, he did not do everything he could have done to keep this country safe," General Clark said. "After 9/11, he took us to a war we didn`t have to fight, and Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda is still going strong. We were at terrorist condition orange."

The debate came two days after the State of the Union address, which appeared in part to be an attempt by Mr. Bush to lay down his own re-election platform, rebutting criticism from the Democrats.

Mr. Bush`s speech echoed in the debate here, as the candidates, for one example, answered questions about their position on gay marriage. Mr. Bush had suggested in his speech that he might support a constitutional amendment barring it.

Among the Democrats, only Mr. Sharpton disagreed with the assertion that gay marriage should be left for the states to decide.

"I am unilaterally opposed to any civil or human right being left to states` rights," he said. "That is a dangerous precedent. I think the federal government has the obligation to protect all citizens on a federal level."

In asserting that he was not out of the mainstream on social issues because his state had approved civil unions, Dr. Dean noted: "We chose not to do gay marriage. We chose to do civil unions. I think that position, actually, is very similar to Dick Cheney`s, who thinks every state ought to be able to do what they want."

The Democrats, all of whom support repealing at least some of the Bush tax cuts, said they were not concerned that Mr. Bush would try to use that position to undercut them, the way Republicans have done to Democrats in a series of elections .

"There was no middle-class tax cut in this country," said Dr. Dean, who supports rolling back all the cuts. "Somebody has to stand up and say we cannot have everything. We can`t have tax cuts, pay for health care, pay for No Child Left Behind and pay for an adequate defense."

Senator Kerry said he would counter attempts to paint him as a liberal. "I am a veteran," he said. "I fought in a war. I`ve been a prosecutor. I`ve sent people to jail for the rest of their life." He added that he had voted to overhaul the welfare system, and that he owned guns.

Asked what he would say to Republicans who tried to challenge him for being too liberal, Dr. Dean said: "Well, let`s talk first about money. The president of the United States can`t balance a budget." He added, "I`m much more conservative with money than George Bush is."

He also said he did not support gun control as much as other Democrats.

Mr. Lieberman, though, said that of all the Democrats, he was the one the White House would have the toughest time coming after.

"The reason is that the Republicans can`t run their normal playbook on me that they try to run on Democratic candidates," Mr. Lieberman said. "They can`t say I flip-flop because I don`t. They can`t say I`m weak on defense because I`m not.

"They can`t say I`m weak on values because I`m not. They can`t say I`m a big taxer and a big spender."



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January 23, 2004
Iraqis Press U.S. for Compromise to Gain Self-Rule
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 — The Bush administration is under growing pressure from Iraqi leaders to shift course and transfer power to an expanded version of its handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, which would then prepare for a direct election later this year, administration and Iraqi officials said Thursday.

The officials said Adnan Pachachi, chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, had proposed the council expansion as a compromise between the American insistence on selecting a new government through a complex caucus system and the demand for direct elections by Iraq`s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Mr. Pachachi`s proposal comes as demonstrations orchestrated by the ayatollah showcase his political power and its potential to narrow American options. The compromise — what one diplomat called a "third option" — has some support among aides to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, the officials said. Diplomats said Mr. Annan was trying to get the United States and the Iraqi leaders to think about alternatives to elections so that those options, too, could be presented to the ayatollah.

An American official said that the administration was cool to the idea but that it had become part of the discussions with Iraqi leaders.

A senior Iraqi leader close to the administration said: "The idea of expanding the Governing Council has a pitfall. What criteria would be used to expand it? We will have to go through a lot of permutations. Whatever you call it, an expanded Governing Council or a transitional assembly, it will happen."

Opposition to the American plan has been increasing in Iraq since November, when Ayatollah Sistani declared that only direct elections were legitimate as a way to choose an interim government to take power on June 30. But Iraqi leaders and other diplomats say he may be persuaded to accept an expanded Governing Council if it included more of his Shiite supporters.

The council now has 25 members, heavily weighted toward secular Shiites and former Iraqi exiles who were close to the Pentagon`s leadership and longtime advocates of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Mr. Pachachi has proposed expanding it to 125 members and turning it into an interim Iraqi legislature.

Discussions about how to choose a government to take office on June 30, the administration`s target for transferring sovereignty, have been intense all week, since a meeting on Monday among Iraqi leaders, Mr. Annan and L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq.

According to diplomats familiar with the meeting, Mr. Pachachi presented his idea in the presence of Mr. Bremer, but Mr. Bremer did not signal his views one way or another. The meeting ended with Mr. Annan appealing to the Iraqis and the Americans to try to reach an accord on how to proceed.

The secretary general agreed to consider a request to send a team to Iraq to meet with Ayatollah Sistani and tell him that direct elections were not feasible before the June 30 deadline because of security and technical problems.

Mr. Annan is said to feel that it will not be enough to tell the ayatollah that his desire for an election is not feasible. The ayatollah needs to hear, diplomats said, when an election can be held and what arrangements can be made before it occurs.

The American-backed plan for caucuses is increasingly derided within diplomatic circles as cumbersome and confusing. Under it, caucuses to choose a new interim legislature would take place in each of Iraq`s 18 provinces. But before that happens, organizing committees in each province would be established.

These committees would choose "selection caucuses," which would choose members of the new Iraqi legislature, which would then choose a prime minister and provisional government — all by June 30. Several diplomats say the process must be radically streamlined, if not scrapped.

Mr. Pachachi, a favorite of the Bush administration who appeared with Laura Bush, the first lady, in the audience during President Bush`s State of the Union address, argues that it will be easier to simply expand the Governing Council.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Pachachi said a transfer of power "to an expanded Governing Council" that was " more representative than it is at present" was "a possibility," provided that elections could be held afterward.

At a meeting with reporters and editors at The New York Times on Thursday, Mr. Pachachi said one virtue of his plan was that it would be easier to meet the June 30 deadline for a transfer of sovereignty. He said he was not promoting the plan but was finding considerable interest in it. Officials said, however, that in a private meeting Mr. Pachachi continued to press for the idea.

In public, Bush administration officials continue to express confidence that Ayatollah Sistani will accept the caucus plan with some "refinements," as they put it.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, in an interview for Egypt TV on Thursday, dismissed the idea of transferring power to the current Iraqi Governing Council.

"That was not what we envisioned," he said, "and I don`t know how a transfer of sovereignty to the present I.G.C. would go down with the Iraqi people. I think we need a little bit more transparent and participatory process than that."

An administration official noted that Mr. Pachachi had suggested his idea in September but that there was skepticism because it seemed as if he was simply trying to hold on to power for himself and other unelected Iraqis on the Governing Council, many of whom might have trouble winning an election.

"This is not the first time these guys have raised this," said the official. "They were really big on it in the fall. Our answer was `no` then, and so far the answer is `no` now."

But in private, United Nations officials, European diplomats, American officials and Iraqi leaders say there is a growing conviction that Ayatollah Sistani has realized that he has considerable power to get his way and cannot be circumvented.

The fear among many is that if he opposes the caucus process, especially with a religious decree, he could effectively prevent the caucuses from being carried out. Some experts say that the ayatollah is mainly interested in gaining power in Iraq, not in democracy, and that he could be bought off in the process.



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January 23, 2004
The Perils of Online Voting

Internet voting has been viewed as a possible cure for some of the ills that afflict the mechanics of American democracy. Recently, the technology has seemed to move ahead of any serious consideration of whether it is actually a good idea to allow home computer owners to choose a president in the same way they order bath towels online or send e-mail to their relatives. But now there are grave questions about whether even the technology makes sense.

Four computer scientists brought in by the Pentagon to analyze a plan for Internet voting by the military issued a blistering report this week, concluding that the program should be halted. These four are the only members of a 10-member advisory committee to issue a report on the program. Their findings make it clear that the potential for hackers to steal votes or otherwise subvert elections electronically is too high. Congress should suspend the program.

The intentions behind the Pentagon`s plan, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, are laudable. Military personnel overseas, and other Americans abroad, face obstacles to registering and voting. The new program would ease the way by allowing them to use any computer hooked up to the Internet. This year, it would be limited to voters abroad who are from one of 50 counties in seven states, but it could eventually be used by all of the estimated six million American voters overseas.

But the advantages of the Pentagon`s Internet voting system would be far outweighed by the dangers it would pose. The report makes it clear that the possibilities for compromising the secrecy of the ballot, voting multiple times and carrying out vote theft on a large scale would be limited only by the imagination and skill of would-be saboteurs. Viruses could be written that would lodge on voters` computers and change their votes. Internet service providers, or even foreign governments that control network access, could interfere with votes before they reached their destination.

This week`s report — which was written by respected scientists, including Aviel Rubin, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University — is not the first to call Internet voting into question. A March 2001 study conducted by the Internet Policy Institute and financed by the National Science Foundation found that Internet systems like the Pentagon`s "pose significant risk to the integrity of the voting process."

There is every reason to believe that if federal elections can be tampered with, they will be, particularly when a single hacker, working alone, might be able to use an online voting system to steal a presidential election. The authors of this week`s report concede that there is no way of knowing how likely it is that the Pentagon`s voting system would be compromised. What is clear, however, is that until the vulnerabilities they identified are eliminated, the risks are too great.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 23, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Democracy at Risk
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation`s psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.

Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?

Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible. (In fact, you can tell a similar story about some of the results in the 2002 midterm elections, especially in Georgia.) Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it`s not just a bad technology — it`s a threat to the republic.

First of all, the technology has simply failed in several recent elections. In a special election in Broward County, Fla., 134 voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting machines showed no votes, and there was no way to determine those voters` intent. (The election was decided by only 12 votes.) In Fairfax County, Va., electronic machines crashed repeatedly and balked at registering votes. In the 2002 primary, machines in several Florida districts reported no votes for governor.

And how many failures weren`t caught? Internal e-mail from Diebold, the most prominent maker of electronic voting machines (though not those in the Florida and Virginia debacles), reveals that programmers were frantic over the system`s unreliability. One reads, "I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded." Another reads, "For a demonstration I suggest you fake it."

Computer experts say that software at Diebold and other manufacturers is full of security flaws, which would easily allow an insider to rig an election. But the people at voting machine companies wouldn`t do that, would they? Let`s ask Jeffrey Dean, a programmer who was senior vice president of a voting machine company, Global Election Systems, before Diebold acquired it in 2002. Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting" (www.blackboxvoting.com), told The A.P. that Mr. Dean, before taking that job, spent time in a Washington correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files.

Questionable programmers aside, even a cursory look at the behavior of the major voting machine companies reveals systematic flouting of the rules intended to ensure voting security. Software was modified without government oversight; machine components were replaced without being rechecked. And here`s the crucial point: even if there are strong reasons to suspect that electronic machines miscounted votes, nothing can be done about it. There is no paper trail; there is nothing to recount.

So what should be done? Representative Rush Holt has introduced a bill calling for each machine to produce a paper record that the voter verifies. The paper record would then be secured for any future audit. The bill requires that such verified voting be ready in time for the 2004 election — and that districts that can`t meet the deadline use paper ballots instead. And it also requires surprise audits in each state.

I can`t see any possible objection to this bill. Ignore the inevitable charges of "conspiracy theory." (Although some conspiracies are real: as yesterday`s Boston Globe reports, "Republican staff members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media.") To support verified voting, you don`t personally have to believe that voting machine manufacturers have tampered or will tamper with elections. How can anyone object to measures that will place the vote above suspicion?

What about the expense? Let`s put it this way: we`re spending at least $150 billion to promote democracy in Iraq. That`s about $1,500 for each vote cast in the 2000 election. How can we balk at spending a small fraction of that sum to secure the credibility of democracy at home?



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washingtonpost.com
A Measure of Success in Iraq
Commanders See Signs of Progress, and New Pitfalls

By Thomas E. Ricks and Liz Spayd
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A01


MOSUL, Iraq -- Senior U.S. commanders say they are making progress toward defeating insurgents in Iraq, but caution that political disputes over the country`s path to sovereignty could prolong or worsen security problems, according to a range of interviews with military officials.

Commanders are heartened by a sharp reduction in the number of attacks on U.S. forces and say that an overhaul of intelligence operations has produced a series of successes that have weakened the anti-occupation insurgency.

"Things have gone well both in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of our military`s ability to get the job done," Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, said in a interview at his headquarters in Qatar after a weeklong tour of the region and consultations with his commanders and the leaders of Pakistan, Jordan and Afghanistan.

But Abizaid said he was reluctant to declare victory in Iraq. "I stay away from the `turning the corner, light at the end of the tunnel` sort of thing," he said. "There are an awful lot of political movements and activities that will take place between now and moving toward some sort of Iraqi sovereign entity, and that will put an awful lot of pressure on the system within Iraq, and that could change the security situation in dramatic ways."

Military leaders believe that their operations in Iraq are entering a critical phase. One of the biggest troop rotations in U.S. history is getting underway, creating new vulnerabilities as 130,000 seasoned soldiers depart and 105,000 fresh ones come in to replace them. Also, the planned U.S. handover of power to the Iraqi people looms in less than six months, intensifying the already volatile politics of the country.

Some military experts, including officers fighting in Iraq, continue to worry about the Iraqi insurgency, which they regard as surprisingly resilient and adaptive.

Some fear that the resistance could be regrouping and planning new attacks, and is quiescent now only because it is studying the changes in the U.S. force structure and searching for new vulnerabilities. Some point out that attacks on Iraqi security forces have increased in recent months.

Defense Department statistics show a drop in U.S. troops killed in action since November, when the insurgency was at its peak. After sustaining 70 such deaths that month, the U.S. military withstood 25 in December -- the month in which former president Saddam Hussein was captured -- and 22 so far in January.

Commanders credit a number of sources for recent military advances. Three-fourths of roadside bombs are now being detected before they explode, Army officials in Iraq said. After a shaky summer marked by finger-pointing among intelligence officials about a raft of failures, especially in the coordination of data, the U.S. intelligence effort in Iraq was revamped in October and November. The overhaul has made operations much more effective, officials said.

"What we`ve done in the last 60 days is really taken them down," a senior military official said, speaking of the insurgency. "We`ve dismantled the Baghdad piece. We`ve dismantled the Mosul piece. I`m not saying we`ve taken down the Fallujah-Ramadi piece, but we`ve hammered it."

"The enemy doesn`t have much left," a battalion commander in Tikrit said this week in assessing the current situation. "They are desperate and flailing."

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon by a video connection from Tikrit on Thursday, Army Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, echoed those views. He said that Hussein`s capture last month marked "a major operational and psychological defeat for the enemy" and produced a rise in accurate tips from Iraqis about insurgent activity. He said that insurgents had been "brought to their knees" and reduced to a "fractured, sporadic threat."

The U.S. military`s Central Command, headed by Abizaid, spent an additional $11 million on the intelligence restructuring, a senior official said, and in the process forced far greater cooperation between regular military forces, Special Operations units, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA. All those entities now use a common database that, for example, enables suspected fighters to be tracked as they move from city to city.

The overhaul`s first major result is a better understanding of the networks that sustain the insurgency. Long stymied by the sophisticated, highly compartmentalized "cell structure" of Iraqi fighters, U.S. interrogators and analysts began focusing on the connections between cells, such as the means by which financing, people, weapons and training are delivered. It was this shift, the official said, that among other things led to Hussein`s capture.

The political and military situation in Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq, is in some ways a microcosm of the U.S. situation in Iraq. The 101st Airborne Division, based in a former palace of Hussein`s in Mosul, had more than two dozen of its troops killed in action during the insurgency offensive that lasted from late October to early December. But it hasn`t lost a soldier in the past month.

But just as the nation`s fractious politics are introducing new strains on the security apparatus, the United States is reducing its presence. In northern Iraq, the number of troops will be halved in the coming months as the 101st heads home to Fort Campbell, Ky. and is replaced by troops from the 2nd Infantry Division.

Some Army officers in Iraq urge caution in assessing the recent downturn in U.S. casualties, as well as successes against the insurgents.

One Army officer said he could "definitely verify" that attacks on the base at Balad are increasingly few and far between, "compared to last summer when they were an almost nightly occurrence." Yet he expressed worry that the enemy fighters might simply be using new tactics to disguise their operations. For example, it seemed to take U.S. military intelligence analysts months to recognize the key role that Iraqi women have played as couriers in the insurgency. "I`m always cautious asking tactical changes to carry strategic significance," this officer said.

Likewise, while roadside bombings are down, suicide car bombings continue to stymie commanders and U.S. intelligence operatives. This is becoming a strategic problem because of recent high-profile attacks on U.S. allies, including one at U.S. occupation headquarters on Sunday that killed 31 people.

U.S. intelligence officials still lack solid information on who the car bombers were but suspect generally disaffected young Arab men from outside Iraq. Aside from that, they say, foreign fighters are not playing a large role in the broader insurgency.

But even if the U.S. solves those military issues, experts say, the security equation remains subordinate to the political process. "We are doing better in military terms, but that has little to do with politics -- and in the end it`s all about politics," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Dale Davis, a specialist on Middle Eastern military and intelligence issues.

An Army officer at the civilian occupation authority agreed, saying that "the main effort in a counterinsurgency is political, economic and social. The military is a supporting effort; its role is to buy time."

Political pressure is likely to grow in the coming months as Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds vie for power in post-occupation Iraq. The most immediate worry is that recent street demonstrations by Shiites in support of calls for elections by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani might turn unruly.

"I worry that the recent street demonstrations in support of Sistani and direct elections could turn into widespread anti-American and anti-Governing Council demonstrations by Iraqis disgruntled with other issues -- no jobs, heat, power, chickens, Mercedes," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst for Iraqi affairs. She doubts whether the U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies could keep a lid on large-scale demonstrations that have the potential to turn into riots.

After spending the past six months creating the rank and file of Iraqi security and police forces, U.S. military officials say their next big challenge is to swiftly develop Iraqi leaders for those new organizations.

A new effort is underway to establish command structures at the local, regional and national levels that will eventually allow Iraqis to take over most security functions from U.S.-led forces.

Police and other security units ultimately will be commanded by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, while military forces will be overseen by a ministry of defense that doesn`t yet exist, but which Abizaid said would be established soon.

U.S. commanders "will be reluctant to want to turn over some of that control to forces that aren`t as capable, and who are under the control of institutions that aren`t yet mature," Abizaid said. "Yet that`s precisely a risk that we`re going to have to take in the next year, and that`s worth taking."



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Alaska Oil Exploration Approved
Strict Environmental Standards Promised for Wilderness Area

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A06


Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton yesterday approved a plan to open nearly 9 million acres of wilderness area on Alaska`s North Slope to oil exploration and drilling in a move to boost the declining production in Alaska and reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

The Bureau of Land Management plan will open a huge, environmentally sensitive area of Alaska`s massive National Petroleum Reserve to long-term production. It is the most important effort to tap new sources of energy since the administration failed to open the adjacent coastal plain of Alaska`s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

Norton said the move "will help meet America`s need for environmentally sound energy development" as part of President Bush`s national energy strategy. Officials stressed that all leases will be subject to "strict environmental standards" and that parts of the reserve will be set aside for migratory birds and marine mammals.

However, environmentalists complained that the plan will produce only a modest amount of oil in the long run and that it will not justify the risk of ruining an area of unique cultural and wilderness value.

"It makes no sense to industrialize this incomparable wilderness area when there`s only about six months` worth of economically recoverable oil in the entire [reserve] and it would take at least 10 years to get it to market," said Charles Clusen, Alaska project director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that, at $25 a barrel, there is likely only 3.7 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil in the entire 23.5 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve. However, government and industry officials say those estimates are overly conservative, and that "technically" industry could recover three times as much or more, depending on oil prices and advances in oil-recovery technology.

Ed Porter of the American Petroleum Institute said new production in the reserve area is important and will help slow what has been a steady decline in North Slope oil production since the boom times of the 1970s and 1980s.

Porter said the area set aside for new production ranks among the top five or 10 fields ever discovered in the United States. "On the other hand," he added, "we`re not talking about something that will be large in terms of satisfying a large portion of the country`s consumption of oil."

The 22.5 million acres of the petroleum reserve, west of Prudhoe Bay and south of the Beaufort Sea, were set aside as an oil and gas reserve by President Warren G. Harding in 1923. The government did not start leasing northeastern portions of the reserve until 1999, during the Clinton administration, when ConocoPhillips, BP, EnCana and others began to move in. Discovery of oil in the Alpine Fields sector sparked industry interest in the remainder of the reserve. Alaska officials -- including Sen. Ted Stevens (R) and Frank H. Murkowski (R), then a senator and now governor -- as well as industry executives and Indian tribes in the area urged federal officials to expand oil exploration and production.

Under the new management plan, 7.23 million acres of the total will be immediately available for leasing, while exploration on the remaining 1.5 million acres will be deferred for 10 years. The plan includes provisions to protect water quality, vegetation, wetlands, fish and wildlife habitats -- including the setting aside of 102,000 acres for migratory birds, beluga whales, spotted seals and black brandts, which are migratory wild geese. The construction of permanent industrial or residential structures will be prohibited.

A lease sale for selected tracts is scheduled for June 2.



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Key Cleric Rejects U.S. Plan For Iraq
Sistani Says Program Lacks `Legitimacy`

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A12


NAJAF, Iraq, Jan. 22 -- Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, has deemed a U.S. plan for the country`s political transition unacceptable in "its totality and its details," a representative said Thursday. The remarks signaled Sistani`s refusal to consider revisions that American officials hoped would permit the plan to go forward.

The comments by the spokesman, Mohammed Aal Yahya Musawi, represented the reclusive Sistani`s most forceful and elaborate rejection yet of the Nov. 15 transition agreement. The depth of the objections suggested a widening gulf between compromises U.S. officials are willing to consider and the demands of a man who is perhaps Iraq`s most powerful figure.

Under the plan, regional caucuses would be held across Iraq to choose a transitional assembly in May. That assembly would select a provisional government that would take power by June 30, formally ending the U.S. occupation. But since December, Sistani has insisted instead on direct elections to choose that government, prompting demonstrations by tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims in Baghdad and Basra, Iraq`s largest cities.

In his remarks Thursday, Musawi said Sistani would drop his demand for elections if U.N. and Iraqi experts determined they were not feasible. But he said that shift would be possible only if another plan were adopted. He called the current plan "extremely dangerous."

"If neutral experts come and say that elections are not possible, I will retreat from my position, but on one condition," Musawi quoted Sistani as saying. "Foreign experts and Iraqi specialists should find an alternative."

Given Sistani`s influence among Iraq`s Shiites, who make up an estimated 60 percent of the country`s 25 million people, U.S. officials have worried that his opposition could derail the transition before it gets under way. U.S. officials have asked U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to send a team to Iraq to determine whether elections are practical and, if not, to suggest alternatives. But they have made clear that they are not contemplating wholesale revisions to their plan or a change in this summer`s deadline.

In Baghdad, Dan Senor, the chief spokesman for U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer, said Thursday that U.S. officials "would consider proposed clarifications" and "proposed elaborations" to their electoral plan.

But, he added, "we are not seriously considering any other options at this point."

The confrontation between the Bush administration and Sistani, who has not appeared in public in nearly a year, has created an enduring irony for the U.S. occupation, with the conservative clergy emerging as the most vocal constituency pressing for democratic elections. Sistani`s call has resonated among the long-repressed Shiites, whose gratitude following the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in April has given way to mounting frustration over joblessness and to distrust of U.S. plans.

U.S. officials have argued that the June 30 deadline makes elections impractical in a country still beset by violence. Senor said Iraq had not conducted a census in more than 20 years, lacked constituency boundaries and voter rolls, had no laws covering political parties and also lacked the infrastructure needed to "protect the legitimacy and fairness" of elections. Some of the administration`s Iraqi allies worry, too, that elections would empower extremist religious and nationalist elements.

Since Sistani`s call in December for elections, clerics loyal to him have begun a grass-roots campaign to rally support for his position. The message has emerged in Friday sermons, the clergy`s most effective channel of communication. Posters have gone up in Baghdad and cities in southern Iraq detailing Sistani`s position. Religious foundations in Najaf have begun circulating pamphlets and leaflets presenting a detailed explanation of the Nov. 15 agreement and Sistani`s objections to it.

The campaign was the pretext for Musawi`s remarks, which were delivered Thursday to a meeting of about 200 veiled Iraqi women at a community center in Najaf. Musawi, a civil engineer who works in Sistani`s office, said the ayatollah`s fundamental objection to the U.S. plan was that it provided no means of ensuring the transitional government or the institutions it set up are seen by Iraqis as legitimate. He suggested that lack of legitimacy was one of the driving forces behind the guerrilla campaign in Sunni-dominated central Iraq.

"This illegitimacy forms an obstacle in front of building Iraq," he said.

Under the agreement, the caucuses would be chosen by committees selected from the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and local and provincial bodies set up under the occupation. Because none of those bodies is elected, Musawi said, no decision they reach will have popular support. Without that support, he said, the transitional government would lack the credibility necessary to deal with Iraq`s neighbors or with a population still emerging from three decades of dictatorship and the uncertainty generated by the U.S. occupation.

"This is the biggest danger in the agreement," Musawi said. "A transitional government must be built on a sound basis," he said. "If the basis is sound, the future will be sound. If the basis is wrong, then the future will be wrong."

The same objections apply, Musawi said, to a basic law designed to serve until a constitution is ratified in 2005. Sistani has insisted that even that law, which Iraqi officials have said will be completed by the end of next month, must be submitted to a popular vote.

With respect to both the transitional government and the basic law, Musawi said, the ayatollah feared precedents would be set for issues such as federalism that could not be overridden. He suspected there would be too few checks on the interim government`s power.

"What is the guarantee that a transitional government will not stay in power for more than a year and a half?" he asked.

Nearly all sides in the dispute have looked to the arrival of the U.N. mission as a crucial moment in the political transition, and Musawi stopped short of outlining what an alternative should look like if the delegation finds elections are not feasible. But he said that Sistani was insisting that the U.N. team`s mandate be broad -- Iraqi experts must be included in the process and the study would require extensive grass-roots consultations. Musawi also warned that the clergy would be sensitive to U.S. or British pressure and suggested that Sistani would retain the right to veto any alternative the team proposed.

"We don`t need a delegation to come and stay in a hotel in Baghdad and give judgment," Musawi said. "We need them to have a dialogue with national, religious and tribal leaders. They should learn the Iraqi point of view and examine the reality of Iraq."

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Baghdad contributed to this report.



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Immunity Pact For U.S. Troops In Postwar Iraq Still Unsettled
Status-of-Forces Agreement Establishes Rules for Forces

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A12


The United States has yet to begin serious negotiations with Iraqis on an agreement to guarantee that American troops in Iraq will remain immune from arrest and prosecution by local authorities once a new Baghdad government takes over in June, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The status-of-forces agreement, often one of the most sensitive pacts reached between the U.S. and countries that host American troops, will also set the rules for where U.S. troops will be based and the conditions under which they will operate.

"All these things have to be negotiated and agreed upon -- the areas they [American troops] will be deployed, their bases and so on," Iraqi Governing Council President Adnan Pachachi said this week. "But we are still waiting for a draft" agreement from the United States, he added.

The U.S. timetable calls for reaching a forces agreement by March 31 with the governing council -- the U.S.-appointed group helping temporarily to run the country. U.S. officials assume, but have no guarantees, that the agreement would be honored by the yet-to-be-created Iraqi government.

The open questions surrounding the future status of U.S. forces are among many uncertainties facing the United States as it heads toward a self-imposed deadline for ending the occupation of Iraq.

Much of the public debate over the transition has centered on whether the United States can deal effectively with the Iraqi insurgency, whether Kurds will retain autonomy, and whether the new government will be created through elections, as demanded by some Shiite leaders, or through a system of caucuses as proposed by the United States.

But brokering a deal authorizing U.S. troops to remain -- and in particular getting a guarantee of legal immunity for troops -- are among the other important details to be settled by June.

"Along with resolution of the Shiite questions and the Kurds on federalism, it is a big issue," said Noah Feldman, an assistant professor at New York University School of Law who has consulted with the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority about Iraq legal matters.

"The idea that if American troops do something wrong they are not tried under your country`s laws is hard for [the Iraqi] people to understand," he said. "At the same time, if there are 100,000 American troops there, they want legal protection."

The Defense Department, under U.S. law, is required "to protect . . . the rights of United States personnel who may be subject to criminal trial by foreign courts and imprisonment in foreign prisons."

Any status-of-forces agreement in Iraq will be negotiated "so our men and women would continue to be protected under U.S. jurisdiction and the host nation [Iraq] is protected, knowing they will be brought to justice" by the U.S. military, said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

In Iraq, U.S. officials have investigated a range of accusations against U.S. troops, including the alleged shooting of noncombatants, the arrest of innocent people, mistreating prisoners and destroying property. When the military finds wrongdoing, troops are to be punished under U.S military law, not Iraqi law.

Such arrangements become highly sensitive when local citizens are caught up in military operations conducted by U.S. troops.

Last week, for example, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad an investigation was underway in Tikrit by the 4th Infantry Division into allegations that a family was killed when their car tried to pass a U.S. Army convoy. Investigators, Kimmitt said, "have not found any reports of any troops that were involved in that incident. But we certainly want to put to rest any perception that the troops are not operating within the rules of engagement."

In the 1970s, the status-of-forces agreement that kept U.S. soldiers out of Iranian courts became a rallying cry for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his revolution against the shah of Iran, said William Quant, who was then a member of President Jimmy Carter`s National Security Council. "It was a big issue, the idea if Americans do anything wrong they are not tried in your country," Quant said.

Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was the Defense Intelligence Agency`s senior analyst in the region, said status-of-forces agreements can be seen by some in the Islamic world "as an alliance with an infidel power."

For years, he said, the U.S. military training mission in Saudi Arabia was described to the people there as a hired mercenary force. "When the U.S. military presence on air bases grew larger," Lang said, "Osama bin Laden began using it as a reason for attacking to government and the U.S."

Normally, a status-of-forces agreement is negotiated with an independent, sovereign government and not, as apparently will be the case in Iraq, with a body -- the Iraq Governing Council -- whose members were appointed by the United States.

Last week, Dan Senor, spokesman for the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, told reporters in Baghdad, "The status of the American security [forces] in Iraq will move in a matter of months from occupational force to invited guest." Negotiations over the terms of that invitation, when they formally begin, will take place between the United States, he said, "and the future Iraqi leadership. That is part of the political process."

Pachachi said U.S. troops assigned to security roles will be eventually replaced by Iraqi police and soldiers. Nonetheless, he sees a continuing presence.

"American troops will be of course needed for a while to protect Iraq from any outside incursions," he said. "It will take time to rebuild an Iraqi army that can withstand the pressures from two powerful neighbors, for example, Iran and Turkey, plus the other smaller neighbors of the Arab world."



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A Multilateral Mr. Bush




Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A20


PRESIDENT BUSH didn`t expand, in his State of the Union address, on how he plans to promote democratization in the greater Middle East, beyond a worthy proposal to double funding for the National Endowment for Democracy. But the White House is considering several potentially important new initiatives. One envisions a charter for freedom for the Middle East -- a mutual commitment by countries in the region to embrace the principles and institutions of democracy, linked to a follow-up process. Another centers on a possible program by NATO to forge training and other security cooperation agreements with Arab states. A third would promote economic links between Middle Eastern countries and the United States and European Union. The ideas are nascent and face a few obstacles. But the fact that the administration is discussing them with key European governments is encouraging.

One important advantage of the initiatives is that they are based on democratization programs that proved successful during and after the Cold War in Europe. The Middle East freedom charter would build on the model of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, an East-West security agreement that formally committed the Soviet Union and its satellites to respecting human rights and provided for monitoring and follow-up diplomacy. The "Helsinki process" played a critical role in the rise of indigenous pro-democracy groups in communist states. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, NATO`s Partnership for Peace program helped to reform the military and security institutions of the East Bloc and encouraged a transition to democracy. So did the economic partnership agreements negotiated by the European Union.

Unlike the war in Iraq or the transitional mission that has followed it, the democracy programs are designed to be multilateral and would probably attract bipartisan support in the United States. They envision the United States joining with European governments, including those that opposed the war, in a long-term effort to encourage change that would be conducted through transatlantic institutions -- which would be invigorated by a vital new mission. The White House did not cook up its ideas in isolation: Discussions about a Helsinki-like initiative in the Middle East or a role for NATO have been underway in think tanks and ad hoc groups for some time. Two weeks ago Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards proposed a similar set of ideas; other candidates, including retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, have endorsed the same principles.

At best, the Middle East initiatives could form the basis for a common European-American strategy for addressing one of the world`s most serious challenges. For now, the White House`s soundings of European governments have generated interest and skepticism. European policymakers tend to doubt whether Mr. Bush`s goal of democratic government in the Middle East is achievable in the near future; they also point out that Arab governments might be reluctant to sign up for cooperation with NATO or pledge themselves to political change. Some European officials appear interested in pursuing a diplomacy toward the Middle East that is distinctly separate from Washington`s. That would be unfortunate. It will be hard enough for Western governments working together to address the political and economic malaise that lies at the root of the Middle East`s extremist and terrorist movements. The Bush administration`s attempt to forge a policy that is both ambitious and multilateral is the right approach.



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Give the Shiites a Say


By Jim Hoagland

Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A21


Iraq`s Shiite majority has begun to pry political control of the country from U.S. administrator Paul Bremer and his small, overwhelmed staff in Baghdad. The Bush administration should welcome and help shape this silent transition rather than fight to retain eroding power.

That power will in any event be exhausted by June 30, the date on which the United States has agreed to return sovereignty to Iraq. That deadline is the one immovable object in a tangled web of U.S.-U.N.-Iraqi negotiations over ending an occupation that has essentially run its erratic course. Other details can and will be fudged.

Bremer`s once unshakable insistence on control over tiny details of occupation is being sapped by a nascent internal Iraqi political process, which triggered high-level meetings on Iraq`s future in New York and Washington this week. The approach of the normally assertive U.S. administrator for Iraq ranged from reactive to passive at the United Nations and in the White House sessions, other participants report.

Acting in concert more often than the Bush administration seems to realize, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and leading Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council agree on one overriding objective: The Shiite majority must not be cheated out of political control of Iraq or once again be subjugated by a domineering minority.

Those fears haunt the Shiites nine months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein`s Sunni-based regime. President Bush came face to face with the force of this fear on Tuesday at the White House, where a brief encounter may have done more to inform Bush`s view of Iraq than dozens of lengthy briefing books or position papers.

During Bush`s spirited meeting with an ethnically and religiously balanced delegation from the Governing Council, Ayatollah Abdul Aziz Hakim suddenly and gravely asked to speak privately with the president, according to several at the meeting.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other U.S. officials visibly tensed and tried to bypass the request. But Condoleezza Rice, Bush`s national security adviser, intervened to get Hakim and his interpreter five valuable minutes with the president. Rice sensed that Hakim had something important to say.

We need your protection. Don`t abandon us. That was the thrust of Hakim`s direct and personal appeal to Bush, according to a reconstruction of the conversation provided by a U.S. source. The ayatollah`s remarks clearly applied to Iraq`s Shiites, who are thought to make up 60 percent of Iraq`s 24 million people.

"The Shiites still fear that the Sunnis have their number," says a mid-level U.S. official who has worked closely with both groups in Iraq in recent months. "Their fears may seem irrational to us, but those fears drive what Sistani and the others are doing. They remember when the United States stood by and let them be slaughtered" during their 1991 revolt.

The murderous insurgency in the Sunni Triangle around Baghdad and suicide bombings by terrorists elsewhere in Iraq have deepened Shiite fears that many Sunnis will fight majority rule as they have fought U.S. occupation. Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the Iraqi branch of the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood, left the Governing Council delegation in New York rather than come to Washington and be photographed visiting the White House.

Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has joined Ibrahim Jafari and other leaders of Shiite Islamic parties and Ahmed Chalabi, a practicing Shiite who heads the secular Iraqi National Congress, to create an informal caucus of Governing Council members. The Shiite caucus has held two important strategy sessions with Sistani at his base in Najaf since the ayatollah raised objections to the Nov. 15 U.S. proposal for indirect elections, according to Iraqi sources.

Sistani, the most respected Shiite cleric in the country, refuses to meet directly with Bremer and is not well known by the Sunni members of the Governing Council. Sistani and the Shiite politicians agree that democratic elections, conducted while U.S.-led coalition forces still provide security, should guarantee the Shiites political dominance.

A U.N. statement fixing a date for direct elections later this year or in early 2005 would provide Sistani with political cover for accepting a short delay in majority rule. Neither his objections nor the recent Shiite street demonstrations should be seen in Washington as menacing developments.

"We have to remind ourselves sometimes that politics in Iraq is a good thing," says one Bush aide, who reported that the president successfully reassured Hakim and the other Governing Council members that he would press for democratic elections as soon as possible. American leadership on that agenda, rather than grudging acceptance of inevitable change, is the right course.

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THE NATION
Border Agents Assail Bush`s Plan to Bring in Guest Workers
The proposal is a slap in the face and in reality an amnesty, say officers` union leaders.
By Scott Gold and H.G. Reza
Times Staff Writers

January 23, 2004

HOUSTON — U.S. Border Patrol agents, charged with enforcing the nation`s border laws, are furious about President Bush`s proposal to create a guest worker program for millions of illegal immigrants, union leaders say.

In interviews this week, nearly three dozen current and former agents across the nation called Bush`s proposal an insult to the thousands of men and women who have devoted their careers to fighting illegal immigration, including wave after wave along the California-Mexico border.

The agents — many of whom otherwise support the White House — savaged the Bush proposal as a grab for Latino votes and a favor to the business community, factions of which rely on cheap immigrant labor. And they say they are bracing for a rush of people trying to sneak into the United States.

"We get rocks thrown at us. We get shot at. We get spit on," said James Stack, a representative of the agents` union and a 16-year veteran who patrols the border near El Paso.

"There have been many agents who have given their lives in the line of duty," Stack said. "This seems to say that those deaths were for nothing, and that this administration is not truly concerned about immigration."

The National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents approximately 9,000 rank-and-file agents, has launched a political campaign — complete with a website — to try to pressure Congress to reject the administration`s proposal when it comes up for a vote.

Retired agent John H. Frecker, a Maine resident and regional union leader who was with the Border Patrol for 26 years, recently sent this letter to the membership: "Hey, you know all those illegal aliens you risked `life and limb` to [apprehend]? Fah-ged-abowd-it. President Bush has solved the problem."

White House officials declined to comment for this report.

It is difficult to pinpoint how many immigrants cross the border illegally each year, and too soon to determine whether there would be a significant increase along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border in response to Bush`s proposal.

But several agents said there was anecdotal evidence that an immigration wave already had begun. People recently detained along the border, the agents said, have demanded "amnesty" upon their capture.

The federal government`s offer of amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants in 1986 — almost a third of them in Southern California — was intended largely to reduce immigration. But even by conservative estimates, the number of illegal immigrants has doubled since then, while the overall population of the nation has increased about 20%. Agents say they have no reason to believe the results will be any different this time.

"The increase in numbers is going to be phenomenal," said Charlie Maxwell, a union leader and senior Border Patrol agent in Brownsville, Texas.

In his State of the Union address this week, Bush said his proposal would reform immigration laws, strengthen the economy and allow Border Patrol agents to "focus on true threats to our national security." Bush was careful to point out that he does not favor "amnesty."

Anticipating, however, that the president`s promise of a limited legalization program might be misinterpreted by would-be immigrants, top officials at the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the Border Patrol`s parent agency — last week prepared a questionnaire for agents to use when quizzing people they have detained. Among the questions, according to documents obtained by The Times, were: "Did the rumors of amnesty influence your decision to enter the USA?" and "Do you plan to apply for amnesty if it is offered?"

Immigration bureau spokesman Mario Villareal said the questionnaire has been revised to delete references to "amnesty" and replace them with "guest worker program" references.

Border Patrol agents also were given an "approved statement" to read to members of the public or media who asked about the proposal. It reads, in part: "The president`s recently announced plan to create a temporary worker program holds the promise of strengthening our control over U.S. borders and in turn improving our homeland security."

The document then instructs agents not to reveal information that could raise questions about the plan. Under a section titled "key points," the document said: "Do not speculate about the program. Do not talk about amnesty, increase in apprehensions, or give comparisons of past immigration reform proposals. Do not provide statistics on apprehension spikes or past amnesty data."

Villareal said the document was not intended to muzzle criticism of the administration`s plan, which has come under fire from both liberals and conservatives.

"It is just general guidance for consistency and nothing more than that," he said.

The collective bargaining agreement that governs the Border Patrol agents` union guarantees top officers the right to publicly criticize government programs. All of the agents who agreed to discuss the Bush proposal for this article said they were speaking in their capacity as union representatives.

Immigration officials estimate that there are between 8 million and 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. T.J. Bonner, a 25-year veteran of the force and president of the National Border Patrol Council, said the number might be closer to 16 million.

Bush`s proposal would allow illegal immigrants already in the United States to register for a three-year work permit to remain here legally as guest workers. The proposal would apply to workers who hold jobs that employers can demonstrate Americans are unwilling to take. Employers also would be allowed to import workers if they cannot find Americans to fill jobs.

Critics on both ends of the political spectrum have said Bush`s proposal does not fully address the problems associated with illegal immigration. Many have suggested the governments of Mexico and the United States would have more effect if they took action against U.S. employers who exploit illegal workers or if they attempted to create new jobs in Mexico.

But Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Commissioner Robert C. Bonner, a former U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles, has defended the proposal as an important tool in fighting terrorism. In an interview, Bonner, who is not related to the union president, said that allowing immigrants to register as guest workers would "result in cutting down the flow of illegal aliens."

"This isn`t amnesty…. It`s facing a reality," the immigration commissioner said. "Like it or not, there is a very large number of people who have come into the U.S. illegally or have overstayed their visas. It`s important for homeland security reasons to know who these people are."

Bonner stressed that the president`s proposal would not alter the Border Patrol`s mission of stemming the flow of illegal immigration. In a Jan. 13 message to immigration and customs bureau employees, the commissioner said that "illegally entering the U.S. was a crime yesterday, it is a crime today, and it will be a crime once the president`s new proposal is finalized."

Many analysts, however, said that the proposal is problematic. University of Virginia law professor David A. Martin — ex-general counsel for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol`s former parent agency — said that "the plan is not well thought out."

Many analysts believe that for the program to work, the government would have to simultaneously deport millions of people once their temporary work permits expired. That would be virtually impossible, the analysts said, and would effectively allow immigrants to remain in the United States forever.

"Its impact will be similar to amnesty," Martin said.

In an attempt to carry that message to the public, the National Border Patrol Council has established a website — http://www.noamnesty.com — calling the guest worker proposal a "slap in the face." The site says Bush "has decided that cheap labor and votes outweigh obedience to laws."

At a union meeting in the San Diego area last week, 35 agents urged their leadership to use the media, particularly talk radio, to make the public aware of their opposition to Bush`s proposal.

In the meantime, many agents said, they feel as if they are fighting for a cause their employer no longer believes in.

"I still try to arrest aliens who are in the interior of the country. Should I keep doing that?" asked Richard Pierce, a union leader based in Tampa, Fla., and a 24-year veteran of the force.

"At some point in the future, the president has the idea that he`s going to say `OK, stop doing that,` " Pierce said. "Border Patrol agents around the country are wondering about their relevance — why they get up in the morning, why they go to work."

Union leaders and rank-and-file agents say the sense of distrust and betrayal is widespread in the Border Patrol. An attempt by The Times to locate agents who supported Bush`s proposal was unsuccessful.

T.J. Bonner, the union president, said agents are not shy about letting him know when his lobbying is misguided. In this case, he said, the response has been unanimous.

"I have not heard from anyone saying, `You`re off base,` " he said. "Every person I have heard from, and there have been many, has said, `Keep pounding away; you`re right on target.` Even managers. They say they can`t speak out. But they say that they appreciate what we`re doing."

Frecker, the retired Border Patrol agent in Maine, agreed that the opposition to Bush`s proposal is widespread within the agency.

"Nobody — not one soul — thinks this is good idea," he said. "It just flies in the face of everything we do."

In the last 10 days, Mexican President Vicente Fox has expressed support for Bush`s proposal, and the Senate`s top Democrat has joined forces with a Republican colleague to offer an immigration plan with goals similar to Bush`s — linking work to the prospect of legal residency.

Still, many analysts say Bush`s chances of pushing his plan through Congress are shaky. Beyond the political criticism, some officials have begun expressing concern that the proposal is simply impractical — from the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to track millions of previously undocumented immigrants to the possibility of fraud.

Immigration experts, however, said the agents` lobbying effort likely will have little effect on the debate.

"The business community, AFL-CIO and the immigrant community are the political forces that are going to determine whether the president`s proposal passes" Congress, said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. The Washington-based group is an association of 8,000 attorneys and law professors who practice and teach immigration law.

As for his agents` criticism, Bonner said: "Like every law enforcement agency, they spout off and speak out. I`m proud of what they`ve done and are doing day and night to protect our border."


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Gold reported from Houston and Reza from San Diego.




Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-cheney2…
THE WORLD
Cheney Is Adamant on Iraq `Evidence`
Vice president revives assertions on banned weaponry and links to Al Qaeda that other administration officials have backed away from.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

January 23, 2004

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declaring there was "overwhelming evidence" that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war were proof of Iraq`s biological weapons programs.

The vice president stood by positions that others in the Bush administration have largely abandoned in recent months, as preliminary analysis of the trailers has been called into question and new evidence — including a document found with Hussein when he was captured — cast doubt on theories that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated.

Cheney`s comments were seen as stoking the controversy over Iraq as the vice president was embarking on a trip to an economic summit in Switzerland and meetings with European officials, some of them fierce opponents of the war who have been dismissive of U.S. claims about the threat posed by Iraq.

Cheney has consistently espoused the most hawkish views among senior administration officials. His statements Thursday suggest he intends to maintain that tone as he takes a more high-profile role in President Bush`s reelection campaign.

"There`s overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government," Cheney said in an interview on National Public Radio. "I am very confident that there was an established relationship there."

That assertion appeared at odds with the recent words of other senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said in an interview this month that he had "not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence" of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Danielle Pletka, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, defended Cheney`s comments, saying he referred only to a "relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

"Nobody has ever said Saddam directed Al Qaeda in attacks," Pletka said. "But it is clear that had he decided to do so at any point it would have been easy."

Members of Congress and some in the intelligence community said Thursday that Cheney`s comments could lead the public to believe there was collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that that was not supported by the evidence.

U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was contact between Hussein`s agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intelligence has surfaced to suggest a deeper relationship, and other information turned up recently has suggested that significant ties were unlikely.

Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in custody, has told American interrogators that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any working relationship with Iraq, which was seen by the terrorist network as a corrupt, secular regime. When Hussein was captured last month, he was found with a document warning his supporters to be wary of working with foreign fighters.

"There`s nothing I have seen or read that backs [Cheney] up," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who called Cheney`s remarks Thursday "perplexing."

Cheney also argued that the main thrust of the administration`s case for war — the claim that Iraq was assembling weapons of mass destruction — had been validated by the discovery of two flatbed trailers outfitted with tanks and other equipment.

"We`ve found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program," Cheney said. "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

That view is at odds with the judgment of the government`s lead weapons inspector, David Kay, who said in an interim report in October that "we have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort."

In a BBC interview that aired Thursday night on public television in the United States, Kay said that is still the case. He said it was "premature and embarrassing" for the CIA to conclude shortly after the vehicles were discovered last year that they were weapons labs. "I wish that news hadn`t come out," Kay said, calling the release of the information a "fiasco."

Experts are still in disagreement over the purpose of the vehicles, with some saying they may have been meant for biological weapons production and others saying it was more likely they were meant for making hydrogen.

Cheney is considered the administration official who has the most influence with Bush. His role in assembling the case for war has been controversial.

His numerous trips to CIA headquarters before the war were interpreted by some critics as an effort to pressure agency analysts to adopt hard-line views. In his public appearances, he often cast the alleged threat from Iraq in a harsh light, warning that United Nations inspectors could not be effective and that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program. Kay has since said there was no active nuclear program.

Since the war, as the administration has sought to deflect charges that it exaggerated the Iraqi threat, Cheney has appeared reluctant to give ground. On occasion, this has created public relations problems for the White House.

After Cheney implied in a television interview in September that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush was forced to acknowledge days later that the administration "had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved" in Sept. 11.

The White House had no comment Thursday on Cheney`s remarks.

Citing Cheney`s latest comments, Democrats on Capitol Hill renewed their calls for an examination of the administration`s use of intelligence.

"This is the same problem that existed before the war. Leaders are going beyond what the intelligence community said," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

The intelligence committees in the House and Senate are nearing completion of reports on intelligence failures in Iraq, but Republican leaders have resisted calls for examinations of claims made by officials in the executive branch.

Cheney insisted the "jury is still out" on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded last year. He said the search for banned arms should continue there.

"It`s going to take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that," Cheney said.

Bush has staunchly defended his decision to go to war, but has had to adopt somewhat strained language to characterize the threat he says was posed.

With no weapons of mass destruction yet discovered, Bush in his State of the Union address Tuesday said the United States had evidence of "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities."

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-pastor2…
COMMENTARY
Lessons in Elections From an Ayatollah
By Robert A. Pastor
Robert A. Pastor is a professor and director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University.

January 23, 2004

Who would have believed that an Iraqi ayatollah would be teaching the United States about the importance of direct elections, and that the Bush administration would be resisting the idea? Who would have thought that the United States would try to export the Iowa caucuses to Iraq when the essence of the caucuses violates the first principle of a fair election: a secret ballot?

Some think that our problem in Iraq is that the Pentagon had a plan for winning the war but no plan for what to do next, yet the real problem was that its postwar posture was based on mistaken lessons of history. The Pentagon`s advisors to Iraq thought they were going to Japan and Germany after World War II. The United States, they figured, would rebuild the country by itself, and the local people would obey.

But instead of asking how the Iraqi occupation was similar, they should have asked how it differed.

The answer is: in many ways, it turns out, but two are particularly pertinent. First, the United Nations in the last half-century has grown legs and has conducted dozens of peacekeeping and peace-building operations. It lacks power, but it alone has the legitimacy for handling a postwar dilemma as difficult as Iraq.

Second, national self-determination is today a universal force that is lethal when resisted. While focusing on 1945, the Bush administration failed to see that these two ideas — the U.N. and self-determination — are actually Washington`s children, and the president has behaved like a deadbeat dad. When Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani demands self-determination, he borrows from Woodrow Wilson, and when we refuse to take him seriously, we act like the European imperialists who resisted Wilson at Versailles, insisting on the benevolence of their rule and the chaos of self-rule.

We are making a second historical mistake by delaying elections for fear that they could lead to ethnic violence, as occurred in the Balkans. The truth is, we are more likely to exacerbate ethnic tensions by impeding the legitimate demand for elections. The ayatollah is right about the importance of direct elections in Iraq. Instead of dismissing his proposal as impractical, we ought to work with him to ask what it would take and how long it would take to complete a registration list and organize a national election.

To understand how short-sighted and arrogant our approach is in Iraq, imagine if the ayatollah were to tell us how we should run our democracy. He might, for example, insist that the United States replace the Iowa caucuses with a real primary, or he could demand that we repeal the electoral college in favor of direct elections. We would protest his interference in our internal affairs, though he would be right again.

One of the virtues of democracy is that it contains a self-correcting mechanism. If a policy is failing, and a politician faces reelection, that person has a strong incentive to learn.

U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III`s effort to persuade the U.N. to return to Iraq and assume responsibility before the U.S. presidential election suggests that the administration is learning. The U.N., however, faces a nearly impossible dilemma: how to establish its legitimacy and autonomy while being protected by U.S. forces. The U.N. mission would start on the right foot if it developed a formula for early direct elections — a hard but not impossible task.

A U.N. mission could also save the U.S. from its next mistake, which is to impose an agreement to maintain U.S. forces in Iraq before transferring power. This poison pill could inject so much resentment that it could jeopardize both the new government and the remaining U.S. forces.

Instead, the U.N. should shift the debate to the country`s central democratic challenge, which is how to persuade the three dominant groups — particularly the Shiites — to invite U.S. forces under a U.N. umbrella to protect minority rights until a federal government is committed to this goal and able to defend it.

If the Bush administration is genuinely committed to democracy in the Middle East, then it needs to avoid selecting Iraq`s leaders and imposing its timetable. It needs to accept that it won`t like some leaders, but most important, it should concentrate on helping Iraqis resolve the issues that will make democracy possible.

Nothing is more important than giving Iraqis a stake in their own security and protecting the rights of the minorities.




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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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[Joerver]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/157714_helen23.html

This year`s speech emphasizes freedom, not WMDs, in Iraq
Friday, January 23, 2004

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- What a difference a year makes.

In last year`s State of the Union address, President Bush based his argument for attacking Iraq on his claim that Saddam Hussein had arsenals of weapons of mass destruction that posed "a serious and mounting threat to our country."

He also maintained that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological agents that "could also kill untold thousands."

But in this year`s State of the Union address, Bush failed to mention the inconvenient fact that U.S. inspectors have failed to find any of those arsenals and stockpiles, despite searching Iraq for eight months.

No big thing. This year, it wasn`t weapons. Instead, it was "programs," as in: If Bush hadn`t invaded Iraq, "the dictator`s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs would continue to this day," as he put it.

This effort to equate arsenals with programs -- whatever those are -- amounts to Bush`s Plan B in his continuing search for a justification for the invasion.

He has moved on -- and he desperately wants the nation to do so, too. Indeed, the public may be willing to let this administration hype fade into history. It could be that the public has been reassured by Secretary of State Colin Powell`s recent statement that, regardless of the lack of actual weapons, Saddam had the "intention" of amassing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

This is the same secretary of state who, last Feb. 5, laid his prestige and credibility on the line by telling the world that Iraq had stockpiles of unconventional weapons. His stunning two-hour presentation to the U.N. Security Council convinced many Americans and helped pave the way to war.

Powell`s efforts to spin himself out of that credibility gulch are unbecoming. Rather than sugarcoat past mistakes, the general would be saluted if he acknowledged them. It would be his badge of honor. But then our leaders rarely bring themselves to do that.

With the presidential campaign now under way, we can hope that the eventual Democratic nominee will have the courage to take a stand against Bush`s strategy of pre-emptive war, a note sounded by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., after the president`s speech.

"The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war, unprecedented in our history and he failed to build a true international coalition," she declared.

Pelosi also said that the war had cost "a colossal $120 billion and rising." Billions of dollars "in no-bid contracts," she declared, had gone to "politically connected companies like Halliburton."

On her point about the president`s go-it-alone approach, it has become obvious that Bush has had second thoughts about seeking support from others, at least when it comes to the frustrating nation-building efforts in Iraq.

After arrogantly turning his back on the United Nations, he now has had to return to the world body for many favors, such as asking the United Nations to intervene to dissuade the Iraqi Shiites from demanding direct elections before the U.S. pullout.

U.S. policy-makers prefer a transitional government picked by Iraqi caucuses.

So suddenly Bush is discovering diplomacy. Perhaps he has decided that the preventive war doctrine -- promoted by his neo-con advisers -- is not all it was cracked it up to be.

Or it could be that the re-election campaign is giving him second thoughts about military adventures.

By the Pentagon`s count, 503 Americans have died in the war and 2,508 have been wounded. The Defense Department does not keep track of Iraqi casualties. A spokesman told me, "The numbers don`t count."

By wrapping himself in the mantle of the commander in chief responding to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which he has conceded had absolutely no connection to Iraq, the president may hope to tiptoe past these tragic costs and win re-election in November.

Before then, I hope the Democratic presidential nominee makes the effort to raise the troublesome questions about whether this price is worth it, given the phony excuses that the administration used for attacking Iraq in the first place.



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Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: [e-mail]. Copyright 2004 Hearst Newspapers.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/157719_theyell23.html

Rocky meets Taz in Howard Dean
Friday, January 23, 2004

By D.J. WILSON
GUEST COLUMNIST

Democratic presidential politics in recent years often have included a single moment, which as history moved forward, served to help define a candidate. They have come to be known succinctly as "The Kiss" (Al and Tipper Gore at the 2000 Democratic Convention), "The Dress" (Bill Clinton and the impeachment) and "The Tank" (Michael Dukakis in the 1988 campaign).

In each case, there was at least some negative response from the electorate that ultimately tarnished these political stars.

Following this week`s Iowa caucuses, Democrats have another definitional title: The Yell.

Howard Dean, who has professed to have difficulty with anxiety, must have been overcome with emotion as the caucus results showed him limping into third place. Only a week before polls showed he was running smartly in first place. The slings and arrows tossed his direction would have delivered an emotional charge to anyone.

Pundits will -- at least before the New Hampshire primary -- disagree about how it was that Dean achieved such a fall from grace. What will not be in dispute is Dean`s embarrassing behavior as he took the microphone Monday night.

With all the emotion of Rocky Balboa, and self-awareness of the Tasmanian Devil, Dean screamed out to adoring supporters. It was as if he were the quarterback of a state championship football team speaking before a high school assembly. It was also as if he were not aware that the world was also watching.

Voters, supporters and cynics -- in this crucial moment after having been served humble pie -- were looking to see how Dean would respond. What occurred was something I could not have imagined only moments before.

It started with Dean demonstrating his ability to memorize U.S. states by listing battlegrounds in which he expects to compete. "And then we`re going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House!"

Then it happened. "The Yell." As quoted on one Web site, the spelling of "The Yell" looks like this:

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHH!"

For that moment, for that single enduring period of time that may well become the caricature of Dean`s candidacy, I apologize to my fellow citizens. I apologize for ever having promoted Howard Dean as a moderate, level-headed, centrist Democratic governor. I apologize for ever arguing that he has a number of positions besides antipathy for George W. Bush and that folks should look at his record as governor. I am sorry to have helped bring this fellow along, albeit in my small way.

I don`t overestimate my importance, mind you. After all, I`ve never won an election. The only power I may broker is among my friends who are patient enough to listen to me.

But, in that small way, I have joined tens of thousands of others in promoting Dean, and by so doing, have felt that I was part of something larger than myself. I am no one in particular, but I am just like everyone involved in Dean`s campaign.

"The Yell" has changed everything for me. It has removed any veil of hope that Dean would evolve into the candidate I hoped. It has struck down the excuse that he speaks plainly and "like America." "The Yell" doesn`t sound like America to me, nor did Dean at that moment sound like the presidential candidate I want to support.

I am embarrassed to ever have thought he should be president. "The Yell" made it evident that he never really could have been.

Lose in Iowa, Howard, and I will stand with you. Be more brazen than my taste in your attack on the war, and I still have your back. Scream like you are a 13-year-old girl at a Justin Timberlake concert, and you`ve lost me.



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D.J. Wilson teaches political science at a community college near Seattle.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Dick Cheney Kills Birds Dead
The manly veep has himself a lazy, "canned" pheasant slaughter, and we are so impressed
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 23, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/01/23/notes012304.DTL



So then about a month ago the vice president of these beautiful and deeply confused United States, he of the struggling defibrillator and the shockingly nefarious wife and the gnarled calluses from working Dubya`s puppet strings, he of the thin-lipped sneer that makes babies cry and women wince and foreign policies crumble like feta cheese in the freezer, well, Dick goes himself a-huntin`.

Not just any ol` regular, camouflage-wearing, man-versus-nature hunt out in the wild, mind. Dick is far too fragile and unskilled and spoiled and scared of the open woods and icky furry monsters for that. Assumedly.

Nossir, our man Dick, he has himself flown over, in Air Force 2, on the taxpayer`s tab, accompanied by his most favoritest shotgun, to the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier, Westmoreland County, in rural Pennsylvania, to have himself a nice, cushy "canned" pheasant hunt.

This is what it was: Dick and about nine other overfed white guys sitting in a comfy luxury blind with their manly shotguns, waiting for the Westmoreland guy stationed behind them on a hill to release clusters of stunned, fat, tame game birds from a net. Then they shoot them.

Lots and lots of them. And then they slap each other on the back. And they grunt and say nice shot as the birds drop like flies as dogs race back and forth hauling dead or dying birds into huge piles. Whee what fun.

More than 400 birds were killed in one lackadaisical afternoon. Dick himself blasted the living crap out of 70 birds, all by himself. That`s right, 70. Plus an unknown number of mallard ducks. Then they had them all plucked and vacuum packed and sent back home to show off to the staff. Dick was driven back to the airport in a Humvee.

Are we not all impressed? Are we not all sitting here saying, wow, that Dick Cheney guy, he of the massive alleged Halliburton corruption scandals, he is one studly dude, slaughtering a small mountain of docile, stupefied birds that had no chance of escape. What a guy.

And what a display of prowess and skill, using his day off to kill almost as many pheasant and duck in an afternoon as all those notions of progress that have been slaughtered by his inbred cronyist pro-industry energy policy since the beginning of this sentence. Gosh.

Even real hunters cringe at canned hunts. It is not a sport. It is not man versus nature. There is no nobility, no honor, no sportsmanship, no instinct, no luck, no tramping through fields and crouching in blinds and waiting for hours as you coddle the barrel of your shotgun and dream of J.Lo and tell jokes about homos and Hillary Clinton, just so you can shoot a few wild birds.

In other words, Cheney`s canned hunt had none of the ostensibly sporting characteristics of true hunting. Cheney`s was essentially a slaughter, a bloody target practice for aging overpampered white males who never have sex and have desperately zero outlet for all their pent-up misanthropic energies. In short.

Yes, there are far more pressing issues for us to care about than a bunch of dead birds. And, yes, there are roughly a billion chickens slaughtered every damn day in this county by giant pollutive industrial farms in far more inhumane and brutal and disgusting and inbred and feces-thick and imminently liquefied and reconstituted and resold-as-McNuggets ways than Uncle Dick`s little afternoon birdie bloodbath.

And, yes, indeed, canned hunts happen far more often than anyone probably imagines. There are private ranches all over the country, most offering manly trophy hunters a "guaranteed" kill of some overbred, tame, exotic animal, such as antelopes, deer, cattle, swine, bears, zebras and sometimes even big cats.

These ranches, most operating in -- you guessed it -- Texas, service lazy fee-paying trophy hunters who want a giant stuffed antelope head for the den but don`t want to deal with any of that nasty nature or travel to Africa. God bless America.

So Dick`s little hunt was not all that rare. Which of course makes it no less stupid, no less of a brutal blood rush. It was a taxpayer-supported trip taken solely for the sake of ... what? Not sport. Not gamesmanship. Not food. Just the little thrill that comes from killing something that never had a prayer? Is that it, Dick? Kick up the defibrillator a notch? Must be.

Hell, we taxpayers could`ve saved a fortune in Secret Service time and Air Force 2 gas money had Dick simply have one of his lackeys -- Colin Powell, say -- tie long strings to the feet of 70 ducks and tether them to the White House lawn. Then Dick could just sit in a nice leather recliner and shoot them at will.

Simpler still, aides simply could`ve nailed the birds` feet to the floor with a staple gun and Dick could`ve put on a pair of army boots like the kind he avoided wearing during the Vietnam War, and as the birds squawked Dick could`ve jumped around like a human pogo stick and stomped on each bird, popping it like a balloon. Yay Dick!

And, finally, there is the patented Dubya hunting method, wherein you make a little gun shape with your thumb and index finger and sit back and "aim" at each bird and shout "Bang!" and someone smashes the bird in the head with a baseball bat. Same difference, really.

You know what? It`s not a big deal. It`s just a bunch of dead birds, right? Over 400 of them spread among 10 guys who simply could not shoot fast enough to kill them all. Again, it happens all the time.

Except here, here in the land of obvious and tragicomic analogy, where you simply cannot help but transfer Dick`s little aggro mind-set -- this numbly violent attitude of "just line `em up and shoot `em and pretend you`re actually a manly hunter when all you are is rather heartless and inhumane and small" -- over to the government itself.

Which is to say, this is the worldview we are up against. This is yet another perfect example of the American agenda as set forth by the CheneyRumsfeldRove Triumvirate o` Pain, very much the way this administration attacks the world. No competition. No sportsmanship. No fairness. Zero respect. No reverence. And no actual talent required. Just kill at will.

Because it is, in the final analysis, all about how you approach and engage the world, nature, yourself. It is all about with what degree of sacredness and veneration you walk the planet, treading lightly or stomping heavily, in awe of the interconnectedness or working to crush the beautiful and the weak for profit and hollow thrill. It is, after all, your choice.

Do you, as Dick Cheney obviously does, see the world as your personal blood-sport playground, where you can take anything you want, kill whatever you like, respect nothing nature has to offer, suffer no ramifications, and do it all on someone else`s tab? Well then. You have made your choice. The GOP wants you.


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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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[Deep Thought]

# 11949

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Das Enttarnen eines CIA-Agenten ist ein Kapitalverbrechen. Der Täter wird im Umfeld von Bush vermutete. Ich hatte nicht erwartet, dass es zu einer Prozeßeröffnung kommt.

Grand Jury Hears Plame Case
Testimony begins in front of a grand jury in the investigation into whether the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame was improperly leaked to the press
By JOHN DICKERSON AND VIVECA NOVAK

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,581456,00.htm…


Thursday, Jan. 22, 2004
Sources with knowledge of the case tell TIME that behind closed doors at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, nearby the Capitol, a grand jury began hearing testimony Wednesday in the investigation of who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak and other journalists.

Prosecutors are believed to be starting with third-party witnesses, people who were not directly involved in the leak of Plame`s identity. Plame`s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, claims that the leak was an act of retaliation against him for undercutting Bush`s weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale for going to war in Iraq. Soon enough, witnesses with more direct knowledge will be called to testify, and a decision to subpoena journalists for their testimony will also be made. In December, the FBI asked some administration staffers to sign a waiver releasing reporters from confidentiality agreements in connection with any conversations they had about the Wilson affair. Novak`s attorney, Jim Hamilton, had no comment about the latest developments.

Grand juries aren`t always used in criminal probes, but they are the preferred way to go in cases with potential political fallout, if only to lend credibility to the result. One conclusion to be drawn from this latest step, said one lawyer familiar with the case, is that investigators clearly have a sense of how the case is shaping up. "They clearly have a sense of what`s going on and can ask intelligent questions" to bring the grand jury up to speed. A grand jury is not a trial jury, but is used as an investigative tool and to decide whether to bring indictments in a case.

Anyone who`s subpoenaed in the inquiry, noted the lawyer, can be almost certain that prosecutors aren`t contemplating indicting him or her. Subpoenas are rarely sent to the targets of an investigation, and if they are, the recipients must be told in advance that they are considered targets—at which point they would almost certainly cite the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer questions.

A huge unanswered question in this case is whether the leaker or leakers knew that Plame was undercover when they gave her identity away. That is a necessary element for any indictment for leaking the name of a covert agent. However, charges could also be brought for making false statements to the FBI, if a guilty party has falsely claimed innocence in interviews with government agents.

It`s also possible that prosecutors will learn who perpetrated the leak but won`t have enough to bring charges. But true to form, the Bush administration continues to be extremely tight-lipped about the investigation -- even internally. "No one knows what the hell is going on," says someone who could be a witness, "because the administration people are all terrified and the lawyers aren`t sharing anything with each other either."

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The End of Freedom
by John Stanton
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 22, 2004


“The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band, presses masses of isolated [people] together and supports them in a world which has become a wilderness for them--and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other which prepares each individual in [their] lonely isolation against all others-- corresponds to each other and needs each other in order to keep the terror-ruled movement in motion and keep it moving. Just as terror…ruins all relationships with men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when [people] have lost contact with [other people] as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, [people] lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced [follower], but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exist.”

-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism


The American nation-state led by the Bush Administration, and the transnational rebel group led by Bin Laden, has brought to life the artificially fabricated insanity that Hannah Arendt so dreaded. But the situation is far worse than she could have imagined. The insanity that permeates the psyche of the United States of America and the mysterious Al Qaeda is being carefully nurtured by Bush and Bin Laden, the products of wealthy families intertwined in business dealings for decades. Rather than trying to find a mid-point where some commonality and reduction of violence might be found, these two zealots and their minions have eliminated the possibility of any peaceful outcome and, instead, daily sow the seeds of destruction for the causes they claim to promote. In short, perpetual ideological conflict played out on the battlefields of the world.

Bush and Bin Laden view themselves as freedom fighters and are steadfast in their beliefs and their gods. On that score, no one can argue. But both have done more to eliminate freedom—the mobility of thought and action—than some of history’s worst scoundrels.

Set on a collision course predetermined by years of dubious American economic, political and military actions throughout the Middle East and Persian Gulf Basin, it was only a matter of time before Bush and

Bin Laden (or President X and Bin X) would find themselves and their followers at war with each other.

For a moment following September 11, 2001, there was an option that both men had and that was to reach out to each other and, adopting the best parts of Christianity and Islam, attempt to address grievances, to right wrongs, to salvage the lives of collateral human beings. Enough potential, enough new beginnings, as Arendt would say, had died on that terrible September day and all the days that came before for those living under tyrannical regimes supported by the USA. But in an already insane--and dangerously bored--world eager to explore new levels of insanity, exercising the freedom to be free from war and its sufferings to “turn the other cheek” seemed, itself, an absurd choice.

Guided by Fantasy

And so Bush and Bin Laden, blinded by their otherworldly beliefs in Christian and Islamic mysticism, launched their hungry followers into the place that they occupy. That place where, as Arendt pointed out, the distinction between fact and fiction and true and false no longer exist--an artificially created insanity, a totalitarian place full of demons and evil where a disembodied concept—God—provides violent guidance.

How else to explain their theatric and compulsive ideological showmanship? Bin Laden claims peace upon Allah but destroys Allah’s name through the destruction of life. Bush says he has done more for human rights than anyone in history, yet he has authorized the creation of a Gulag, the torture and killing of prisoners, soldiers and collateral human beings alike. Bin Laden takes his guidance from the Koran and his zealous advisors. Bush takes all his guidance from the Bible and claims not to read or watch any newscasts, getting his views from advisors who never met a boardroom they didn’t like. Both leaders demand total organizational secrecy.

One of the central personality characteristics of both men is their need to hide. Bin Laden has been on the run since the CIA supported him against the Soviets in the 1980’s. No surprise there. But Bush’s hide-everything characteristic and “I don’t have to tell anyone why I do things” has unfortunately spilled over into much of American society where even the operation of local utilities has been classified and hidden under the guise of national security. This protect-the-sewercap homeland security mentality in a nation of 300 million people occupying a continental landmass with a width of 4421 kilometers and a length of 2572 kilometers is patently insane. So, absent the bright light of a public that thinks and a responsible US Congress and media, Americans essentially already have the equivalent of a martial law government, a government run out of a bunker that never sees the “real” light of day (perhaps an arrangement can be made with the US military to keep the current government and business leaders in their bunkers after the next rebel assault).

Trust Me

Earn your daily bread and we’ll take care of politics and your defense, they say. Arendt points out in The Human Condition that one of the main goals of tyranny is to get the public, the followers to forget about opposition politics, to not ask tough questions. Right on cue, Bush’s minions lash out at any criticism of his/their policies as unpatriotic and unrealistic. Don’t Ask! Have Faith! They admonish. And that attitude permeates today’s society. For example, in the business world in-your-face, know-your-place takes the form of statements like these, “Those of us who make the big decisions get the big money and those who sweep the floors don’t” according to one executive and retired military commander. One can only imagine the penalty that Bin Laden has for dissent. Yet, it is critical to remember that in the fantastical world that Bush and Bin Laden occupy, Arendt’s insanity is normalcy. It is useless to ask, where’s the outrage, simply because millions of followers in government, in business and in the public exist in that same unreal reality. Anyone else just doesn’t matter.

Distinctions between Bush and Bin Laden followers are difficult to make. Both advocate preemption, War/Jihad, assassination, coups, and kidnapping and torture. So it’s no surprise to learn that Bush and Bin Laden think there’s just too much freedom. They’ve done everything in their power to ensure that freedom-- that open space to move about or fill with thought--is designed in accordance with their totalitarian worldview. It’s no surprise that in Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address he made note of the fact that many Americans do not believe that the USA is at war. In a backhanded slap at the American Constitution, Bush mocked the US civilian justice system opting to glorify war and the US military, and give Americans another dose of fear. Bush is keeping the movement in motion, as Arendt would have said. In this environment, Individuality is of no use; in fact, it’s dangerous. The day may be close when an individual born in the USA will not receive citizenship until later in life and after being subjected to a background check, fingerprinting, neural mapping and a citizenship test. Can it be long before every American is classified as a national security interest?

Goodbye Individuality

Bush has adroitly fused state, religious (Faith Based government) and business interests into one indistinguishable tyrannical mass (would one expect anything different in a country run by Bin Laden?). In like manner, the needs of that tyrannical mass has (or soon will) supercede and absorb individual thought and action, even the individual self as property. All of life’s effort will be on behalf of national survival, national security. At the dinner table, at the office, upon waking up from sleep, on the metro, in the movie theater, all images, thinking and movement is dominated by war or the threat of war. Join the cause or find yourself on the outside is the new thinking. The next step, perhaps well underway, begins with collection of US census data, airline passenger manifests, medical records, driving records, credit reports, academic transcripts, property records, religious affiliation, sexual affiliation, and marriage records, all of which are finding their way into centralized databases run by NASA, the US Army, the Pentagon and, undoubtedly, the FBI, CIA, NSA and who knows how many other organizations.

In compressed databases across the country, one no longer has a private and unique record, but rather becomes a classification, lumped together in an indistinguishable group. The data pattern determines your eligibility to join the group outside the database; for example, to board the airplane or train. You board the aircraft because of the very fact that you are no longer unique, you are no longer an individual, you are part of the group. You’ve selected non-freedom. Your interests match those of the tyrannical mass. And that’s not all. Non-invasive neurological testing as proposed by NASA will be done right at the airport or train station to determine, like a lie detector test, whether your nervous. Is your nervousness a sign that you are a threat?

The Horror

Adam Smith once said that the purpose of government is to protect the rich from the poor. Bush’s policies and actions, or should we say those of his advisors, demonstrate at once that the federal government of the

USA is being reduced to an entity that concerns itself only with national security. Smith’s view is in play in 2004. As Bush chides the federal government to reduce “wasteful” spending on education, infrastructure repair, global health insurance, veterans benefits, social security, medicare and environmental protection, etc., he asks for more tax cuts for the wealthy, more weapons, more tax breaks for corporations and more funding for an other-worldly program of space exploration best left to mechanical explorers, not flesh and blood.

Bush terrorizes his own populace and the world by indicating that the entire cosmos hangs in the balance. And it’s not just the cosmos, it’s your job, your home. And now your sexuality is under attack. Homosexuals and lesbians—and the radical judges who rule in their favor--threaten the national security of the USA because they may destroy the sanctity of the marriage contract. For this reason—and in another swipe at the US judicial system, Bush would amend the US Constitution inserting discrimination into a document that what was supposed to guarantee freedom.

Perhaps Arendt’s most powerful and simple statement was that people need to think about what they are doing. She warned that the consequences of action taken today can’t be known or may not be controllable once set into motion. The individuals that remain need to think hard about who and what they want to become—ammunition and human capital in the violently absurd world of Bush and Bin Laden, or thinking individuals moving in the open space of a fearless society.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. He is the co-author of America’s Nightmare. Reach him at [e-mail]

Other Articles by John Stanton

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When will the American people be told of bin Laden`s capture?

Memorial Day
July 4th
September 11th
As he`s chained to the stage at the GOP CONvention

Report: bin Laden held


BERLIN, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has been captured, Germany`s Die Welt newspaper reported Thursday.

The newspaper, on its Web site, cited "unconfirmed reports" as the basis for its report.

Bin Laden is the Saudi dissident blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. He was believed to be hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Copyright 2004 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.

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#953

Wer mitabstimmen will, wann die Gefangennahme von Bin Laden bekanntgegeben wird, kann hier mit abstimmen:

http://www.mystolennation.com/index.php

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Codpiece

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22 Jan 2004 16:11

No truth to rumor bin Laden captured - U.S. official
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - There is no truth to a rumor in the foreign exchange markets that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been captured, a U.S. official said on Thursday.

"It`s not true," the official said when asked about the rumor.

U.S. forces have been hunting for bin Laden since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America that were blamed on al Qaeda.

[Joerver]

Soldaten sind zum Töten ausgebildet, und es ist gut, wenn sie das am lebenden Objekt üben können.

Wars `useful`, says US army chief
The head of the United States army has said that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have provided a "tremendous focus" for the military.
General Peter Schoomaker said in an interview with AP news agency that the wars had allowed the army to instil its soldiers with a "warrior ethos".

But the general, who became chief of staff in August, denied warmongering saying the army must be ready to fight.

He also said he doubted recruiting more troops was a solution to army stress.


Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that terrorists have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph
General Peter Schoomaker
"You aren`t stronger because you have more people," he said, adding that expanding the army was similar to pouring water on sand.
Many senior military figures have expressed concern about "overstretch", a problem which has become particularly acute in post-war situations like Iraq which require more troops than combat.

But General Schoomaker says the answer could be to expand combat strength by freeing troops from other assignments.

`Silver lining`

General Schoomaker said the attacks on America in September 2001 and subsequent events had given the US army a rare opportunity to change.

"There is a huge silver lining in this cloud," he said.

"War is a tremendous focus... Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph."

He said it was no use having an army that did nothing but train.

"There`s got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for," he said.

"I`m not warmongering, the fact is we`re going to be called and really asked to do this stuff."


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/3419715.stm

Published: 2004/01/22 12:51:54 GMT

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In den Staaten am Kaukasus und anderen Mittelasien Staaten, bat sich ein neuese Konfliktpotential unter Mithilfe der USA auf.

Published on Friday, January 23, 2003 by OneWorld.net
Washington Trades Human Rights for Oil in Azerbaijan
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON -- The oil-rich nation of Azerbaijan, eagerly courted by the Bush administration, is suffering its worst repression since it became an independent state--after the Soviet collapse more than a decade ago--according to a new report released today by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). http://www.hrw.org/

The 55-page report, "Crushing Dissent: Repression Violence and Azerbaijan`s Elections," details hundreds of arbitrary arrests, widespread beatings and torture, and politically motivated firings of opposition activists and supporters following October 15 presidential elections widely denounced as unfair and fraudulent by Western and other observers.

The elections confirmed Ilham Aliev as the nation`s new ruler. He is the son of Heidar Aliev, a former top KGB official and Kremlin adviser, who became president two years after Azerbaijan became independent in 1991. The elder Aliev died last month while receiving medical treatment in the United States.

"Azerbaijan is experiencing its gravest human rights crisis of the past ten years," said Rachel Denber, acting director of HRW`s Europe and Central Asia Division. "The government must take immediate steps to end the repression."

The report, based on hundreds of interviews with victims and witnesses in 13 towns and cities during and immediately after the elections and subsequent testimonies and press reports, found that repression has only intensified over the last several months.

It also accused the U.S. and other western governments of responding to the elections and the crackdown that followed them by sending muted and contradictory messages, capped by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s visit last month. Rumsfeld personally congratulated the younger Aliev on his election victory, but otherwise refused to make any comment on the political situation.

"The international community needs to take a strong and consistent stance against the rising tide of abuse," said Denber. "In light of President Bush`s recent statements on democracy in neighboring countries in the Middle East, U.S. inaction on Azerbaijan is particularly troubling."

Despite its vast oil wealth, Azerbaijan remains a poor country with an annual per capita income well below US$4,000, and about half the population living below the poverty line. The country lost part a key part of its territory, Nagorno-Karabakh, in a fierce conflict with neighboring Armenia in the early 1990s that was suspended by a cease-fire in 1994 but has yet to be fully resolved.

Corruption under the Alievs has reportedly been rampant, particularly with the investment of billions of dollars by foreign oil companies eager to exploit the country`s energy resources, found primarily in and around the capital, Baku, and beneath Azerbaijan`s territorial waters in the Caspian Sea.

Washington has been interested in Azerbaijan as a major future supplier of oil for the past decade. It has played a leading role in promoting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that will carry oil from the Caspian through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey`s easternmost Mediterranean port, a controversial project designed to ensure to circumvent Russia and Iran, even though using existing grids would be a much cheaper transport method.

Azerbaijan was quick to offer assistance to Washington after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and military ties between the two nations have grown steadily. Beginning in 2002, Bush waived a ban on security assistance to Azerbaijan that was first imposed during its war with Armenia.

Indeed, Rumsfeld`s recent trip there was aimed at intensifying military cooperation and assessing Baku`s willingness to host U.S. military facilities. Washington has also expressed interest in providing Azerbaijan with training and equipment, including a Coast Guard cutter, to permit its navy to patrol its waters.

But some analysts say the growing coziness with the Aliev government carries serious risks, particularly if repression and corruption are not soon curbed. The fact that it had to resort to fraud to ensure its election victory, according to this view, suggests that the government is deeply unpopular and could be destabilized.

"A failure to fully promote democracy will ensure that the profits from oil production will end up in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt leaders and government officials," warned Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) in a recent article in which he argued that Washington faces similar challenges throughout the Caucasus region. Some days later, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was ousted in a popular uprising.

While the Georgian crisis was resolved in a free election swept by a pro-U.S. opposition, the October election in Azerbaijan was anything but free, according to HRW and other independent analysts.

HRW found that the government prevented many opposition candidates from campaigning effectively--often through police brutality, arbitrary arrests, and intimidation--during the election campaign. On election day it carried out a well-organized campaign of fraud to ensure victory for Ilham Aliev with some 75 percent of the official vote. The fact that the fraud was carried out in front of the largest election-monitoring team ever deployed to Azerbaijan only increased the frustration of both the opposition and the observers.

Immediately after the election, protest demonstrations were met by "brutal and excessive force" carried out by the police, as a result of which at least 300 protestors suffered serious injuries and one was killed. Azerbaijani authorities have so far refused to carry out an investigation of the police violence, let alone punish any of the security forces involved.

In the weeks following the election, the authorities used the violence as a pretext for rounding up nearly 1,000 people--among them, opposition leaders and activists, activists of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) perceived as supporting the opposition, journalists, and election officials and observers who challenged the fraud. Those detained routinely suffered beatings by police, while opposition leaders held at the Organized Crime Unit of the Interior Ministry were tortured by electric shock, severe beating, and threats that they would be raped.

As of last week, more than 100 detainees remain in custody and, if convicted of various crimes with which they have been charged, may face up to 12 years in prison. More than 100 opposition supporters and their family members have been fired from their jobs, while opposition activists throughout the country are subject to constant harassment by the policy.

"The government of Azerbaijan is attempting to crush the opposition with few attempts to hide it," charges the HRW report, which calls on the government to immediately release all of those detained for political reasons and thoroughly investigate acts of torture and other official misconduct. But it stressed that the role of the international community, particularly Western powers, could play a critical role.

Next Tuesday, the Council of Europe`s Parliamentary Assembly, is scheduled to debate Azerbaijan`s compliance the Council`s human rights requirements--an opportunity, according to HRW for European governments to express stronger concern. "The Assembly needs to adopt a strong resolution making clear that Azerbaijan`s credentials are at risk unless the government remedies the situation," said Denber. Azerbaijan was admitted to the Council in February, 2001.

Washington also needs to convey a clearer message, according to HRW, which recognized the Aliev`s election victory, even as U.S. observers sent by the administration denounced them as a "sham."

Copyright 2004 OneWorld.net

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Published on Friday, January 23, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Thomas Friedman Wants a Democrat Who Can Win World War III
by Ira Chernus

Thomas Friedman, the respected foreign affairs columnist for the respectable New York Times, announced recently that we are fighting World War III, a war of ideas. In his last four columns, he told us how to fight and win this war.

In Tom`s world, there are just two sides. The good guys have good ideas, the kind of ideas you`d expect from a centrist American politician or corporate executive. The bad guys are the guys who have any other kind of ideas. That makes the bad guys a big stewpot of all sorts of ideas, a pot big enough to fit both Osama and Saddam.

That`s why Friedman could commit such a howler in last column. He wrote that the U.S. had to conquer Iraq because "the Islamist threat had to be confronted," Excuse me? When Saddam ruled Iraq, real Islamists (people who want the state to be governed by strict Islamic law) were among the most likely to be tortured.

A couple of paragraphs later, Tom admits that there is some difference between Al Qaeda and Saddam. But it doesn`t matter, he says, because "they emerge from the same pathology of widespread repression, economic stagnation and fear of cultural decline." Building a decent Iraq is very much part of the war on terrorism, Friedman adds.

The quoted words come from an "expert" who runs a Democratic centrist Clinton-style think tank. That`s just the kind of policy Friedman is touting. For these folks, good ideas-liberal democracy plus capitalism plus corporate globalization-are "decent." Everything else is sick "pathology."

But a decent centrist also needs "toughness and resolve," Tom says. Those were favorite words of Democratic cold warriors like JFK and LBJ. Not surprising, since Friedman calls this World War "a long cold-war-like struggle to strengthen the forces of moderation and weaken the forces of violent intolerance within the Arab-Muslim world."

Of course, the forces of intolerance may not always listen to the decent moderate good guys. That`s when you need toughness and resolve, according to Friedman: "Sometimes smashing someone in the face is necessary to signal others that they will be held accountable for the intolerance they incubate." Yep, sometimes the only way to stop intolerance is a good smash in the face.

Democratic presidents understand that. Kennedy loved the Green Berets. Johnson smashed millions in Vietnam. Clinton sent Wesley Clark to smash the Serbs in the face.

In his last column on World War III, Tom Friedman breathed a great sigh of relief that the voters of Iowa understand it, too. That`s why they derailed Howard Dean`s train to the White House. And a good thing too, Tom says. A candidate who won`t applaud smashing Iraq in the face just isn`t "credible." In other words, he`s not a good guy with good ideas. Now we can rest assured that we`ll have a Democratic candidate who is ready to do some mouth-smashing when the time comes. Of course, a good guy can have bad ideas about how to fight World War III. Friedman criticizes the Bush administration, not for going to war, but for being "sloppy and unprepared for postwar Iraq." He wants a decent, moderate Democratic president to bring "stability" to Iraq. Oh, and democracy.

Does that mean letting the Iraqi people elect their own leaders? Gosh, no. That`s a bad idea, says Tom, and if you want free elections in Iraq you must be supporting the forces of violent intolerance.

If you don`t understand that, you don`t have good ideas, so Tom won`t even bother explaining why there is no contradiction here. Let me explain it for you. A decent society is an "open" society. World War III is "the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies."

Open to what? Investment capital and corporate takeover, from anyone, anywhere in the world. That`s why Paul Bremer`s government in Iraq has opened the nation to all comers. He wants "stability." That`s a good guys` code word. It means a predictably safe environment to protect returns on investment. So Bremer allows no restrictions on capital flows, no government regulations, and creates a flat tax to let the rich get richer. It`s an IMF - WTO dream come true.

If the Iraqi people were allowed to vote for their leaders, they might very well elect leaders (and not necessarily Shi`ites) who would put the interests of their own people ahead of the interests of the global capitalist elite. Since that elite is the very essence of good, moderate, decent thinking, keeping them out would leave only the forces of intolerance to run Iraq.

In Tom Friedman`s world, there is no other alternative. Tom agrees with George W. that are no neutrals in this war. Everyone who isn`t a good guy is a bad guy. So those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq, and applauded Howard Dean when he was the antiwar candidate (Is he still?), must be bad guys, supporters of violent intolerance. We may even be traitors.

But as long as the Democrats nominate a "credible" candidate -- one with good ideas about stability, open societies, and the occasional smash in mouth -- Thomas Friedman can sleep easy at night. He won`t have to worry about the rest of us and our silly bad ideas at all.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. [e-mail]

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Revealed: The women who suffered Saddam`s tyranny
By Robert Fisk - 23 January 2004

http://www.k1m.com/antiwarblog/archives/000098.html

The women`s faces are all veiled. They are mostly young. They are all Iraqi Shia Muslims. And their terrible fate - their vicious torture and deliberately cruel executions - should place their deaths on the list of barbarities for which Saddam Hussein could be tried, although almost all were put to death when the United States was supporting Saddam`s regime.

For only now has a newly formed "Documentation Centre for the Female Martyrs of the Islamic Movement" at last produced the chronicle of these women`s suffering. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Wives were forced to watch their husbands hanged before being placed in the electric chair, were burned with acid, tied naked to ceiling fans, sexually abused. In several cases, women were poisoned or used as guinea pigs for chemical substances at a plant near Samarra believed to be making chemical weapons.

Their names - along with the names of their torturers and executioners - are at last known. One man, Abu Widad, once boasted that he had hanged 70 female prisoners in one night at the Abu Ghraib jail outside Baghdad. In many cases, women were put to death for the crime of being the sisters or wives of a wanted man. Most were associated with the forbidden al-Dawa party, whose members were routinely tortured and killed by the Baathist government.

A typical entry in Imprisoned Memories: Red Pages from a Forgotten History - compiled by Ali al-Iraq in the Iranian city of Qum - reads as follows: "Samira Awdah al-Mansouri (Um Iman), born 1951, Basra, teacher at Haritha Intermediate School ... married to the martyr Abdul Ameer, a cadre of the Islamic movement military wing ... member of Islamic Dawa party ... Torturers: Major Mehdi al-Dulaymi who tortured while drunk, Lieutenant Hussain al-Tikriti, who specialised in breaking the rib cages of his victims by stamping on them ... Lieutenant Ibrahim al-Lamee who beat victims on their feet ... Um Iman was beaten ... hung by her hair from a ceiling fan and and suffered torture by electricity. Having spent two months in the prison cells in Basra without giving way, al-Dulaymi recommended she be executed for carrying unlicensed arms and belonging to the al-Dawa party."

In fact, Um Iman was transferred to the Public Security Division in Baghdad, where further torture took place over 11 months. She subsequently appeared before the Revolutionary Military Security Court, which sentenced her to death by hanging. She spent another six months in the Rashid prison west of Baghdad, until - when she might have hoped that her life would be spared - she was, on a Sunday evening, transferred to Abu Graib and executed by Abu Widad.

There are frequent accounts of women and children tortured in front of their husbands and fathers. In 1982, for instance, a Lieutenant Kareem in Basra reportedly brought the wife of an insurgent to the prison, stripped and tortured her in front of her husband, then threatened to kill their infant child. When both refused to talk, the security man "threw the baby against the wall and killed him".

Ahlam al-Ayashi was arrested in 1982 at the age of 20 because she was married to Imad al-Kirawee, a senior Dawa member. When he refused to give information to the security police, two torturers - named in the report as Fadil Hamidi al-Zarakani and Faysal al-Hilali - attacked Ahlam in front of the prisoner and his child, torturing her to death. Three of Ahlam`s five brothers were executed along with her husband, and another brother was killed in the insurrection that followed the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. But her child Ala, who witnessed her mother`s torture, was taken to Iran, where she married and is now about to enter university.

Awatif Nour al-Hamadani, 21, was betrayed by her own husband, who - under extreme torture - named his wife and several colleagues as gun-runners.

Awatif was pregnant but was set upon by a man called Major Amer who beat her with a metal chair and then sexually abused her. At her trial, Judge Mussalam al-Jabouri suggested that "a miniature gallows should be found for her baby daughter because she had sucked on her mother`s hate-filled milk". Awatif was taken to be executed for the first time with two female colleagues and forced to watch the hanging of 150 men, 10 at a time; as their corpses were taken away, she recognised one of them as her husband. She was then returned to her cell. She was later executed in an electric chair.

Maysoon al-Assadi was an 18-year-old university student when she was arrested for membership of a banned Islamic organisation. During her interrogation, she was hanged by her hair and beaten on the soles of her feet and then sentenced to hang by Judge Awad Mohamed Amin al-Bandar. Her last wish - to say goodbye to her fiance - was granted, and the two married in the prison. But while saying goodbye to other prisoners, she made speeches condemning the leadership of the Iraqi regime, and the prison governor decided that she should be put to death slowly. She was strapped into the jail`s electric chair and took two hours to die.

Salwa al-Bahrani, the mother of a small boy, had been caught distributing weapons to Islamic fighters in 1980.

She was allegedly administered poisoned yoghurt during interrogation by a doctor, Fahid al-Dannouk, who experimented in poisons that could be used against Iranian troops. Salwa died at home 45 days after being forced to eat the yoghurt.

The 550-page report is no literary work. Some of its prose is florid and occasionally appears to describe women`s martyrdom as a fate to be emulated. Nor is this a work which will make easy reading for Americans anxious to use it as evidence against Saddam. The book repeatedly states that the chemicals used on women prisoners were originally purchased from Western countries. But the detail is compelling - the names and fates of at least 50 women are recorded, along with the names of their torturers - and the activities of the "Monster of Abu Ghraib", Abu Widad, have been confirmed by the few prisoners who survived the jail. He carried out executions between 8pm and 4am and would hit condemned men and women on the back of the head with a hatchet if they praised a murdered imam before they were hanged. In the end, 41-year-old Abu Widad was caught after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. He was hanged on his own gallows in 1985.

Copyright: The Independent



http://www.robert-fisk.com

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Helicopter Crashes in Iraq; 2 Pilots Dead

Friday January 23, 2004 9:31 PM


BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter attached to the 101st Airborne Division crashed Friday in northern Iraq, killing the two pilots, the U.S. military said.

The helicopter went down about 8:30 p.m. near Qayyarah, some 30 miles south of Mosul, the military said.

The cause of the crash was unclear. The military said ``an initial report from the accompanying second helicopter did not make mention of hostile activity.``

Friday`s deaths brought to 507 the number of American service members who have died since a U.S.-led coalition launched the Iraq war March 20. Most of the deaths have occurred since President Bush declared an end to active combat May 1.

It was the fourth helicopter crash suffered by U.S. forces in Iraq this month.

On Jan. 2, an Army OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter was shot down near the central city of Fallujah, killing one pilot. Six days later, an Army Black Hawk medevac helicopter was shot down by a rocket near Fallujah, killing all nine U.S. soldiers aboard.

A U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter was brought down by apparent enemy fire on Jan. 13, but both crew members escaped injury.

On Nov. 15, two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters collided and crashed in Mosul, killing 17 American soldiers in the U.S. military`s worst single loss of life since the Iraq war began.

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Shiite Leader Rejects U.S. Plan for Iraq

Friday January 23, 2004 8:01 PM


By HAMZA HENDAWI

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The U.S.-backed plan for handing over power to Iraqis is unacceptable as it stands, according to a top Shiite Muslim leader who met with President Bush this week.

However, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim said Friday that the Americans, as well as others, are slowly coming around to the need for elections to chose a new legislature rather than have the members named by 18 regional caucuses.

``As it stands, it`s unacceptable,`` al-Hakim said of the political blueprint reached Nov. 15 between L. Paul Bremer, America`s top civilian official in Iraq, and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. ``It was hurriedly agreed.``

Iraq`s top Shiite cleric urged followers Friday to stop public demonstrations in support of his call for an early vote until U.N. experts decide whether an election is feasible.

Tens of thousands have marched in Baghdad and elsewhere in support of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, whose opposition to an earlier U.S.-backed plan forced Washington to drop it. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to decide next week whether to send a team to determine whether early elections can be held.

Al-Hakim, who was among members of a Governing Council delegation who met with Bush on Tuesday at the White House, heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country`s most powerful Shiite political group.

His views carry considerable weight in Iraq, where the Shiite majority has risen to dominate the political scene after decades of suppression by the Sunni Arab minority.

Al-Hakim, a close associate of al-Sistani, described as ``complicated`` the part of the U.S.-backed plan providing for the selection of members of the transitional legislature through regional caucuses.

The proposed legislature will appoint a government that will take over sovereignty from the U.S.-led coalition July 1.

Under the plan, Iraqis will vote early next year to chose delegates who will draft a constitution. The draft will later be adopted in a national referendum. The third and final 2005 vote, under the plan, is to elect a new parliament.

Faced with al-Sistani`s demand for an early vote, Iraqi and U.S. officials asked Annan on Monday to dispatch a team of experts to Iraq to see whether an election was feasible before July 1. Annan will make a decision on sending a team next week, a spokesman said Friday.

A U.N. security team arrived in Baghdad on Friday to study the possible return of international staff from the world body, months after deadly bombings at the Baghdad U.N. headquarters prompted Annan to withdraw them from Iraq.

If the experts conclude an early vote is not feasible, then sovereignty could be handed over to the Governing council, said al-Hakim, but he added it was ``a last-resort option.``

He said U.S. and U.N. officials were slowly coming to understand the political aspirations of Iraqis after Saddam Hussein`s ouster.

``We see day after day that their convictions are moving closer,`` he said.

In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a representative of al-Sistani quoted the cleric as calling on supporters not to march again in support of his demand for an early vote until the U.N. experts` findings become known.

However, protests should be held if they become necessary again, the representative, Abdul-Mehdi al-Karbalai, told worshippers in a Friday sermon.

Another leading member of the Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, said in Washington that he believes Iraq should be able to have elections with six months of planning. He also said Saddam left Iraq deep in debt, and that his crimes will come to light when he is tried by Iraqis.







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New WMD blow for Blair
Survey chief resigns saying Iraq never had stockpiles

Duncan Campbell and Patrick Wintour
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian

Tony Blair last night suffered a blow on the eve of the most testing week of his premiership when the US official at the helm of the hunt for Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction asserted Iraq did not have large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Resigning from his post after nine fruitless months in charge of the Iraq Survey Group he said he did not think there had been a large-scale weapons programme inside Iraq since 1991.

David Kay, a hardline CIA of ficial close to the Republicans also criticised President George Bush for failing to give him adequate support.

His remarks will add to the pressure on Mr Blair as he battles to win backbench support ahead of Tuesday`s vote on top-up tuition fees and tries to avert criticisms in the Hutton report into the death of the government weapons scientist David Kelly.

Lord Hutton is due to rule on whether the government exaggerated the September 2002 intelligence dossier on the threat of Saddam`s arsenal.

Opposition parties are demanding an independent inquiry into whether there was a massive intelligence failure - an inquiry that would probe much wider than the narrower terms of reference handed to Lord Hutton.

Mr Blair has already shifted ground from saying he was absolutely confident that Saddam`s weapons arsenal would be located to saying instead that evidence of weapons programmes would be found.

More recently on the BBC Frost programme he said he did not know if any weapons would be found.

Downing Street had already been discussing the possibility of a confidence vote next week if Mr Blair failed to win Commons backing for tuition top-up fees.

Backbench rebels claimed the government needed to win over as many 30 rebels ahead of Tuesday`s vote, findings confirmed by a Guardian survey today.

The news from Washington over the resignation of Mr Kay will reduce Mr Blair`s authority ahead of Tuesday`s vote and also raise fundamental questions about his judgment that urgent military action in Iraq was necessary.

Mr Kay said of Iraqi weapons "I don`t think they existed.

"What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the Gulf War and I don`t think there was a large-scale production programme in the 90s."

His suggestion that Saddam had no illegal weapons means Saddam was involved in a gigantic bluff to shore up his international prestige

Mr Kay added that the hunt would become even more difficult once the US has handed over power to Iraqis in June. His departure had been anticipated, but will be seen as indication that the search for WMD may turn out to be futile.

The US wants to hand back power to Iraqis through a carefully crafted process of selecting appointees to a transitional government, but vociferous opposition from Shia clerics, who want direct elections, is forcing a rethink.

A leading member of the Iraqi governing council close to the Bush administration said yesterday that elections were possible, and urged Washington to change its mind.

"Elections are possible," Mr Chalabi told a thinktank conference in Washington. "Seek to make them possible and they will be possible."

His replacement, former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, has also spoken sceptically about prospects for locating the menace that was used as the casus belli. I think the reason that they haven`t found them is they`re probably not there," he said recently.

Downing Street responded by calling for patience, saying: "There is still more work to be done, and we await that."

But the Liberal Democrats seized on the resignation with the party`s foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell claiming

"David Kay`s admission that he does not believe that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons casts severe doubt on the government`s case for war.

Donald Anderson, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee, acknowledged that it now appeared "likely" that Saddam did not have the weapons attributed to him.

Mr Anderson told Newsnight: "It looks increasingly forlorn that there are any chances now of finding those stockpiles."

The Bush administration has tried to shift the emphasis from the hunt for WMD on to efforts to improve security and pave the way for a handover of power to Iraqis.

The White House said last night it was hoping to learn soon whether the UN would agree to send a team back to Iraq to examine how best to elect a new Iraqi government.

Two UN security experts arrived in Baghdad last night to explore whether security is good enough to allow a full UN team back in.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has said the UN should play a part but not at the expense of the safety of its staff.

The US says security is improving, but incidents continue to kill and maim, the latest bombing on Thursday killing two men at an Iraqi Communist Party office.

Two US pilots meanwhile died last night when their helicopter came down in northern Iraq.

It was unclear what caused the crash.

· The US military indicated yesterday that they may fill the "spider hole where Saddam Hussein was eventually captured so that it does not turn into an attraction for tourists.

A spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, said yesterday: "To get rid of the hole would reduce the amount of traffic to the area, which only complicates our military mission."


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Iraqi informer`s family is marked for death
Nawaf al-Zaidan earned $30m by leading the US to Saddam`s sons. Now local tribes have sworn revenge

Rory McCarthy in Mosul
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian

The spot where Nawaf al-Zaidan`s mansion once stood is now empty. Bulldozers flattened the building, leaving a neat square of red earth, as if to erase the memory of what happened here six months ago. Scrawled nearby in red paint are the words: "Houses and land for sale."

On July 22 last year, Mr Zaidan left his home in the al-Bareed suburb of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul shortly after dawn. He drove to an American military base with his son, Shalan, where he admitted to incredulous officers that for several days he had been sheltering Uday and Qusay, the two feared sons of the former dictator Saddam Hussein.

By mid-afternoon, after a huge military operation, a torrent of US firepower had destroyed the house and Uday and Qusay were dead, together with the two others inside: Qusay`s son, Mustapha, and Uday`s bodyguard, Abdul Samad.

Mr Zaidan, 36, last seen calmly smoking in the back of a military Humvee as he watched the battle, was promptly paid a $30m (£16.3m) reward for leading the Americans to two of their most wanted. He was flown to a new life abroad with his wife, Mohassin, their son Shalan, 18, and their four younger daughters.

Six months later, the 101st Airborne Division, which oversaw the operation, is at the end of its tour and will soon fly home. But in Mosul the repercussions of that day are still felt. Mr Zaidan`s decision to give up Saddam`s two sons has left the rest of his large family in fear of their lives. They believe 48 of the men and boys are now being hunted down.

US officers look back with pride on the operation, the first major strike against Saddam`s close family. "It was a big day, a big event," said Major Trey Cate, of the 101st Airborne, although he noted that the same week the division lost six soldiers in two ambushes. Tips from Iraqis have dramatically increased, he said.

"It takes time for an intel [intelligence] structure to build and grow. They paid the man the reward for the information and that showed people that we can be trusted to do what we say, and we can be trusted to go after the bad guys."

But by handing in Saddam`s sons, Mr Zaidan betrayed one of the most closely-held principles of tribal law: that a host has an obligation to protect his guests.

The families at the top of Saddam`s powerful albu-Nasir tribe, who still swear allegiance to the dictator, have promised to exact revenge on the Zaidans. In the weeks after the operation, printed lists appeared on walls in Mosul and in the town of Sinjar, the Zaidan family home to the west, naming dozens of male relatives and threatening them with death. There was an explosion outside the house of one of Mr Zaidan`s brothers, and another two empty family houses were ransacked.

His four brothers, Sabah, Salah, Wadhah and Moeyd, have now disappeared from Mosul and have sought shelter in the Kurdish town of Irbil, 50 miles to the east. They refuse to talk about what has happened, but one of Mr Zaidan`s cousins, Abu Mushtaq, a balding, chain-smoking man dressed in a grey suit and shirt, described how Uday and Qusay came to Mosul to seek shelter in May last year, weeks after the collapse of the regime.

Huge sums


The two were brought by the bodyguard, Abdul Samad, a cousin of Saddam and a friend of the Zaidan family. He took them first to the house of Nawaf Zaidan`s elder brother, Salah, also in Mosul, where they stayed during May and June last year. Although Salah had been imprisoned by Saddam for three years, he was willing to take the two men in. "He took them in because he knew they would leave huge sums of money for him, millions of dollars," said Abu Mushtaq.

Then Nawaf Zaidan, a businessman who neighbours said grew wealthy during the 1990 occupation of Kuwait, encouraged them to move to his house, a large, two-storey concrete mansion on a corner of a main road in the city. For 18 days they stayed hidden, until July 22, when Mr Zaidan apparently believed they were to be smuggled out of the country.

Late the previous night, according to Abu Mushtaq, Saddam had appeared at the house to see his sons before they left. He was gone before dawn on the day of the operation.

At around 6am, Nawaf Zaidan took his own family from the house. He left his wife and daughters at a restaurant and drove with his son to a nearby American military base to give his information. Abu Mushtaq said the betrayal had dishonoured the family and should be punished. "All the tribes around Mosul said it is a shame to see one of our people do something like this," he said. "If we see Nawaf now we will kill him. It is our tradition. If someone kills your brother and suddenly you find yourself in front of the man who did it, will you let them go? No.

"Nawaf knew this but he was hungry for money. He is a bad guy and this is the time of the devil. He wanted to live as a real sheikh. Even if he borrowed money from people, he would spend it straight away, just to show he had money."

He said the four brothers were at the top of the list of hunted men, together with their sons, several cousins and their uncles. At least 48 were under threat. "Salah especially is in great danger," he said. The tribes would not accept negotiations or any payment in lieu of revenge.

Power vacuum


It appears from this case that men loyal to Saddam are still able to exact revenge against their enemies, nearly a year after the fall of the regime. The threats also underline the pervasive influence that the often brutal tribal laws carry in the power vacuum of postwar Iraq.

At Saddam`s former palace, now the headquarters of the US military in Mosul, Maj Cate said the army was unaware of any threats against the Zaidan family. "We do not have any visibility on the subject. I think it is more of a police issue. The police are out on the streets doing their job now," he said.

In the headquarters of the provincial police, the police chief, Major General Mohammed Queri Mahmoud al-Barhawi, said he did not believe that any of the Zaidans were at risk. "We have had no complaints from anyone that they have received threats," he said. "I think Uday and Qusay deserved to be killed because they hurt Iraqi society so much."

But he admitted the tribal code remained powerful within the conservative culture of Mosul. "Revenge killings do still continue, just like any third world country," he said. "We will not disagree with the tribal code unless it works against the law. It is a part of the tradition of our society."

But Abu Mushtaq said the family feared the revenge would come soon and would be brutal. "It will not be enough for them to kill just the eldest ones, they will kill even the young boys," he said. "They will not kill them one by one. They are preparing a huge operation."


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Of course the White House fears free elections in Iraq
Only an appointocracy can be trusted to accept US troops and corporations

Naomi Klein
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian

"The people of Iraq are free," declared President Bush in his state of the union address on Tuesday. The previous day, 100,000 Iraqis begged to differ. They took to Baghdad`s streets, shouting: "Yes, yes to elections. No, no to selection."

According to Iraq occupation chief Paul Bremer, there really is no difference between the White House`s version of freedom and the one being demanded on the street. Asked whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was heading towards a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani`s call for direct elections, Bremer said he had no "fundamental disagreement with him".

It was, he said, a mere quibble over details. "I don`t want to go into the technical details of refinements. There are - if you talk to experts in these matters - all kinds of ways to organise partial elections and caucuses. And I`m not an election expert, so I don`t want to go into the details. But we`ve always said we`re willing to consider refinements."

I`m not an election expert either, but I`m pretty sure there are differences here that cannot be refined. Al-Sistani`s supporters want all Iraqis to have a vote and the people they elect to write the laws of the country - your basic, imperfect, representative democracy.

Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organising committees. These will then choose delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These will then select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers, who will form the new government. This, Bush said in the state of the union address, constitutes "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty".

Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add the fact that Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and Bush to his by the US Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by an appointee`s appointee`s appointees` appointees` appointees` selectees.

The White House insists its aversion to elections is purely practical; there just isn`t time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The favourite explanation is that Bush needs a "braggable" on the campaign trail: when his Democratic rival raises the spectre of Vietnam, Bush will reply that the occupation is over, we`re on our way out.

Except that the US has no intention of actually getting out of Iraq: it wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones and the oilfields. It was with this goal in mind that, on September 19, Bremer pushed through a package of economic reforms that the Economist described as a "capitalist dream".

But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Bremer`s reforms, arguing that under the international agreements that govern occupying powers - the Hague regulations of 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1949 - the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq`s economic assets, not its auctioneer. Radical changes - such as Bremer`s order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100% foreign ownership - violate these agreements and so could be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.

This prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out. Bremer has responded by quietly cancelling his plan to privatise Iraq`s 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva conventions, can legally sell off Iraq`s assets.

But will it? Given the widespread perception that the US is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well decide to expel US troops immediately and to reverse Bremer`s privatisation project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect - far more than the absence of a census - explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.

Under the current American plan for Iraq, the transitional national assembly would hold on to power from June 30 until general elections are held "no later" than December 31 2005. That`s 18 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite US troops to stay indefinitely and turn Bremer`s capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this "self-rule". It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.

That means that the world is once again facing a choice about Iraq. Will its democracy emerge stillborn, with foreign troops dug in on its territory, multinationals locked into multi-year contracts controlling key resources, and an economic programme that has left 60-70% of the population unemployed? Or will its democracy be born with its heart still beating, capable of building the country Iraqis choose?

On one side are the occupation forces. On the other are growing movements demanding economic and voter rights in Iraq. Increasingly, occupying forces are responding to these forces by using fatal force to break up demonstrations, as British soldiers did in Amara earlier this month, killing six.

Yes, there are religious fundamentalists and Saddam loyalists capitalising on the rage, but the very existence of these pro-democracy movements is itself a kind of miracle; after 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and now occupation, it would certainly be understandable if Iraqis met further hardships with fatalism and resignation. Instead, the violence of Bremer`s shock therapy appears to have jolted hundred of thousands into action.

This courage deserves our support. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai last weekend, the author and activist Arundhati Roy called on the global forces that opposed the Iraq war to "become the global resistance to the occupation". She suggested choosing "two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq" and targeting them for boycotts and civil disobedience.

In his state of the union address, Bush said: "I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again." He is being proven right in Iraq every day - and the rising voices are chanting: "No, no USA. Yes, yes elections."

nologo.org


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German trial hears how Iranian agent warned US of impending al-Qaida attack
Ben Aris in Berlin
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian

The United States was warned of impending September 11 terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him, German secret service agents testified yesterday in the trial of an alleged al-Qaida terrorist.

The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not believed, two German officers who interviewed him told the Hamburg court.

Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret services responsible for "carrying out terrorist attacks globally", one of the officers said.

Prosecutors called the spy as a surprise witness against a Moroccan man, Abdelghani Mzoudi, who is on trial for being a key aide to three of the September 11 hijackers.

He is said to have handled money, covered for absences by members of the al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg and trained in an Afghan al-Qaida camp himself.

He is charged with 3,066 counts of aiding and abetting murder, one for each of the victims of the New York and Washington suicide attacks.

Mzoudi is one of a clutch of suspected al-Qaida operatives being held around the world.

Iran said for the first time yesterday it was planning to try a dozen suspects who have been detained in the country.

The Bush administration, which has accused Iran of harbouring al-Qaida militants, countered by saying Tehran should send the suspects to their home countries for judgment.

The US has long suspected that the detainees slipped into Iran from neighbouring Afghanistan following the American-led invasion in 2001.

"We want to see action, and the action we want to see is that they turn over those al- Qaida members in their custody to their country of origin," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Western intelligence officials believe that among the Iran-held figures could be an Egyptian, Saif al-Adel, the security chief of Osama bin Laden`s network.

A son of Bin Laden and a spokesman for the network chief could also be in Iran, Saudi sources said.

The testimony at the Hamburg trial could heap more embarrassment on the US state department and secret services, which have denied allegations that they were forewarned of the attacks.

The White House and US intelligence agencies have been plagued by accusations of a catastrophic failure since the four planes were hijacked to such devastating effect in 2001.


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Saddam`s WMD never existed, says chief American arms inspector
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
24 January 2004


David Kay, who stood down yesterday as head of the Bush administration`s hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said that he did not believe that any stockpiles of such weapons ever existed.

Mr Kay, a former UN inspector, said that most of what was going to be found in the hunt for Saddam Hussein`s WMD had already been uncovered. The returning of sovereignty to the Iraqis would make the search more difficult, he added. "I don`t think they existed," Mr Kay said, referring to Saddam`s alleged stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the [1991] Gulf War and I don`t think there was a large-scale production programme in the Nineties."

Mr Kay`s comments will be an embarrassment for the Bush administration. Earlier this week the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, one of Washington`s most outspoken hawks who led the rallying cry for war insisting that Saddam possessed WMD, said the outcome of the search was not clear. "I think the jury is still out," he said. "It`s going to take ... time to look in all of the cubby holes and ammo dumps in Iraq."

Despite having the resources of more than 1,000 personnel dedicated to the hunt for such weapons, an interim report issued by Mr Kay in October conceded that no weapons had been found, even though there was evidence Iraq had retained the "template" of a weapons programme.

The Bush administration appears determined to continue its public stance that such weapons could be discovered.

Donald Anderson, the Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said that Mr Kay`s comments posed serious problems for British and American intelligence agencies. "My understanding is that the President and the Prime Minister were acting on intelligence then available [at the time of deciding to go to war]. So this raises very important questions about the quality of that intelligence," he told BBC`s Newsnight.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "It is important that people are patient and we let the Iraq Survey Group do its work. Their work is continuing and we should await the outcome of that. Our position is unchanged."

Today the former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said that Mr Blair must now admit that the Iraq war was a mistake.

Mr Cook said he believed Mr Blair led Britain into the conflict in order to demonstrate to US President George Bush that he was a reliable ally and had been driven by "missionary zeal" and "evangelical certainty".

Mr Cook said on BBC Radio 4`s Today programme: "It is becoming really rather undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can now see he was wrong, when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has said he was wrong.

"I think it is very important that Tony Blair does concede that there were mistakes made, maybe in all good faith, probably he believed them genuinely, but there were mistakes. Because if we don`t face up to the fact that we got it wrong, then we are not going to learn the lessons.

"We have got to drop this very dangerous doctrine under which we went to war of the pre-emptive strike. If there was no threat from Iraq we obviously had no right to carry out a pre-emptive strike to remove that threat. And we better drop that doctrine before somebody else in the world uses it in their own back yard."
24 January 2004 10:34


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Einmal eine ganz andere Geschichte. Noch nicht gehört, deshalb dieser Artikel hier im Thread.
Solange die Chinesen nicht die neuen Engländer sind, ist es alles halb so schlimm [/url]

On Asia`s beaches Chinese are the new Germans: boorish but rich
By Jasper Becker in Beijing
24 January 2004


For neighbouring Asian countries, Chinese holidaymakers have become the "new Germans", turning up at the beach noisy and boorish, but rich.

As China`s overheated economy shuts down for the annual spring festival, record numbers are spreading across South-east Asia and Australia, putting a new sparkle in the profits of airlines and hoteliers, badly shaken by last year`s Sars panic.

Airlines which teetered near bankruptcy are now hitting 90 per cent capacity and putting on extra flights, especially to newly popular destinations such as Japan, Bali and Hong Kong. Only one thousand Chinese tourists visited to Thailand in 1991 but this year about a million may go, many of them on budget sex and shopping tours.

There have been complaints that Thailand`s sex industry is being transformed by the influx of Chinese demanding a supply of virgins, often girls lured from remote areas in Burma or southern China. Another 900,000 Chinese are heading for Malaysia and 700,000 to Vietnam, making Chinese the biggest source of tourist revenues for these countries, and turning the Chinese renminbi into a de facto convertible currency.

The tourist boom is the most visible symbol of the re-establishment of China`s status as the middle kingdom, dispensing favours, as it did in the Qing and Ming dynasties, to tributary states as a reward for their loyalty. With $400bn-worth of foreign exchange reserves and an economy which grew at more than 9 per cent last year, despite the Sars slowdown, China can easily allow its citizens to spend money abroad.

Countries around the world are fighting hard to persuade the Chinese government to add their names to the list of 28 approved destinations. Australia, one of the first to be listed, is welcoming more than 24,000 Chinese for the new year holiday. Many are escaping the harsh winter and the tedious festivities at home for a chance of sunshine and beaches, but others are seeking adventure in Cuba, Chile, Brazil and Kenya.

Outbound tourism is growing by 20 to 30 per cent a year and the number of Chinese going overseas is expected to reach 20 million in the next few years. China is one of the world`s top tourist destinations and expects to host 60 million visitors during the festival, which officially lasts a week until Thursday but usually extends until 5 February.

Europe is an increasingly popular desination for Chinese tourists. Last year, 600,000 visited Germany and this is expected to double within five years. The Scandinavians are also opening a tourist office in China, expecting to see numbers jump.

Some visitors never return. When Croatia welcomed its first group of 34 Chinese tourists last November, they disappeared in Zagreb, on the day their visas expired, leaving their baggage behind. Croatia lies on a notorious smuggling route into the European Union and the visitors probably left for Slovenia and then dispersed across the Continent. Even those that do return leave a bad impression behind. Many hotels in Europe have become reluctant to house Chinese tour groups because of their crude manners.

Xu Shengli, an official with the German National Tourism Board, said: "It is true that people complain about their loudness and spitting. This may disgust local European citizens but I don`t think this will matter a lot." Ma Han, a Chinese travel agent, said: "When I went on a tour to Europe, my fellow tourists would argue about buying a beer, but then in Antwerp they suddenly pulled out wads of cash and bought all the diamonds they could see."

The Chinese government launched an official campaign in the autumn in an attempt to curb the "unsocial and uncouth behaviour of Chinese abroad". The Beijing Evening News printed a special page telling the Chinese to avoid spitting, how to queue in an orderly fashion, and what to say and not to say.

Liu Xiaoping, the manager of Beihai Youth International Service, said: "Some Chinese people look down on our poor neighbours, like Vietnam, which offend local people."

China has announced new measures to allow residents in 100 large and medium-sized cities to apply for individual passports, so the exodus is bound to accelerate.
24 January 2004 10:47



© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Das ist hart für BushCo!

January 24, 2004
Iraq Illicit Arms Gone Before War, Departing Inspector States
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 — David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year.

In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq`s own decisions "got rid of them."

Asked directly if he was saying that Iraq did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country, Dr. Kay replied, according to a transcript of the taped interview made public by Reuters, "That is correct."

Dr. Kay did not respond to telephone calls and e-mail messages from The New York Times.

Dr. Kay`s statements undermined one of the primary justifications set out by President Bush for the war with Iraq. Mr. Bush and other top administration officials repeatedly cited Iraq`s possession of chemical and biological weapons as a threat to the United States, and the lack of evidence so far that Saddam Hussein actually had large caches of weapons has fueled criticism that Mr. Bush exaggerated the peril from Iraq.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said the administration stood by its previous assessments that Mr. Hussein had both weapons programs and stores of banned weapons.

"Yes, we believe he had them, and yes we believe they will be found," Mr. McClellan said. "We believe the truth will come out."

With Dr. Kay`s departure, the administration on Friday handed over the weapons search to Charles A. Duelfer, a former United Nations weapons inspector who has expressed skepticism that the United States and its allies would find any banned chemicals or biological agents.

Dr. Kay`s comments and the appointment of Mr. Duelfer, made by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, appeared to be a turning point in the administration`s defense of its assertions that Mr. Hussein had amassed large stores of illicit weapons that he could use or turn over to terrorists for use against the United States or other nations.

The assessment Dr. Kay provided to Reuters on Friday was far more conclusive about Iraq`s weapons programs than the report he delivered to the White House and Congress in October. At that time, he said he and his team "have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone."

But he also reported in October that his team had uncovered evidence of "dozens of W.M.D.-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

Although the White House stood by its statements last year that Mr. Hussein possessed stores of banned weapons, a position reiterated on Thursday by Vice President Dick Cheney, other administration officials said anonymously on Friday that the prospects that the search would turn up substantial caches of chemical or biological weapons were much diminished.

Dr. Kay told Reuters that one of the reasons he left was that the team he headed, the Iraq Survey Group, had been diverted to some degree for use in battling the insurgency in Iraq. That diversion, he said, left him short of the resources needed to complete the job by the end of June, when the United States plans to return sovereignty to the Iraqis.

He and his team were "not going to find much after June," he said. "I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we`re going to find."

Democrats said Dr. Kay`s statements raised serious questions about the administration`s case for war and the quality of American intelligence. "It is increasingly clear that there has been a massive intelligence failure," Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "The potential threat posed by Iraq`s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and Iraq`s nuclear weapons program was central to the case for war. In light of Dr. Kay`s statement, the president owes the American public and the world an explanation."

Mr. McClellan said that the Defense Department had made decisions about providing money and people to the Iraq Survey Group, but that the group had been provided with additional support.

"We appreciate Dr. Kay`s service and the ongoing work of the I.S.G.," Mr. McClellan said.

"They already have confirmed that Saddam Hussein was in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which gave him one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences," Mr. McClellan said, referring to the finding in Dr. Kay`s interim report in October that Iraq was pursuing dozens of weapons programs and had hidden equipment from inspectors.

In choosing Mr. Duelfer to replace Dr. Kay, Mr. Tenet turned to an acknowledged expert in the field who has a reputation as a straight shooter. But the choice also highlighted divisions within the administration over the likelihood of finding banned weapons.

In an interview on Jan. 9 with PBS`s "Newshour," Mr. Duelfer said that the prospect "of finding chemical weapons, biological weapons is close to nil at this point," and that the search by the United States had been more extensive than what the United Nations had been able to accomplish during the period that it was carrying out inspections in Iraq.

Mr. Duelfer, 51, served as deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, or Unscom, from 1993 to 2000. Before that he served in the State Department during the administration of the first Mr. Bush. He has most recently been a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a research organization in Washington.

In the "Newshour" interview, Mr. Duelfer also said it was "quite clear" that Mr. Hussein did at one point have banned weapons.

In a conference call with reporters on Friday after his appointment was formally announced, Mr. Duelfer said that his duty as an investigator was different from his role as an outside observer and that he had not prejudged the outcome of the search.

"My goal is to find out what happened," Mr. Duelfer said. "So I think you can understand that there would be a difference between someone who is handicapping the outcome of an investigation and one who is then in charge of the investigation."

Dr. Kay had said in October that it would take him another six to nine months to complete his work, suggesting that his final report could land in the middle of the presidential election campaign. Mr. Duelfer said he did not know how long it would take to complete his work.

The top administration officials who had been most vocal in accusing Iraq of building stockpiles of banned weapons, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, have stood by their positions in recent weeks. Asked during an interview on Thursday with National Public Radio whether the administration had given up on finding banned weapons, Mr. Cheney replied, "No, we haven`t."

He said it would "take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubby holes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 24, 2004
New Pressures Over U.S. Plan for Iraqi Rule
By EDWARD WONG

NAJAF, Iraq, Jan. 23 — Iraq`s most influential Shiite cleric asked his followers on Friday to suspend demonstrations demanding direct elections, even as a prominent political leader joined the call for such elections.

The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, asked his followers to wait while the United Nations decided whether to send a team to Iraq to weigh whether early direct elections were possible.

The growing chorus of calls for direct elections signaled increasing trouble for plans by the American occupation authorities to turn over sovereignty to Iraqi representatives in June without a popular vote.

Ayatollah Sistani, who lives off a narrow alleyway here in Najaf, delivered his message through a representative at a mosque in Karbala, a holy city nearby.

Last Monday, before American and Iraqi officials met at the United Nations to discuss Ayatollah Sistani`s demands, as many as 100,000 people marched through Baghdad in support of the cleric. It was the largest demonstration in Iraq since Saddam Hussein`s government was ousted in April, and it came as Shiite religious leaders were beginning to realize their enormous influence on American policy here.

American officials still insist they will hold caucus-style ballots in Iraq`s 18 provinces to select members of a transitional assembly, though they have said they are willing to make some changes in this mechanism. L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, has repeatedly said there is not enough time to organize direct elections before June 30.

But a prominent member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, contested that view in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "Elections are possible," he said. "Seek to make them possible, and they will be possible."

Mr. Chalabi, who has had strong backing from the Pentagon, added that the caucuses proposed by American officials were a "sure-fire way to have instability" because they would result in a transitional assembly lacking legitimacy.

Direct elections would favor Shiites, who make up more than 60 percent of the population in Iraq.

American and United Nations officials, who refused to be identified publicly, expressed irritation at Mr. Chalabi`s comments. They said his true agenda was to feed the current impasse over the transition to self-rule in the hope that the United States would eventually empower the Iraqi Governing Council, on which he serves.

Mr. Chalabi joins other Shiite members of the Governing Council in calling for direct elections. Ibrahim Jafari, head of the Dawa Islamic Party, said Wednesday that he favored direct elections. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, an independent member of the council, said in an interview on Thursday that the caucuses would result in an illegitimate government.

Adnan Pachachi, the current chairman of the council and a Sunni Arab, has said he does not think quick direct elections are possible. He has reportedly asked the Bush administration to reach a compromise by expanding the Governing Council to 125 members, from 25, and turning it into an interim legislature.

Ayatollah Sistani has said that if the United Nations sent a team of experts to assess whether elections could be organized quickly, he would listen closely to their opinions. That helps explain why he has called for calm as Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, continues to weigh whether to send such a mission here.

"This issue concerns all the sects that comprise the Iraqi people," Abdul-Mehdi al-Karbali, a representative of Ayatollah Sistani, said Friday at the mosque in Karbala, according to The Associated Press. "Sunnis, Christians and all other sects are urged to support the religious order in its position, so that the occupation forces will not adopt any steps that serve their interests and that do not serve the interests of the Iraqi people."

Protests can be held later if needed, he said, adding that the most senior clerics in Iraq were supporting a halt to demonstrations.

In an interview in Najaf on Friday, the son of one of those clerics said getting a United Nations electoral assessment team here was absolutely crucial.

"Who will supply legitimacy to the new government?" said Muhammad Hussein al-Hakim, the son and spokesman of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim. "I think you will agree with me when I say the U.N. or the rule of the U.N."

In Baghdad, a two-person team composed of a military adviser and a security coordinator arrived on Friday to assess safety conditions on the ground for United Nations` Iraqi staff members and for the eventual return of its international workers, United Nations officials said.

Their presence was unrelated to Mr. Annan`s pending decision on whether to send an electoral assessment team, a spokesman said. He added that a separate security team would have to prepare the ground for that mission.

American diplomats at the United Nations expressed frustration at the delay in sending experts to assess the prospects for elections. "The U.N. said they wanted to have a significant role in the country, and now that we have offered them one, they seem to be dragging their feet," a senior American official said.

Lakhdar Brahimi, who has just returned from two years as the United Nations special envoy to Afghanistan, was invited to Washington on Thursday, where President Bush joined in the campaign to enlist him for Iraq, according to a senior United Nations diplomat.

Mr. Brahimi also met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and her aide on Iraq, Robert Blackwell. Mr. Brahimi told them he was not available and intended to take time off before taking up his new position as Mr. Annan`s special adviser on peace and security, the diplomat said.

In late August, a suicide truck bomb exploded at the headquarters of the United Nations in Baghdad, killing 22 people. By October, the United Nations had withdrawn all its foreign workers, and Mr. Annan has said the tenuous security situation is the main reason the United Nations is reluctant to return.

Violence continues in Iraq.

A bomb planted at a branch office of the Iraqi Communist Party in Baghdad exploded on Thursday, killing two people and destroying much of the office. Eleven people, including two American soldiers, were killed in various attacks on Thursday, continuing a deadly string of assaults that began Sunday with a suicide car bombing at the American occupation headquarters.


John H. Cushman Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, Warren Hoge from the United Nations and Steven R. Weisman from Washington.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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January 23, 2004
Q&A: The Kurds` Agenda

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 16, 2003

What do the Kurds of Iraq want?

Kurdish leaders on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) are pushing for an autonomous federal state in the new Iraqi nation. Kurds, who make up some 20 percent of Iraq`s population of 25 million, have a lengthy history of often-violent campaigns for independence. Since 1991, they have enjoyed virtual autonomy in northern Iraq, which they call Iraqi Kurdistan. Experts say the Kurds are trying to lock in their special status before the scheduled transfer of authority from the U.S.-led coalition to an Iraqi government on June 30, 2004. Objections from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq`s senior Shiite cleric, may interfere with that timetable.

Does the Kurdish proposal differ from Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) plans for Iraq?

Yes. The CPA and IGC are currently debating different proposals, one of which would organize Iraq into 18 provinces based on the governing system used by Saddam Hussein`s regime, experts say. Howar Ziad, the United Nations representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two main Kurdish parties, says another idea on the table, proposed by members of the IGC, would create provinces for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds based on where each group has historically resided. The CPA and most members of the IGC generally agree, experts say, on some issues: all private militias in the country should be banned and disarmed, and the central government will have authority over national policy decisions on budgets, foreign policy, national security, natural resources, and monetary policy. They point out, however, that debate continues on these issues and the Kurds` status.

How have non-Kurdish Iraqis reacted?

Many experts say Sunni and Shiite Iraqis strongly oppose the Kurdish proposal because they fear it will inflame ethnic tensions and jeopardize the unity of a new democratic state of Iraq. Saddam Hussein is a Sunni and favored members of this branch of Islam. Sunnis now resent their loss of influence and don`t want it to pass to the Kurds, experts say. Shiites, an estimated 60 percent of the population, suffered under Saddam Hussein and now want proportionate influence in the new nation. It is unlikely that either group will give in to Kurdish demands, and that, some experts say, explains why the Kurds are pressing their case while the Americans are still in charge.

What are the details of the Kurdish plan?

The five Kurdish members of the IGC envision a federal Iraq with regions for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, Ziad says. Their proposal would expand the existing area of Iraqi Kurdistan and give the Kurds control over northern Iraq`s oil, estimated at 40 percent of the nation`s total reserves. The Kurds also want some control over their peshmerga, or resistance fighters--who would be integrated into the Iraq National Army but serve in regional commands in Kurdish areas--and over Iraqi troop movements in their region. A Council of Kurdish Ministers, with the power to approve decisions made by the central government in Baghdad, would also be created under the proposal.

What is the most controversial part of the Kurdish proposal?

The issue that generates the most heated debate is the status of Kirkuk, an oil-rich city in the north of Iraq. The Kurdish proposal would add Kirkuk and its environs to Duhok, Erbil, and Suleimaniyah, the provinces currently under Kurdish control. Areas in the ethnically mixed provinces of Nineveh and Diyala would also be annexed to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Are the areas to be annexed predominantly Kurdish?

Many of them were historically Kurdish, experts say, but Saddam Hussein`s regime altered their ethnic makeup. It ethnically cleansed Kurdish villages in the 1980s, experts say, and instituted an "Arabization" policy that moved Arabs and other groups into the area in a bid to eradicate Kurdish cultural identity. The Kirkuk region has residents of Arab, Turkomen, Assyrian, Chaldean, Jewish, and Christian descent, many of whom resist the plan for Kurdish autonomy. Thousands of Arabs and Turkomen marched in the streets of Kirkuk on December 31 to protest the plan; four people were killed.

What concessions will the Kurds make for their plan?

In return for their demands, Kurdish leaders promise to equitably share oil revenues from Kirkuk with the central government and give up agitating for an independent Kurdistan, which would unite the approximately 25 million Kurds in the region and include Kurdish-populated areas of Turkey, Syria, and Iran.

What are the chances the Kurdish plan will be implemented?

Observers disagree. Michael Amitay, executive director of the advocacy group Washington Kurdish Institute, says it`s "inevitable" that Iraq`s Kurds will win autonomy, though probably not by June 30. "The only other alternative is civil war," he says. "The United States cannot force the Kurds to accept less freedom than they [currently] have." But Roberta Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says the outcome is by no means assured. The governing council faces complex negotiations, she says, about balancing the Kurds` demands against the desires of other Iraqi groups. "The Shiites and Sunnis don`t like the idea of an ethnically based federal system, because it would cut into their power," she says.

Do all Kurds in Iraq agree on the new proposal?

Many do, say experts, who stress that the Kurds` urgent focus on negotiating a favorable position for themselves in the new Iraq has superseded even the bitterest of old rivalries. Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and Jalal Talabani, the PUK leader, were deadly enemies for many years.

What is the history of the rivalry between the two main Kurdish leaders?

Talabani was once a friend and ally of revered independence leader Mustafa Barzani, the founder of the KDP and father of current KDP leader Massoud Barzani. However, the two men clashed, and in 1975 Talabani left the KDP to start the rival PUK. In Iraqi Kurdistan`s first elections in 1992, the two parties split the vote evenly. A bitter turf war followed, and Talabani invited Iranian forces to support his campaign to wipe out the KDP. In return, Massoud Barzani allied with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army. A U.S.-brokered cease-fire ended the violence in 1998, and the two leaders (who sit on the Iraq Governing Council together) have put their former enmity behind them.

How were Kurds treated in Saddam Hussein`s Iraq?

In 1968, when the Baathist government was established, its resistance to Kurdish demands for a unified and autonomous Kurdistan led to extended warfare between peshmerga fighters--led by Mustafa Barzani--and Iraqi troops. The fighting continued throughout the `70s and `80s. Saddam Hussein attacked the Kurds many times during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), when Kurdish leaders, with Iranian backing, rebelled against his rule. Iraqi forces used poison gas against Kurdish villages, including the town of Halabja, and systematically executed Kurdish men to put down resistance. Human Rights Watch estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds were killed in these campaigns. Saddam Hussein brutally crushed another attempted Kurdish uprising that was encouraged by the United States after the Gulf War in 1991. Some 1.5 million Kurdish refugees fled to Turkey and Iran. Many returned after the United Nations passed Security Council Resolution 688 in April 1991, which authorized humanitarian efforts to help the Kurds and led to a no-fly zone over northern Iraq patrolled by U.S. and British fighter planes. Elections were held in 1992.

Do the Kurds have experience governing their own society?

Yes. Protected from Saddam Hussein`s forces by the no-fly zone, the Kurds established an "autonomous region" in 1992. The KDP and the PUK split the vote and eventually divided control of the region between them. Each party governed its section of Iraqi Kurdistan; they are now in the process of unifying the separate governments. "The Kurds are much better prepared to [govern themselves] than either of the other groups [i.e., Shiites or Sunnis]," says Ralph Peters, a retired U.S. Army officer and author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World." "They`ve had the training wheels on the bicycle for a while."

How would an autonomous Kurdish area in Iraq affect the region`s security?

Many experts worry that a strong, unified Iraqi Kurdistan, with control over oil and peshmerga fighters, could ignite Kurdish separatist passions in neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria. There are roughly 13 million Kurds in Turkey, 5 million in Iran, and 2 million in Syria. The United States and those nations oppose any talk of secession by Iraqi Kurdistan, which some experts say could doom the vision of a unified, democratic Iraq. "Clearly the Kurds wish, in some way, to preserve their historic identity and to link it in some way to geography," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on January 6. "But I think it`s absolutely clear that part of Iraq must remain part of Iraq."

What are Turkey`s concerns?

Turkey fought a 15-year guerrilla war against Kurdish separatists concentrated in the country`s impoverished southeast. Experts say Turkey fears that giving Iraqi Kurdistan too much power will stir separatist longings among Turkey`s Kurdish minority and spark renewed violence. Turkey also fears that Iraqi Kurdistan could become a U.S. favorite in the region, reducing Ankara`s strategic significance. "During the war, when the Turks failed [to assist American military efforts], the Kurds stepped up to aid the United States," says David L. Phillips, senior fellow and deputy director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

-- by Esther Pan, staff writer, cfr.org



Copyright 2004 |

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January 23, 2004
Q&A: Keeping the U.S. Plan for Iraqi Elections on Track

From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 22, 2004

How can the United States keep its Iraq plan on track?

U.S. authorities are making a concerted effort to keep to their timetable for the creation of a transitional government by June 30, despite calls for early elections and other changes to the U.S.-backed plan by Iraq`s most influential Shiite cleric and large Iraqi demonstrations in support of his position. The coalition is asking the United Nations for help in making its plan more acceptable to the Shiite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. If compromise fails, Washington is reportedly considering transferring sovereignty to an enlarged version of its hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council.

What is Washington asking the United Nations to do?

It wants the United Nations to send a team of international experts to Iraq to confirm that elections are not feasible in Iraq before June 30, the date when the occupation is scheduled to end and sovereignty will pass to an Iraqi government. Sistani has called for early elections because he says that Washington`s plan for selecting delegates to a transitional assembly is not sufficiently democratic or transparent. Experts say he also wants to ensure that Shiites, who comprise 60 percent of Iraq`s population, are proportionately represented in the transitional government. The 73-year-old cleric has suggested that a voter list for an election could be created from U.N. lists used in the 1990s to distribute rations under the Oil for Food program. He has dismissed U.S. arguments that a rapid election is impossible but has indicated that he might bend or back down if a U.N. team endorses the U.S. position.

What parts of the plan does Sistani object to?

His primary concern is how delegates will be chosen for a transitional assembly, which will, in turn, appoint a transitional government for Iraq. According to the U.S. plan signed November 15 by the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer III, and a representative of the 24-member Iraqi Governing Council, assembly delegates will be chosen through a complex system of regional caucuses. Caucus members would not be directly elected. Rather, they would be nominated by an "organizing committee" composed of local dignitaries and people selected by the Iraqi Governing Council. Only "notables"--a term not precisely defined by the agreement--would be eligible for appointment to the caucuses.

How could the plan be modified?

One idea that has been floated by governing council members seeking a compromise with the powerful cleric would be to allow caucus delegates to be selected though local-level elections wherever possible. Some districts have already indicated they have the capacity to hold municipal elections.

Another idea is to allow any Iraqi to nominate a caucus candidate, provided he or she meets basic conditions, such as "age, not being convicted [of a crime], the usual," said Adnan Pachachi, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council. Pachachi, along with other council members, agrees with Sistani that there is room for improvement in the caucus plan, but stresses that the June deadline for a transfer of power should not be allowed to slip. "The whole idea is to make the [caucus] process more transparent so that people feel they are very much involved in the whole thing," he said January 20.

Will the United Nations send an elections assessment team?

It looks likely. The United Nations has been reluctant to send international personnel back to Iraq after the August 19 bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad killed 22 people, including the U.N. envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Since that time, the United Nations has been conducting limited Iraq activities from Cyprus and Jordan. But U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is coming under pressure from the Americans, British, and Iraqis to authorize the election team. International support for the team is growing; on January 19, the U.N. Security Council unanimously supported the idea of the mission. Annan said January 21 that he wants to insure that the team can act independently and that its conclusions will be respected. "If the U.N. gets involved, we must insist on our independence and neutrality and that both sides accept our judgment," he told German ARD television.

What would the team do?

It would travel around Iraq interviewing coalition and military representatives, Iraqi government officials, religious leaders, political party representatives, and ordinary Iraqis about what would be needed to prepare for a free and fair election. At the end of its stay, it would likely issue a recommendation about when elections could be held, and--if an election is not possible by June 30-- offer other recommendations about how to modify the process.

What are the stumbling blocks to a June 30 election?

There are many, most experts say. There is no up-to-date census in Iraq that can form the basis of an accurate voter registration list, nor are there rules to govern political parties or voting procedures. Setting up such rules takes time. In addition, precarious security conditions in much of Iraq could keep elections from being free and fair and prevent some Iraqis from voting. Experts warn that Iraq shouldn`t rush into an election if the security conditions are too unstable. "No election is better than an election perceived as illegitimate," says Simon Chesterman, senior associate at the International Peace Academy in New York.

Another concern is that the occupation authorities would have too much influence over an election held under their supervision. A group of Iraqi Sunni religious leaders, for example, issued a statement January 19 rejecting the predominately Shiite calls for an early election, insisting that no honest polls could be held under occupation by U.S. forces. Kurdish governing council members are also against early elections, arguing that conditions are too unstable. Both groups are concerned that an early election would allow the well-organized Shiites to dominate the transitional government.

When could elections be held?

It`s unclear, given the many security and political considerations. But the technical aspects of organizing a vote could likely be completed in under a year, some assessments say. According to a timetable produced by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and sent to coalition authorities November 1, an accurate voter`s list could be produced within 10 months. And according to Time magazine, a U.N. electoral assessment team that visited Iraqi for two weeks last summer concluded that it was possible within six months to set up mechanisms for elections. This internal finding was never circulated and is now considered outdated by U.N. officials because of the deteriorating security conditions, The New York Times reports. The current U.S. transition plan calls for direct elections for a constitutional assembly in March 2005 and elections for a permanent Iraqi government by December 31, 2005.

Would Sistani be willing to wait until after June for elections?

It appears so. According to Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite governing council member, Sistani would accept up to a six-month delay in elections if U.N. experts conclude they cannot be held by June. In the meantime, the governing council could function as a transitional government, eliminating the need to appoint a new provisional government, Rubaie said. The governing council could be expanded as part of such an arrangement, Pachachi said January 21. It is unknown if Sistani or Washington will accept this idea. Many Iraqis have questioned the unelected governing council`s legitimacy.

Is the voter registration process under way?

No, and this is an apparent point of contention between some governing council members and the coalition. According to The New York Times, American officials rejected the planning ministry`s voter registration plan in November, citing security concerns. But governing council members claimed to have never seen the plan before it was rejected--and some said they would have supported it.

What is the general Iraqi attitude toward U.S. intentions regarding elections?

Suspicious, many experts say. "There`s anxiety, mistrust, and a lack of understanding of the U.S. intentions," says Joseph Siegle, the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who adds that many Iraqis suspect the United States wants to control their nation and its oil. Another concern expressed by some Iraqis, including Sistani`s representatives, is that the Iraqi transition timetable appears to be influenced more by the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November than conditions on the ground in Iraq. Though denied by the Bush administration, this worry is echoed by some democratization experts. "The Iraq timetable is much more about domestic political considerations in the U.S. than the situation in Iraq," Chesterman says.

In addition, the coalition has had difficulty choosing appropriate local leaders for some Iraqi cities, heightening Iraqi concerns. In Najaf--Sistani`s hometown-- Americans first appointed as mayor an ex-Baathist Sunni officer who turned out to be corrupt. After he was removed, U.S. military personnel helped organize municipal elections. These were cancelled by Bremer in mid-June after 16 candidates had already begun to campaign. He cited security reasons, but speculation that Bremer was worried about the potential results abounded, says Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan. "As Sistani watched these missteps unfold, he must have conceived an enormous mistrust of how the United States was going to handle national electoral affairs," he says.

What could be the United Nations future role in Iraq?

A two-person security assessment team arrived in Baghdad January 23 to determine if international U.N. staff can safely return to the country. After that, the election assessment team will likely deploy. Washington is also reportedly lobbying for Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran U.N. diplomat and former Algerian foreign minister, to become the U.N. special representative for Iraq. Brahimi was a key figure behind organizing the loya jirga process in Afghanistan after the U.S.-led rout of the Taliban in November 2001. He is reportedly reluctant to take the post--and some experts predict a major U.N. presence in Iraq won`t be established until after sovereignty is transferred to Iraqis. Why? Because of the security risks and because decision-making authority over the Iraqi political process still lies squarely with the coalition. "The U.N. is reluctant to put its imprimatur on what has been a U.S. process," Siegle says. "I don`t think [the United Nations] will become actively involved before June unless the coalition restructures the whole process. And that might take longer than would be acceptable."

-- by Sharon Otterman, staff writer, cfr.org



Copyright 2004 |

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What put me in mind of all this nonsense was President Bush`s State of the Union address.

Bürokratie ist international.

January 24, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Sorry State of Affairs
By GREGORY JAYNES

MEMPHIS
The crowning blow, the straw that broke the camel`s back, the ultimate bureaucratic insult, arrived in the post the other morning. Time Warner Cable was demanding $250 for its little black box, which I left in my house in Brooklyn, after I had sold it, last month.

The new owners of my old house had requested cable service. Time Warner said it could not grant the request until the previous subscriber at that address returned the cable box. After the interminable, obligatory may-I-have-a-real-person phone call, I offered what I thought an ingenious solution: give the new owners my box and switch the account to their names.

Silly me. Time Warner said it had to collect my box and install a box just like it for the new owners. I was responsible for returning my box, and I was 1,200 miles from New York City.

I capitulated and wrote Time Warner Cable a check.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development sent me a letter just before I sold my house. The letter said I was in violation of eight building codes. All the violations were recorded before I even bought my house. Nevertheless, after two days in their good offices, I gave them a $300 money order (no personal checks accepted).

Then the city returned my money order. Only the current owner of the house, I was notified, may correct violations. Between the time I cleared my record and the time my clearance was recorded, the property had changed hands. Two days of cooling my heels. Evaporated. Square one.

I bought a dishwasher from Sears for my new house in Memphis. The man who installed it ran it through a cycle successfully and had me sign a document that said I was satisfied. Then he left and I loaded the dishwasher. It would not start.

I felt like a man who had bought a Ford that got him out of sight of the dealership, and no farther. When I called the man, he said he was only a contractor. I called Sears. Sears asked me if the dishwasher was plugged in, if the little green lights on the front panel blinked. I said, "I promise." Sears said, "Just a simple yes or no will do, sir."

I was in line with my toothpaste at Walgreens the other day. When I got to the register, with no one behind me, the cashier looked at me straight in the face and hollered, "Next!"

My health insurance coverage recently changed. By mistake I mailed my premium to my old insurance company. It mailed it back, saying someone else was in charge now. But the new insurance company would not take my check until I had cleared the decks with its predecessor. So I mailed the check to my old insurance company again and said please accept my money. It mailed it back to me with the same explanation as before.

I won`t go on with this one because it gets ugly.

Some years ago I was fixing up an old house I had bought. I beseeched a local bank for a loan. The bank appraiser was due on Thursday. He did not make it. On a Friday, we tore out the ancient kitchen so we could put in a new one. On Monday, the appraiser showed up. We cannot make a loan on a house without a kitchen, he said. We consider this a shell. If you had been here when you said you would, I said, you would have seen a kitchen. He shrugged and walked away.

My 5-year-old son once asked me for $5 to pay for his kindergarten class photo. When I received the picture, my son was not in it. He had been absent the day the photo was taken. I did not know this. Todd, I said, you are not in the picture. Why? If I was not there, he said, how would I know I missed it?

•

What put me in mind of all this nonsense was President Bush`s State of the Union address.


Gregory Jaynes is a former correspondent and columnist for The Times.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Qadriya Hussein, a recently displaced Arab, lives with her husband and eight children in a mud house in Kirkuk. Kurds want Arabs expelled from the city.
washingtonpost.com
Iraqi City Fractures Along Ethnic Lines
In Kirkuk, Hussein`s Fall Released Old Rivalries Among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 24, 2004; Page A14


KIRKUK, Iraq -- This ethnically mixed city sitting atop vast oil resources has become dangerously polarized, with Kurds and Arabs vying to dominate it in the new Iraq.

Talk of ethnic brotherhood has ended, replaced by heated, exclusionist rhetoric and violence. Kurdish gunfire killed at least two demonstrators at a New Year`s Eve march by Arabs and Turkmens -- Kirkuk`s third major ethnic group -- against a measure of autonomy for Kurds. Within a week, unknown gunmen killed three Kurds.

Over at the Turkmen Culture Center and Billiards Hall in a Turkmen part of town, young men complained that Kurdish teachers had supplanted Arabs and Turkmens and were scheduling exams so that the students could not participate in political demonstrations. The students said they felt intimidated.

"We are getting afraid to speak out," said Anes Sabah Mohammed, a student at Kirkuk Technical Academy, a mixed vocational school. On Jan. 8, someone detonated a bomb in front of the school. It shattered windows but injured no one. "Anyone could have put it there," he said. "Everyone could be a target of someone in Kirkuk."

The overthrow of former president Saddam Hussein, rather than ushering in an era of reconciliation, appears to have released long-repressed ethnic rivalries and aspirations here. As the June 30 deadline approaches for the U.S.-led occupation authorities to hand over power to an Iraqi government, all sides are jockeying for position.

Kirkuk has emerged as a key arena. It is a city of impossible math. Kurds say they make up 40 percent of the population. Arabs say Arabs make up half, and Turkmens, Iraq`s third-largest ethnic group, also say they are half of Kirkuk`s population.

"Kirkuk is a flash point," said Ghazi Yahya Auglu, an official of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, one of the political parties in Kirkuk.

Kurdish political parties and their militias want to expel 270,000 Iraqi Arabs from Tamim province, which includes Kirkuk, under a plan to annex the region to a future autonomous zone. Kurds argue that they are merely redressing an injustice perpetrated by a variety of Iraqi governments that expelled Kurds northward and took their lands. Hussein accelerated the program and brought in Arab settlers to replace the Kurds.

The Kurds say that without ironclad pledges of expanded autonomy and an explicit commitment to reverse population engineering, they will not go along with U.S. plans to hand over power in Iraq to a central government in Baghdad. The threat represents a major turnaround for the Kurds. During the war, they were the staunchest allies of the United States in Iraq.

Religious leaders of Iraq`s majority Shiite Muslim population reject expanded autonomy for the Kurds. Sunni Muslim leaders also reject the Kurdish notion of a federal state, as do northern Iraq`s Turkmens, an ethnic group with deep roots here, who say they fear becoming second-class citizens.

All players regard Kirkuk, with a population about 800,000, as the grand prize. It is an ancient city that grew in national importance with the discovery of oil in the 1920s. The wells begin at the city`s western edge, where flames from burned-off natural gas light up the night sky. Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens live in both segregated communities and mixed , but with the expulsion of Iraqi forces last spring, Kurdish refugees from the north began to flood into the city, establishing a police force and dominating the U.S.-appointed city council.

"Of course, this is a sensitive situation. Kurds were thrown out and want to come back, so naturally there is a period of uncertainty. But people must accept that there was an injustice. The ones who really fight it are backers of the old regime," said Jalal Jawhar, an official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

The PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party rule a zone in far northern Iraq that was independent of the central government for 12 years following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Jawhar`s office was damaged by a car bomb in November and by mortar fire this month.

Jawhar makes no apologies for the call to expel Arab settlers. He expressed dismay that Arabs were coming to live in Kirkuk in unknown numbers. "I have heard that Arabs are coming or will come," he said, listing a half-dozen city districts where Arabs have settled in.

"We are against the presence of everybody brought in by Saddam Hussein. We want them to leave. We want it in a legal way, but they must leave." International organizations should compensate the Arabs and take them back to their areas of origin, he added.

Qadriya Hussein, a mother of eight, is an Arab who recently settled in Kirkuk after being expelled from her home in the countryside. She has taken refuge in a half-built house on a rutted dirt street. "I don`t have time for politics," she said from under a worn shawl, gesturing toward her children. "I need a house. I need food. I need our life to be like it was."

The government moved her and her neighbors from a village farther south in 1977. Returning to that ancestral home is impossible, she said, a newly built reservoir inundated her village. "Maybe it was wrong that Saddam brought us here, but what were we to do?" she asked.

Last spring, when Kurds emptied Haifa, the village near Kirkuk where she used to live, the Arabs moved to the shore of the lake and lived in tents. There was no work for her farmer husband, and it grew cold in December. They moved to Kirkuk, where day laboring jobs, while scarce, were available.

Her current shelter has no electric power, running water or windows. The floor is unfinished concrete. The children run the street barefoot. A sister who lives in Kirkuk supplies rations of food, since the wheat and sesame they salvaged from Haifa has long run out. The owner of the house arrived the other day to evict them, but U.S. soldiers persuaded him to let the family stay for the time being. "We were fortunate," Hussein said. "The Americans happened to pass by. But what about next time?"

A political party called the Arab National Bloc, representing Arabs` interests, emerged recently in Kirkuk, but it seems to be devoted as much to the old system of government as to its potential constituency. Its members` rhetoric is as unforgiving as the Kurds`.

"Iraqi Kurdistan is imaginary. The Kurds wave their suffering like a flag. Halabja, Halabja, Halabja is all they ever talk about," said Ismael Ubaidy, deputy director of the party, referring to the 1988 poison gassing of thousands of Kurds by Saddam Hussein`s armed forces. "Frankly, I think the Kurds did it themselves."

Ubaidy expressed little regret for the Arabization policy, given the Kurds` restless history. "Arabs came here for opportunity like everyone else. The Kurds had trouble with the government, but that is not our fault," he said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Halliburton Suspects Overbilling, Pays U.S.


By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 24, 2004; Page E01


Halliburton Co. said yesterday that it has paid the government $6.3 million to cover potential overcharging by a subcontractor for work in Iraq and alleged kickbacks.

The amount covers possible overbilling by a Kuwaiti firm as well as "improper payments" to one or two employees of KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary that has a broad Defense Department contract to provide food, shelter and other logistical support to the U.S. military in Iraq and other parts of the world, the company said.

"We will bear the cost of the potential overcharge, not the government," Randy Harl, KBR president and chief executive, said in a statement. Halliburton said it uncovered the problem and kickback scheme during a routine audit and reported it to the Defense Department inspector general.

The firm sent a check to the Army Materiel Command, which administers the wide-ranging logistics contract, "just in case the overbilling charge bears out," it said. KBR has been awarded $3.8 billion in work under the contract, which it won in 2001.

While saying it had fired the employees involved, Halliburton declined to provide further details on what goods or services the Kuwaiti subcontractor was providing or how much the employees may have pocketed. The Wall Street Journal reported the alleged scheme yesterday.

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon inspector general declined to comment.

The issue is not related to the controversy over a separate KBR contract dealing with Iraq`s reconstruction. Pentagon auditors last week asked the inspector general to investigate a deal between KBR and a Kuwaiti supplier to import fuel into Iraq under a no-bid contract. A draft audit report last month found that KBR may have overcharged the government at least $61 million under that arrangement. KBR has denied wrongdoing, and the Corps of Engineers said its audits have turned up nothing improper.

KBR has been awarded more than $2.2 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq`s infrastructure under the no-bid contract. Last week it was awarded a competitively bid reconstruction contract, worth up to $1.2 billion, to continue repairs to the nation`s oil facilities in the south.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said yesterday that KBR should not have been awarded more work while there were outstanding questions about the other contracts, including the latest kickback allegations.

"It is incomprehensible that the administration could give Halliburton another billion-dollar contract without fully investigating such criminal wrongdoing," Waxman said in a letter to Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, in which he asked for hearings on the Halliburton contracts. Dick Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton before being elected vice president.

Meanwhile, a congressional report released yesterday raised questions about how much Iraq will be able to pay for the reconstruction of its infrastructure.

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, found that Iraq will need maximum production from its oil industry and "substantial relief" from its international debt obligations or it will not be able to pay for any of the rebuilding efforts. It noted that Iraq hopes to earn almost $19 billion a year from oil by 2006. "But reaching the level of production that the Iraqi government envisions and sustaining it over time will depend on improving the security situation as well as investing in the oil fields and infrastructure," the report said.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Empty Words for the War-Torn


By Colbert I. King

Saturday, January 24, 2004; Page A19


Since President Bush`s State of the Union speech last year, thousands of Americans have experienced the emotional equivalent of a 9/11 event in their lives. Because the tragedies weren`t collective, didn`t occur in a single day or within the confines of a downtown city block, the devastation and pain may have been lost on the rest of us. But within the past year, more than 500 Americans have lost their lives, thousands have been maimed -- many for life -- and an untold number of U.S. families and communities have been shattered because of war in a far-off place called Iraq.

Last Tuesday night was an opportunity for George W. Bush to eulogize the fallen, a chance for him to tell their families what their sacrifices mean to the nation -- a time for the president to help heal broken hearts. That didn`t happen.

Yes, in his long address to a joint session of Congress, Bush offered a few words of praise for the skill and courage of the men and women in the military. He delivered a line about "sorrow when one is lost," and shared a self-serving recollection of himself landing on the deck of a carrier in the Pacific Ocean and his Thanksgiving Day fly-in to Baghdad. There was also a pledge to supply the troops with all the resources they need to fight and win. But victims of the Iraq war, as well as their moms, dads, spouses, children, neighbors and friends, deserved more than what they got from the president.

Instead of a moment of silence for those who have paid the ultimate price, they heard presidential pitches for prescription drugs and a new immigration law, and a denunciation of steroids and gay marriage. Instead of hearing the president recognize the preciousness of young lives expended far from home, they got a plea to put Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts. Instead of telling the country why it should remember what the dead and dying stood for, Americans were given an earful on child tax credits, the death tax and cuts in taxes on capital gains.

Sure, the president had a right to use the State of the Union to defend his policies against his Democratic critics. And, yes, it was no surprise that he took advantage of the occasion to trot out his campaign themes.

But all the smiling and presidential bonhomie on display seemed ill-placed for a country still at war. Looking at the partisan cheering and all of the leaping-to-their-feet on the Republican side of the aisle, you wouldn`t know that thousands of Americans are bearing the sorrows of armed conflict. You wouldn`t know that the chief reason we went to war -- because Saddam Hussein allegedly had weapons of mass destruction and planned to use them -- has not been backed up by any credible evidence.

Tuesday was the time to tell U.S. families whose sons and daughters are losing their lives and limbs that their brave sacrifices still make sense -- even as we saw on the front page a photograph of able-bodied Iraqi men enjoying themselves at the horse races. Tuesday was the time to explain why the nation is straining under a growing budget deficit, and why the military is stretched to nearly the breaking point. The families needed an honest answer as to why young men and women in uniform are expected to fight and die in country dominated by clerics who want our protection as they vie for power and, once they get it, want us gone.

Instead, we got a Bush speech laying the groundwork for his quest for reelection.

This does not come from a Bush hater. He rallied the nation after Sept. 11, 2001, and set the right tone for a military response to al Qaeda. George W. Bush is not the ogre his critics make him out to be. But if ever the country needed a commander in chief who understands the horrors and wastes of war, it`s now. That kind of president was not on display Tuesday night.

To know what it means to be in combat and to experience the trauma of war, we must look beyond this White House and the Pentagon`s civilian war planners.

Perhaps that explains the appeal of public figures such as Sens. John F. Kerry and John McCain, retired general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.

I have just read an account of war by a recipient of three Purple Hearts for wounds, a holder of the Bronze Star and the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He was writing at the time to his future wife about the death of a friend in the service of America:

"I don`t know really where to begin -- everything is so hollow and ridiculous, so stilted and so empty. I have never in my life been so alone with something like this before. I feel so bitter and angry and everywhere around me there is nothing but violence and war and gross insensitivity. . . . The world I am part of out there is so very different from anything you, I, or our close friends can imagine. It is filled with primitive survival, with destruction of an endless always seemingly pointless nature and forces one to grow up in a fast, no holds barred fashion."

He described the sight of a violent death.

"I didn`t know his name. Nobody in the tent did, I think. He was completely nude and his bony, minute body was stretched out on the brown plastic mat covering the operating table." He watched as pints of blood were pumped into the man, whose neck was bleeding.

He described the blood pouring out of the man and how his own stomach began to twist, and sweat poured all over him -- how he sat down on the floor because he thought he was going to be sick.

Suddenly the man`s right arm moved straight out, grasping toward the door. "He grunted desperately. . . . His toes, sticking out from the plastic splints, twinkled back and forth. He tried to raise his head and look -- perhaps ask something -- perhaps a last twinge of fight -- and then he was quiet. His right hand, still reaching, came down slowly onto his chest and his other arm, bandaged and absent, lolled over the side of the stretcher." The man, he said, was gone.

"No words. No cry," wrote then-Lt. j.g. John Kerry.

The account appeared in "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War," by Douglas Brinkley, excerpted in the December 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly.

A president who has been down in the trenches and seen people die would never have gone up to Capitol Hill in the midst of war and delivered the kind of State of the Union speech that the nation heard Tuesday night.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Saturday, January 24, 2004
War News for January 24, 2004 Draft

Jede Meldung Ein Link(Gestern erst sehr spät aktualisiert):
http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed, 33 wounded, including seven US soldiers, by car bomb in Samarra.

Bring `em on: Two Iraqis killed in Baghdad bombing.

Two US soldiers killed in helicopter crash near Mosul.

One British soldier killed, one injured in road accident near Amarah.

Al-Hakim says Bush`s transition plan is "unacceptable."

Al-Sistani calls for an end to election protests. "On Friday, addressing a prayer group in the holy city of Karbala, Ayatollah al-Sistani said no protests should be held until the United Nations` position has become clear, and `after that we will say our word.`"

Internal survey indicates Bush`s War causing major retention problems in Reserve components.

Kirkuk fractures along ethnic lines.

Cheney earns his salary from Halliburton. "`The company is a great company. They do great work for the federal government, as well as for their customers around the world,` he told Fox News Radio in an interview Wednesday. `They`ve had now, I believe, some 15 people killed -- either Halliburton employees or subcontractors working for them. They are operating in a combat zone. They`re rendering great service, and they make about three cents on the dollar for it. This is not the most profitable part of their business portfolio, by any means. They do it because they`re good at it, because they won the contract to do it. And, frankly, the company takes a certain amount of pride in rendering this kind of service to U.S. military forces.`"

Casualty Reports

Local story: Massachusetts soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.

Local story: Indiana soldier wounded in Iraq.





# posted by yankeedoodle : 3:02 AM
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-toyota2…
THE NATION
Toyota Cuts in Front of Ford as No. 2
Japanese firm`s rapid growth shows that even biggest U.S. names are unsafe in global market.
By John O`Dell
Times Staff Writer

January 24, 2004

Japanese giant Toyota Motor Corp. sped past American corporate icon Ford Motor Co. last year to become the world`s second-biggest car company, according to sales figures released Friday.

The ascension marks a major milestone for Toyota, which began as a small weaving factory in 1918, didn`t produce its first vehicle until 1935 and as recently as 1966 sold a mere 20,000 cars and trucks in the crucial U.S. auto market.

Its overtaking of Ford — a company that gave birth to the auto industry when it created the first mass-production assembly line nearly a century ago — is a powerful symbol of how even the biggest names in business aren`t safe from bruising competition in the global marketplace.

Toyota`s preliminary figures show that the Tokyo-based automaker`s worldwide retail sales climbed about 10% to 6.78 million in 2003, ousting Ford from the No. 2 spot it held for decades. General Motors Corp., with global sales of more than 8 million cars and pickup trucks, remains firmly in the No. 1 spot it has held for 75 years.

In the eyes of some industry experts, ceding ground to Toyota is a big blow for Ford. Analysts estimate Ford`s worldwide retail sales for last year at about 6.4 million units. "Being second in such an important global industry can be an important marketing tool that it has now lost," said Bob Schnorbus, chief economist for J.D. Power & Associates.

But the numbers speak as much to Toyota`s rise as they do to Ford`s fall.

Toyota Chairman Hiroshi Okuda has set a lofty goal of capturing 15% of the global auto market by early next decade, up from 10% today. To do so, Toyota must continue to snatch business away from traditional American brands as well as Asian and European rivals.

"Toyota is pursuing world domination and doing it successfully," said Gordon Wangers, president of AMCI, an automotive market research firm in Marina del Rey.

In the U.S., Toyota now ranks fourth in passenger vehicle sales and is close to overtaking Chrysler Group for the third spot.

Last year, Toyota captured a company record of 11.2% of the U.S. auto market, where it has been the top-selling import brand since 1975. The Toyota Camry sedan was the top-selling passenger car in the U.S. in 2003 — for the sixth time in seven years — while the company`s Lexus line was the most popular luxury brand for the fourth consecutive year.

It is because of this rapid growth that Wall Street now pegs Toyota`s total stock value higher than GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler combined.

Despite all that, Toyota contends it is not engaged in a race with the domestic brands.

"Our focus is on customer satisfaction," said Xavier Dominicis, a spokesman for Toyota`s import, distribution and marketing arm, Toyota Motor Sales USA, in Torrance. No parties are planned at Toyota`s U.S. headquarters for the official announcement Monday of the global sales figures, he said.

In recent decades, Toyota has expanded into all major auto markets and now sells cars in 160 countries, with manufacturing plants in 27 nations. Toyota`s sales figures include those of its subsidiaries Hino Motors and Daihatsu Motor Co.

All told, Toyota sold 1.87 million cars and pickup trucks in the U.S. in 2003, just under the 2 million units it sold in Japan. But the U.S. auto market — the world`s largest — is the most important for Toyota because it accounts for about 70% of the company`s profit.

Ford too has downplayed Toyota`s gains.

Chief Executive William Clay Ford Jr., great-grandson of founder Henry Ford, said his company`s new focus was on regaining profitability, not hanging on to market share. Last year, Ford posted a $495-million profit after racking up $6.4 billion in losses in 2001 and 2002. Ford`s sales figures include its foreign brands Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin.

Although Ford`s pickup truck sales, led by the F-150, are strong, the company`s passenger car sales continue to slip. As a result, Ford finished the year with a 19.5% U.S. market share, its lowest since Henry Ford was running the company in 1929.

Ford and GM are now refocusing their efforts on passenger cars, a market that Toyota and Honda have dominated in recent years. Meanwhile, the big European and Japanese automakers — Toyota among them — have begun attacking the domestics` hold on the profitable pickup and SUV markets.

Toyota also has taken a leadership position in the so-called green car market with its innovative Prius sedan and a pair of upcoming SUVs, all powered by a hybrid electric-and-gas engine with dramatically improved fuel economy.

The carmaker`s unlikely start dates to 1933, when Kiichiro Toyoda set up a small auto manufacturing unit in his father`s Toyoda Automatic Loom Works.

Although the family`s name is Toyoda, the company`s was changed to Toyota for simplified pronunciation and because, in Japan, eight is a lucky number and it takes eight strokes of a calligrapher`s pen to write "Toyota" in one popular form of Japanese script.

Until the end of World War II, Toyota Motor Co. primarily built trucks for the Japanese Imperial Army. The firm survived the war with its major manufacturing facilities intact — Japan surrendered just before a scheduled U.S. bombing raid on the Toyota factory complex — and began producing civilian cars again in 1947.

From the outset, the postwar company set its sights on global expansion.

In 1957, the firm set up its most ambitious overseas operation, Toyota Motor Sales USA, in an abandoned Rambler dealership in Hollywood. The first car it sold in the U.S. was a pokey, boxy, four-door Toyopet Crown sedan in the summer of 1958.

The early Toyotas sold here handled poorly when driven more than 60 mph and tended to overheat in the mountains and deserts. Toyotas were derided by American automakers as cheap and poorly designed imitations of real cars.

But Toyota`s prices were right. And over time, it improved efficiency at its factories to the point that they became models for modern industry.

"They are the best in the world at auto manufacturing," said Wangers of AMCI, the research firm. "Their production system is the one all others try to emulate."

The 1973 OPEC oil crisis gave Toyota and other import brands a big boost because they specialized in fuel-efficient cars at a time when domestic automakers were engaged in a gas-guzzling horsepower war.

By 1990, Toyota was selling 1 million vehicles annually in the United States. Then in 1999, Toyota shocked Detroit when it launched the first Japanese-made large pickup truck, the Tundra, and immediately bested Ford and GM trucks in various quality and buyer satisfaction awards.

Toyota also has made enormous investments in manufacturing and distribution facilities in the U.S., Wangers pointed out, with eight factories in the U.S. and a ninth under construction. It employs about 35,000 employees here.

As a result, Toyota is "more politically comfortable about challenging the domestics," Wangers said. "There`s a good chance that in my lifetime — and I`m 46 — they`ll surpass GM in global sales too."

Global Insight, Times Research


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-defense…
THE NATION
Bush Seeks 7% Boost in Military Spending
The $402-billion plan covers weapons and antiterrorism programs. A separate request is expected for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

January 24, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration wants to boost military spending by 7%, to nearly $402 billion, in fiscal 2005, the Pentagon said Friday.

That would take the defense budget to levels exceeding those at the height of the Cold War. The increase would help pay for a raft of costly weapons and programs bolstered by Washington`s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But the proposed budget does not include the costs of ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which for two years have largely been funded through massive supplemental spending bills.

The administration is expected to make a request later in the year — most likely after the November presidential election — for an additional $50 billion or more to pay for those military operations.

The $401.7-billion request is in line with what the Pentagon a year ago projected it would seek as part of a long-range plan to boost military spending to $484 billion annually by 2009. It does not include defense programs funded by the Energy Department, expected to cost about $20 billion in 2005.

Although public support for the war on terrorism has been key to securing annual spending increases, defense analysts said, ongoing programs such as fighter jets, warships and missile defense also have reaped the benefits.

"When you listen to the rhetoric coming from the Pentagon, one might get the impression that all the increases in spending since 9/11 have been closely related to waging the war on terrorism. But clearly this has not been the case," said Steven M. Kosiak, director of budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense think tank in Washington.

The Pentagon is not expected to release a complete breakdown of the spending request until Friday, but said it included more money for intelligence, homeland defense and readiness and training.

Defense officials said privately that the budget will include increased spending on unmanned spy planes and robotic technologies considered the vanguard of fighting terrorists and other emerging threats. It will keep funds flowing to two new multibillion-dollar jet fighter programs and is expected to further increase spending on missile defense testing and deployment — a program that grew by more than $9 billion in 2003.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a statement Friday that the budget reflects both the need to retrain troops and to provide the pay, benefits and other quality-of-life measures necessary to recruit and retain volunteers for both active and reserve forces.

The long deployments faced by reserve and National Guard troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have raised fears of a major exodus when enlistments are up.

"This budget builds upon past work to provide for a ready force made up of the talents and skills needed in our new national security environment," Rumsfeld said.

With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, lawmakers are likely to look favorably on the Pentagon`s request. And in the Democratic presidential campaign, only Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio has talked of cutting the defense budget if elected.

Stephen Daggett, a defense analyst for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, said the requested 2005 budget increase is about half of what is needed to keep up with inflation.

"The big news is that it doesn`t include the supplemental appropriations for Iraq or any projection of what those costs will be in fiscal 2005," Daggett said.

The proposed budget is likely to reflect more money for forces and resources to fight the sort of prolonged conflict that has emerged in Iraq since the end of major combat operations in May, and less for a force to fight big, quick battles, military analysts said.

The Pentagon is "looking at an army that is built for marathons instead of sprints, that is built for handling stability operations that take years instead of fighting blitzkriegs," said Andrew F. Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

That means shifting soldiers away from war-waging specialties like heavy armor and artillery and into peacekeeping specialties like military policing, intelligence and civil affairs jobs.

It also means moving troops into smaller, more mobile units oriented to fighting demanding missions in the near term, instead of building a military geared toward fighting a large-scale war in another decade.

And while the armed service chiefs have been under pressure to increase the size of the military — most recently from more than two dozen House Democrats backing a bill to add 40,000 soldiers, 28,700 airmen and 15,000 Marines to the active-duty ranks — they are expected to continue to resist.

Military officials worry that the money that would be necessary to pay ballooning personnel costs would be bled from badly needed modernization programs.

In addition, a report by the Congressional Budget Office Friday warned that war and reconstruction costs in Iraq could soar if oil production there remains weak and Iraq doesn`t win relief from the international community of its debt.

"Lower oil exports or oil prices and higher levels of debt service could mean that Iraq would need billions in additional assistance in the years to come," said the budget office, which is Congress` nonpartisan fiscal analyst.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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January 24, 2004
2 U.S. Troops, 3 Iraqis Killed in Attacks
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:50 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Two American soldiers and three Iraqis were killed in separate bomb attacks Saturday, a day after two U.N. security experts arrived in the capital to study the possible return of the world body`s international staff.

The American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb that struck their convoy near Fallujah, a city 50 miles west of Baghdad in an area that has been a center of anti-American resistance. The latest deaths brought to 509 the number of American service members who have died since the United States and its allies launched the Iraq war March 20.

In another attack, a truck bomb exploded soon after a U.S. patrol passed by in Samarra, which also is in the restive so-called Sunni Triangle, an area north and west of Baghdad that is home to diehard Saddam Hussein loyalists who have been blamed for most of the insurgent attacks on civilians and U.S. forces.

The blast killed three Iraqis and wounded 40 people including seven American soldiers, Capt. Jennifer Knight of the 720th Military Police Battalion said.

The American military police patrol was turning into a police station to join Iraqi police when the explosion occurred behind it, Sgt. Maj. Nathan Wilson of the 720th Military Police Battalion.

Despite Saddam`s capture on Dec. 13, insurgents loyal to him have continued to attack police stations and U.S. troops.

Also Saturday, at least one sniper in a building shot and wounded an American soldier who was in a foot patrol in a Baghdad neighborhood, Maj. Kevin West said.

A bridge across the Tigris River in Baghdad, leading to the coalition headquarters, was closed by U.S. troops for two hours Saturday. Witnesses said they were searching for a bomb, but this could not be independently confirmed.

Baghdad has been a frequent target of insurgents. In one of the deadliest attacks, the U.N. headquarters in the capital was bombed in August, killing 22 people including top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan withdrew all foreign U.N. staff in October.

A U.N. military adviser and a security coordinator arrived Friday in Baghdad, the first foreign staff to return since then.

They planned to meet with officials from the U.S.-led coalition and inspect buildings the world body might use, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

``Their primary focus will be to open lines of communication ... and also to look after the interests of our national staff in Iraq,`` Dujarric said.

Annan also is considering sending a separate security team that would be needed if he decides to send experts to Iraq to determine whether direct elections for a transitional government were feasible.

That team would help resolve a dispute between the coalition and Iraq`s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who is demanding direct elections as opposed to a U.S. plan calls for letting regional caucuses choose a legislature. The legislature would then name a new Iraqi government that will take over from the coalition on July 1, under the U.S. plan adopted on Nov. 15.

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite leader, said Friday the plan ``as it stands ... is unacceptable.`` But Americans and others are slowly coming around to the need for elections, he said.

Al-Hakim, who was among members of a Governing Council delegation that met with President Bush on Tuesday at the White House, heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country`s most powerful Shiite political group.

He said if the U.N. experts conclude an early vote is not feasible, then sovereignty could be handed over to the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council. But he added it was ``a last-resort option.``

Al-Hakim`s views carry considerable weight in Iraq, where the Shiite majority has risen to dominate the political scene after decades of suppression by the Sunni Arab minority.

The United States maintains that it is impossible to hold elections in such a short time given the lack of a census and electoral rolls and the continuing violence.

The Bush administration said Friday that it was holding to its July 1 deadline for ending the U.S. occupation but the method of selecting a new government wasn`t decided.

``We have an open mind about how to most effectively facilitate an orderly transfer of sovereignty,`` State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said.

Under the U.S. power-transfer plan, Iraqis also will vote early next year to chose delegates who will draft a constitution. The draft will later be adopted in a national referendum. The third and final 2005 vote, under the plan, is to elect a new parliament.

On Friday, a U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter attached crashed in northern Iraq, killing the two pilots, the U.S. military said. The deaths raised the American forces` death toll in the Iraq conflict to 507. The cause of the crash was unclear.



Copyright 2004 The Associated Press

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Das ist die morgige Bestsellerliste der NYTimes.
Interessant die Nr.1 ist die Abrechnung von O`Neill mit Bush. Die Nr.2 ist ein Sport Ass. Dann die 3 ist die Geschichte der Bush-Familie, darüber gibt es zwei Auszüge hier im Thread, einen von der LATimes.
Dann Moore ist bekannt.
Die 5 da geht es um die Bush Lügen, ist seit 22 Wochen auf der Liste.

Hardcover Nonfiction

Published: February 1, 2004


This Week Last Week Weeks On List
1 THE PRICE OF LOYALTY, by Ron Suskind. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) A view inside the Bush administration from the perspective of Paul O`Neill, the president`s first Treasury secretary. 1
2 MY PRISON WITHOUT BARS, by Pete Rose with Rick Hill. (Rodale, $24.95.) A memoir by the former player who was banned from baseball for betting on games while he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. 1 2
3 AMERICAN DYNASTY, by Kevin Phillips. (Viking, $25.95.) The political commentator details a "pattern of deception" in four generations of the Bush family. 5 2
4 DUDE, WHERE`S MY COUNTRY? by Michael Moore. (Warner, $24.95.) The author of "Stupid White Men" calls for "regime change" in Washington. 2 15
5 LIES (AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM), by Al Franken. (Dutton, $24.95.) A satirical critique of the rhetoric of right-wing pundits and politicians. 3 22

Die Rechten sind auf 7 , Savage Radio Moderator.
O`Reilly der Fernsehmann auf 9.
Dann auf 12 von 15 das Buch:
A Confident Prescription for Foiling the Terrorists
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 13, 2004
The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors` absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/books/13KAKU.html?ex=10750…