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When Blair stood on the brink

Guardian special investigation of the build-up to war in Iraq reveals:
· Loss of vital Commons vote would have provoked rash of resignations
· Straw and Blunkett among those close to PM prepared to quit
· Blair terrified that Iraq would be `his Vietnam`

Patrick Wintour, chief political correspondent
Saturday April 26, 2003
The Guardian

Senior cabinet ministers at the centre of Tony Blair`s war strategy were braced to quit along with the prime minister in the run-up to the Commons vote on Iraq, the Guardian can reveal.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, told the Guardian that he intended to resign if the vote went against the government. The home secretary, David Blunkett, also said that cabinet ministers close to Mr Blair would "go down with him". The prime minister revealed last week that he had told his family he might be forced to quit over Iraq.

In an interview with the Guardian as part of a special investigation into the build-up to war, Mr Blunkett recalled: "Everyone believed, in the run-up to that vote, that Tony had put his premiership on the line and those who are very close to him would go down with him. I thought it would be a hit on the government as a whole."

Mr Straw said: "The projected voting figures were very serious ... I knew there would be a point at which Tony would resign and I would resign as well. I told my wife I might well have to go over this. I think Tony assumed that I would go."

The revelations show how perilous the government`s position became during the build-up to war. At one point, Labour whips told Mr Blair that up to 200 Labour MPs would vote against the government, and frantic last-minute efforts were made to persuade rebels back on side.

According to one cabinet source, the entire cabinet could technically have been forced to tender their resignation. "If the prime minister resigns, the whole government resigns. Everybody`s portfolios and talents would be put into the hands of the new leader."

In the last desperate 24 hours before the vote, the government essentially ground to a halt as the energies of Mr Blair and other leading cabinet figures were devoted to winning over potential rebels.

Mr Straw recalled: "We used every argument, including telling them that this is no longer about what you say to your local paper, this is about whether you want to keep this government in business."

The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, warned his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, about the possible consequences of the vote. He told the Guardian: "I had a long conversation with him, warning him that if the vote went wrong we might not be able to be there. I did not want him or anyone on the US side not to understand the significance of where we were on the importance of the parliamentary vote. The US came to understand it was about us gambling just about everything in getting this right."

He added: "If we had lost that vote, that would have been it."

For Mr Blair, the critical yardstick was winning the support of more than half the parliamentary party. In the event, 139 out of 412 Labour MPs voted against the government`s motion.

Mr Straw, one of the strongest proponents of a Commons vote, believed he would have been blamed if it had gone wrong. "I knew it was a very serious risk and if it went wrong I would get a lot of the blame." But it would have been a mockery of parliament to deny MPs a vote, he said.

After the vote, the cabinet`s anxieties focused on how the war would progress. In the first few days, Mr Blunkett recalled, "all of us were asking the question, was this going to be a long haul or a complete collapse?"

Mr Blair privately feared that the war could turn into his Vietnam, with British and US troops bogged down for years, the Guardian learned.

He asked the intelligence services every day for their assessment. "Tell me what the picture is: is this Ceaucescu in Romania, or is this the Vietcong?" he asked them. "In other words, is this a security apparatus that has a grip on a country that will fight to keep that grip, but actually has no popular support, in which case they will be removed, or is this a movement that actually does have some genuine popular support?"

The daily response from the intelligence service was that the situation was more akin to Romania than Vietnam.

But even loyal ministers feared that the government was heading into the unknown. "Either Tony knows something the rest of us don`t know, or he`s insane," was one minister`s view hours before the war started.

The Guardian also reveals the degree of anger within the cabinet at Clare Short`s radio interview 10 days before the war began, in which she repeatedly accused Mr Blair of recklessness and threatened to resign. One cabinet minister, hearing the interview, was so furious that he threw his radio across the room.

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April 27, 2003
Hoping to Speed Iraqi Weapons Hunt, U.S. Plans to Add to Teams
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN


WASHINGTON, April 26 — The Bush administration, concerned about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq, is moving to triple the size of the team searching for scientists and for incriminating lethal materials. Some officials are even saying that they are losing hope of finding actual weapons.

Administration officials, some speaking publicly and some on condition of anonymity, insist that they remain entirely confident that evidence of illegal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs — as opposed to the weapons themselves — will accumulate in coming weeks and months, though perhaps slowly.

But to step up the pace, a military official said, about 1,000 military and scientific personnel will be added in coming weeks to the team trying to interview Iraqis who may have knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs and looking for evidence. Only 500 are doing this job now, with perhaps 150 actually searching and the rest providing backup and support.

"A fairly robust organization is going over there," said a military official. "It will also look for evidence of war crimes, terrorism connections, missing P.O.W.`s — anything it can find that will help get to the weapons of mass destruction."

Some officials say they think the United States should react more positively to the demand by France that United Nations inspectors certify that Iraq is free of unconventional weapons before economic penalties against the country are permanently lifted. Many United Nations members favor a return to Iraq by Hans Blix as an inspection leader as soon as the country is secure. Others say that a couple of hundred more experts, with or without Mr. Blix, cannot hurt and could actually help.

But theirs is a decidedly minority view. Even the State Department, which advocated trying to find the weapons using United Nations inspectors last fall, has no tolerance for asking those inspectors to return.

"Forget it," one official said. "On principle, we don`t want the United Nations running around Iraq."

One official, discussing the American plans, said that despite some polls indicating that Americans do not care very much whether the weapons are found, White House officials are pressing the United States Central Command to step up the search for them because of worldwide skepticism that the main American rationale for the war was not proving to be true. "There`s just a lot of pressure coming from the White House on this," an administration official said. "But Centcom is pushing back because they have other things to do — like securing the country and guarding its antiquities."

Administration officials and experts say that evidence of Iraq`s illegal weapons programs will most likely consist of items like empty shells for chemical or biological weapons, labs that could be used to make arms and so-called precursor chemicals that could be converted to weapons use but could also be used for fertilizers, pesticides and the like.

"People are realizing that Saddam Hussein may not have stored the weapons themselves, in part because when you put chemical or biological agents into weapons, they deteriorate very rapidly," an administration official said. He and others said that if the weapons themselves — the "smoking gun" that has eluded the United States since United Nations inspectors went into Iraq last fall — should not turn up, American experts may be forced to base their case for the existence of weapons programs on fragmentary evidence that could be interpreted in different ways.

"The evidence that we do find will be convincing to most experts, but not necessarily to those predisposed to doubt what we say," said an American official.

Another official said: "It may be that the Iraqis poured toxins into the ground, or scoured out their shells, or never filled their shells. There may be weapons, and there may not be."

"But it will be clear," the official continued, referring to weapons of mass destruction by their initials, "that they were pursuing W.M.D. actively."

The increasing possibility of a somewhat ambiguous result on weapons programs has led to a debate in the administration over what to do now that President Bush has decided that there will be no role for the United Nations inspectors in finding or destroying illegal weapons.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, like some in the administration, has argued that a United Nations team of some sort may be necessary to ratify a conclusion that weapons programs existed. The point, some officials say, would be to convince skeptics that weapons programs were indeed there. "The big concern is credibility," a military official said. "When we say we have found something, are the media sources in the Middle East and other parts of the world going to believe it?"

While it appears that Mr. Blix`s team will not be allowed to return soon, some State Department officials say that some kind of United Nations team might be acceptable eventually to help verify incriminating evidence or to destroy it.

"If there were a role for the United Nations on weapons, it would be different from the one they had before," said an administration official. "It`s too early to say what their role would be. It`s too early to say that there will be no role."

France has threatened to withhold its vote on lifting the permanent sanctions against Iraq until there is some agreement on the role for the United Nations in weapons inspections and destruction. French officials say this is faithful to the United Nations resolutions that were based on a finding that Iraq, in defiance of the world community, had such weapons. "How can we just walk away from what the sanctions were all about?" a French official asked.

Americans say there is no room for negotiating with the French on lifting sanctions if the issue is United Nations weapons inspectors. They accuse France of having a hidden agenda: ensuring contracts for French companies in an Iraqi reconstruction program paid for with revenues from Iraqi oil exports.

One problem is that American officials who now say they may not find actual weapons have changed their arguments somewhat. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the United Nations that the United States had evidence of actual weapons, not just weapons programs.

Indeed, he suggested that some of those weapons were ordered sent into the field before the war. Now there is some doubt about that because some experts say that if there had been intelligence on their deployment, there should have been intelligence to help Americans find them.

"There are still holes in what Iraq reported it had," said Raymond Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. "The Iraqis always said they destroyed the materials we know they had, but they never offered proof."

But like some experts, Mr. Zilinskas said he doubted that the Iraqis had actually started up weapons programs after a first round of inspections ended in 1998. That does not mean that elements of weapons programs cannot be found now in Iraq, he said, only that the weapons themselves may not be there.

"The British and now the Americans have been changing their tune," said Mr. Zilinskas, who was a weapons inspector in Iraq in the mid-1990`s. "Before, they said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to go. The British said they were on the shelf and could have been deployed within 45 minutes."

But in the face of doubts like those expressed by Mr. Zilinskas, an administration official said: "Remember the quagmire that we were supposed to be in during the war? Don`t start saying we`re in a quagmire on the weapons. We`ll find them."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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US Forces Make Iraqis Strip and Walk Naked in Public



All photos by Tomm W. Christiansen


>>> On 25 April 2003, the newspaper Dagbladet (Norway) published photos of armed US soldiers forcing Iraqi men to walk naked through a park.

On the chests of the men had been scrawled an Arabic phrase that translates as "Ali Baba - Thief."

A military officer states that the men are thieves, and that this technique will be used again.

No word yet from the newly liberated Iraqi people about some of them being summarily found guilty of theft, forced at gunpoint to strip, having a racist phrase written on their bodies, and then made to walk naked in public. No doubt the Arab/Muslim world is impressed by this display of "democracy," "freedom," "due process," and "no cruel or unusual punishment."

We wonder if the soldiers will be using this technique on their comrades who stole $13.1 million in Iraq. Or the journalists who looted Iraq`s art.



http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/stripped-iraqis.htm

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE
News Flash
AI Index: MDE 14/097/2003 (Public)
News Service No: 103
25 April 2003


Iraq: Stripped naked and humiliated by US soldiers

Amnesty International expressed concern today at the disturbing article and images portrayed in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet which show American soldiers escorting naked Iraqi men through a park in Baghdad. The pictures reveal that someone has written the words `Ali Baba - Haram(i)` (which means Ali Baba - thief) in Arabic on the prisoners` chests.

The article quotes a US military officer as saying that this treatment is an effective method of deterring thieves from entering the park and is a method which will be used again; another US military officer is quoted as saying that US soldiers are not allowed to treat prisoners inhumanely.

"If these pictures are accurate, this is an appalling way to treat prisoners. Such degrading treatment is a clear violation of the responsibilities of the occupying powers," Amnesty International said today.

"Whatever the reason for their detention, these men must at all times be treated humanely. The US authorities must investigate this incident and publicly release their findings."

Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention clearly states that "Protected persons are entitled in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manner and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity".


To link to the article from Dagbladet please go to: http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2003/04/25/367175.html

For a full copy of Amnesty International`s report: Iraq: Responsibilities of the occupying powers please go to:http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde140892003



Public Document
****************************************
For more information please call Amnesty International`s press office in London, UK, on [phone]
Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW. web: http://www.amnesty.org

For latest human rights news viewhttp://news.amnesty.org

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Die Amerikaner werden den Tag verfluchen, an dem sie in den Irak einmarschiert sind.

Iraqis emulate Palestinians by stoning troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad
27 April 2003


A tactic of the Palestinian intifada has spread ominously to Iraq, less than three weeks after US tanks rolled into the middle of Baghdad.

American troops are coming under attack from Iraqi children throwing stones, replaying scenes from the West Bank and Gaza Strip that were broadcast on state-run television before the fall of Saddam Hussein.

News reports said that children – who at first flocked around the American forces, and were given sweets by the soldiers – have begun hurling rocks in Mosul and the Shia city of Najaf. In one incident this weekend, a group of youths threw stones at a group of soldiers moving through Mosul on foot.

"They were throwing them like they were pitching a baseball," said Sgt John McLean, who was hit on the helmet, in the back and on the heel. The crowd was only dispersed when the Americans fired a warning shot over their heads. Crowds of 250-300 Iraqi teenagers hurled stones at American marines patrolling Najaf on Thursday and Friday, US officers said.

Although this phenomenon represents no serious threat to the US forces, it is a highly symbolic gesture in the Middle East, where it is seen by Arabs as a heroic form of resistance to an illegal occupying force. It also disrupts the US military`s efforts to adopt a more relaxed posture on the streets – part of the larger American and British drive to win support from the 24 million Iraqi population.

It will raise concerns over whether such assaults are organised by anti-US elements in an attempt to draw a violent response from the soldiers that will widen the opposition to their presence. The Israeli military responded to stones and firebombs thrown by youngsters by shooting plastic bullets, tear gas canisters and, at times, live ammunition, killing a large number of children, especially early in the uprising.

Since the allied invasion of Iraq, there have been three suicide bombings – another intifada tactic. During the height of the looting in Baghdad, there were reports of arson against government institutions, and US troops are still being fired on, including those guarding the headquarters of Jay Garner, the retired US general heading the coalition reconstruction team.

To the disapproval of some Iraqis and aid agencies, Mr Garner has established his headquarters inside a palace compound once lorded over by Saddam Hussein. Some here say that the choice of a palace, ringed now by razor wire and protected by tanks, sends entirely the wrong message to the Iraqi people.
26 April 2003 23:17


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Link zur vorherigen Seite:

http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2003/04/25/367175.html

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In Round 2, It’s the Dollar vs. Euro
U.S. will make Europeans pay for failing to back war on Iraq
GEORGE W. BUSH isn’t going to do that. I’m told he responded politely. Though a typical Gallic opportunist, Chirac may still have his uses, depending on how eager he really is to suck up. But Bush isn’t going to rush to ask him—let alone the European Union or the United Nations—to join us in the back booth of post-Saddam Iraq. The thinking in and around the White House is: We’re Boss now, and it’s going to stay that way for a … while.
Mankind is at one of those hinge moments in history, in which every big-power decision, phone call and diplomatic move has the potential to echo loudly down the years. The forces set in motion by 9/11 essentially destroyed a global structure that had lasted since 1947. A new world is being created. Ironically, the most troublesome clash of civilizations in it may not be the one the academics expected: not Islamic fundamentalists vs. the West in the first instance, but the United States against Europe.
To oversimplify, but only slightly, it’s the dollar vs. the euro.






And just because Newt Gingrich attacked the State Department the other day, don’t assume that Secretary of State Colin Powell is on the other side. He’s not. The much ballyhooed war between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon is exaggerated. Yes, mid-level diplomats at State, leaking to their favorite reporters, seethe at the influence of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his coterie of neocons. Yes, the neocons view the lifers at State as naïve accommodationists. But Powell, I’m told by White House officials, is firmly with the president in being wary—very wary—of Europe and its bureaucratic ally, the United Nations.
Powell made that plain in an interview on public TV. As if to respond to Gingrich’s accusation that State had been too meek in its diplomatic dealings, Powell blandly said that France would suffer “consequences” for its role in trying to undermine American efforts to win global backing for the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein. As with much else in life and politics, those consequences will involve money.
Nobody in an official capacity on either side of the Atlantic wants to say this in so many words. We say that the war isn’t over, that it’s our job—and only our job—to continue the search for weapons of mass destruction and to bring stability to Iraq with an interim government. The Europeans and the United Nations insist that they should resume the task of searching for WMDs. Until that issue is settled, they say, international sanctions can’t formally end. (France is only proposing to “suspend” them.)
In fact, the dispute isn’t about WMDs at all. It’s about something else entirely: who gets to sell—and buy—Iraqi oil, and what form of currency will be used to denominate the value of the sales. That decision, in turn, will help decide who controls Iraq, which, in turn, will represent yet another skirmish in a growing global economic conflict. We want a secular, American-influenced pan-ethnic entity of some kind to control the massive oil fields (Iraq’s vast but only real source of wealth). We want that entity to be permitted to sell the oil to whomever it wants, denominated in dollars. We want those revenues—which would quickly mount into the billions—to be funneled into the rebuilding of the country, essentially (at least initially) by American companies. Somewhere along the line, British, Australian and perhaps even Polish companies would get cut in. (Poland provided troops.) President Bush doesn’t dare sell the war as a job generator, but it may, in fact, produce more than a few.



The Europeans and the United Nations want the inspections regime to resume because as long as it is in place, the U.N. “oil-for-food” program remains in effect. Not only does France benefit directly—its banks hold the deposits and its companies have been involved in the oil sales—the entire EU does as well, if for no other reason than many of the recent sales were counted not in dollars but in euros. The United Nations benefits because it has collected more than a billion dollars in fees for administering the program. As long as the 1990 sanctions remain in effect, Iraq can’t “legally” sell its oil on the world market. At least, to this point, tankers won’t load it without U.N. permission, because they can’t get insurance for doing so.
Sometime in the next few weeks, push will come to shove. There are storage tanks full of Iraqi crude waiting in Turkish ports. For now, Rumsfeld and Powell are playing “bad cop, bad cop.” “This isn’t on the president’s radar screen right now,” an aide told me. “Powell is totally on board, though. He is as angry at the French as anyone else, maybe more. There may come a time when the smart thing to do is turn the whole Iraq situation over to the U.N. This is not that time.” Meanwhile, if the rest of the world tries to block any and all Iraq oil sales, it’s possible that American companies will find a way to become the customer of first and last resort.
And we’ll pay in dollars.

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Im Augenblick werden einige von Murdock Mitarbeitern im Irak gefundene Dokumente aufgearbeitet. Über die Echtheit herrscht Unklarheit.

Saddam `held talks on alliance with al-Qaeda`
Martin Bright and Jason Burke
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

Negotiations about about a possible alliance between Saddam Hussein`s regime and al-Qaeda took place in 1998, according to documents found in Baghdad by a British newspaper.

The papers found in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq`s feared secret police, show that an envoy from the terror group was sent to the Iraqi capital in March 1998 from Sudan. It was in Sudan that al-Qaeda had been based until 1996, when its leadership moved to Afghanistan after the Sudanese government bowed to pressure from the United States to expel Osama bin Laden`s organisation.

The find will be seized on by the US and British intelligence services who have so far struggled to prove a link between bin Laden and the fallen Iraqi regime.

The Sunday Telegraph claims the papers show that the meeting, which took as its starting point a common hatred of America and Saudi Arabia, was spread out over a full week. It ended with discussions about a visit to Baghdad by the al-Qaeda leader himself. The representative stayed at the al-Mansour Melia hotel at the expense of the Iraqi government.

These talks took place a month after bin Laden issued his notorious fatwa establishing a World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. This religious statement said: `To kill Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim.`

Five months after the visit to Baghdad, al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and Nairobi in Kenya, killing more than 300 people and injuring 5,000.

Other Mukhabarat documents include a paper from 19 February 1998 containing plans for the trip to be arranged through the Iraqi intelligence service`s station in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

A letter says a message to be relayed to the al-Qaeda leader would `relate to the future of our relationship with bin Laden, and achieve a direct meeting with him`.

The letter recommends bringing the al-Qaeda envoy to Iraq as a way of maintaining contacts with bin Laden. The documents are said to be countersigned by the deputy director general of the Mukhabarat.

The find coincides with the capture of former Mukhabarat head of operations Farouk Hijazi near the Syrian border on Friday. Washington has said Hijazi was Iraq`s key link man with al-Qaeda, and that he travelled to meet him at Kandahar in Afghanistan.

Remarkable though it is, the find is unlikely to be the `smoking gun` the US and Britain are looking for.

Representatives from the Mukhabarat are known to have travelled to Kandahar in the late Nineties to build links with al-Qaeda. Most analysts believe, however, that the ideological differences between the Iraqis and the terrorists were insurmountable.

The talks are thought to have ended disastrously for the Iraqis, as bin Laden rejected any kind of alliance, preferring to pursue his own policy of global jihad , or holy war.

· A senior US politician warned Syria last night that it had made `historic mistakes` in its policy towards Iraq, and said an end to support for `terrorist` organisations was a prerequisite for improving Damascus`s ties with the US.

`Syria`s position in the United States...dropped dramatically as we saw the transfer of military equipment from and through Syria to Iraq,` said Tom Lantos, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives` International Relations Committee.

`These were very bad mistakes, historic mistakes, and the time is long overdue to correct the course of Syrian policy,` Lantos said after meeting Syria`s President Bashar al-Assad.

The congressman warned: `We find it unacceptable...that there should be headquarters of terrorist organisations in Damascus. These will need to be closed if Syria is to forge a new relationship with the United States.`


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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In a land without law or leaders, militant Islam threatens to rule
Liberation from terror will bring democracy, the White House promises. Yet power could go, not to the people, but to the clerics

Jason Burke in Kirkuk
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

Acrid smoke was still curling from the old Baath Party headquarters, gunfire rattled regularly in the narrow streets of the Arab neighbourhoods and corpses still lay in the dirt by the side of the road. Kirkuk, the key northern Iraqi city, had fallen less than 48 hours earlier but already its people were making their hopes known.

Across walls all over the city hastily scrawled political statements were appearing. Near Kirkuk`s main square, where a felled statue of Saddam still lay like a chopped tree, a wall was covered in Arabic letters in green paint: `Islam is the solution.`

The slogan dates from 1928 when, in Egypt, a schoolteacher called Mohammed al-Banaa established the Muslim Brotherhood. Its aims were clear: through the strict application of Islamic principles to contemporary life the imperialist rule of Western powers could be thrown off and a just and prosperous society achieved.

There should be no surprise that such slogans have resurfaced in Iraq. Since the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime, Iraqi administrative systems have collapsed. Although the Americans are working hard to restore a semblance of civic order, they have made little progress so far and society is in chaos. The result is that in much of the country the only functioning social system is that of the mosques and the only leaders with any credibility are the prayer leaders.

In the northern city of Mosul last week it was local clerics, such as Sheikh Ibrahim al-Namaa, who were the only effective authority. Although several hundred American soldiers have moved into the city, they are nowhere near enough to control a metropolis of more than a million people that is riven with ethnic tensions.

On the day Mosul fell Sheikh al-Namaa sent young men with guns to guard hospitals and homes. A few days later he successfully ordered looters to return stolen property to mosques. Elsewhere, particularly in the Shia-dominated south-west, local clerics took the lead in establishing order, organising law enforcement, the protection of property, even healthcare. And, swiftly, their moral authority assumed political dimensions.

Last week al-Namaa and several other prayer leaders formed a political party in Mosul. `[Saddam Hussein`s] end was a good thing,` al-Namaa said, `but the British and American invasion of Iraq was in the interest of Israel.` The right programme for the reconstruction of Iraq was, to al-Namaa, obvious. `In Islam, there is the answer to every social problem.`

Some observers, notably Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, dismissed the clerics as a noisy minority who had no broad support. Others watched warily, scared that a tidal wave of Islamic sentiment was sweeping Iraq. In one sense Rumsfeld is right: the Iraqis, Shia or Sunni or Kurd, are among the most secular people in the Middle East. But he is wrong to underestimate the depth of feeling on the part of many millions of people.

Rumsfeld would do well to read some history books. The emerging politicised religious movement in Iraq has roots that go back further than the recent days of anarchy. In the Fifties and Sixties popular political debate in the Middle East was dominated by the secular, nationalist ideologies of the autocratic new rulers who had taken power in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the Western colonialist powers. Yet such ideas, and the men who espoused them, were in much of the region discredited by successive military defeats by Israel and by the failure to deal with massive economic problems.

The populations of the Middle Eastern states, made more aware than ever of the grim realities of their lives compared to the West by modern education systems and communications, looked for alternatives. Through the Seventies the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical offshoots went from strength to strength.

In Iraq, however, Saddam and the Baath Party regime managed, through co-opting the middle classes and by vicious repression, to exclude religion from politics and from power. The old statist, nationalist, secular ideology was perpetuated through terror. As a result the shift in popular support to political Islamic ideology seen elsewhere never happened. With the removal of the Baath Party the lid has come off. In Iraq the shift is happening now, a generation late.

So what happens next? In Algeria a moderate political Islamist movement was suppressed by the government. With the moderates in prison, radical militants ran amok. Even today, after 12 years and more than 100,000 dead, civil war continues.

In Egypt massive repression, and significant concessions too, have restricted, but not ended, a violent insurgency launched by radical groups which moved to the fore when the more moderate elements were suppressed.

The lessons appear clear: engage the moderates or the consequences could be dire. If secular nationalism fails, and moderate political Islam is made to fail, then democracy is unlikely to be the ideology sought out by angry, humiliated, hungry people.

A year ago Adam Ayub Ahmed was a 17-year-old schoolboy with a head full of dreams. Last week he sat in a rank prison cell in the northern Iraq city of Sulaymaniyah, with his hands cuffed behind him. On the first day of the war Adam joined Ansar ul-Islam, the militant group linked to al-Qaeda, that sprang up in the eastern part of the Kurdish-run enclave in northern Iraq in late 2001. He was captured when Ansar ul- Islam was destroyed by US airstrikes and assaults by Kurdish troops backed by US Special Forces.

Adam, who came from a typically moderate Kurdish religious background, was impressed by his Arabic and Islamic studies teacher at the local school. The teacher was a member of Ansar ul-Islam and was able to convince the young man of the need to struggle against `the Zionist-Crusader alliance`.

`It all made sense to me,` Adam said. `It explained all our problems. I felt I understood everything.` There was only one truth, Adam said, that of the radicals, that of men like Osama bin Laden.

Saudi-born bin Laden`s fate is now more closely entwined with that of Iraq than it has ever been. All over the Muslim world the attack on Iraq has been seen as an attack on Islam. The primary objective of the terrorist actions that bin Laden has sponsored has not been to hurt the economies or the society of the West through physical damage. Instead they have been designed to rally the world`s 1.2 billion Muslims to bin Laden`s banner. By radicalising the Middle East, the war in Iraq has played straight into bin Laden`s hands.

For a substantial number of people in Iraq, Islam is indeed `the solution`. The question is `whose Islam?` - that of the extremists or the moderates?


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Observer Comment Extra

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Mr Blair`s dark days

How distressed poor Tony, Jack and David must have been when they thought they might have to quit. Its good to see they never lost sight of what really matters

Terry Jones
Sunday April 27, 2003

Nobody could have read this Saturday`s accounts of the Iraq crisis without being deeply moved. To read how close Tony Blair had come to losing his job was a sobering experience. It was similarly dreadful to learn how "terrified" the Prime Minister had been that Iraq would prove to be his personal "Vietnam". And how touching it was to discover that Mr. Blair had had to warn his family that he might have to quit over Iraq. Those must have been dark days indeed.
How distressful it must have been for Jack Straw to know that, should things go against them, he might actually get the blame for pushing for a Commons vote. And poor David Blunkett must have need all the comfort his dog could give him, knowing that as one of those close to the Prime Minister, he would go down with him. And how they must have hated Clare Short. No wonder she has no future in politics.

And yet now it has all turned out so well. At the cost of only a few thousand Iraqi deaths (nobody`s really bothered to count them) Mr Blair has succeeded in helping the extreme-right Republicans in the White House to pursue their publicly stated objective of world domination. How proud Mr Blair and the others must feel that their resolve and nerve have enabled Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney to see through the first stage of their project by establishing a permanent American "force presence" (as they call it) in the Gulf.

Mr Blair must now be looking forward to helping the US hawks to fight the next of their `multiple simultaneous large-scale wars` which they have proposed on their website. (I hope you`ve checked it out, Mr. Blair. If you still haven`t it`s: newamericancentury.org)

It must be encouraging too for Mr. Blair to contemplate how successful he has been in helping Rumsfeld & Co. dismantle the United Nations. Now, at last, there is no longer any international forum for disputes and the United States of America can do whatever it wants to 13 year-old children in GuantÀnamo Bay.

In fact, come to think of it, now the United States of America can do whatever Mr. Rumsfeld and his chums want...and that involves bombing a whole lot more countries...creating permanent tension and war right around the globe...

I have to confess, all that time, during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, when Tony was walking around looking so ill and worried, I foolishly imagined it was because he was wrestling with his conscience. I know it`s laughable to think of it now, but I actually thought Mr. Blair was worrying about the rights and wrongs of killing Iraqi children and women, in order to further American military interests in the Middle East.

You can imagine how relieved I am to discover that nothing of the sort was going through his head. No...our Tony never took his eye off the real issues of the day: the survival of the Labour government and his continued residence in No. 10.

It`s reassuring to know we never need to worry about our Prime Minister placing our country in danger because he wishes to pursue a moral line. His only interests, and those of his government, are manifestly those of the right-wing extremists who now inhabit the White House, and that must be good for someone - if only we knew who.

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And here is another fine mess from Army intelligence

Burhan Wazir
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

The first casualty of war is intelligence. Several weeks ago, on my arrival in Kuwait to be `embedded` with the British Army before the start of the conflict, I met Laurel and Hardy, two `Human Intel` officers attached to my unit. The duo oozed coffee breath, viewed their jobs with Chandleresque intrigue and possessed the wary eyes of those whose contacts have, over the years, led them down a hundred blind alleys.
Our initial zone of engagement was benign. I was washing my underwear outside my tent. Laurel said: `I know everything about you, but you know nothing about me. You`re with the press.`

I was wearing a bright yellow badge stamped `Media` that had been issued by the Ministry of Defence in London, so this was hardly a great insight, I thought. I wondered what else he had deduced.

`Back home, you work on Gray`s Inn Road,` said Laurel, beaming with confidence. Wrong. `Fleet Street?` Wrong again. `Canary Wharf?` Wrong once more. `Wapping?` I put him out of his misery by telling him I worked in Farringdon Road.

Laurel had been right about one thing, though. I didn`t know anything about him, although it was beginning to dawn on me that for an intelligence officer, he appeared a little dim.

Hardy wasn`t the brightest bulb in the building, either. A few days later, as our unit approached Basra, he nudged my elbow. `Got something for you,` he said. `Don`t print this - it`s third hand - but they are going to take Saddam`s palace.`

Someone told him that the British television news organisation, ITN, had anchored its show from the palace the previous evening. Hardy looked shocked, but he spoke on in a whisper. `Might have something else for you,` he said. `War graves. Getting close.` He held one finger to his lips. `Shhhh. Don`t print anything.`

As a breaking story, the lead turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Wrong in the sense that southern Iraq is full of war graves...like intelligence officers in a war zone, you can`t move for bumping into them.

In this land of tombs, the graves are as conspicuous as posters of Saddam Hussein, Americans and balding war correspondents who hold up their mobile phones and broadcast the sounds of falling bombs to their foreign-desk administrators back home.

I was starting to see why the words `military` and `intelligence` are not mutually compatible. My last encounter with Laurel and Hardy, a few days ago, was no less farcical. This time, we met in the vestibule of Saddam Hussein`s luxurious palace near the Boulevard of Martyrs in Basra. I told Hardy I was planning to spend two days with the nuclear, biological and chemical unit, the British forces combing southern Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

`Keep your ears open,` he said, before vanishing. Two hours later, as I was making coffee, he reappeared at my side. `Remember what I said about keeping your ears open?` he whispered. `Forget it. It didn`t lead anywhere. Might have something else for you later, though. I`m into something big.`

This proved to be true. Not long after, he fell into a manhole. As I stood sympathising with the men, one of Hardy`s colleagues smiled. `For an intelligence officer,` he said, `that was bloody stupid.`

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Tony Blair`s diplomacy of intolerance
Claims that the outcome in Iraq vindicates the British approach risk further damaging Britain`s position in Europe.

Kirsty Hughes
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

The British government believes that the success, in their view, of the war on Iraq vindicates their approach to Iraq, to transatlantic relations and to Europe. The UK, so the spin doctors say, has majority support in the soon-to-be enlarged EU of 25. It is France they insist who risks isolation post-war unless it changes its ways substantially.

But, in fact, it is Britain that has seen the most damage to its standing and influence in Europe. It is now Britain, not France, which has its work cut out to avoid marginalisation while also denying to the British public that this is the case. As the dust settles from the war, it is becoming clear that the events of the last few months, have substantially undone six years of constructive diplomacy by Tony Blair aimed at establishing the UK as a leading player in Europe, equal to France and Germany. Britain`s post-war approach does not so far seem to be doing much to repair this damage.

Since 1997, many on the continent, have seen Blair as the most pro-European British Prime Minister in decades, and thought there had been a sea change in British attitudes to the EU. That illusion has now been rudely shattered. As one British official close to the European scene puts it: "Britain did what its governments have done since time immemorial: it said `we want to be at the heart of Europe`, and then we find when push comes to shove that we stand for much that is different to a lot of the continental positions, and that we are not prepared to stand with them".

The risk is that BritainÀs post-war position risks simply amplifying the `diplomacy of intolerance`, which has characterised the Blair governmentÀs approach to those in Europe who do not agree with it. This intolerance has also merged into myth-making about events both pre- and post-war.

Blair`s credentials as a multilateralist are now looking very tattered both in the EU and at the UN. And in both organisations, Britain has found itself in a minority and not in the lead. Indeed, in the EU only five out of the current fifteen member states supported the UK over Iraq. And in Brussels, as post-war assessments are made, it is the UK`s commitment to Europe that is now being questioned as a result of the Iraq crisis - much more than any of the other five.

Although two of the other larger member states, Spain and Italy, sided with the US-UK stance, their overall European commitment is not doubted, in the way that Britain`s is. And their profile was much lower - they did not lead the debate at the UN, nor send troops. Moreover, the fact that Aznar and Berlusconi are not as pro-European as their predecessors is simply seen as part of the normal political cycle. These countries are in the euro and committed politically to European integration.

In contrast, Britain`s real political commitment to Europe has always been doubted. Now many think that even Blair, the best hope for years in making Britain more committed to the EU, has failed to shift the UK from its traditional ambivalence.

For the UK repairing relations with France and Germany is vital but difficult. The revival of the Franco-German relationship last autumn took British politicians and officials by surprise. The series of new Franco-German agreements that started in October, first on funding enlargement, and then on the future of Europe convention, from economic policy to justice and home affairs and defence issues, left the UK on the back foot.

This culminated in the joint Franco-German stance on the Iraq crisis from late January this year. In a deliberate attempt to `get back` at the French and Germans, the British and Spanish seriously aggravated European differences, through the infamous letter from eight European leaders to the Wall Street Journal .

Blair`s intolerance of countries holding different views to his sank to new depths after the failure to get a second UN resolution. He and Jack Straw, led extraordinary insults and attacks on France to try to cover up this failure, ignoring the fact that they had no majority at the UN Security Council, and France was in line with international political and public opinion. At the same time the new myth was born, which Blair still repeats post-war, that the second resolution was a final ultimatum which could have prevented the war and not about providing a legal basis for it. As one Brussels official puts it with considerable understatement, these insults to France from top British politicians `were not appreciated`. Blair and Straw`s behaviour is not forgotten by many, and not only France, in the EU today. Nor does the imminent enlargement of the EU 25 member states rescue the UK. It is true that eight of the central and East European countries who will join the EU next year signed declarations of support for the US over Iraq, allowing the UK to claim a majority of 14 out of 25 future member states. But many of these countries felt highly pressured into their statements of support, given their twin applications for NATO as well as EU membership.

As David Kral of the Czech thinktank Europeum puts it, in the Czech case, there were considerable differences of view inside the governing coalition and "the country found herself uncomfortably torn between the US and Europe trying to maintain strong transatlantic links but also to build up strong intra-community relations in view of the upcoming EU accession". Once the candidate countries are safely inside both the EU and NATO, their diversity of views, interests and alignments will become apparent. There is no `new Europe` group for the UK to try to lead.

Nor do other areas of European policy offer the UK much comfort. A positive decision on holding a euro referendum is not expected soon. Indeed most of the new member states are likely to join the euro before Britain. Nor will these countries welcome British demands, as a new budget debate gets underway, that they continue to subsidise the British rebate. In another important policy area, the UK (together only with Ireland) remains outside the Schengen border free zone.

Meanwhile, plans for progress on a common European defence policy - pushed forward by France and Britain five years ago - will be taken forward at a mini-summit of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg on 29 April. They will hold the door open to encourage Britain to join them afterwards. But the message is clear - if we Europeans cannot move forward in unanimity on political integration, we will aim to do so in a smaller `coalition of the willing`.

Britain has tried to caricature the French position as anti-American, to cover its own damaging marginalisation, arguing that France will have to shift its position to avoid isolation. Blair has called for a European `reckoning` over transatlantic relations. But officials say that no such reckoning or postmortem is likely. Given the deep ongoing divisions, it is seen as too damaging a process. Nor would many EU countries, in such a reckoning, endorse the various myths that Blair is creating for the UK audience.

Indeed, Blair could take one step to rescue the UK`s position in Europe if he would make it publically clear that US threats to punish France for daring to have a different view were unacceptable. US policy is also likely to focus on attacking French and German leadership in the EU. Blair should not imagine this will help his own European leadership ambitions - he cannot lead in Europe without France and Germany. Some suggest the UK will help France and Germany to repair bridges with the US and so strengthen BritainÀs European position. This is overoptimistic and puts the cart before the horse. First Britain must find ways to demonstrate its renewed political commitment to the EU, and to political relations within the EU, and to show its alliance with the US does not always or mostly come first.

To do this, Blair should drop his anti-American characterisation of France and recognise that Chirac is calling for a common European foreign policy that will express Europe`s interests, not an anti-American foreign policy. This is the task all 15 EU leaders gave to the current future of Europe convention 18 months ago. Indeed a common foreign policy, if it could be achieved, would be expected to look for positive transatlantic relations, but also would have differences of view, both major and minor, from time to time. It is the UK that will have to shift from its unstinting support for the US, if it is to participate in this European foreign policy ambition. It is this necessary shift that Blair wants to conceal from the British public, hence his reluctance to drop his critique of France.

Some observers believe that Britain, in its recent statements on post-war Iraq and the role of the UN and in its caution over comments on Syria, is already quietly trying to make this shift. As one senior Brussels official puts it: "obviously the British would not say they are trying to distinguish themselves from the US. But they are trying to come back to Europe". Some hope that the UK`s failure to act as an effective bridge between Europe and the US, and the dismissive comments of Donald Rumsfeld when he suggested the US could easily go to war without the UK, will lead Britain, on reflection, to make a stronger choice in favour of Europe. Others doubt this, arguing that Britain will continue to remain midway across the Atlantic trying to balance its European and American commitments.

Much will depend on what the US does next. As one British official in Brussels says "if the US invades Iran, Syria or North Korea, then Blair really will have an existential choice to make". For now, Blair is in the uncomfortable position of trying to repair the damage done to the UK`s standing and influence in the EU, without letting on to the British public and media quite how much damage has been done.

· Kirsty Hughes is Associate Fellow, London School of Economics and Senior Fellow, Centre for European Policy Studies Brussels

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Can the Transatlantic rift be healed?
The economic costs of not recreating the western alliance could be enormous - but Europe risks making its case in the wrong way.

William Wallace
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

The conventional wisdom at the end of the Cold War on both sides of the Atlantic was that interdependence had grown so close that Europe and the US had no alternative to partnership. Integration was thought to have taken west European states well past any breakdown in relations among member governments. War in Iraq is testing these assumptions. Britain and France have taken sharply opposing positions within the European Union; competing declarations have lined up other states in one camp or the other. Washington has divided its European allies into supporters and opponents, crudely labelled `old` and `new` Europe. Its conservative think tanks have hailed this `success`, and declared that it is in America`s strategic interest to keep Europe weak and subservient.

It is important to recognise how far the development of an open international economy - the foundation for the astonishing, if uneven, global economic development over the past half-century - has rested on American multilateral leadership, and its partnership with west European states through multilateral institutions.

Australia and Canada were founder members of the post-1945 `west`; Japan from the 1970s became to a limited extent a partner in a broader coalition of industrial democracies, with Korea and Mexico also playing minor roles. It has been the transatlantic relationship, however, which has remained central: through successive trade rounds within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the US and the European Union (EU) have defined the agenda and shaped the outcome; and within the overlapping bodies that manage the global economy, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Group of Seven - now, with Russia, the G8.

The integration of the west European economy into a single market, reinforced by strong economic growth in the 1980s and a stream of direct investment within the US, made this a balanced and unavoidably close relationship. Nevertheless, the surge of technology-led growth in America through the 1990s, while the German economy and its neighbours struggled, has supported a resurgence of triumphalism within the US, a sense that there is less justification for compromising on international economic regulation with `sclerotic` Europe.

The US was always more dominant in maintaining the security of the western world. A network of bilateral security treaties legitimised American dominance in east Asia. In western Europe, however, the underlying reality of American supremacy was moderated through the multilateral framework of NATO - an institutional hypocrisy which all except Gaullist France found useful, through which they could exert a degree of influence on American strategy.

In spite of the rapid expansion of UN membership in the 1960s and 1970s, these western allies retained a substantial degree of influence within this global institution, with three of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, two other west European seats, and Japan or Korea often occupying the Asian seat.

Thrown into question

Now all these institutions have been thrown into question. Many in Washington openly dismiss the entire global structure; right-wing think tanks with close links to the administration have been floating wild plans for an alternative body to the `failed` UN, built around `the three great powers - the US, Britain and Russia`. The future of NATO is yet again in doubt; civilians in the Pentagon have been talking of moving their bases eastward from Germany, to `punish` that ungrateful ally.

The Doha WTO development round is in disarray almost before it has started; transatlantic differences on agricultural trade are among the most difficult issues it has to face. French President Jacques Chirac`s attack on the alleged disloyalty of the candidate states throws doubt on whether ratification of the EU`s eastern enlargement will be completed. In Paris and Brussels, with some support from Berlin, the idea of a `core` Europe, built around Franco-German partnership, reinforced by Belgium and Luxembourg, has again been floated as a bastion against the malign influence of the Anglo-Saxons and the Nordics.

Each side of the Atlantic blames the other for this breakdown in trust and multilateral cooperation. Both deserve to share the blame, though for different reasons. The problem in Washington is that the foreign policy debate has been captured, to a remarkable extent, by ideological conservatives who reject multilateral constraints on American supremacy, see military power as the decisive factor in international politics, and underplay the importance to the US of the network of multilateral rules that underpin the global economy.

The problem in Europe is that no government is thinking about the continent`s contribution to global order, or attempting to define shared European interests in promoting a stronger framework for that order. There is, therefore, no basis for a constructive transatlantic dialogue. Washington policy-makers see no reason to listen, and European governments have nothing to say.

The attacks on the World Trade Center, and the subsequent transformation of the `war` on terrorism into a war on Iraq, have provided the immediate focus for this American rejection of international law and institutions as constraints. But the roots of this rejectionist strain in US foreign policy lie far deeper in American culture, tradition and religion.

In 1919, the Protestant Evangelical Churches of America denounced the League of Nations as `the antichrist`, drawing on the Book of Revelation then in the same way that Christian fundamentalists do today. President Ronald Reagan used puritan imagery when he described America as `the city on the Hill`, in the same way that contemporary conservatives insist that America is `a righteous nation`.

A decade ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that international law could not in any way constrain the domestic laws created under the US constitution. The veterans of the Reagan administration who came back into office with present President George Bush had a well-defined agenda for reasserting America`s moral and military ascendancy, reinforced by the intellectual support of a younger generation of neo-conservatives.

Three longer-term developments have strengthened support for this `Jacksonian` approach within the US. First has been the long rumble of American discontent with corruption and irresponsibility within the UN and UN agencies, from the time when Daniel Moynihan was US Ambassador to the UN thirty years ago. It has been a constant sub-theme of this rising chorus of congressional and administration discontent that the European allies have provided too little support for the reform of international institutions, failing to back Washington`s justified criticisms of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the 1980s; and acquiescing in the election of Libya to the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission last year.

Second has been the failure of America`s European partners to respond to successive calls, from President John Kennedy onwards, for more equitable transatlantic `burden-sharing`, most of all in the provision and projection of military power. West European governments increased this imbalance by taking their full share of the `peace dividend` at the end of the Cold War. They then demonstrated their inability even to manage the conflict in neighbouring Yugoslavia, calling on America to provide the air and land power to contain Serbian expansionism.

NATO`s subsequent Defence Capabilities Initiative has made no impact; and the parallel European Defence Initiative, with `headline goals` for mobile military forces to be achieved this year, is going the same way.

The third justification for American unilateralism has been the sustained growth of the US economy throughout the 1990s, while Europe`s regional growth was held back by German recession and resistance to deregulation in France and Italy.

Few in European governments are ready to admit that their own drift and self-preoccupation have contributed to American disillusion with the multilateral order which their enlightened predecessors built after the Second World War. Most Europeans are instinctively happier with Democratic administrations than Republican; with the America of the east and west coasts than with an administration and Congress dominated by the mountain states and the south.

September 11 2001 silenced the internationalist wing of the Democrats; they have not yet recovered their voice, nor found a credible candidate to recapture the White House next year. And for all its friendlier rhetoric, President Bill Clinton`s administration was not able to deliver new American commitments to global cooperation on - for example - combating climate change, or the International Criminal Court. Without strong incentives, and active persuasion from European allies, a future Democratic administration might again find itself blocked by Senate scepticism.

How not to make Europe`s case

Viewed from Washington, most European states justifiably look self-absorbed and sclerotic, while the idea of a coherent European approach to foreign policy beyond the EU`s immediate borders seems a mirage. The British are exempted from general condemnation, thanks to Prime Minister Tony Blair`s public support for the US since September 11 and the commitment of British forces to Iraq; but it is doubtful whether the limited influence over US foreign policy this has gained will be sustainable through the crisis and its aftermath.

French and German political leaders are seen as having played, very successfully, to their domestic audiences, without seriously engaging the broader issues. Italian foreign policy matters little to Washington; Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has offered Washington symbolic support, but the Italians have nothing more to contribute.

International institutions matter enormously to European governments; so, their leaders wish to argue, should they matter to intelligent policy-makers in the US. But the case can only be sustained against a sceptical elite in Washington if Europe can agree on the institutions it wants, and on how to reform and strengthen them.

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin`s Alastair Buchan lecture in March was a classic example of how not to make the case: full of exhortation to return to the institutions of global order, looking towards Europe playing a larger role among `a number of regional poles, structured to face current threats,` which should `not compete against each other, but complete each other,` but without any detail on how Europe might move from here to there.

Forge a coherent message

It should now be clear to British, French and German leaders that European influence in Washington can only be sustained through close cooperation, and through having a coherent message to deliver. That first requires a stronger EU - which alone can recapture American attention and respect - with real foreign policy capabilities and the projection of military power.

There`s little evidence yet that any EU government is seriously committed to the compromises and commitments this will require; the EU Convention is discussing stronger institutions, but without the resources or the coordination of national policies to make them work. Behind the personal disdain that Chirac has for Blair, and the fascination with `special` relations with Washington that has gripped the British prime minister, an understanding between France and Britain has to form the core of European integration in this field.

Britain and France, so far alone among European states, are prepared to commit troops to state reconstruction and nation building in Africa. Dutch-German deployments to Afghanistan, and Danish special forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere, indicate that others are moving, and that a basis for a more common approach to order and institutions outside the European region may slowly be emerging. It will not succeed, however, without political investment by the leaders of the major states, as well as those within the Brussels institutions, in redefining the agenda of European foreign policy. So far no politician in Paris, London, Berlin or Brussels has been willing to make this.

Rescue NATO

Next, European governments must redefine the purpose of NATO - unless they are content for it to wither, as American demands sink into scepticism in the face of Europe`s passive response. NATO will collapse unless the European allies can integrate their limited resources into a more capable combined force, and agree on the rules of engagement under which this may be deployed beyond Europe. The imbalance within NATO between a dominant US and its querulous but impotent partners is not sustainable. That, of course, will only be possible on the basis of a more integrated common foreign policy, with a more constructive European approach to world order and global institutions.

Then European governments must combine their weight in global institutions and grapple with the agenda of UN reform - overcoming Franco-British rivalry on the Security Council, and the self-seeking compromises that other member states often strike.

EU states collectively underperform in global institutions. Yet they provide forty percent of the UN`s regular budget and fifty percent of its peacekeeping budget; with twenty five members they will also form a substantial voting bloc. If Chirac would at last overcome his visceral defence of the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU could take the lead in pushing the Doha round forward, carrying a divided US administration with it.

American unilateralism rests both on domestically driven foundations and on the disillusioned perception of many in Washington that there are no others prepared to share the burden of global order. Since the end of the Cold War, and the end of the Japanese economic miracle, European states collectively are the only available balancer to American global domination: the only potential concentration of economic, political and military power that Washington realists might treat with respect. So far, most European leaders have preferred to criticise American leadership or bandwagon on American power; it remains to be seen if they are capable of providing a reasoned alternative vision of world order, backed by collective diplomacy and shared resources.

Lord Wallace is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a member of the Chatham House Council.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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April 27, 2003
He`s Out With the In Crowd
By MAUREEN DOWD


ASHINGTON

The swank cocktail party celebrating the fall of Baghdad was the hot ticket on Embassy Row.

The host was the Bush administration`s vicar of foreign policy. The guests on Saturday, April 12, included Tony Brenton, acting head of the British Embassy, and dozens of ambassadors from the smaller countries that fashioned the fig leaf known as the coalition of the willing.

The ambassador of Eritrea was welcomed to the house on Kalorama Road, even as the French ambassador, who lives directly across the street in a grand chateau, was snubbed. The German ambassador is kaput, but the ambassador of the Netherlands mingled with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Gen. Richard Myers and Gen. Peter Pace of the Joint Chiefs. The winners were gaily lording it over the losers, sneering at the French.

Conspicuously absent was the nation`s top diplomat. Asked if Colin Powell was invited, a State Department official replied, "No. People here didn`t know about the party."

The host was Rummy, top gun of a muscle-bound foreign policy summed up by the comic Jon Stewart as, "You want a piece of this?"

Washington has a history of nasty rivalries, with competing camps. There were Aaron Burr people and Alexander Hamilton people; Lincoln people and McClellan people; Bobby people and Lyndon people.

Now, since Newt Gingrich aimed the MOAB of screeds at an already circumscribed Mr. Powell, the capital has been convulsed by the face-off between Defense and State.

There are Rummy people: Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Ariel Sharon, Fox News, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board — Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman — and the fifth column at State, John Bolton and Liz Cheney.

And there are Powell people: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bush 41, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, Richard Haass, the Foreign Service, Joe Biden, Bob Woodward, the wet media elite, the planet.

The dueling secretaries made a show of having lunch Wednesday at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, Mr. Armitage said Newt was "off his meds and out of therapy"; Mr. Baker called Mr. Gingrich "someone with no foreign policy or national security experience . . . who was in effect forced to resign" as House speaker; a Powell aide said it was "inconceivable that Newt could have made this extraordinary attack on his own" without running it past Rummy; and a Powell friend said the hard-liners had tormented the frustrated diplomat and made his life "hellish."

Newt, amateur historian, is part of Rummy`s brain trust. The defense chief regularly forwards blathering Gingrich e-mail about military strategy to irritated Pentagon officials.

This clash is epochal because it`s beyond ego. It`s about whether America will lead by fear, aggression and force of arms or by diplomacy, moderation and example.

Rummy may merely be a front man for Dick Cheney, who tangled with Mr. Powell for being too cautious in the first Persian Gulf war, and scorned Mr. Powell`s strategy of going to the U.N. before the second.

Karl Rove scolded Mr. Gingrich for overreaching; W. still dislikes Newt for leading the revolt against Poppy for breaking his tax pledge.

But the president has not spoken up for Mr. Powell, allowing his credibility to be undermined as he heads off to the Middle East to build the peace. And Mr. Bush has never reined in Rummy`s rabid fedayeen.

W.`s gut leans toward the macho Cheney-Rummy idea that America is not bound by history, that the U.S. can help Israel and reshape the Arab world and the rest of the world and not care who is run over, or worry about what will happen if we don`t get cooperation on terrorism, proliferation, AIDS, trading, or if people everywhere get up in the morning thinking about how to get back at us.

Nerviness, absolutism and smiting enemies are seductive. Nuance and ambivalence aren`t.

The day before Rummy`s party, senators were shown an organizational chart for remaking Iraq. Just below Jay Garner, who reports to Tommy Franks, was a line to Larry DiRita, who is a special assistant to the defense chief. Even the time on the chart was "1700," for 5 p.m.

Diplomacy in Washington now runs on military time.

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Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Rückzugsgefechte der Hardliner

April 27, 2003
The Meaning of a Skull
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


riday`s Times carried a front-page picture of a skull, with a group of Iraqis gathered around it. The skull was of a political prisoner from Saddam Hussein`s regime, and the grieving Iraqis were relatives who had exhumed it from a graveyard filled with other victims of Saddam`s torture. Just under the picture was an article about President Bush vowing that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, as he promised.

As far as I`m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn`t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam`s tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken. The thing about Saddam`s reign is that when you look at that skull, you don`t even know what period it came from — his suppression of the Kurds or the Shiites, his insane wars with Iran and Kuwait, or just his daily brutality.

Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.`s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don`t think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way.

So why isn`t everyone celebrating this triumph? Why is there still an undertow out there, a holding back of jubilation? There are several explanations. For me, it has to do with the nature of Iraq and the Middle East. You always have this worry that in the Middle East, fighting evil is like holding back the desert. The minute you fight off one evil, three others blow in to take its place.

You always worry that maybe these countries are not real states, but are simply collections of tribes that can be controlled only with a fist, and the only options are an evil iron fist or a softer, more benign one. No sooner is Saddam gone than up pops a group of Shiite clerics demanding that Iraq be turned into another Iran. So as much as I believe we did good and right in toppling Saddam, I will whoop it up only when the Iraqi people are really free — not free just to loot or to protest against us, but free to praise us out loud, free to speak their minds in any direction, because they have built a government and rule of law that can accommodate pluralism and stand in the way of evil returning.

I also think many Democrats are reluctant to celebrate because they fear — with good reason — that President Bush will be empowered by this war victory, that he and Karl Rove will use that power to drive through a radical conservative agenda that Democrats fear is erasing separations between church and state, depriving government of the tax funds it needs to maintain decent social and educational programs, and despoiling the environment. Sure, Democrats argue, we did right in Iraq, but if it will only lead to more wrong at home, how good can you feel?

And when you look at the way war critics — from the Dixie Chicks to Tom Daschle — have been savaged by conservatives, it feels as if some people want to use this war to create a multiparty democracy in Iraq and a one-party state in America.

France and Russia refuse to acknowledge that any good was done in Iraq because if America`s war ends justify its unilateral means, their power will be further diminished.

The Arab world refuses to acknowledge any good from this war, because many Arab regimes have features in common with Saddam`s, and if getting rid of him was good, so would be getting rid of them. And Arab intellectuals and the Arab League won`t acknowledge any good having been done in Iraq by America, because it only reminds them that they should have taken care of this problem themselves — and didn`t.

Bottom line: We can get rid of the sculptures of Saddam with one tug, but our job is to build a regime in Iraq that won`t produce any more battered human skulls. That will be a huge task, which will need many helpers. The challenge for the Arabs, France and Russia is to get over the fact that Mr. Bush did something good, and roll up their sleeves to help make it last. And the challenge for Mr. Bush is to not take the good thing he has done and cast it in an ideological framework that will make people resent it — at home and abroad.



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April 27, 2003
Fuzzy Math on Iraq

here has been a lot of talk in Washington about refashioning Iraq into a prosperous, tolerant democracy that can serve as a model for the Middle East. Unfortunately, there hasn`t been much plain speaking about how much that is going to cost. That`s because the honest answer isn`t something American taxpayers want to hear. The hard numbers just don`t support the White House`s rosy claim that once this year`s American aid package of $2.5 billion is paid out, Iraq`s oil sales will pay all the bills.

Oil will certainly be part of the equation. So should debt relief and aid from other countries, if Washington ever acknowledges that remaking Iraq has to be an international project with full United Nations involvement. But even with this help, a substantial share of the rebuilding costs, at least over the next two to three years, will have to come from the United States Treasury.

Making a liberated Iraq an example for the region requires making its economy whole again. Independent analysts say it could cost up to $10 billion a year for the next three years to restore Iraq`s public services, agriculture, infrastructure and living standards to the levels of the late 1980`s. That was before Saddam Hussein`s invasion of Kuwait and the resulting sanctions reduced one of the Arab world`s most developed economies to its present, hardscrabble state.

The latest war disrupted food, water and electricity supplies and damaged roads, airfields and communications networks. But it does not seem to have inflicted much long-term physical damage. The $2.5 billion Washington has budgeted this year for relief and reconstruction should be able to restore conditions in Iraq to the level of late last year. That immediate prewar level, however, was appalling. In the late 1980`s, per capita income in Iraq was around $3,000. Last year it was $700 or less. Over the same period, infant mortality soared and education levels plummeted. Unemployment became the norm, with most Iraqis surviving on rationed food.

For the past few years, Iraq has been allowed to export as much oil as it could produce, with most of the revenue going to buy the food rations, medicines and consumer goods that Iraqis live on day to day. Not much is left for rebuilding Iraq`s degraded economy, infrastructure and social services. Over time, Iraq may be able to increase its oil production significantly. But this will take at least several years and billions of dollars in new oil field investments — and higher output may well translate into lower prices per barrel. Instead of supporting other sectors of the economy, oil may well compete with them for outside credit and investment.

It may be possible to reduce the share of oil revenue going to pay victims of Saddam Hussein`s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the issue of Iraq`s inherited obligations isn`t likely to be resolved quickly or painlessly. Valid claims still owed to victims of that war are likely to total more than $80 billion.

Iraq also owes some $60 billion to $100 billion in accumulated debt to foreign companies and governments, on which it has made no significant payments for years. Some write-down of these obligations seems inevitable. But with much of the money owed to private corporations and individuals, no quick or easy solution is likely. Even if payments are stretched out, they will consume a substantial chunk of Iraq`s oil income for years.

Iraq is fortunate to sit atop the world`s second-largest oil reserves. Without Saddam Hussein, this bounty should be able to provide its people with the decent life they deserve. Getting there, however, will take a lot more American financial help than the administration has so far acknowledged.



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Close Look at a Focused President
In Reviews, Scholars Cite Bush`s Discipline But Question Policies

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page A04


PRINCETON, N.J., April 26 -- President Bush has not been particularly friendly to historians: He signed an executive order making it easier for officials to classify documents, gave former presidents a veto over the release of their papers, and in most cases allows his staff to give only the most sanitized accounts of life in his White House.

But the 43rd president is providing rich fodder for those historians, offering a colorful and elusive target for a raft of professors trying to explain how a semi-prepared Texan, armed with simple eloquence and prickly certitude, managed to elevate the office but alienate much of the world after the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001.

Hugh Heclo, a public affairs professor at George Mason University, says Bush`s presidency "is already destined for a remarkable place in the history books," not just because of his response to the terrorist attacks, but also because of his early decision to brush aside the conventional advice to proceed cautiously after the election debacle of 2000.

"The only modern president with less of a mandate was Gerald Ford in 1974, who received zero popular votes," Heclo said. But he added that in contrast to Bush`s image as a slacker, "focus, self-control and unblinking perseverance prepared Bush to be a wartime president before he, or America, knew it was at war."

Bush has 43 percent of his term left -- 828 days down, 634 to go. Two-thirds of his "axis of evil" remains. Osama bin Laden as well as Saddam Hussein and Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction are unaccounted for. The economy dithers. His reelection race is still in previews.

But in the era of the 24-hour news cycle, history can`t wait. Fifteen well-known presidential scholars packed a lecture hall at Princeton University on Friday and today for "The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment."

Liberals and other Bush skeptics were well-represented, and one presenter joked privately that the subtext of the sessions was: "This guy`s crazy. Why is he so successful?"

Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University, an authority on presidential leadership styles who organized the conference, said the consensus was that Bush has mastered the art of doing a few things well: He is very much in charge, sets a few priorities and sticks to them, and surrounds himself with very experienced people but is not intimidated by them.

"That might not keep him from driving the country off the cliff," Greenstein said. "But he would be a very good race-car driver."

Karen M. Hult, a political scientist at Virginia Tech, drew flow charts of the West Wing and found a White House "permeated with concerns about public relations" that drive policy deliberation and initiatives. She said Bush`s aides accelerated the trend, building since President Richard M. Nixon, of using the presidency to serve "the permanent campaign."

A criticism from several seminars was that Bush, 56, has favored short-term victories and may leave messes behind. Allen Schick, a specialist in public finance at the University of Maryland, said the White House has mounted a misleading "no-fault defense" for rising deficits by blaming the terrorist attacks and a fragile economy rather than the $1.3 trillion tax cut that was the signature victory of Bush`s first months in office.

"The Bush White House is not clueless on the fiscal course the president has charted," Schick said. Instead, he sees Bush as embarked on a strategy of depriving government of revenue so that Congress will be forced to restrain spending and unable to rescue Social Security and Medicare.

"Just as Reagan was succeeded by presidents who boosted taxes, so too will George W. Bush," Schick said. "It does not even matter whether his successor is a Republican or a Democrat."

While Schick alleged intended consequences, two former members of President Bill Clinton`s National Security Council staff warned of unintended consequences from Bush`s policy of preempting attacks by crushing states that harbor terrorists. Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, argued that administration arrogance has bred mistrust and resentment abroad, and could turn the United States into "a powerful pariah state that, in many instances, will prove unable to achieve its most important goals."

The Brookings scholars sought to debunk the notion that the terrorist attacks had changed Bush`s worldview. They said today`s foreign policy, which Daalder described as "killing people before they kill you," is a logical outcome of Bush`s choice of "intelligent hardliners" rather than moderate Republicans as his campaign advisers. The scholars wrote that the al Qaeda hijackings affirmed Bush`s conviction "that this dangerous world could be made secure only by the confident application of American power, especially its military power."

"George Bush is an agent of his own making," Daalder said. "This is a man who is in control. This is not a revolution of an administration. It is a revolution of one man."

Daalder contended Bush had sacrificed vital international cooperation by failing "to convince the rest of the world of the justice and logic of the Bush revolution."

Similarly, George Mason`s Heclo asserted that Bush`s "decisiveness and essentialism" have made him a skillful politician but have caused him to "lead without teaching."

Panelists marveled repeatedly at that decisiveness. Greenstein, pointing to Bush`s determination to "campaign and govern on the basis of explicit objectives," noted a potential irony.

"Bush 41 may have failed to win reelection in 1998 because he lacked vision," Greenstein said. "If the aftermath of war in Iraq or Bush`s quest for a supply-side remedy for a halting economy go wrong, Bush 43 may be undone because of his policy vision."



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The Postwar Dilemma




Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page B06


TWO CONTRADICTORY lessons are emerging from the initial experiences of American forces in postwar Iraq. Officials concerned with restoring Iraqi infrastructure, services and government have quickly realized that they face humbling challenges, and that reaching the goal of a stable Iraq under a democratic regime may take a few years to accomplish. In the cities, meanwhile, U.S. commanders and troops are learning that Iraqi patience for a U.S. presence may quickly be exhausted, meaning that a longer occupation will risk mounting resistance. So far the Bush administration has reacted to this conundrum by accelerating work on a political transition to a frantic pace: The occupation chief, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, now plans to establish a temporary administration by the end of this week, and White House officials aim to create a more formal Iraqi Interim Authority in a month. Yet it`s telling that the haste has been welcomed by the pro-Iranian clerics and neighboring Arab dictators who most oppose secular democracy in Iraq. Like the reconstruction experts, they know that a half-baked transition will minimize the chances for any liberal government to take hold.

There`s no easy way to sustain the postwar operation long enough to make a representative government more likely, but the most proven approach is to make Iraqi reconstruction a multilateral project, backed by the United Nations. European and Arab governments are ready to supply funds, peacekeeping troops or police to such an operation, thereby easing the burden on the United States. Even more important, a multinational operation will diminish widespread Iraqi and Arab fears that the United States intends to make Iraq the equivalent of a colony. In Afghanistan the United States managed to exert decisive influence even while recruiting troops from many nations and allowing the United Nations to help form a government; it could do the same in Iraq. Moreover, President Bush publicly promised his closest war ally, Britain`s Tony Blair, that he would seek a "partnership" or "vital role" for the United Nations.

So why the rush to carry out a transition that excludes the rest of the world? No coherent explanation has come from the administration -- in part because senior policymakers once again are quarreling among themselves. Some contend that that the quick march to Iraqi self-government will work fine, that all the United Nations need do is lift sanctions and get out of the way. Others say they envision a more substantial U.N. role -- but only if prewar adversaries France and Russia stop their anti-American maneuvering and agree to support the political process already underway. France`s announcement last week that it would favor the suspension but not ending of U.N. sanctions, officials point out, was not very helpful: The French, like the Russians, still are trying to perpetuate U.N. control over Iraqi oil sales and insisting that a full lifting of sanctions be linked to certification by U.N. inspectors that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction -- which could take many months.

Weeks of thorny negotiations are now likely at the Security Council. It may be that France and Russia will choose obstructionism, leaving the United States no choice but to proceed on its own. But that outcome would be less likely if the Bush administration dropped its shortsighted plan to take punitive steps against France and agreed to modest cooperative measures that are clearly in the American interest. U.N. technical assistance could help any Iraqi transitional administration; the full participation of a designated U.N. representative in the selection of that government would improve its chances of gaining legitimacy and recruiting foreign aid and peacekeepers. Though there shouldn`t be a link to sanctions, U.S. findings about weapons of mass destruction would have more credibility if confirmed by U.N. inspectors; for the same reason, there should be some international monitoring of how Iraq`s oil earnings are used. Agreeing to such things wouldn`t require the Bush administration to surrender much authority in postwar Iraq; the question is whether it will show any flexibility at all.




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Bush`s Leadership Pinnacle


By David S. Broder

Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page B07


At a midweek news briefing, Sen. Ted Kennedy was doing what he does so well -- laying out the Democratic case on domestic policy, preparing the ground for the debates that will resume now that Congress is back from its Easter recess.

His staff had positioned a chart highlighting the economic problems that Kennedy says have piled up during President Bush`s tenure: "2.5 million fewer private-sector jobs; long-term unemployment up by 184 percent; over 2 million more Americans without health insurance . . . retirement savings eroded . . . consumer confidence down . . . a projected $5.6 trillion federal surplus turned into a $4 trillion deficit."

It looked like a script for a TV ad in the 2004 campaign -- good, red-meat stuff, hitting Bush on the economy -- the same kind of attack that sank the president`s father in 1992.

In the subsequent question-and-answer session, Kennedy -- who strenuously opposed the United States` taking military action against Iraq -- was asked what he thought now that Saddam Hussein`s regime had been routed. "I commend the president on his leadership," he said, "and the men and women of the armed forces."

In that moment, I thought I saw the problem the Democrats face in trying to defeat this President Bush. No one, not even the most partisan of politicians, thinks it prudent to challenge Bush on his strong suit -- leadership.

The reason is obvious. A mid-April poll by Public Opinion Strategies, a respected Republican firm, gave Bush a 68 percent approval score -- 9 points higher than he enjoyed last October, on the eve of the Republicans` midterm election victory. Particularly notable, pollster Bill McInturff told me, were the reasons people gave for their support.

Only 4 percent of those approving said it was because of Bush`s economic policies. Only 13 percent said it was because he had prevented additional attacks. Even though the poll was taken days after the fall of Baghdad, only 23 percent said it was because of his direction of the war. Fully 52 percent said they approved because of "his general personal strength and sense of leadership."

McInturff told me that he was not surprised. For 18 months, "when you ask people why they support him, they go right past specific policies and focus on those leadership qualities."

It is not just partisan Republicans who make this point. In an early April Gallup-CNN-USA Today poll, 80 percent of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement that Bush "is a strong and decisive leader" -- an all-time high in that survey`s measure of this trait.

It is evident that the event that defined Bush as a strong and decisive leader was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A month earlier, only 55 percent of Gallup respondents attributed those traits to him. A month after the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it had jumped to 75 percent -- and it has basically stayed at that stratospheric level.

It appears that 9/11 did for Bush what the assassination attempt that Ronald Reagan survived and almost laughed off did for his reputation, barely two months into his presidency in 1981. That event formed an indelible impression of Reagan in the minds of millions of voters and gave him an almost mythic dimension that withstood recession, scandal and controversy.

Almost everything Bush has done since becoming president has been designed to create a similar sense of steadfastness. His pursuit of adversaries in Afghanistan and Iraq is of a piece with his persistence in pressing for passage of big tax cuts and confirmation of conservative judges here at home.

Implicitly, he also seems to be saying he is a different breed of cat than his father, who had to fight "the wimp factor" as a candidate in 1988 and was savaged by many in his own party in 1992 for allegedly caving in to the Democrats on taxes.

Today`s Democrats are pounding on the second George Bush, as befits an opposition party. His economic policies provide plenty of ammunition for the assault Kennedy outlined on his chart.

But there is little the Democrats can do to shatter the reputation for strong leadership Bush has built, and not much their presidential candidates can do to win equal reputations for themselves. McInturff is probably right that the winner of the Democratic contest will -- simply by virtue of winning -- gain stature. But it seems to me unlikely that anyone in the field will close the leadership gap simply by gaining more votes than others in New Hampshire or South Carolina or Arizona.

Democrats may challenge Bush on the issues, but it will be tough to topple him from his leadership pinnacle.



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"Redefining war on our terms"

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Wars Tailor Made


By Jim Hoagland

Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page B07


President Bush resembles both the Little Red Hen and Aladdin as the war in Iraq subsides. He has baked a loaf of liberation and hope for that broken Arab country -- with precious little help from presumed friends. To accomplish that, he rubbed the magic lamp of U.S. military technology and summoned a genie with powers to remake the world.

Fairy tales persist because they capture essential truths about the human condition. So it is with the Little Red Hen, who pleads in vain with the other animals for help in preparing and baking a loaf of bread. They disparage her efforts but are ready to devour her accomplishment when it comes out of the oven.

That tale anticipates the current stance of France, Russia and other naysayers who fought Bush`s liberation efforts and now gather at the U.N. table to perpetuate a corrupt hold on Iraqi oil contracts and sales. Bush cannot allow that greed to stand.

He has made the moral dimension of the war in Iraq a dominant theme in his explanations of its causes and conduct. The brilliance of the campaign -- its lightning speed, relatively low number of casualties, and avoidance of huge refugee flows and widespread material destruction -- reinforce an emerging Bush doctrine that would harness America`s vast and precise military power to moral purpose in world affairs.

Bush enunciated the core of that vision in St. Louis on April 16: "By a combination of creative strategies and advanced technology, we are redefining war on our terms. . . . In this new era of warfare, we can target a regime, not a nation. Our aim is to track and strike the guilty. Terrorists and tyrants have now been put on notice, they can no longer feel safe hiding behind innocent lives."

"Redefining war on our terms" is a huge ambition that Bush feels is now within his grasp. As a presidential candidate, he promised a transformation of the "overextended" U.S. military in broad, functional terms that seemed like so much rhetoric. It was not until 9/11 that he and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were abruptly presented with a history-changing mission for U.S. power.

The St. Louis speech and the warnings that followed to Syria and Iran underscored the varying ways in which Bush will now use that power. The president was explicit: Syria was given a chance to change its behavior to avoid the risk of regime change. It seems to have begun to do so. Iran now has the same chance, and the same risk to ponder.

That is not recklessly drawing up a hit list or doing Israel`s bidding. The Syrians were tempted to shelter Faruq Hijazi, a key Iraqi intelligence contact for al Qaeda. But they instead facilitated his capture on Thursday after being warned by Washington of the risk that sheltering him would bring.

Many critics portray Bush`s motives in Iraq as vile. He is grabbing oil fields. Or they stigmatize him for allegedly being in the grip of hidden Israeli agents in the administration they label as "neocons." Such critics are stuck in self-defeating time and perception warps. This labeling grossly distorts and delays a much-needed serious debate about the uses of U.S. "creative strategies and advanced technology" in the Middle East and the world at large.

The 9/11 horrors brought home to the Bush team the dangers of continuing to count on crisis management (aka "the peace process") to stave off as long as possible the next Arab-Israeli war or another terror assault on Americans. Waiting is no longer an acceptable policy in the Middle East. Israelis and Arabs are likely to be surprised and then distressed at how strongly the protection of U.S. interests will figure in the administration`s approach to the peacemaking to come.

France, Russia and others react in horror not simply to losing oil contracts in Iraq but also to the vision of the surgical-therefore-moral American genie of power that Bush conjured up in his St. Louis speech. The Europeans don`t fear that it won`t work nearly as much as they fear that it will.

Was the Clinton administration`s approach of preventive diplomacy punctuated by low-risk (to Americans) airstrikes on the infrastructure of offending nations really more moral than a strategy of preventive wars tailored to destroying regimes, not countries?

The answer is not as simple as those who claim that a Zionist "neocon" clique has seized power in Washington pretend. They obscure the important new debates -- on morality and power, and most of all on the still unproven feasibility of tailored warfare -- that Bush`s words should summon.



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Time for Arabs to Take The Lead on Freedom


By Jamil Khoury

Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page B07



For some, perhaps -- including many Arab Americans -- the rightness or wrongness of the war in Iraq is a simple question. For me it has not been. Rather, it has created within me a painful conflict of conscience.

I`ve found myself torn between my strong antiwar impulses and a keen awareness of the horrendous suffering inflicted by the regime of Saddam Hussein. This inner conflict has put me at odds with many people I know, both on the American left and among Arab Americans. At the same time, it has raised my hopes for a new frontier in Middle East activism.

Although Hussein`s crimes are well documented, including the destruction of more than 4,000 Kurdish villages, the near eradication of the ancient civilization of the Marsh Arabs and the gassing of civilians, what exemplified for me the full horrors of the regime were the personal narratives. Since the mid-1980s I have been speaking to Iraqis, both in the Middle East and in the United States, who have shared graphic and heart-wrenching stories of torture, disappeared loved ones and murdered family members. These stories were often too painful to bear, let alone ignore, and it became clear to me that justice in Iraq could not be achieved through appeasing or containing a criminal dictatorship, but only through ensuring its demise.

Unable to trivialize or deny the courageous voices of Hussein`s victims, or to be unmoved by the nearly universal support for war among organized Iraqi exiles, I landed in the precarious position of supporting military action to topple Hussein`s regime while remaining highly skeptical of this war`s architects and their geopolitical objectives. I adopted a lesser-of-two-evils equation, in which the nightmare of war paled beside the nightmare of the Iraqi status quo.

This has been most trying for me on the home front -- "home" being at least in part the American left and the Arab American community, both nearly unanimous in their opposition to the war. Early on, I attended antiwar rallies and marches and found myself feeling alienated. I was dismayed by the failure of rally organizers to articulate an alternative (and realistic) vision for ending Hussein`s dictatorship and promoting freedom for Iraqis. I was also struck by the noticeable absence of Iraqis and Iraqi Americans at such rallies and was greatly affected when local Iraqis expressed hurt and dismay about the protests.

An argument can be made that as American citizens our role is to try to influence the actions of our government, not involve ourselves in the "domestic" affairs of another country. It is an argument that offers little hope to Iraqis and falls on its face when judged against efforts by the American left to advocate freedom in other parts of the world. Much to my dismay, I found many in the antiwar movement to be uninterested in discussing the behavior of the Iraqi regime. Moreover, the fact that many on the left seemed more intent on seeing Bush fail than Hussein fall revealed a skewed sense of priorities.

I am not questioning the sincerity and integrity of those involved, nor do I believe they are naive. It was difficult for me to break ranks with people whose opinions I respect and draw inspiration from. But for me, the prospect of ending Hussein`s regime trumped all else.

While the left fell short of expectations, though, it was Arab American activists from whom I felt most estranged. I was appalled to see high-profile Arab Americans essentially dismissing the pleas of Iraqi exiles, some going so far as to suggest that the exile leadership lacked legitimacy. Instead of deferring to those most affected by the Iraqi regime -- those with family members living in Iraq -- the activists effectively removed Hussein`s horrors from the equation and framed the discussion in terms of the United States vs. the Arab world. Yet the question remained: Who better than Iraqis to differentiate between liberation and foreign aggression and to define the best interests of their homeland?

As an Arab American, I am deeply proud of Arab Americans` accomplishments and our contributions to the rich fabric of American life. Arab American leaders and spokespeople are by and large sophisticated, principled and committed. Yet I am compelled to demand more from them and more from myself. It is high time we began to publicly and aggressively criticize the despotism of Arab regimes. We must demand that our government not only stop supporting those regimes but also adhere to the principles of promoting democracy and human rights. After all, there exist no greater violators of Arab human rights than Arab regimes.

It is time for Arab Americans to place a higher premium on freedom in the Arab world than on romantic notions of Arab nationalism or fidelity to the failed statist ideologies of yesterday. Just as we defend the civil rights of Arab and Muslim Americans, and demand an end to Israel`s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, we must be equally vigilant in demanding freedom for Arabs. To be fair, I don`t know any responsible Arab American who thinks well of the Arab regimes. Yet all too often our criticism is either muted or treated as a distraction from some "larger" issue, when indeed it is the larger issue.

It bothers me that American progressives and Arab Americans woefully cede discussion of democracy in the Arab world to neoconservatives with discernibly dubious motives. Shouldn`t we be the ones taking the lead on these issues? Shouldn`t we be the ones brainstorming ways to support a free Iraq, instead of gloating and peddling worst-case scenarios? This is an exciting and important time for Arabs. Iraq today stands a chance of becoming a model of civil society for the entire region.

The writer is an instructor in Middle East studies at the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies and the artistic director of Silk Road Theatre Project.




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WHITE HOUSE: WE LIED

Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam`s weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.

"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."

Full Storyhttp://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/US/globalshow_03042…

So why didn`t the Bush Regime tell the American people it was overemphasizing the danger from the weapons they claimed represented an imminent threat - in order to gain support for committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths?

Officials now say they may not find hundreds of tons of mustard and nerve agents and maybe not thousands of liters of anthrax and other toxins.

So why didn`t the Bush Regime tell the American people it "might not find" the weapons the regime claim represented the reason for committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths?

Beyond that, the Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.

So why didn`t the Bush Regime tell the American people it would be committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths to "flex US muscle" in the Middle East - and not in response to an imminent threat?

The Bush administration wanted to make a statement about its determination to fight terrorism.

So why didn`t the Bush Regime tell the American people it would be committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths in order to "make a statement" - and not in response to an imminent threat?

And officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target.

So why didn`t the Bush Regime tell the American people it would be committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths to target an individual that made a "perfect" symbol - and not in response to an imminent threat?

One official said that in the end, history and the American people will judge the United States not by whether U.S. officials find canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent.

History will judge the United States, the official said, by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America.

So why didn`t the Bush Regime tell the American people it would be committing mass slaughter in their name and sending their loved ones to their deaths as a gamble - and not in response to an imminent threat?

Could it be that the Bush Retime knew the American people would not allow the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the slaughter of 135 US servicemen, and the destruction of a country in their name - on the basis of a muddled collection of unsupported hunches, gambles, and lies?

Could it be the unelected and illegitimate election thief and his regime hold the American people in contempt, and believe that the people, whose loved ones would be ordered to their deaths, cannot be trusted to award the regime the power and support to which it is entitled? Just as they couldn`t be trusted to have given the regime sufficient votes to which it was entitled?

Could it be that the Bush Regime knew the risk was just too high that the American people would see through even the flimsy justification of rolling the dice blindly and hoping "history shows" a positive outcome at some point - right through to the more obvious motives of profit and political gain?

Flashback: January 2003

MR. FLEISCHER: I think if you take a look at all the public surveys on this issue, there`s a lot of Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein does, indeed, pose a threat. And they believe --

Q They`ll give their brothers, their husbands, their children?

MR. FLEISCHER: -- and they believe that if the President, knowing what he knows, makes the determination that the best way to protect the American people from the risks that we have seen our nation is vulnerable to --

Q So he believes people want to go to war?

MR. FLEISCHER: -- is to disarm Saddam Hussein from having weapons of mass destruction, the President will make a case --

Q We have weapons of mass destruction. Eight other countries have them.

MR. FLEISCHER: And how many resolutions has the United Nations passed urging us to not have the weapons that we have that have successfully kept the peace for 50 years?

Q How many other nations have defied U.N. resolutions and gotten away with it?

MR. FLEISCHER: None like Saddam Hussein on a measure that has been this unequivocal

Transcript

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Eine böse Seite?
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Ein kleiner Beitrag zur großen Weltverschwörung

http://www.atimes.com

Middle East

THE ROVING EYE
The Baghdad deal
By Pepe Escobar

BAGHDAD - Much of the world was surprised. After the spirited resistance in the south of Iraq, how could Baghdad possibly have fallen in only two days?

An Asia Times Online investigation in Baghdad, Tikrit and Najaf has yielded a clear certainty among Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi`ite, as to the answer: The Pentagon and the Ba`ath Party leadership made a safqua ("secret deal" in Arabic) for the (almost) bloodless fall of Baghdad. Crucially, this safqua may have included a package of American green cards for top Republican and Special Republican Guard commanders and their families.

"Shaku maku"? ("What`s new"?). "Makushi"? (No news). In the answer to this popular exchange in Baghdad slang, makushi has been replaced by safqua.

Mohammed al-Douri, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, was the one who pronounced the famous last words "the game is over" - referring to the end of Saddam Hussein`s regime. And a game it might well have been. (Al-Douri, according to al-Jazeera television, has enjoyed safe passage to Syria, and might even end up the UN ambassador of the new Iraqi government).

At the beginning of last week, a congregation of sheiks clad in dazzling black linen robes was camped in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. They were once again seeking an appointment with Mohammed Mohsen al-Zubaidi, the self-anointed governor of Baghdad (now demoted by the Americans).

The sheiks wanted to talk about their main priority: security. They wanted cooperation with the US Marines, but most of all they needed medicine for their hospitals and all the help they could get to "rebuild our country". Sheik Altai was among the participants. An affable and subtle man, he was a political prisoner of Saddam`s regime from 1995 to 2002 in a Baghdad jail. He commands the allegiance of about 70,000 people. And as an important tribal leader, he ultimately ended up being courted by Saddam himself.

From a long conversation with the sheik, observations from a Ba`ath Party official who calls himself Ali and now lives in discreet civilian garb in a nondescript house in the Karada district, former Ba`ath Party officials laying low in Tikrit and top Shi`ite clerics in Najaf, it`s possible to reconstitute how the "fall" of Baghdad was staged.

No one will know what really happened in this war until a number of crucial questions are answered. And Iraqis are not expecting these answers to be spelled out by the Americans.


How did American forces manage to storm into and take over Baghdad with practically no resistance? In Basra, which is much smaller and which was relatively lightly defended, there was no pro-Anglo-American uprising, and the city took three weeks to be subdued.

What happened to the 20,000-strong, well-equipped Special Republican Guards, charged with the defense of Baghdad? Where did they melt away to?

How come there was no coordination between the Ba`ath Party-Republican Guard defense of Baghdad and the jihadis who poured in from Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Egypt to help?

How come the Republican and Special Republican Guards did not destroy a single bridge in Baghdad - an effective tactic to delay the American invasion?

How did the entire Iraqi cabinet manage to escape? This includes Saddam and his sons, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Dr A K Hashimi (Saddam`s personal adviser), the ministers of defense, economy, trade and health and the unforgettable, insult-laden Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf of the information ministry.

Similarly, how did the vast majority of the Ba`ath Party leadership and the Republican Guard evade capture or surrender?

What happened to the infrastructure of the regime - the bulk of the estimated 500,000 elite?

What has happened to Saddam? Is he still in Iraq, in Taramiya, not far from Tikrit, or in Mecca, as per wild speculation in the Arab world?

Why were the oil fields in northern and southern Iraq not set on fire - a tactic already used by Saddam in Kuwait in 1991?

Where are Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction - the official reason for the war?

Iraqi sheiks confirm that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah - who enjoys excellent relations with the Bush family - had been working tirelessly for months for a political solution to the Iraqi crisis. If Saddam is in Mecca, the architect would surely have been Prince Abdullah. His rationale always was to prevent by any means a long, bloody guerrilla war in Iraq which would turn the whole Middle East into a volcano. The Bush administration rationale was to grab a chance to engineer an allegedly quick post-Saddam stabilization process and so create a shortcut to the much-talked-about but yet-unpublicized roadmap supposed to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the beginning of the war, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon briefings highlighted the constant flow of "communications" between the Americans and Republican Guard commanders. But Iraqis are now saying that the most important set of secret channels was between Republican Guard commanders and commanders of the Fedayeen of Saddam. This channel completely bypassed Saddam and his son Qusay - the de facto commander of the defense of Baghdad.

The whole issue was about survival, considering that the regime`s demise, confronted by overwhelming American power, was inevitable. At least two Republican Guard divisions plus the well-trained, well-fed, well-armed Special Republican Guard could have raised hell against the Americans in the defense of Baghdad. The Palestinization of Iraq, coupled with a jihad fought like a guerrilla war, could have lasted months, if not years. So as the Americans approached Baghdad they came up with an offer selected Iraqis could not refuse.

So the story goes that a reward package for the "peaceful" handover of Baghdad was offered to Republican Guard commanders and, later on, the Fedayeen of Saddam. Republican Guard commanders received a lot of cash, a "secure" relocation outside of Iraq, and crucially for those not considered war criminals, the promise of a new job in post-Saddam Iraq. After all, the new American government will need cadres to run the remains of the devastated state apparatus. Top commanders were offered the option of residency in the US, for themselves and their families, and most of all the chance to play a relatively prominent role linked to some factions of the Iraqi opposition - basically the Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by the Pentagon`s pet Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi.

The story also goes that although there were less than 50 human shields in Baghdad when the war started, many had been coming and going since February. The role played by some was not that of a completely innocent bystander: they were Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents. These agents, equipped with sophisticated micro-communication devices, were in fact the only American "human intelligence" on the ground in Baghdad. They worked as a kind of carrier pigeon in meetings with key Republican Guard commanders.

Saddam and his son Qusay seem to have been totally out of this loop. It`s certainly difficult to conceive that Ba`ath Party officials could not or did not do enough to detect the spies among the human shields placed in factories and water and power plants. In most of these installations, there were underground bunkers with a dizzying array of weapons - enough to fuel a guerrilla war for years. It`s an open secret in Baghdad that these weapons were later duly discovered by the Marines as they took control of the capital.

The CIA human shields updated and guided the American forces to the bombing of key regime installations, and to selected places where Saddam and the Ba`ath Party leadership would meet: thus the origin of the information that led to the "decapitation strike" with four 900 kilogram bombs in the Mansur district on April 8, the first night of the war. Saddam survived. But 14 civilians were killed - members of two Christian families, mostly women and children. Asia Times Online has been to the site twice: for Baghdadis, it`s an unofficial shrine to the horrors of this war.

As the Americans bribed the resistance, the order not to resist started streaming from the top commanders down. Republican Guard commanders told the rank-and-file that the resistance would be secret and long-term, according to Saddam and Qusay`s long-elaborated scenario of a guerrilla war. The "fall" of Saddam International Airport was the first part of the deal. Another open secret in Baghdad were the famous tunnels linking the main Republican palace of Saddam to the airport. Republican Guard commanders tipped off the Marines, and the tunnels were immediately seized.

Proof that Saddam and top Ba`ath Party officials were out of the handover loop was the promise by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, in one of his briefings, that the media should expect an "unusual" Iraqi counter-attack to retake the airport. Many thought about chemical and biological warfare, when in fact the plan was to send Special Republican Guards through the tunnels to take the Americans by surprise. The surprise went the other way.

When the American Abrams tanks arrived close to the Palestine Hotel - Baghdad`s international media headquarters - the "game" was practically over. The Republican Guard commanders were about to be airlifted out of Iraq, and their soldiers had orders to demobilize and melt into the civilian population. Independent media had to be intimidated, silenced or corralled - and that`s why the al-Jazeera office and the Abu Dhabi TV office were hit, as well as the Palestine Hotel itself. The deliberate communications and power black out of Baghdad fit into the pattern: the Pentagon and the Republican Guard had to be dancing together in the dark.

The commander of the Fedayeen of Saddam had heard about the American offer to the Republican Guard elite officers. He realized that his own best interests were to get his own piece of the action. He got it. The Fedayeen were instantly beheaded, and were left to roam helplessly around Baghdad and finally dissolve into the civilian population. Game over.

Baghdad now can watch satellite TV in the streets. The communication blackout is slowly being lifted. Away from the American media spin, the same theme is being replayed over and over again in Iraq, from Sunni neo-entrepreneurs to Shi`ite clerics, from last week`s unprecedented street demonstration after jumma (Friday) prayers at the Abu Hanifa mosque to the emotional convulsion of the Shi`ite celebrations in Karbala: the Americans want Iraq`s oil, and the guerrilla war will start sooner or later.

George W Bush solemnly promised that war criminals would be brought to trial in Iraq. There are around 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad. They are all empty. The giant Mukhabarat complex - the secret services` pleasure dome, thoroughly bombed by the Americans - is empty. When one goes to these places, still loaded with shredded, burned or partially readable documents, only reporters are to be found: not a single American forensic specialist. War criminals of lower rank - Saddam`s invisible professional torturers, the so-called "B" list of the Ba`ath Party - are not being pursued. Iraqis openly say that most of these people are now seeking to work for the new occupying power: all smiles in their newfound, nondescript, civilian clothes, they were to be found starting from 9am every day outside the Palestine Hotel, trying to get a job with the Marines` Civil Affairs Unit. In an effort to disclose names and responsibilities in a giant, totalitarian police state, every bit of information is helpful. The Americans are not even trying to make an effort.

So all these unanswered questions keep resurfacing in Baghdad. Like the mysterious "fires" in dozens of ministries, in fact all of them except the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of Interior. The top floor of the Ministry of Information - a mine of information, in fact - was on fire in the middle of last week. Marines on site were patrolling the streets. The Ministry of Education was on fire by the end of last week: Marines in the Palestine Hotel asked this correspondent, "What city is that?"

Few in Baghdad believe these recurrent fires were provoked by the "remnants of Saddam`s regime" - as goes the official Washington line. They don`t know for sure for whom the arsonists are working. But they are asking themselves three questions. Who profits from the destruction of the whole infrastructure of the Iraqi state? Who profits from the destruction of Iraq`s invaluable cultural wealth? And why are Americans soldiers just blank-stared, gum-chewing spectators of all this pyromania?

(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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The Decline and Fall of American Journalism (Part LXV): the Case of Judy Miller
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As a million Shi`ite pilgrims streamed toward Karbala earlier this week, shouting "No to America, no to Saddam, no to tyranny, no to Israel!" (slogans recorded by a reporter for Agence France Presse) can`t you just imagine the plash of complacent `I Told Him So`s` from the lips of George Bush Sr., on the phone to Brent Scowcroft and other members of the old gang like Bush Sr.`s Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who recently took audible pleasure in telling the BBC that "If George Bush [Jr.] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about fifteen minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can`t get away with that sort of thing in this democracy."

Until Judith Miller`s piece showed up on the front page of the New York Times on April 21, I`d thought the distillation of disingenuous US press coverage of the invasion came with the images of Iraqis cheering US troops in the Baghdad square in front of the Palestine Hotel on April 9 as they hauled down Saddam`s statue. I know the world has moved on, and now we`re wondering if Saddam is putting up his Vargas girls with thumbtacks on some motel wall in Minsk, but let`s make record for posterity that the April 9 Baghdad demonstration was a put-up job, a fake from start to finish.

Remember, the photos of the statue going down, the flag on Saddam`s face, the cheering Iraqis, were billed as the images that showed It Was All Worthwhile, up there in the pantheon with Joe Rosenthal`s photograph of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima and the news film of the Berlin wall going down. Obviously, there were plenty of Iraqis in Baghdad delighted at the realization that the Age of Saddam was drawing to a close (though it turns out Baghdad will probably be run by the same cops, the same bureaucrats, the same torturers, all now Ba`ath Party members who taken Saddam`s picture off their office walls and are proclaiming their fealty to the free market). And probably there were some Iraqis prepared to wave at Saddam`s conquerors riding in on their tanks. All the same, the clamorous masses in the square never existed.

I`ve yet to see the full image reproduced in any mainstream US newspaper, but I have seen photographs on the web of the entire square when that statue was being pulled down. In one small portion of the square, itself sealed off by three US tanks, there`s a knot of maybe 150 people. Close-up photographs suggest that the active non-US participants were associates of Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the exile group that rode in on the back of those US tanks, the Iraqi National Congress. (Go to www.counterpunch.org/statue.html and see for yourself.)

So here, concocted by Pentagon or CIA news managers, we had a "virtual" demo in front of the Palestine Hotel, where the international press was housed. The "event" was obviously a huge political plus for the Bush Administration and gave Americans back home the false tidings that their troops were being greeted as liberators. Predictably, the US media were somewhat coy in offering the news, not long thereafter, that US troops had shot at least ten in a crowd in Mosul that shook their fists instead of offering flowers. Promote a lie, and it`s sometimes not long before that lie comes home to roost.

As for the Weapons of Mass Destruction, their non-appearance has become a huge embarrassment for both Bush and Blair. Last Sunday`s British Independent carried the following huge frontpage banner headlines: "SO WHERE ARE THEY, MR BLAIR? NOT ONE ILLEGAL WARHEAD. NOT ONE DRUM OF CHEMICALS. NOT ONE INCRIMINATING DOCUMENT. NOT ONE SHRED OF EVIDENCE THAT IRAQ HAS WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN MORE THAN A MONTH OF WAR AND OCCUPATION."

The days passed, and each excited bellow of discovery of WMD caches on the road north from Kuwait yielded to disappointment. Then came Judith Miller`s story in the New York Times. The smoking gun at last! Not exactly, as we shall see. But first a word about the reporter. If ever someone has an institutional interest in finding WMD in Iraq it`s surely Miller, who down the years has established a corner in creaking Tales of Terrorism, most of them bottle-fed to her by Israeli and US intelligence.

It was Miller who served up Khidir Hamza, the self-proclaimed nuclear bombmaker for Saddam, later exposed as a fraud. It was Miller who last year whipped up an amazing confection in the Times, blind-sourced from top to toe, about a Russian biowar scientist (sounding suspiciously like Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love, and since deceased) ferrying Russian smallpox to Saddam. At least the Times`s headline writer tried to keep things honest this time. "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert."

What did who say and who did the asserting? It turns out that Miller, in bed with the entire 101st Airborne, had been told by "American weapons experts" in a group called MET Alpha that they have been talking to "a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq`s chemical weapons program," that the Iraqis destroyed chemical weapons days before the war and that "Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990`s, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda."

Now isn`t that just what you`d expect him to say? And if you were an Iraqi scientist looking for quick passage out of Iraq to the USA, isn`t that just what you would say, in a series of unverifiable claims all fragrant to American nostrils?

Miller does concede that the MET Alpha group would not tell her who the scientist was, would not allow her to question him (assuming it wasn`t a "her," maybe Lotte Lenya in a later incarnation) or do anything more than look at him from a great distance as he stood next to what was billed to Miller as a dump for "precursors" for chemical weapons. (Come to think about it, it`s probably a recycling facility for used cans of Roundup).

Furthermore, she wasn`t allowed to write about the unnamed Iraqi scientist for three days, and even then US military censors went over her copy line by line. What convenient disclosures this Iraqi allegedly offers, tailor-made to buttress Rumsfeld`s fist-shaking at Syria and Bush and Powell`s claims that Saddam and Osama bin Laden worked hand in glove, a claim that depended originally on an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker last year. At least Goldberg talked to the man claiming Osama/Saddam ties, although he made no effort to check the man`s "evidence," subsequently discredited by less gullible journalists.

With Miller we sink to the level of straight press handout. I guess Miller, who`s apparently writing a sequel to her last book, on bioterror, needs to stay on the good side of MET Alpha. That`s the problem with embedfellows. Just one kiss is all it takes. And talking of embedfellows, I can`t imagine Laura Bush is too happy about Iraq`s national library being torched, even if the prime loss was a bunch of manuscript Korans, and what good Christian would care about them? As the joke went around the Pentagon after Franklin Graham held Good Friday services in the chapel normally used by the DoD`s Muslims, the scratches Graham found in the floor were the Devil`s fingernails.

An Anecdote about Judy Miller in Earlier Days

As a useful introduction to the history of onshore Kuwait, also as a literary curio, readers might hunt up a slim volume called Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf, by Peter Mansfield, ready for publication, just before Saddam`s 1990 invasion, by Hutchinson, a British subsidiary of Random House. Back in July of 1990, Alberto Vitale, head of Random House, went to London to attend a sales conference of the Random Century group, which includes Hutchinson.

Hutchinson had available two books about Iraq and Kuwait. One, Republic of Fear, by an Iraqi pseudonymously known as Samir al-Khalil, pseudonym of Kanan Makiya, and these days an aide to Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who said the noise of bombs falling on Baghdad was music to his ears), did not excite Vitale. His enthusiasm was reserved for Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf, which had--aside from Mansfield`s amiable account of the emirate--the allure of a guaranteed purchase of several thousand copies by the government of Kuwait.

Clapping executives of Random Century on the back and counseling them to aim for more of this type of publishing, Vitale returned to New York. Saddam forthwith launched his invasion, thus annulling the promised bulk purchase of the book, priced at £14.99, which now jammed the warehouse. Belatedly Vitale`s attention shifted to al-Khalil`s Republic of Fear, a savage portrait of Iraq under Saddam. U.S. rights had been bought by University of California Press, which had sold the paperback rights to Pantheon, ironically part of the Random House group, for a tidy sum.

Scanning Republic of Fear, Vitale found it excessively scholarly and lacking the color and punch that a Judith Krantz or Jacqueline Susann might have brought to the theme. He announced to the folks at Random Century that he was summoning to England a fine writer who would work with al-Khalil to produce a version of Republic of Fear more accessible to the common man and woman. Judith Miller, a former New York Times Middle East correspondent and then the deputy editor of the Times media column, duly clambered off the plane at Heathrow, only to be told by al-Khalil that he did not care to partake in this refashioning of his work.

No problem, said Miller; she would stay up all night and by dawn descend with the synopsis of an entirely new work on Iraq on which they could collaborate. She went about her business, but when dawn came al-Khalil examined the fruit of her labors and exclaimed that this was indeed nothing but a remake of Republic of Fear. Exclaiming in her turn that she was not just a rewrite girl, Miller swept off.

On September 7, 1990, the Times carried a media item headlined "Crisis in Iraq Inspires Spate of Books." The story by Roger Cohen underneath this energetic headline-while Miller was still deputy editor of the media page-showed that, as a word meaning something resembling a torrent, "spate" had come down in the world, here connoting just two books. One was Republic of Fear and the other a quickie to be put out by Times Books, an imprint of Random House, by none other than Judith Miller, writing with Laurie Mylroie, a Harvard professor specializing in Middle Eastern studies. In earlier years Mylroie was scarcely the foe of Saddam that she later became.

To his friends al-Khalil/ Makiya confided news of an encounter he later had with Miller, whose demeanor was unfriendly and conversation replete with suggestions that aside from her own influential position at The New York Times she had powerful friends and that al-Khalil`s future literary endeavors would not necessarily flourish this side of the Atlantic. (Miller confirmed she`d discussed a book project in London with al-Khalil. She described him as a "friend" and said she wouldn`t discuss the content of their conversations or where and when she might have met him later, since this could endanger his life. For its part, Hutchinson confirms that prior to the invasion, the emirate put down cash in part payment for the bulk purchase of Kuwait, which one U.S. publishing informant said at the time involved 15,000 books.)

Miller covered the invasion crisis nobly.. On October 1, 1990, for example, the Times published under her byline a most affecting story about Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah`s speech to the U.N. General Assembly the previous Thursday. It was of a tone surely gratifying to the Emir and to his public relations advisers, Hill & Knowlton, who no doubt be billed the offshore government of Kuwait for hundreds of thousands of dollars for due diligence in persuading The New York Times to decorate Miller`s story with such subheads as "Wrapped in Dignity, the Emir Manages to Dazzle."

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Sehr viel patriotisches:
http://www.cafeshops.com/thewhitehouse.5557036

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Erosion of Rights
Freedom denied -- at home
Anis Shivani
Sunday, April 27, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2003%2F04…


Is anyone struck by the anomaly that while literally millions of Americans have come out to protest the war against Iraq, few, if any, marchers have rallied against the destruction of freedoms at home?

Could it be that admitting the extent of the repressive revolution at home would cause the mostly middle-class protesters to change their view of the nature of the American political system? Could this create far greater discomfort than protesting faraway wars that are unstoppable anyway?

Attorney General John Ashcroft`s undermining of constitutional rights far exceeds anything experienced in American history. Consider only these recent events:

-- At the University of Idaho, 120 FBI agents descended in the middle of the night to arrest a Saudi graduate student for alleged visa violations. In the meantime, the rest of the student population was terrorized, and coerced into snitching on others they thought might be suspicious.

-- Judge Michael B. Mukasey of U.S. District Court in Manhattan has been frustrated with the government`s failure to arrange a meeting between Jose Padilla and his lawyers. Padilla is an American citizen suspected of terrorist connections but held indefinitely without charges. The government continues to openly defy the judge`s determination.

-- As citizenship ceases to protect Americans against illegal and indefinite confinement, we ought to keep in mind what happens to these prisoners as a preview of what might happen to any of us should we be targeted by the government.

-- The planned Patriot Act II envisions stripping Americans of their citizenship when it is "inferred" that by supporting terrorist (or is it political?) activities they have given up their citizenship.

-- The Justice Department plans to create an unprecedented national DNA database, including samples from states that collect it not only from people convicted, but even those just arrested.

-- The "imminent threat" from terrorists gives the highway patrols around the country license to stop any vehicles (that`s yours and mine) for random searches.

-- In all but name, a domestic spy agency along the lines of Britain`s MI5 has come into existence. The Terrorist Threat Integration Center merges information from the FBI, CIA and the DHS`s domestic security intelligence unit. Counterterrorism operations are to be moved to a single site in northern Virginia, leading to a super-spy agency separate from the CIA and FBI.

-- Bretton Barber, a high school junior in Dearborn Heights, Mich., was forced to remove an anti-war T-shirt. Such violations of free expression are becoming frequent across the country. There will be fewer and fewer Dixie Chicks and Susan Sarandons.

As even environmental activism begins to fall under the purview of terrorism, domestic political activity will suffer a chilling effect. There is no limit to the extent of searches to which Americans must now submit, by police and military forces. Federal border inspectors will soon start screening all travelers for radiological materials, despite the fact that the pager-sized detectors frequently generate false alarms. Americans are being prepared to expect frequent suicide bombings and loss of mobility.

Even on the superficial level of street protest, the destruction of the Constitution hasn`t registered. The anti-war movement`s larger coalition, Win Without War, disavows civil disobedience. The idea that nonviolent noncooperation by professionals and functionaries charged with administering immoral laws might be a way to resist effectively doesn`t seem to have occurred to the movement.

High school and college students have also gotten into the act, walking out of classes to protest the war. But nary a squeak has been heard from them about the loss of domestic freedoms.

The lack of protest against violations of our fundamental liberties, at least as rigorous as that mounted against the war, points to only one conclusion: Americans have grown comfortable with the slow erosion of our constitutional rights over the past two decades, and by now see nothing much wrong with giving them up entirely. In which case, what have the anti-war protesters been marching to preserve?

Anis Shivani ([e-mail]) is the author of the forthcoming "Fear and Repression in the New Plutocracy" (Common Courage Press) and is a contributor to the online magazine CounterPunch.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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The history that winners write
Propaganda myths follow all wars and some stories are sillier than others. But we seem to have a need to believe and spread them

David Beresford
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

Senator Patrick Moynihan, who died a few weeks ago, told a story about a Nato general, who had spent much of his professional life monitoring the state of the Soviet economy and hence its ability to wage war. Then the Berlin Wall fell and the general was at last able to visit the country he had studied so long. He arrived at an airport in the former Soviet Union and was met by a jeep. He climbed in. The driver started the vehicle and put it into gear, upon which the gear stick came away in his hand. It was the first inkling the general had had of the parlous state of the Soviet economy. The time and money wasted by Nato misapprehensions about the state of the "enemy" hardly bear contemplation.

History, it is said, is written by the winners and there is much to justify that in our lifetimes. Certainly the "bodyguard of lies" which had moulded my perceptions as a schoolboy still marched with me into adulthood. That I realised while sitting, open-mouthed, in front of the TV recently, watching a documentary demolish a World War II myth of submarine warfare which I had never doubted - that German submariners suffered an compulsion to machine-gun helpless passengers thrashing around hopelessly in the sea, after torpoeding their ships. Apparently there had been only one recorded instance of this happening and the German commander involved was subsequently subjected to a court martial back in Germany.

It is the type of propaganda which seems to accompany all war. Some are sillier than others. During the Falklands conflict, for instance, there was the story of the underwater "forest" of skeletons, their feet anchored in blocks of concrete - supposedly all that remained of the "disappeared ones", who had opposed the rule of the Argentinian generals. The "discovery" was said to have beeen made by a nuclear submarine.

It is questionable whether these post-war "truisms" have their origins in some delibate act of misinformation - psy-ops, or "black information" operations. I suspect that, for the most part, they are born of prejudice, misunderstanding and wishful thinking, which accounts for their speed of proliferation and for the weight which tends to be given to them in the popular imagination.

In the 1st Gulf War, for example, the incubator babies story which gained so much currency - that Iraqi soldiers invading Kuwait tossed babies out of their incubators in a local hospital - seems to have originated from the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the UN, who was not likely to have been part of a professional "psy-ops" operation.

In the aftermath of the 2nd Gulf War there is, of course, much in the way of wishful thinking, including the entire justification for the war - grounded in Bush and Blair`s claims that the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Present indications are that the president and prime minister will soon have to indulge in a bit of nifty footwork on the issue, explaining that Saddam and his seemingly never-ending supply of sons and half brothers were simply a thoroughly bad lot who deserved everything they got, whether or not weapons of mass destruction were involved.

At this point of the proceedings such post hoc justification for the war would probably be enough, whereas it is doubtful if they would have been able to start the war on that basis in the first place.

To make up for the absence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons we do have have such as the capture of Abu Abass - the man who led the hijack of the Achille Lara - to show that Bagdhad is one of the world`s capitals of terrorism. Only it seems the man is reformed and nobody wants him.

There is the discovery in Al Zubayr by the Press Association and Sky TV of hundreds of cardboard coffins containing the dusty remains of people who had allegedly been executed by the Iraquis. Bizarrely, logbooks were also found, showing where each one had been shot. Why it was necessary to log executions by the type of wounds, why cardboard coffins were used - as opposed to customarily contemptuous mass graves - and why they had not been buried previously, Sky and the Press Association still need to clarify.

And then, of course, there were the documents showing that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger to fabricate a nuclear bomb, a piece of "intelligence" whose only link with intelligence seems to be that they were the one`s who forged the documents.

Reflecting on our gullibility where political gombeen men such as George W Bush and Tony Blair are concerned there is, I suspect, a longing in this global village of ours to have the opportunity to make decisions based on some form of understanding that the truth as we would be told it is the truth as we would know it.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers

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Zwar nichts Neues, aber eine gute Zusammenfassung.

Die Sieger auf Beweissuche im Morgenland

Florian Rötzer 27.04.2003
Noch fehlt ein wirklicher Beweis zur Kriegslegitimation, die britische und amerikanische Regierungen üben sich schon in der Rhetorik des Verschwindens, aber auch al-Qaida ist stumm geworden

Mit den angeblich im Irak befindlichen Massenvernichtungswaffen, dem offiziellen Kriegsgrund der Alliierten, sieht es noch immer schlecht aus. Obgleich schon bald vier Wochen im Land wurde von Amerikanern oder Briten noch immer nichts gefunden. Vermutlich sollen auch deswegen keine unabhängigen UN-Inspektoren ins Land ( Poker um die Sanktionen). Immerhin versprach der britische Außenminister Jack Straw, dass man keine Funde vortäuschen werde. Aber wer soll das eigentlich noch glauben, hatte doch etwa sein Chef ebenso wie US-Präsident Bush immer von zweifelsfreien Beweisen für das Vorhandensein von Waffen gesprochen. Seltsam ruhig ist es auch um Bin Ladin und al-Qaida geworden.

US-Präsident warb erst am Donnerstag wieder für den militärischen Erfolg im Irak und den "historischen Tag für die Sache der Freiheit". Man habe nicht nur einen grausamen Diktator gestürzt, sondern auch die Welt sicherer gemacht. Hussein habe mit Terroristen kooperiert: "Und das Regime war bewaffnet mit Massenvernichtungswaffen." Die habe das Regime 12 Jahre lang versteckt, weswegen nun Zeit notwendig ist, sie zu finden. Die gab es aber vorher nicht für die UN-Waffeninspektoren, was Bush geflissentlich übergeht.

Besonders effektiv scheint man die Suche allerdings nicht zu betreiben. Von den vorgesehenen 20 "mobile exploitation teams" sind erst zwei im Einsatz. Die bislang befragten Wissenschaftler, die an der irakischen Rüstungsproduktion beteiligt waren, haben sich freiwillig gemeldet und erklärt, der Irak habe keine Massenvernichtungswaffen. Es gab zwar letzte Woche eine Meldung, dass ein Wissenschaftler die US-Experten an ein Versteck geführt haben soll. Überdies habe er gesagt, es seien Massenvernichtungswaffen zerstört worden. Seitdem hat man aber nichts mehr gehört ( Geheime Machenschaften und verdächtige Zeugen).

Die Washington Times berichtet heute zwar, dass man in Naiji in der Nähe von Tikrit 14 Tonnen mit einer Flüssigkeit gefunden habe, die zur Herstellung von chemischen Waffen dienen könnten. Angeblich habe man Sarin- und Senfgas-Elemente in einem Fass entdecken können. Mitteilungen solcher Art, die dann doch nicht den schlagenden Beweis ergaben, gab es allerdings schon öfter.

Nissar Hindawi, der in den 80er Jahren und bis Mitte der 90er Jahre am irakischen Programm für biologische Waffen beteiligt war und vor einiger Zeit vom Hussein-Regime ins Gefängnis gesteckt wurde, soll am Freitag berichtet haben, dass die UN-Inspektoren angelogen worden waren. Zu seiner Zeit habe man große Mengen von Botulinus und von flüssigem Milzbrand hergestellt. Später seien Teile oder alles vernichtet worden. Der Irak habe aber nicht die Möglichkeit gehabt, Milzbrand als Pulver herzustellen. Flüssiges Anthrax aber wird schnell unwirksam. Allerdings scheint Hindawi, der sagt, er sei zur Mitarbeit beim Waffenprogramm gezwungen worden, kein sehr glaubwürdiger Zeuge zu sein.


Wenn keine Massenvernichtungswaffen gefunden werden, wurden sie zu gut versteckt oder zerstört


Aber Bush hat auch schon eine Antwort, wenn man Massenvernichtungswaffen nicht finden sollte. Der Diktator hat sie dann vernichtet: "But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them, or hid them, we`re going to find out the truth." Dass die Version, Hussein habe die Waffen zerstören lassen, zur rhetorischen Rechtfertigung zu werden scheint, klang auch bei Ari Fleischer durch, der versicherte, der Irak habe Massenvernichtungswaffen zumindest bis zum Beginn des Krieges gehabt: "We can`t explain why they may have destroyed some of them. Perhaps over time we will find out what drove them to do that. Perhaps it was the fear of actually being discovered, caught red-handed with the very weapons we said they had."

Die "Logik", eher schon "Rhetorik", scheint so zu gehen: Hussein hatte Massenvernichtungswaffen. Wenn wir sie nicht finden, hat er sie gut versteckt oder zerstört. Und dass er sie so gut versteckt oder rückhaltlos zerstört hat, zeigt erst recht die Gefährlichkeit des Regimes. Oder, in Worten von Ari Fleischer, der auf die Frage antwortete, ob es möglicherweise keinen wirklichen Beweis gebe: "Only if you presume that it`s possible to destroy something that you never had."

Es gibt freilich einen Haken über die immanente Schwäche der Beweisführung hinaus, die man im Pentagon schon früher gut jesuitisch ausgefeilt hatte ( Rumsfeld und der Gottesbeweis): Wenn Hussein sie vernichtet hätte, wäre der Irak schon keine Bedrohung mehr für die Welt und die USA gewesen - oder hat er sie gar zerstören lassen, um die britische und amerikanische Regierung womöglich aus dem Grab heraus noch zu ärgern? Aber das wären Feinheiten, die nach einem Sieg keine Rolle mehr spielen. Man kann erwarten, dass die fehlende Rechtfertigung der geschichtlichen Amnesie und der Realpolitik anheim fallen wird.


Auch die britische Regierung windet sich


Besonders stark hatte sich der britische Regierungschef Tony Blair für den notwendigen Krieg gegen den Irak gemacht. Die Faktenzauberei schien jedoch selbst den Geheimdiensten gelegentlich zu weit zu gehen ( Lesen Sie den CIA-Bericht noch einmal!). Schon im September des letzten Jahres hatte er, um die Weltgemeinschaft und den Sicherheitsrat zu überzeugen - was ihm auch später mit seinem aus dem Internet abkopierten Dossier nicht recht gelang ( Geheime Cut-and-Paste-Informationen) - ein Dossier über Massenvernichtungswaffen vorgelegt. "Jenseits allen Zweifels" hätten die Geheimdienste den Beweis erbracht, schrieb er damals, dass "Saddam weiterhin chemische und biologische Waffen produziert hat" ( Beweise jenseits allen Zweifels ...). Zudem war alles ganz gefährlich, denn nach dem Dossier und Blair wäre Saddams Regime in der Lage, innerhalb von 45 Minuten nach Befehl diese einzusetzen.

Noch Außenminister Powell versuchte in seiner UN-Präsentation am 5. Februar die die Gefährlichkeit der irakischen Massenvernichtungswaffen zu demonstrieren ( Nichts als die Wahrheit oder Onkel Powells Märchenstunde?). Auch bei ihm natürlich alles Beweise: "Jede Aussage, die ich heute mache, wird unterstützt durch Quellen, solide Quellen. Das sind keine Behauptungen. Wir geben Ihnen Fakten und Schlussfolgerungen, die auf soliden geheimdienstlichen Erkenntnissen basieren." Hans Blix hat vor kurzem erst wieder deutlich gemacht, dass es sich dabei im Wesentlichen um Behauptungen und sogar um Fälschungen gehandelt hatte. Nach Powell könnte das Irak-Regime in einem Monat genügend biologische Agenten herstellen, um Hunderttausende von Menschen zu töten. Zeit genug bis zum Beginn der Krieges wäre gewesen. Überdies besitze der Irak - "nach unseren konservativen Schätzungen" - "100 bis 500 Tonnen Substanzen für chemische Waffen". Wenn es nur 100 Tonnen wären, so Powell, so könne Hussein auf 100 Quadratmeilen "mass casualities" verursachen.

BBC hat beim britischen Außenminister nachgefragt. Jack Straw versicherte, dass es wesentlicher einfacher sein würde, den Krieg zu rechtfertigen, wenn man Massenvernichtungswaffen finden würde. Gleichzeitig sei das Finden von Waffen aber nicht die Rechtfertigung der militärischen Aktion. Überdies bestehe die Verletzung der UN-Resolution 1441 und der vorhergehenden Resolutionen in der ungenügenden Kooperation, weswegen die Massenvernichtungswaffen eigentlich unerheblich wären, wie Straw unterstellt.

Der Nachweis von Massenvernichtungswaffen als Kriegsrechtfertigung lässt sich aber nach allen Äußerungen der britischen und amerikanischen Regierung nicht ganz ableugnen. Straw ist sich klar, dass ohne unabhängige Experten jeder Fund stets bezweifelt werden würde. Aber die US-Regierung will diese bekanntlich nicht wieder ins Land lassen. Für Straw ist das Finden eines materiellen Beweises auf jeden Fall "schwer", weil das Regime seit dem Beginn der Warnungen Monate Zeit hatte, diese zu verstecken. Und dazu hatte es auch "unbezweifelbare Fähigkeiten". Straw bleibt jedoch dabei, dass der Irak solche Waffen besessen habe.

Seltsam freilich ist, warum das Regime, mit dem Untergang vor Augen, die Waffen nicht eingesetzt hat, wie dies oft prophezeit wurde. Möglicherweise ist der Grund, so fragt etwa auch die britische Times, dass Hussein eben keine hatte. Dass aber darf nicht sein, weswegen der britische Verteidigungsminister Geoff Hoon beispielsweise BBC am Donnerstag sagte, dass die Massenvernichtungswaffen in der Zeit, als die Waffeninspektoren im Land waren, "über den ganzen Irak hinweg verstreut und gut versteckt waren". Daher sei auch gar nicht erstaunlich, wenn man noch nichts gefunden habe, obgleich er auch sagt, man kenne die "Lagerorte der Massenvernichtungswaffen". Dass man sie aber nicht, wenn sie übers ganze Land verteilt wurden, innerhalb von 45 Minuten einsetzen könne, wie das im Dossier der britischen Regierung behauptet wurde, liegt auf der Hand.

Daraufhin von BBC gefragt, kann sich Hoon nicht so ganz mehr an das Dossier erinnern. Kurz vor dem Krieg meinte er freilich noch, dass die Massenvernichtungswaffen "heute eine sehr ernsthafte Gefahr" darstellen. Und nur weil der Angriff plötzlich die Kommandostrukturen zerstörte, wären sie nicht eingesetzt worden. Zeit genug hätte es zur Vorbereitung zwischen Ankündigung des Krieges und der ersten Bombardierung allerdings schon gegeben, schreibt ironisch die Times. Überdies sei es seltsam, dass das Regime so gut organisiert gewesen sei, die Waffen so gut zu verstecken, dass die Befreier bis heute noch keine Spur von ihnen gefunden haben, während es gleichzeitig so desorganisiert gewesen war, keine einsetzen zu können. Aber Hoon ist überzeugt: "We certainly will find WMD - that was the primary reason for invading Iraq and bringing down the regime - but at the same time, the beneficial consequences cannot be under-estimated to the people of Iraq."

Wurden die Massenvernichtungswaffen vielleicht nach Syrien geschafft? Das ist tatsächlich unwahrscheinlich. Nicht nur, weil man dort sicherlich angesichts der Kriegsvorbereitungen vorsichtig gewesen wäre, sondern auch, weil dies durch Satellitenüberwachung auch festgestellt worden wäre. Schließlich ging es möglicherweise um Dutzende von mobilen Labors und vielen Tonnen von chemischen Waffen mitsamt Sprengköpfen und Trägerraketen. Terroristen hingegen, so vermutet die Times, könnten die chemischen oder biologischen Waffen vermutlich deswegen schon nicht gebrauchen, weil man nicht nur große Mengen für einen Anschlag benötigen würde, sondern auch die notwendigen Mittel wie teure Trägerraketen oder Flugzeuge. Bliebe vielleicht radioaktives Material für eine "schmutzige Bombe".

Das aber könnte man auch anderweitig erhalten, zudem ist die wohl einzige Nuklearanlage in Tuwaitha von den Inspektoren genau und wiederholt untersucht und versiegelt worden. Möglich wäre allerdings, dass nicht waffenfähiges, aber für eine schmutzige Bombe zu gebrauchendes Uran etwa nach Kriegsbeginn von Plünderern geraubt worden ist. Dazu liegt noch keine Überprüfung vor, aber das wäre schwerlich dem Irak-Regime selbst zuzurechnen. Und mitgenommen haben die flüchtenden Regime-Angehörigen die Waffen, falls es sie gegeben haben sollte, wohl auch nicht, wenn sie schon Millionen von Dollar in Cash versteckt zurückgelassen hatten, weil sie es wohl nicht transportieren konnten.


Ist der Internationale Terrorismus bereits handlungsunfähig?


Aber da ist auch noch al-Qaida. Noch immer konnte kein Nachweis erbracht werden, dass es tatsächlich zwischen dem Hussein-Regime und der Terrororganisation nähere Kontakte gegeben hatte. Für Bush aber war dies eine der Rechtfertigungen des Krieges, da al-Qaida mit dem 11.9. die unmittelbare Bedrohung deutlich gemacht habe. Die Festnahme des ehemaligen Geheimdienstchefs Farouk Hijazi soll nun wenigstens den Beweis erbringen, dass das Hussein-Regime in Kontakt mit al-Qaida gestanden hat. Die Chancen aber stehen auch hier nicht gut für überzeugene Nachweise.

Auch in diesem Zusammenhang gab es einen neuen Fund des Telegraph-Reporters, der schon für mehrere Enthüllungen verantwortlich war, deren Bedeutung sich allerdings erst noch herausstellen muss ( Britischer Labour-Abgeordneter am Pranger). Angeblich habe er in der Geheimdienstzentrale in Bagdad Dokumente gefunden, die zeigen, dass im März 1998 ein al-Qaida-Angehöriger vom Sudan aus nach Bagdad eingeladen worden sei. Das Treffen mit irakischen Geheimdienstmitarbeitern habe eine ganze Woche gedauert, man habe auch einen Besuch von Bin Ladin diskutiert. Damals stand dieser noch nicht auf der US-Fahndungsliste ganz oben, die Anschläge auf die zwei US-Botschaften in Afrika erfolgten erst später. Für den Telegraph ist das Treffen im Jahr 1998 der "Beweis" dafür, dass "Saddam mit Bin Laden zusammen gearbeitet hat". Es habe sich um ein "enges Verhältnis" gehandelt.

Auffällig ist überhaupt, dass al-Qaida nicht den Irak-Krieg zu weiteren Anschlägen ausgenutzt hat ( Warum schweigt bin Laden?). Vor dem Krieg hat angeblich Bin Ladin - oder wer auch immer - dazu aufgerufen, den Irakern zu helfen, auch wenn das Regime nicht islamisch sei. Es gehe um den Kampf gegen die amerikanischen Invasoren, nicht für das Hussein-Regime. Geraten wurde zu Selbstmordanschlägen. Man solle auch vor den Bombardierungen keine große Angst haben, schließlich seien Bin Ladin und seine Getreuen auch von Tora Bora den Bombardierungen entgangen ( Wie eine Tonbandbotschaft vielen Zwecken dient). Aber nicht nur löste sich das Regime schnell militärisch auf und tauchte unter, es kam auch kaum zu ernsthaftem und vor allem erfolgreichem Widerstand von Selbstmordattentätern, auch wenn aus anderen arabischen Ländern Kampfwillige eingereist waren. Und auch im Ausland trat al-Qaida nicht, wie von vielen erwartet, mit spektakulären Attentaten hervor.

Das könnte nicht nur zum Problem von al-Qaida, sondern auch von der amerikanischen Regierung werden. Die Terrororganisation zeigt, dass sie womöglich nicht mehr handlungsfähig ist. Vielleicht hatten die Festnahme von Khalid Mohammed in Pakistan und die vorhergehenden Verhaftungen die Organisation für weitere Aktionen zu sehr geschwächt. Es bleibt zumindest seltsam, warum der Krieg gegen den Irak, der viele Araber emotional berührt hat, nicht ausgenutzt wurde.

In Verlegenheit gerät aber womöglich auch die Bush-Regierung. Nicht nur fehlt eine wirkliche Verbindung zwischen Hussein und al-Qaida und daher zwischen dem Irak und dem 11.9., sondern womöglich war der Krieg gegen den internationalen Terrorismus auch erfolgreich oder al-Qaida keine so große Bedrohung. Wäre al-Qaida tatsächlich handlungsunfähig oder gar weitgehend zerschlagen, dann wäre aber auch die politische Strategie der Bush-Regierung, die nationale Sicherheit, den Ausbau des Überwachungsstaates, das militärische Vorgehen gegen Terroristen und Schurkenstaaten sowie steigende Rüstungsausgaben in den Vordergrund zu stellen, auf Chimären erbaut.

Problematischer freilich könnte werden, die militärisch mit leichter Hand vorgenommenen Regime-Wechsel in Afghanistan und im Irak langfristig zu konsolidieren und dabei den nationalen Terrorismus gegen die Besatzungsmacht und die eingesetzte nationale Regierung zu bekämpfen. Das Beispiel Afghanistan gibt bereits ein Lehrstück, dass nach einem kurzen, erfolgreichen und medientauglichen Krieg zwar zuerst die Position des US-Präsidenten mitsamt seiner Regierung gestärkt wird, aber der Konflikt noch lange nicht ausgestanden ist, sondern auf unspektakuläre, kontinuierliche und teure Weise weiter schwelt. Und man wird nicht immer Willige finden, die den USA den "Ruhm" der spektakulären schnellen Aktion überlassen und für die Folgen einstehen.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

April 26, 2003

The Other War
The Bush Administration and the End of Civil Liberties
by ELAINE CASSEL

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

--President George W. Bush,
September 20, 2001

It didn`t take President Bush to tell Americans that the world changed on September 11, 2001. But it took Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and an unquestioning Congress to change the legal foundation of what it means to be "free" in America. The president declared from the start that it would take more than military might to wage the fight. This war would require a new arsenal of laws and regulations at home. And he got them. If the September 11 suicide hijackers hated us for our freedoms, as the president also said, today there is less to hate.

The legal firepower behind the war on terror consists of two pieces of legislation, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the USA Patriot Act of 2001, as well as a host of executive orders and federal agency regulations. Ashcroft, Bush, and numerous federal courts have decreed that freedoms must be curtailed in the name of fighting terror. But that formulation suggests they will be temporary. Given the nature of terrorism, and of politics, that is extremely unlikely.

Bush, after all, has said repeatedly that this is to be a war of many years` duration, a life`s work. It will not stop until every terrorist threat the US cares to identify is vanquished. It is a global war without territorial boundaries and without a known cast of enemies, save one--evil. And it`s being fought at home, too, in churches and town squares, courtrooms and libraries.

At the center of this new body of terror and homeland security laws lies a vague and amorphous definition of its central term: What is terrorism? Government agencies and departments use varying standards. But the USA Patriot Act defines terrorism as "acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of criminal law" that "appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion." This definition is so broad that practically any act of civil disobedience could be construed to violate the law. (A political demonstration taking place in the path of an ambulance, for example, could be termed "dangerous to human life.")

As many Arab-Americans have discovered, individuals making contributions to Islamic-based charities that turn up with "alleged terrorist ties" may wind up terror suspects themselves. Under the Patriot Act, any organization that engages in legitimate as well as illegitimate activities can be presumed a terrorist organization for all purposes. And the prohibited activity that lands a group on the government`s list need not consist of violent acts directed at people; anything that is intended to destabilize a government or "influence" its policy by coercion can be termed terrorism. Flooding a congressional office with e-mails critical of government policies, and jamming a server in the process--is that an act of terror? Some organizations that use the Internet to ask people to e-mail members of Congress fear that it might be so construed.

As well they should. For the war on terror now encompasses a breathtaking range of new government powers here at home. More than ever before, the mere fact of dissent could make you a target in the war on terror.

The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act

To all my fellow Americans ... I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.

--President Bill Clinton, April 23, 1995, speaking of Oklahoma City.

Most critics of the terror war`s assault on civil liberties mark its beginning with the Clinton administration`s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. But the US government`s propensity for spying on its own citizens on the professed grounds of national security goes back much further, and it`s not just a relic of the Hoover days. As recently as the 1980s, the FBI conducted surveillance of Americans involved in a variety of causes. Activists who supported rebel groups in El Salvador, attended rallies protesting American aid to the Salvadoran military, signed petitions, or possessed reading material associated with the Committee in Solidarity with People of El Salvador (CISPES) were targeted for activities labeled as "terrorist" or "leftist."

These investigations went on for more than two years, until they were finally halted by congressional hearings and the exposure of documents obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests. Congress denounced the scope of the anti-CISPES investigations, and in 1994 enacted a law protecting First Amendment activities from FBI investigations. That law was expressly repealed in the Antiterrorism Act of 1996.

The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was the Clinton Administration`s comprehensive response to both political and personal violent crime. Making the death penalty "effective" meant making it harder to appeal convictions of capital offenses. In terms of fighting terrorism, the law was a reaction to bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Like the Patriot Act, it too, passed the Senate easily--91-8. (Clinton also cited the suspicious crash of TWA Flight 800 and the bombing at Atlanta`s Olympic Village in 1996 as further proof of the dangers.) According to its critics, including Georgetown University Law School Professor David Cole, the law never yielded any significant protection against terrorism--everything a "terrorist" does was already illegal--although it did lead to substantial incursions on constitutional rights, such as:

Allowing the government to deport immigrants based on undisclosed evidence; Making it a crime to support even the lawful activities of an organization labeled as a terrorist group by the State Department; Authorizing the FBI to investigate the crime of material support for terrorism based solely on activities protected under the First Amendment, notably specifically allowing agents to attend religious services at Muslim mosques "undercover"; Freezing assets of any US citizen or domestic organization believed to be an agent of a terrorist group, without specifying how an "agent" was identified; Expanding the powers of the secret court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), where federal judges sit in secret to consider--and mostly rubber-stamp--Justice Department requests for widespread surveillance of "terrorists." The surveillance methods in question include pen registers and "trap-and-trace" logs, methods that can capture incoming and outgoing telephone calls; Repealing the law that barred the FBI from opening investigations based solely on activities protected under the First Amendment--such as the anti-CISPES investigations--and allowing such surveillance to go forward if the individuals were believed to be associated with any person or organization labeled as "terrorist;" Allowing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport (mostly Muslim) citizens upon the order of INS officials. The evidence typically was not disclosed to the deportees, and the decision of the official was not subject to challenge in a federal court.

The USA Patriot Act of 2001

How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command--every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war--to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network. -

-President Bush, September 20, 2001

With little debate, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT ACT) of 2001 was passed just six weeks after the September 11 attacks. Though several elected officials expressed trepidation at what appeared to be a dismantling of the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments to the Constitution, only one member of the Senate, Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.), had the courage to vote against it.

The media was slow to pick up on the controversial provisions of the act, which, within its more than 275 pages, amended dozens of existing criminal and civil statutes. It wasn`t until mid-2002, when the Justice Department began to hand down indictments under the act, that people started to take notice.

The act expanded guilt by association to the point that the most tenuous connection to a "terrorist organization" (as designated by the Secretary of State) can now lead to charges. Several groups of people have been indicted for operating terrorist cells in Portland, Buffalo, Detroit, and Moscow, Idaho. The trial in the Detroit case began in the third week of March and is expected to last for six weeks or more. Some charges against Muslim charities have led to plea bargains to drop terrorist charges in exchange for pleas to minor tax or fraud charges. The government`s successes in the courtroom have not, to date, matched John Ashcroft`s bravado in announcing the indictments in public press conferences. But the chilling effect of being arrested for crimes of terror cannot be underestimated, as many American citizens and resident aliens have learned.

Some of the more drastic incursions on civil liberties resulting from these Patriot Act provisions:

It is a crime for anyone in this country to contribute money or other material support to the activities of a group on the State Department`s terrorist watch list. Organizations are so designated on the basis of secret evidence, and their inclusion on the list cannot be challenged in court. Members of any such targeted organization can be deported even if they have not been involved in any illegal activities. The government freely admits that some of the groups it will designate are broad-based organizations engaged in lawful social, political, and humanitarian activities as well as violent activities.

The FBI can monitor and tape conversations and meetings between an attorney and a client who is in federal custody, whether the client has been convicted, charged, or merely detained as a material witness. New York City attorney Lynne Stewart (the court-appointed representative of Sheik Abdel Rahman, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) has been indicted for aiding and abetting terrorism based on conversations with her client. Her trial is set for January 2004, and the prosecution is clearly intended as a warning: Attorneys representing people charged with terrorism-related crimes will be watched as closely as the defendants.

Americans captured on foreign soil and thought to have been involved in terrorist activities abroad may be held indefinitely in a military prison and denied access to lawyers or family members. No federal court can review the reason for the detention. Such is the plight of Yaser Hamdi, detained in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia, whose family and attorney made valiant efforts to gain access to him. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal trial judge`s order that Hamdi be allowed to meet with the federal public defender.

The FBI can order librarians to turn over information about their patrons` reading habits and Internet use. The librarian cannot inform the patron that this information has been provided. Librarians, on the whole, are outraged at their new role; some have taken to posting signs in the library warning users not to use the Internet, others to destroying their logs of Internet users. One librarian said to a Washington Post reporter, "This law is dangerous.... I read murder mysteries--does that make me a murderer? I read spy stories--does that mean I`m a spy?"

Foreign citizens charged with a terrorist-related act may be denied access to an attorney and their right to question witnesses and otherwise prepare for a defense may be severely curtailed if the Department of Justice says that`s necessary to protect national security. Jose Padilla, the American Muslim fingered by Ashcroft last year as a would-be "dirty bomb" builder, is a case in point.

Resident alien men from primarily Middle Eastern and Muslim countries must report for registration. And hundreds of the ones who have reported have been detained and arrested for minor immigration infractions. It recently came to light that immigration authorities are refusing to let the men appear with their attorneys, a refusal that is a violation of Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS, formerly the INS) regulations.

Lawful foreign visitors may be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the country and made to periodically report for questioning.

The government can conduct surveillance on the Internet and e-mail use of American citizens without any notice, upon order to the Internet service provider. Internet service providers may not move to quash such subpoenas.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can search any car at any airport without a showing of any suspicion of criminal activity.

The TSA can conduct full searches of people boarding airplanes and, if the passenger is a child, the child may be separated from the parent during the search. An objection by a parent or guardian to the search will put the objector at the risk of being charged with the crime of obstructing a federal law enforcement officer and tried in federal court. Travelers in Portland and Baltimore have reported such arrests.

The TSA is piloting a program to amass all available computerized information on all purchasers of airline tickets, categorize individuals according to their threat to national security, and embed the label on all boarding passes. The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) program is designed to perform background checks on all airline passengers and assigns each passenger a "threat level." Passengers will not be able to ascertain their classification or the basis for the classification.

The TSA distributes a "no-fly" list to airport security personnel and airlines that require refusal of boarding and detention of persons deemed to be terrorism or air piracy risks or to pose a threat to airline or passenger safety. This is an expansion of a regulation that since 1990 has looked out for threats to civil aviation. Names are added daily based upon secret criteria. Several lawsuits that challenge these regulations are now pending, some from irate passengers who were mistaken for people on the list.

American citizens and aliens can be held indefinitely in federal custody as "material witnesses," a ploy sometimes used as a punitive measure when the government does not have sufficient basis to charge the individual with a terror-related crime. The 1984 material witness law allows the government to detain citizens at will for an arbitrary period of time to give testimony that might be useful in the prosecutions of others. A Jordanian man picked up a few days after September 11 was held more than nine months before being released. And last week a federal judge in Oregon ordered that Mike Hawash, a software engineer and long-time naturalized American citizen who has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison for more than a month, be questioned by April 29, 2003. It is notable, however, that the judge has already conducted a secret hearing that determined Hawash`s detention to be lawful.

Immigration authorities may detain immigrants without any charges for a "reasonable period of time." The BCIS need not account for the names or locations of the detainees, and what constitutes a "reasonable period of time" is not defined.

American colleges and universities with foreign students must report extensive information about their students to the BCIS. BCIS in turn may revoke student visas for missteps as minor as a student`s failure to get an advisor`s signature on a form that adds or drops classes. College personnel cannot notify students to correct the lapse in order to save them from deportation. To a very large extent, campus police and security personnel have become agents of the immigration authorities.

Accused terrorists labeled "unlawful combatants" can be tried in military tribunals here or abroad, under rules of procedure developed by the Pentagon and the Department of Justice. All it takes to be named an unlawful combatant is the affidavit of a Pentagon employee, who is not required to provide the rationale for his or her decision, even to a federal judge. (In the case of Yaser Hamdi, the federal appellate court ruled that it has no authority to look behind this affidavit and question the determination.) Unlawful combatants are also denied counsel and contact with family members. In fact, hundreds of "unlawful combatants" are still being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without attorneys, without family contact, and under conditions said by some to be tantamount to physical and psychological torture. A federal court ruled in March that these persons had no access to the federal courts since they were on Cuban, not American, soil.

A warrant to conduct widespread surveillance on any American thought to be associated with terrorist activities can be obtained from a secret panel of judges, upon the affidavit of a Department of Justice official. If arrested as a result of the surveillance (as was the case with the attorney, Lynne Stewart), the defendant has no right to know the facts supporting the warrant request.

The FBI can conduct aerial surveillance of individuals and homes without a warrant, and can install video cameras in places where lawful demonstrations and protests are held. Facial recognition computer programs are used to identify persons the FBI deems suspicious for political reasons. An ACLU employee in South Carolina was recently indicted for the federal offense of being in a "restricted area" at the Columbia, South Carolina airport in October 2002, when President Bush made a political campaign appearance. (The South Carolina AG, who happens to be the son of retired Senator Strom Thurmond, authorized the indictment.)

Most of these restrictions on liberty were not part of the letter of the Patriot Act; they were shaped by means of rules and regulations adopted in agencies and departments of government with little notice to the public. That`s because the Patriot Act granted sweeping new powers to agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, and BCIS to go their own way in prosecuting the war on terror.

Will the Clinton/Bush expansion of federal powers help much in protecting the country from terrorism? That is an imponderable, since we can`t know what might have happened by now, or what might happen going forward, in their absence. But the arrests hyped by Ashcroft so far don`t suggest that his new powers are yielding much. One of the most notorious cases involved Jose Padilla, an American-born Muslim arrested for allegedly plotting to build a dirty bomb. Padilla is still being held without charges, and many believe it`s because the government has no real case against him. (The file on Padilla is secret, obviously, but some news accounts have suggested his sole crime was attempting to download "dirty bomb" construction plans from the Internet.) Several people charged with terrorist-related acts have pled guilty to some charges, such as visiting an al Qaeda training camp (as defendants in Buffalo have recently done), or to lesser non-terrorist-related offenses (money laundering instead of financing terrorist activities), in order to avoid the risk of conviction and longer sentences. The Justice Department seeks grand jury indictments of the "kitchen-sink" variety--throw in everything remotely chargeable, and then declare victory when the defendant pleads to one or two charges.

What we do know about these laws is that they allow government agents to be more aggressive and, when they wish, more abusive. Most of the people indicted in Buffalo and Portland have been charged with being terrorist sympathizers because they were in the presence of people themselves labeled as terrorist sympathizers (visiting their homes, for instance) or because they had contributed to a non-profit organization that the government has decreed to have a connection to terrorism somewhere in the world. Attorney Lynne Stewart was indicted for the "crime" of zealously representing a convicted terrorist she was court-appointed to defend.

The proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003

There is no Patriot Act II. That said, it doesn`t mean that we aren`t constantly thinking and discussing how to make things better, safer.... So if there are some leaks... it`s about what we`ve been thinking.

--Attorney General John Ashcroft, March 4, 2003

On February 7, 2003, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity obtained a leaked draft of what is being called Patriot Act II. John Ashcroft immediately went on the defensive, taking pains to call it a mere trial balloon--something to get the debate moving. The version posted on the center`s site at www.cpi.org belies such talk; it indicates that the draft was delivered to Vice President Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Against a backdrop of perpetual war, it`s hard to imagine that Congress will put up much of a fuss over Patriot II. Who could vote against better domestic security? Here are some of the more unsettling proposals:

Broadens the definition of Americans who could be under surveillance without a warrant, and mandates further coordination between state, local, and federal law enforcement for the purpose of conducting surveillance. Translation: The feds can instruct your local police to keep an eye on you.

Creates new crimes and punishments relating to nonviolent activities linked to terrorist groups, which could include making charitable contributions to a group on the State Department`s terrorist list. The list includes organizations that provide humanitarian aid to Muslims across the world. Under Patriot I, the government needs to show that the contributor knowingly "aided and abetted" terror, a tall order since most people who give to Islamic charity and relief organizations are motivated by humanitarian rather than political goals.

Expands surveillance powers to grant easier government access to bank accounts, home computers, telephones, and credit card accounts based upon subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice. The entities subpoenaed to obtain information about you could not refuse to provide the information (an expansion of current powers under Patriot I). Evidence obtained that would link a person to terrorism or terrorist groups (as defined by the State Department) would not be disclosed except to a court (individuals would have no right to know why they were charged) and pretrial detentions would be mandatory. You would have little possibility of defending the charges.

Makes some nonviolent acts punishable by the death penalty if they are linked to broader "terrorist activities."

Empowers the federal government to conduct its own autopsies of victims of terrorism and "other deadly crimes," presumably any type of murder.

Amends the Freedom of Information Act to curtail even further the public`s ability to obtain information about people detained or charged. If you were arrested for a crime of terror, your accuser could remain nameless.

Forces any terrorism suspect to give a DNA sample to the federal government, the results of which could then be shared with state and local law enforcement.

Grants government the power to strip away the citizenship of any American involved in the lawful activities of an organization deemed to have terrorist ties. Such people could be held indefinitely, or deported to any country that agreed to take them.

Increases federal powers over immigrants by means that include: expedited deportation proceedings, the criminalization of even minor paperwork violations (such as a student`s failure to report that he or she dropped a course), and even more limited judicial review of immigration rulings.

Just in case Patriot II doesn`t make it into law, Congress is scheduling hearings to extend Patriot I beyond 2005, when some of its more controversial measures are set to expire.

How Much Is Too Much?

"We will...defend freedom, and justice, no matter what the cost."

Attorney General John Ashcroft, April 9, 2002

"Freedom" has been part of the post-September 11 mantra. The terrorists hate our freedoms. We have to defend our freedoms. We toppled Saddam Hussein`s regime so that Iraqis might claim their God-given freedom. Weighed against the Bush administration`s legal actions at home, this line of rhetoric is ironic, to say the least.

Patriot I was enacted in an atmosphere of panic, paranoia, and patriotism. Ashcroft mounted quite an offensive when he laid it out before Congress. If you dared to criticize in that hour of peril, you were by definition soft on terrorism. The press now admits that it rolled over for Patriot I; the handful of journalists who questioned its provisions got hate mail and death threats for their trouble. But it left even some Republicans thinking Ashcroft had gone too far.

Though there isn`t much they can do about it. We may have Congress to thank for the Patriot Act itself, but Ashcroft`s executive orders and the regulations hastily promulgated by the agencies under his control are where the real action has been. In 2002, more than 1,200 secret warrants were issued by Ashcroft`s Justice Department, FBI field offices, and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to conduct surveillance on all manner of personal activities and records. Indeed, people recently arrested for "crimes" allegedly uncovered as a result of such secret surveillance have been stunned to learn that the Patriot Act specifically disallows any judicial review of the legality of the warrant or of the evidence obtained as a result. Secret detentions, secret evidence, secret trials. What`s next? Secret executions?

The administration engaged in much finger-pointing recently when Cuba secretly tried some of its political dissidents. The trials were in secret, appeals were summarily denied, and harsh sentences were meted out. Cuba claims the dissenters were a threat to its security, echoing Ashcroft`s justification for his Justice Department`s heavy-handed tactics. Already in this country we have closed trials and, for the first time in American history, closed arguments in a federal appeals court. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, a federal court that sometimes makes the U.S. Supreme Court look liberal, is closing to the public the appeal of Zacharias Moussaoui, who, according to the Justice Department, was involved in planning the September 11 terrorist strikes.

The government is appealing U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema`s ruling that the Justice Department must give Moussaoui and his lawyers access to the government`s star witness against him. Judge Brinkema says that the Justice Department is cloaking its case in such a shroud of secrecy that a fair public trial, as required by the 6th Amendment, will be difficult if not impossible. The Justice Department has suggested that if it loses on appeal--not likely, given the Fourth Circuit`s propensity to rule for the government--it may remove Moussaoui to Guantanamo, Cuba and try him in a military tribunal. And no US court can touch him then.

Some parents of Afghan prisoners in Guantanamo filed a lawsuit challenging their sons` continued detention; it was tossed out by a District of Columbia federal judge. Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the detention was a violation of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. But the administration has termed them (like Yasir Hamdi) unlawful combatants: They were not wearing the uniform of any recognized country, and thus they are not entitled to the protections of international law. The Court, in one of the all-too-many post-September 11 rulings fraught with catch-22 reasoning, said that the detainees are not in the United States, but in a foreign country, and hence the doors of U.S. courthouses are closed to them. The decision places a Guantanamo prisoner in legal limbo, even though he is imprisoned all the while by the American government on a US military installation.

Those who expect that elected officials and the courts will one day decide to restore our liberties have not spent much time looking at history. The Supreme Court has traditionally taken a hands-off approach to curbs on presidential power in wartime--and this, after all, is to be a war of many years` duration. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a prescient book on this subject; Justice Antonin Scalia has said, in essence, that the Bill of Rights is not a contract at all, just a rough guide that courts were free to treat as circumstances required. This sentiment was recently echoed by Justice Stephen Breyer as well.

The Supreme Court will likely hear the first cases to test the limits of the Patriot Act and other attacks on freedom in its 2003-2004 term. In the meantime, President Bush is handily convincing the Senate to approve his right-wing judicial nominees one after another. Once his judges don their robes, the federal judiciary will be, by some estimates, 65 percent or more conservative Republican. The Supreme Court has become so predictably political that the loss of just one liberal justice--or frequent swing vote Sandra Day O`Connor--will tip the court all the way to the right. And since Congress has amiably ceded its duty to uphold the Constitution in the laws it enacts, we will be left with exactly one branch of government, the executive.

Elaine Cassel teaches law and psychology and practices law in the District of Columbia and Virginia. She is a contributor to CounterPunch and Findlaw.com`s Writ, and keeps a watch on the Bush Administration`s rewriting of the Bill of Rights on her blog site hosted by Minneapolis, Minnesota`s City Pages. This article originally appeared in City Pages, edited by longtime CounterPunch contributor Steve Perry. Cassel can be reached at: [e-mail]

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P-I Focus: The road the U.S. traveled to Baghdad was paved by `Scoop` Jackson
The hawks` hawk

Sunday, April 6, 2003

ROGER MORRIS

America`s attack on Iraq started 65 years ago in the wooded curving inlets and gentle fog of Snohomish County.

At least that`s one genealogy of the war, curling back through closed-door politics where so much of U.S. history happens.

Nineteen thirty-eight was the year Henry Martin Jackson, an ambitious 26-year-old Democrat from Everett fresh out of the University of Washington Law School, was elected prosecuting attorney for Snohomish County. As usual, few outside Washington state noticed the obscure local vote. But it launched a fateful political career, and ultimately led to the U.S. missiles, tanks and troops flung into Iraq last month.

Jackson rose rapidly from the Everett courthouse. Making a name for himself chasing bootleggers and gamblers, he shot on to Congress in 1940. He served five terms in the House, broken by a stint as a World War II GI, and by 1952, had gained the Senate, where "Scoop," as he was called, became a national force. A middle-of-the-road, pro-labor Democrat on domestic issues and an early champion of environmental causes, Jackson was chairman for nearly two decades of the Interior Committee (later Energy and Natural Resources) and sat on the Government Operations Committee and Joint Committee on Atomic Energy -- all major fiefdoms in dispensing federal money and wielding influence in politics and policy. One of Capitol Hill`s more vigorous legislators, he was a main author and driving force of the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, major wilderness preservation and other landmark acts.

With another local prosecutor raised to Senate power, King County`s Warren Magnuson, Jackson also saw to it that generous appropriations and contracts were sluiced to his home state, especially the Puget Sound area. "Scoop" especially would be known scathingly in congressional corridors as the "Senator from Boeing" for being on-call to the corporate giant.

But it was in national security that Jackson`s impact was deepest. The hawks` hawk, he was to the right of many in both parties. Not even the massive retaliation strategy and roving CIA interventions of the Eisenhower `50s were tough enough for him. Perched on the mighty Armed Services Committee as well as his other bases of power, he went on over the next decade to goad the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, urging the Vietnam War, fatter military budgets, stronger support of Israel in the Middle East and a more aggressive foreign policy in general.

It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the CIA`s "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed.

The result was the systematic murder of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA killing lists comprised much of Iraq`s young educated elite -- doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be there to oppose Saddam`s growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the current war.

By 1969, Jackson was so prominent in military and national security affairs, and so at odds on those issues with many in his own party, that newly elected Republican Richard Nixon thought to name the Washington Democrat his secretary of defense, though the senator declined the job.

But Snohomish County`s favorite son coveted the White House himself and was soon a sharp critic of Nixon`s arms control and détente. Added to his cold warring was even greater zeal for Israel, a certainty that the United States should endorse the Israelis` own hard line -- absorbing the West Bank after its conquest in the 1967 Middle East War, the long-term subjugation of Palestine and an abiding hostility to Iraq and other Arab states.

As Jackson grew nationally prominent, he attracted the inevitable ambitious staffers and partisans boarding his coattails to advance both their own hawkish views and themselves. Among them was a recent graduate of the University of Southern California who was fanatic about amassing and projecting U.S. power, especially on behalf of Israel, and not least about his own strategic genius. The young New Yorker named Richard Perle became Jackson`s chief assistant from 1969 to 1980.

I saw these origins firsthand working in the Senate in the early `70s after resigning from Henry Kissinger`s National Security Council staff over the invasion of Cambodia. Seen from the inside, Jackson`s Senate heft was considerable. Though a relatively small, unprepossessing figure as politicians go, he usually did his homework, could be incisive about important details his colleagues let slip and struck a shrewd balance between conviction and expedience. Much of his Capitol Hill power derived from his unique role, which he played well, as a northern Democrat with solid labor backing and other party credentials yet whose hard-line international view drew the support of many Republicans and the most conservative Southerners on either side of the aisle.

His belligerence also exerted (and still does) a kind of extortionist pull on liberal Democrats deathly afraid of appearing "weak" on national defense or in standing up to the Russians and anyone else. There was no question that "Scoop," from the mountains and straits of the far northwest corner of the continental United States, caught the unease and reflexive combativeness of much of America in dealing with a planet we knew so little despite our power. Still, in the `70s, a more worldly post-Vietnam moderation and sensibility in the leadership of both parties appeared to have passed Jackson by, leaving his chauvinism and foreign policy animus marginal, sometimes looking a bit crazed.

As for Perle, he was a pear-shaped, slightly fish-eyed man of self-consciously affected locution, the too-hungry, too-sly and too-toadying aide familiar in bureaucracies public and private. His views were patently uninformed, and he wore his conference-room warrior`s zealotry no more gracefully than his expensive blue pinstriped suits. It seemed obvious that the bellicose policies he and Jackson embodied were not only wrong for America, but would also usher Israel into the ruinous isolation I and other admirers of its brave people most feared. "Scoop" & Co. would remain, I assumed, an extremist fringe. How wrong I was.

Jackson, of course, never got the White House. With big pro-Israeli money though stolid style, he lost the presidential nomination in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, who offered a fresh face in the national weariness in the wake of the Watergate scandal. But when Jackson died seven years later back in Everett, ending more than four decades on the national scene, he had spawned a cult following. There was always much less substantively than met the eye in the lavishly financed and much-propagandized neoconservative cabal taking power under President Reagan, and now again under George W. Bush. In any case, its throwback foreign policy was, and is, "Scoop" Jackson warmed over -- the red, white and blue, Israel-first, bombs-away dawn of an old era.

For his part, Perle missed a long-coveted chance to make presidential policy when Jackson stumbled in 1976. But the aide promptly moved on to the next coattails in classic, if banal, Washington, D.C., style. Relentlessly levering the system he learned under Jackson, he cultivated the media, courted politicians in both parties and used old allies in the politically potent pro-Israeli and military-industrial lobbies. By the Reagan `80s, he was an assistant secretary of defense, veteran of the now-venerated Jackson tradition of military expansion and a self-promoted strategist for a Republican president as comfortably as for a Democratic senator.

Whatever "Scoop" Jackson`s mix of political principle and opportunism, Perle`s politics were largely himself.

On the way up, Perle gathered his own disciples -- Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and others who would go on themselves in similar fashion to become key officials in the current administration. Like Perle, who was appointed to chair the administration`s influential Defense Policy Board, they`re all longtime advocates, years before the Sept. 11 attacks, of pre-emptive American military invasions in Iraq and elsewhere and of implicit, if not open, support for the expansionist and repressive policies of their right-wing counterparts in Israel. By all accounts, their concerted influence was decisive in going to war in Iraq.

Grown wealthy in the revolving door between government and corporate plunder, Perle has drawn notoriety lately not only for his intimate ties to Israel but also for his connections to companies standing to profit obscenely from the war he`s mongered. When Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. and Sen. Carl Levin began to prod Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the disreputable dealings, Perle angrily resigned March 27 from the chairmanship of the board, though he continues to sit as a full-fledged member of the pivotal body. Token resignation aside, it all reeks of the seedy conflict-of-interest "Scoop" once would have prosecuted in Snohomish County. But in the rest of their martial provincialism, Perle and his minions are Jackson`s offspring.

By the way, Snohomish County`s current prosecuting attorney, if you hadn`t noticed, is a young woman named Janice Ellis. She seems dedicated to her job. But you can`t tell where these county officials may go. Please let us know if Ellis begins to take an unusual interest in national security.

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On message, on script
Bush`s never-ending war story boasts a shocking and awesome cast of sometimes-crazed characters

And behind the Born Aga


LINDA DIEBEL

It seems so long ago, but it was only March 6 when George W. Bush ambled to a podium in the East Room of the White House and began to take questions from assembled reporters in a prime-time press conference.

His main message was the continuing threat of Saddam Hussein`s weapons of mass destruction, and his sworn oath as president to protect the American people from that peril.

Bush had a "single question" for U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.

Remember him? Little Swedish guy? Seems to have disappeared?

"Has the Iraqi regime fully and unconditionally disarmed, or has it not?" asked Bush.

After all, the war was still almost two weeks away and there was, theoretically, still time for the Iraqi dictator to disarm.

"Saddam Hussein is not disarming," said Bush. "This is a fact. It cannot be denied."

A fact.

And then, in a slip, Bush looked up from his notes and said, "King ... John King?"

Whaaaa?

"Oh, that was scripted," said Bush quickly, to nervous laughter from the press corps.

What he meant was that John King, CNN`s lantern-jawed senior White House correspondent, was next on the pre-arranged list of questioners. What he didn`t say, but many thought, was that the questions, too, were pre-arranged, that the whole thing was — gasp — scripted.

The next day, the White House said it wasn`t.

In hindsight, though, the significance of that press conference seems clear.

Since the issue of Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction has fallen by the wayside — yes, yes, they`re still looking; maybe they`re in Syria — it appears the value of Bush`s performance that night lay in alerting the public to the existence of a script.

Psychiatrists might say that Bush, ever the crowd pleaser, couldn`t help letting us in on the secret.

And what a script it has been!

What a marvellous ride this war has been for students of power politics.

Now, of course, that wouldn`t be your point of view if you were sitting in the rubble of your home in Baghdad, or worse, but as a study of pure political manipulation — Wow!

And, it`s not just one war. The war against Afghanistan`s Taliban regime is over. So, it would appear, is the war against Iraq`s Saddam. But the War on Terror continues.

Democrats are so afraid of fallout — of being called unpatriotic — that a "prominent Democratic senator" had to go off-the-record recently to tell the New York Times the White House is pursuing a policy of "never-ending war" in order to keep the U.S. public from focusing on Bush`s domestic record and get him re-elected next year.

A senator who doesn`t want his name in the paper?

Now, that`s intimidation. You gotta stand back in awe.

Well, shock and awe.

That, after all, is the working title of this particular production by Bush & Co., also known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Its genesis lies in the days right after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the loss of more than 3,000 lives, when the enemy was clearly Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.

It evolves into backroom deals, meticulous planning and political warfare.

It highlights a panoply of larger-than-life characters, so rich in idiosyncrasy, so awe-inspiring, colourful, exciting and, at times, crazed, that only the most powerful nation on Earth could cast them all up at one time.

Where to begin?

At the top is the commander-in-chief, George Dubya, the reluctant president who, perhaps in his heart, just wanted to be the best commissioner of baseball there ever was.

Had it not been for 9/11, he might never have found, for better or worse, the touchstone of his presidency. Even critics don`t doubt that Bush sees the world as he says he does, as good vs. evil, them vs. us.

Born Again, no booze, no drugs, he slips increasingly into the role of religious crusader.

The facilitator is Vice-President Dick Cheney who, from "an undisclosed location," always seems to be pulling strings behind-the-scenes.

He once admitted he regretted not having supported marching all the way to Baghdad when he was defence secretary during the 1991 Gulf War.

After Saddam fell, Cheney could barely contain his glee in castigating the war`s armchair generals. In that speech, he discussed plans for Iraqi oil in such detail — 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day by year`s end, wellheads, spreadsheets, expected revenues — he was practically using a megaphone to stress the importance of that oil to the Bush administration. Or, as Bush puts it, the "oil-that-belongs-to-the-Iraqi-people."

The big picture guys arrived long before bombs fell on Baghdad. Among others, defence department adviser Richard Perle ("Prince of Darkness") and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz ("Wolfowitz of Arabia") joined administrative officials and think-tankers in putting together a plan that became the Bush doctrine.

Called the National Security Strategy of the United States, it threw out a Cold War policy of containment and embraced pre-emptive strike and regime change. The first test was Afghanistan; the second, Iraq.

Military muscle begins with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose small frame and rumpled demeanour belie his obsession with putting some real meat on the $400 billion (U.S.) annual defence budget.

Working with him this time were, among others, taciturn Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; operations commander Gen. Franks (in his 50s and still called "Tommy"); and Brig.-Gen. Vincent Brooks, who reportedly auditioned for the job of chief spokesperson at Central Command briefings in Doha, Qatar. He`s slim, handsome, articulate and photogenic.

Rumsfeld is master of the patriot game. He practically wore his hand over his heart at Pentagon briefings.

Last week, he was asked why U.S. soldiers stood around while looters stripped Baghdad`s National Museum of Antiquities of its treasures.

"It`s an awful lot to ask of young men and women whose lives are at risk, to ask them to go into an area and protect everything in that area that it would be nice to protect," he replied.

But, sir, didn`t they protect the oil ministry building around the block?

The diplomats were led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has come out of this war so low that former House speaker Newt Gingrinch, hardly a master of the political game himself, felt free to attack him last week.

Gingrich serves on Rumsfeld`s Defence Advisory Board, along with Perle and, seemingly, a few thousand others.

Gingrich described Washington`s pre-war handling of Turkey, as "a pathetic public campaign of hand-wringing desperation" and called Powell`s coming trip to Syria "ludicrous."

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage defended his boss.

"It`s clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," he said.

For the moment, Bush reportedly has accepted Powell`s recommendation of talks with North Korea, which last week boasted it actually has the Bomb. Rumsfeld apparently opposed the talks, which is particularly scary.

And, according to the Nelson Report diplomatic newsletter, Rumsfeld wanted to dispatch U.S. troops into Syria to look for deposed Iraqi officials, another idea temporarily on hold.

The spinners are a category unto themselves.

Ari Fleischer is the president`s press secretary who portrays Bush in the black-and-white terms — good and evil, our side and theirs — he seems to crave. His briefings resemble English-as-a-second-language classes for children.

He speaks very slowly to the children, repeating a few simple, easily mastered, phrases.

He stays "on message."

The president, according to Fleischer, always seems to have two moods. He`s "very happy" that the POWs have been rescued, but "very sad" other American lives have been lost. The president is "very relieved" but "very concerned" about ....

Happy. Sad. Relieved. Concerned. One almost feels slapped from side to side.

It`s the U.S. public reduced to sitcom audience.

Language is critical. "Regime change," for example. How bloodless, how surgical — must be a good thing.

"It`s the same with every White House — you control the language, you control the debate," says William Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers University. "This administration is very good at it, and they`ve gotten better."

One man fits an entire category. Call it, the "master class." Here we have the king, Bush`s political guru Karl Rove, also known as "The General."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is so horrible, it makes me sick. After failing to get bin Laden, and abdicating political responsibility, they turned it to political advantage`

Jason Stanford, Democratic party consultant

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


You don`t hear his name much. But behind what`s called the Office of Global Communications, operating out of the White House with its 24-hour spin campaign, with everybody on message all the time, sits the Buddha, Rove.

Bush calls him the "man with the plan," and he`s been close to the Bush family since the 1970s, when Bush Sr. headed the Republican National Committee and Rove used to hand over the car keys (honest) when George W. came to Washington.

Rove is feared. He is the first full-time political adviser to have an office right in the White House.

In a recent Esquire magazine profile, Ron Suskind wrote about waiting outside Rove`s office and listening to him berate some political operative who had displeased him.

"We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f----- him!"

Wrote Suskind: "As a reporter, you get around — curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events — but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking."

Rove continued the rant for a few minutes, then walked out to greet Suskind, still flushed, but sweet as "Clarence the Angel" with a big, "Come on in!"

Rove marks the spot where character and history meet for the Bush administration.

This particular history begins on 9/11 with a hole in the ground, both a physical tragedy and psychic tear in the fabric of this great nation.

But it`s worth remembering that those held responsible for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, then operating from Afghanistan under the protection of that country`s Taliban regime.

A month later, bombs began to fall on Kabul and, within a month, the Taliban fell.

But no bin Laden.

"You`ve got a 6-foot-5-inch guy dragging his dialysis machine through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we are letting him get away," Jason Stanford, a Texas-based consultant for the Democratic party, says in an interview.

Stanford — the only Democratic analyst brave enough to be quoted by name in Bush`s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater — says he`s disgusted by how easily the White House, under Rove`s guidance, shifted the focus away from the elusive bin Laden to Iraq`s Saddam, with more to come.

Here`s what he says in the book:

"Hey, we can`t take over a country that doesn`t exist, so fine, we`ll go take over some country. We can`t invade Al Qaeda. We can`t occupy it. We can`t even find it. Okay. Fine. But we do know where Baghdad is. We`ve got a map. We can find it on a map. And they`ve got oil and an evil guy. So let`s go there."

Or, as Moore and Slater put it: "Karl Rove needed a better, simpler more marketable war."

After 9/11, says Stanford, a number of forces came together.

"There are Christian coalition people who want peace in Jesus` homeland, conservative Jewish interests who want security for Israel and then the ones who want to remake the Middle East a conservative Christian pax Americana place that exists only in the heads of crazy people."

It all "dovetailed nicely" with the Bush presidency`s need for a focus. The War on Terror became that focus, Stanford says, and strategist Rove took over to organize everything.

Another strategist quoted in Bush`s Brain says "it was starting to look like we couldn`t win the war on terrorism .... Suddenly, it wasn`t the people who were terrorists who killed us. It was evil itself. And that can apply to anyone they want."

The never-ending war strategy fit with an agenda Cheney and Wolfowitz had "been pushing for a decade to expand American influence and military abroad into a form of empire. Rove`s political strategy for the presidency transformed a policy whose scope and tenets were unprecedented in American history," say Moore and Slater.

"All it needed was a little justification.

"And Iraq was handy."

The War on Terror became the "engine" that drives the Bush/Rove White House.

"Rove is Nixonian in his cynicism and manipulation of patriotic themes," a Washington consultant for both parties told the authors.

"It`s like Rove is Nixon`s heir. Cold-blooded. Ruthless. Paranoid. But, unlike Nixon, Rove has figured out how to mask it all behind Bush`s smile."

Is he that important?

"He`s the ringleader," says Stanford. "He`s the one who understands what the smart people are talking about," he says. "Without Karl Rove, George W. Bush wouldn`t be in the Eastern time zone. He`d be in Texas."

There is a final category of players — the corporate winners. In it, we place the subsidiary of Halliburton, Cheney`s old company — which already has scooped up $7 billion, without bids, to rebuild Iraqi oil wells — and the defence contractors Bush has visited in recent days.

Another winner is the Bechtel Group of San Francisco, the multinational, privately owned construction company awarded a reconstruction deal by the United States Agency for International Development after an internal government bidding process. It`s for $35 million and could soar to $680 million.

It`s a sliding scale, depending on costs.

Canadians know about Bechtel`s sliding scales.

In 1971, Bechtel won the contract to build Quebec`s James Bay hydroelectric project for $6 billion, a figure that doubled, then tripled, quadrupled over time, leaving then-premier Robert Bourassa with a political mess on his hands and impending loss to the separatist Parti Québécois in 1976.

Bechtel is a controversial company, its board of directors a revolving door for powerful Republican officials, including a former secretaries of state and defence and a former CIA chief.

Laton McCartney`s 1988 book, Friends In High Places, The Bechtel Story, The Most Secret Corporation And How It Engineered The World, chronicles how Bechtel settled a sex discrimination case with 80 per cent of its workforce and was accused of involvement in CIA coups in Syria and Iran.

It also describes, in language reached by legal agreement, how Bechtel "creations inadvertently had generated the revenues that would help finance the regime" of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

In Iraq, Bechtel is rebuilding roads, airports, railway tracks and stations, water and electric power systems and communications centres destroyed by the war and the years of bombing by British and U.S. warplanes policing the no-fly zones unilaterally created after the 1991 Gulf War.

Destroy. Rebuild.

Genius, really.

Or, as Bush said recently, the United States "is redefining war on our own terms."

In recent days, there has been a bit of a downward spiral in Iraq, with a self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad ignoring American military law, assorted disobedient proxy politicians and U.S. troops nervously watching a return to the self-flagellation rituals of Islamic fundamentalism.

But, for the moment, Bush seems to be on a roll.

And the reason for war? Weapons of mass destruction?

So far, nada.

Blix recently gave an interview to Spain`s El Pais newspaper.

"Consider the case of contracts for a presumed Iraqi purchase of enriched uranium from Niger," he said. "This was a crude lie. All false. That information was provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency by U.S. intelligence services. As for the mobile laboratories, in attempting to verify the data that was passed on to us by the Americans, we found only some trucks dedicated to the processing and control of seeds for agriculture."

Blix continued.

"I originally thought the Americans began the war believing that they existed. Now, I believe less in that possibility. But I do not know. Nevertheless, when one sees the things the United States tried to do to show that Iraq had nuclear arms, such as the non-existent contract with Niger, one does have many questions."

True, but it can be hard to ask them in the United States.

After 9/11, criticism of the Bush administration became something more.

"We collapsed the identity of the country into the government," is how Lutz, from Rutgers University, describes it.

So, if you criticize Bush, you are criticizing the American people. It`s anti-America. It`s dangerous ground, which is why Democrats are so sensitive.

The polls show, for now at least, that Americans not only support Bush, they accept an unproven link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, most Americans consider the war a success, even without Saddam, without weapons of mass destruction.

Not Democrat consultant Stanford.

"It is so horrible, it makes me sick," he says. "After failing to get bin Laden, and abdicating political responsibility, they turned it to political advantage."

He faults Democrats for being gutless. They should have stuck to one message, he says: "Bring us bin Laden`s head on a plate. It should have been a mantra. They should have been brave enough to get through the first month looking crazy."

But he believes there is still hope for the Democrats in next year`s presidential vote.

"Absent a war, we can beat him on his record. Bush is the only post-World War II president to have a net job loss," he says.

Right. Absent a war.

How likely is that?

Wait for it. Sometime next year, coming to a theatre near you ....
Additional articles by Linda Diebel


http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thes…

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Wer soschnell nicht lesen kann, hier die Quotes einzeln. Jede ein geistiger Hochgenuss.

http://www.cafeshops.com/thewhitehouse/32470

Hier noch ein paar Anregungen, um Freunden etwas Gutes zu tun.

http://www.cafeshops.com/thewhitehouse

Nicht versuchen mit in die USA einzureisen.

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[Joerver]

ZNet | Terror War

Iraq War
A Policy of Christian and Jewish Fundamentalism; Worse lies ahead

by Saul Landau; April 24, 2003

"Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.

Congratulations to George W. Bush, winner and still champion after defeating a highly ranked heavyweight contender! Indeed, the heroic U.S. victory in Iraq should engrave 43’s name in the history books. The Bush Doctrine means fighting “preemptive” wars with disarmed nations that in the very distant future might conceivably threaten U.S. interests. In Christian lore, the U.S. invasion of Iraq will find its justification in the first three words of the adage: “Do unto others…”

The biblical talk overflowed from the White House, but military commanders, under orders from their civilian bosses, dispatched troops to protect the oilfields while other U.S. soldiers, also under orders, stood by and allowed if not encouraged the destruction of the very sacred relics to which the Bible refers. “Praise God and speak reverently of His works, but watch carefully over your newly acquired treasure,” the Bible should have said.

The gap between words and deeds should make people laugh as we already hear threats of the next war. Those who screamed loudest in Congress about supporting our troops cut their benefits. No matter! The headlines and lead stories barely reported that. Instead, we saw on TV the American flag – flying high and being waved, of course. A good section of the anxious U.S. public seems eager to accept as truth any nonsense uttered from the White House and repeated in the media. Use God early and often in each speech!

“Let the word go forth,” George Bush (43) has chosen war as his (or His) method of forging peace -- and getting re-elected. Taking his orders from his own special Christian God and his brilliant political manipulators, Bush has set out on a divine mission of “liberation.” The billion people who adhere to the Islamic faith – do they share a collective memory of the Crusades? – should feel rightfully apprehensive.

With the bodies of Iraqis still unburied and the once fabled ancient treasures either missing or destroyed, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld threatens Syria. Nothing new! It’s the old “possessing weapons of mass destruction” and “harboring terrorists” crap. Syrians should understand that the President makes rapid decisions. He needs no evidence to convince him of the righteous course. He acts with an air of total confidence. Policy depends not on facts or analysis, but on his trusted gut feeling about good and evil. He explained to an Oklahoma City audience what distinguishes “us” from “them.”

Last August 29, he said: “See, we love - we love freedom. That`s what they didn`t understand. They hate things; we love things. They act out of hatred; we don`t seek revenge, we seek justice out of love."

To combat evil, to find justice and love, the best of human nature, Bush of course relies on war – to obtain peace. And God, for Bush, made us the most powerful military force. So, as soon as U.S. forces were ready for action after 9/11, Bush ordered them to attack the mighty Taliban in Afghanistan. When the bombs and missiles exploded, the Afghan losses made the numbers lost in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon pale. Explosives rained on the land ruled by the Saudi-backed fundamentalists where wicked Al Qaeda had training camps.

Few of the cogniscenti saw Afghanistan as the beginning of a new U.S. imperial order. Whatever Bush said, they took it as logical “revenge.” Surely, the Republican dominated ruling elite would temper “the youngster’s” overseas behavior. But the young emperor, using terrorism as his loose metaphor for all evil, continued to pursue war in the evil region -- against Iraq. Bush (43) made it clear to other governments that he cared not a Texas hoot what they think.

Wow, says Hans Blix, the former Chief UN Weapons Inspector. On April 9, Blix told El Pais in Madrid that "there is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections." Was Blix naïve?

Perhaps he didn’t take Bush’s threats seriously because they rang with that religious fundamentilist timbre that seemed, well, inappropriate for modern, sophisticated U.S. power. But Bush had made his intentions clear. On September 5, 2002, Bush spoke to Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya and others using a Louisville, Kentucky audience as his medium: "I want to send the signal to our enemy that you have aroused a compassionate and decent and mighty nation, and we`re going to hunt you down."

A war to bring about his deepest religious desires! “You need to tell your loved ones, the little ones in particular, that when they hear the President talking about al Qaeda, Iraq and other places, I do so because I long for peace."

For Bush -- ignorant of Orwell’s 1984 -- peace meant war. “When we need to be plenty tough, we`re going to be plenty tough. And they`re [the terrorists] learning another thing about America. When we need to be compassionate and loving, we can be compassionate and loving, too."

Most pundits and politicians apparently missed the sea change in world affairs that resulted from the 9/11 events. What many saw as a temporary shift – the revenge cycle – has turned into a long-term alteration in the geo-political order. 9/11 served as a U.S. equivalent of Hitler’s 1933 Reichstrag fire in which “fighting terrorism” became the pretext for radical new forms of control at home and abroad.

Look at the changes. In place of law, the UN, NATO and other treaties, Bush substituted naked U.S. power, which he and his minions justify either with biblical jibberish or neo-Metternichean jargon. (Prince Klemens von Metternich led Austria on its imperial path during the first half of the 19th century. Metternich stressed that heads of state must make policies including war to secure peace. He saw revolution and rebellious or non-complaint behavior as diseases and tried to suppress them everywhere.)

To wage war, Bush needed sufficient backing at home – to Hell with the rest of the world. So, he used the tried and true demonization method, insinuating that the devilish Saddam had somehow directed the 9/11 attacks. In his speeches and press conferences, he demonized a truly bad man without presenting any evidence of actual links that Saddam had to terrorists or weapons of mass destruction. These same accusatory speeches came replete with multiple references to God and peace.

The spin worked. By March 19, 2003, when U.S. forces invaded Iraq, a substantial percentage of the public had become convinced that Saddam had not only “gassed his own people” but had inflicted the 9/11 damage on “us.” Thus, Bush was right to invade.

Most of our allies – except for England, Spain and Australia – had watched with an air of disbelief the belligerent foreplay before the aggressive penetration. Bush really wouldn’t make war without Security Council backing! Then, when he made war, they protested and wrung their hands.

They had expected the civilized Colin Powell to stall the war machine. After all, important sectors of the ruling elite, including Daddy Bush (41) and his consigliere James Baker and Brent Scowcroft had evinced serious reservations about going ahead without UN support.

But the supposedly prudent Secretary of State demonstrated that his servility outweighed his caution. When the crucial debate occurred in the United Nations Security Council, the opponents of war had insufficient cojones to stand dramatically against Bush’s war of naked, unprovoked aggression. Nor did the leading Democrats – there were a few exceptions like Senator Robert Byrd (W-WV) and Congressman Dennis Kucinic (D-OH) -- have the courage to warn him and the nefarious chicken hawks that planned the attack that they were about to commit war crimes.

The Bushies laughed at the wussy-like Democrats, scoffed at the weak-willed European opposition, sneered at the once-powerful Russians and commercially addicted Chinese. They occasionally patted Blair, America’s pet poodle on the head and scorned those Cassandras warned about the reaction of “the angry Arab street” and “world public opinion.”

“How many divisions do they have?” Bush might well have asked, paraphrasing Stalin’s mocking of the Pope who disapproved of his policies as his administration practiced the politics of raw power.

They took what had been peripheral issues at best – like Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda as imminent threats to U.S. security – and made them central. Simultaneously, they deftly distorted facts that the media predictably lacked the curiosity to check. But they knew they could count on the media to present memory eroding volleys of changing “Reality TV in Iraq” images.

When the ruling elite leaned on him to get UN backing before going to war, the Bushies took spinning to a new level. Saddam, they charged, had violated UN Security Council resolutions. The very organization that Bush had routinely disparaged as worthless, now took on holy status. Saddam’s sin of sins was his violation of UN resolutions.

So, repetition of charges: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, violation of UN resolutions and “he tried to kill Daddy” – referring to an ambiguous assassination attempt in Kuwait in 1993 – became the Administration mantra. At no time, did the President present evidence. He simply repeated the accusations. Hey, who are you going to believe, your president or the guy who gassed his own people?

Instead of telling him “go sleep it off,” the cowardly Democrats, ever fearful that someone will expose them as “weak,” wrung their hands, publicly accepted Bush’s claptrap and in October 2002 awarded him special wartime powers. (The Senate vote was 77-23.)

The Bush planners had already decided to fight this war without concern for law (a fig leaf at best) or international opinion. It surprised few people that the immense superiority of U.S. weaponry defeated a far weaker military force – especially one like Iraq’s, which had basically disarmed before the invasion. The Americans didn’t even really need the British.

The lesson: circumvent international law, the UN and world public opinion and substitute brute force and the world will grasp the essentials of the U.S. order in the 21st Century. Hail America, America waives the rules!

Of course, it helped to target a universally despised villain and fool. But Saddam didn’t use mass destruction weapons against the invading Americans and British. Perhaps he didn’t have any such lethal arms. Time will tell.

The historical record shows U.S. Administrations in the 1970s and 80s cooperating with this ogre when it suited their interests. Documents show Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand in 1983 as President Reagan’s envoy. Rummy helped facilitate Iraq’s acquisition of chemical and biological weapons and U.S. logistical help to deploy them.

Coincidentally, several administration officials have close ties to companies that will materially benefit from the war, like Vice President Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton that will make billions on the rebuilding of Iraq. In the March 17, 2003 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh offers substantial evidence to show that U.S. Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle used his inside position to make substantial fees. No reason not to do well while doing good!

These Jewish neo-cons and Christian fundamentalists have made a marriage of bellicose convenience, in which the rest of the world gets screwed. They see the world as theirs to win – unless something untoward occurs in the 2004 election or the economy continues its downward spiral.

Consequences? Bush hasn’t talked about them. He dismissed the appearance of up to 20 million people demonstrating in the streets of cities throughout the world this winter as comparable to a “focus group.”

But as Seumas Milne reports in the April 10 Guardian, the North Koreans are paying close attention to both Bush’s policies and the reaction to them. “As anti-war and anti-American demonstrations erupt throughout the world,” he writes, “North Korea`s foreign ministry dramatized one sobering lesson drawn from this four week war.”

A North Korean government official said: "The Iraqi war shows that to allow disarmament through inspections does not help avert a war, but rather sparks it." The North Koreans concluded that to prevent attacks on nations the United States has placed in the axis of evil, requires "a tremendous military deterrent force."

As the sounds of prayer emanate from the White House, Milne sees the chicken hawk planners of the Iraq war circling “around Syria and Iran.” They have provided “a powerful boost to nuclear proliferation.” He concludes that “anti western terror attacks seem inevitable, offset only by the likelihood of a growing international mobilization against the new messianic imperialism.”

Amen, I say, in my non-religious way. I, like tens of millions of others, will continue to resist.



Saul Landau is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach Programs for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Find him on the web at www.rprogreso.com

His new film, IRAQ: VOICES FROM THE STREETS, is available through The Cinema Guild. 1-800-723-5522

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[Joerver]

Der Euro als Wunderwaffe

Bernd Kling 28.04.2003
Ein Umstieg vom Petro-Dollar zum Petro-Euro könnte die Weltordnung verändern

Die militärische und wirtschaftliche Hegemonie steht seit dem neuen Irak-Krieg außer Zweifel. Vor diesem Krieg gab es noch eine vage Hoffnung, die von vielen im Rest der Welt inzwischen als Schurken-Supermacht gesehenen USA mit den Mitteln der Diplomatie zumindest einzudämmen. Doch seither haben die Vordenker der Bush-Regierung entdeckt, dass sie einen Krieg auch ohne Deckung der Vereinten Nationen führen können und ihre eigene Wählerschaft dennoch bei guter Laune bleibt.

Der Zugriff auf den Ölhahn, der sich aus der erfolgten Besetzung des Irak ergibt, erlaubt es den USA, eine Zwickmühle für den Rest der Welt zu öffnen. Ein weit geöffneter Ölhahn sorgt für fallende Preise und gefährdet damit die wirtschaftliche und politische Stabilität Russlands, die auf ihren eigenen Ölexporten beruht. Ein reduzierter Ölfluss hingegen bewirkt steigende Preise und setzt damit Volkswirtschaften wie Frankreich, Deutschland, Japan und China unter Druck, die stark von Ölimporten abhängig sind. Allein dieses Drohpotential kann schon ausreichen, um die erwünschte Vasallentreue zu sichern.

Der kommende Einfluss auf den Ölpreis addiert sich zur bestehenden wirtschaftlichen Vormachtsstellung. Weltweit steigen und fallen die Börsen, wie es der Takt der Wall Street vorgibt. Der US-Dollar bildet die Reservewährung für die meisten Staaten der Welt. Internationale Vereinbarungen gelten schon lange nichts mehr, wenn sie den Interessen der USA zu widersprechen scheinen. Kann es überhaupt noch Widerstand geben gegen dieses Wirtschaftsimperium, das zudem gewillt und in der Lage ist, seine Interessen mit militärischen Mitteln zu sichern?


Die Gallier der Welt


Hoffnung macht der britische Kolumnist George Monbiot im Guardian. Er schlägt seinen Euro-kritischen Landsleuten dringend vor, den Euro durch den englischen Beitritt zum Währungsgebiet zu stärken, um die US-Hegemonie zu bekämpfen. Er argumentiert, dass insbesondere der Euro-Beitritt von Norwegen und Großbritannien bedeutsame Wirkung hätten, da sie mit dem Preis für Brent-Öl eine Preismarke im internationalen Ölmarkt setzen.

Monbiot beruft sich auf einen führenden OPEC-Mitarbeiter, der es für erstrebenswert halte, wenn die OPEC-Länder ihre Ware nicht mehr gegen Dollar, sondern gegen Euro anbieten. Das ergäbe laut Monbiothttp://www.monbiot.com/ eine regelrechte Domino-Reaktion: Der Dollarpreis rutscht ab. Wenn er aber seine relative Stabilität im Vergleich zu anderen Währungen erst einmal verloren hat, stürzt er erst recht ab, weil andere Länder nicht mehr gezwungen sein werden, ihn als Währungsreserve zu nutzen. Die überbewertete und ungleichgewichtige US-Wirtschaft kippt und damit auch die militärische Macht der USA.

Monbiot bezieht sich offenbar auf die Überlegungen von William Clark, der sich schon im Januar 2003 in einem umfangreichen Dossier mit The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War With Iraqhttp://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html mit dem gesamtwirtschaftlichen Hintergrund des Irak-Kriegs beschäftigte. Clark zitierte einen ungenannten früheren Regierungsbeamten und Makroökonomen, der den absehbaren Krieg sogar im Zusammenhang mit der durch den Irak bereits Ende 2000 durchgeführten Währungsumstellung vom Dollar zum Euro sah:

"Saddam sealed his fate when he decided to switch to the euro in late 2000 (and later converted his $10 billion reserve fund at the U.N. to euros) -- at that point, another manufactured Gulf War become inevitable under Bush II. Only the most extreme circumstances could possibly stop that now and I strongly doubt anything can -- short of Saddam getting replaced with a pliant regime.
Big Picture Perspective: Everything else aside from the reserve currency and the Saudi/Iran oil issues (i.e. domestic political issues and international criticism) is peripheral and of marginal consequence to this administration. Further, the dollar-euro threat is powerful enough that they will rather risk much of the economic backlash in the short-term to stave off the long-term dollar crash of an OPEC transaction standard change from dollars to euros. All of this fits into the broader Great Game that encompasses Russia, India, China."

Die gut geölte Dollar-Presse

"Wann werden wir Öl in Euros bezahlen?" fragt auch Faisal Islamhttp://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,900867,00.ht… im Wirtschaftsteil des Oberserver. Er führt aus, dass die üblichen wirtschaftlichen Regeln für die USA außer Kraft gesetzt sind durch die internationale Rolle des Dollars. Denn etwa drei Billionen Dollar sind weltweit in Umlauf und ermöglichen den USA ihr praktisch permanentes Handelsdefizit. Zwei Drittel des Welthandels werden in Dollar abgewickelt. Zwei Drittel der Devisenreserven der Zentralbanken in aller Welt lauten ebenfalls auf die grünen Scheine.

Die meisten Länder benötigen Dollars, um Öl zu kaufen. Die Öl-Exporteure halten aus diesem Grund Milliarden der Währung, in der sie bezahlt werden, als Währungsreserve. Für sie besteht praktisch auch kein Währungsrisiko, wenn sie diese Petro-Dollar gleich wieder in die US-Wirtschaft investieren. So brauchen die USA dann ständig nur weiter Geld zu drucken wie eine Art von Schuldscheinen, um sich damit Steuererleichterungen, erhöhte Militärausgaben und wachsenden Konsum zugleich leisten zu können, ohne dadurch Inflation oder eine Rückforderung der Schulden befürchten zu müssen. Als Hüter der weltweiten Währung können sie im Notfall jederzeit den Dollar abwerten und die Exporteure anderer Länder für ihre angewachsenen wirtschaftlichen Probleme bezahlen lassen.

Doch nun kommt der Euro, der nach seinem Fehlstart zunehmend an Wertschätzung gewinnt. Sein Währungsgebiet bekommt mit der EU-Erweiterung eine vergleichbare wirtschaftliche Grundlage wie der US-Dollar. Der zunehmende Vertrauensverlust gegenüber der amerikanischen Wirtschaft stärkt den Euro. Die Euro-Zone ist der größte Öl-Importeur der Welt, und der Nahe Osten bezieht 45 Prozent seiner Importe aus Europa. Die Parlamente von Iran und Russland haben über eine mögliche Übernahme des Euro für Ölverkäufe debattiert. Die meisten Länder der OPEC haben ein überwiegendes Interesse am Euro als Ölwährung. Verhindert hat die Ablösung des Dollars bislang vor allem Saudi-Arabien. Der frühere US-Botschafter in Saudi-Arabien erklärte im Jahr 2002 einem Kongress-Komitee:



"One of the major things the Saudis have historically done, in part out of friendship with the United States, is to insist that oil continues to be priced in dollars. Therefore, the US Treasury can print money and buy oil, which is an advantage no other country has. With the emergence of other currencies and with strains in the relationship, I wonder whether there will not again be, as there have been in the past, people in Saudi Arabia who raise the question of why they should be so kind to the United States."

Was macht die OPEC?

Eine Schlüsselrolle spielt jetzt neben der Euroland-Entwicklung das Ölkartell OPEC, das mit der erfolgten Besetzung des Irak einem erhöhten Druck der USA ausgesetzt ist. Werden die OPEC-Länder sich dem Druck beugen oder auf ihre Weise wehren?

Entscheidend wird sein, wie sich Saudi-Arabien in Zukunft verhält, das neokonservative US-Falken ja auch bereits ins Visier genommen haben. Was kann und wird die künftige Währungsstrategie der OPEC-Länder beeinflussen? Überlegungen zu einem Wechsel zum Petro-Euro jedenfalls gibt es auch bei der OPEC schon länger. In einem seinerzeit nur wenig beachteten Vortrag The Choice of Currency for the Denomination of the Oil Bill in Spanien während der spanischen EU-Präsidentschaft im April 2002 sah Javad Yarjani, Leiter des Petroleum Market Analysis Department der OPEC,http://www.opec.org/NewsInfo/Speeches/sp2002/spAraqueSpainAp… einen Währungsumstieg allerdings aufgrund der damaligen Euroschwäche noch eher in der mittleren oder fernen Zukunft:

"However, while the euro has the potential to be a viable competitor and possible alternative to the dollar in international financial and commodity markets in the medium to long term, its external weakness to date has meant it has been unable to gain inroads in the last two years. From the time the euro was floated in January 1999, the currency drifted downwards, losing by October 2000 about 30 per cent of its initial value against the dollar. It has since regained some of this lost ground, but is still far removed from parity with the dollar and even further removed from its starting value."

Das Argument mit dem im Vergleich zum Dollar schwachen Euro ist inzwischen offensichtlich erledigt. Der Euro darf in absehbarer Zukunft als stabilere Währung im Vergleich zum Dollar gelten. Einen möglicherweise entscheidenden Anstoß zum Petro-Euro sah der OPEC-Analyst im offiziellen Nennwert der Nordseesorte Brent-Öl, die mit einem Wechsel der Öl-Produzenten Norwegen und Großbritannien zum Euro kommen könnte:

"Of major importance to the ultimate success of the euro, in terms of the oil pricing, will be if Europe`s two major oil producers - the United Kingdom and Norway join the single currency. Naturally, the future integration of these two countries into the Euro-zone and Europe will be important considering they are the region`s two major oil producers in the North Sea, which is home to the international crude oil benchmark, Brent. This might create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros."

Aus genau diesem Grund nun ruft der eingangs erwähnte George Monbiot insbesondere auch seine globalisierungskritischen Landsleute auf, zu denen er sich selbst zählt, sich für die bisher eher kritisch gesehene Übernahme des Euro einzusetzen. Er sieht sogar eine moralische Verpflichtung darin, sich zusammen mit dem Rest der Welt der Hegemonialmacht USA zu widersetzen:

"To defend our sovereignty - and that of the rest of the world - from the US, we must yield some of our sovereignty to Europe."

[Joerver]

After 13 years fighting Saddam, Lord of the Marshes wants his country back
Guerrilla leader who became a legend emerges from hiding

Ewen MacAskill in Amarra
Monday April 28, 2003
The Guardian

For 13 years he was a defiant symbol of Iraqi resistance. Hunted in vain by Saddam Hussein`s militia, the legendary guerrilla fighter Abu Hattem fought an extraordinary campaign against the Iraqi regime from his secluded bases in the poisoned marshland of southern Iraq.

Known as the Lord of the Marshes, his exploits earned him a reputation that is a cross between Robin Hood and Lawrence of Arabia, with tales of suicidal missions and narrow escapes.

Western journalists tried for years to track him down during the guerrilla years, visiting Iranian border towns in the hope of finding him. They had no more success than the Iraqi secret police. Now that Saddam has fallen, the rebel leader has finally emerged from hiding and has given his first interview to the Guardian.

Abu Hattem said many of the legends about him were true. He fought what he calls The War of the Fleas with small groups, continually on the move, a constant source of irritation to the Iraqi army. He could not defeat them in open battle but he left them nervous about entering the marshes.

He had under his command at various times anything from a few hundred to 1,000, armed with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. They slept out in the marshes, a landscape that neutralised the Iraqi army`s superior numbers and technology. They had almost no money, and lived on fish and arms smuggling. "Many times they came close to catching me. On the first of July 1997, I was ambushed entering the small town of Maimoona at eight in the evening. My car was destroyed and I had 34 injuries, though only minor. I still have some of the shrapnel in my body," he said.

"The regime thought I had been killed and sent congratulations to all the armies in the south."

He is a striking figure, tall and thin, part politician, part brigand, dressed in white robes and traditional Arab headdress. He said Saddam did not even know what he looked like. "At one point, the regime was prepared to pay millions of dinars just for a picture."

Apart from the Kurds in the north, he is the only one to have mounted a sustained campaign within Iraq.

Until now, the idea of someone being able to sustain a campaign for 13 years against the repressive power of Saddam`s military seemed extremely improbable. But the events of the past weeks have revealed a powerful rebel leader, whose forces reached the eastern town of Amarra before the US and British; they are now running the town.

Politically ambitious, he feels this record entitles him to a say in the future of Iraq. But he is also leader of Hizbollah of Iraq, a name that for the US conjures up Islamist extremism and it may seek to exclude him. He was not invited to the first meeting of Iraqi opposition groups in Nassiriya, in southern Iraq, two weeks ago, hosted by the US and Britain.

He may yet abandon the gun and enter into peaceful politics but he said he is prepared too, if necessary, to turn his forces loose against the US and Britain if they overstay their welcome.

Asked if he would mount an armed campaign against the US if it stays on, he said: "It depends on the nature of the US presence in Iraq and the time of such a presence. Then, if the people will decide and if the people ask us to fight, we will be the first to take up arms. We did not fight Saddam to have US colonialism."

Abu Hattem is a nom de guerre. His original name is Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Hatab, born in Amarra in 1958. He fought with Kurdish guerrillas, the peshmerga, in the north and later studied at a religious school. He was jailed in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad from 1980 to 1986. On release, he started to organise peaceful dissent.

After the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he switched to guerrilla tactics, seeking a haven in the marshes.

He said the most difficult fighting was the year after the first Gulf war. Between February 28 and May 23, he was confronted by the Hamurabi division of the Republican Guard hunting him with helicopter gunships. "We had 43 killed and 413 wounded but they failed to establish control over the marshes. Saddam then began draining the marshes. With the marshes dry, we no longer had natural cover but it was still possible to fight."

The biggest engagement after that came between April 28 and May 13 in 1995 when the Iraqi army attacked Um-Jela, south of Amarra. He said the Iraqi army eventually withdrew after suffering losses.

Although he owes a lot to the marshes, he will not campaign for the restoration of the water that would bring life back to the marshes and allow the Marsh Arabs to return home. He would like to see it happen but it is not a priority for him. "This period of our lives in the marshes is over. The marshes will not be part of our new agenda."

A Shia Muslim, he is vague about that agenda, beyond saying he favours a broad-based democracy. He recognised that when people hear the name Hizbollah, they immediately think of political and religious violence.

He insisted that though his group is called Hizbollah, it has no links with the Lebanese-based organisation of the same name. Hizbollah in Lebanon is backed by both Syria and Iran but Abu Hattem said he had not received backing from any country, including Iran.

His forces, in civilian clothes and armed with Kalashnikovs, have set up headquarters in the former headquarters of the Iraqi army and Saddam`s Ba`ath party in Amarra. They maintain the checkpoints in the town, effectively controlling one of the main north-south routes between Basra and Baghdad.

There are mixed feelings in Amarra about the presence of his force. Some residents denounce them as thieves. British forces are standing back - for now.

Abu Hattem said: "We have established an understanding with the British forces. The British maintain a symbolic presence and we have a daily meeting with them."

He hoped the British and US forces "will go soon". He expected this to happen when security was established - which it has been - and local government set up.

He was alarmed by a US proposal last week to maintain four permanent bases in Iraq. "I have the same feelings about this idea as would every single guerrilla fighter round the world who does not want a foreign power over him," he said.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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The Right has the might - but it`s not invincible
The Left must learn how to take on the triumphant neo-conservatives

Henry Porter
Sunday April 27, 2003
The Observer

A few days before America and Britain attacked Iraq, the cover of Amnesty International`s membership magazine suggested that the human cost of war might be 50,000 deaths, 500,000 civilian injuries, two million refugees and displaced people and 10 million in need of humanitarian assistance.

Amnesty was wildly wrong on the figures but maybe also in its stance. Now that the stories of the extensive cruelty of Saddam`s security forces are being heard in full, an organisation that is devoted to the eradication of torture must wonder about the wisdom of a position that effectively argued for the continuation of a regime which practised torture like no other. As of this moment the torture chambers are empty, the executions have stopped and people are no longer losing their ears, eyes and tongues in routine mutilations. Surely that is the only result the charity could have hoped for.

The people at Amnesty are an easy target in these postwar days because that particular magazine cover portrayed exactly the liberal pessimism that neo-conservatives in the US claim has been exposed along with the true nature of Saddam`s regime. If ever proof were needed of the caution, hysterical dismay and unyielding self-righteousness of the liberal Left on both sides of the Atlantic, then Amnesty seems to have provided it.

Ten days ago The Wall Street Journal - a favourite outlet for neo-conservatives - published an editorial that pointed out the lamentable track record of the Left`s prewar predictions. The Arab street did not rise; the Turks did not invade northern Iraq; and the war did not involve Israel. It then quoted one of its own columnists, Robert Bartley, who wrote that today`s Left `had become a self-insulated elite convinced of its own virtue`.

It`s difficult to argue with that. Since Baghdad fell there has been very little movement on the Left to absorb and respond to events. Commentators who got it wrong are busy converting their vision of catastrophe to include an uprising of the Shia. They still insist on the general evil of the United States and remain rooted in arguments they obtained in the early part of this year, without adapting to the catalysing effect of the neo-con triumph.

The result of this inflexibility is that liberals who were opposed to the war concede a large part of the high ground to the neo-conservatives who seem to demonstrate their interest in rights and liberties. The one part of the argument that still belongs to the liberals is the failure of the coalition to produce convincing evidence on weapons of mass destruction. This is no small matter and it may yet prove a serious problem for Tony Blair, but one suspects that the neo-cons will not be unduly troubled by a failure to locate WMD. Regime change was always their primary objective, Saddam`s arsenal merely the pretext.

What is astonishing is the unabashed nature of the neo-conservative views that pour from commentators, editors and academics in Washington DC. Their only concern now is to consolidate the strategic advantages made by the Iraq war. There is no sense of apology and certainly no concession to the liberal consensus. This is in part due to the fact that many neo-cons like Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon`s Defence Planning Board, and Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld`s deputy at the Pentagon, migrated from the Left after becoming disillusioned with liberal institutions such as the UN.

An aura of invincibility surrounds the neo-cons which may prevent liberals from seeing US plans for the Middle East as being profoundly simple minded. For instance the neo-cons cannot understand that the passion for Islam in the Arab mind eclipses the desire for the material acquisition and rights that come with democracy.

Neo-conservatives are much more inconsistent than most people realise. While they urge democratic reform in Syria, Iran and even Saudi Arabia, they are less enthusiastic about democracy in Palestine. The fabled road map for the Middle East which at Blair`s request received Bush`s backing before the war is now being attacked in Washington. Tom DeLay, the leader of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, said last week: `The Israelis don`t need to change course. They don`t need to travel the path of weakness as defined by the neo-appeasers.`

Mindful of the Jewish lobby during an election year, Bush is unlikely to push for an `independent, viable, sovereign and democratic Palestine`, as defined by the road map. He will receive little encouragement to empower the Palestinians from the neo-cons because one thing that binds them is favouritism towards Israel.

If only liberals realised how damaging this inconsistency is to neo-con credibility, they would begin to retrieve some of initiative in the debate. And it is not just in Palestine that the neo-con case is exposed. Since 9/11, the date which marks the beginning of their takeover of US foreign policy, the Bush administration has been steadily eroding democratic rights in America. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of American citizens have been held by the Justice department without access to legal representation or judicial procedure. Across the world there are camps where terrorist suspects are imprisoned and tortured by American proxies.

Distaste for the war has prevented many liberals from thinking straight and seeing neo-con policies for what they are. Liberals may have been intimidated by their simplicity of purpose and understanding of power, but sooner or later they willrealise that neo-conservatism is not an all-conquering ideology but a risky strategic enterprise.

Liberals need to brush off the dust of the Iraq war, look at the new circumstances of the Middle East and meet the neo-cons on their own terms. This requires realism and a recognition that the idiom and reflexes of the Vietnam era are no longer applicable to a world created by the neo-conservatives.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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April 28, 2003
Invective`s Comeback
By WILLIAM SAFIRE


WASHINGTON

Here`s good news: Vigorous vituperation is coming back.

A lust for civil discourse almost stamped it out. Back in the mid-90`s, I took a pop at Colin Powell for having failed to finish off Saddam Hussein; in a New Yorker interview, he popped back mildly with "Safire is getting arrogant in his old age" (which didn`t rate as genuine vituperation because it was too close to the truth). Even so, at a subsequent New Year`s Eve party, the general felt the need to apologize.

Classic invective demands a vivid figure of speech. The current State Department reaction to criticism by the hawkish commentator Newt Gingrich offers examples of weak and strong vituperation.

In a Washington speech, Gingrich had blazed away at "ineffective and incoherent" State for "six months of diplomatic failure" and its "propensity for appeasing dictators and propping up corrupt regimes." In contrast, he noted, the Defense Department "delivered diplomatically and then the military delivered militarily."

The former Republican Speaker berated State bureaucrats for undue deference to the U.N. and for tolerance of terrorism in Syrian-occupied Lebanon. Because much of his unofficial view is shared by what many liberals call "the neocon cabal" around Bush, Gingrich`s broadside was taken by le tout Washington as damning evidence of internal war between Rumsfeldian hawks and Powellite doves.

The State response was ad hominem, attacking the speaker rather than his speech. Pitifully weak invective came from Elizabeth Jones, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who maintains our close friendship with France, Germany and Turkey. "What he said is garbage," our diplomat told Agence France-Presse. "He is an idiot and you can publish that."

That is mere sputtering expostulation, mark of a flustered and inarticulate partisan, not of an adept vituperator. It fell to Colin Powell`s longtime best friend, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, to slam back in the classic tradition.

"It`s clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," said America`s second-ranking diplomat. All of us observing "the Shootout at the Neocon Cabal" agree that was a good one. The rhythm of Armitage`s memorable phrase — reminiscent of Adlai Stevenson`s "out of sorts and out of office" — suggests that an unbalanced Gingrich is in need of, and running from, psychiatric care. The deputy secretary`s riposte offends only psychiatrists, and there are no Republican psychiatrists.

The heavyset, bullet-headed Armitage is known for having a good head on his shoulders. (That is primarily because he has no neck, but as they say on the seventh floor of Foggy Bottom, better neckless than feckless.) His "off his meds and out of therapy" is somewhat heavier-handed than the Democrats` sly dig at Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense (and the Sheriff Wyatt Earp of the Shootout at the Neocon Cabal), who has been saddled with the sobriquet "Wolfowitz of Arabia," and now stands as the eighth pillar of T. E. Lawrence`s wisdom.

Does this compare to other political invective in history? Not quite. It was John Randolph of Virginia, member of the House at the turn of the 18th century, who said of the brilliant Representative Edward Livingston of New York, who went on to become Andrew Jackson`s secretary of state: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks." That would now be considered a little over the top.

Gingrich, whose ethical decisions I castigated when he was riding high, may wish to respond to the Armitage counterattack with a cool analysis of institutional spinelessness at State. Perhaps he can use this example of invective without rancor:

"I remember, when I was a child," said Winston Churchill in the 30`s, directing his Commons oratory at J. Ramsey MacDonald`s Labor government, "being taken to the celebrated Barnum`s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit which I most desired to see was the one described as `The Boneless Wonder.`

"My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes," said Churchill, fixing a cherubic gaze at MacDonald, "and I have waited 50 years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Rebuilding Iraq: No Job for a Coalition


By Rachel Belton

Monday, April 28, 2003; Page A23


As the war in Iraq shifts from ending one regime to building another, America must pick a strategy for waging peace as effective as our strategy for waging war. Many thoughtful people hope to use a postwar international coalition to regain America`s legitimacy abroad, so badly damaged in the lead-up to war. Coalitions are crucially important to America`s war against terror. Yet a coalition is the wrong method for reconstructing Iraq.

The United Nations and international allies promised to rebuild democracy in Bosnia. Seven years later, they have departed -- only to hand over responsibility for the semi-state to the European Union. They failed again in Kosovo, where they are preventing a civil war but have brought little movement toward self-government in their four-year reign. In Afghanistan, international aid is coming too little and too late to support the fragile government.

The failure of these efforts to build autonomous, sovereign democracies lies in the very structure of international coalitions. Coalitions diffuse responsibility. When Bosnia failed to arrest war criminals, each coalition member could blame its compatriots. No one felt responsible for ensuring the legitimacy of the coalition -- or the success of the country. Slow funding from a coalition is also inevitable, given the multiple money streams and organizations that must be coordinated. Yet lack of disposable funds causes pro-Western politicians to lose ground to more shady leaders, often funded by less-savory states and criminal organizations, who can deliver results to the citizenry more quickly.

Reconstruction efforts often become the battlefields for unconnected struggles between coalition members. To gain the upper hand, "internationals" dissipate their time and energy playing politics against one another. Unable to agree on clear values and goals, and needing local allies for their fights, international organizations leave themselves at the mercy of local politicians. The locals who rise to the top after a war -- rarely the best of characters -- play agencies against one another to achieve their own purposes. As foreign countries beat out the local citizenry for the role of primary constituent, domestic politics is impoverished and viable democracy is delayed.

Poor political planning is one manifestation of bureaucratic international organizations` inability to think strategically. Broad goals and values for rebuilding government institutions are lost in the tactics of establishing and funding particular programs. As they run their small efforts, international organizations ignore strategic political junctures and critical pressure points crucial to moving a country toward self-rule and democracy.

Finally, coalitions overwhelm nascent, struggling local governments. Distrusting one another`s information, international organizations send their own fact-finding missions, hold their own meetings with local politicians and publish their own reports. Local ministries, understaffed after purges of former party members, are barely able to meet the demands of their international overseers, much less undertake the actual work of running a country.

The military has led the only two successful attempts at postwar democratization. In Japan and Germany, defense officials took full responsibility. Used to thinking stra- tegically, they focused on overarching values and critical missions. The centralized defense structure allowed America`s core values to remain consistent and penetrate every aspect of the mission. Yet, after setting and enforcing broad guidelines, they gave the Germans and Japanese great leeway in setting up their own governments. Perhaps most important, the military authorities did not want to remain. Unlike international organizations, whose entire job is to "help" other countries, the Pentagon has other work to do. It has every incentive to create a viable local government and then allow it the autonomy to function on its own.

Those who support multilateral reconstruction believe we can begin repairing rifts in the international system by diffusing responsibility for reconstruction. Yet under all proposed scenarios, America is going to run the reconstruction effort. Our detractors will still frame us as occupiers, while our attempts to placate international critics will sentence Iraq to a decade of uncertainty and limbo under international auspices.

Helping Iraq build a functioning democracy in which Iraqis can soon govern on their own is essential to our international legitimacy and crucial to the Iraqi people. The United Nations and other international organizations are staffed by many capable, intelligent, well-intentioned people. They should be encouraged to run humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq and should create a broad, multilateral coalition to control Iraq`s oil revenue to expunge the accusation that this has been a war for oil. Yet in concert, they would fail to democratize Iraq and would prevent it from regaining its autonomy and sovereignty. The Pentagon has succeeded in the past, and it has the unified structure that will allow it to succeed again. Let it do the job.

Rachel Belton is writing a book on nation-building.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
An Excess of Security




Monday, April 28, 2003; Page A22


IN AN AGE of threatened domestic terrorism, the government has come to treat people who seek asylum with greater suspicion. In March the Department of Homeland Security announced that asylum seekers who had just arrived from 33 mostly Muslim countries would be automatically detained while their applications were pending. This meant that individual pleas for bond, no matter how compelling, would be ignored. This tough policy was, at least, temporary, and the rationale was clear and direct: The government feared that Saddam Hussein or al Qaeda would send terrorists under cover of seeking asylum, and it had past cases to prove it. But last week Attorney General John D. Ashcroft released a ruling in an asylum case that stretches this already strained national security policy beyond any reasonable grounds.

The case concerns an 18-year-old Haitian, David Joseph, who made it to Florida on one of those overcrowded boats in October. The Board of Immigration Appeals approved Mr. Joseph`s release on bond last month, saying he did not pose a danger to the community or a flight risk. Mr. Ashcroft overturned that decision. His first reason, he wrote, was that releasing Mr. Joseph would "encourage further surges of mass migration from Haiti by sea." The reasoning here is already questionable, because it establishes a precedent of detaining someone not because he is a flight risk or a threat but to send a general message to a community.

But then Mr. Ashcroft stretched it further, invoking Sept. 11, 2001. These mass migrations, he wrote, "heavily taxed Coast Guard capacity and reduced responsiveness in other mission areas," meaning the lookout for terrorists. He also referred to a State Department report saying that "third country nations (Pakistanis, Palestinians) [were] using Haiti as a staging point" for entering the United States. Both these reasons are far-fetched. Every immigration case strains the resources of some government agency, and automatic detentions just strain vital immigration resources in a different way. As for the third-country nations, the difference between a Haitian and a Pakistani entering from Haiti could surely be discovered in a perfunctory border check.

Asylum has a long and symbolically rich history in the United States; it also has a well-established system of checks. Even before 9/11, asylum policy was moving in a more restrictive direction. After Mr. Joseph`s boat landed, for example, the Immigration and Naturalization Service made it more difficult for Haitians who arrived by sea to get a bond hearing, even if they had already landed on shore. The point is, the immigration system can be flexible to changing circumstances. But for the attorney general to send the message to immigration officials that broad national security concerns should always take priority over a case`s individual merits is overkill.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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April 28, 2003

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY

The plausibility meter is again going haywire. This notion that Saddam Hussein hurriedly disposed of his weapons of mass destruction just before the U.K. and U.S. invasion is preposterous.

First of all, if anything Blair and Bush were saying could be believed, all Saddam had to do was destroy the weapons and he could have avoided the consequences. Why would Iraq play cat and mouse with the inspectors, hide or move things just before Blix`s teams got there, and then turn around and secretly destroy the weapons, still providing the "coalition of the chilling" with the lynch pin needed to effect their execution? This doesn`t make sense to me either.

Secondly, with 300,000 troops amassed at Iraq`s borders, an armada of war vessels anchored within striking distance, and every indication that a siege is about to begin, why would Saddam destroy the only weaponry that might mire the advance of the invaders? If in fact they had such nasty agents, why weren`t they used when there were 10,000 troops staged in the area, 50,000 troops, 100,000 troops, you get the idea? Russia and France had to be telling Saddam all along that war was inevitable, so with that knowledge, they covertly destroy their only deterrent? Hardly a strategy even the most inept defender would choose.

Thirdly, what would the rationale be for such a move? Maybe Saddam wanted to go down in history as being right about what he was saying all along, that he didn`t posses any such weapons? Was he Trying to avoid the embarrassment of being called a liar by Blair and Bush? Or was Saddam just trying to ward off the agressors by letting them believe he could inflict great harm to any invader? The possibilities are mind boggling when dealing with an unpredictable tyrant.

Besides, wouldn`t there be all sorts of evidence of the hasty destruction of the quantities of chemicals and biological agents that Iraq was charged with possessing? Bush and Powell claimed there were tons and tons of unaccounted for agents. Althoughm,I have my own theory on how they have been moved undetected to Syria. It is called the "Nomad Theory", and it goes like this:

Knowing that constant surveillance by no fly zone monitors would easily detect a convoy of vehicles crossing over into Syrian territory, the wily Saddam formed a bestial team of the most unsightly weapons of mass destruction movers imaginable. Taking his cue from heroin smuggling mules, the weapons were loaded into condoms and forced fed to a massive herd of camels. Then, Saddam himself led this mercenary drove of dromedary death dispensers across nomadic routes into Syria. Not only was Saddam able to retain his diabolical arsenal, but he was also able to innocuously slip away to safety. As long as the camels did not "release" any of their contraband in the vicinity of the oil fields, the likelihood of discovery was quite remote. Carefully planned routes made detection near impossible. With only a modest supply of laxative, it is just a matter of time before Saddam can again threaten the entire free world.

Hey, it`s as plausible as any other reason forwarded thus far as to why the weapons can`t be found.

YT Cai

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Wohl die beste und ausführlichste Abhandlung

Carla Binion: `Bush lies and manipulates public and Congress`
Date: Friday, April 25 @ 10:04:54 EDT
Topic: Commander-In-Thief


By Carla Binion

In a May 2003 article for The American Prospecthttp://www.prospect.org/print/V14/5/bennett-d.html, Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken write "it is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush`s signature as president . . . More distressing even than the president`s lies, though, is the public`s apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it."

The Bush administration lied and deceived its way into the Iraq war. (See below list of links to articles that detail the Bush administration`s lies.)

Bush has also misled the public with fallacy and deceptive rhetoric. In The Progressive, April 2003, editor Matthew Rothschild talks about Bush`s manipulation of language. Rothschild quotes a line from Bush`s February 10 speech to a conference of religious broadcasters: "Before September the 11th, 2001, we thought oceans would protect us forever."



Later that day at an informal press conference, Bush repeated the "ocean" catchword, saying: "The world changed on September 11 . . . In our country, it used to be that oceans could protect us—at least we thought so." He used the "oceans" example again in his March 6 press conference.

Rothschild asked Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, what he makes of Bush`s rhetoric. Miller replied: "This notion of unprecedented vulnerability is absolutely crucial to the Bush team`s anti-constitutional program. The true meaning of anything Bush says is connotative. What that statement really means is, `We were safe, now we`re in danger, and the danger is so severe that you must give me all possible power. What the oceans once did now only I can do."

Rothschild notes the Bush description is irrational, because oceans haven`t really served as a buffer since Pearl Harbor. In fact, says Rothschild, the Soviet Union`s intercontinental ballistic missiles were aimed at the U.S. for years despite the oceans` barrier.

However, when words are used in ways that manipulate public fear, facts and rationality are beside the point. The aim of the corruption of language—whether conscious or unconscious—is to confuse rather than clarify, and to cause the listener to believe an illusion rather than the truth.

In his article, "Fallacies and War," Dave Koehlerhttp://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/50401.html points out misleading public arguments the administration uses to justify war. For example, the Bush team often presents the false dilemma—claiming there are only two possible options when, in fact, more choices are available.

Kohler refers to the statement Bush issued right after 9/11: "You`re either with us or with the terrorists." As Kohler says "Countries can be both against terrorism and not an ally of the U.S . . . Many countries are showing they are both against a preemptive war and against the current Iraqi regime." Bush said the U.N. must vote for war or face irrelevance. As Kohler points out, the U.N. can simultaneously survive and disagree with Bush.

The Bush team also repeatedly uses the fallacy of exclusion, meaning they leave out important aspects of any given argument. For example, Colin Powell and George Bush spoke about aluminum tubes being used for uranium enrichment for nuclear weapons use. Kohler notes they failed to take into account the essential fact that U.N. inspectors said the tubes were conventional rocket artillery casings.

Kohler points to another fallacy, argument from ignorance—the claim that what hasn`t been disproved must be true. The Bush administration implies Iraq must have weapons of mass destruction because of Iraq`s failure to prove it doesn`t. As Kohler says, the burden of proof is on the party making the claim, therefore the U.S. "must prove that Iraq has WMD. It is impossible for Iraq to prove they don`t."

In his article, "An Orwellian Pitch," John R. McArthur,http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=42761 publisher of Harper`s Magazine, writes about the Bush team`s manipulation of public opinion. He says, "Effective propaganda relies on half-truths and the conflation of disparate `facts` (like Saddam`s genuine human rights violations)." McArthur says the Bush team has managed to get away with this deceptive fact twisting because they use a tactic George Orwell described as "slovenliness" in the language.

Both Orwell and Aldous Huxley have written about dictatorial leaders and their methods of managing public opinion. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote that tyrants often use propaganda techniques that rely on the following. (1) Repetition of catchwords, (2) Suppression of facts the propagandist wants the public to ignore. (3) Inflaming mass fear or other strong emotional reaction for the purpose of controlling public opinion and behavior.

Huxley talks about Adolf Hitler`s propaganda efforts to appeal to the emotions of the masses instead of reason. He notes that Hitler systematically exploited the German people`s hidden fears and anxieties. The Bush administration has clearly exploited the American people`s fears of terrorism since September 11.

According to Huxley, Hitler said the masses run on instinct and emotion rather than facts and are easy to manipulate, while society`s intellectuals and independent thinkers insist on factual evidence and logic and easily see through fallacies. Huxley says Hitler encouraged the masses to attack or shout down intellectual dissenters rather than engage them in logical debate, because the rational dissenters would likely win any argument on the basis of fact.

Bush supporters have tried to silence dissent. Media bulldogs such as Bill O`Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage often use Hitler`s suggested technique of attacking and shouting down antiwar voices.

Huxley quotes Hitler`s statement that "all propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas . . . Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd." Bush has delivered the stereotyped formulas "You`re either with us or with the terrorists;" "the oceans can`t protect us;" and Saddam is connected with "al Qaeda," using constant repetition.

There can be little doubt the Bush administration has worked to coerce Congress, the public and the media into supporting Bush`s Iraq policy. On MSNBC, reporter Jeff Greenfield discussed the administration`s war propaganda with news anchor Paula Zahn. Greenfield said propaganda isn`t necessarily a negative thing, because it can influence an enemy regime to behave in ways that help U.S. troops and government officials.

The problem is, Bush`s propaganda has targeted average American citizens and Congress, using tactics that were once reserved to influence enemy governments abroad. Propaganda is negative when it promotes lies and encourages people to act against their own best interests, as the Bush administration`s spin has done.

In the months before Congress gave Bush the authority to wage war on Iraq, Bush administration officials tried to influence members of Congress by briefing them with reports that alleged Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, a central African country. Later it was revealed the Niger documents had been forged.

Congressman Henry Waxman said the Bush administration likely hoodwinked members of Congress. According to a March 25 Mother Jones article, Waxman said he voted to give Bush authority to invade Iraq in large part because he believed the administration`s claims about Iraq`s effort to purchase nuclear weapons.

The Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2003/13/we_338_01.htm…article includes an excerpt from a reproachful letter Waxman sent to George W. Bush. Waxman wrote: "It appears that at the same time that you, Secretary Rumsfeld, and State Department officials were citing Iraq`s efforts to obtain uranium from Africa as a crucial part of the case against Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials regarded this very same evidence as unreliable. If true, this is deeply disturbing: it would mean that your Administration asked the U.N. Security Council, the Congress, and the American people to rely on information that your own experts knew was not credible."

When Congress gave Bush virtually unlimited power to wage war, many legislators were unaware Bush officials had essentially planned the invasion of Iraq and "regime change" years before September 11. For more on this, see:
Were Neo-Conservatives` 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War? http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/DailyNews/pnac_0303…
Practice to Deceivehttp://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall…
Just the Beginninghttp://www.prospect.org/print/V14/4/dreyfuss-r.html


Bush sold the Iraq war by repeatedly (and falsely) linking September 11 with Saddam Hussein.

In a March 14 article for The Christian Science Monitor,http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html Linda Feldmann writes, "In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11. Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was `personally involved` in Sept. 11."

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former CIA officers, argues that the Bush administration`s evidence on Iraq`s alleged threat to the U.S. and purported ties to Al Qaeda are not credible. According to a March 14 Associated Press article,http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/… members of VIPS accused Bush administration officials of "cooking" the intelligence books and promoting "information that does not meet an intelligence professional`s standards of proof."

In a speech in early February, Colin Powell told the nation he had a transcript of a new Osama bin Laden tape—one that proved a "partnership" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. However, in a February 12 article for Salon, "War, lies and audiotape," reporter Joe Conason points out Powell misrepresented the transcript. The actual document, says Conason, "clearly contradicted the headlines [Powell] was trying to make."

The Bush administration also lied about Iraq`s weapons capabilities. According to a March 10 ABC news websitehttp://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/2020/GMA030310Iraq_weapon… report: "Before Congress, and in public, President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have repeatedly pointed to aluminum tubes imported by Iraq which they say are for use in making nuclear weapons. But on Friday, head United Nations nuclear inspector Mohammad ElBaradei told the Security Council that it wasn`t likely that the tubes were for that use."

According to another articlehttp://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6130936%255E… on the subject of Iraqﾒs weapons capabilities: "On February 5, Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council that the Iraqis possessed a drone plane that could fly 500 kilometers, violating U.N. rules that limit the range of Iraqi weapons to 150k." According to the article, Jane`s Defence Weekly, one of the most respected publications on defense matters, reported it was "doubtful" the drone could have flown the distance claimed by Powell. Drones expert Ken Munson said on the Jane`s web site there was no possibility the drone could fly "anywhere near 500 kilometers." Munson added, "The design looks very primitive, and the engines—which have their pistons exposed—appear to be low-powered."

Since September 11, the Bush administration and its various media mouthpieces have tried to intensify the public`s fear of terrorism, using lies to build a case for war and other questionable policies. Members of Congress, with few exceptions, have abdicated their responsibility to the American people by giving Bush unprecedented freedom to make war at will with virtually no congressional oversight.

Fortunately, Representatives Henry Waxman, Dennis Kucinich and a handful of others in the House, and Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Edward Kennedy and a few others in the Senate have challenged some of the Bush policies. However, too many in Congress have acquiesced to Bush on almost every important legislative issue and failed to fully investigate the Bush administration`s most egregious misdeeds.

U.S. diplomat John Brady Kiesling resigned from the State Department on February 27. In his letter of resignation, Kiesling said: "We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq . . . The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests."

The American people should urge Congress to exercise its oversight role and check the Bush administration`s power. The U.S. Constitution requires such checks and balances, and American democracy won`t thrive without them. If high crimes and misdemeanors can be established, Congress shouldn`t rule out impeachment.
Mehr Links:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=11152

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ESSAYS by Pierre Tristam
Award winning writer Pierre Tristam`s thoughts appear every Tuesday.

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Refusing lollipops of deception from Bush’s imperialist bazaar
President Bush`s Magic Kingdom version of compassionate imperialism is summed up in a single picture at whitehouse.gov, the presidency`s official Web site (not to be confused with the more nakedly honest pictorials at a similarly named Web site). The picture features a U.S. soldier in full combat gear crouching down to eye level with an Iraqi boy of 6 or 7, and offering him a pink-tipped sucker. The boy is dark-skinned in that white-man`s-burden sort of way. Besides ashen overalls, he`s wearing the hint of a Mona Lisa smile. He`s not sure what to think of the soldier`s offering. The United States dropped at least twice as much bomb tonnage in two brief Gulf wars as it did for the entirety of the Vietnam War. A sucker may not seem like the most convincing segway to rosy-fingered intentions. The boy nevertheless accepts the treat the way anyone but a masochist would accept an aggressor`s change of heart.
The intended audience of the picture, indeed the intended recipient of the sucker, is not the Iraqi boy. It is the American taxpayer, whose support for the unprovoked invasion and occupation of another country depends on believing that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is not a $100 billion swindle. Support once depended on believing that Saddam Hussein was a playmate of Osama bin Laden`s, that Iraq was a giant chemistry set, that Saddam was capable, from his thousand-and-one-night police state, of actually harming the mainland of the United States. The White House`s Ali Babas peddled these deceptions as if the world was their bazaar. But hot merchandise eventually cools.

You can topple only so many statues, arrest so many half brothers, hand out so many pink suckers and uncover so many dungeons (which have nothing on America`s gulag of supermax prisons anyway) before the public wearies of rebuilding somebody else`s Babylon while the American economy drifts toward Portugal. Yet one deception endures: that troops are in Iraq to protect our freedoms and our way of life. Invoke that one, and the shakedown of allegiance for the cause, or the silencing of opposition to it, can chug along with more octane than all the oil in Arabia.

The logic inherent to an unjust war makes it necessary to pretend that troops are individually rendering an indisputable service to the nation even if the collective purpose is suspicious. How else to justify to parents, widows and children back home the wasted lives, the injuries, the anguish, the endless absences? How else to justify the astounding expense of an optional war? Such a war needs every buy-in it can muster. It needs fabrications of worthy sacrifice like sentimental profiles of ex-POWs. It needs what the writer and Desert Storm veteran Anthony Swofford calls "the good news about war and warriors." But there`s a point when the myths become offensive. People who hawk those tales, Swofford writes at the end of "Jarheads," his Gulf War memoir, "are liars and cheats and they gamble with your freedom and your life and the lives of your sons and daughters and the reputation of your country."

U.S. troops in Iraq are not protecting freedom in America. Rather, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is endangering it. It is part of a pattern of aggression that mirrors the dubious excesses of the cold war abroad and at home, where the national security state was homeland defense`s oppressive parent. As an enemy to public liberty (to paraphrase James Madison), the Bush administration`s vague new wars on terrorism or on inflated enemies are the most to be dreaded. The security-industrial complex of contrived defenses like so-called Patriot Acts and color-coded alerts give the president the excuse to restrict freedom, judges the reasoning to abrogate it, legislators the room to ignore it, and a docile public the self-appointed task of trampling it to the proud tune of "God Bless America." Meanwhile the national treasury is bleeding red, its trillion-dollar deficits a bigger threat to national security than Saddam Hussein`s army of inflatable soldiers could have been. Baghdad may be secure (for now). Social Security, and social security, aren`t. We`ve been so busy waging wars in the name of freedom that freedom itself has become collateral damage.

That irony is never so sharp as when jingoes belittle war dissenters by trotting out the old cliche about U.S. soldiers abroad protecting the rights of dissenters at home. Not only are soldiers in Iraq not protecting anyone`s liberty at home, or even life and the pursuit of lucre, but the reverse has rarely been so true. Troops are the instrument of illegal conquest abroad and wars the justification of methodical erosions of liberties at home. Since Congress surrendered to the White House shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, it is the dissenters, by sheer acts of opposition, who are forcing debate on these vague wars and injecting balance and a sense of democracy in the moblike submission to Magic Kingdom empire-building. The dissenters are conscious of Madison`s warning. They`re refusing to accept the sucker. It is enough to make a soldier`s fans angry. But suckers make neither freedom nor free men.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at [e-mail].

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Lessons from the Past:
The American Record in Nation-Building

The following is an unedited version of a forthcoming policy brief. The final document will be published May 1, 2003 in both electronic and print form.

By Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper

Executive Summary

The record shows that democratic nation-building is among the most ambitious and difficult of foreign policy undertakings for the United States. Of the 16 over the past century, democracy was sustained in only 4 countries ten years after the departure of American forces. Two of these followed total defeat and surrender (in World War II) and two were in tiny countries (Grenada and Panama). The record also reveals that unilateral nation-building by the United States has an even lower success rate perhaps because unilateralism has led to the creation of surrogate regimes and direct American administration during the interim post-conflict period. The use of interim surrogate regimes has produced a record of complete failure. No American-supported surrogate regime made the transition to democracy and only one case of direct American administration (in Japan) succeeded in ushering in democracy. To heed the lessons of experience, the Bush administration should support a multilateral reconstruction strategy centered on bolstering political legitimacy and economic burden-sharing under the auspices of the United Nations.




The real test for the success of President George W. Bush`s preemptive strike against the regime of Saddam Hussein is whether or not he can rebuild Iraq after the war. Few national undertakings are as complex, costly, and time-consuming as reconstructing the governing institutions of foreign societies. Even the combination of unsurpassed military power and abundant wealth does not guarantee success, let alone quick results. Historically, nation-building attempts by outside powers are notable mainly for their bitter disappointments, not their triumphs.

Among great powers, the United States is perhaps the most active nation-builder. Since the founding of the republic, the United States has used its armed forces abroad on more than 200 occasions. To be sure, the majority of American military interventions abroad consisted of major wars (as in the two world wars), peace-keeping missions (as in Bosnia today), proxy wars (as in Nicaragua and Angola in the 1980s), covert operations (such as the coup in Chile in 1973), humanitarian interventions (as in the Balkans in the 1990s), rescue of American citizens, defense of allies under attack (as in Korea in 1950), and one-off retaliatory strikes (as the bombing raid against Libya in 1986). To separate ordinary military interventions from nation-building efforts, we apply three strict criteria. First, the practical effect, if not the declared goal, of American intervention must be a regime change or the survival of a regime which would otherwise collapse. Regime change or survivability is the core objective of nation-building because an outside power, such as the United States, must overthrow a hostile regime and/or maintain a friendly indigenous regime to implement its plans. Without such indigenous regimes, nation-building by outside powers is merely colonial rule by another name. It is worth noting that, at the outset, the primary goal of the United States was, in most cases, strategic. Washington decided to replace or support a regime in a foreign land to defend its core security and economic interests, not to build democracy. Later, America`s own political ideals and the need to sustain domestic support for nation-building made it imperative that the United States establish democratic rule in target nations.

The deployment of large numbers of American ground troops is the second indispensable element of nation-building. As the case of Guatemala in 1954 demonstrates, regime-change may occasionally be accomplished without the deployment of American ground forces. But nation-building generally requires the lengthy commitment of ground forces which are used to depose the regime targeted by the United States or maintain a regime the United States it favors. In many cases, American ground troops are needed not only to fight hostile forces in target countries, but to perform essential administrative functions, such as establishing law and order.

Finally, the use of American military and civilian personnel in the political administration of the target countries is the quintessential feature of nation-building. As a result of deep American involvement in the political process of target countries, the United States exercises decisive influence in the selection of political leaders to head the new regimes. Washington also restructures the key political institutions of the target countries (such as rewriting the constitution and other important laws) and participates in the routine administrative activities (such as public finance and delivery of social services) of target countries.

Based on these criteria, we characterize 16 of more than 200 American military interventions since 1900, roughly 8 percent, as attempts at nation-building through the promotion or imposition of democratic institutions desired by American policy-makers. (Table 1).

The American Record in Nation-Building

The most striking aspect of the American record in nation-building is its mixed legacy in establishing democratic regimes. Table 1 shows the sobering results. The United States had two unambiguous success stories, Japan and West Germany, both defeated Axis powers in WWII. (Unconditional surrender by the old regimes in these two cases appeared to have created a more favorable psychological environment for the rebuilding efforts in the post-conflict phase.) Grenada and Panama may also be considered successes. However, Grenada is a tiny island nation with 100,000 inhabitants; Panama`s population is less than 3 million. Nation-building generally is less challenging in small societies. On the other hand, American nation-building efforts failed to establish and sustain democracies in the other 11 (excluding Afghanistan) cases. Three years following the withdrawal of American forces, democracy was considered functioning only in 5 of the 15 cases (excluding Afghanistan); ten years after the departure of American forces, democracy was sustained in only four cases. We judge whether a regime is democratic or authoritarian on the basis of a widely used index provided by Polity. In that ranking, a fully democratic regime gets a score of 10 while a fully authoritarian regime is assigned minus 10. In our study, regimes scoring 3 or less (for example, today`s Iran receives 3) are considered non-democratic. If we apply this yardstick, the United States` overall success rate of democratic nation-building is about 26 percent (4 out of 15 cases).

Failure to sustain democratic regimes in target nations can produce disastrous consequences for the local populations. In Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua, for example, brutal dictatorships, albeit friendly to Washington, emerged in the wreckage of botched nation-building efforts. These societies remained mired in misrule and wide-spread poverty. In Cambodia, a genocidal regime gained power after the departure of American troops and perpetrated one of the worst crimes against humanity in history. American defeat in Vietnam ushered in a communist regime which forced millions to flee their native land.

Among these 16 cases, 12 were undertaken unilaterally. Two (Afghanistan and Haiti) were authorized by the United Nations. U.N. resolutions not only provided the United States with helpful allies in these two difficult undertakings, but also international legitimacy. One case, the rebuilding of West Germany, was undertaken following the Allied victory in World War II, while the American occupation of Japan was multilateral in form but unilateral on the ground. American unilateralism in nation-building has been made possible by the preponderance of American power. Except in taking on powerful states such as Japan and Germany, the United States faced few external constraints in imposing its will on other societies. For example, in Latin America, the strategic backyard of the United States where Washington attempted nation-building on 11 occasions, the United States has intervened in the internal politics of the countries in the region with little regard for opposition from other states.

However, since the end of the Cold War, the United States seems to be more willing to assemble multilateral support in humanitarian interventions and the rebuilding if failed states. In the case of forced regime change in Haiti in 1994, President Bill Clinton obtained authorization from the United Nations Security Council. The ensuing nation-building efforts in Haiti, although ultimately unsuccessful, were supervised by the United Nations. Another case is the on-going nation-building project in Afghanistan. Even though American military intervention was decisive in toppling the Taliban, the Bush administration ceded to the United Nations the primary responsibility for rebuilding Afghanistan. In Bosnia and Kosovo, two cases of multilateral humanitarian intervention (not regime change), post-conflict nation-building is also being carried out under the auspices of the United Nations.

There is a clear connection between unilateralism and the way targeted nations were governed in the period immediately following American military intervention. Of the 16 cases of nation-building by the United States, 7 can be classified as instances of interim rule by American-supported surrogate regimes. Surrogate regimes are characterized by their near-total dependency on Washington. They are headed by individuals picked by or acceptable to the United States. American military support is crucial to their survival. These virtual American protectorates included the regimes in Cuba (1917-22), Haiti (1915-34), the Dominican Republic (1965-66), Nicaragua (1909-33), Panama (1903-36), South Vietnam (1964-73), and Cambodia (1970-73). What is notable about the use of interim surrogate regimes in nation-building is that this strategy has produced a record of complete failures - none of the target countries ruled by surrogate regimes made the transition to democracy ten years after the withdrawal of American forces. One possible explanation was that, in building these interim regimes, the United States facilitated the rise of the military, a key state institution, as a potent political power. Strongmen seized control of the military later on to advance their personal ambitions. Another likely explanation is that these surrogate regimes lacked indigenous legitimacy and, after American withdrawal, had to resort to repression to maintain their power.

In the other 9 cases, the United States adopted a variety of approaches to interim administration. In Cuba (1898-1902 and 1906-09), the Dominican Republic (1916-24), and Japan (1945-52), Washington imposed direct American rule. In West Germany (1945-49), the United States opted for multilateral administration, sharing the power with France and England. In Grenada (1983), Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994), Washington quickly turned power to democratically elected local leaders. In Panama and Haiti, the United States was able to do so mainly because of the availability of legitimate leaders who actually had won contested elections prior to the U.S.-led regime change. The only instance of an interim administration under the mandate of the United Nations is Afghanistan following the overthrow of the Taliban regime. The record of these different approaches to interim administration is uneven. Direct American administration worked only in Japan, but not in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Handing power to legitimately elected local leaders proved successful in Panama and Grenada, but not in Haiti. Multilateral administration enabled West Germany to regain its self-rule quickly, but remains a work in progress in Afghanistan.


What Makes Nation-Building Work

In all likelihood, the low overall success rate understates the difficulty of nation-building in underdeveloped societies. Of the 14 cases of American nation-building in such countries, only two (Panama in 1989 and Grenada) were successful, a success rate of just 14 percent. In retrospect, success or failure in nation-building depends on three critical variables:

1. The internal characteristics of the target nation:

Nation-building is political engineering on a grand scale. Some nations, such as Haiti, may have social and political attributes (such as deep ethnic fissures, religious animosities, and high levels of inequality) which made them inherently resistant to political engineering by outsiders. Societies that have a relatively strong national identity (such as Japan and Germany), high ethnic homogeneity, and relative socioeconomic equality are more suitable targets for nation-building. In such societies with a high level of internal cohesion, occupying foreign forces are less likely to be dragged into domestic power struggles or manipulated by dueling groups to settle long-standing grievances. By contrast, ethnically fragmented countries, such as Iraq, pose extraordinary challenges to nation-builders because, lacking a common national identity, different ethnic groups, particularly those long-oppressed, tend to seize the rare opportunity of outsiders` intervention to seek complete independence or gain more power. This can trigger national disintegration or a backlash from other ethnic groups, with the outside powers caught in the middle.

Equally important is the state capacity of the target nation. This capacity includes the organizational effectiveness and discipline of the military, bureaucracy, and judiciary. Stronger state capacity in target countries obviates the need for the intervening states to perform the most rudimentary functions of government, usually thankless tasks for outsiders with scant knowledge of complex local conditions. In Cuba, the United States drafted laws of local governments and the judiciary, pacified labor strife, settled election disputes, and managed the nation`s public finance. In Haiti, American forces oversaw public health, controlled the treasury, supervised routine government affairs, and suppressed local rebellions. In the Dominican Republic, the United States built roads, bridges, and other infrastructure projects. Such deep and extensive involvement reduced nation-builders to quasi-colonial rulers and helped generate local resentment.

In contrast, the United States relied primarily on the indigenous bureaucracies in Japan and West Germany to perform these routine governmental functions. This had obvious advantages but required a deep compromise on regime change. In both Germany and Japan, the United States curtailed the purge of the loyalists of the old regime and left the majority of civil servants and business elites untouched. In Japan, for example, out of 2.5 million cases investigated, only 40,000-fewer than 2 percent-of the politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen with ties to the militaristic regime were purged from power. After the occupation, many of these disgraced elements of the old regime regained their political rights; in the first post-occupation Diet election, they accounted for 42 percent of the winning candidates. In West Germany, many former Nazi elements officially ousted from power during "de-Nazification" were also brought back into the government as the Cold War got underway.

It is worth noting that while strong state capacity is almost a requirement for success, building indigenous state capacity may be a challenge beyond even the most well-intentioned and determined outsiders. Effective state institutions historically evolve organically out of the social structure, cultural norms, and distribution of political power of a given society. Political engineering by outsiders seldom succeeds in radically altering the underlying conditions responsible for the ineffectiveness of the state. Even lengthy commitment does not guarantee success. For example, the United States was engaged in nation-building in Panama for 33 years (1903-36), in Haiti for 20 years (1915-34), in Nicaragua for 18 years (1909-27), in Cuba for, cumulatively, 11 years, and in the Dominican Republic for 8 years (1916-24).

Finally, previous experience with constitutional rule is a crucial variable. Nation-building in target countries that have had periods of constitutional rule - characterized by a practice of the rule of law and binding limits on the power of the government- is more likely to succeed. The importance of such experience of constitutionalism, however brief, is that political behavior in these societies is more subject to the most fundamental rules of governing. Political conflicts get settled through established institutional procedures. Both Japan and Germany had had brief histories of constitutional rule. In contrast, none of the states where American efforts failed did.

2. Convergence of geopolitical interests of the outside power and the target nation:

Outside powers have greater probability of success if their broad geopolitical interests dovetail with those of both the elites and the people in the target nation. Three conditions must be met. First, the commitment of the outside power must be sustained by a compelling strategic interest. In the case of Japan and West Germany, American resolve was bolstered by the need to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In addition, this strategic interest should be broadly aligned with the national interests of the target country. Third, there should also be a consensus on such shared strategic interests within the society of the target nation. In Japan and West Germany, the public in both countries agreed with their leaders` policy of allying with the United States to resist the spread of communism. Popular acceptance of nation-building by outsiders becomes unsustainable if the local population perceives the occupying foreign power as advancing its own interests or the interests of domestic ruling elites. The United States` disappointing record in nation-building is due, in large part, to ill-considered decisions to ally with unsavory local elites in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Such alliances of political expediency were ultimately rejected by the people in the target nations as illegitimate.

3. Commitment to economic development in target nations:

Successful nation-building requires not only political commitment, but enormous economic resources. In West Germany, the generous aid provided under the Marshall Plan was a critical factor in re-vitalizing the country`s economy. In Japan, economic recovery benefited considerably from American aid channeled through the efforts to fight the Korean War. However, in Latin America, the United States typically failed to deliver substantial economic aid following its military interventions. To the contrary, in many instances, the United States took advantage of the target countries economically through sweetheart deals for American corporations. More important than the absolute amount of American aid, however, is whether such aid could help launch a self-sustaining economic development process in the target nations. Japan and West Germany, both highly educated, developed societies before American occupation, faced no difficulty in utilizing the aid to re-build their economies. On the other hand, countries such as Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and South Vietnam, had no indigenous capacity to make productive use of American assistance.

The Challenges Ahead in Iraq

The challenge of post-war Iraq represents, without doubt, the most ambitious American nation-building project since Vietnam. The internal characteristics of Iraqi society will severely test Washington`s resolve, skill, and patience in the pursuit of its declared goal of political transformation. With a population of 24 million, Iraq is larger than any of the Latin American countries where the United States has attempted nation-building. More worrisome are the deep ethnic and religious divisions within Iraq, as compared to others. The long-running ethnic and religious hostility among Iraq`s three dominant ethnic groups, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, will greatly complicate the American effort. Each group has an inherent incentive to exploit the American presence to advance its own agenda. Washington will find itself perpetually tested and judged for even-handedness on a whole array of local issues, for which there is no good, or even fair, answer. For example, whether to return the Kurds to Kirkuk, Iraq`s major oil production center from which they were expelled by Saddam will be an early test. Outside efforts to bridge such ethnic and religious divisions through reconciliation, as demonstrated in the former Yugoslavia, have a poor track record.

More problematic will be cleansing the new Iraqi state of the loyal elements of the Baath regime. Saddam`s ruling regime resembled a Leninist party-state in which the state and the party are one and the same. In this unique political structure, the organization of the ruling party is built into the institutions of the state, such as the police, bureaucracy, and judiciary, as well as the military. Thus, a thorough de-Baathification would eviscerate the existing Iraqi state, at least in the short term. This would require the U.S.-led occupation authorities to perform nearly all critical governmental functions in Iraq. The re-building of Iraqi`s state capacity, involving recruitment and training of new law enforcement officials, civil servants, and judges, would almost certainly take longer than the optimistic 1-2 year timeframe suggested by some Bush administration officials. The alternative is to retain many low and mid-level elements of the existing Baath party-state and use them to run post-war Iraq. This may relieve the occupying American forces of routine administrative tasks, but expediency creates its own problems, the most serious of which is the adverse impact of this policy on the Shiite and Kurdish population because nearly all members of the Baath regime are Sunnis.

Most challenging will be the task of aligning American strategic interests with those of the Iraqi elite and public. The Kurds` strategic interest in separation conflicts with the Bush administration`s stated policy of protecting Iraq`s territorial integrity. Other ethnic groups` receptivity to an American presence is at best unclear. Once the despotic Saddam regime is removed from power, the United States could find it almost impossible to persuade the Sunnis and Shiites that their long-term strategic interests overlap with those of Washington. Despite the administration`s best efforts to project a vision for its long-term objective in Iraq, Washington`s real agenda remains under deep suspicion in the region.

Long-term prospects for nation-building in Iraq would likely be enhanced if this project is managed by the United Nations, which has been supervising similar post-conflict reconstruction in many countries, such as East Timor, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia. To be sure, a multilateral approach to nation-building does not guarantee success; nation-building undertaken under the U.N. framework brings with it its own set of problems and challenges. At the initial stage, coordination is likely to be poor, and lines of authority will be unclear. But the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Economically, this approach would spread the costs of re-building Iraq more widely. Politically, a multilateral approach will help heal the wounds caused by the acrimonious dispute between the United States and many nations before the war. In all likelihood, a U.N.-led re-building effort will be viewed as more legitimate, especially in the Middle East. Suspicions about Washington`s ulterior motives in Iraq would be dispelled.

To be sure, some in the administration appear committed to a U.S.-led effort. They should reconsider their position in light of the sobering lessons from American nation-building in the last century. Aside from an overall low probability of success, such unilateral undertakings have led to the creation and maintenance of surrogate regimes that eventually mutated into military dictatorships and corrupt autocracies. Repeating this mistake in Iraq, especially after President Bush`s declaration of American resolve to build democracy there, would be a tragedy for the Iraqi people, and a travesty of American ideals and reputation.

Tabellen:
http://www.ceip.org/files/print/2003-04-11-peipolicybrief.ht…

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Greenspan`s Unfortunate Return


Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.http://www.cepr.net/


Reappointing Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is like inviting the Titanic`s captain back to the helm for another cruise.

The financial markets and the punditocracy continue to believe that Greenspan is the closest thing to God on Earth -- witness the market rally on April 22, when the White House announced the reappointment. But this faith in Mr. Greenspan says more about their continued lack of contact with reality than his merits as Fed chairman. After all, these are some of the same people who thought a 5,000 NASDAQ index made sense (it`s now below 1,500).

Do they forget that Greenspan ignored the largest financial bubble in history, which led to a loss of more than $8 trillion in stock wealth? It should have been clear by 1997 that the stock market had entered a bubble, as at least a few economists were saying at the time. As a result of its bursting, the economy remains mired in stagnation.

It would not have been difficult for Greenspan to deflate this bubble, as he inadvertently demonstrated in late 1996, when he made his famous comment about the market`s "irrational exuberance." The comment sent the market plummeting. If Greenspan hadn`t reversed his position two days later, his comment might have, by itself, prevented further expansion of the bubble. If he had consistently berated the markets with "irrational exuberance" comments and supported his case with charts and graphs, it is unlikely the market would have reached the dizzying heights of 1999 and 2000. If talk proved insufficient, he could have raised the margin requirement (which restricts borrowing to buy stock), and if necessary, he could have raised interest rates.

But he didn`t do any of that -- and arguably, he even may have promoted expansion of the bubble with his "new economy" rhetoric. The economy will suffer for years to come as a result.

The bad news is not all behind us. Greenspan continues to ignore a housing bubble, the collapse of which is likely to have even larger repercussions for the economy and the retirement security of millions of Americans. People are currently buying homes in the bubble-infected markets (mostly on the east and west coasts), which could lose 30 to 40 percent of their value in a drop. For most families, their home is their biggest investment. Tens of millions of baby boomers are counting on equity in their home to support them in retirement now that their 401(k) plans have suffered so drastically from the stock market retreat. Instead of warning of a housing bubble, Greenspan testified before Congress last summer that there is no such thing.

He also supports an over-valued dollar that is causing the nation to borrow more than $1.5 billion every day from abroad. This process cannot continue for long. At some point the country literally will run out of things to sell -- in about 20 years at the current rate, if foreigners don`t lose interest in the United States long before that. Whenever it happens, the dollar will drop, sending import prices and inflation soaring, and U.S. living standards will plummet. Again, Greenspan could act now, but he seems happy to let this debt continue to grow, happy to pass this problem on to future generations.

Those generations will suffer, too, from his endorsement of Bush`s first round of draconian tax cuts. It`s not clear why Greenspan did it -- after all, the head of the Fed shouldn`t be influenced by the political climate -- because it was crystal clear from the start that those cuts were reckless.

Yet, unlike the custodian or the factory worker who get fired for poor performance, Greenspan just keeps drawing praise and getting reappointed. Nice work, if you can get it.


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Published: Apr 24 2003

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7646/view/print

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[Joerver]

Reagan blasts Bush
"My father crapped bigger ones than George Bush," says the former president`s son, in a flame-throwing conversation about the war and the Bush administration`s efforts to lay claim to the Reagan legacy.

By David Talbot

April 14, 2003 | The Bush inner circle would like to think of George W.`s presidency as more of an extension of Ronald Reagan`s than of his one-term father`s. Reagan himself, who has long suffered from Alzheimer`s disease, is unable to comment on those who lay claim to his political legacy. But his son, Ron Jr., is -- and he`s not pleased with the association.

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he`s in now," he said during a recent interview with Salon. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the `80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father`s -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don`t trust these people."
Reagan spoke with Salon from his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Doria, a psychologist. A former ballet dancer ("At 45, I`m afraid those days are over"), he has worked in recent years as a magazine journalist and a TV personality, currently hosting dog shows for the Animal Planet network ("I live `Best in Show`"). He and Doria have three cats, but no children ("They`re like kids, without the tuition"). Though he never followed his father into politics, Reagan takes a strong interest in public issues, serving on the board of the Creative Coalition, an organization founded in 1989 by performers like Susan Sarandon and Christopher Reeve to politically mobilize entertainers and artists. Reagan recently moderated a Creative Coalition panel discussion in San Francisco on the topic of free expression during wartime, featuring Alec Baldwin on the left and Michael Medved on the right (and a smoldering Sean Penn in the audience).

Reagan, still as lean as he was in his dancing days, has a sharp tongue -- but like his father, he has a knack for softening his barbs with a charming affability and disarming sense of humor.

Reagan took a swipe at Bush during the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, which featured a tribute to his father, telling the Washington Post`s Lloyd Grove, "The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What`s his accomplishment? That he`s no longer an obnoxious drunk?" Since then he`s been quiet about the current occupant of the White House -- until now.
Some observers have compared Bush`s persona as an intellectually challenged but politically gifted leader to that of Reagan. But the younger Reagan vehemently rejects the analogy. "The gunslinging cowboy, the actor who just read his lines -- that stereotype doesn`t fit who my father really was.

"My father had decades of experience in public life. He was president of his union, he campaigned for presidential candidates, he served two terms as governor of California -- and that was not a ceremonial office as it is in Texas. And he had already run for president, against Ford in `76, nearly unseating the sitting president in his own party. He knew where he was coming from, he had spent years thinking and speaking about his views. He didn`t have to ask Dick Cheney what he thought.

"Sure, he wasn`t a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that`s the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

Reagan says he doesn`t have anything personal against Bush. He met him only once, at a White House event during the Reagan presidency. "At least my wife insists we did -- he left absolutely no impression on me. But Doria remembers him very negatively -- I can`t repeat what she said about him, I`d rather not use profanity. I do remember Jeb -- a big fella, seemed to be the brightest of the bunch. And of course their parents were very charming."

But Reagan has strong feelings about Bush`s policies, including the war in Iraq, which he ardently opposes. "Nine-11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda -- and they didn`t hesitate for a moment to use it. I mean, by 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, `Let`s hit Iraq.` They`ve used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."

Of course, Reagan`s father was also known for his military buildup and aggressive foreign policy. "Yes," he concedes, "there are some holdovers from my dad`s years, like Elliott Abrams and, my God, Admiral Poindexter, who`s now keeping watch over us all. But that observation doesn`t hold up. My father gave a speech a couple years after he left the White House calling for `an international army of conscience` to deal with failed states where atrocities are taking place. He had no thought that America should be the world`s policeman. I know that for a fact from conversations I had with him. He believed there must be an international force to intervene where great human tragedy was occurring. Rwanda would have been a prime example, where a strike force capable of acting quickly could have gone in to stop the slaughter.

"Now George and Dick and Rummy and Wolfy all have a very different idea about America`s role in the world. It was laid out by [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz back in `92 -- Iraq is the center of the Middle East, its axis, and it`s of such geo-strategic importance that we can`t leave it in the hands of Saddam. We need to forcibly change that regime and use Iraq as a forward base for American democracy, setting up a domino effect in the region, and so on. My father, on the other hand, was well aware of the messiness of the Middle East, particularly after [the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in] Lebanon."

Reagan says his opinions about the war were not changed by the rapid fall of Baghdad. "Look, whether or not Saddam was a bad guy, or whether the Iraqi people were terribly oppressed, was never the issue. I mean I`m happy for the Iraqis, but that`s not what this was all about. Nor was the military conclusion ever in doubt; this was the Dallas Cowboys playing a high school team. Their army was a third the size it was in `91, and it didn`t give us much trouble then.

"And the weapons of mass destruction? Whatever happened to them? I`m sure we`ll find some," he laughs. "They`re being flown in right now in a C-130.

"There were, and will be, a lot of people killed over there. And if you don`t care about the Iraqi casualties, what about the American? We stand to lose more people in the next months of occupation than we lost in the weeks of war. One of the reasons we escaped largely unscathed so far was because our military moved so fast. But now we`re sitting targets -- we have to establish bases, patrol the streets, guard checkpoints. We`re sitting targets for suicide bombers and other terrorists."

Reagan`s parents were notoriously remote from their four children. Ron Jr. reportedly had the closest relations with his parents and he remains close with his mother, Nancy Reagan, who as the keeper of the Reagan flame is often called upon to dedicate public sites bearing her husband`s name. Reagan says his mother shares his "distrust of some of these [Bush] people. She gets that they`re trouble in all kinds of ways. She doesn`t like their religious fervor, their aggression."

Reagan says his family feels particularly alienated from the Republican Party over its opposition to embryonic stem cell research, which could have significant benefit for Alzheimer patients like his father. "Now ignorance is one thing, ignorance can be cured. But many of the Republican leaders opposing this research know better, people like [Senate Majority Leader] Bill Frist, who`s a doctor, for God`s sake. People like him are blocking it to pander to the 20 percent of their base who are mouth-breathers. And that`s unconscionable -- there are lives at stake here. Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics."

Reagan, who says the label "progressive" would fit him, does not belong to a political party. "I`m certainly not a Republican; I couldn`t belong to any party that had leaders like Tom DeLay. And the Democrats are too busy trying to out-Republican the Republicans."

His father entered politics at a relatively late stage in his life, after careers as a sports broadcaster, actor and General Electric pitchman. Has Reagan ever considered running for office? No, he insists, "I have no political ambitions. For one thing, I`m not interested in raising all that money. It`s just not the life I want to lead. When is the last time you heard a politician speak his mind? McCain? Yes, he came close. But I once asked him at a Creative Coalition meeting, `You talk passionately about this nexus of money and influence that is corrupting our democracy. Why don`t you name names?` His response was a demurral.

"I have no problem with public service. And yes, better people should be running for office. But personally I just can`t see myself doing it, to live in Washington D.C., the whole package. I was immersed in that my whole life. I saw politicians up close and there were so many who just repulsed me."

What if a group of concerned citizens approached him and helped raise money for his entry into politics -- would that make a difference? "You mean like they did with George W.? `Hey, you`ve got name recognition, that`s all that matters -- we`ll give you millions of dollars to run!` Imagine coming to a man with just two years` experience in public office, and a ceremonial one at that. Imagine installing such a blank slate in the presidency of the United States! This is a regency, not a presidency.

"And they told us, `Don`t worry about W. not knowing anything, good old Dick Cheney will be his minder.` Dick Cheney? And this was going to be compassionate conservatism? Dick Cheney is to the right of Genghis Khan, he wants to drill in your backyard, he wants to deny black people their rights --it was all there in his voting record for us to see. What were we, rubes?"

While Reagan rejects a political career, he clearly doesn`t shy from speaking out. What if GOP conservatives, who still lionize his father as the greatest president of the 20th century, pressure him to shut up? "That wouldn`t be a smart thing for anyone to do."


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[Joerver]

>>> During the same week, the front covers of Newsweek and US News and World Report showed the same Iraqi kissing different soldiers. And the guy also had a prominent spot smashing the statue of Saddam at the stage-managed pull-down in Baghdad. Surely Hollywood will soon be calling for this hot young actor.







posted 25 April 2003 | Thanks to Eschaton

[Joerver]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030512&s=greider


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Rolling Back the 20th Century
by WILLIAM GREIDER

[from the May 12, 2003 issue]

I. Back to the Future

George W. Bush, properly understood, represents the third and most powerful wave in the right`s long-running assault on the governing order created by twentieth-century liberalism. The first wave was Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 allowed movement conservatives finally to attain governing power (their flame was first lit by Barry Goldwater back in 1964). Reagan unfurled many bold ideological banners for right-wing reform and established the political viability of enacting regressive tax cuts, but he accomplished very little reordering of government, much less shrinking of it. The second wave was Newt Gingrich, whose capture of the House majority in 1994 gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in two generations. Despite some landmark victories like welfare reform, Gingrich flamed out quickly, a zealous revolutionary ineffective as legislative leader.

George Bush II may be as shallow as he appears, but his presidency represents a far more formidable challenge than either Reagan or Gingrich. His potential does not emanate from an amiable personality (Al Gore, remember, outpolled him in 2000) or even the sky-high ratings generated by 9/11 and war. Bush`s governing strength is anchored in the long, hard-driving movement of the right that now owns all three branches of the federal government. Its unified ranks allow him to govern aggressively, despite slender GOP majorities in the House and Senate and the public`s general indifference to the right`s domestic program.

The movement`s grand ambition--one can no longer say grandiose--is to roll back the twentieth century, quite literally. That is, defenestrate the federal government and reduce its scale and powers to a level well below what it was before the New Deal`s centralization. With that accomplished, movement conservatives envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900, when William McKinley was President. Governing authority and resources are dispersed from Washington, returned to local levels and also to individuals and private institutions, most notably corporations and religious organizations. The primacy of private property rights is re-established over the shared public priorities expressed in government regulation. Above all, private wealth--both enterprises and individuals with higher incomes--are permanently insulated from the progressive claims of the graduated income tax.

These broad objectives may sound reactionary and destructive (in historical terms they are), but hard-right conservatives see themselves as liberating reformers, not destroyers, who are rescuing old American virtues of self-reliance and individual autonomy from the clutches of collective action and "statist" left-wingers. They do not expect any of these far-reaching goals to be fulfilled during Bush`s tenure, but they do assume that history is on their side and that the next wave will come along soon (not an unreasonable expectation, given their great gains during the past thirty years). Right-wingers--who once seemed frothy and fratricidal--now understand that three steps forward, two steps back still adds up to forward progress. It`s a long march, they say. Stick together, because we are winning.

Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right`s historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing? The right`s unifying idea--get the government out of our lives--has broad popular appeal, at least on a sentimental level, because it represents an authentic core value in the American experience ("Don`t tread on me" was a slogan in the Revolution). But the true source of its strength is the movement`s fluid architecture and durability over time, not the passing personalities of Reagan-Gingrich-Bush or even the big money from business. The movement has a substantial base that believes in its ideological vision--people alarmed by cultural change or injured in some way by government intrusions, coupled with economic interests that have very strong reasons to get government off their backs--and the right has created the political mechanics that allow these disparate elements to pull together. Cosmopolitan corporate executives hold their noses and go along with Christian activists trying to stamp out "decadent" liberal culture. Fed-up working-class conservatives support business`s assaults on their common enemy, liberal government, even though they may be personally injured when business objectives triumph.

The right`s power also feeds off the general decay in the political system--the widely shared and often justifiable resentments felt toward big government, which no longer seems to address the common concerns of ordinary citizens.

I am not predicting that the right will win the governing majority that could enact the whole program, in a kind of right-wing New Deal--and I will get to some reasons why I expect their cause to fail eventually. The farther they advance, however, the less inevitable is their failure.

II. The McKinley Blueprint

In the months after last November`s elections, the Bush Administration rattled progressive sensibilities with shock and awe on the home front--a barrage of audacious policy initiatives: Allow churches to include sanctuaries of worship in buildings financed by federal housing grants. Slash hundreds of billions in domestic programs, especially spending for the poor, even as the Bush tax cuts kick in for the well-to-do. At the behest of Big Pharma, begin prosecuting those who help the elderly buy cheaper prescription drugs in Canada. Compel the District of Columbia to conduct federally financed school voucher experiments (even though DC residents are overwhelmingly opposed). Reform Medicaid by handing it over to state governments, which will be free to make their own rules, much like welfare reform. Do the same for housing aid, food stamps and other long-established programs. Redefine "wetlands" and "wilderness" so that millions of protected acres are opened for development.

Liberal activists gasped at the variety and dangerous implications (the public might have been upset too but was preoccupied with war), while conservatives understood that Bush was laying the foundations, step by step, toward their grand transformation of American life. These are the concrete elements of their vision:

§ Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as the essential predicate for dismantling the progressive income tax. This will require a series of reform measures (one of them, repeal of the estate tax, already accomplished). Bush has proposed several others: elimination of the tax on stock dividends and establishment of new tax-sheltered personal savings accounts for the growing "investor class." Congress appears unwilling to swallow these, at least this year, but their introduction advances the education-agitation process. Future revenue would be harvested from a single-rate flat tax on wages or, better still, a stiff sales tax on consumption. Either way, labor gets taxed, but not capital. The 2003 Economic Report of the President, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers, offers a primer on the advantages of a consumption tax and how it might work. Narrowing the tax base naturally encourages smaller government.

§ Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement system as we know it, starting with Social Security privatization but moving eventually to breaking up the other large pools of retirement savings, even huge public-employee funds, and converting them into individualized accounts. Individuals will be rewarded for taking personal responsibility for their retirement with proposed "lifetime savings" accounts where capital is stored, forever tax-exempt. Unlike IRAs, which provide a tax deduction for contributions, wages are taxed upfront but permanently tax-sheltered when deposited as "lifetime" capital savings, including when the money is withdrawn and spent. Thus this new format inevitably threatens the present system, in which employers get a tax deduction for financing pension funds for their workers. The new alternative should eventually lead to repeal of the corporate tax deduction and thus relieve business enterprise of any incentive to finance pensions for employees. Everyone takes care of himself.

§ Withdraw the federal government from a direct role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the poor and many other long-established social priorities, first by dispersing program management to local and state governments or private operators, then by steadily paring down the federal government`s financial commitment. If states choose to kill an aid program rather than pay for it themselves, that confirms that the program will not be missed. Any slack can be taken up by the private sector, philanthropy and especially religious institutions that teach social values grounded in faith.

§ Restore churches, families and private education to a more influential role in the nation`s cultural life by giving them a significant new base of income--public money. When "school choice" tuitions are fully available to families, all taxpayers will be compelled to help pay for private school systems, both secular and religious, including Catholic parochial schools. As a result, public schools will likely lose some of their financial support, but their enrollments are expected to shrink anyway, as some families opt out. Although the core of Bush`s "faith-based initiative" stalled in Congress, he is advancing it through new administrative rules. The voucher strategy faces many political hurdles, but the Supreme Court is out ahead, clearing away the constitutional objections.

§ Strengthen the hand of business enterprise against burdensome regulatory obligations, especially environmental protection, by introducing voluntary goals and "market-driven" solutions. These will locate the decision-making on how much progress is achievable within corporate managements rather than enforcement agencies (an approach also championed in this year`s Economic Report). Down the road, when a more aggressive right-wing majority is secured for the Supreme Court, conservatives expect to throw a permanent collar around the regulatory state by enshrining a radical new constitutional doctrine. It would require government to compensate private property owners, including businesses, for new regulations that impose costs on them or injure their profitability, a formulation sure to guarantee far fewer regulations [see Greider, "The Right and US Trade Law," October 15, 2001].

§ Smash organized labor. Though unions have lost considerable influence, they remain a major obstacle to achieving the right`s vision. Public-employee unions are formidable opponents on issues like privatization and school vouchers. Even the declining industrial unions still have the resources to mobilize a meaningful counterforce in politics. Above all, the labor movement embodies the progressives` instrument of power: collective action. The mobilizations of citizens in behalf of broad social demands are inimical to the right`s vision of autonomous individuals, in charge of their own affairs and acting alone. Unions may be taken down by a thousand small cuts, like stripping "homeland security" workers of union protection. They will be more gravely weakened if pension funds, an enduring locus of labor power, are privatized.

Looking back over this list, one sees many of the old peevish conservative resentments--Social Security, the income tax, regulation of business, labor unions, big government centralized in Washington--that represent the great battles that conservatives lost during early decades of the twentieth century. That is why the McKinley era represents a lost Eden the right has set out to restore. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a pivotal leader in the movement`s inside-outside politics, confirms this observation. "Yes, the McKinley era, absent the protectionism," he agrees, is the goal. "You`re looking at the history of the country for the first 120 years, up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that." (In foreign policy, at least, the Bush Administration could fairly be said to have already restored the spirit of that earlier age. Justifying the annexation of the Philippines, McKinley famously explained America`s purpose in the world: "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God`s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.")

But the right employs a highly selective memory. McKinley Republicans, aligned with the newly emergent industrial titans, did indeed hold off the Progressive advocates of a federal income tax and other reforms, while its high tariffs were the equivalent of a stiff consumption tax. And its conservative Supreme Court blocked regulatory laws designed to protect society and workers as unconstitutional intrusions on private property rights.

But the truth is that McKinley`s conservatism broke down not because of socialists but because a deeply troubled nation was awash in social and economic conflicts, inequities generated by industrialization and the awesome power consolidating in the behemoth industrial corporations (struggles not resolved until economic crisis spawned the New Deal). Reacting to popular demands, Teddy Roosevelt enacted landmark Progressive reforms like the first federal regulations protecting public health and safety and a ban on corporate campaign contributions. Both Roosevelt and his successor, Republican William Howard Taft, endorsed the concept of a progressive income tax and other un-Republican measures later enacted under Woodrow Wilson.

George W. Bush does not of course ever speak of the glories of the McKinley era or acknowledge his party`s retrograde objectives (Ari Fleischer would bat down any suggestions to the contrary). Conservatives learned, especially from Gingrich`s implosion, to avoid flamboyant ideological proclamations. Instead, the broader outlines are only hinted at in various official texts. But there`s nothing really secretive about their intentions. Right-wing activists and think tanks have been openly articulating the goals for years. Some of their ideas that once sounded loopy are now law.

III. The Ecumenical Right

The movement "is moving with the speed of a glacier," explains Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at Stanford`s Hoover Institution who served as Reagan`s house intellectual, the keeper of the flame, and was among the early academics counseling George W. Bush. "It moves very slowly, stops sometimes, even retreats, but then it moves forward again. Sometimes, it comes up against a tree and seems stuck, then the tree snaps and people say, `My gosh, it`s a revolution.`" To continue the metaphor, Anderson thinks this glacier will run up against some big boulders that do not yield, that the right will eventually be stopped short of grand objectives like small government or elimination of the income tax. But they`ve made impressive progress so far.

For the first time since the 1920s, Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court are all singing from same hymnal and generally reinforcing one another. The Court`s right-wing majority acts to shrink federal authority, block citizen challenges of important institutions and hack away at the liberal precedents on civil rights, regulatory law and many other matters (it even decides an election for its side, when necessary).

Bush, meanwhile, has what Reagan lacked--a Reaganite majority in Congress. When the Gipper won in 1980, most Republicans in Congress were still traditional conservatives, not radical reformers. The majority of House Republicans tipped over to the Reaganite identity in 1984, a majority of GOP senators not until 1994. The ranks of the unconverted--Republicans who refuse to sign Norquist`s pledge not to raise taxes--are now, by his count, down to 5 percent in the House caucus, 15 percent in the Senate.

This ideological solidarity is a central element in Bush`s governing strength. So long as he can manage the flow of issues in accord with the big blueprint, the right doesn`t shoot at him when he makes politically sensitive deviations (import quotas for steel or the lavish new farm-subsidy bill). It also helps that, especially in the House, the GOP leaders impose Stalinist discipline on their troops. Bush also reassures the far right by making it clear that he is one of them. Reagan used to stroke the Christian right with strong rhetoric on social issues but gave them very little else (the man was from Hollywood, after all). Bush is a true believer, a devout Christian and exceedingly public about it. Bush`s principal innovation--a page taken from Bill Clinton`s playbook--is to confuse the opposition`s issues by offering his own compassion-lite alternatives, co-opting or smothering Democratic initiatives. Unlike Clinton, Bush does not mollify his political base with empty gestures. Their program is his program.

"Reagan talked a good game on the domestic side but he actually didn`t push for much," says Paul Weyrich, leader of the Free Congress Foundation and a movement pioneer. "Likewise, the Gingrich era was a lot of rhetoric. This Administration is far more serious and disciplined.... they have better outreach than any with which I have dealt. These people have figured out how to communicate regularly with their base, make sure it understands what they`re doing. When they have to go against their base, they know how to inoculate themselves against what might happen."

Norquist`s ambition is that building on its current strength, the right can cut government by half over the next twenty-five years to "get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" [see Robert Dreyfuss, "Grover Norquist: `Field Marshal` of the Bush Tax Plan," May 14, 2001]. The federal government would shrink from 20 percent of GDP to 10 percent, state and local government from 12 to 6 percent. When vouchers become universally available, he expects public schools to shrink from 6 to 3 percent of GDP. "And we`ll have better schools," he assures. People like Norquist play the role of constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible. "I`m lining up support to abolish the alternative minimum tax," he says. "Has Bush spoken to this? No. I want to run ahead, put our guys on the record for it. So I will be out in front of the Bush Administration, not attacking the Bush Administration. Will he do everything we want? No, but you know what? I don`t care."

Americans for Tax Reform serves as a kind of "action central" for a galaxy of conservative interests, with support from corporate names like Microsoft, Pfizer, AOL Time Warner, R.J. Reynolds and the liquor industry. "The issue that brings people to politics is what they want from government," Norquist explains. "All our people want to be left alone by government. To be in this coalition, you only need to have your foot in the circle on one issue. You don`t need a Weltanschauung, you don`t have to agree with every other issue, so long as the coalition is right on yours. That`s why we don`t have the expected war within the center-right coalition. That`s why we can win."

One of the right`s political accomplishments is bringing together diverse, once-hostile sectarians. "The Republican Party used to be based in the Protestant mainline and aggressively kept its distance from other religions," Norquist observes. "Now we`ve got observant Catholics, the people who go to mass every Sunday, evangelical Christians, Mormons, orthodox Jews, Muslims." How did it happen? "The secular left has created an ecumenical right," he says. This new tolerance, including on race, may represent meaningful social change, but of course the right also still feeds on intolerance too, demonizing those whose values or lifestyle or place of birth does not conform to their idea of "American."

This tendency, Norquist acknowledges, is a vulnerability. The swelling ranks of Latino and Asian immigrants could become a transforming force in American politics, once these millions of new citizens become confident enough to participate in election politics (just as European immigrants became a vital force for liberal reform in the early twentieth century). So Bush labors to change the party`s anti-immigrant profile (and had some success with Mexican-Americans in Texas).

Norquist prefers to focus on other demographic trends that he believes insure the right`s eventual triumph: As the children of the New Deal die off, he asserts, they will be replaced by young "leave me alone" conservatives. Anderson, the former Reagan adviser, is less certain. "Most of the people like what government is doing," he observes. "So long as it isn`t overintrusive and so forth, they`re happy with it."

IV. Show Me the Money

Ideology may provide the unifying umbrella, but the real glue of this movement is its iron rule for practical politics: Every measure it enacts, every half-step it takes toward the grand vision, must deliver concrete rewards to one constituency or another, often several--and right now, not in the distant future. Usually the reward is money. There is nothing unusual or illegitimate about that, but it sounds like raw hypocrisy considering that the right devotes enormous energy to denouncing "special-interest politics" on the left (schoolteachers, labor unions, bureaucrats, Hollywood). The right`s interest groups, issue by issue, bring their muscle to the cause. Bush`s "lifetime savings" accounts constitute a vast new product line for the securities industry, which is naturally enthused about marketing and managing these accounts. The terms especially benefit the well-to-do, since a family of four will be able to shelter up to $45,000 annually (that`s more than most families earn in a year). The White House has enlisted Fortune 500 companies to spread the good news to the investor class in their regular mailings to shareholders.

Bush`s "market-friendly" reforms for healthcare would reward two business sectors that many consumers regard as the problem--drug companies and HMOs. Big Pharma would get the best of all worlds: a federal subsidy for prescription drug purchases by the elderly, but without any limits on the prices. The insurance industry is invited to set up a privatized version of Medicare that would compete with the government-run system (assuming there are enough senior citizens willing to take that risk).

Some rewards are not about money. Bush has already provided a victory for "pro-lifers" with the ban on late-term abortions. The antiabortionists are realists now and no longer badger the GOP for a constitutional amendment, but perhaps a future Supreme Court, top-heavy with right-wing appointees, will deliver for them. Republicans are spoiling for a fight over guns in 2004, when the federal ban on assault rifles is due to expire. Liberals, they hope, will try to renew the law so the GOP can deliver a visible election-year reward by blocking it. (Gun-control advocates are thinking of forcing Bush to choose between the gun lobby and public opinion.)

The biggest rewards, of course, are about taxation, and the internal self-discipline is impressive. When Reagan proposed his huge tax-rate cuts in 1981, the K Street corporate lobbyists piled on with their own list of goodies and the White House lost control; Reagan`s tax cuts wound up much larger than he intended. This time around, business behaved itself when Bush proposed a tax package in 2001 in which its wish list was left out. "They supported the 2001 tax cuts because they knew there was going to be another tax cut every year and, if you don`t support this year`s, you go to the end of the line next time," Norquist says. Their patience has already been rewarded. The antitax movement follows a well-defined script for advancing step by step to the ultimate goal. Norquist has organized five caucuses to agitate and sign up Congressional supporters on five separate issues: estate-tax repeal (already enacted but still vulnerable to reversal); retirement-savings reforms; elimination of the alternative minimum tax; immediate business deductions for capital investment expenses (instead of a multiyear depreciation schedule); and zero taxation of capital gains. "If we do all of these things, there is no tax on capital and we are very close to a flat tax," Norquist exclaims.

The road ahead is far more difficult than he makes it sound, because along the way a lot of people will discover that they are to be the losers. In fact, the McKinley vision requires vast sectors of society to pay dearly, and from their own pockets. Martin Anderson has worked through the flat-tax arithmetic many times, and it always comes out a political loser. "The conservatives all want to revolutionize the tax system, frankly because they haven`t thought it through," Anderson says. "It means people from zero to $35,000 income pay no tax and anyone over $150,000 is going to get a tax cut. The people in between get a tax increase, unless you cut federal spending. That`s not going to happen."

Likewise, any substantial consumption tax does severe injury to another broad class of Americans--the elderly. They were already taxed when they were young and earning and saving their money, but a new consumption tax would now tax their money again as they spend it. Lawrence Lindsey, Bush`s former economic adviser, has advocated a consumption-based flat tax that would probably require a rate of 21 percent on consumer purchases (like a draconian sales tax). He concedes, "It would be hitting the current generation of elderly twice. So it would be a hard sell."

"School choice" is also essentially a money issue, though this fact has been obscured by the years of Republican rhetoric demonizing the public schools and their teachers. Under tuition vouchers, the redistribution of income will flow from all taxpayers to the minority of American families who send their children to private schools, religious and secular. Those children are less than 10 percent of the 52 million children enrolled in K-12. You wouldn`t know it from reading about the voucher debate, but the market share of private schools actually declined slightly during the past decade. The Catholic parochial system stands to gain the most from public financing, because its enrollment has declined by half since the 1960s (to 2.6 million). Though there was some growth during the 1990s, it was in the suburbs, not cities. Other private schools, especially religious schools in the South, grew more during the past decade (by about 400,000), but public schools expanded far faster, by 6 million. The point is, the right`s constituency for "school choice" remains a small though fervent minority.

Conservatives have cleverly transformed the voucher question into an issue of racial equality--arguing that they are the best way to liberate impoverished black children from bad schools in slum surroundings. But educational quality notwithstanding, it is not self-evident that private schools, including the Catholic parochial system, are disposed to solve the problem of minority education, since they are highly segregated themselves. Catholic schools enroll only 2.5 percent of black students nationwide and, more telling, only 3.8 percent of Hispanic children, most of whom are Catholic. In the South hundreds of private schools originated to escape integration and were supported at first by state tuition grants (later ruled unconstitutional). "School choice," in short, might very well finance greater racial separation--the choice of whites to stick with their own kind--and at public expense.

The right`s assault on environmental regulation has a similar profile. Taking the lead are small landowners or Western farmers who make appealing pleas to be left alone to enjoy their property and take care of it conscientiously. Riding alongside are developers and major industrial sectors (and polluters) eager to win the same rights, if not from Congress then the Supreme Court. But there`s one problem: The overwhelming majority of Americans want stronger environmental standards and more vigorous enforcement.

V. Are They Right About America?

"Leave me alone" is an appealing slogan, but the right regularly violates its own guiding principle. The antiabortion folks intend to use government power to force their own moral values on the private lives of others. Free-market right-wingers fall silent when Bush and Congress intrude to bail out airlines, insurance companies, banks--whatever sector finds itself in desperate need. The hard-right conservatives are downright enthusiastic when the Supreme Court and Bush`s Justice Department hack away at our civil liberties. The "school choice" movement seeks not smaller government but a vast expansion of taxpayer obligations. Maybe what the right is really seeking is not so much to be left alone by government but to use government to reorganize society in its own right-wing image. All in all, the right`s agenda promises a reordering that will drive the country toward greater separation and segmentation of its many social elements--higher walls and more distance for those who wish to protect themselves from messy diversity. The trend of social disintegration, including the slow breakup of the broad middle class, has been under way for several decades--fissures generated by growing inequalities of status and well-being. The right proposes to legitimize and encourage these deep social changes in the name of greater autonomy. Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself.

Is this the country Americans want for their grandchildren or great-grandchildren? If one puts aside Republican nostalgia for McKinley`s gaslight era, it was actually a dark and troubled time for many Americans and society as a whole, riven as it was by harsh economic conflict and social neglect of everyday brutalities.

Autonomy can be lonely and chilly, as millions of Americans have learned in recent years when the company canceled their pensions or the stock market swallowed their savings or industrial interests destroyed their surroundings. For most Americans, there is no redress without common action, collective efforts based on mutual trust and shared responsibilities. In other words, I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country.

This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush`s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision. No need for scaremongering attacks; stick to the well-known facts. Pose some big questions: Do Americans want to get rid of the income tax altogether and its longstanding premise that the affluent should pay higher rates than the humble? For that matter, do Americans think capital incomes should be excused completely from taxation while labor incomes are taxed more heavily, perhaps through a stiff national sales tax? Do people want to give up on the concept of the "common school"--one of America`s distinctive achievements? Should property rights be given precedence over human rights or society`s need to protect nature? The recent battles over Social Security privatization are instructive: When the labor-left mounted a serious ideological rebuttal, well documented in fact and reason, Republicans scurried away from the issue (though they will doubtless try again).

To make this case convincing, however, the opposition must first have a coherent vision of its own. The Democratic Party, alas, is accustomed to playing defense and has become wary of "the vision thing," as Dubya`s father called it. Most elected Democrats, I think, now see their role as managerial rather than big reform, and fear that even talking about ideology will stick them with the right`s demon label: "liberal." If a new understanding of progressive purpose does get formed, one that connects to social reality and describes a more promising future, the vision will not originate in Washington but among those who see realities up close and are struggling now to change things on the ground. We are a very wealthy (and brutally powerful) nation, so why do people experience so much stress and confinement in their lives, a sense of loss and failure? The answers, I suggest, will lead to a new formulation of what progressives want.

The first place to inquire is not the failures of government but the malformed power relationships of American capitalism--the terms of employment that reduce many workers to powerless digits, the closely held decisions of finance capital that shape our society, the waste and destruction embedded in our system of mass consumption and production. The goal is, like the right`s, to create greater self-fulfillment but as broadly as possible. Self-reliance and individualism can be made meaningful for all only by first reviving the power of collective action.

My own conviction is that a lot of Americans are ready to take up these questions and many others. Some are actually old questions--issues of power that were not resolved in the great reform eras of the past. They await a new generation bold enough to ask if our prosperous society is really as free and satisfied as it claims to be. When conscientious people find ideas and remedies that resonate with the real experiences of Americans, then they will have their vision, and perhaps the true answer to the right wing.

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April 27, 2003
The Empire Slinks Back
By NIALL FERGUSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/magazine/27EMPIRE.html?pag…

Wheresoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits. — Seneca

Iraq has fallen. Saddam`s statues are face down in the dust. His evil tyranny is at an end.

So -- can we, like, go home now?

You didn`t have to wait long for a perfect symbol of the fundamental weakness at the heart of the new American imperialism -- sorry, humanitarianism. I`m talking about its chronically short time frame. I wasn`t counting, but the Stars and Stripes must have been up there on the head of that statue of Saddam for less than a minute. You have to wonder what his commanding officer said to the marine responsible, Cpl. Edward Chin, when he saw Old Glory up there. ``Son, get that thing down on the double, or we`ll have every TV station from here to Bangladesh denouncing us as Yankee imperialists!``

An echo of Corporal Chin`s imperial impulse can be heard in the last letter Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse sent home before he and his Marine unit entered Iraq. Chanawongse joked that his camp in Kuwait was like something out of ``M*A*S*H`` -- except that it would need to be called ``M*A*H*T*S*F``: ``marines are here to stay forever.``

But the question raised by Corporal Chanawongse`s poignant final joke -- he was killed a week later, when his amphibious assault vehicle was blown up in Nasiriya -- is, Are the marines in Iraq ``to stay forever``? No doubt it is true, as President Bush said, that the America will ``honor forever`` Corporal Chanawongse and the more than 120 other service personnel so far killed in the conflict. Honored forever, yes. But there forever? In many ways the biggest mystery about the American occupation of Iraq is its probable duration. Recent statements by members of the Bush administration bespeak a time frame a lot closer to ephemeral than eternal. As the president himself told the Iraqi people in a television broadcast shortly after the fall of Baghdad: ``The government of Iraq and the future of your country will soon belong to you. . . . We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq`s future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.``

What the president didn`t make entirely clear was whether the departing troops would be accompanied by the retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner and his ``Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance,`` newspeak for what would once have been called Omgus -- the Office of Military Government (United States). Nor was he very specific about when exactly he expected to see the handover of power to the ``peaceful and representative government`` of Iraqis.

But we know the kind of time frame the president has in mind. In a prewar speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Bush declared, ``We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day more.`` It is striking that the unit of measure he used was days. Speaking less than a week before the fall of Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, suggested that Garner would be running Iraq for at least six months. Other administration spokesmen have mentioned two years as the maximum transition period. When Garner himself was asked how long he expected to be in charge, he talked about just three months.

If -- as more and more commentators claim -- America has embarked on a new age of empire, it may turn out to be the most evanescent empire in all history. Other empire builders have fantasized about ruling subject peoples for a thousand years. This is shaping up to be history`s first thousand-day empire. Make that a thousand hours.

Let me come clean. I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang. Twelve years ago -- when it was not at all fashionable to say so -- I was already arguing that it would be ``desirable for the United States to depose`` tyrants like Saddam Hussein. ``Capitalism and democracy,`` I wrote, ``are not naturally occurring, but require strong institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary . . . by military force.`` Today this argument is in danger of becoming commonplace, at least among the set who read The National Interest, the latest issue of which is practically an American Empire Special Edition. Elsewhere, writers as diverse as Max Boot, Andrew Bacevich and Thomas Donnelly have drawn explicit (and in Boot`s case, approving) comparisons between the pax Britannica of Queen Victoria`s reign and the pax Americana they envisage in the reign of George II. Boot has gone so far as to say that the United States should provide places like Afghanistan and other troubled countries with ``the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.``

I agree. The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of ``postcolonial`` historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy ``mix`` favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things Iraq needs right now. If the scary-sounding ``American empire`` can deliver them, then I am all for it. The catch is whether or not America has the one crucial character trait without which the whole imperial project is doomed: stamina. The more time I spend here in the United States, the more doubtful I become about this.

The United States unquestionably has the raw economic power to build an empire -- more, indeed, than the United Kingdom ever had at its disposal. In 1913, for example, Britain`s share of total world output was 8 percent, while the equivalent figure for the United States in 1998 was 22 percent. There`s ``soft`` power too -- the endlessly innovative consumer culture that Joseph Nye argues is an essential component of American power -- but at its core, as we have seen in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, American power is far from soft. It can be very, very hard. The trouble is that it is ephemeral. It is not so much Power Lite as Flash Power -- here today, with a spectacular bang, but gone tomorrow.

Besides the presidential time frame -- which is limited by the four-year election cycle -- the most obvious symptom of its short-windedness is the difficulty the American empire finds in recruiting the right sort of people to run it. America`s educational institutions excel at producing young men and women who are both academically and professionally very well trained. It`s just that the young elites have no desire whatsoever to spend their lives running a screwed-up, sun-scorched sandpit like Iraq. America`s brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia, but to manage MTV; not to rule Hejaz, but to run a hedge fund; not to be a C.B.E., or Commander of the British Empire, but to be a C.E.O. And that, of course, is one reason so many of the Americans currently in Iraq are first-generation immigrants to the United States -- men like Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse.


America`s British allies have been here before. Having defeated the previous Ottoman rulers in the First World War, Britain ran Iraq as a ``mandate`` between 1920 and 1932. For the sake of form, the British installed one of their Arab clients, the Hashemite prince Faisal, as king. But there was no doubt who was really running the place. Nor did the British make any bones about why they were there. When two Standard Oil geologists entered Iraq on a prospecting mission, the British civil commissioner handed them over to the chief of police of Baghdad; in 1927 the British takeover paid a handsome dividend when oil was struck at Baba Gurgur, in the northern part of Iraq. Although they formally relinquished power to the ruling dynasty in 1932, the British remained informally in control of Iraq throughout the 1930`s. Indeed, they only really lost their grip on Baghdad with the assassination of their clients Faisal II and his prime minister, Nuri es-Said, in the revolution of 1958.

The crucial point is this: when the British went into Iraq, they stuck around. To be precise, there were British government representatives, military and civilian, in Baghdad uninterruptedly for almost exactly 40 years.

And that brings up a simple question: Who in today`s United States would like to be based in Baghdad as long as the British were -- which would be from now until 2043?

``Don`t even go there!`` is one of those catch phrases you hear every day in New York. Somehow it sums up exactly what is flawed about the whole post-9/11 crypto-imperial project. Despite their vast wealth and devastating weaponry, Americans have no interest in the one crucial activity without which a true empire cannot enduringly be established. They won`t actually go there.


A British counterexample. Gertrude Bell was the first woman to graduate from Oxford with a First Class degree. She learned to speak Arabic during an archaeological visit to Jerusalem in 1899 and, like T.E. Lawrence, became involved in British military intelligence. In 1920, she was appointed Oriental Secretary to the British High Commission in Baghdad. She died there in 1926, having scarcely visited England in the interim. ``I don`t care to be in London much,`` she wrote. ``I like Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It`s the real East, and it is stirring; things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs me.``

Dotted all over the British Empire were thousands of ``Orientalists`` like Gertrude Bell -- simultaneously enamored of the exotic ``Other`` and yet dominant over it. Her account of Faisal I`s coronation in 1921 perfectly illustrates their mode of operation: ``Then Saiyid Husain stood up and read Sir Percy`s proclamation in which he announced that Faisal had been elected king by 96 percent of the people in Mesopotamia, long live the King! with that we stood up and saluted him, the national flag was broken on the flagstaff by his side and the band played `God Save the King` -- they have no national anthem yet.``

The British regarded long-term occupation as an inherent part of their self-appointed ``civilizing mission.`` This did not mean forever. The assumption was that British rule would end once a country had been sufficiently ``civilized`` -- read: anglicized -- to ensure the continued rule of law and operation of free markets (not to mention the playing of cricket). But that clearly meant decades, not days; when the British intervened in a country like Iraq, they simply didn`t have an exit strategy. The only issue was whether to rule directly -- installing a British governor -- or indirectly, with a British ``secretary`` offering ``advice`` to a local puppet like Faisal.

In other words, the British did go there. Between 1900 and 1914, 2.6 million Britons left the United Kingdom for imperial destinations (by 1957 the total had reached nearly 6 million). Admittedly, most of them preferred to migrate to the temperate regions of a select few colonies -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa -- that soon became semiautonomous ``dominions.`` Nevertheless, a significant number went to the much less hospitable climes of Asia and Africa. At the end of the 1930`s, for example, the official Colonial Service in Africa was staffed by more than 7,500 expat Brits. The substantial expatriate communities they established were crucial to the operation of the British Empire. They provided the indispensable ``men on the spot`` who learned the local languages, perhaps adopted some local customs -- though not usually to the fatal extent of ``going native`` -- and acted as the intermediaries between a remote imperial authority and the indigenous elites upon whose willing collaboration the empire depended.

Expat life was not all tiffin and gin. As Rudyard Kipling saw it, governing India was a hard slog: ``Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death or broken in health and hope.`` Yet this was a service that could confidently expect to attract the very brightest and best products of the elite British universities. Of 927 recruits to the Colonial Service between 1927 and 1929, nearly half had been to Oxford or Cambridge. The proportion in the Indian Civil Service was even higher.

Why were so many products of Britain`s top universities willing to spend their entire working lives so far from the land of their birth, running infernally hot, disease-ridden countries? Why, to pick a typical example, did one Evan Machonochie, an Oxford graduate who passed the grueling Indian Civil Service exam, set off for Bengal in 1887 and spend the next 40 years in India? One clue lies in his Celtic surname. The Scots were heavily overrepresented not just in the colonies of white settlement, but also in the commercial and professional elites of cities like Calcutta and Hong Kong and Cape Town. The Irish too played a disproportionate role in enforcing British rule, supplying a huge proportion of the officers and men of the British army. Not for nothing is Kipling`s representative Indian Army N.C.O. named Mulvaney. For young men growing up on the rainy, barren and poorer fringes of the United Kingdom, the empire offered opportunities.

Yet economics alone cannot explain what motivated Machonochie or Bell. The imperial impulse arose from a complex of emotions: racial superiority, yes, but also evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also a sincere belief that spreading ``commerce, Christianity and civilization`` was not just in Britain`s interest but in the interests of her colonial subjects too.


The contrast with today`s ``wannabe`` imperialists in the United States -- call them ``nation-builders`` if you prefer euphemism -- could scarcely be more stark. Five points stand out.

First, not only do the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire to leave the United States; millions of non-Americans are also eager to join them here. Unlike the United Kingdom a century ago, the United States is an importer of people, with a net immigration rate of 3.5 per 1,000 and a total foreign-born population of 32.5 million (more than 1 in 10 residents of the United States).

Second, when Americans do opt to reside abroad, they tend to stick to the developed world. As of 1999, there were an estimated 3.8 million Americans living abroad. That sounds like a lot. But it is a little more than a tenth the number of the foreign-born population in the United States. And of these expat Americans, almost three-quarters were living in the two other Nafta countries (more than one million in Mexico, 687,700 in Canada) or in Europe (just over a million). Of the 294,000 living in the Middle East, nearly two-thirds were in Israel. A mere 37,500 were in Africa.

Third, whereas British imperial forces were mostly based abroad, most of the American military is normally stationed at home. Even the B-2 Stealth bombers that pounded Serbia into quitting Kosovo in 1999 were flying out of Knob Noster, Mo. And it`s worth remembering that 40 percent of American overseas military personnel are located in Western Europe, no fewer than 71,000 of them in Germany. Thus, whereas the British delighted in building barracks in hostile territories precisely in order to subjugate them, Americans today locate a quarter of their overseas troops in what is arguably the world`s most pacifist country.

Fourth, when Americans do live abroad they generally don`t stay long and don`t integrate much, preferring to inhabit Mini Me versions of America, ranging from military bases to five-star ``international`` (read: American) hotels. When I visited Lakenheath air base last year, one minute I was in the middle of rural Cambridgeshire, flat and ineffably English, the next minute, as I passed through the main gate, everything -- right down to the absurdly large soft-drink dispensers -- was unmistakably American.

The fifth and final contrast with the British experience is perhaps the most telling. It is the fact that the products of America`s elite educational institutions are the people least likely to head overseas, other than on flying visits and holidays. The Americans who serve the longest tours of duty are the volunteer soldiers, a substantial proportion of whom are African-Americans (12.9 per cent of the population, 25.4 per cent of the Army Reserve). It`s just possible that African-Americans will turn out to be the Celts of the American empire, driven overseas by the comparatively poor opportunities at home. Indeed, if the occupation of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the growing number of African-American officers in the Army. The military`s most effective press spokesman during the war, Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, exemplifies the type.

The British, however, were always wary about giving the military too much power in their imperial administration. Their parliamentarians had read enough Roman history to want to keep generals subordinate to civilian governors. The ``brass hats`` were there to inflict the Victorian equivalent of ``shock and awe`` whenever the ``natives`` grew restive. Otherwise, colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins.

Now, ask yourself in light of this: how many members of Harvard`s or Yale`s class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a ``clash of civilizations,`` America`s brightest students show remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.

After graduation, too, the members of America`s academic elite generally subscribe to the ``Wizard of Oz`` principle: ``There`s no place like home.`` According to a 1998 survey, there were 134,798 registered Yale alumni. Of these, little more than 5 percent lived outside the United States. A mere handful -- roughly 70 -- lived in Arab countries.

Sure, the bolder products of the Kennedy School may be eager for ``tours of duty`` in postwar Baghdad. And a few of the star Harvard economists may want to do for Iraq what a couple of their professors did for post-Soviet Russia back in the early 90`s. But what that means is flying back and forth, writing a bunch of papers on ``transition economics,`` pocketing some fat consultancy fees and then heading for home.

As far as America`s Ivy League nation-builders are concerned, you can set up an independent central bank, reform the tax code, liberalize prices and privatize the major utilities -- and be home in time for the first reunion.


It can of course be argued that Americans` tendency to pay flying visits to their putative imperium -- rather than settling there -- is

just a function of technology. Back in the 1870`s, by which time the British had largely completed their global network of railways and steamships, it still took a minimum of 80 days to go around the world, as Jules Verne celebrated in the story of Phileas Fogg. Today it can be done in a day.

The problem is that with the undoubted advantages of modern technology comes the disadvantage of disconnection. For example, Secretary of State Colin Powell was criticized earlier this year for conducting his foreign policy by telephone. It was noted that Powell had traveled abroad twice in 2003 already, but one trip was to Davos, Switzerland (Jan. 25-26), and the other was to the Far East (Feb. 21-25). We can only guess at how much more Secretary Powell might have achieved if he had paid a visit to Paris -- or Ankara -- last month. And it is not just the big guns who seem happiest close to the Beltway. Recall, too, how after 9/11 the C.I.A. had to scour American colleges to find anyone capable of speaking fluent Pashto. It turned out that most C.I.A. officers preferred life in Virginia to what the British once called the North-West Frontier. (Have you seen the state of the restrooms up the Khyber Pass?)

One of this month`s most disturbing pieces of news was that Garner`s team at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance would include people from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development ``who have worked in a similar capacity in the former Yugoslavia, in Haiti and in Somalia.`` Considering the pitifully short duration of American interventions in those countries, their dismal failure in two of three cases and the vast differences between Iraq and all three, this is scarcely encouraging. Even more surreal was the disclosure that the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance has been hiring British Gurkhas to provide security around their Kuwait base. A nice imperial touch, granted, but a bunch of Gurkhas are hardly going to blend in discreetly in downtown Baghdad.

What, then, about the much-vaunted role of nongovernmental organizations? Might they provide the men and women on the ground who are so conspicuously hard to find in government service?

It is true that a substantial number of Americans are currently working overseas for NGO`s. An American friend of mine recently startled his friends -- not to mention his wife -- by quitting his artist`s studio and his teaching job in London, where he has spent much of the last 20 years, to take a position with a French-run aid agency in one of the most dysfunctional of Central Africa`s wretched republics. Perhaps he will find the new life he seeks there. But most Americans who do this kind of thing start younger and spend little more than a year overseas. For many it is not much more than a politically correct ``gap year`` before starting at graduate school.

Nor should we pin too much hope on the aid agencies that, like the missionaries of old, can be as much an irritant as a help to those trying to run a country like Iraq. It is one of the unspoken truths of the new imperialism that around every international crisis swarms a cloud of aid workers, whose efforts are seldom entirely complementary. If Garner`s team successfully imposes law and order in Iraq, economic life will swiftly pick up and much aid will be superfluous. If it fails to impose order, aid workers will get themselves killed -- as they frequently do in lawless Chechnya.


The dilemma is perhaps insoluble. Americans yearn for the quiet life at home. But since 9/11 they have felt impelled to grapple with rogue regimes in the hope that their overthrow will do something to reduce the threat of future terrorist attacks. The trouble is that if they do not undertake these interventions with conviction and commitment, they are unlikely to achieve their stated goals. Anyone who thinks Iraq can become a stable democracy in a matter of months -- whether 3, 6 or 24 -- is simply fantasizing.

Where, then, is the new imperial elite to come from? Not, I hope, exclusively from the reserve army of unemployed generals with good Pentagon connections. The work needs to begin, and swiftly, to encourage American students at the country`s leading universities to think more seriously about careers overseas -- and by overseas I do not mean in London. Are there, for example, enough good scholarships to attract undergraduates and graduates to study Arabic? How many young men and women currently graduate with a functioning grasp of Chinese? That, after all, is the language of this country`s nearest imperial rival, and the power President Bush urgently needs to woo if he is to deal effectively with North Korea.

After Kipling, John Buchan was perhaps the most readable writer produced by British imperialism. In his 1916 thriller ``Greenmantle,`` he memorably personifies imperial Britain in the person of Sandy Arbuthnot -- an Orientalist so talented that he can pass for a Moroccan in Mecca or a Pathan in Peshawar. Arbuthnot`s antithesis is the dyspeptic American millionaire John Scantlebury Blenkiron: ``a big fellow with a fat, sallow, clean-shaven face`` and ``a pair of full sleepy eyes, like a ruminating ox.`` These eyes have seen ``nothing gorier than a presidential election,`` he tells Buchan`s hero, Richard Hannay. The symbolism is a little crude, but it has something to it.

Well, now the Blenkirons have seen something gorier than an election. But will it whet their appetites for an empire in the British mode? Only, I think, if Americans radically rethink their attitude to the world beyond their borders. Until there are more Americans not just willing but eager to shoulder the ``nation-builder`s burden,`` adventures like the current occupation of Iraq will lack a vital ingredient. For the lesson of Britain`s imperial experience is clear: you simply cannot have an empire without imperialists -- out there, on the spot -- to run it.

Could Blenkiron somehow transform into Arbuthnot? Perhaps. After all, in the years after the Second World War, the generation that had just missed the fighting left Harvard and Yale with something like Buchan`s zeal for global rule. Many of them joined the Central Intelligence Agency and devoted their lives to fighting Communism in far-flung lands from Cuba to Cambodia. Yet -- as Graham Greene foresaw in ``The Quiet American`` -- their efforts at what the British would have called ``indirect rule`` were constrained by the need to shore up the local potentates more or less covertly. (The low quality of the locals backed by the United States didn`t help, either.) Today, the same fiction that underpinned American strategy in Vietnam -- that the United States was not trying to resurrect French colonial rule in Indochina -- is peddled in Washington to rationalize what is going on in Iraq. Sure, it may look like the resurrection of British colonial rule in Iraq, but honestly, all we want to do is give the Iraqi people democracy and then go home.

So long as the American empire dare not speak its own name -- so long as it continues this tradition of organized hypocrisy -- today`s ambitious young men and women will take one look at the prospects for postwar Iraq and say with one voice, ``Don`t even go there.``

Americans need to go there. If the best and brightest insist on staying home, today`s unspoken imperial project may end -- unspeakably -- tomorrow.



Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of financial history at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He is the author of ``Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.``




Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Soll er weggelobt werden

Blair: I don`t want to be president
Matthew Tempest, political correspondent
Monday April 28, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair today categorically ruled out taking a future job as EU president, a post he has been linked with in any deal to allow Gordon Brown to become prime minister.

Mr Blair again stated his support for the creation of an EU presidency, a concept backed by the recent convention of the future of Europe. But he stated: "It is not a job I would want to do, no."

His comments came in an post-war interview with the Financial Times, in which he was at pains to attack French president Jacques Chirac`s hopes for Europe to rival the US as an independent voice.

Although he refrained from talk of "punishing" Mr Chirac for France`s threat to veto a second UN resolution on Iraq, Mr Blair said a multipolar world would be "dangerously destabilising".

He told the paper: "I don`t want Europe setting up in opposition to America. I think it will be dangerous and destabilising.

"I believe that they [different centres of power] will very quickly develop into rival centres of power."

Mr Blair said: "The thing we are learning about our modern world is that the more freedom, the more democracy, the more justice, the greater the security."

He echoed Republican claims that the Iraqi regime had links with international terrorism, including al-Qaida, saying: "I think the link is very clear. I think it is highly significant, for example, that those people that were the last fighters in Iraq were in the main not Iraqis.

"What we found was that they were al-Qaida people, they were people from various different Arab states, various extremists, we even had Chechens there."

On Britain`s evolving stated war aims, the prime minister said retrospectively that "getting rid of the regime was justified in its own terms morally".

On the domestic front, Mr Blair promised to "fundamentally redraw" the welfare state, as well as threatening to outlaw any strikes by teachers.

He said: "What we have got to do is fundamentally redraw the way the 1945 welfare state settlement is implemented, and we have got to do it for health, for education, for the employment and labour markets, and actually in the longer term, for pensions too."

On the threat by the National Union of Teachers to boycott some testing in schools, Mr Blair called it "nonsense", warning: "I am not going to go in and start speculating about the measures that we will take, but the one thing I can assure you of, [is that] we will put the interests of the consumer of the services, and the children in relation to our schools first."

Pressed by the FT on the success of the congestion charge in London, Mr Blair was forced to pay tribute to the London mayor Ken Livingstone, saying he "deserved credit" for implementing the scheme.

But he added: "You have got to be wary of what it really means and how applicable it is to other situations."



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Kurt Nimmo: `US military bases: The spoils and deceptions of war`
Posted on Monday, April 28 @ 09:56:16 EDT
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By Kurt Nimmo

Donald Rumsfeld says the US does not want its troops in countries where they are not welcome. "You want to be someplace that people want us, you really do," he admitted in an interview. "We don`t want to be places that we`re not wanted. We simply don`t."

No word if the interviewer laughed or even scoffed. What Rumsfeld said is so deceptive that it transcends absurdity. He said the size of the US military force in the Gulf region would likely shrink now that the Iraqi military no longer poses a threat to its neighbors. "With the absence of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, the need for a US presence in the region would diminish rather than increase," he said. The US has troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

So, will the US simply yank up its tent stakes and go home?



Consider the investments. The United States spent a bundle on a state-of-the-art air command center at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. It recently shelled out $1.5 billion for an air base at Al-Udeid in Qatar. In Central Asia, the US acquired the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan last year. It concluded US base agreements with Pakistan and two former Soviet republics, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many of these agreements are classified -- contained within documents known as "status of force agreements" -- in order to prevent opposition on the part of the locals. Secret agreements and local opposition aside, Russian journalists reported that the United States and Uzbekistan signed an agreement leasing the Khanabad base for 25 years.

Before the invasion of Iraq Deputy Defense Secretary and neocon Paul Wolfowitz discussed US bases in an interview with the New York Times. "Their function may be more political than actually military," he explained. US bases "send a message to everybody, including important countries like Uzbekistan, that we have a capacity to come back in and will come back in."

Is it possible Rumsfeld is telling a lie -- hardly a rarity for the duplicitous Bushites -- in order to mask the Pentagon`s true intentions? Last Sunday the New York Times quoted unidentified Bush administration officials as saying the United States wants to keep four permanent military bases in Iraq. More than likely these bases will be situated at the international airport, the H-1 airfield, Tallil airfield near Nasiriya, and Bashur airfield. "The impression that`s left around the world is that we plan to occupy the country, we plan to use their bases over the long period of time, and it`s flat false," Rumsfeld said about the New York Times story.

"Whenever America goes to war, the spoils of victory invariably include more US military bases overseas," writes Ian Traynor of the Guardian. "The Iraqi deployment plans fall into the century-old pattern of US foreign bases being built on the back of military victory. They are also the latest episode in an extraordinary surge in America`s projection of military muscle since September 11... From Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, a result of the 1999 Nato campaign, to the Bishkek airbase in Kyrgyzstan, appropriated for the Afghanistan war, the Americans are establishing an armed presence in places they have never been before."

Either Rumsfeld falls asleep during Pentagon meetings, or he is smoking crack on his lunch break. As head honcho at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld should know about the upgrades to the Krzesiny air base at Poznan in western Poland. He should be aware of the visit of General Gregory Martin, the top US air force officer in Europe, to Bulgaria and Romania where Martin checked out real estate for a move into the Balkans. "All of those places now represent opportunities for us to create relationships that some day will allow us the access we need," Martin told the Stars and Stripes.

"In every meaningful sense, the reach and spread of the US bases is growing very strongly, alarmingly from the point of view of the rest of the world," Marcus Corbin, a security analyst at the Center for Defense Information think tank in Washington, told the Guardian. "The big thing to come out of Iraq is that the US will redouble its efforts to diversify its assets and potential."

It`s helpful to read between the lines when Rumsfeld and the neocons speak. Obviously, a large and undisguised presence of US troops in the Middle East and Central Asia would make the locals nervous -- and has the potential to destabilize governments in the neighborhood. The Bushites are looking for permanent access, not permanent basing. "Our basic interest is to have the ability to go into a country and have a relationship and have understandings about our ability to land or over-fly and to do things that are of mutual benefit to each of us," Rumsfeld said last year aboard an Air Force C-32 bound for Central Asia. "But we don`t have any particular plans for permanent bases."

If not for permanent bases, and thousands of obtrusive and resented US troops, how will the Bushites impose "democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world," as the neocon national security strategy characterizes it?

Think Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. Think Suharto, the brutal dictator who ruled Indonesia for 32 years. Think General Castillo Armas in Guatemala, General Joseph Mobutu in Zaire, General Pinochet in Chile, or Jonas Savimbi in Angola. In fact, think of Saddam Hussein, the obscure Ba`ath Party hit man who eventually "came to power on a CIA train," as Ali Saleh Sa`adi, the Baath Party secretary general, described it. All of these dictators were catapulted to power by the US with the covert and often not so covert help of the CIA. No invasions were necessary, no conspicuous "footprint" was required.

As former CIA agent John Stockwell has noted, after successful coups in the Third World, the US went about setting up and training secret police. "We created and left behind [in Nicaragua] a National Guard with officers trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests. This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism... The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units that are, today, the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders were on the CIA`s payroll, trained by the CIA in the United States. We had the public safety program going throughout Central and Latin America for twenty-six years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people: interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it."

In post-invasion Iraq, however, the CIA appears to building a complete "intelligence service" from the ground up. "You really want whatever emerges on Iraq to reflect favorably on the CIA," Vincent Cannistraro told the Newhouse News Service. "That almost certainly means, in this case, starting over with new people. You`re going to have to start from scratch." Cannistraro is probably best known as the man in charge of the CIA`s collusion with the contras in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.

More than likely the "new people" mentioned by Cannistraro will be former Ba`athists who worked for Saddam Hussein and Mukhabarat, or the Department of General Intelligence or the General Directorate of Intelligence (Al-Mukhabarat Al-A`ma). Chances are the US will get a better understanding of how Mukhabarat operated so effectively -- creating, in essence, a hermetically sealed dictatorship and, as Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times writes, "a parallel state in Iraq" -- now that Farouk Hijazi, the former operations director for Saddam Hussein`s secret police, was allegedly captured near the Syrian border.

A new CIA-fashioned Mukhabarat, working undetected deep within the inscrutable domain of spooks and secret police to circumvent political movements unacceptable to the US-imposed government of Iraq, may reduce the US military "footprint" so abhorred by Iraqis and other Arabs, but ultimately, if the tenacity of the Shi`ites are any indication, it will fail. If the Bush neocons need an example of what very well may happen in Iraq sooner before later, they need look no further than Iran where demonstrations against a pro-US government in 1978 eventually resulted in the downfall of the shah and Khomeini`s declaration of an Islamic republic. "The radical fundamentalist regime that rules Iran today," writes Mark Zapezauer, "could never have found popular support without the CIA`s 1953 coup [against democratically elected prime minister Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh] and the repression that followed."

Even as the Bushites have demonstrate their ability to engage in pathological lying (most notably in regard to WMD and attempting to finger Saddam as a supporter of al-Qaeda), they cannot deny or easily paper over the current situation -- Iraqi Shi`ite demands for a dominant role in Iraq`s future, a future many of them want to be dictated by the precepts of religion.

In Washington, policy hacks and Pentagon officials are now beginning to realize the Shi`ites are far more organized and dedicated than previously believed. Last Monday, according to the Washington Post, "one meeting of generals and admirals at the Pentagon evolved into a spontaneous teach-in on Iraq`s Shi`ites and the U.S. strategy for containing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq." In fact, the Bushites are so clueless about the influence of Shia Islam in Iraq that Rumsfeld made himself look foolish by blaming it all on the Iranians. Attempts to ""transform Iraq in Iran`s image will not be permitted," Rumsfeld blustered. "We will not allow the Iraqi people`s democratic transition to be hijacked by those who might wish to install another form of dictatorship."

Moreover, as if to send the message that he is not only an ignoramus, but a racist as well, Rumsfeld said the "Shias in the country are Iraqis and the Shias outside the country from Iran are Persians. My guess is that the Iraqi people would prefer to be governed by Iraqis and not Persians... The government of Iran has encouraged people to go into the country [Iraq] and... they have people in the country attempting to influence the country." Rumsfeld seems incapable, or unwilling, to accept the fact Islam refuses to be contained by borders -- borders, incidentally, established by the British and French -- or is Islam circumscribed by race.

As the journalist Robert Fisk told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Bush`s plans for Iraq are doomed to failure. "I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon, which of course will be first referred to as a war by terrorists, by al Qaeda, by remnants of Saddam`s regime... but it will be waged particularly by Shi`ite Muslims against the Americans and the British to get us out of Iraq and that will happen... We now have American troops occupying the wealthiest Arab country in the world. And the shockwaves of that are going to continue for decades to come, long after you and I are in our graves, if that`s where we go. And I don`t think we have yet realized -- I don`t think that the soldiers involved or the Presidents involved have yet realized the implications of what has happened. We have entered a new age of imperialism, the life of which we have not attempted to judge or assess or understand."

Kurt Nimmo`s Another Day in the Empire:
http://nimmo.blogspot.com/

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U. S. Iraq Policy for Dummies

Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
April 28, 2003

What with Shia and Sunni and Ba`ath and imams and Syria and Abu Mazer and WMDs, it`s no wonder many are confused in this post-Iraq-war period. Time once again to turn to that franchised series of books for easy-to-comprehend answers to difficult questions.



Q. What happened? First the U.S. was bogged down in Iraq and it looked like deja Vietnam quagmire all over again, and then suddenly, without much of a fight, the U.S. sweeps into Baghdad and it`s all over but the cheering.

A. The U.S. military wasn`t quite ready, but the Hothead Hardliners in the Bush Administration didn`t want to wait one more second -- they were terrified of getting bogged down in diplomacy and thus being prevented from launching their war. So, even though they had no Turkish base from where they could insert their infantry into Northern Iraq, they hastily entered from the South, which meant a long, hard slog up to Baghdad. They were unprepared for the welcoming fire they got in the South, and, at first, didn`t have enough troops to battle all the forces that were attacking them and that were holed up in the cities along the route to Baghdad.

But U.S. superiority in terms of computers, air bombing, artillery and tanks finally kicked in, and the troops began a fast track to Baghdad, outracing their supply lines. Reportedly, some deals were struck with various Iraqi military generals in Baghdad -- offering them everything from money and post-war positions and even U.S. citizenship -- and Saddam`s Republican Guard divisions melted away. Note: It`s conceivable they could be reconstituted, if things play out their way.

Q. And how are things playing out? True, no WMDs ever were discovered, but from what I can see, the U.S. achieved a smashing victory and got what it wanted. It`s in total military command of the country, and has set about repairing the electrical grid, the waterworks, etc. It even got the oil flowing again. Why would the Saddam forces even think about regrouping and taking on the U.S.?

A. As was the case in Vietnam, and then again in Afghanistan, Pentagon strategists never fully appreciated the strength of nationalistic pride, or the repetitive historic cycle of wars against invaders. There are huge sectors of the Iraqi population grateful to the U.S. for getting rid of their brutal dictator for them -- both Sunni and Shi`ite Muslims -- but now they want the U.S. military to leave and let them sort out the future of their country by themselves.

(Note: The U.S. now needs the former government`s officials and technicians to help get the country back up and running. Translated, that means some elements of the old Ba`athist structure will be back in positions of power; for those Saddam forces in exile or who melted into the civilian population, that will be the key to reconstituting their forces -- that and the genuine anti-U.S. feelings among many, stirred up by religious clerics anxious to assert their power now that the secular regime has fallen.)

Many Iraqis don`t trust the Bush Administration`s motives in the slightest. They think the U.S. is there to set up stealth colonial-type institutions, tie corrupt entrepreneurs into shady deals that will benefit mainly outside corporations (and not just regarding oil), establish a secular government beholden to the U.S., use Iraqi bases for asserting its military power against other Muslim governments in the region, etc. By and large, they are spot-on.

Q. But I thought the U.S. went in there to liberate the Iraqi people. Bush says we won`t stay there one more day than is necessary. You don`t believe him?

A. He`s telling the truth. But the key question is "necessary for whom?" Once he`s got a friendly interim government installed, once the U.S. corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel set up "reconstruction" shop, once the use of the military bases is worked out with the new government, once the oil is flowing fully again (with that U.S.-friendly government in charge, and outside oil companies handling part of the business), then the bulk of the U.S. military will be out of there.

But there`s a possible catch. The Pentagon strategists, you see, never really thought through the post-Iraq phase of the war. For one thing, they just assumed they`d find the dread WMDs, thus legitimizing their invasion; egg on the face time. They`re also now forced to recognize that they might have won the battle -- and broke the spine of Saddam`s cruel regime -- but they may well lose the war, both inside Iraq and in the Arab region in general.

Q. How can they lose the war? There is no military rival that can stand up to them, either inside Iraq or outside.

A. What U.S. officials are learning, to their surprise and horror, is that you can have the strongest military in the world and still not be able to control the population, especially when that population thinks you`re on their sacred homeland for nefarious purposes.

And the U.S., clueless as usual, continues to permit things that are anathema to the population. Such as: permitting missionaries into the country to attempt to Christianize the Muslim citizenry; Bush has approved Franklin Graham (Billy`s son) and his missionaries being let loose in Iraq. Graham on several occasions has denounced Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion," making Muslims just a tad suspicious of the man.

Because the Saddam regime collapsed so quickly -- the U.S. experienced a "catastrophic success," said Rumsfeld -- and the U.S. had no ready-to-go post-war plan worked out for Iraq, Islamic clerics stepped into the breech and began exercising their influence, with the more fundamentalist among them drawing huge crowds for once-banned religious ceremonies and anti-U.S. rallies. The U.S.-sponsored exiled opposition leaders, like Ahmad Chalabi and others, are regarded as corrupt lackeys of the U.S. and are not likely to generate popular support -- and, if the Pentagon Hardliners manage to install him into power anyway, you can expect both a civil war and near-total opposition to the U.S. forces on the ground.

The U.S. is now having to face the possibility that, unless they can engineer a popular secular interim government soon that will assume control, the democratic tiger they are riding into Iraq may yield a radical Islamist regime, despite Rumsfeld`s warning that the U.S. won`t let that happen. Nobody is quite sure what the long-range implications of an Islamist regime would mean, except that it most probably wouldn`t mean anything good for the Americans: All their blood and treasure will have been spent for nothing, and bye bye, Bush, in the 2004 election.

So, you see, the Hardliners in the Bush Administration are almost forced into staying the course in Iraq, trying to pull the democratic rabbit out of the Islamic hat, thus risking geopolitical disaster if it goes wrong.

Q. You keep talking about "Hardliners" in the Bush Administration. Who are they? How much influence do they have, and what are their motives?

A. By and large, we`re referring to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) ideologues who, after a decade on the outside looking in, are now the prime movers in developing the strategic foreign policy of the United States. They include such powerful Administration figures as Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Advisory Board members Richard Perle and James Woolsey (a former CIA director), National Security Council`s Mideast honcho Elliot Abrams, and a host of other highly-placed officials.

Their goals, as stated in their position papers and speeches, can be summarized thusly: Since the U.S. is the only superpower in the world, it should assert its power aggressively, in order to ensure that no other state or foreign organization (such as the U.N. or the E.U.) can ever rise to parity with the United States and challenge its pre-eminence. This aggressive posture includes the use of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., if the U.S. thinks a country or force may want, at some future point, to take on America, the U.S. goes in guns-ablazing and convinces them otherwise. The PNAC doctrines are now official U.S. policy, as laid out in the National Security Strategy promulgated last year by the Bush Administration.

Iraq, with a universally despised ruler, was selected as the demonstration model. The reasoning is similar to what Truman used in dropping atomic bombs on Japan, as a warning to the rest of the world to not even think about challenging America. As a result of what the U.S. did to and in Iraq, the rest of the Middle East has been informed in stark terms not to get too uppity or it could happen to you. Already, Syria has started backing away from its challenge to U.S. hegemony in the region.

The long-term result of achieving dominance in a region -- not necessarily by having to put troops on the ground -- is: 1) you now have effective control of the natural resources in that area; 2) you are able to reshape governments more to your liking, in this case more "democratic" governments in the autocratically-ruled Arab Middle East.

Q. But doesn`t the U.S. risk that true democratic elections might bring into power fundamentalist Islamic rule antagonistic to U.S goals?

A. Yes, of course. Especially because the U.S. doesn`t really understand Islam, Islamic nationalism, or proud Islamic history of battling "infidels." Case in point: Bush early on used the term "crusade" to describe what the U.S. was about in the Middle East, and was clueless as to why Muslims worldwide reacted in anger and horror. Sending in Christian missionaries to Iraq just fuels this fire of resentment.

Rumsfeld says the U.S. won`t let Islamists take control. But once you let the democracy genie out of the bottle, it`s often impossible to deal with the implications on the ground.

The PNAC boys tend to see only how strong the U.S. is militarily, and believe that force always is capable of bending the will of citizens and nations. The PNACs are weaker in understanding the force of people power, of religious fervor, of nationalistic pride -- all of which may well came back to bite them where it really hurts.

Q. But wouldn`t democracy be good for all the downtrodden Arabs in the Middle East, who have been chafing for decades under authoritarian rule?

A. Yes, of course -- unless they elect religious parties that will be just as strict and totalitarian as what they replace, maybe even worse. Then the citizens of those countries will have gained very little, except to have the freedom to choose their own repressors, who are not easy to turn out at the polls once they get their Big Brother organizations running. Iran is a good example.

Q. So what can the U.S. do to try to prevent this scary state of affairs from ever happening?

A. The one thing that will defuse the growing power of the fundamentalist Islamic movement is to quickly engineer a just resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian situation. If Palestine can obtain its own geographically and politically viable state -- and the only way to do that is for the U.S. to lean hard on the Israeli government to end the Occupation and withdraw from all settlements on Palestinian land -- the pus-filled boil would be lanced in the Arab body politic. Two independent states would live side by side, with security guaranteed, no terrorist attacks by Palestinians inside Israel, no incursions by Israel into Palestine.

That`s the one thing that the U.S. immediately could do, and needs to do, to change the explosive chemistry of the Middle East. Will it do it? History seems to point to a negative answer. The U.S., time after time, seems willing to back off and give in to Israel`s extremist desires, which translate into further humiliation and frustration for the Palestinians. This time, the U.S. probably would have to threaten to withdraw all U.S. economic and militiary aid to Israel in order to force it to end the Occupation and totally withdraw from all its settlements in Palestinian land -- but the Bush Administration has given no indication that it has that kind of foresight or courage.

The result, if no just and comprehensive settlement takes place, is that Palestinian extremists will continue their terror campaign inside Israel, Israel will continue visiting its brutality upon the Palestinians, the Arab world will unite in its condemnation of the U.S. for not really wanting a just peace in the Middle East, and Islamic fundamentalists will assume more and more power in the area. We won`t even mention the terrorism that would make its way to U.S. shores.

Q. I`m gathering then that the U.S. will not make a military move on Syria or Iran, at least until after the Israel/Palestine "roadmap" is laid out and negotiations there begin. Am I right?

A. Yes. As a result of the way the U.S. entered and destroyed Iraq -- with an illegal, immoral war, not caring what anybody else thought of its actions -- the unanimity against the U.S. in the Arab world, and the anti-U.S. economic boycotts being organized in Europe and elsewhere, are making even the PNAC boys have second thoughts about moving right now. First comes defusing the situation a bit, then later it`ll be time to light the fuse of war-threats again. And then there`s the upcoming 2004 campaign; none of the Hard-Righters want to do anything that would endanger Bush`s chances.

Q. Do you see any chance that Bush could lose in 2004?

A. Let`s just say that it`s still the economy, stupid, and Bush&Co. -- who took the largest surpluses in history and brought the country into huge deficits -- continue to shoot their own feet, pressing for even more enormous tax cuts (mostly for the wealthy and giant corporations) that will only do further damage to our tattered economy. Plus, so great is the resentment against Bush among Democrats and many moderates that they may just unite in force behind a viable Democrat candidate this time. And, no, don`t ask me who; we`ll get to all that in another Dummies-type article.

In the meantime, put pressure on your local elected officials to have voting machines that guarantee ways of checking that the balloting is on the up-and-up, and that exit polls are back in operation. If the computer voting machines` software has been tampered with and there`s no paper trail, or exit-polling, to measure votes cast against votes counted, all the good Democrat campaigning in the world will never gain a victory. You`ve been forewarned.



Bernard Weiner also has authored "The War on Terrorism for Dummies," http://www.counterpunch.org/weinerdummies.html "The Middle East for Dummies,"http://www.counterpunch.org/mideastdummies.html "The intifadeh & Israel for Dummies," http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/04.17F.BW.Dummies.htm and "The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies."http://www.counterpunch.org/weiner0601.html

Copyright 2003 by Bernard Weiner

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Pause the postwar glee to ask: Were supporters misled?
By Don Campbell


The ``victory`` in Iraq that evoked so much irrational exuberance in Washington is degenerating into a bit of a farce. Iraqi Shiite clerics are telling us to get out and take our notions of nation building with us. We can`t find Saddam Hussein, the egomaniacal dictator we could tolerate for 25 years but not a day longer, though we`re fairly certain he`s not in control anymore.

Most importantly, the premise on which the White House sold this war to Americans -- Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were a direct threat to us -- has yet to be validated. Some who accepted that are beginning to feel a little bit had. If you`re going to invade a country without direct provocation, the justification should be ironclad both before and after the fact. That point seems to have gotten lost in the general euphoria, which is not to say that nothing good came from selectively bombing Iraq to smithereens.

But the war`s only unqualified benefit was here at home: The U.S. military finally has the kind of respect it deserves from people who previously neither understood nor appreciated the professionalism and character of its members.

Beyond that, how you view the Iraqi outcome depends mostly on the political and philosophical biases you held before the war. You can spin it any number of ways as an affirmation of what you believed all along.

Those media nags

Problem is, some things don`t spin very well. Exhibit A would be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admonishing the media when they ask about the elusive weapons of mass destruction. Before the war, the administration insisted that Iraq had hundreds of tons of chemical weapons and thousands of gallons of biological weapons. Now Rumsfeld says we must be patient, that finding easily concealed weapons takes time. Excuse me, Mr. Secretary, but isn`t that just the argument the U.N. Security Council was using when you and I and many others were ridiculing their Inspectors Clouseau?

But that is background noise to the issue I care most about: the need to hold elected officials accountable for what they say and do. It`s not a Democratic or Republican or liberal or conservative proposition. If we could hold Bill Clinton accountable for fooling around with an intern and lying about it -- and we did, even if the Senate wimped out at the end -- surely we can hold President Bush accountable for his rationale for taking the country to war.

A threat to USA

Remember, the White House insisted repeatedly that Iraq was a threat to the United States -- not to Israel, not to Great Britain, not to Guinea-Bissau -- because a Hitler-in-the-making had weapons of mass destruction. I and a lot of people accepted that even while worrying that Iraq would be a costly diversion from the most important task ahead, which is to chase terrorists to the ends of the earth and destroy them.

That`s why Bush had better hope that all those horrific chemical and biological weapons are found. Reports that the number of U.S. personnel searching for weapons will be tripled shows Bush apparently understands that.

Public opinion polls won`t help him much. One survey says a majority of Americans are concerned that U.S. troops have not found these weapons; another says a majority feel the war was worth it even if the weapons are not found. You can get just about any result out of a poll, of course, so let`s put polls aside and get it straight:

If the weapons are found and their authenticity confirmed, Bush will have the I-told-you-so moment of his presidency. He`ll deserve to be rewarded politically for staring down the Nervous Nellies and defending the nation against weapons controlled by a mad man.

If the weapons are not found, the most charitable explanation is that they were moved out of Iraq while we were bombing our way to Baghdad -- or that we had rotten intelligence to begin with. Either illustrates incompetence.

The more ominous conclusion is that Bush deliberately misled Americans to gather support for the Iraqi invasion -- or unwittingly was misled himself by gung-ho advisers, none of whom wear uniforms. I don`t know which of the two is worse, but either should carry a heavy political price.


Don Campbell, a member of USA TODAY`s board of contributors, lives in Atlanta.

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http://www.outragedcomics.com

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Bush`s Supply-Side Leadership

Bush has taken Reagan`s excuse for giving more money to the wealthy-- supply-side economics-- and applied it to the policies of his administration as a whole. Supply-side theory postulates that giving money to the producers and investors allows them to take that money and produce more, creating jobs and greater consumption by the workers because they have more money to spend. This theory contradicts the classical model of consumer need and desire stimulating cause for production. Supply-side economics didn`t work for Reagan and it`s not working for Bush, but in both cases the rich have gotten more money, and that`s the point of this GOP excercise in reverse Robin Hood economics.

Ever since Bush was selected by the Supreme Court to live in the White House, we`ve seen supply-side theory --giving the people what you want to produce-- being employed on the domestic front. It`s a matter of government selling its citizens things they don`t want to buy. The people voted for Gore, but the Supreme Court gave us Bush. The people want Church and State separated, but Bush and Sec. of Ed. Paige give us faith-based public education. The people said they preferred medical care and better education to tax cuts for the rich, but to no avail. The people want a clean environment, but the corporations pulling the Bush strings give us dirty water and dirty air. The people want fair, unbiased judges, but Bush appointees have solid records of being against civil rights and workers` rights. Initially, the people didn`t want a war in Iraq, but the growing documentation of administration lies indicates that supply-side propaganda changed that. Now, mainstream pundits are beginning to wonder what kind of "democracy" Bush wants to provide for the Iraqi people.

Clearly, the Bush administration is a supply-side government. Don`t give the people what they want to buy, but what you want to sell them , then invest in distortions and lies to make your sale.

Bush has been called disciplined and determined, but these are hardly positive traits if they are used in the creation of policies that harm us. Bush has been called a leader, but what good is a leader who takes us in the wrong direction? --Politex, 04.28.03



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Kein Artikel über Verschwörungstheorien, aber viele offene Fragen.

The Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
by Bernard Weiner

Don`t know about you, but all this who-knew-what-when pre-9/11 stuff is mighty confusing. So once again, I head to that all-purpose reference series for some comprehensible answers.

Q. I`ve heard all these reports about the government knowing weeks and months in advance of 9/11 that airliners were going to be hijacked and flown into buildings, and yet the Bush Administration apparently did nothing and denied they did anything wrong. They claimed the fault lay in the intelligence agencies "not connecting the dots," or that it was the "FBI culture" that failed. Can you explain?

A. Most of the "it`s-the-fault-of-the-system" spin is designed to deflect attention from the real situation. Bush and his spokesmen may well be correct in saying they had no idea as to the specifics -- they may not have known the exact details of the attacks -- but it is more and more apparent that they knew a great deal more than they`re letting on, including the possible targets.

Q. You`re not just going leave that hanging out there, are you? Just bash Bush with no evidence to back it up?

A. There`s no need to bash anybody. There is more than enough documentation to establish that the Bush Administration was fully aware that a major attack was coming from Al-Qaeda, by air, aimed at symbolic structures on the U.S. mainland, and that among mentioned targets were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Congress, Statue of Liberty. (According to Richard Clarke, the White House`s National Coordinator for Anti-Terrorism, the intelligence community was convinced ten weeks before 9/11 that an Al-Qaeda attack on U.S. soil was imminent.)

Q. If they knew in advance that the, or at least an, attack was coming, why did the Bush Administration do nothing to prepare the country in advance: get photos of suspected terrorists out to airlines, have fighter jets put on emergency-standby status or even in the air as deterents, get word out to the border police to stop these "watch-list" terrorists, put surface-to-air missiles around the White House and Pentagon, etc.?

A. The explanation preferred by the government is to admit, eight months late, to absolute and horrendous incompetence, up and down the line (although Bush&Co., surprise!, prefer to focus the blame lower down, letting the FBI be the fall guy). But let`s try an alternate explanation. Think about it for a moment. If their key goal was to mobilize the country behind the Bush Administration, get their political/business agenda through, have a reason to move unliterally around the globe, and defang the Democrats and other critics at home -- what better way to do all that than to have Bush be the take-charge leader after a diabolic "sneak attack"?

Q. You`re suggesting the ultimate cynical strategem, purely for political ends. I can`t believe that Bush and his cronies are that venal. Isn`t it possible that the whole intelligence apparatus just blew it?

A. Possible, but not bloody likely. There certainly is enough blame to spread around, but the evidence indicates that Bush and his closest aides knew that bin Laden was planning a direct attack on the U.S. mainland -- using airplanes headed for those icon targets -- and, in order to get the country to move in the direction he wanted, he kept silent.

Q. But if that`s true, what you`ve described is utterly indefensible, putting policy ahead of American citizens` lives.

A. Now are you beginning to understand why Bush&Co. are fighting so tenaciously against a blue-ribbon commission of inquiry, and why Bush and Cheney went to Congressional leaders and asked them not to investigate the pre-9/11 period? Now do you understand why they are trying so desperately to keep everything secret, tightly locked up in the White House, only letting drips and drabs get out when there is no other way to avoid Congressional subpoenas or court-ordered disclosures? They know that if one thread of the coverup unravels, more of their darkest secrets will follow.

Q. You`re sounding like a conspiracy nut.

A. For years, we`ve avoided thinking in those terms, because so many so-called "conspiracies" exist only in someone`s fevered imagination. Plus, to think along these lines in this case is depressing, suggesting that American democracy can be so easily manipulated and distorted by a cabal of the greedy and power-hungry. But I`m afraid that`s where the evidence leads.

Q. You mean there`s proof of Bush complicity in 9/11 locked up in the White House?

A. We wouldn`t use the term complicity. So far as we now know, Bush did not order or otherwise arrange for Al-Qaeda`s attacks on September 11. But once the attacks happened, the plans Bush&Co. already had drawn up for taking advantage of the tragedy were implemented. A frightened, terrorist-obsessed nation did not realize they`d been the object of another assault, this time by those occupying the White House.

Q. This is startling, and revolting. But I refuse to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon until I see some proof. Bush says he first heard about a "lone" pre-9/11 warning on August 6, and that it was vague and dealt with possible attacks outside the U.S. Why can`t we believe him? After all, the FBI and CIA are notorious for their incompetence and bungling. You got a better version that makes sense, I`d love to hear it.

A. Bush and his spinners want us to concentrate on who knew what detail when; it`s the old magician`s trick of getting you to look elsewhere while he`s doing his prestidigitation. We`re not talking about a little clue here and another little clue there, or an FBI memo that wasn`t shared. We`re talking about long-range planning and analysis of what strategic-intelligence agencies and high-level commissions and geopolitical thinkers around the globe -- including those inside the U.S. -- saw for years before 9/11 as likely scenarios in an age of terrorist attacks.

The conclusion about Al-Qaeda, stated again and again for years by government analysts, was basically: "They`re coming, by air. Get prepared. They`re well-organized, determined, and technically adept. And they want to hit big targets, well-known symbols of America." (There was a 1999 U.S. government study, for example, that pointed out that Al-Qaeda suicide-bombers wanted to crash aircraft into a number of significant Washington targets; during the 199 5 trial of Ramsi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he revealed plans to divebomb a plane into CIA headquarters, and earlier he had told FBI agents that the list was expanded to include the Pentagon and other D.C. targets.)

Elements in the FBI, all over the country, who suspected what was coming, were clamoring, begging, for more agents to be used for counter-terrorism investigations, but were turned down by Attorney General Ashcroft; Ashcroft also gave counter-terrorism short shrift in his budget plans, not even placing anti-terrorism on his priority list; John O`Neill, the FBI`s NYC anti-terrorism director, resigned, asserting that his attempts at full-scale investigating were being thwarted by higher-ups; someone in the FBI, perhaps on orders of someone higher-up, made sure that the local FBI investigation in Minneapolis of Zacaria Moussauoi was compromised. All this while Ashcroft was shredding the Constitution in his martial law-like desire to amass information, and continues even now to further expand his police-state powers.

(Note: An FBI agent has filed official complaints over the bureau`s interfering with anti-terrorism investigations; his lawyers include David Schippers, who worked for the GOP side in the Clinton impeachment effort; Schippers says the agent knew in May 2001 that "an attack on lower Manhattan was imminent." A former FBI official said: "I don`t buy the idea that we didn`t know what was coming...Within 24 hours [of the attack], the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and someone was sitting on it.")

One can accept the usual incompetency in intelligence collection and analysis from, say, an anti-terrorist desk officer at the FBI, but not from the highest levels of national defense and intelligence in and around the President, where his spokesman, in a bald-faced lie, told the world that the 9/11 attacks came with "no warning." More recently, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in a quavering voice, tried to characterize the many warnings as mere "chatter," and concerned attacks "outside the U.S." But the many warning-reports focused on terrorist attacks both inside and outside the United States; the August 6th briefing dealt with planned attacks IN the United States.

Not only were there clear warnings from allies abroad, but the U.S., through its ECHELON and other electronic-intercept programs, may well have broken bin Laden`s encryption code; for example, the U.S. knew that he told his mother on September 9: "In two days you`re going to hear big news, and you`re not going to hear from me for a while".

And, the word of an impending attack was getting out: put options (hedges that a stock`s price is going to fall) in enormous quantities were being bought on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, the two carriers of the hijackers, as early as September 7; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by "an airport security man" on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day; Newsweek reported that on September 10, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"; many members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11, etc. etc.

Q. You`re giving me intriguing bits and pieces. Can`t you tie it all together and make it make sense?

A. OK, you asked for it, so we`re going to provide you with a kind of shorthand scenario of what may well have gone down, a kind of narrative that attempts to tie a lot of disparate-seeming events together. There is voluminous, multi-sourced evidence that establishes this scenario. It`s scary, so prepare yourself.

We believe that the HardRight began serious planning for a 2000 electoral victory -- and then implementation of a HardRight agenda, and the destruction of a liberal opposition -- a year or two after Clinton`s 1996 victory. (The impeachment of Clinton was a key ingredient to sully Democrat opposition.) The GOP HardRight leaders decided early to select George W. Bush, a none-too-bright and easily malleable young man with the right name and pedigree. They ran into a speed-bump when John McCain began to take off in the public imagination, and so with dirty tricks they wrecked his campaign in the South and elsewhere, and continued on their merry course.

For a while, they fully expected an easy victory over dull Al Gore, tainted goods for a lot of conservative Republicans and others because of his association with Clinton, but, given the obvious limitations of their candidate, they weren`t going to take a lot of chances. In Florida, for example, where it looked as if the race might be tight, they early on arranged things -- through Bush`s governor-brother Jeb, and the Bush campaign`s Katherine Harriss, Florida`s Secretary of State -- so that George W. couldn`t lose. An example: removing tens of thousands of eligible African-American voters from the rolls.

As it turned out, Gore won the popular vote by more than a half-million votes nationwide, and, we now know, would have won Florida`s popular vote had all the ballots been counted, but the U.S. Supreme Court HardRight majority, despite its longtime support for states` rights, in a bit of ethical contortionism did a philosophical reverse in midair and ordered the Florida vote-counting to stop and declared Bush the winner, installing a President rather than letting the people decide for themselves.

Q. That`s ancient history. I`m interested in 9/11, not tearing at an old scab.

A. OK. We`re merely trying to indicate that the HardRight`s campaign to take power was not an overnight, post-9/11 whim but worked out long in advance. After so many near-chances to take total control, they would do anything to guarantee a presidential victory this time around -- which would give them full control over the reins of power: Legislature (where HardRightists dominated the House and Senate), the Courts (where the HardRight dominated the U.S. Supreme Court and many appelate courts), and the Executive branch, not to mention the HardRight media control they exerted in so many areas.

They had followed the news, they knew that the Al-Qaeda terrorist network was engaged in a maniacal jihad against America, and was quite capable -- as they had demonstrated on many occasions, from Saudia Arabia to East Africa to the first attempt on the World Trade Center -- of carrying out their threats. They also knew, from innumerable intelligence reports from telecommunications intercepts, and from various commissions, CIA and foreign agents that Al-Qaeda liked to blow up symbolic icon structures of countries targeted, and that Al-Qaeda, and its affiliates, had an affinity for trying to use airplanes as psychologic or actual weapons. (The French had foiled one such attack in 1994, where a hijacked commercial airliner would be flown into the Eiffel Tower.)

By early 2001 and into the Summer, warnings were pouring in to U.S. intelligence and military agencies from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, and other Middle East and South Asian intelligence sources, along with Russia and Britain and the Phillipines, saying that a major attack on the U.S. mainland was in the works, involving the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction.

Indeed, in June and July of 2001, the alerts started to be explicit that air attacks were about to go down in the U.S.; even local FBI offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis began passing warnings up the line about Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously at flight schools. In July, Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airliners and traveled only by private plane, and Bush, after but a few months in office, announced he was going to ground, spending the month of August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Cheney disappeared from view, and our guess is that he was coordinating the overall, post-attack strategy.

Under this scenario, in mid-Summer 2001, Bush&Co. decided this was it. Bin Laden unknowingly was going to deliver them the gift of terrorism, and they were going to run with it as far and as fast and as hard as they could. The various post-attack scenarios had been worked out, the so-called USA Patriot Act -- which contained various police-state eviscerations of the Constitution -- was polished and prepared for a rush-job (with no hearings) through a post-attack Congress, the war plans against the Taliban in Afghanistan were readied and rolled out, the air-base countries around Afghanistan were brought onboard, and so on. All during the Summer of 2001.

Q. I don`t understand how war against Afghanistan could have been anticipated so early.

A. Follow the money. Various oil/gas/energy companies had wanted a Central Asian pipeline to run through Afghanistan (costing much less to build, but also so it wouldn`t have to go through Russia or Iran); that project was put on hold during the chaos in Afghanistan, but when the Taliban took over and brought stability to that country, the U.S. began negotiating with the Taliban about the pipeline deal. Even after sending them, via the United Nations, $43million dollars for "poppy-seed eradication," and inviting them to talks in Texas, the Taliban began to balk. At a later meeting, the U.S. negotiator threatened them with an attack unless they handed over bin Laden and reportedly told them, in reference to the pipeline, that they could accept "a carpet of gold" or be buried in "a carpet of bombs." (The later U.S. government spin was that the bin Laden issue and the pipeline issues were separate, and that the U.S. threats didn`t mix the two and there were misunderstandings of what was said.) Shortly thereafter, bin Laden, hiding out in Afghanistan, initiated the September 11th attacks, and the U.S. bombing of that country began. Oh, by the way, in case you haven`t noticed, under the new <U.S.-friendly> government in Kabul, the pipeline project is back on track. Oh, by the way, the pipeline will terminate reasonably close to the power plant in India built by Enron that has been lying dormant for years, waiting for cheap energy supplies.

Q. You`re saying that U.S. war and foreign policy have been dictated by greed?

A. Among other pleasant motivations, such as hunger for domination and control, domestically and around the globe -- which always ties in with greed. That`s why Bush&Co. play such political and military hardball. That`s why the arrogant, take-no-prisoners, in-your-face attitude, to bully and frighten potential opponents into silence and acquiescence, even questioning their patriotism if they demur or raise embarrassing issues.

Q. But this is a democracy, people are still speaking their minds, right?

A. Certainly, there are areas of America`s democratic republic that have not yet been shut down. But where there should be a vibrant opposition party, raising all sorts of questions about Bush Administration policy and plans, America receives mostly silence and timidity. However, as more and more of the ugly truth begins to emerge -- and Enron, Anthrax, and pre-9/11 knowledge are just the tips of the iceberg -- the Democrats (and moderate Republicans) are beginning to feel a bit more emboldened. But just a bit, preferring to run for cover whenever Bush&Co. accuse them of being unpatriotic when they raise pointed questions.

Q. You`re so critical and negative about the Bush Administration. Can`t you say anything good about what they`re doing?

A. Yes. They have moved terrorism -- the new face of warfare in our time -- front and center into the world`s consciousness, and have mobilized a global coalition against it. They may be making mistakes, which could lead to horrifying consequences, or acting at times out of impure motives, but at least the issue is out there and being debated and acted upon.

Now, having said that, we must point out that the institutions in this country -- the Constitution, the courts, the legislative bodies, civil liberties, the Bill of Rights, the press, etc. -- are in as much danger as they`ve ever been in. And the U.S.`s bullying attitude abroad may well lead to disastrous consequences for America down the line.

Q. So, what`s to be done?

A. The most important thing at the moment -- even, or especially when, the inevitable next terrorist attack occurs -- is to break the illusion of Bush&Co. invulnerability. The best way to do that, aside from ratcheting up the Enron and Anthrax and 9/11 investigations (and it may turn out that those scandals are deeply intertwined), is to defeat GOP candidates in the upcoming November elections. If the Democrats hang on to the Senate and can take over the House, the dream of unchallengable HardRight power will be broken. Bush&Co. will become even more desperate, overt, nasty, and in their arrogance and bullying ways, will make more mistakes and alienate more citizens. The edifice will begin to crumble even more; there will be more and deeper Congressional and media investigations; resignations and/or impeachments (of both Bush & Cheney, and Ashcroft) may well follow.

Q. You`re asking me to support ALL Democrats, even though in a particular race a moderate GOP conservative would be better?

A. Yes. In some cases, you may have to hold your nose and send money to, canvass for, and vote for a Democrat; we can get rid of the bad ones later. The objective right now -- for the future of the Constitution, and for the lives of our soldiers in uniform and civilians around the globe -- has to be to break the momentum of the HardRight by taking the House and keeping the Senate from returning to GOP control. Doing so would be even more important than what happened when that courageous senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, appalled by the HardRight nastiness and greed-agenda of the Bush folks, resigned from the GOP and turned the Senate agenda over to the Democrats.

Q. And you think if the GOP gets its nose bloodied in the November election, that will convince Bush to resign or lead to his impeachment? I don`t get that.

A. Churchill once told the Brits during World War II that "this is not the beginning of the end, but it is the beginning of the beginning of the end." There is a lot of hard work and organizing and educating to be done, but the recent exposure of Bush coverup-lies about pre-9/11 knowledge is "the beginning of the beginning of the end." With a GOP defeat in November, Democrats will be emboldened to speak up more, investigate deeper, and those inquiries will unlock even more awful secrets of this greed-and-powerhungry administration. And that will be the beginning of the end -- and the beginning of the beginning of a new era of more humane values for America and the rest of the world.

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught American government & international relations at Western Washington University and San Diego State University; he was with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly 20 years..

[Joerver]

African Americans still have to dream on
Heather Stewart
Monday April 28, 2003
The Guardian

Stock market sell-offs and collapsing corporations have been the most visible signs of the US economic downturn over the past two years.

But as growth slowed the economic pain spread well beyond chastened dotcom millionaires, hitting disadvantaged groups which had only just begun to benefit from the long boom of the late 1990s.

For all its supposed classlessness and new world meritocracy, the US is a deeply divided society.

Figures released by the government last Friday painted a bleak picture of the lives of the 36 million black Americans - those who are "non-institutionalised" and do not form part of the notoriously large and disproportionately black US prison population.

Unemployment within the white population last year was 5%; among African Americans it was 11%. Poverty is also disproportionately concentrated among black people. In the population as a whole, 12% live in poverty, but the incidence among black people is 23%. For children, that rises to an astonishing 30%.

As the economy turned downwards in 2001, with global trade depressed and the consequences of the heady years of over-investment making themselves felt, hopes for the poorest stopped moving in the right direction.

In 1979, the poverty rate among black people was 31%. Ten years and two presidential terms for Ronald Reagan later, it was unchanged. But through the roaring 1990s things began to improve.

Jared Bernstein, of the Washington think-tank the Economic Policy Institute, said the benefits of the extraordinary period of expansion had begun to trickle down to the bottom of society.

"Black families made quite significant gains against poverty in the late 1990s," he said. "The rising tide finally did lift some of the rowboats." By 2000, the black poverty rate had dropped to 22.5%: still high, but the lowest figure since the US government began measuring it, in 1959.

Progress in the 1990s was not the result of economic growth alone. The mininum wage was raised, bringing up the incomes of those at the bottom of the income scale - and Bill Clinton experimented with welfare to work policies, raising the in-work tax credits, which Gordon Brown later replicated in the UK. As Mr Bernstein put it: "Welfare to work was pushing, the economy was pulling, and full employment certainly helps."

In The State of Working America, its survey of US society published last year, the EPI said: "Truly effective poverty reduction depends on both market forces and the redistribution of economic resources."

With market forces - for the moment, at least - pointing in the wrong direction, it would be simplistic to put the blame for rising poverty on the change of personnel in the White House.

But, with President Bush fighting to convince Congress that the best way of boosting the economy is cutting taxes for the rich, it seems certain that policy is not going to help.

How much inequality - and how much sheer poverty - a civilised society should be willing to stomach is an open political question.

Inequalities are much harder to justify if there is no route out of poverty for some groups. Sadly, according to last week`s figures from the census bureau, the American dream is much less likely to come true if you are black.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Ist zwar bekannt und wurde auch von mir am 25.04. eingestellt, aber diese Zusammenfassung mit allen Links(im Original) bringt alle Fakten auf eine Seite.

Die Kinder von Guantanamo

Florian Rötzer 29.04.2003
Auch Kinder unter 16 Jahren werden als "feindliche Kämpfer" vom Pentagon auf dem kubanischen Stützpunkt festgehalten, aber den "sehr, sehr gefährlichen Menschen" ginge es bestens

Letzte Woche erst wurde bekannt, dass das Pentagon im Gefängnislager Guantanamo auf Kuba auch Kinder unter 16 Jahren eingesperrt haben. Am 23. April räumte Oberstleutnant Barry Johnson ein, dass Kinder als "aktive Kämpfer gegen die US-Streitkräfte" festgenommen und nach Guantanamo gebracht wurden, um sie dort zu vernehmen. Insgesamt befinden sich noch über 660 "feindliche Kämpfer" in rechtlosem Zustand in dem amerikanischen Gefangenenlager. Auch der Status von Kriegsgefangenen wird ihnen verweigert, um sie im Prinzip unbegrenzt in den Zellen zu halten.


Manche der Gefangenen sind hier bereits seit anderthalb Jahren. Nur wenige wurden bereits entlassen. Darunter auch Greise oder andere Menschen, die teilweise wohl auch zufällig in die Hände der US-Soldaten gerieten, die offenbar nicht sehr wählerisch waren ( Was machen eigentlich die deutschen Neonazis?). Vermutlich gehörte der Großteil der Gefangenen nicht einmal al-Qaida an. Angeblich gibt es Plakate auf arabisch und englisch im Lager mit dem Text: "The road to return must be paved with complete truth and cooperation. I know!!!" Bei den Inhaftierten häufen sich offenbar Selbstmordversuche. Manche müssen mit Antidepressiva behandelt werden. Nicht verwunderlich bei der völligen ungewissen Zukunft. Man ist den Amerikanern völlig rechtlos auf deren Belieben ausgesetzt. Gerichte in den USA haben bestätigt, dass die Gefangenen keinen Anspruch auf Rechtschutz haben, weil Guantanamo Bay nicht auf amerikanischen Territorium liegt. Das ist eine im Hinblick auf Menschenrechte höchst beunruhigende Entscheidung ( USA: Im Krieg ist das Recht eingeschränkt).

Schon welchen Wert ihre möglichen Informationen über al-Qaida nach so langer Gefangenschaft noch haben könnten, ist höchst fraglich. Der Kommandeur des Lagers, Geoffrey C. Miller, erklärte jedoch, dass man noch immer Informationen von ihnen erhalte. Dass die US-Soldaten mit Gefangenen nicht gerade zimperlich umgehen ( Unerwünschte Bilder), wurde jetzt auch wieder im Irak bekannt. Zwar hatte das Pentagon die Genfer Konvention über den Umgang mit Strafgefangenen ins Spiel gebracht, als der Sender al-Dschasira, dessen Büro in Bagdad später vom US-Militär bombardiert wurde, Bilder von amerikanischen Kriegsgefangenen sendete, die vom irakischen Fernsehen stammten. Amnesty protestierte jetzt, nachdem die schwedische Zeitung Dagbladet berichtet hatte, dass amerikanische Soldaten mutmaßliche Plünderer nackt durch eine Park in Bagdad abführten. Auf ihre Brust hatte man auf arabisch "Ali Baba - Haram(i)" (Dieb) geschrieben.

Über den Umgang mit mutmaßlichen Kindersoldaten

Genaue Angaben über die Zahl der Kinder in Guantanamo gibt es nicht. Medien gehen von mindestens drei Kinder im Alter zwischen 13 und 15 Jahren aus, es könnten aber auch mehr sein. Oberstleutnant Johnson sagte nurhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,941876,00.html, es handele sich um sehr kleine Zahl, die festgehalten würden, weil "sie das Potenzial haben, wichtige Informationen über den andauernden Krieg gegen den Terrorismus zu liefern". Ihre Freilassung hänge von der Entscheidung ab, "dass sie keine Gefahr für die Nation darstellen und keine weiteren Aufklärungswert besitzen". Angeblich seien alle Gefangenen unter 16 Jahren nach dem Januar 2002 nach Guantanamo gebracht worden. Erst nach medizinischen Untersuchungen habe man entdeckt, dass sie Kinder seien. Das aber hat ihnen dann offenbar auch nichts genützt.

Angeblich soll sich darunter ein 16-Jähriger mit kanadischer Staatsangehörigkeit befinden, der im Juli 2002, als er noch 15 war, schwer verletzt in Ostafghanistan nach einem Schusswechsel festgenommen. Er wird beschuldigt, eine Granate auf einen amerikanischen Soldaten geworfen zu haben, der dadurch getötet worden ist. Sein Vater soll für finanzielle Dinge bei al-Qaida verantwortlich gewesen sein. Kanadischen Beamten wurde bislang keine Möglichkeit gegeben, mit dem Jungen in Kontakt zu treten.

Jo Becker von der Menschenrechtsorganisation Human Rights Watch kritisierte, dass eine Befragung keine Rechtfertigung darstelle, Kinder gefangen zu halten. Sie gehörten sicherlich nicht, wie Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld die Gefangenen in Guantanamo bezeichnet und deren Rechtlosigkeit legitimiert hatte, zu den "Schlimmsten der Schlimmen". Auch wenn es sich um Kindersoldaten der Taliban handelt, sollten sie nicht zusammen mit anderen Erwachsenen eingesperrt und bestraft, sondern resozialisiert werden. Amnesty forderte ihre Freilassung und wies darauf hin, dass die US-Regierung das Abkommen über die Beteiligung von Kinder an bewaffneten Konflikten im Dezember 2002 unterzeichnet hat, das die Mitgliedsstaaten zur Resozialisierung der Kindersoldaten verpflichtet.

Inzwischen hat auch Olara Otunnu, der in der UN für die Rechte von Kindern im Krieg zuständig ist, die USA kritisiert. Gegenüber BBC sagte er, das nach internationalem Recht sowohl der Einsatz von Kindersoldaten als auch deren Einsperrung verboten sei. Er verlangte von den US-Behörden, im besten Interesse der Kinder zu handeln und die Situation aufzuklären.

Alles ganz legal

Auf einer Pressekonferenz letzte Woche erklärte Stabschef Richard Myers dazu:

Die Kinder seien "trotz ihres Alters sehr, sehr gefährliche Menschen sind. Das sind Menschen, die hauptsächlich in Afghanistan festgenommen und einen sorgfältigen Verfahren unterzogen worden sind, um zu bestimmen, in welcher Art sie beteiligt sind. Einige wurden getötet. Einige haben gesagt, wie würden wieder tötet. Sie können also Jugendliche sein, aber sie sind kein Schülerteam, sondern sie spielen in einem Erwachsenenteam, das ein Terroristenteam ist. Und sie sind in Guantanamo aus guten Grund - für unsere Sicherheit, für Ihre Sicherheit."

US-Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld sagte, dass alles, was mit den Gefangenen in Guantanamo geschehen ist, auf ganz legalem Weg erfolgt sei. Durch die Gefangenschaft halte man die Menschen, die zu al-Qaida oder den Taliban gehören, von der Straße weg. Rumsfeld schloss sich der Meinung seines Vorredners Myers an, dass die gefangenen Kinder eigentlich keine Kinder seien. Überdies seien viele Menschen von Teenagern getötet worden. Über die rechtliche Lage, also dass sie nach Ansicht der US-Regierung nicht von Anwälten besucht und unbegrenzt lange festgehalten werden, äußerte sich Rumsfeld nicht weiter.

Glückliche Kindersoldaten lieben Meerfilme

Wie die Nachrichtenagentur AP berichtete, soll es den Kindern nach einer neuen Pentagon-Version bestens gehen:

"Am Morgen lernen sie lesen und schreiben in ihren Muttersprachen, säubern ihre Räume und mähen draußen den Rasen. In der Freizeit spielen sie Fußball und schauen Filme wie `Castaway` an, der zu ihren Lieblingsfilmen gehört. Am Nachmittag arbeiten Psychlogen mit ihnen, um die Wunden körperlicher und emotionaler Misshandlungen zu heilen.

Leutnant Barry Johnson, der Sprecher des Gefangenenlagers, jedenfalls kann nur Gutes berichten. Als er sie besuchte, so erzählte er AP übers Telefon, hätten sie gerade Mathematik gelernt. Sie seien aufgestanden, hätten gegrinst und mit dem bisschen Englisch, das sie gelernt haben, Witze gemacht: "Offensichtlich mögen sie Meerfilme, weil sie das Mehr sehen können."

Die Jungen würden separat von den Erwachsenen leben. Sie könnten fünf Mal am Tag beten und wöchentlich einen "islamischen Kaplan" treffen. Die Wachen hätte man nach ihrer Erfahrung mit Jugendlichen ausgewählt. Sie wären zum Militärdienst gezwungen worden, weswegen man sie eben psychologisch behandelt: "Ich weiß nicht, ob sie irgendwo anders in der Welt, wenn man von ihrem Status als feindliche Kämpfer ausgeht, diese Art der Behandlung erhalten würden, eine Umgebung, die zur Förderung ihrer Entwicklung gestaltet wurde", sagt Johnson.

Für das Böse gibt es keine Altersgrenze

Michelle Malkinhttp://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20030428-21250064.htm versuchte hingegen in einem Kommentar in der konservativen Washington Times die Rumsfeld-Myers-Haltung zu bestärken, dass es sich eigentlich nicht um Kinder handelt, weswegen man sie so behandeln kann, wie alle anderen auch. Hier handelt es sich übrigens bereits um vier Jugendliche, die, so Malkin, keineswegs Nintendo oder in einer Sandkiste spielten, als sie festgenommen wurden, sondern die sich auf dem Dschihad befanden:

"Wir sprechen nicht von Herden von friedliebenden engelhaften Schülern (wie denjenigen, die von amerikanischen Truppen aus Saddams Gefängnissen befreit wurden). Wir sprechen von vier männlichen Jugendlichen, die als aktive feindliche Kämpfer gegen US-Truppen festgenommen wurden und verdächtigt werden, Verbindungen mit dem terroristischen al-Qaida-Netzwerk des besiegten Taliban-Regimes in Afghanistan gehabt zu haben."


Malkin verbindet ihren Kommentar, der die liberalen Kritiker und Menschenrechtsorganisationen lächerlich zu machen versucht, mit dem Fall des 17jährigen Lee Malvo, der letztes Jahr zusammen John Allen Muhammad im Raum von Washington 13 Menschen erschossen haben soll. Für das Böse, so Malkin, gebe es keine Altersgrenze, "kaltblütige Mörder und blutdurstige Kämpfer gibt es in allen Größen".

http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/14694/1.html

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Die Frage ist, wielange Blair sich noch halten kann und wer sein Nachfolger wird

Blair warns France of cold war with US
Michael White, political editor
Tuesday April 29, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair yesterday warned France and other critics of the US-led war in Iraq that any attempt to create "rival centres of power" to compete with the United States would restore the disastrous divisions of the cold war era.

"If we do not deal with the world on the basis of partnership between Europe and America, we will in a sense put back into the world divisions we wanted to get rid of when the cold war finished. I think that would be a disaster," the prime minister declared.

Mr Blair flies to Moscow today for crisis talks with President Vladimir Putin as four European Union states, including France and Germany, meet in Brussels to discuss strengthening military ties. Mr Blair was not invited.

Insisting that France and Britain still have many common interests, he warned that the fundamental question now is whether the world develops in what would "rapidly become rival centres of power".

At his first Downing Street press conference since the conquest of Iraq, Mr Blair also told anti-war critics not to "gloat" or "jump around gleefully" because coalition forces have so far failed to unearth the weapons of mass destruction which were meant to justify the invasion.

"I remain confident that they will be found," he told reporters. Up to 1,000 sites -many revealed since the invasion - would have to be painstakingly examined after years of active concealment. Jack Straw struck a similar note of caution when he made a Commons statement to MPs.

Dismissing the internal damage done within Labour`s ranks - "the series of mass resignations never occurred in reality at all" - Mr Blair also expressed dismay that anyone should suggest that evidence about the Iraqi stockpile might be faked.

"There is nobody in any part of my administration, or working for any of our services, that would ever agree to such a thing," he said while admitting that details of the "indepen dent verification" process is still being discussed with the US and UN.

Mr Blair insisted that President Bush would honour his promises on the Middle East road map, despite Israeli predictions to the contrary.

"President Bush himself is completely committed to taking the Middle East peace process forward," he said. "I would take the words of President Bush, they are good enough for me, and I think they are good enough for you."

Mr Blair remained doggedly upbeat about the conduct of the war and only slightly less confident than a month ago about the prospect for democratic civilian rule in Iraq. "I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of people, given a free choice, whatever their religious faith, want to live in a state that guarantees their freedom and democracy," he said.

He admitted that the US prison camp for Afghan detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is "an unsatisfactory situation," but explained that "as we get more information about what al-Qaida is up to we are able to check it with the people" held there.

On attitudes towards Iran and Syria, Iraq`s neighbours, the prime minister was conciliatory - urging both to cooperate and not to seek to destabilise Baghdad - while making it plain they face close scrutiny. Supporting terrorism, as Syria had done, "has got to stop".

Asked directly what message he might have for Saddam Hussein, widely assumed to be in hiding, Mr Blair said it had been on his mind a great deal, but pointedly declined to urge him to give himself up - a hint that the fallen dictator can expect no mercy.

In a Commons statement, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, admitted that "isolated pockets" of resistance remained from pro-Saddam forces. As normality returns in British-controlled Basra, he predicted that "for all the immense challenges that lie ahead one thing I know for certain: Iraq`s future will be better than its past".


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Cook to intervene in growing euro row
Patrick Wintour, chief political correspondent
Tuesday April 29, 2003
The Guardian

The former cabinet minister Robin Cook is to intervene in the growing battle over Labour`s decision on the euro by warning that ruling out a single currency in this parliament will have serious political and economic consequences.

Since his resignation Mr Cook has confined his criticisms to British policy on Iraq, but next week he will help launch a Britain in Europe report setting out how delay could result in lost foreign investment and other problems.

The analysis has been prepared by a group of distinguished economists, chaired by Professor David Begg.

Today Peter Mandelson will also plead with the cabinet to re-examine the euro issue next year, rather than slamming the door shut.

Speaking to the British Chambers of Commerce, he hopes to demolish the case for deferring a decision being prepared by the chancellor Gordon Brown`s aides, which is to be published in mid-May.

Mr Mandelson will argue that it would be an ideal time to announce that Britain intends to join the euro, even if entry is deferred because of economic uncertainty.

Urging the Labour party and the unions to "wake up" to what is at stake, he will state: "Inflation and interest rates are now substantially convergent and the pound has fallen against the euro to a more realistic level for entry. As a result the risks of joining today are infinitely less than they were three or more years ago."

He will add: "We cannot blame international business for cavilling at another Duke of York act marching the troops up the hill and down again, and wondering what is going on."

Mr Mandelson also argues that staying out makes it more likely that Mr Brown will have to choose between tax rises and lower public spending.

"If business takes seriously the belief of no single currency for Britain before 2010 at the earliest, then the loss of confidence will be severe."

Pro-euro cabinet ministers fear that they will have to discuss the euro in the same way that the Budget is discussed: on a take it or leave it basis.

Mr Brown would prefer to rule out a euro referendum for the lifetime of this parliament, barring totally unforeseen circumstances. Mr Blair wants to keep options open and believes he can persuade Mr Brown.

A complicating factor is the parlous state of relations with France. Some pro-euro ministers fear a referendum is impossible so long as relations with President Jacques Chirac remain poor. He could set very demanding conditions for British entry.

There is a growing likelihood of a ministerial reshuffle following this week`s local elections, but it is not likely to affect the euro debate. It is not expected that anyone will be shifted from the big three offices of state, but Clare Short, the international development secretary, may be sacked for disloyalty.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Nochmals den Kommentar zur Dollar -Euro Debatte. Dieses Thema sollte weiter beachtet werden.

The bottom dollar
There is only one way to check American power and that is to support the euro

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 22, 2003
The Guardian

The problem with American power is not that it`s American. Most states with the resources and opportunities the US possesses would have done far worse. The problem is that one nation, effectively unchecked by any other, can, if it chooses, now determine how the rest of the world will live. Eventually, unless we stop it, it will use this power. So far, it has merely tested its new muscles.

The presidential elections next year might prevent an immediate entanglement with another nation, but there is little doubt about the scope of the US government`s ambitions. Already, it has begun to execute a slow but comprehensive coup against the international order, destroying or undermining the institutions that might have sought to restrain it. On these pages two weeks ago, James Woolsey, an influential hawk and formerly the director of the CIA, argued for a war lasting for decades "to extend democracy" to the entire Arab and Muslim world.

Men who think like him - and there are plenty in Washington - are not monsters. They are simply responding to the opportunities that power presents, just as British politicians once responded to the vulnerability of non-European states and the weakness of their colonial competitors. America`s threat to the peace and stability of the rest of the world is likely to persist, whether George Bush wins the next election or not. The critical question is how we stop it.

Military means, of course, are useless. An economic boycott, of the kind suggested by many of the opponents of the war with Iraq, can never be more than symbolic: US trade has penetrated the economies of almost all other nations to such an extent that to boycott its goods and services would be to boycott our own. Until recently, as Bush`s government sought international approval for its illegal war, there appeared to be some opportunities for restraint by diplomatic means. But now it has discovered that the United Nations is unnecessary: most of its electors will approve its acts of aggression with or without a prior diplomatic mandate. Only one means of containing the US remains. It is deadly and, if correctly deployed, insuperable. It rests within the hands of the people of the United Kingdom.

Were it not for a monumental economic distortion, the US economy would, by now, have all but collapsed. It is not quite a West African basket case, but the size of the deficits and debts incurred by its profligacy would, by any conventional measure, suggest that it was in serious trouble. It survives only because conventional measures do not apply: the rest of the world has granted it an unnatural lease of life.

Almost 70% of the world`s currency reserves - the money that nations use to finance international trade and protect themselves against financial speculators - takes the form of US dollars. The dollar is used for this purpose because it is relatively stable, it is produced by a nation with a major share of world trade, and certain commodities, in particular oil, are denominated in it, which means that dollars are required to buy them.

The US does very well from this arrangement. In order to earn dollars, other nations must provide goods and services to the US. When commodities are valued in dollars, the US needs do no more than print pieces of green paper to obtain them: it acquires them, in effect, for free. Once earned, other nations` dollar reserves must be invested back into the American economy. This inflow of money helps the US to finance its massive deficit.

The only serious threat to the dollar`s international dominance at the moment is the euro. Next year, when the European Union acquires 10 new members, its gross domestic product will be roughly the same as that of the US, and its population 60% bigger. If the euro is adopted by all the members of the union, which suffers from none of the major underlying crises afflicting the US economy, it will begin to look like a more stable and more attractive investment than the dollar. Only one further development would then be required to unseat the dollar as the pre-eminent global currency: nations would need to start trading oil in euros.

Until last week, this was already beginning to happen. In November 2000, Saddam Hussein insisted that Iraq`s oil be bought in euros. When the value of the euro rose, the country`s revenues increased accordingly. As the analyst William Clark has suggested, the economic threat this represented might have been one of the reasons why the US government was so anxious to evict Saddam. But it may be unable to resist the greater danger.

Last year, Javad Yarjani, a senior official at Opec, the oil producers` cartel, put forward several compelling reasons why his members might one day start selling their produce in euros. Europe is the Middle East`s biggest trading partner; it imports more oil and petrol products than the US; it has a bigger share of global trade; and its external accounts are better balanced. One key tipping point, he suggested, could be the adoption of the euro by Europe`s two principal oil producers: Norway and the United Kingdom, whose Brent crude is one of the "markers" for international oil prices. "This might," Yarjani said, "create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros."

If this happens, oil importing nations will no longer need dollar reserves to buy oil. The demand for the dollar will fall, and its value is likely to decline. As the dollar slips, central banks will start to move their reserves into safer currencies such as the euro and possibly the yen and the yuan, precipitating further slippage. The US economy, followed rapidly by US power, could then be expected to falter or collapse.

The global justice movement, of which I consider myself a member, has, by and large, opposed accession to the euro, arguing that it accelerates the concentration of economic and political power, reduces people`s ability to influence monetary policy and threatens employment in the poorest nations and regions. Much of the movement will have drawn comfort from the new opinion polls suggesting that almost 70% of British voters now oppose the single currency, and from the hints dropped by the Treasury last week that British accession may be delayed until 2010.

But it seems to me that the costs of integration are merely a new representation of the paradox of sovereignty. Small states or unaffiliated tribes have, throughout history, found that the only way to prevent themselves from being overrun by foreign powers was to surrender their autonomy and unite to fight their common enemy. To defend our sovereignty - and that of the rest of the world - from the US, we must yield some of our sovereignty to Europe.

That we have a moral duty to contest the developing power of the US is surely evident. That we can contest it by no other means is equally obvious. Those of us who are concerned about American power must abandon our opposition to the euro.

· www.monbiot.com.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Nuclear war risk grows as states race to acquire bomb
By Peter Popham
29 April 2003


A conference on nuclear non-proliferation began in Geneva yesterday, in the shadow of North Korea`s departure from the global treaty and with the bleakest prospects for progress in the pact`s 33-year history.

John Wolf, US Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Non-proliferation told a news conference on the first day of the meeting that Iran has "an alarming, clandestine programme" to get hold of nuclear technology. "Iran is going down the same path of denial and deception that handicapped international inspections in North Korea and Iraq," he said.

But disarmament experts said that American lack of commitment to non-proliferation was as damaging as the behaviour of the proliferators.

Representatives of 187 countries are attending the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This is the second of three sessions that will be held before the Review Conference in 2005.

North Korea became the first state ever to defect from the process – Israel, India and Pakistan, all known nuclear states, have never been members – when it announced its departure in January. More defections are feared.

This was the Treaty that was supposed to lead to a non-nuclear world, but experts say the risks of proliferation are worse now than for 50 years. In the past two years the multilateral effort to contain and reduce the nuclear risk has unravelled. At the last NPT review conference in 2000 all member states signed a 13-point programme that included an undertaking by the five declared nuclear-weapon states to nuclear disarmament.

"That agreement is now gathering dust on some filing cabinet somewhere," said Dan Plesch, senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute. "For the first time since the 1950s there isn`t a global framework ... to get rid of nuclear weapons."

Pyongyang`s off-the-record announcement last week that it already had the bomb was a further blow. "Everyone is at a loss as to how to move forward on North Korea," said Kathryn Crandall of the British American Security Information Council, a research organisation. It is expected that the meeting will try to agree on a statement – but given the low morale it is more likely to be an invitation to return to the fold than a blast of brimstone.

At least as damaging as North Korea`s departure have been successive moves by Washington to distance itself from nuclear disarmament.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the US President, George Bush, signed National Security Presidential Directive 17, which said: "The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force – including potentially nuclear weapons – to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States ..."

This assertion, analysts say, undermined an important prop of the NPT process: the so-called "negative security assurances", initially made in 1978 and strengthened by the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 984 in 1995, not to use nuclear weapons against the non-nuclear weapon states.

The assurances were considered vital in discouraging states from developing their own nuclear weapons. Now people wonder if they are worth the paper it they are written on.

The popularising of the term Weapons of Mass Destructionhas blurred the formerly stark distinction between nuclear and other weapons, and has paved the way for this change, claims Ms Crandall. She said: "Such terminology reduces the understanding of the unparalleled destructive capacity of nuclear weapons compared to the less destructive effects of chemical and biological weapons."

More and more states are likely to buy the argument that the only way to be secure in a unipolar world is to go down the nuclear road – "to pre-empt pre-emption", one analyst said. "People look at the different ways that the `Axis of Evil` states – Iraq and North Korea – have been treated and they draw their own conclusions."

"What other countries are going to sit around after dinner saying, if Pakistan`s got the bomb why haven`t we?" said Mr Plesch. On the list of those likely to be holding such conversations, he said, are Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey and perhaps pre-eminently Japan, North Korea`s uneasy neighbour.

No long-term ill consequences threaten those that go down such a route. After India, then Pakistan, tested nuclear weapons in 1998, sanctions were clamped and both countries widely condemned. But all that changed after 11 September 2001, when the US needed Pakistan`s co-operation.

Last week, America`s outgoing Ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, spoke of India as "a rising great power of the 21st century" and of how the US and India "have made enormous strides" in the past two years towards "forging concentrated strategic collaboration". "Two years ago, there were economic sanctions ... against India related to its 1998 nuclear tests," Blackwill said. "Today, those sanctions are long gone." India congratulates itself that its stock in the world is higher now than before it got the bomb.

"It`s a double hit," said Mr Plesch. "A failure to disarm the world at the end of the Cold War. And now proliferating countries and the United States all deciding that they are not interested in this or other treaties any more ... the whole future of the treaty is up for grabs."

ATOMIC NATIONS

ISRAEL

Believed to have between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, but has never acknowledged them. Refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and does not allow United Nations weapons inspectors into the country. Has around 90 Jericho 1 surface-to-surface medium-range (311 miles) missiles, and Jericho 2 long-range (1,000 miles) missiles, and 100 aircraft that could deliver nuclear devices.

IRAN

Development of nuclear power facilities at Busheher using Russian expertise has stoked US fears that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite an agreement that spent fuel rods will be disposed of in Russia. Recent tests of a new generation of Shihab 3 medium-range rockets has added to US concerns, and a Shihab 4 rocket capable of reaching Western Europe is believed to be near to testing.

INDIA

In 1974, India exploded what the government described as a "peaceful nuclear device", and has expanded its capability ever since, bringing nuclear-capable Agni (Fire) II surface-to-surface long-range (1,242 miles) missiles into service last year. Also has short-range Agni I missiles, and 40 or more aircraft capable of delivering nuclear devices. Has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

When hundreds of thousands of Indian and Pakistani troops amassed on either side of the line of control in Kashmir last May, Pakistan test-fired Ghauri, Ghaznazi (Hatf 3) and the Abdali (Hatf 2) missiles to show it was ready and capable of using short and medium-range nuclear warheads. It also has 40 or so aircraft capable of delivering nuclear devices. Has not signed the non-proliferation treaty.

PAKISTAN

Signed the non-proliferation treaty in 1985 and pulled out in January this year. This followed a US-led decision to halt oil shipments over Pyongyang`s admission it was restarting its nuclear programme. Believed to have one or two nuclear weapons, and testing of the long-range Pekodosan 1 (formerly the Taepodong 1) missile continues. Has two or more aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
29 April 2003 10:10

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Matters of Emphasis
By PAUL KRUGMAN


We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target."

A British newspaper, The Independent, reports that "intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war." One "high-level source" told the paper that "they ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat."

Sure enough, we have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction. It`s hard to believe that we won`t eventually find some poison gas or crude biological weapons. But those aren`t true W.M.D.`s, the sort of weapons that can make a small, poor country a threat to the greatest power the world has ever known. Remember that President Bush made his case for war by warning of a "mushroom cloud." Clearly, Iraq didn`t have anything like that — and Mr. Bush must have known that it didn`t.

Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some people say that it doesn`t: we won, and the Iraqi people have been freed. But we ought to ask some hard questions — not just about Iraq, but about ourselves.

First, why is our compassion so selective? In 2001 the World Health Organization — the same organization we now count on to protect us from SARS — called for a program to fight infectious diseases in poor countries, arguing that it would save the lives of millions of people every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would have been about $10 billion per year — a small fraction of what we will spend on war and occupation. Yet the Bush administration contemptuously dismissed the proposal.

Or consider one of America`s first major postwar acts of diplomacy: blocking a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war. The U.S. complains that it will cost too much. And that must be true — we wouldn`t let innocent people die just to spite the French, would we?

So it seems that our deep concern for the Iraqi people doesn`t extend to suffering people elsewhere. I guess it`s just a matter of emphasis. A cynic might point out, however, that saving lives peacefully doesn`t offer any occasion to stage a victory parade.

Meanwhile, aren`t the leaders of a democratic nation supposed to tell their citizens the truth?

One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.`s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement — if it is ever announced — that it was a false alarm? It`s a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent coverage; the subsequent debunking did not.

Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to question the administration`s credibility? Some strange things certainly happened. For example, in September Mr. Bush cited an International Atomic Energy Agency report that he said showed that Saddam was only months from having nuclear weapons. "I don`t know what more evidence we need," he said. In fact, the report said no such thing — and for a few hours the lead story on MSNBC`s Web site bore the headline "White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq." Then the story vanished — not just from the top of the page, but from the site.

Thanks to this pattern of loud assertions and muted or suppressed retractions, the American public probably believes that we went to war to avert an immediate threat — just as it believes that Saddam had something to do with Sept. 11.

Now it`s true that the war removed an evil tyrant. But a democracy`s decisions, right or wrong, are supposed to take place with the informed consent of its citizens. That didn`t happen this time. And we are a democracy — aren`t we?

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April 29, 2003
How to Mix Politics With Religion
By REUEL MARC GERECHT


BRUSSELS
Twenty-four years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini outmaneuvered Iran`s religious establishment, his spiritual disciples in Iraq are attempting a similar clerical coup d`etat. In Iraq before Saddam Hussein, as in Iran before the Islamic revolution of 1979, Shiite clerics often had political influence. But they generally respected the age-old Shiite doctrine that clerics should keep their distance from politics.

Iraq`s two most prominent revolutionary clerics, Moktada al-Sadr, a 22-year-old firebrand from a great and rebellious clerical family, and Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, Iran`s favorite Iraqi cleric, are gambling that the collapse of Saddam Hussein`s regime has unsettled and compromised the Shiite religious establishment. Using physical intimidation and political demonstrations, they are trying to humble and silence their peers, like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who might accept the creation of a pluralistic, secular democracy under American guidance. It is a smart tactic given the Iraqi clergy`s historical distaste for non-Muslim "invaders."

It is unclear whether Mr. Sadr and Mr. Hakim can convince enough of Iraq`s younger Shiite clerics, who reflect the many intellectual strains of Iraqi Shiism, that their traditional leaders are morally compromised and politically irrelevant. The odds are probably against them.

To begin with, everyone in Iraq, not just the Shiite religious establishment, was compromised by Saddam Hussein`s rule. In Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi`s Iran, dissident Shiite clerics were often imprisoned and tortured, but the regime was always careful in its actions toward senior clerics. In Saddam Hussein`s Iraq, open dissent meant certain death.

Moreover, for more than 15 years before he came to power, Ayatollah Khomeini worked to create a cadre of loyal, increasingly revolutionary mullahs. Radical Iraqi clerics from Iran will not have the grass-roots networks that were so critical to Mr. Khomeini`s success. Nor is it likely that the forces behind Mr. Sadr and Mr. Hakim will benefit from the aid that Ayatollah Khomeini received in the 1970`s from the large and well-organized Iranian left. The Iraqi Communist Party, a disciplined, redoubtable organization, may well now enjoy a renaissance, but it is most unlikely that it will again become a major player. And the Communists, and whatever other leftist forces that can coalesce in the ashes of Baathist Iraq, surely know what happened to their Iranian equivalents when the mullahs gained power: they were annihilated.

Meanwhile, the rank-and-file of the Iraqi clergy may well be in a time warp. To their east is Iran, which Iraqi clerics see as more moral than what they knew under the Westernized Saddam Hussein. But these clerics do not know their Iranian counterparts nearly as well as they once did. It is quite possible that the average Iraqi cleric, deprived of information under a totalitarian system, is not fully aware of the Iranian people`s increasing distaste for Iran`s experiment with "Islamic democracy."

With the collapse of Saddam Hussein`s regime, however, Iraqis and Iranians will be able to observe each other more closely. In particular, Iranian and Iraqi clerics will quickly resume their student exchange programs, which had been going on for centuries. Iran`s best clerical students will certainly return to the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, the most prestigious center of learning in Shiism. Given the significant dissident clerical movement within Iran, it is not unlikely that Iran`s ruling hard-core mullahs — and Mr. Sadr, Mr. Hakim and other revolutionary Iraqi clerics — will lose influence when Iraqi clerics learn more about Iran`s "Islamic Revolution."

Yet it will be difficult for Iraq`s senior Shiite clergy to embrace publicly America as a midwife to democracy. For clerics who have been proud guardians of the country`s Islamic patrimony and independence from foreign rule, it would be embarrassing to support America. Mr. Sadr, Mr. Hakim and their allies in Tehran understand this all too well — which is in part why they have engaged the religious establishment so forcefully so soon.

The American occupation of Iraq is new and unsteady. Concerned about appearing to be "imperialists," and perhaps still hopeful they can exit Iraq sooner rather than later, United States officials have not, until recently, forcefully articulated their postwar democratic intentions and plans. (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld`s unqualified veto of an Iranian model of government for Iraq, and the arrest of Baghdad`s self-proclaimed mayor, are significant steps in defining what America views as politically permissible.)

Mr. Sadr and Mr. Hakim have been playing to what they see as an American vacuum. At the neighborhood mosque level, their allies have unquestionably gained ground. Perhaps more effectively than American soldiers, they have restored order and public services. The recent murder in Iraq of a prominent exile cleric, Sheik Abdel Majid al-Khoei, the son of a famous anti-Saddam, anti-Khomeini cleric, also no doubt unnerved the religious establishment. This murder was symbolically important because Mr. Khoei had been supported by the United States.

The recent religious celebrations at the holy city of Karbala, in which thousands of Shiites scourged themselves with chains and knives as they rallied near the city`s mosques, were also a catalyst for Shiite radicals. The celebrations undoubtedly led some Western observers and American officials, unfamiliar with this age-old Shiite passion play, to believe that the radicals have the upper hand.

Further weakening the cause of more moderate clerics, the Pentagon has failed to deploy to Iraq an Arabic-speaking civilian team dedicated exclusively to the Iraqi Shiite clergy, in particular with Ayatollah Sistani and his followers. An accomplished, old (male) Arabist who knows how to chit-chat with clerics would serve the United States well.

The internecine battle between Iraq`s Shiites isn`t an impossible task for the United States to handle. Americans should realize that neighborhoods run by clerics aren`t necessarily bad. In difficult times, the Shiite clergy has always tried to protect its flock. United States officials can resist the radical factions while also being careful not to run roughshod over the duties and prerogatives of the traditional clergy. Washington must be willing, however, to exercise decisive force to curtail those who seek to sabotage the foundations of liberal democracy. If the Iranians are financing their preferred Iraqi clerics, then we must do so as well.

Above all, America must hold its ground until democratic institutions take hold. If it is patient, the odds are decent that Iraqi Shiites will support democratic government. If they do so, they may bury forever, in both Iraq and Iran, the spirit of Ayatollah Khomeini.


Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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April 29, 2003
`Empire of a Devil`
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Here`s a news item you may have missed:

"Military experts said that a war between North Korea and the U.S. will end with the delightful victory of North Korea, a newly emerging military power, in 100 hours. . . . The U.S. [will] be enveloped in flames . . . and the arrogant empire of a devil will breathe its last."

That was issued by the North Korean news agency on Sunday. So I guess we`ve located the blustery Iraqi information minister — he must have taken refuge in North Korea.

The North Korean crisis is at a turning point. The talks between the U.S. and North Korea ended acrimoniously on Friday after the North said it already had nuclear weapons (which the C.I.A. believes is true, but it`s still impolite to say in public).

Still, there`s a reed of hope. North Korea proposed, officials say, that it might give up its nuclear programs and halt missile exports in exchange for security guarantees, normalized relations and mountains of aid. Basically, North Korea would do what it promised in a 1994 deal (but failed to do) if we would do what we pledged in 1994 (but also failed to do).

The administration is studying the proposal, and there are some signs of reason in the air. Earlier, to get to the talks, North Korea abandoned its insistence on a purely bilateral discussion with the U.S., while the U.S. gave up its demand for purely multilateral discussions. It also stopped insisting that North Korea dismantle its nuclear program before any talks.

The Bush administration spun this so artfully that it was widely portrayed as North Korea`s backing down in fear after the Iraq war. In fact, Washington caved at least as much as Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, China, which had been AWOL, is now playing a heroic role. It pressured North Korea, cutting off oil supplies for imaginary "technical reasons," and stepped up to the plate to mediate the talks between the U.S. and North Korea.

The North Koreans` new proposal is encouraging, although, as President Bush put it, it means that "they`re up to their old blackmail game." Mr. Bush`s refusal to reward North Korean bad behavior is perfectly admirable, but it`s also entirely impractical.

"The history of nonproliferation is rewarding bad behavior," one American expert said. "This has been true since Atoms for Peace. But the country has to stay bought."

There are two alternatives to rewarding bad behavior. One is to acquiesce in the North Korean nuclear program, which would risk widespread proliferation, with terrorists buying plutonium and Japan and South Korea developing their own nuclear weapons.

A second alternative is to continue the administration`s failed policy of trying to shun North Korea. Yup, this is the same policy that over the last few months led the North to revive its frozen plutonium program.

"The new approach of depending entirely on squeezing them looks like it is going to be an utter failure, and it is squandering everything we had achieved over the years," a senior U.S. official glumly observed.

The hawks are aghast at the idea of a new package deal with North Korea, and Washington seems to have been reasonable lately only because the Pentagon was too distracted by Iraq to notice what the State Department was up to. Pentagon officials yelped when they noticed, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circulated a memo suggesting that Washington and Beijing together bring down the North Korean government.

A fine dream. But what`s scary is that this proposal is so divorced from reality (Beijing would never agree) that it suggests that policy is being formulated by ideologues sealed within the Pentagon.

And when sanctions on North Korea would fail, the next step would be a military strike. It`s a sign of the mess we`re in that even a thoughtful statesman like Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican, is talking openly about a military strike. A strike would be a historic gamble that might work, or might trigger a war that would incinerate hundreds of thousands of people in Korea and Japan.

"That would be truly insane," said Steven Bosworth, a former ambassador to Seoul. He added, "For us to unilaterally attack North Korea would in my judgment be one of the most immoral acts conceivable."

All in all, looking at the alternatives, starting negotiations should be preferable to starting wars.




Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Baghdad Bait and Switch


By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, April 29, 2003; Page A23


It happened again.

As always, it was the middle of the night and I was sound asleep. I was awakened by the sound of the bedroom window being opened and the clump of two feet hitting the floor. I felt the usual breeze on my face. My long-dead grandfather was paying me yet another visit.

"So, nu, where is it?" he yelled.

"Grandpa, is that you?" I asked.

"You were expecting maybe Chemical Ali?"

"Where`s what?" I asked.

"The weapons from mass destruction. The chemical stuff and the biological stuff that could make you sick and the atomic stuff that could make you dead. Where are they, college boy? You wrote that this is why you supported the war."

"We`ll find them," I said. "Iraq is a big country, the size of --

"I know. California. You think maybe you got snookered?"

"Oh, no, Grandpa. I talked to experts. I went to briefings. They all said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

"This the same group of hotshots who said Saddam had a nuclear program that could produce a bomb in six months?"

"Yes."

"Not true, though, right?"

"Looks that way."

"And they said there was some sort of link between Saddam and the terrorists. One guy knew another guy and someone had been in Baghdad and someone else had sent a cake to someone in Brooklyn. You know what this reminds me of? How you could go to a union rally in the old days and pretty soon the FBI had you linked to Joseph Stalin."

"Well, I admit they haven`t come up with much proof," I said.

"Much proof? For this your mother sent you to college? How about no proof? Nothing. This poor Gen. Vince Brooks, this guy they had talking like a ventriloquist`s dummy, a regular Charlie McCarthy, he had to make a big deal about the capture of Abu Abbas in Baghdad. The New York Times found Abbas in Baghdad last November and interviewed him. Next they`re going to find Soupy Sales. For this you fight a war?"

"Okay, but Saddam Hussein was a beast. It was a good thing to get rid of him. He was like another Hitler."

"I read that column where you said that. All my friends said, `This is your grandson, the hotshot columnist? This is the guy people read so that they should know what to think?` Hitler? Hitler was a threat to the world. Saddam threatened only his own people. He fought for only 26 days. I had longer fights with your grandmother."

"I remember, Grandpa," I said. "But now we`re going to have a new government in Iraq and it will be a model for the entire Arab world. When Saddam`s statue was toppled, it was like when the Berlin Wall went down."

"When the Berlin Wall went down, the Germans took pieces of it. When the statue went down, the Iraqis took pieces of hospitals and museums."

"You`ve got a point."

"Hoo-ha! I got a point. Of course I got a point."

"You don`t understand, Grandpa. Now we have a chance to transform the Middle East. A democratic Iraq will be an example for the entire region."

"Really? Who says? There is already a democracy in the Middle East. It`s called Israel. How come it`s never an example, but instead something to be destroyed?"

"It`s not an Islamic country."

"I`ve noticed. Still, the Arabs could see it worked. It`s free. It`s prosperous. The people make a nice living. What does it matter if it`s run by Jews, Irishmen or whirling dervishes?"

"Because . . . I don`t know."

"Now we`re cooking with gas. There`s so much you don`t know. First you wanted a war because of terrorism, then because Iraq had a nuclear program. Then you wanted a war because it has poison gas and little crawling things you can`t see. Now you want to bring democracy to the Middle East. You know what we use to call this when I was in retail?"

"No, what?

"Bait and switch."

"I still believe we did the right thing," I insisted. "I still think it`ll turn out all right."

"From your mouth to God`s ear," he said.

"You could help," I said. "You`re embedded."

"It doesn`t work like that."

Then I heard the window open and felt the breeze on my face. "I hope everything turns out hunky-dory, like you`ve been writing," he said. "Otherwise, you should have been an accountant and made some money so you could take care of your parents." He looked at me, tenderly.

"Give them my love, boychick."

With that, the window closed, the breeze ceased and I went back to sleep. I had a nightmare that I was an accountant.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Omens of Trouble In Iraq


By David Ignatius

Tuesday, April 29, 2003; Page A23


BAGHDAD -- U.S. generals and intelligence officers have done many things right in this month`s lightning victory in Iraq. But they appear to have botched their relationship with Iraq`s newly ascendant Shiite Muslim majority, causing problems that could undermine U.S. postwar reconstruction efforts.

The Americans had a strategy for dealing with the Iraqi Shiite community, but it seems to have gone wrong almost from the start. The following account, drawn from conversations with Iraqi sources here and coalition officials, illustrates the dangerous landscape that is postwar Iraq.

The decisive setback for the U.S.-led coalition was the April 10 murder in Najaf of the Shiite cleric who was to be America`s key ally in that community, Abdul Majid Khoei, 50. He was the son of a revered leader of Iraqi Shiites, the late Grand Ayatollah Abolqassem Khoei, who died in 1992 after being placed under house arrest by Saddam Hussein.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said after the younger Khoei`s death: "He was a religious leader who embodied hope and reconciliation." In the weeks since Khoei`s murder, U.S efforts to woo Iraq`s 60 percent Shiite majority have seemed to founder.

In early April, according to Iraqi sources, U.S. officials brought Khoei to the Talil air base near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, which had recently been seized by U.S. troops. U.S. Special Forces took him to Najaf a few days later. The strategy was for Khoei to gain control of the city and the gold-domed Imam Ali mosque there, which Shiite Muslims revere as the tomb of the prophet Muhammad`s son-in-law, Ali.

According to Iraqi sources, Khoei was to be assisted by about two dozen other Iraqi Shiites who had been recruited outside the country and flown into Iraq by the United States to help Khoei establish his power base in Najaf. They were accompanied by a CIA officer who gave them Thuraya mobile phones, the Iraqi sources said.

According to the Iraqi sources, Khoei planned to ask Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq`s top Shiite cleric, to issue a religious fatwa urging Iraqi Shiites not to cooperate with an Iranian-backed mullah named Bakr Hakim. The United States hoped that Khoei could forge an alliance with the movement headed by a militant Iraqi Shiite leader in Najaf named Muqtada Sadr, whose father, a founder of an Iraqi wing of the Islamist Dawa Party, had been murdered by Saddam Hussein in 1999.

Things went disastrously awry soon after Khoei`s arrival in Najaf. On April 10, he went to the Imam Ali mosque with a caretaker appointed by Hussein. Khoei apparently hoped to gain control of the mosque, but the two men were attacked by an outraged mob, and both were murdered.

Initial U.S. accounts of Khoei`s death suggested that he had been killed accidentally, caught in the crossfire by a mob that was really after Hussein`s hated caretaker. But Iraqi sources say the killing of Khoei was intentional. He fired a pistol in the air after the mob began its attack and was then stabbed repeatedly. According to one account, his assailants included Sadr`s followers -- the very people the United States had hoped would be Khoei`s allies.

The disaster in Najaf reinforced Shiite suspicions and boosted the power of pro-Iranian clerics, according to Iraqi sources. That`s now one of the biggest problems facing U.S. forces in their attempt to create a stable, pro-Western government in postwar Iraq.

An earlier intelligence blunder of a different sort seems to have occurred in the early hours of the war. The United States apparently expected, based on covert contacts, that Iraqi Lt. Gen. Khaled Saleh al-Hashimi, commander of the Iraqi 51st Division, would surrender.

Hashimi`s capitulation would have been a powerful psychological boost for the coalition. His troops guarded the area around Basra, and their surrender would have eased the way north.

U.S. officials actually announced Hashimi`s surrender on March 21, the day the ground war began. The problem was, Hashimi hadn`t surrendered. The next day he told al-Jazeera television that the reports were "a lie" and that "the commander and fighters of the 51st Mechanized Division are . . . fighting to defend Basra." The city finally fell nearly two weeks later.

A U.S. official cites the fog of covert war in explaining the confusion. Some of Hashimi`s commanders may indeed have surrendered, as expected. Others may have been prevented from doing so. In any event, the official stresses, the march north continued.

For the U.S.-led coalition, the war itself truly may have been the easy part. The postwar battle now being waged, overtly and covertly, deserves as much care as the magnificently planned ground assault.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Realizing The U.N.`s Promise


By Mike Moore

Tuesday, April 29, 2003; Page A23


Once again, as it has before in the past 100 years, the United States stands unchallenged in the world in terms of economic and military might. It has learned from these occasions and now it faces the need, once again, to apply the lessons.

The most important is that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, determined to avoid the pitfalls that had stymied Woodrow Wilson`s efforts at creating a structure for international order after World War I, began planning a postwar international architecture even before World War II was over. That structure, which included the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the predecessor agency of the World Trade Organization, delivered economic growth, peace and progress unparalleled in human history. NATO, though it has been shaken and tested over the years, has been the most important of all these institutions.

But when the Berlin Wall collapsed nearly a half-century after war`s end and the Cold War was won, it had a domino effect, creating new relationships throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. Now, as the United States again stands all-powerful, there is unease about U.S. dominance, expressed most strongly with regard to the war in Iraq. The rest of the world seems not to realize just how fundamentally the United States changed after the horrors of 9/11: that it now truly sees itself as acting in self-defense abroad and certainly not in pursuit of empire.

Study the media response to the liberation of Iraq. The media of those countries that supported the coalition had photos of Saddam Hussein`s statue falling and Iraqis cheering. Those that opposed the war -- and they weren`t just Arab countries -- showed that brief moment in which an American flag was draped over the statue`s face. In this postwar atmosphere, there is a lot of misunderstanding to be cleared up. One organization with some possibility for doing so is the United Nations. Unfortunately, the United Nations seems to be getting the blame from all sides for the discord, and this isn`t fair. The United Nations can do only what its members allow it to do. That is perhaps why its practice has not matched its promise. It is held together at the moment by the idealism and hope of its founders and by its public face, Kofi Annan, whose dignity and integrity are unquestioned.

Its agencies, of course, do worthy social work. But surely the "greatest generation," which constructed the United Nations primarily in the image of American ideals, did not want it to be just a super-duper Red Cross, as important as that work is.

After 50 years, the United Nations and its agencies need a makeover. Two-thirds of the nations represented there did not exist a half-century ago. The world economy has changed dramatically in that time. There are now more than 100 international agencies whose functions and mandates overlap and whose policies are contradictory. Some bureaucrats told ministers at Doha, Qatar, not to launch a new trade round. One agency told China not to join the World Trade Organization -- instructions that could have had disastrous consequences had they been followed.

The U.N. secretary general has few executive powers, and when he seeks to make changes, vested interests and tenured bureaucrats who enjoy the privileges of the status quo block him. The management systems of the world body would make a Polish shipyard manager of the 1950s blush. For many in the world, multilateralism is simply an opportunity to block progress in the interest of achieving selfish gains.

A small group of representative leaders needs to take control and, writing on a blank page, come up with a new architecture. This has to be done from the top down; otherwise it will be lost in the details and compromised, and it will fail. Next, these leaders need to convince the world of the worthiness of their plan. President Bush would stun his critics if he were to take the lead. Only he can. Moreover, this must be done in parallel with other important work the administration is carrying out to build peace elsewhere in the Middle East.

No nation, mighty or modest, can combat terrorism, manage a tax system, provide clean air, fight the drug war and prevent AIDS without the cooperation of others. Woodrow Wilson, when challenging the U.S. Senate to adopt the League of Nations treaty, asked, "Will you reject this treaty and break the heart of the world?" It did, and another war followed.

That example tells us why the United Nations must be made to work and to live up to its promise.

The writer is a former director of the World Trade Organization and former prime minister of New Zealand.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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North Korea`s Stance




Tuesday, April 29, 2003; Page A22


NORTH KOREA`S latest message to the United States was not quite as provocative, or as perplexing, as it may have seemed. U.S. officials first told reporters that during a break in a meeting in Beijing last week, Pyongyang`s representative abruptly informed the head of the American delegation that his country possessed nuclear weapons and might sell them or provide a "physical demonstration," depending on the U.S. response. Though the United States has suspected for a decade that the North might have one or two nuclear weapons, the announcement was portrayed as belligerent and embarrassing to China, which hosted and joined the talks. Chinese officials acknowledged they were shocked; but a senior official told foreign ambassadors yesterday that North Korea coupled its latest revelation with a broad offer to abandon its weapons programs and exports in exchange for U.S. security guarantees and economic concessions. In that sense the North was merely repeating the message it delivered during its last meeting with a U.S. envoy eight months ago, when it boasted of an emerging nuclear capability but offered to trade it away. In both cases the Bush administration chose to emphasize the alarming threat while playing down the offer of a deal. Yet any judgment about how to proceed needs to take both signals into account.

As described by the Chinese official, the proposal from dictator Kim Jong Il sounds a lot like what he has been suggesting since his negotiations with the Clinton administration: that is, a willingness to give up weapons programs in exchange for Washington`s agreement to accept and subsidize his criminal regime. President Bush has rightly refused to consider this blackmail; substantial economic and political concessions to North Korea should be made not for weapons, but only for a broader choice by Mr. Kim to open and reform his country. The administration used the talks to repeat its position that North Korea must dismantle its arms programs before concessions in other areas can be discussed; and it may be that China, which holds enormous economic leverage with Pyongyang, will now be more willing to pressure Mr. Kim to comply. Still, by choosing -- correctly, in our view -- to test the possibility of dialogue with North Korea, Mr. Bush has embraced a course that ultimately would require some kind of negotiated settlement.

There is, in fact, a crude logic to North Korea`s public statements. It says it regards itself as a likely next target of American military might -- not an unreasonable perception given its place on Mr. Bush`s "axis of evil" -- and sees its only defense as a nuclear arsenal, or, failing that, a "change of attitude" and accompanying guarantee of nonaggression from the United States. If that`s the case, disarmament without any U.S. assurances would look unacceptably dangerous to Mr. Kim. If negotiations are to succeed, the Bush administration will have to give up the goal of regime change and be willing to offer Pyongyang some sort of guarantees -- while perhaps holding up concrete economic concessions until after weapons programs are stopped and linking those to internal reforms. The Bush administration is clearly loath to abandon regime change as a goal; but the strategies that would produce it -- war, or an embargo meant to induce a North Korean collapse -- are not acceptable to key allies and must be a last resort. The White House says it has not decided whether the talks will continue; before they do, Mr. Bush must accept the necessity of offering a solution to Mr. Kim.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Amerikanischer Wahlkampf und Sozialpolitik

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Gephardt Goes Universal . . .


By Harold Meyerson

Tuesday, April 29, 2003; Page A23


Sixty years ago America`s newly powerful industrial unions faced a conundrum. There was a war on, complete with a freeze on prices and wages, making it no easy task for the United Steel Workers and the United Auto Workers to deliver for their members. But the old CIO unions were a creative bunch, and after intense bargaining with management, they emerged to present their members with something new under the American sun: employer-subsidized health coverage. The American way of health insurance was born.

Last week Richard Gephardt effectively reopened those World War II-era negotiations with the proposition that maybe wages and health coverage didn`t have to be traded off against each other after all. Unveiling a universal health insurance plan, the Missouri congressman and presidential candidate called for the government to mandate that employers provide their workers with health insurance, with government subsidizing those employers through tax credits covering 60 percent of the total cost. (Workers would make up most of the balance, with the government covering most of the expense to low-income workers.)

Gephardt`s plan is far costlier than most recent such proposals (about $210 billion in its first year), because it extends the subsidy to all employers, including those that already are providing health coverage to their workers. Currently, these companies can claim a 30 percent tax credit; Gephardt doubles that figure.

Why provide a safety net for Americans who already have one? In part, because it`s so easy to slip through the holes: With companies reducing coverage and laying off workers, with workers changing jobs more frequently than they used to, job-based coverage is a sometime thing. Over a given two-year period, one out of three Americans younger than 65 goes without health coverage for at least some of that time.

But the intent of Gephardt`s plan is also to offer something to those workers whose health coverage is relatively secure. By doubling the government`s subsidy, say, to General Motors, Gephardt enables GM to spend more on research and development and the UAW to bargain for more in wages. The bargaining session of 1944 is hereby reconvened.

More than that, though, Gephardt is trying to overcome perhaps the chief political obstacle that has confronted everyone who has proposed a universal system in recent decades: how to mobilize support for nationwide coverage in a nation where two-thirds of the citizens already have coverage.

When Bill Clinton tried to turn out the supporters of his (admittedly incomprehensible) plan in 1994, the best efforts of the White House and some of the most politically adept unions yielded a series of poorly attended rallies. Gephardt`s proposal, by contrast, offers something for everyone, including $50 billion for state and local governments to defray their health insurance expenses, but which could also be used to plug the gaping holes in their budgets and avoid the ensuing layoffs.

In the short run, Gephardt has devised a plan that could win him (or win him back) the allegiance of the unions, both industrial and public-employee, whose support he`ll need in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. In the long run, he has devised the kind of universal plan that is politically more viable than means-tested programs. (Compare the fates of Social Security and Medicare, for instance, with that of welfare.) A universal plan costs more, and Gephardt will be attacked for that, but the higher cost is what we pay to create politically sustainable programs in America.

Gephardt`s Democratic critics are likely to subject him to two lines of attack for his proposal. The fiscal conservatives in and around the Democratic Leadership Council may agree with him that we should repeal the 2001 Bush tax cuts, but they certainly would prefer that the money go to deficit reduction. Gephardt, however, is wagering that when confronted with a clear choice among tax cuts largely for the rich, deficit reduction and health care for all, Americans will take the health care. Gephardt`s Democratic rivals may also assail him for proposing a plan so large as to be utopian. Florida Sen. Bob Graham has attacked Gephardt`s proposal for being fatally ambitious, just as Clinton`s was. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean has called the plan "pie-in-the-sky, radical."

Dean, of course, has been touting his record of having created a near-universal program for children in Vermont, but his attack on Gephardt sounds lamentably like Al Gore`s attack on Bill Bradley`s health care plan during the 2000 primaries. Gore denigrated the very idea of an ambitious plan to get to universal coverage, and Dean now seems to be following in Gore`s footsteps. For a candidate who begins every speech by announcing that he represents "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," this is a dubious path to be taking.

Gephardt still has to answer many legitimate and tough questions from his fellow Democrats about his tenure as their House leader and his support for a war whose casus belli (the weapons of mass destruction -- remember them?) has yet to turn up. On domestic policy, though, he has staked a persuasive claim of his own to the Democrats` Democratic wing.

The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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THE DICK
by Shane Kosakowski

Remember when the US was cool? It wasn’t that long ago, think back.

We were the fun, rich, good-looking, popular country. We drove the coolest car and had the tasty girlfriend with the big tits and the pool. We hung out with all the other cool countries, but still said hi to Mexico in the hallways (even though he smelled like a spicy sweatsuit). We were the best athlete and played guitar in a shitty band. We would get drunk and prank Russia and do coke on the away bus. We would kick somebody’s ass if they fucked with our friends and we would lend money if our friends were fucked. We were a superhero in the history of the world.


Sure, we were only human. We hooked up with Panama’s girlfriend while he was away at soccer camp. We got caught smoking a blunt in our basement and blamed it on Nicaragua. We felt up El Salvador’s sister when she got drunk and fell asleep. We pretended to be friends with Greece, and then made fun of her behind her back (after all, that bitch did look like Snufalupagos). We did a lot of things that young, stupid countries do when they’re growing up; mistakes the rest of the world could overlook. Then, I don’t know…we changed.

We started picking on the band kids more than we used to. And instead of just calling them “dorks,” we began to slap them around a little. When they didn’t let us copy off their tests, we’d wait for them outside of class and drop their pants in front of Sweden and Brazil. Sure, we’d still help Columbia if somebody was talking shit to him, and we’d give Canada a ride home whenever she needed it, but you could really tell that we thought we were a little too cool. You could see we were getting a little too cocky to hang out with.

Before you knew it, America was, officially, the big dickhead. We went from being the fun-loving character, who would get drunk and pretend we were fucking a lamp, to the guy talking on his cell phone at the gym. Now we wear purple-tinted sunglasses inside the mall and wife-beaters to the bar (to show off our barbed-wire tattoo). Nobody likes us anymore; when the world sees our name on caller I.D., they just let it go to voicemail. Look at who we hang out with now—England. Fucking England! How long has it been since England was cool? The only chicks that call England have chipped teeth and pockmarks.

So where do we find ourselves? It’s Friday night and we’ve decided to crash the party that we didn’t get invited to. Iraq got a keg, a band and is charging everybody 10 bucks at the door. We’ve decided to walk into the backyard, beat the shit out of Iraq and only let our friends fill their cups. What will the rest of the world do? Individually speak out against us? Yeah right…we’ll fuck shit up. All get together and beat the shit out of us? Nope—most of them don’t like each other anyway. So what would you do to a bully that is taking what isn’t theirs, a bully who is too big to defeat alone, a bully who must understand the repercussions of being a douchebag?

You key his car.

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All the President`s Lies
Bush`s rhetoric bears no resemblence to his policies. How does he get away with it?
Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken

Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling. Lyndon Johnson was said, politely, to have suffered a "credibility gap" when it came to Vietnam. Richard Nixon, during Watergate, was reduced to protesting, "I am not a crook." Bill Clinton was relentlessly accused by both adversaries and allies of reversing solemn commitments, not to mention his sexual dissembling. But George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush`s signature as president.

The pattern is now well established. Soothing rhetoric -- about compassionate conservatism, about how much money the "average" American worker will get through the White House tax program, about prescription-drug benefits -- is simply at odds with what Bush`s policies actually do. Last month Bush promised to enhance Medicaid; his actual policy would effectively end it as a federal entitlement program.

More distressing even than the president`s lies, though, is the public`s apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-September 11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there`s more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president`s lies?

One thing is clear: If a Democrat, say, Bill Clinton, engaged in Bush-scale dishonesty, the press would be all over him. In the spirit of rekindling public outrage, here are just some of the president`s lies.

The Education President


"Every single child in America must be educated, I mean every child. ... There`s nothing more prejudiced than not educating a child." -- George W. Bush, presidential debate versus Vice President Al Gore, Oct. 11, 2000
Along with tax cuts, education was Bush`s top priority when he entered the White House. He charmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in an effort to get his bill passed, a bill that combined greater accountability and testing with increased funding. Then, in what has become a trademark, he pulled the plug on the funding.
Members of Congress had good reason to believe Bush was being sincere. As governor of Texas, he had raised state education spending by 55 percent, tightened curriculum requirements and pushed for more accountability from the schools themselves. Even state test scores shot up -- although that was likely the result of the tendency to "teach to the test" rather than an actual increase in learning or knowledge. (The increase wasn`t reflected in national standardized test scores.) Still, Bush was able to persuade the top two education Democrats in Congress, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), to work with him on the No Child Left Behind Act. And when the lawmakers objected to voucher provisions, Bush dropped the vouchers -- and toned down the testing measures to win Congress` approval.

But in his 2003 budget, Bush proposed funding levels far below what the legislation called for, requesting only $22.1 billion of the $29.2 billion that Congress authorized. For the largest program, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides support to students in impoverished school districts, Bush asked for $11.35 billion out of the $18.5 billion authorized. His 2004 budget was more than $6 billion short of what Congress authorized. Furious, Kennedy called Bush`s proposal a "tin cup budget" that "may provide the resources to test our children, but not enough to teach them."

The result: States already strapped by record deficits are being held responsible for the extra testing and administration mandated by law -- but aren`t getting nearly enough money to pay for it. So the number of public schools likely to be labeled "failing" by the law is estimated to be as high as 85 percent. Failing triggers sanctions, from technical assistance to requiring public-school choice to "reconstitution" -- that is, firing the entire school`s staff and hiring a new one. And Bush isn`t doing much to help. The New Hampshire School Administrators Association calculated that Bush`s plan imposed at least $575 per student in new obligations. His budget, however, provides just $77 per student. It`s a revolution in education policy, all right, but No Child Left Behind was simply a lie.

Healthy Skepticism


"Our goal is a system in which all Americans have got a good insurance policy, in which all Americans can choose their own doctor, in which seniors and low-income citizens receive the help they need. ... Our Medicare system is a binding commitment of a caring society. We must renew that commitment by providing the seniors of today and tomorrow with preventive care and the new medicines that are transforming health care in our country." -- George W. Bush, Medicare address, March 4, 2003
The man simply has no shame. His program does none of this. What it does, simply, is to make dramatic cuts in the benefits for both the poor and the elderly.
Under the current Medicaid program, the federal government matches, on a sliding scale, the money that states put up. The state is required to cover some beneficiaries and services, although others are "optional." But "optional" services include many essential and life-saving treatments. And "optional" beneficiaries are seldom able to pay for private insurance. Bush`s plan, in effect, would turn Medicaid into a block grant, capping the federal contribution. Because states are already hard-pressed to keep up with Medicaid costs, services to the poor will simply dwindle. As Leighton Ku, a health-policy analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, notes, if under the current plan "you wanted to save that much money, you would have to specify which cuts to make, how to make the cuts. But it`s much easier to cut the block grant because it`s invisible; someone else has to make the decisions."

Bush claims to bring flexibility to Medicaid, and, in a sense, he`s right. Under his plan states would have, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson put it, "carte blanche" in dealing with optional benefits and optional recipients. In other words, a mother making more than $9,000 a year would be fair game, as would an 8-year-old child who lives in a family with an income just above the poverty line, or a senior citizen or disabled person living on $7,200 a year.

And there`s a whiff of coercion to the way in which the states are offered the option of switching to the Medicaid block grant. The states, which have already started cutting Medicaid on their own, are literally begging for federal fiscal assistance, and none is forthcoming. But if they consent to Bush`s Medicaid plan, they`ll get not only $3 billion in new federal money next year (a loan they would have to repay) but the ability to save money by trimming their Medicaid rolls. In other words, the president is making them an offer they can`t refuse.

Bush relentlessly invokes a rhetoric of choice on Medicare. But the Republican proposal pushes seniors toward heavily managed private plans that offer partial drug benefits but limit choice of treatment and doctor. If you stayed with traditional Medicare (which does offer free choice of doctor and hospital), you`d only get minimal prescription-drug benefits. The plan would spend some $400 billion over 10 years, a sum that provides coverage worth 40 percent less than that enjoyed by members of Congress under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, which Bush repeatedly invokes as a model.

And while the plan allows House Republicans to avoid making politically unpopular cuts to Medicare, it requires Congress to cut $169 billion over 10 years from programs they oversee. So in the end, Medicare cuts may end up paying for prescription-drug benefits.

Despite rhetoric promising to increase other health spending, a close reading of the House Republican budget proposal shows $2.4 billion in cuts for programs -- such as the National Institutes of Health, Community Health Centers and the Ryan White AIDS program -- that Bush has pledged to support. Even though Bush vowed in his State of the Union address to spend $15 billion over the next five years to provide AIDS relief to Africa, much of that money won`t be available until at least 2006. [See Garance Franke-Ruta, "The Fakeout," TAP, April 2003.]

A Paler Shade of Green


"Clear Skies legislation, when passed by Congress, will significantly reduce smog and mercury emissions, as well as stop acid rain. It will put more money directly into programs to reduce pollution, so as to meet firm national air-quality goals. ..." -- George W. Bush, Earth Day speech, April 22, 2002
Actually, the Clear Skies law doesn`t do any of this. The act, in fact, delays required emission cuts by as much as 10 years, usurps the states` power to address interstate pollution problems and allows outdated industrial facilities to skirt costly pollution-control upgrades. The Environmental Protection Agency ensured that few people would notice this last regulation by announcing the change on the Friday before Thanksgiving and publishing it in the Federal Register on New Year`s Eve. Still, nine northeastern states immediately filed suit against the administration; their case is pending. Meanwhile, Bush`s commitment to clean water is just as murky. Despite saying last October that he wanted to "renew our commitment" to building on the Clean Water Act, he`s instead decided to "update" it by removing protections for "isolated" waters and weakening sewage-overflow rules, which could significantly increase the potential for waterborne illnesses.
It`s hardly surprising to learn that big business is behind a lot of these changes. The Washington Post recounted a meeting between Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator John Graham and industry lobbyists during which the latter were encouraged to identify particularly onerous rules -- and ultimately created a regulatory "hit list." "There is a stealth campaign that`s going on behind closed doors to twist the anti-regulatory process into a pretzel so that the public will be unaware that they are bottling up these protections," says Wesley Warren, the National Resources Defense Council`s senior fellow for environmental economics. A good chunk of the 57-item list fell under the EPA`s jurisdiction. One by one these rules have been submitted to OIRA under the Paperwork Reduction Act for cost-benefit analysis, a regulatory accounting technique that often ends up justifying watered-down rules.

Even as EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced that global warming is a "real phenomenon," Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. His decision weakened the treaty`s effectiveness because the United States produces 25 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.

The former Texas oilman, who made one environmental promise after another on the campaign trail, has slashed the EPA`s budget by half a billion dollars over two years, cut 100 employees and rolled back regulations on a near-weekly basis. "There has never been anything to compare this to," says Greg Wetstone, director of advocacy at the National Resources Defense Council. "Even in the days of Reagan, there was never an administration so willfully and almost obsessively concerned with finding ways to really undermine the environmental infrastructure."

Whitman, the administration`s supposed environmental champion, is also contributing to the weakening of protections. Although she said the administration was working to put in place a standard to "dramatically reduce" levels of arsenic in drinking water, she later tried to lower the existing regulation, saying that even the 10-part-per-billion federal benchmark was too tough. The EPA rolled back the standard until a report warning of health risks (and public outcry) forced the agency to reinstate the old limit.

Here`s another classic Bush whopper. In his State of the Union address, the president proposed $1.2 billion in research funding to develop hydrogen-powered cars, in part to make the United States less reliant on foreign oil. What he didn`t say is that the technology and infrastructure needed to mass produce such cars won`t be available until at least 2020. If Bush truly cared about immediate relief, he might start by acknowledging existing hybrid vehicles or supporting more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards for light trucks and SUVs. Neither is likely to be part of a Republican energy package this year.

Democrats in the Senate dealt Bush a rare blow when they voted down his proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in March, although House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) plans to bring the issue back. Still, many lawmakers, especially in the House, feel they can do little except try to fend off the administration`s attacks on the environment. "There is an absolute hostility toward any positive strengthening of environmental law," says Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. "It is a wholesale turning over to corporate America the governing of this country."

Hypocrisy has been defined as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. George W. Bush lied about all these policies because the programs he pretends to favor are far more popular than the ones he puts into effect. But unless the voters and the press start paying attention, all the president`s lies will have little political consequence -- except to certify that we have become something less than a democracy.

Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken
Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken, "All the President`s Lies," The American Prospect vol. 14 no. 5, May 1, 2003. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to [e-mail].


http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/5/bennett-d.html

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[Joerver]

Bananenrepublik zu dagen, ist eine Beleidigung für jede BR.

Well, Well, Well
Army Secretary and Enron Exec Thomas White Is Fired -- But for All the Wrong Reasons
by Tamara Baker

April 25, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Well, well, well.

I`m not just speaking of what our troops are currently guarding in Iraq -- as opposed to, say, banks, hospitals and museums.

I`m talking about Donald Rumsfeld`s firing of Army Secretary Thomas White http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/04/26/army_leadership/in….

Tom White, you may recall, is a prime example of the dark side of what President Eisenhower referred to as "the military-industrial complex." He`s spent the better part of the past two decades bouncing back and forth between the Department of Defense and various corporations -- the most recent being Enron, where the unit he headed was up to its neck in cooked books and what former employees described as "illusory profits."

He`s a big backer of the privatization gospel, of course. That`s why he got picked to be Secretary of the Army in the first place.

Which is why it`s sad for me to report that his firing is a black day for the US military.

Why?

Because he -- and Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki -- aren`t being fired for being corrupt moneygrubbers. They`re fired for being right, and for being in Donald Rumsfeld`s way.

White and Shinseki, along with every other Pentagon official who isn`t a Rumsfeld-installed civilian chickenhawk, argued most forcefully against invading Iraq, especially with the skeleton forces Rumsfeld wanted to use. It was only after lobbying him hard that he agreed to have "extra" troops held in reserve on carriers in the Gulf -- troops that turned out to be necessary during the second week of the invasion, when sandstorms and fiercer-than-expected Iraqi resistance threatened to cut off the US and UK`s supply lines, which would have forced Rummy to look up the word "Corregidor" in the history books of which he`s allegedly so fond.

Of course, the troops were used -- and Rumsfeld now is pretending that it was his idea all along to have those reserve troops at the ready. He`s also trying to pretend that he won`t need them around to restore order, much less create a government that will be acceptable to Western eyes, so he`s starting to send them home.

So he has to make White and Shinseki fall on their swords -- presumably with exit contracts to keep them from writing their memoirs.

Or from publicly saying "I told you so" when a depleted US force is unable to keep the irate Iraqis from putting Ahmad Chalabi`s head on a pole as Iraq`s mullahs seize power.

Well, well, well.

http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030425Baker.html

[Joerver]

Published on Friday, April 25, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Ex-CIA Professionals:
Weapons of Mass Distraction: Where? Find? Plant?
by David MacMichael and Ray McGovern

MEMORANDUM

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: The Stakes in the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Bush administration’s refusal to allow UN inspectors to join the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in US-occupied Iraq has elicited high interest in foreign news media. The most widely accepted interpretation is that the US is well aware that evidence regarding the existence and location of such weapons is “shaky” (the adjective now favored by UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix), and that the last thing the Pentagon wants is to have Blix’ inspectors looking over the shoulders of US forces as they continue their daunting quest.

Administration leaders will not soon forgive Blix or Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for exposing to ridicule the two main pieces of “evidence” adduced by Washington late last year to support its contention that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons development program: (1) the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger, and (2) the high strength aluminum rods sought by Iraq that the US insisted were to be used in a nuclear application. That contention was roundly debunked not only by IAEA scientists but also by the international engineering community.

The normally taciturn Blix now finds it “conspicuous” that a month after the invasion of Iraq, the US search for weapons of mass destruction had turned up nothing. He expressed eagerness to send UN inspectors back into Iraq, but also served notice that he would not allow them to be led “like dogs on a leash” by US forces there.

The media have raised the possibility that the US might “plant” weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that this may be another reason to keep UN inspectors out. This is a charge of such seriousness that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have been conducting an informal colloquium on the issue. As one might expect, there is no unanimity among us on the likelihood of such planting, but most believe that Washington would consider it far too risky. Those holding this view add that recent polls suggest most Americans will not be very critical of the Bush administration even if no weapons of mass destruction are found.

Others, taken aback by the in the in-your-face attitude with which Secretary of State Colin Powell reacted both to the exposure of the Niger forgery and to the requiem for the argument from aluminum rods, see in that attitude a sign that the Bush administration would not necessarily let the risk of disclosure deter it from planting weapons. They also point to the predicament facing the Blair government in Great Britain and other coalition partners, if no such weapons are found in Iraq. They note that the press in the UK has been more independent and vigilant than its US counterpart, and thus the British people are generally better informed and more skeptical of their government than US citizens tend to be.

While the odds of such planting seem less than even, speculation on the possibility drove us down memory lane. Likely or not in present circumstances, there is ample precedent for such covert action operations. VIPS member David MacMichael authored this short case-study paper to throw light on this little known subject. What leaps out of his review is a reminder that, were the Bush administration to decide in favor of a planting or similar operation, it would not have to start from scratch as far as experience is concerned. Moreover, many of the historical examples that follow bear an uncanny resemblance to factors and circumstances in play today.

* * *

1. Faked evidence was a hallmark of post-World War II US covert operations in Latin America. In 1954, for example, it was instrumental in overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Arbenz, who was suspected of having Communist leanings, had tried to make the United Fruit Company comply with Guatemalan law. At President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s direction, the CIA organized and armed a force of malcontent Guatemalans living in Nicaragua to invade their home country.

The invasion was explained and “justified” when a cache of Soviet-made weapons planted by the CIA was “discovered” on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Washington alleged that the weapons were intended to support an attempt by Arbenz to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.

2. One of the more egregious and embarrassing uses of fake material evidence occurred on the eve of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, when Alabama National Guard B-26 bombers attacked a Cuban Air Force base in Havana. When Cuba’s UN ambassador protested, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson (himself misinformed by the White House) insisted that the attacking planes were those of defecting Cuban Air Force pilots.

Two of the aircraft were shot down in Cuba, however, and others were forced to land in Miami where they could be examined. When it became clear that the planes were not Cuban, Washington’s hand was shown and Stevenson was in high dudgeon.

Legends, however, seem to die more slowly than dudgeon. The US government clung unconscionably long to “plausible denial” regarding the B-26s. Four Alabama National Guardsmen had been killed in the incident and Cuba kept trying to get the US to accept their bodies. Not until 1978 did Washington agree to receive the remains and give them to the families of the deceased.

3. The war in Vietnam is replete with examples of fabrication and/or misrepresentation of intelligence to justify US government policies and actions. The best-known case, of course, is the infamous Tonkin Gulf incident—the one that did not happen but was used by President Lyndon Johnson to strong-arm Congress into giving him carte blanche for the war. Adding insult to injury, CIA current intelligence analysts were forbidden to report accurately on what had happened (and not happened) in the Tonkin Gulf in their daily publication the next morning, on grounds that the President had already decided to use the non-incident to justify launching the air war that very day. The analysts were aghast when their seniors explained that they had decided that they did not want to “wear out their welcome at the White House.”

More directly relevant to the current search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is the following incident, which was related to the author at the time by one of the main participants. US officials running the war in Vietnam believed that North Vietnamese Communist troops operating in South Vietnam were supported by large, secret supply dumps across the border in Cambodia. In 1968, the US military in Saigon drew up plans to raid one of those suspected supply bases.

The colonel in charge of logistics for the raid surprised other members of the raiding party by loading up large amounts of North Vietnamese uniforms, weapons, communications equipment, and so forth. He clearly had supplementary orders. He explained to the members of his team that, since it would be necessary to discover North Vietnamese supplies to justify the incursion into neutral Cambodia, it behooved them to be prepared to carry some back.

4. With William Casey at the helm of the CIA during the Reagan presidency, the planting of evidence to demonstrate that opponents of governments in Central America were sponsored by the USSR reached new heights—or depths. The following are representative examples:

(a) In January 1981 four dugout canoes were “discovered” on a Salvadoran beach. The US claimed that the boats had carried 100 armed Sandinista guerrillas from Nicaragua to support leftist insurgents in El Salvador. Neither weapons nor Nicaraguans traceable to the boats were ever found, but Washington drew attention to the fact that the wood from which the boats were made was not native to El Salvador.

This kind of “proof” might at first seem laughable but this was no trivial matter. The Reagan administration successfully used the incident to justify lifting the embargo on US arms to El Salvador that President Carter had imposed after members of the Salvadoran National Guard raped and murdered three US nuns and their lay assistant. The names of those four women now sit atop a long list of Americans and Salvadorans subsequently murdered by US weapons in the hands of the National Guard in El Salvador.

(b) In February 1981, the State Department issued a sensational “White Paper” based on alleged Salvadoran rebel documents. Authored by a young, eager-to-please Foreign Service officer named John Glassman, the paper depicted damning links between the insurgents, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. A smoking gun.

Unfortunately for Glassman and the Reagan administration, Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny got access to the same documents and found little resemblance to what was contained in Glassman’s paper. Glassman admitted to Kwitny that he had made up quotes and guessed at figures for the Soviet weapons supposedly coming to the Salvadoran insurgents.

(c) Certainly among the most extraordinary attempts to plant evidence was the Barry Seal affair—a complicated operation designed to incriminate the Nicaraguan Sandinista government for international drug trafficking. The operation began in 1982, when CIA Director Casey created the position of National Intelligence Officer for Narcotics. Casey’s handpicked NIO wasted no time telling representatives of other agencies that high priority was to be given to finding evidence linking both Castro and the Sandinistas to the burgeoning cocaine trade.

Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers protested that this might be counterproductive since Cuba was the most cooperative government in the Caribbean in the fight against drugs and there was no evidence showing that the Nicaraguan government played any significant role. Never mind, said the NIO, the task was to put black hats on our enemies.

In 1986 Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who had trained Nicaraguan Contra pilots in the early eighties, was facing a long sentence after a federal drug conviction in Florida. Seal made his way to the White House’s National Security Council to make the following proposition to officials there. He would fly his own plane to Colombia and take delivery of cocaine. He would then make an “emergency landing” in Nicaragua and make it appear that Sandinista officials were aiding him in drug trafficking.

Seal made it clear that he would expect help with his legal problems.

The Reagan White House jumped at the offer. Seal’s plane was flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where it was fitted with secret cameras to enable Seal to photograph Nicaraguan officials in the act of assisting him with the boxes of cocaine.

The operation went as planned. Seal flew to Colombia and then to Nicaragua where he landed at a commercial airfield. There he was met by a Nicaraguan named Federico Vaughan, who helped with the offloading and reloading of boxes of cocaine and was duly photographed—not very well, it turned out, because the special cameras malfunctioned. Though blurred and grainy, the photos were delivered to the White House, and a triumphant Ronald Reagan went on national TV to show that the Sandinistas were not only Communists but also criminals intent on addicting America’s youth. What more justification was needed for the Contra war against the Sandinistas!

Again, the Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Kwitny played the role of skunk at the picnic, pointing out substantial flaws in the concocted story. Vaughan, who according to the script was an assistant to Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomas Borge, was shown not to be what he claimed. Indeed, congressional investigators found that the telephone number called by Seal to contact Vaughn belonged to the US embassy in Managua.

It was yet another fiasco, and Seal paid for it with his life. His Colombian drug suppliers were not amused when the Reagan administration identified him publicly as a US undercover agent. As he awaited trial on other narcotics charges in Louisiana, Seal was ambushed and killed by four gunmen who left his body riddled with 140 bullets.

5. Fabricated evidence also played an important role in the first President Bush’s attempt to secure congressional and UN approval for the 1991 Gulf War.

(a) Few will forget the heart-rending testimony before a congressional committee by the sobbing 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah on October 10, 1990:

“I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

No congressperson, no journalist took the trouble to probe the identity of “Nayirah,” who was said to be an escapee from Kuwait but was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. With consummate skill, the story had been manufactured out of whole cloth and the 15 year-old coached by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which has a rich history of being “imbedded” in Republican administrations. Similar unsubstantiated yarns made their debut several weeks later at the UN, where a team of seven “witnesses,” also coached by Hill & Knowlton, testified about atrocities in Iraq. (It was later learned that the seven had used false names.) And in an unprecedented move, the UN Security Council allowed the US to show a video created by Hill & Knowlton.

All to good effect. The PR campaign had the desired impact, and Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991. (The UN did so on November 29, 1990.) “Nayirah’s” true identity did not become known until two years later. And Hill & Knowlton’s coffers bulged when the proceeds arrived from its billing of Kuwait.

Interestingly, the General Manager of Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, DC office at the time was a woman named Victoria Clarke. She turned out to be less successful in her next job, as Press Secretary for the re-election campaign of President George Bush in 1992. But she is now back in her element as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

(b) There was a corollary fabrication that proved equally effective in garnering support in Congress for the war resolution in 1991. The White House claimed there were satellite photos showing Iraqi tanks and troops massing on the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. This fueled the campaign for war and frightened the Saudis into agreeing to cooperate fully with US military forces.

On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed “120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.” But an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to support the president’s claim, it refused to do so—and continues to refuse to this day.

Interestingly, the national media in the US chose to ignore Heller’s story. Heller’s explanation:

“I think part of the reason the story was ignored was that it was published too close to the start of the war. Second, and more importantly, I do not think that people wanted to hear that we might have been deceived. A lot of the reporters who have seen the story think it is dynamite, but the editors seem to have the attitude, ‘At this point, who cares?’”

Does some of this have a familiar ring?

/s/

Richard Beske, San Diego
Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison, Santa Fe
Patrick Eddington, Alexandria, VA
Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA


Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a coast-to-coast enterprise; mostly intelligence officers from analysis side of CIA. Ray McGovern ([e-mail]) worked as a CIA analyst for 27 years. He co-authored this article with David MacMichael

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0425-11.htm

[Joerver]

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Notwehr?
EU-Verteidigung

Vierergipfel will gemeinsames Hauptquartier für Euro-Truppe

Die Staats- und Regierungschefs von Deutschland, Frankreich, Belgien und Luxemburg haben sich in Brüssel darauf geeinigt, ein Hauptquartier für die neue europäische Truppe zu schaffen. Spanien übte Kritik an dem Alleingang der vier EU-Mitglieder.

Brüssel - Als Kern dieser neuen Truppe sollte die bereits existierende deutsch-französische Brigade dienen, hieß es in der Abschlusserklärung des Vierergipfels zur europäischen Verteidigungspolitik, zu dem sich die Staats- und Regierungschefs heute Vormittag in Brüssel getroffen hatten. Das gemeinsame Hauptquartier solle bis Ende 2004 geschaffen werden.

Die "Chefs" forderten zudem die Einrichtung eines europäischen strategischen Lufttransportkommandos bis spätestens Juni 2004. Zugleich bekannten sie sich zu dem schon länger von der EU verfolgten Vorhaben einer Kriseneingreiftruppe. Damit blieben die Teilnehmer hinter dem belgischen Vorschlag zurück, ein von der Nato ganz getrenntes Hauptquartier aufzustellen.

Nach dem Treffen äußerte sich der französische Staatspräsident Jacques Chirac zu der Übereinkunft. Demnach nützt eine Stärkung der EU-Verteidigungspolitik auch der Nato. "Wir tragen selbstverständlich zu einer stärkeren atlantischen Allianz bei", sagte er zum Abschluss des Vierergipfels. Der belgische Regierungschef Guy Verhofstadt sagte, es werde kein Widerspruch zur Nato aufgebaut. In der Schlusserklärung hieß es: "Die atlantische Partnerschaft bleibt für Europa eine grundlegende strategische Priorität."

Das eintägige Treffen war unter den Partnern der EU und der Nato umstritten, da eine neuerliche Spaltung dieser übernationalen Institutionen befürchtet wurde. Spanien kritisierte denn auch am Dienstag den Brüsseler Gipfel. Eine gemeinsame europäische Verteidigungspolitik könne man nicht zu dritt oder viert betreiben, betonte die spanische Außenministerin Ana Palacio. Die Verteidigung dürfe nicht zu einem "Faktor der Teilung in der EU" werden. Spanien stimme inhaltlich mit den Vorschlägen von Deutschen und Franzosen weitgehend überein. Eine Initiative zur Stärkung der gemeinsamen Verteidigungspolitik müsse jedoch allen EU-Staaten offen stehen.

Spanien plädierte dafür, die EU stärker an Friedensmissionen zu beteiligen. Außerdem solle die EU mehr in Missionen zur Konfliktverhütung eingebunden werden und Drittstaaten beim Kampf gegen den Terrorismus helfen. Die Rolle der Verteidigungsminister in der EU solle gestärkt werden.


© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung der SPIEGELnet AG

[CheapThrill]

The Lists:

We have come up with three different categorizations for the celebrities listed on this site:


The Blacklist http://www.celiberal.com/theBlacklist.php

This is the list of the celebrity liberals (celiberals) that have spoken anti-American or anti-Bush comments. The celiberals on this list are the most offensive and the ones that we advocate the boycotting of their products and services.


The Celiberals http://www.celiberal.com/theCeliberals.php


This is simply a list of liberal celebrities (or those that lean slightly to the left) that haven`t quite made the jump to The Blacklist. We don`t feel that these celebrities should be boycotted, just because they are liberal (and illogical, hypocritical, over-emotional, unpatriotic, etc.).


The Righties http://www.celiberal.com/theRighties.php

This is a list of conservative celebrities (or those that lean slightly to the right) that haven`t received the appropriate amount of media coverage. We do advocate patronizing these celebrities.



Also, von Johnny Ramone bin ich wirklich sehr enttäuscht ...

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American troops shoot children in Iraqi demo

BY BILL JACOBS WESTMINSTER EDITOR


UNITED States soldiers shot back at anti-American protesters, hitting at least seven, including three young boys, after being fired on in a town near Baghdad. A local hospital director said 13 people were killed.

The shooting took place on Monday night in the town of Fallujah, about 30 miles west of the capital. Though residents reported 15 deaths, Col. Arnold Bray of the 82nd Airborne Division said seven people in the crowd were hit.

But Dr Ahmed Ghanim al-Ali, director of Fallujah General Hospital, said there were 13 dead, including three boys under 11 years old. He said his medical crews were shot at when they went to retrieve the injured, which he said numbered 75.

Residents said the demonstration was conducted by children and students between the ages of 5 and 20, but Bray said some were armed. "Ask them which kind of schoolboys carry AK-47s," he said.

The troops were headquartered in a schoolhouse, and some of the protesters fired on the building, Bray said.

Arab television channel Al-Jazeera quoted residents as saying the troops opened fire after someone threw a rock at the school. The demonstrators were reportedly protesting against US troops’ presence in the city.

Local Sunni Muslim cleric, Kamal Shaker Mahmoud, said the demonstrators were unarmed students who had gone to the school to ask the troops to leave.

"It was a peaceful demonstration. They did not have any weapons. They were asking the Americans to leave the school so they could use it.

"They opened fire on the protesters because they went out to demonstrate."

Meanwhile the US reacted angrily to suggestions that a Belgian lawyer might sue its Commander in Chief in the Gulf Tommy Franks for war crimes such as the looting of hospitals, firing on an ambulance, and the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

The Bush administration said there would be "diplomatic consequences" for Belgium if it did not block the move.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said: "We believe the Belgian government needs to be diligent in taking steps to prevent abuse of the legal system for political ends."

In a separate development, the head of Britain’s armed forces has warned that the UK military is overstretched and should not pursue another war for 18 months.

Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, who retires as chief of the defence staff at the end of this week, said the Army, Navy and Air Force must be allowed to "draw breath" before going into major action again.

His comments were seized on by Tory defence spokesman Bernard Jenkin who said the government had to decide whether to reduce Britain’s military commitments or increase defence spending.

Sir Michael spoke out as former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz claimed Saddam Hussein was still alive and on the run.

Meanwhile Tony Blair was flying out to Moscow today to try to mend relations with Russian president Vladimir Putin strained by the war.

Admiral Boyce said that the military action against Iraq had put a huge burden on Britain’s armed forces .

He said: "If you asked us to go into a large scale operation in 2004, we couldn’t do it without serious pain. We must allow ourselves time to draw breath.

"If it was to be something of the scale that we have done this time, it would have to be something that the government is convinced is pretty important because I would tell them it would take a while to recuperate."

He said that the armed forces could not handle another "discretionary conflict, a conflict waged by choice" if it were launched in 2004.

He also questioned the need to spend £18 billion on 232 Euro fighters when bombers had proved much more important than fighters in the conflict.

But he did say that the plan for two new "super aircraft carriers" had been proved necessary by the diplomatic difficulties of flying planes over sensitive countries in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

A new poll shows that six out of ten Britons think Mr Blair’s decision to go to war alongside the US in Iraq has increased the risk of a terrorist attack on the UK.

Forty three per cent of those questioned by Mori think the attack could come in the next six months.

Concern will be increased by Mr Aziz’s claim that Saddam walked away after coalition air strikes aimed at killing him on two occasions - March 19 and April 7.

The loyal aide to the Baghdad dictator said Saddam - who turned 66 yesterday - was now on the run in Iraq.

An opposition leader in the country Ahmed Chalabi said that Saddam and his two notorious sons Uday and Qusay were on the run separately in Iraq but opponents had an idea of where they were heading.

Prime Minister Mr Blair was in Moscow today to meet President Putin and to try and heal the rift which has grown with Russia over the action. It was partly the Russian threat to refuse to back a second UN resolution authorising military action which led Britain and America to act unilaterally.

Russia is now calling for UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq to verify any findings of weapons of mass destruction.

President Putin is also objecting to a lifting of sanctions on Iraq by the UN without further discussions.

Mr Blair and Mr Putin were expected to discuss questions of co-operation within the UN Security Council in the rebuilding of Iraq.


This article:

http://www.news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=489802003

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Just How Cynical Is George W?
By P. M. Carpenter
Mr. Carpenter holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Illinois and is a syndicated columnist. Please consider contacting your local newspaper to carry his column.

We have all heard 43`s rhetorical drumbeat of "coalition" forces having remedied matters in The Evil Empire`s latest incarnation. Said empire - or rather regime, regime, regime; another of his drumbeats - is now well on its way to beatitude. We can thank not the towering behemoth of the U.S military for this deed, but the sainted "Coalition of the Willing."

In the beginning Bush claimed this vague international federation simply refused to tolerate Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction any longer. When these bugaboos proved to be more rhetoric than reality the coalition, with much greater ease than one might have imagined, then decided Saddam`s internal brutality was far more intolerable. Beastly weapons begone from message; enter the good guys` unfailing humanitarianism.

This much we all know. We also know it`s a crock.

The coalition`s vaunted, forty-odd count of mostly inconsequential nations was as laughable as it was pathetically symbolic from the get-go. (Best laugh yet: One coalition member`s prime minister was unaware of his country`s involvement until a reporter called for comment. The little nation of the Solomon Islands has since withdrawn its mysterious membership.)

Further, suspicious White House hype about stockpiled WMD soon revealed itself as more than just your garden-variety ballyhoo. It was outright deception. Not one molecule of Saddam`s anthrax or mustard gas or even foul-smelling deodorant spray was unearthed in the war`s aftermath. Nor will it be, assuming, that is, Rummy doesn`t airmail it first.

Yes, that debate is over, dear Bush apologists. You were egregiously - though willingly on your part - misled all along. The debate is over and done with since, lo and behold, administration officials now admit they never really expected to find illegal stash. Saddam`s WMD were a lovely pretext to muscle their way into the Middle East, redo it, and in the process scare the bejesus out of the world by demonstrating American military power. This they disclose only after the sale. You want sleazy? Don`t look to American Airlines` very former CEO. The true pros of sleaze reside at the White House. As president, a little hanky-panky will get you impeached. But murder thousands of innocents, expend a few hundred uniformed American boys and girls, con the public to the tune of God-only-knows how many billions of dollars and naturally, you`re hailed as a leader.

Worsening the swindle still, piece by piece we learn that behind the curtain of fabricated hysteria sat calm insiders marking time until Dick and Rummy coughed up their benevolent graft.

Again, all this has been reported - in print, at least - and the focus of many an op-ed page. But there was another, equally offensive crock that went largely unnoted by the press, perhaps from exhaustion as it toiled to keep up with all the other crockdom gushing from Bush II. I venture you won`t be surprised by this underreported transgression, however.

It`s our constant companion: The president`s brazen, but casual, hypocrisy.

I said you wouldn`t be surprised.

His hypocrisy has become so routine it`s barely even newsworthy these days. We simply expect it, so it no longer qualifies as an interesting development to be reported. Nevertheless, what should have been newsworthy - indeed, profoundly striking - about this particular hypocritical go-around was its global scale.

Before a puzzled world, the president turned on a dime and quickly hustled the revisionist reason for demolishing a non-belligerent country; that is, the "coalition`s" determination to snuff out Saddam`s human rights abuses. Yet the freedom-loving coalition he assembled contained some the world`s most notorious human rights abusers themselves. How, with a straight face and no shame, 43 could boast of a coalition teeming with Saddam-like cutthroats and torturers staggers the mind and offends every sense of decency.

According to the latest annual reports issued by Human Rights Watch - a nonpartisan organization as tough on Iraq as anyone - America`s new-found ally of Albania, for instance, winked at "violent attacks against journalists" in 2002 and condoned "widespread … torture and physical abuse of detainees," including children. Even worse, if that`s possible, Albania was a "major point of transit" in the "trafficking of human beings. Most victims were women and girls trafficked for forced prostitution and children trafficked into forced labor." Albanian officials dismissed these accusations as an "issue of illegal migration rather than a serious human rights violation." Nice fellas, no? And we count them among our friends - all of whom, Bush instructed, detested Saddam`s cruelty above all.

Down south we had as a coalition participant the upstanding nation of Colombia, where "paramilitary groups operating with the tolerance and often support of units within [the formal] military were linked to massacres …, selective killings and death threats." In Africa, one hopes we`ll always have Uganda as an allied human rights advocate. Yet it seems that in 2001 its "elected" regime dispensed "torture and state-sponsored violence against opposition supporters," and the following year "broke up a peaceful rally … by firing on demonstrators with live ammunition." Next door in Rwanda the government "demonstrated continuing hostility towards political dissent, press freedom and an independent civil society" as it steamed, as promised, towards righteous democracy. Uh-huh.

Space limitations prohibit HRW`s grim tales of other coalition countries, such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ethiopia and Uzbekistan - the latter of which the watchdog group said only 2 months ago "is distinguished by human rights abuses on an epic scale." What`s more, many of the countries recently criticized by our own State Department as inhumane, and in some cases labeled as "serious human rights" abusers, were - you guessed it - happily included by Bush in his coalition to end human rights abuse in Iraq.

While the president`s right-wing base dutifully applauds his every behavior no matter how odious, his cynical hypocrisy in the course of this crock is offensive beyond words to honest patriots. They yearn for at least a smidgeon of ethics in the White House. It is nothing less than tragic that they`ll have to wait 2 years or 6.



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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-war-oesche…

Are We Dumb or Just Numb?
Robert Scheer

April 29, 2003

Forget truth. That is the message from our government and its apologists in the media who insist that the Iraq invasion is a great success story even though it was based on a lie.

In the statement broadcast to the Iraqi people after the invasion was launched, President Bush stated: "The goals of our coalition are clear and limited. We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world." To which Tony Blair added: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."

That claim of urgency — requiring us to short-circuit the U.N. weapons inspectors — has proved to be a whopper of a falsehood. Late Sunday, the U.S. Army conceded that what had been reported as its only significant WMD find — two mobile chemical labs and a dozen 55-gallon drums of chemicals — "showed no positive hits at all" for chemical weapons.

But we now live easily with lies. "As far as I`m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war," writes Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. The pro-administration rationalization holds that the noble end of toppling one of the world`s nastier dictators — assuming that the Iraqi people end up freer and not ensnared in an Iranian-type theocracy — justifies the ignoble means of lying to the world. Or, as Friedman puts it, "Mr. Bush doesn`t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue.)"

Hyping? Is that how we are now to rationalize the ever more obvious truth that the American people and their elected representatives in Congress were deliberately deceived by the president as to the imminent threat that Iraq posed to our security? Is this popular acceptance of such massive deceit exemplary of the representative democracy we are so aggressively exporting, nay imposing, on the world?

It is expected that despots can force the blind allegiance of their people to falsehoods. But it is frightening in the extreme when lying matters not at all to a free people. The only plausible explanation is that the tragedy of Sept. 11 so traumatized us that we are no longer capable of the outrage expected of a patently deceived citizenry. The case for connecting Saddam Hussein with that tragedy is increasingly revealed as false, but it seems to matter not to a populace numbed by incessant government propaganda.

The only significant link between Al Qaeda and Hussein centered on the Ansar al Islam bases in the Kurdish area outside of Hussein`s control. That`s the "poison factory" offered by Colin Powell in his U.N. speech to connect Hussein with international terror. But an exhaustive investigation by the Los Angeles Times of witnesses and material found in the area "produced no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad and indicated that Ansar was not a sophisticated terrorist organization." Moreover, the purpose of this camp was to foster a holy war of religious fanatics who branded Hussein as "an infidel tyrant" and refused to fight under the "infidel flag" of his hated secular regime.

The embarrassingly secular nature of the government was summarized in another Los Angeles Times story on the status of women: "For decades, Iraqi women — at least those living in Baghdad and some other big cities — have enjoyed a degree of personal liberty undreamed of by women in neighboring nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates."

Those freedoms — to drive, study in coeducational colleges and to advance in the professions — are now threatened by the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the invasion. The former U.S. general now governing Iraq has stated that he will not accept a reversal of those freedoms, but our long history of cozy relationships with the oppressive Gulf regimes can`t be reassuring to Iraq`s women.

Such issues would be less compelling had the claim that Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent security threat to the U.S. proved true. Our goal, the destruction of those weapons, would then have been clear, and once that goal was accomplished, an expeditious U.S. withdrawal would have been justified.

But in the absence of such a threat, the U.S. role in Iraq becomes inevitably stickier. For "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to be more than a catchy propaganda slogan assumes an enduring obligation to provide the content of freedom to the Iraqi people that Americans claim to believe in. It is hoped that will include the election of a leader who tells the truth.


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April 28, 2003

Get the US Out of Iraq
And Its Military Out of Our Mind
By RON JACOBS

So, the US is occupying Iraq. What does that mean?

Does it mean that US marines are shooting into crowds of Iraqis protesting the US presence and killing some members of the crowd?

Does it mean the reappearance of death by cholera and typhoid in the city of Baghdad because the hospitals in that city have been bombed, looted and burned and these hospitals don`t have the medicines to combat these diseases and others related to the destruction wrought by years of US sanctions and days of bombing?

Does it mean the theft of priceless antiquities by organized gangs of criminals while US marines stood guard at Iraq`s oil ministry building?

Does it mean the death by cluster bombs and depleted uranium shell casings of more Iraqi civilians?

Does it mean the denial of entry into Iraq of UN weapons inspection teams by the United States?

Does it mean the construction of US military bases on Iraqi soil? Bases constructed for the purpose of maintaining US control of the country and to enable an easy attack on any other nations or popular movements in the region who refuse to go along with the US desire for global domination beginning in the Middle East?

Does it mean that anyone challenging the Americans and their plans is subject to arrest by the US military?

Does it mean incredible profiteering off the Iraqi people`s misery by corporations whose connections to the regime in Washington DC are more than just coincidental?

I wish I could truthfully answer no to all these questions, but I can`t. Unfortunately, the answer to every single one of them is yes. What this means is that the US is once again disregarding its moral and legal obligations. Not only was their war on Iraq immoral and illegal, so is their occupation! The invaders have a moral and legal obligation to rebuild the infrastructure they destroyed with money from their own pockets. The invaders have a moral and legal obligation to clean up the unexploded ammunition and the shell casings its attack left strewn about the country with money from their own pockets. The invaders have a moral and legal obligation to provide security and food to the citizens of the country that they so brutally destroyed-with money from their own pockets. But the US is doing none of this!

This fact is reason enough to insist that the US military get out of Iraq now and take all their weapons and airplanes with them. They shouldn`t wait until after their democracy anointed by Bush and Rumsfeld is installed. They shouldn`t even wait until their version of security is in place. Heck, they shouldn`t even wait until next week. They should leave NOW!.

The US has not begun aid shipments, it has blocked them. The US has not opened up the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community, it has made itself very clear that it has no intention of opening this process up. Indeed, the only thing the US has done in Iraq besides killing protesters opposed to its presence is get the oil flowing again.

Even if the US were to do an about face and meet all of its obligations they should still demand that they get out of Iraq. Why? Because they don`t belong there, that`s why. Nobody invited them in. Who, then will help the Iraqis rebuild if the US doesn`t? How will they ever achieve democracy and freedom?

Well, here`s a revolutionary thought. Why not let the Iraqis rebuild their country? Why not let them organize their own government? Can they do that? Do they know how?

Let me answer that by talking about another kind of occupation.

Occupation is not just a military action. It is a psychological and social phenomenon, too. Occupation is one of the first steps towards colonization. In the case of the US and Iraq in 2003, our country is the colonizer whether we like it or not. Now, the colonial mindset does not only affect the colonized, it also affects the colonizer. As surely as there are US servicewomen and men occupying Baghdad, our psyche is occupied by a mindset that leads us to question the ability of Iraqis to govern themselves and rebuild their country without US interference. Why? Because we are trained to think that only the US (and maybe some of its allies) know what a good government is. Many of us think this even if we don`t like our government.

It doesn`t matter if we think the US should run Iraq or if we think the UN should. It doesn`t matter whether we think the US liberated the Iraqi people or just took over the place for their oil. The very fact that we question the Iraqis` ability to take care of themselves shows how our consciousness is tainted with the stain of the occupier.

As long as the United States is in Iraq and the Middle East, we are occupiers and colonizers.

So, can the Iraqis rebuild their own country?

Of course, the Iraqis can rebuild their own country.

Furthermore, the only way the Iraqi people will be able to really choose their own destiny is by getting the US masters of war out of their country. Likewise, the only way we in the United States will ever be able to truly choose our own destiny is by getting the masters of war out of our government. In other words, the first step towards real democracy in the USA is also the first step towards democracy in Iraq-and that first step is getting the US out of Iraq.

I watch the daughter of a friend every afternoon. This little girl has helped me remember in the past several months, more than anything or anybody else, why I oppose war and work for justice and peace. It`s a very simple reason: I want the world that she lives in to be a place where she and her generation can thrive. Not just survive, but thrive. Not just here in the US, but everywhere in the world. I want her smile and the smile that almost every child has, no matter what their circumstances, to never disappear from her face because of something I did or something I failed to do.

Insisting on the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq is not only about improving the future of Iraq and its children, it`s also about improving the future of the United States.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground.

He can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs04282003.html

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Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Americans have good reason to be afraid of their leaders

28.04.2003 -

Freed from the oppression of their dictator, Iraqis are now free to complain. From tens of thousands of marchers chanting "down, down USA - don`t stay, go away" to individuals spitting at soldiers, Iraqis are flexing a muscle that, paradoxically, had atrophied under Saddam Hussein.

But now here`s an irony that no one expected. Back in America, complaining about America is the one thing that`s pretty much disappeared, lost under the weight of a collective patriotism and increasing constitutional limitations.

Voicing any sort of anti-war opinion is just not done any more and a number of organisations have sprung up with the express purpose of blacklisting celebrities who speak out.

Susan Sarandon is obviously on the list. She`s quoted as saying she doesn`t remember ever being in a climate where people were too afraid to even have a conversation about an issue, let alone a debate.

But then in America, uttering any threatening remark about the President is illegal and likely to land you in jail. Writer Jonathan Freedland, looking at America`s history of tolerance and diversity, said in the Guardian that the country was turning into a very un-American America, "where the limits of acceptable discussion have narrowed sharply and anyone commenting negatively on the war or the President is denounced as unpatriotic".

It shouldn`t come as a surprise. A quick reading of the 2001 Patriot Act, formed in the dark hours after 9/11, clearly shows it`s all part of a bigger plan. Under the guise of security, the act allowed all kinds of incursions into private life.

Some - like the right to track organisations suspected of funding terrorists - made sense in light of the attacks. Others - like the right to seize library lending records or the recruitment of posties, pizza delivery guys, and local shopkeepers into a national network of informers - did seem draconian.

But it turns out it was not enough. Sweeping new amendments to the bill have been drawn up. The Patriot Act II or as the brave would have it, the Liberty for Security Act, was leaked to the press in February and in its present form makes for scary reading. It allows things like random arrests, secret military tribunals for presidentially designated terrorists, and concealment of presidential records.

It even proposes reversing a federal court decision authorising the release of the names of the hundreds of people still detained, without representation, in the dragnet following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Perhaps you believe that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear? The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, in New York, warns that for the first time in United States history, the act will explicitly authorise secret arrests, not to mention sneak-and-peek searches.

That cute term means federal agents can enter your home, download your computer and internet viewing history, take your private business records and any other material, including confidential library and bookstore records - without telling you, without proof of probable cause, or without getting a court order.

And the best part? The legislation does not restrict searches to people suspected of being involved in terrorism.

It gets worse. The act not only increases Government power while decreasing checks on its invasive power. If passed (and that looks likely), the Government will be able to sample and catalogue genetic information, without a court order or your consent. The act also broadens the term "terrorist" to include anyone with views that differ from the Government.

And forget being a whistle-blower. That`s set to become illegal, even if your motive is to protect the public from corporate wrongdoing or Government neglect.

But then to whistle-blow you need access to information. Under Patriot Act II information such as the environmental safety of local factories will be off-limits. And you won`t be able to contribute to meaningful dialogue on the future of such resources as forests (that constitutes belonging to a "special interest group").

In addition if you don`t like a secret decision made by a Government organisation - say, clear-felling ancient sequoia trees - you`ll have no right to appeal. And even the press will be barred from publishing contentious information.

Feeling a tingle up your spine yet? Richard Woods, the head of our own spy service, the SIS, wouldn`t comment. Even his receptionist Mary "I don`t give my second name" would not comment on questions about New Zealand`s response to the Patriot Act II.

But in comparison to the US draft, the proposed amendments to our own 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act are puny procedures - like we require a court warrant to use electronic tracking devices.

So for now - while Americans are waking up to a world where, if you`re not for your Government, you`re a traitor - New Zealanders are safe from the tyranny of an apparently unfettered Government.

America is changing. And it`s changing fast and that raises an apposite question. Are we, tucked away in our comfortable corner of the world, up with their play and, if so, how do we intend to respond to it?




©Copyright 2003, NZ Herald

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Geht schon wieder abwärts

FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Latest: April 22-23, 2003. N=900 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.
.

"Do you approve or disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing as president?"
.............. ... Approve.... Disap-prove ... Don`tKnow

.................. % ... %... %
.

4/22-23/03......... 65... 25 ...10
4/8-9/03........... 71... 20... 9
3/25-26/03 .........66 ...24.... 10
3/11-12/03......... 60... 32.... 8
2/25-26/03......... 55... 33... 12
2/11-12/03..........57....32... 11
1/29-30/03......... 59....28....13

http://www.pollingreport.com/

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The threat to our TV from this corrupter of politicians
The Lords must stop Murdoch from seizing another slab of the media

Polly Toynbee
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian

Now is the time for the Lords to earn its ermine. There are few occasions when its lack of democratic legitimacy is an advantage - but the communications bill is one. Over the next weeks, the Lords can exercise its duty to protect the citizens against the shabbier venalities of democracy. (Though that may not be what Tony Blair meant when he chose to leave them 100% unelected).

With both Labour and Conservative leaders in humiliating thrall to the menacing might of Rupert Murdoch, this is the legitimate time for the unelected Lords to rebel against the elected Commons and stop Murdoch seizing yet another slab of the British media.

Yesterday saw the opening skirmishes over the communications bill: the Lords will vote on it in a few weeks. This vast and baggy bill, packed with important but uncontentious technicalities, contains two momentous threats to the future quality of broadcasting. The key clauses have one sole function - to remove all obstacles to Murdoch seizing Channel 5, overshadowing ITV and, within a short time, providing the main competition to the BBC. The bill abolishes the requirement for owners of TV companies to be British or EU citizens. (Murdoch took US nationality to take over Fox TV: the US bans foreign ownership.)

The other crucial clause removes existing laws that prohibit anyone who owns 20% or more of newspaper readership from buying into TV. Murdoch already owns over 40% of Britain`s newspaper readership, as well as his mighty Sky satellite empire.

Pity the wretched ministers charged with pushing through this shameless bill, Downing Street`s gun at their heads. Three hapless women - Tessa Jowell at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, together with Patricia Hewitt at the Department of Trade and Industry and Tessa Blackstone leading in the Lords - all look miserable and sound less convincing every time they speak.

It`s hard to find a soul in the Labour party who supports this: even those paid to mouth assent look ashamed. However, politics is a savage game and one-day-wonder resignations rarely change anything beyond the career path of resigners. To steal a line - the political grave is a fine and private place, but none from there their steps retrace. Besides, there are too few good senior women to see these three walk the plank.

A fourth woman, former cabinet minister Margaret Jay, probably spoke for all in condemning this shocker yesterday. But the unhappy tones of Ms Jowell on the Today programme was a cringe-maker: "This is not about Rupert Murdoch. Let`s be absolutely clear, these proposals are proprietor-neutral."

Where did these killer clauses come from? Chris Smith`s white paper did not contain them: they were not on his radar screen, he says. Trying to hide the blindingly obvious reason why, Downing Street has produced bizarre excuses. The call of the wild free market is invoked. There is indeed a need for untrammelled innovation in the white heat of the deadly competitive international phone/IT market. But they deliberately mix that in with the quite different question of who owns and controls broadcasting. The call to free up TV to exhilarate investment from America defies belief: welcome to AOL Time Warner and Disney. As the EU struggles to save cultural goods from the terms of GATT so countries can protect their cultural industries from US depredation, Britain throws open TV to America, without any reciprocity. US owners can offload backlists of old US programmes - easy profits even if viewer numbers fall.

But worst is the clause letting Murdoch buy Channel 5. Pretending C5 needs investment is absurd: its principal shareholder is five times the size of Granada and Carlton put together. But to Murdoch it would be invaluable. He could buy up sports rights for both terrestrial and satellite, outbidding all-comers, cross-promoting across his newspapers and two TV platforms. With Murdoch behind it, Channel 5 could destroy ITV as it is unshackled by ITV`s public service obligations. That would bring it head to head with the BBC. Optimists say naively that the BBC would shine with no competition but bilge. But the BBC is always dragged down by the surrounding media ecology, even if it keeps its nose just above the prevailing water level. Now is a low ebb to praise British broadcasting: what was once one of the best in the world is now only one of the least worst. Greg Dyke`s belated promise this week that the BBC will do better still doesn`t sound as if he understands how radical a revolution is needed. God knows how many thousands of hours went into producing their latest self-laudatory nonsense "Vision, Mission, Values", but it only emphasised the current chasm between rhetoric and output.

But however bad, you can bet Murdoch`s arrival would make it worse. All he touches turns to dross - and gold in his own pocket. Date the decline of Britain`s press into a laughing stock among European countries from the day he bought the Sun, and Mrs Thatcher let him break all media laws to acquire the rest. Mrs Thatcher twisted EU law to get him an exemption when he launched Sky to allow him to use almost entirely US programming, breaking EU import quotas. In 1996, John Major, desperate to assuage the wrath of his press, gave him all he wanted in the new digital universe. (Labour put up no objection, with Geoff Hoon smoothing its path through the Commons.) Now here we go again, Tony Blair handing over the last prize to Murdoch, whose papers repay him handsomely just now. (But only for now, so long as there is no euro referendum.) Murdoch is the great corrupter of politicians: John Major dates his downfall from the day Murdoch decided to oust him. Politicians fear they need this bully`s patronage. Whenever they cave in, his grip on politics tightens.

Now it is down to the Lords to fight off this threat: "I hope their lordships will be conscious of their responsibilities," says Chris Smith, who wants the landmines inserted into his bill removed. At least Labour rebel peers, led by Lord Puttnam, will know they rebel with the wholehearted support of virtually all their elected counterparts in the Commons. The same is true of the Tories: Iain Duncan Smith missed a magnificent chance to seize the moral high ground and put Labour to shame over this - but no doubt he was well warned that Murdoch`s daisycutters (tabloid and broadsheet) would fall upon his unprotected pate. Tory peers may consider that if Conservatism means anything, its values surely include conserving the best of British broadcasting.

Now here is a theory I would like to believe: Labour hierarchs would not be heartbroken to lose these clauses in the Lords. No 10 can tell Mr M that they tried, but the damned Lords just wouldn`t wear it and now the time has run out. Did our best, not our fault, awfully sorry, so please don`t beat up on us, please.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Those Iraq exclusives in full
Rod Liddle
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian

I must leave for Baghdad immediately, for these are great times in which to practise the exalted trade of journalism. Out there in the charred and smouldering ruins of Iraq, there are incriminating files. Millions of them, by the look of it. Just lying around the place, waiting to be chanced upon by any opportunistic hack, however inept and addled. Book me a flight: this is All The Presidents Men and Hitler`s Diaries all rolled into one. Except that unlike Hitler`s Diaries, these files are, of course, wholly authentic. This is the real stuff. And it`s just lying around there. I can feel my nostrils twitching like they did in the old days when I was a trainee journalist and an ambulance happened to go by. The scent of blood: I feel reinvigorated.

The scoops I`m talking about are the stories EVERYBODY has been talking about. That great one about how a bunch of documents had been discovered which proved that George Galloway MP was on the Iraqi payroll all along, just as we`d suspected. Saddam apparently bunged Galloway loads of dosh every month - millions, I think, probably - and crates of Russian champagne, sevruga caviar, plus exotic and illegal unguents to make his moustache even more luxuriant and imposing. The lucky reporter found the documents in downtown Baghdad tucked inside a cabinet labelled (in English): DO NOT OPEN: EXTREMELY CONFIDENTIAL STUFF ABOUT THAT IDIOT GALLOWAY`S LINKS WITH SADDAM.

Incredible. Hell of a scoop. And it was just there, waiting to be found. That reporter could have been me.

Then there`s this latest story, the one about the French. You just knew it, didn`t you? It`s wonderful how these stories serve merely to confirm our darkest suspicions. As it turns out, the French government didn`t just oppose the war with Iraq, it was actually in league with the Iraqis. They exchanged information, the French secret service and their horrible Iraqi equivalents, details about how to disrupt human rights conferences, the covert use of fundamentalist Mediterranean cuisine to irritate Americans and tips on the quickest way to surrender your capital city when guns can be heard some way off in the distance. Again, quite incroyable . And once more found simply by some intrepid hack rifling through a few cabinets, particularly those marked: Alors! Confidentiale: Memoires pour le axis magnifique Iraq et Français. Defence d`ouvrir, s`il vous plait .

Those perfidious French, huh? Why do they have trees in the Champs Elysées? Well, the Germans need a bit of shade, you know. Ha.

But anyway, clearly there`s loads more stuff to be found. Quite apart from the possibility of stumbling across huge oil drums full of anthrax, sarin, VX, plutonium etc which will have materialised, miraculously, within the past week or so, as if by the guiding hand of a kindly, benevolent, Christian God.

I suppose with my luck I might find nothing more than a few spoiled chads from the last Iraqi election which will suggest to an avid world that Saddam won with a majority of only 99.98% of the vote, rather than the 100% which he claimed, thus making it abundantly clear that the whole process was a fraud and an insult to the democratic inspirations of the people of Iraq. But frankly, even that would do.

Listen: there might be Sars stuff there. He`s got to have had a hand in that, somehow. Maybe I`ll find millions of those paper surgical masks the Chinese look so cute in and supporting documentary evidence to prove that it was all down to the work of Dr Germ, that weird woman who we trained - in good faith - to kill us all in our beds.

What I want, though, is the secret document to beat all secret documents; the one which reveals the enemy in his full perfidy. What I expect to find, maybe with a little help from whatever British intelligence sources are already out in Baghdad, is the file that reveals the true wickedness of the collaborators here in Britain.

Somewhere - there will be the file that reveals the links between the Ba`ath party and, as if we hadn`t already guessed, Clare Short and Robin Cook. It wouldn`t surprise me if Tony Benn, the Womens Institute, Carole Caplin and Peter Foster were implicated somewhere along the line, too. In my fervent dreams, which are beginning to multiply, as you may have noticed, this stuff will be in a large manila envelope marked "Top Secret" and carry an 11 Downing Street letterhead: The Iraqi Programme for Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Role Played by that Bastard Brown.

I haven`t found it yet, but I will. And remember: you read it here first.

My plane song

Travelling back from south-east Asia yesterday, on a hideously cramped and interminable flight, I found myself singing, over and over again - while watching that mesmerising computerised map that tells you where the plane is - the best two opening lines of a rock song ever recorded.

They were written by the brilliant, if confused, Alex Chilton, and they go like this:

"Here`s a little thing that gonna please ya/It`s just a little town down in Indonesia - Bangkok."

Later, somebody with an atlas managed to penetrate Alex`s chemically induced bewilderment. So subsequently he sung:

"Here`s a revision, it`s kind of minor/It`s just a little town down in Indochina - Bangkok."

Later still, maybe after rehab or something, and when he got more aware about stuff and realised that "Indochina" was passe as a geopolitical term, the first lines became:

"Here`s a little thing that`s sure to phase ya/It`s just a little town down in south-east Asia - Bangkok."

Do not think, though, that political correctness entirely neutered Chilton`s poetic world vision. Even the new version of the song contained these wonderful lines:

"Two slanty-eyed men lying in bed/One got his Mauser out, the other said - Bangkok!"

Alex is from North Carolina. Maybe his psychobilly masterpiece Bangkok should form part of an exam question for American schoolkids, where they are asked to debate the appropriate levels of respect and knowledge from which the US should view the rest of the world. They could cross reference various ignorant pronouncements from US presidents - Reagan, Bush, Bush, Carter - and even quote a later Chilton epic, Dalai Lama.

"High up in Tibet up in the Himalayas/There lives a cat called the Dalai Lama/I hear he never swats a mosquito/That`s cos he a follower of Buddha."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Shadow of the gunman
Shots in Falluja echo round the world

Leader
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian

Convincing Iraqis that US soldiers are there to help them will be all the more difficult after the shocking events in Falluja, west of Baghdad. Preventing already widespread popular opposition to the American military presence turning into concerted armed resistance will also be increasingly problematic unless the US army can explain why it was justified in opening fire on a crowd comprising a large number of children and teenagers, killing at least 13 and wounding 75. Local residents said that the children were protesting at the occupation of their school by the US soldiers and that the Americans started firing when a rock was thrown. The shooting reportedly went on for half an hour. People were hit by bullets, shrapnel and possibly by heavy machinegun rounds. Ambulance crews said they were also fired on.

A US officer at the scene, Lieutenant Christopher Hart of the 82nd Airborne Division, was quoted as saying his troops were defending themselves against an attack by two gunmen on a motorcycle and had at first tried to disperse the demonstration with smoke bombs. He claimed some people in the crowd may also have had guns. But this does not begin to explain the severity and duration of the in cident. Lt Hart could not say for sure how many people his men had killed. His vagueness is not surprising. On the basis of the known facts at this point, the Americans appear to have acted with staggering recklessness, turning a residential area full of kids into a murderous free-fire zone. Whatever rules of engagement they supposedly observe clearly did not work. Whatever force was required to ensure their own safety, the degree of force actually used appears to have been massively disproportionate.

Even though the war is over, US soldiers continue to kill Iraqi civilians almost every day, for a variety of reasons. But Falluja`s tragedy is of a different order of magnitude. To prevent more such disastrous incidents and stop the security situation deteriorating further, an inquiry must be urgently held, preferably with UN oversight and with reference to the Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying forces. For reasons of law, morality and self-interest, our relentlessly self-righteous government has a clear obligation to demand that its ally comply. Meanwhile, 82nd Airborne units should be withdrawn from Falluja. If necessary, they could be replaced by better-disciplined British troops.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

The gaping hole in Iraq
Occupation has brought social collapse, Bloody Sunday shootings and the waking of a Shi`ite giant

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian

There are three ways you know the war in Iraq is meant to be over. First, George Bush is due to declare combat operations formally at an end this week. Second, Tony Blair has started talking about public services - domestic bread-and-butter - again. Third, Toyah`s eating ants on I`m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! Would they dare engage in such frivolity if British troops were still in action?

So the conflict must be over. Surely we are now in the "aftermath", that less spectacular phase of war confined to the inside pages and worthy foreign policy seminars. The rest of us can doubtless tune out, unwind after a stressful few months and get ready for summer.

Not so fast. President Bush may want to rush out his victory declaration, but there is still plenty of unfinished business from this war. For one thing, there is the irritating matter of the war`s official cause: Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction. Until they turn up, the nagging doubt will remain that both Bush and Blair talked up a threat to justify an unnecessary conflict. The damage Operation Iraqi Freedom has wrought to the US relationship with Europe goes on, too: just yesterday, the anti-war quartet of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg announced a new European security and defence union, separate from Nato and pointedly excluding pro-war countries such as Britain. And the strategic reverberations of the second Gulf war are just beginning to be felt: now we learn that the US is to shift the bulk of its Gulf forces from Saudi Arabia to tiny Qatar. It surely can`t be long before it decides the ideal location is newly won Iraq.

But you don`t have to search so far into the future for evidence that this story is far from over. For its next and, in some ways, most dramatic chapter is being played out right now. It is the American occupation of Iraq that could prove even more fraught with danger than the war itself.

Officially, it`s all plain sailing. "Every day, life in Iraq improves," a sunny Bush told a cheering Arab-American crowd in Michigan on Monday. But the reality on the ground is not quite so rosy.

While Bush was at his podium, US troops were firing into a crowd of demonstrators in the Iraqi town of Falluja, killing 13 of them. The Pentagon says the Americans were fired on first, but eyewitnesses insist the protesters were unarmed. Apparently they were trying to reclaim a local school that US forces had taken over.

Falluja is now at least the third Bloody Sunday-style incident in Iraq in as many weeks: twice at Mosul Americans also killed demonstrators said to be unarmed. Of course, there will be no Bloody Sunday-style outcry - after all, the victims were not US citizens - but this latest episode does suggest an alarming pattern. To put it at its mildest, America is shaping up to be a pretty inept occupier.

It`s not just the military`s knack for inflaming a tense situation into a deadly one. Nor is it the bumbling rhetorical efforts of pro-consul Jay Garner, who`s good enough at serving up treacly, sub-Clinton platitudes - "let`s do this for the children of Iraq" - but who has failed to get a basic grip on the country he is meant to run. Electricity is still out for most of the day, there is no police force to speak of, workers remain unpaid and disorder is widespread. The leitmotif of all this is, inevitably, Iraq`s ransacked museums: a trove of antiquities denuded in what one archaeologist calls the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years.

The common thread is not malignancy, so much as unpreparedness. How could the US have been surprised either by the museum looting - which happened during the 1991 war, too - or by the wider anarchy? It should have been obvious that the toppling of Saddam would leave a power vacuum. This was not the fall of communism, despite the frequent invocations of 1989. In eastern Europe, the top layer of leadership was removed, but the governing apparatus remained intact: the ship of state could stay afloat. But here the entire machine was the target for elimination, making lawlessness inevitable. Now the coalition faces a lose-lose choice: either they impose order and police the streets of Baghdad themselves, or they bring back the men of the old regime to do it for them.

But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so other forces are beginning to fill it. Chief among them is Shia Islam, which can claim the allegiance of 60% of the Iraqi population. Where order exists, it is the Shi`ites who are providing it: the mosques have even sent out volunteers to act as traffic cops. Once again, this should have been easily predicted. Oppressive regimes in Islamic countries leave only one place where people can assemble and organise: the mosque. That`s what happened in 1970s Iran under the Shah and that`s what`s happening now.

And Iran is a key player in this new drama. Iraqi-born clerics exiled in Iran have been crossing the border, determined to make Najaf once again the Shia spiritual centre (perhaps as a moderate alternative to Iran`s Khomeinist hub of Qom). The Iranian television station, al-Alam, has become must-see TV in those Iraqi homes lucky enough to have power, while the coalition`s own TV channel - beamed via military plane - is said to be poor, with fuzzy reception, showing nothing worth seeing.

In other words, the US and Britain have ripped a big hole in Iraq and it is Shia Islam, backed in part by Iran, which is stepping through it. General Garner may demand that there be no "out of country" influence on the new Iraq - apparently forgetting that he and his fellow Americans are hardly native-born Baghdadis - but this is the fast-emerging reality.

The US response is to plead for patience. Sit tight, they say, a transitional government is on the way: a national conference should convene to pick it in a month`s time. That could be tricky, with some Shia leaders still boycotting the process. And what about after the transition? If Iraqis have a simple, winner-takes-all election, then Shi`ites could remain in permanent power, freezing out Sunnis and Kurds. Fair elections might bring victory to an Islamist party. (Wouldn`t that be an irony, US-liberated Iraq home to the new Taliban?) Donald Rumsfeld was reported as saying that`s "not going to happen" at the weekend. But if Iraq is going to be a democracy, as London and Washington insist, it`s hard to see how that can be ruled out. No wonder Geoff Hoon was squirming last week, when asked if Iraq`s future elections would be of the one-person, one-vote variety. The system would be "representative," was all Hoon would promise. In other words, Iraqis are to have a Henry Ford election: they can have whatever colour they want so long as it`s black.

No, this war is far from over. Indeed, when you consider the combustible elements now in play - a blundering, tactless foreign occupier confronting a nation surging with Islamic fervour - this battle may be just beginning.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

George Foulkes: Advice to Blair: Ignore Brown, join the euro
The issue is so important that the judgement of one man cannot be allowed to stand in the way
30 April 2003


As Gordon Brown prepares for his statement on the euro in the next few weeks, I hope that the Chancellor, like me, will learn the lessons of the past few decades. I fear, however, that he will draw the wrong lessons. This issue is so important that the judgement of one man cannot be allowed to stand in the way, and that if he is against then the Prime Minister should overrule his Chancellor for the sake of the economic wellbeing of the British people.

Every Labour government in my lifetime – up until now – has been destroyed by a crisis of confidence in the currency markets.

In the early 1950s, Clement Attlee`s administration was ripped apart by a dispute about the consequences for sterling of paying for the war on Korea. In the 1960s we were traumatised by the devaluation of 1967 and the crunch for public spending that followed. And one can be sure the letters IMF are burnt into the heart of every Labour member – including me – who was active in the 1970s.

So far we have avoided these problems this time round but it would be madness to pretend they have gone away when, in fact, the risks of a sudden currency crisis have actually increased.

Today we are running an Edwardian monetary policy – a freely exchangeable pound – in a 21st-century market-place, where currency dealers exchange sums the equivalent to the total of our GDP every day. The longer we persist with this approach, the more power we are handing over to the speculators. My objection is not that speculators are the vanguard of the counter-revolution or a bunch of fascist hyenas out to destroy Labour. Their attack will be based on one thing, and one thing only: they will make money from it.

Joining the euro will not remove the risk of a speculative attack on our currency. But it will do two things. Firstly, it will make one far more difficult. The markets are powerful, but given the scale of currency trading, speculative attacks have to reach a tipping point before they make an impact. This level is higher for the euro than sterling.

Secondly, they will simply matter less. Today a bout of speculation will hit every exporter or importer in Britain as 100 per cent of our external trade is with countries with a different currency. If we joined the euro, that figure would be halved overnight.

This ought to be reason enough for any democratic socialist to take a positive attitude to the euro. So why is it that a small, but disproportionally influential, group of Labour MPs is so opposed, and why do these people seem to be in danger of winning the argument with the Government?

In the end, the conclusion has to be that this has become solely a question of politics – and bad politics at that. Deep at the heart of government, somewhere in No 10 or No 11, there is a profound reluctance to take on a 30 per cent opinion poll deficit, to challenge the Murdochs, the Blacks and the Rothermeres and to press the case that, whatever we think of their foreign policies, strengthening our trade with France and Germany is fundamentally in our interests. They seem to have forgotten we are at our best when we are at our boldest.

Of course, if the Government were to conclude we shouldn`t join, it would frame its arguments in terms of economics. But such arguments hold little water.

Let me deal with the easy one first – the suggestion that because the average growth on the Continent is lower than in Britain, we should not join the euro. Certainly some euro countries, Germany in particular, are suffering. But that has nothing to do with the euro. The problem is a structural one, unrelated to the level of interest rates, and reflects a long-term hangover from reunification. In any case, German weakness actually strengthens the case to join, as that way we can maximise our advantages today and seize the opportunities tomorrow when the German revival comes.

So too with the argument that the euro economies are too inflexible. So what if they are? If French or Spanish labour laws weaken their ability to compete, that is no argument for lumbering our exporters with the disadvantage of a separate currency.

What matters is the flexibility of the British economy, because that will determine our ability to withstand economic shocks. And on just about every measure we are not just flexible today but getting more flexible. Long-term unemployment has been tackled and the Government has made consistent efforts to make it easier to bring new ideas and businesses to the market.

Finally, there is the question of interest rates. Surely, argues the opposition, we must agree that one-size-fits-all interest rates would do us irreparable damage. But again, there is no economic evidence to back this up.

Engineering firms in my constituency in Scotland already have to live with a uniform UK interest rate. They have no reason to fear a European-wide rate. In any case the differences are already minimal – 1.25 per cent at the short end, nothing at the long end – and there is every reason to expect the gap will narrow further when we announce an intention to join.

Our economy is flexible enough to allow us to join. It`s time our politics was too.

The author is former minister at the Department for International Development, 1997-2001
30 April 2003 07:54

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

[Joerver]

Toy soldiers
A divisive and unnecessary strategy for European defence




The mini-summit held between the leaders of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg yesterday must count as either one of the most intellectually confused or instead politically dishonest meetings conducted by EU nations. At the press conference after the short gathering Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder sought to minimise the significance of what had been proposed. Meanwhile, Guy Verhofstadt, the Prime Minister of Belgium and their host, spoke somewhat more candidly of their collective desire to “relaunch” European defence and of the “new height of ambition” that the seven-point statement they had published represented. He is right to focus on the text and its implications and not the short-term attempt to limit the political fallout from it.
Much of what was outlined has, it should be observed, been suggested elsewhere, not least as part of the ongoing constitutional convention on the future of the EU. The very fact of drawing these otherwise separate, often disparate, themes together into a whole, however, illustrates the extent to which the prospective “European Security and Defence Union” would be a radical departure from existing practice. The “gang of four”, though, went yet further, announcing their intention to form a multinational, deployable force headquarters for their joint operations and declaring they would create “a nucleus of a collective capability which they would make available to the EU for operational planning and command of EU-led operations” outside Nato.

If the form of words chosen appears tortuous, then that is quite deliberate. A blunter argument, which Belgium wanted to make but from which France and Germany recoiled, is that this initiative would serve as the prototype for a distinctive and duplicate military structure that would enjoy a semi-detached relationship with Nato and have access to dedicated, exclusively European, material. France also proposed that its membership should adopt a “solidarity clause” — in effect a mutual pledge that an attack on one country within the pact would be deemed an assault on all — that directly mirrors Nato’s existing Article 5 provision. This enterprise will be placed formally before all EU leaders at their next summit.

That the concept will do nothing for European defence is indicated by its internal contradictions and damaging external consequences. The plan offers no prospect of a serious increase in defence spending — indeed, at least one leader expressed the hope that co-ordination could allow for “cutting costs” — but instead outlined a series of new bureaucracies. It took all of Jacques Chirac’s capacity for contorted logic for him to praise the “fundamental character” of the transatlantic alliance while aspiring to bury it in the form that it has been known for 54 years, and then move on to contend that a plan which involves planting duplicate bodies inside Nato would “limit wasteful national duplication which exists at present”.

The issue is how others will now respond. Tony Blair was relatively restrained yesterday, especially when compared with the robust public words of Ana Palacio, the Spanish Foreign Minister. There will be a temptation, given the nature of the EU, for the several states who believe this is a profoundly bad idea to attempt to dilute it rather than pull the plug on it. This would be mistaken. The notion would live to fight another day when the shadow of the Iraqi campaign did not hang over it. It would be regarded in Washington and elsewhere, correctly, as the thin end of an extremely unwelcome wedge. The Prime Minister says he would not back anything that “in any shape or form undermines the Nato relationship”. This scheme has the shape and form to do precisely that.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-663837,00.html

[CheapThrill]

Was Dubya "Involved" in an Illegal Abortion??


Join the investigation http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bushabortion/

On CNN`s Crossfire on October 20, 2000, Larry Flynt exploded a bombshell: that he has evidence that George W. Bush was "involved in an abortion in Texas" in the early 1970`s - when abortions were still illegal.

Here are the details, as reported by Bartcop http://www.bartcop.com/bushabortion.htm :

In the winter of 1971 George W. Bush was dating a woman named Robin Lowman (now Robin Garner). Miss Lowman became pregnant by Smirk and he arranged for her to have an abortion - which in the great state of Texas in 1971 was very illegal! Not to mention that George W. is running as a pro-life candidate for the presidency.

The unnamed source of this story, was a friend of Robin Lowman`s and the girlfriend of the man who arranged the abortion. His name is Robert Carl Chandler. Chandler is a Bush friend and supporter from way back and he made the arrangements for Miss Lowman`s abortion at the Twelve Oaks Hospital in Houston, TX (now the Bayou City Medical Center). The source overheard the call by Mr. Chandler to arrange the abortion and the source visited Robin Lowman at the Twelve Oaks Hospital after the procedure.

The source meanwhile, is afraid of coming forward, saying that she was threatened by Chandler and another Bush friend and supporter named Jim Bath. Bath has longstanding intelligence connections, and played a role in the BCCI scandal. Robin Lowman (now Garner) is married to Jerry Lee Garner who is an FBI agent.

So, that`s the story: an illegal back room abortion arranged by the Republican party Presidential candidate who is running on a pro-life ticket.


The CNN Coverup

Amazingly, CNN scrubbed its own story http://american-politics.com/20001022CNNCensorsFlynt.html !!!!
This has all the markings of a cover-up by CNN - just like the cover-ups of Bush`s many other scandals http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm , from going AWOL http://democrats.com/smokingjet , to using illegal drugs, to corruption in Texas government, to lying under oath.

Here is the original transcript that was published by CNN, but has now been scrubbed http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0010/20/cf.00.html .

[ROBERT] NOVAK: Mr. Flynt, never let it be said that we censor any of our guests here on CROSSFIRE, and you said you wanted to talk about the election. Tell me what you wanted to say.

FLYNT: Well, during the impeachment debacle, we did an investigation which resulted in the resignation of Bob Livingston and others and we have continued this investigation and for eight months we`ve been looking into George W. Bush`s background. And we`ve found out in the early 1970s he was involved in an abortion in Texas, and I just think that it`s sad that the mainstream media, who`s aware of this story, won`t ask him that question when they were able to ask him the drug question without any proof at all, and we`ve got all kinds of proof on this issue.

NOVAK: Well, you`re...

FLYNT: You know, the guy admitted he was a drunk for 20 years, and if the abortion issue is true then that puts him lower on the morality scale than Bill Clinton.

NOVAK: Mr. Flynt, you said if it`s true and you have no proof of that. I gather you are a very strong...

FLYNT: The hell we don`t have proof.

NOVAK: Sir, I gather you`re a very strong Gore supporter. Is that correct?

FLYNT: I`ll vote for the lesser of the two evils. I don`t like either one of them.

[BILL] PRESS: All Right, Larry Flynt, a man who speaks his word, but we remind you they are Larry Flynt`s words and not ours. Larry Flynt, thank you very, very much for joining us.

This was followed by an online chat, in which Flynt went into greater detail:

CNN - Mr. Flynt, I would like to know how you plan to protect yourself from a law suit by claiming to have the goods on GWBush.

Flynt: Because we have them and the truth is an absolute defense.

CNN; When and where are you going to publish information about George W. Bush?

Flynt: When I said that we had the proof, I am referring to knowing who the girl was, knowing who the doctor was that pereformed the abortion, evidence from girlfriends of hers at the time, who knew about the romance and the subsequent abortion. The young lady does not want to go public, and without her willingness, we don`t feel that we`re on solid enough legal ground to go with the story, because should she say it never happened, then we`ve got a potential libel suit. But we know we have enough evidence that we believe completely. One of the things that interested us was that this abortion took place before Roe Vs. Wade in 1970, which made it a crime at the time. I`d just like the national media to ask him if abortion is okay for him and his family, but not for the rest of America. We`re not looking at it as a big issue, we`re looking at it as a situation of people not being told the truth. I think the American people have a right to know everything there is to know about someone running for President.


Why is this story important?

1. Because George W. Bush says he is "pro-life http://georgewbush.com/issues/lifeissues.html , which means he regards abortion as murder. If he was "involved" in an abortion, then in his own heart he is a murderer.

2. Because George W. Bush supports a "Human Life Amendment" http://www.rnc.org/2000/2000platform4 to the Constitution, which would overturn Roe v. Wade. This would subject 1.3 MILLION women each year - and their doctors - to criminal prosecution.

3. Because George W. Bush points to the two most anti-abortion Justices of the Supreme Court - Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia http://past.thenation.com/issue/001009/1009neas.shtml - as his models for Supreme Court appointees. And he may get to appoint a Supreme Court Justice soon.

4. Because George W. Bush has a solid record http://naral.org/choice2000/candidate_positions.html of opposing abortion as Governor of Texas, where he signed 18 anti-abortion laws, and President [sic].

5. Because George W. Bush ran on "restoring honor and integrity to the White House," and therefore should be expected to tell the truth.

George W. Bush must state clearly whether or not he was involved in an illegal abortion in Texas.
And the media must tell the American people!

Read more: http://www.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=159


_______________________________________________________________________________


Dubya Responds to Abortion Rumors


"Abortion is immoral. And it was pretty damned expensive, too!"


Governor Bush regales a "Right To Life" gathering in Michigan with his technique for getting crystallized powders to fall from your nose onto your lower lip -- instead of being lost on your shirt.


DETROIT, MI (AP). George W. Bush appeared last night at a potluck supper held by "Right to Life" in an elegant suburb of Detroit, Michigan. During the dinner he was asked by Mrs. Wallace Summerstock to respond to reports [ur]>http://www.bushwatch.com/flynt.htm[/url] being circulated
http://www.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=159 in liberal circles (but carefully avoided by America`s heretofore "liberal press" ) that Mr. Bush had impregnated an underage girl and paid for her to have an abortion in Houston in 1970.

Mr. Bush, appearing somewhat surprised by the hostess` query, responded: "Well, I`m a governor. That`s what governors do. We govern. We make decisions." When further pressed for an explanation about whether the abortion had actually occurred, Mr. Bush laughed a bit and said: "Now, I`m not going to get into responding to rumors like this. But I will say that I have not paid for any underage girls to have abortions in 40 years. No, of course, I meant 30 years. Well, let`s make that 31 years just to be on the safe side. And I have not done any of that cocaine stuff in 24 years and four months and three days. And I have not been AWOL from the Air Force in going on 28 years now. And I haven`t cheated on my lovely wife Laura in -- well, let`s just say since before Bill Clinton cheated on his. And, I`m proud to say, it`s been quite a while since I danced on top of a bar naked drinking tequila and shaking my ass and dick!"

Reports of Mr. Bush paying for an underage girl to have an abortion can be traced back to Larry Flynt, who says he has four affidavits to support the shameful allegation. Mr. Flynt is a dreadful smut peddler who will say anything – even if it is true – to besmirch those who stand up for traditional family values and the rights of the unborn. In the past, Mr. Flynt has repeated horrible stories about Bob Livingstone, Newt Gingrich, Helen Chenoweth, Dan Burton, and Henry Hyde having affairs and Bob Barr paying for an abortion – all of which, while absolutely true, would have been left unspoken by anyone from a good family.

Mrs. Bowers said to her dear friend Barbara Bush after hearing the news: "Bar, I know we all agreed that we hated Bill Clinton so much we`d put an idiot – I mean, anyone in the White House other than a Demon-crat, and I won`t have a word said against your son, but I ask you! A child molester?" After reassuring Betty that the girl looked "almost legal," Mrs. Bush further assuaged concern by pointing out: "Yes, George made his underage lover kill their baby, but you have to understand, he was out of his mind on cocaine at the time. There is a really good chance that he would never make a fifteen year old do that now."

Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer responded by saying "Governor Bush has not changed his position on abortion. He is no hypocrite. It was illegal when he had it done and he wants it to be illegal for everyone else, too. Fair is fair."


"I`m glad that the Supreme Court picked Bush for us."
-- Mrs. Betty Bowers


http://www.bettybowers.com/newsbush.html

[Joerver]

April 30, 2003
Hypocrisy & Apple Pie
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

Richard Perle is at ease with neo-imperial swagger.

At the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday night, the Pentagon`s Prince of Darkness lectured Hans Blix as if he were a colonial subject, instructing him on why an invasion of Iraq had been justified even though no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found.

Asked afterward how Mr. Blix had reacted, Mr. Perle replied merrily: "He`s a Swedish disarmament lawyer. He`s used to a lot of abuse."

When one partygoer told Mr. Perle that she would miss the buzzy, standing-room-only "black coffee briefings" on Iraq held by hard-liners at the American Enterprise Institute, he suggested the neo-cons might hold another round.

"We`ll have green tea briefings on North Korea," he said slyly.

On Fox News, Bill Kristol spoke up for a more brazen imperial attitude. "We need to err on the side of being strong," he said. "And if people want to say we`re an imperial power, fine. If three years from now, we have beaten back these threats and have a decent regime there, it`ll be worth it."

But imperial flair is rare. America is a furtive empire, afraid to raise its flag or linger too long or even call things by their real names. The U.S. is having a hard time figuring out how to wield its colonial power, how to balance collegiality with coercion, how to savor the fruits of imperialism without acknowledging its imperialist hubris.

When Kofi Annan called the Americans in Iraq an "occupying power" last week, Bush officials freaked. Maybe they would have preferred Honored Guests.

The Pentagon once more outgunned the State Department this week, changing the name of a new governing body of Iraqis from "interim authority" to "transitional government" to signal that the U.S. would leave quickly and give its Armani-clad puppet, Ahmad Chalabi, an advantage. But it doesn`t matter what euphemistic name is used; if there are too many militant Shiite clerics involved, Rummy, the real authority, will tell them to take their camels and vamoose.

"America is the empire that dare not speak its name," Niall Ferguson, the Oxford professor who wrote "Empire," told a crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations here on Monday. He believes that America is so invested in its "creation myth," breaking away from a wicked empire, that Americans will always be self-deceiving — and even self-defeating — imperialists.

"The great thing about the American empire is that so many Americans disbelieve in its existence," he said. "Ever since the annexation of Texas and invasion of the Philippines, the U.S. has systematically pursued an imperial policy.

"It`s simply a suspension of disbelief by Americans. They think they`re so different that when they have bases in foreign territories, it`s not an empire. When they invade sovereign territory, it`s not an empire."

Asked in an interview about Viceroy Jay Garner`s promise that U.S. military overlords would "leave fairly rapidly," Mr. Ferguson replied: "I`m hoping he`s lying. Successful empires must be based on hypocrisy. The Americans can say they`re doing things in the name of freedom, liberty and apple pie. But they must build a civil society and revive the economy before they have elections.

"From 1882 until 1922, the British promised the international community 66 times that they would leave Egypt, but they never did. If they leave Iraq to its own devices, the whole thing will blow up."

Afghanistan offers cautionary lessons. It was the abandonment by the U.S. after Afghanistan`s war in 1989 with the Soviet Union that stoked the fury of Al Qaeda. The regime of the American puppet Hamid Karzai is still perilously fragile.

As Carlotta Gall wrote in The Times last weekend, after two U.S. soldiers were killed by Afghan rebels: "In a very real sense the war here has not ended. . . . Nearly every day, there are killings, explosions, shootings and targeted attacks on foreign aid workers, Afghan officials and American forces, as well as continuing feuding between warlords."

Exiled Taliban leaders have called for a holy war against the "occupying forces." The religious police are once more harassing and beating women over dress and behavior, and schools that take little girls are being attacked and threatened.

Until we can get democracy stabilized in our new colonies, Mr. Ferguson offers two words of advice: "Better puppets."





Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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April 30, 2003
Dear President Bush
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN



Memo to: President Bush, the White House
From: Saddam Hussein, in a Baghdad basement
Well, you sure ruined my birthday. . . . O.K., you won, and your prize is Iraq. Are you ready for it? I don`t think so. Truth is, I hope you fail. But because my people have suffered enough, I`ll give you a few tips on how to run this place, before you make a total mess:

(1) Yes, Iraq was the way it was, in part, because I was the way I was — and I was a bad boy. But what you`re seeing now is that I was the way I was, in part, because Iraq was what it is — a very difficult place to rule without an iron fist. You see, I know the Iraqi people didn`t want me. And you will soon discover they don`t want you. The big question here has always been: Do they want each other? Can Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis find a way to live together without an iron fist holding them together? Maybe, but they`re not going to find it on their own. They are going to need a firm hand guiding them. You need to have a very clear idea of where you want to take this place, because, trust me, if you don`t, others will.

(2) If you want to build a self-governing authority here, you had better understand that "shock and awe" is not just for war-making. It`s an everyday tool for running this place. Why did it take you two weeks to throw out that bozo who declared himself mayor of Baghdad? What about all the others? You now have armed gangs or Shiite clerics grabbing control all over the country. You thought that you were just going to decapitate my army and then rely on it to run the place for you. But the whole army collapsed instead, and you don`t have enough troops here to fill the security vacuum. So when a few of your guys come under fire, they panic and start shooting up the place. I ran Iraq with an iron fist. You`re trying to run it on the cheap with an iron finger. No way. This ain`t Norway here, pal. Your powerlessness will scare people here much more than your power.

(3) When you broke my army, you broke the most important secular institution in the country, and the clerics are rushing to fill the void. Some are O.K., and some are bad news. Since the Shiites make up 60 percent of Iraq, if you`re going to let the people here rule, that means the most important question for you is: Who dominates the Iraqi Shiite community? Not only is the future of Iraq at stake in the answer, but also, to some extent, the future of Iran.

How so? Remember, the real academic and spiritual center of Shiism is the Iraqi town of Najaf, not the Iranian city of Qom. Qom is a backwater that became religiously important only because I crushed my Shiites, while Khomeini created a Shiite theocracy in Iran.

Most Iraqi Shiite spiritual leaders in Najaf have long opposed Khomeini`s notion that Shiite clerics should be in power. They think this has corrupted the clergy in Iran, angered the people and driven young Shiites away from their religion. You`ve now set off a fight for control of Najaf, between those Iraqi Shiite leaders who believe in the separation between mosque and state, and the pro-Iranian clerics who want to run Iraq Khomeini-style. That`s why the Iranians are so concerned about what`s happening here. They know if Najaf re-emerges as the center of Shiism — and if it`s dominated by Iraqi ayatollahs who don`t believe that the clergy should be in politics — the claim of the Iranian clergy to remain in power will be weakened.

This is the most important power struggle in the Middle East today. For now, the Iraqi Shiite clergy in Najaf are weak. They don`t have many senior clerics. I kept it that way. But you can`t just install your own Iraqi Shiite leaders. They will have to emerge on their own. You need to create the conditions in Najaf whereby students can come back and the natural Iraqi-Arab Shiite traditions can flower again to counter the Iranians.

(4) Always remember: This is an Arab country. Iraqis want to be first-class Arabs, not second-class Americans. If you want to build a legitimate, moderate political center here, you need to enlist some help, and some cover, from Arab states and the U.N. Iraqis will eventually want their parties and leaders legitimized by the Arab world and media. They won`t want to be seen as U.S. stooges. They don`t watch Fox News here.

Mr. Bush, I know you`re wondering why I did not do more to avoid this war, which ended my political life. What in the world was I thinking? Who was I listening to? The answer is: I was listening only to myself. Don`t make my mistake.






Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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`Saddam letter` calls for Iraqi resistance
Staff and agencies
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian

A hand-written letter supposedly signed by Saddam Hussein and urging the Iraqi people to resist coalition forces has been received by an Arabic newspaper based in London, it emerged today.

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi, said the letter was dated April 28 and received by fax yesterday.

"It refers to betrayals that led to the coalition`s victory and a warning to the Iraqi people that US-installed leaders won`t bring them freedom," he said.

The newspaper published a statement yesterday by a group called Iraqi Resistance and Liberation saying Saddam would make a statement to Iraqis within 72 hours.

Mr Atwan said today: "I think the letter is genuine. We can`t verify it because we don`t know where he is, he is on the run. I have seen his signature before and it looks like it. I think it is authentic."

Mr Atwan was not surprised to receive it. "We have received letters and emails from Osama bin Laden. People know we are a credible and honest newspaper with circulation all over the world.

"I believe that for the statement Saddam will try to emulate Osama bin Laden, by issuing a video tape or audio cassette to a prominent satellite channel.

"There is a resemblance now between him and Osama bin Laden. Both are on the run, both are against the United States, both are suffering from US military presence in their country. I think he will try to use his style by issuing his statement in this way.

"I expect it to be issued at any time, but you have to remember he is on the run, he does not have a fixed address, so I would not be surprised if there was some delay."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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An Explosive Story

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 30, 2003; 8:43 AM


What if they held a war over weapons of mass destruction and couldn`t find any?

Would there be outrage on the American street? Or nothing but yawns?

Among the pundit class – the liberal pundit class, to be precise – the WMD backlash is building.

This part of the war is no cakewalk.

After all, the notion that Saddam Hussein could threaten us – and the world – with chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons was a major part of the administration`s sales job, repeated endlessly by the president and his top lieutenants. That was what the whole six-month dance with the U.N. and the Hans Blix inspection adventure was about: finding what American officials insisted the scurrilous Saddam was hiding.

So far, we`ve found squat. That could change. But it does raise the question of whether the White House – intentionally or not – was exaggerating the WMD threat for political reasons.

No question, there are other reasons – good reasons – why the ouster of Hussein was a great accomplishment. The depth of corruption, depravity and torture in that regime is becoming breathtakingly clear.

Despite some anti-American resentment, most Iraqis seem thrilled to be rid of this despot. But there are a number of cruel dictators around the world, and we don`t try to topple them all. The public case for invading Iraq turned on Saddam`s alleged stockpiles of dangerous weapons.

Paul Krugman says in his New York Times column that the Bushies were rather dishonest about all this:

"`We were not lying,` a Bush administration official told ABC News. `But it was just a matter of emphasis.` The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration `wanted to make a statement.` . . .

"Sure enough, we have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction. It`s hard to believe that we won`t eventually find some poison gas or crude biological weapons. But those aren`t true W.M.D.`s, the sort of weapons that can make a small, poor country a threat to the greatest power the world has ever known. Remember that President Bush made his case for war by warning of a `mushroom cloud.` Clearly, Iraq didn`t have anything like that – and Mr. Bush must have known that it didn`t.

"Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some people say that it doesn`t: we won, and the Iraqi people have been freed. But we ought to ask some hard questions – not just about Iraq, but about ourselves. . . .

"One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.`s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement – if it is ever announced – that it was a false alarm? It`s a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place."

Salon`s Joe Conason takes on the NYT`s Tom Friedman for writing that "Mr. Bush doesn`t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue)."

Says Conason: "Avid Friedman fans must be badly confused by now. After all, this is the same preeminent foreign affairs columnist who told us on March 9, `If the president can`t make his war of choice the world`s war of choice right now, we need to reconsider our options and our tactics.` And he is also the same multi-Pulitzered pundit who said on March 19 that `such a preventive war is so unprecedented and mammoth a task . . . that it had to be done with maximum U.N legitimacy and with as many allies as possible,` adding that `we need to patch things up with the world. Because having more allied support in rebuilding Iraq will increase the odds that we do it right, and because if the breach that has been opened between us and our traditional friends hardens into hostility, we will find it much tougher to manage both Iraq and all the other threats down the road.`

"All very sensible advice, yet I wonder why the globe-trotting, VIP-visiting Friedman no longer seems to understand how important the issue of WMDs is to the credibility of U.S. policy. Americans may or may not care whether we ever find chemical or biological weapons (there are almost certainly no nukes in Iraq). Others around the world care intensely – and are unlikely to be soothed by realizing that the WMD issue was a pretext for preemptive war. What is to stop India or Pakistan or China from concocting a pretext for launching a strike against a perceived danger? If we did it, so can they. . . .

"Doesn`t it matter at least as much whether the White House lied about weapons of mass destruction?"

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen consults an unimpeachable expert – his dead grandfather – who says:

"`The weapons from mass destruction. The chemical stuff and the biological stuff that could make you sick and the atomic stuff that could make you dead. Where are they, college boy? You wrote that this is why you supported the war.`

"`We`ll find them,` I said. `Iraq is a big country, the size of --

"`I know. California. You think maybe you got snookered?`

"`Oh, no, Grandpa. I talked to experts. I went to briefings. They all said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.`

"`This the same group of hotshots who said Saddam had a nuclear program that could produce a bomb in six months?`

"`Yes.`

"`Not true, though, right?`

"`Looks that way.`"

Those celebrating the fall of Saddam might like to declare the Iraq war over, but that`s not the case, as this Chicago Tribune report demonstrates:

"At least 13 Iraqis were shot to death and up to 75 were wounded during a demonstration late Monday that turned into a confrontation with U.S. troops, the deadliest clash between civilians and American forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein`s regime.

"The circumstances leading to the deaths were disputed. Iraqis insisted the demonstration was peaceful, but U.S. troops said they were fired on by men with AK-47s who had mixed into the crowd in Fallujah, a city of 100,000 about 35 miles west of Baghdad that is a loyalist stronghold for Hussein."

How divided is the GOP on the Hill? Divided enough that Bill Frist had to do public penance:

"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist publicly apologized yesterday for undercutting House Republicans on tax cuts, and he and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert sat down hours later with President Bush to plan a new tax-cut strategy," the Washington Times reports.

"`I have apologized. I have said I`ve made mistakes,` Mr. Frist, of Tennessee, told reporters after meeting with fellow Republican senators. . . .

"Two weeks ago, Mr. Frist and other Senate Republican leaders pledged to hold a tax-cut bill to $350 billion to win two senators` support for the budget. But that surprised House leaders, who said it violated a deal they had secured hours earlier to allow tax cuts of as much as $550 billion."

The Philadelphia Inquirer declares an unofficial end to the storm over Santorum:

"It would appear the worst is over for Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.).

"Under fire for his remarks on homosexuality, Santorum was welcomed back with open arms yesterday by leading figures of the Republican establishment as lawmakers returned from a two-week recess.

"Santorum attended a White House ceremony on the global AIDS crisis with President Bush and other senior Republicans, mingling easily with participants. Later, he briefly addressed Senate Republicans at a private luncheon, thanking them for supporting him following the furor over his remarks seeming to compare homosexuality to incest, bigamy and adultery.

"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R., Tenn.) said shortly after the meeting that Santorum`s role as third-ranking Senate Republican leader was secure. `Absolutely, he will remain in the leadership,` Frist said. In the House, Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R., Texas) called Santorum`s remarks on homosexuality `courageous.`"

Gays, among others, might use a different adjective.

The New Republic`s Michelle Cottle questions the mental health of one Senior Pentagon Official:

"The war is over. The reconstruction has begun. And the main question on everyone`s mind now should be: Is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld losing it?

"Oh, sure, the secretary looks happy enough, drifting from press conference to chat show, grinning broadly, and tossing out pithy rejoinders to anyone who dares question the intrinsic perfection of our nation`s Iraq strategy. But more and more, the grin looks a tad too large and the quips sound a tad too flippant for comfort. It`s not just that Rumsfeld is pleased about the way the war went. (Hell, we`re all pleased about that.) It`s more that, high on the fumes of military victory, the secretary seems to have decided that he is, in fact, a military and foreign affairs genius who no longer needs to suffer any criticism, or even mild disagreement, from mere mortals. Watching him smirk and snark his way through public appearances, the word `overconfident` leaps to mind--along with the phrases `delusions of grandeur` and `God complex.` . . .

"If Rumsfeld were only being high-handed with the media, it would hardly be cause for concern. (Anyone familiar with the Washington press corps realizes how easy we are to loathe.) The defense secretary, however, seems to regard his battlefield successes as proof that his long-held world view--diplomacy is for losers--should now dominate administration policy."

Dan Kennedy is appalled at NBC`s dissing of Ashleigh Banfield:

"Let me see if I`ve got this straight. Right-wing homophobic talk-show host Michael Savage, in his `book,` The Savage Nation, jokes that MSNBC stands for `More Snotty Nonsense By Creeps,` and refers to MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield as `the mind-slut with a big pair of glasses that they sent to Afghanistan.`

"So how did MSNBC executives respond? Why, they hired him, of course. And when he called Banfield a `slut` on the air for daring to interview loyalists to Saddam Hussein, his bosses reacted with silence.

"Now Banfield has chosen to speak out, criticizing the networks – not just her own – for portraying the war as a glorious romp for democracy rather than the more complex and bloody conflict that it was. `You did not see where those bullets landed. You didn`t see what happened when the mortars landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me,` Banfield said at a speech at Kansas State University last week.

"She also dared to take on Savage, saying: `He was so taken aback by my daring to speak to martyrs . . . for being prepared to sacrifice themselves, he chose to label me a slut on the air, and that`s not all, as a porn star and an accessory to the murder of Jewish children. These are the ramifications for simply bringing the message in the Arab world.`

"A rational response might be to cheer Banfield for stating some obvious truths that few mainstream-media people want to say. But, noooo. Instead, NBC News released a statement saying: `Ms. Banfield does not speak for NBC News. We are deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks, and will review her comments with her. In the meantime, we want to emphasize how proud we are of the journalism produced by NBC News and of the men and women who worked around the clock, even risking their lives, to bring this story to the American public.`

"Unfortunately, what`s going on is very simple. Banfield is absolutely right about the war coverage, and besides, she`s simply defending herself from someone who has attacked her twice in grotesquely sexist terms. But MSNBC`s past attempts to turn her into its hot-babe marquee ratings star failed, so she`s not allowed to speak out."

Another media embarrassment, chronicled here in a USA Today wire story:

"The Salt Lake Tribune said yesterday that it fired two reporters who were paid $20,000 for collaborating with the National Enquirer on an Elizabeth Smart story because they misled their employer about the level of their involvement with the tabloid.

"Michael Vigh and Kevin Cantera were fired less than a week after Tribune editor James E. Shelledy refused their resignations.

"While the reporters told Shelledy they had given the tabloid a `roadmap` of the investigation, Shelledy said he had since learned they provided a much larger part of the story. `I feel saddened and angry that these two reporters damaged themselves, their colleagues and the reputation of the Tribune with their conduct,` he said.

"`The reporters told us a different story than we found out later to be true so they were terminated,` said Dean Singleton, Tribune publisher and president of the newspaper`s owner, MediaNews Group Inc."

ABC`s Note gives John Kerry and pal Chris Lehane the nod for their attack on Howard Dean musing about the day when America would no longer have the strongest military (which a more seasoned candidate would have sensed might be taken out of context):

"The Kerry campaign is staffed by people who think `rapid response` is too slow, who have a vivid knowledge of how to reach out to the right reporters and get heard, and believe (not without reason) that the politico-media culture rewards those who attack aggressively and punishes those who sit still as prey.

"Dean for America – not so much.

"Dean is smart and pugnacious, but, as he himself has said, he has a lot to learn about this whole process, and, while he has attracted a growing and loyal following (including some with national political experience, which is always helpful) the clips suggest at least something of a mismatch. . . .

"The Kerry campaign is liking this so much because they believe it puts in doubt Dean`s

"a. competence

"b. national security bona fides

"c. reputation for straight talk."

The Dean camp offers this reaction on the same site:

"News Flash!!! Yesterday we were attacked by the Anointed One!

"And we`re not even talking about Chris Lehane. . . .

"As you know, recent polls show an extraordinarily tight race in New Hampshire between Howard Dean and John Kerry. Which leaves us scratching our heads.

"If your biggest fear is headlines that scream `Kerry vs. Dean,` why go out of your way to create headlines that scream `Kerry vs. Dean?`"

The Kerry camp was, shall we say, terse:

"We appreciate the reply from Gov. Dean but we still anxiously await a straight talk answer to why America won`t always have the strongest military."

National Review founder William F. Buckley tut-tuts the whole matter:

"Senator John Kerry was spoiling for a fight with Governor Howard Dean. Both men want to be president of the United States and they have to quarrel about something, since they are contenders for the same Democratic nomination. Howard Dean, who is campaigning every day and has already lost his speaking voice, though he has 15 months to go before the Democratic National Convention, said something rather trivial about how U.S. military preeminence can`t be counted on to solve all problems, which is on the order of saying that man cannot live by bread alone.

"But it was enough to get Senator Kerry to scream and yell that Governor Dean wants to sell short the military and that such an attitude toward the military is inappropriate in a man who seeks to serve as commander-in-chief, etc., etc."

One advantage of having a blog is that you can get the last word after a TV debate, as David Frum does here:

"I did the British `Newsnight` program with Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation Monday night. I have to give the woman credit for one thing at least: She has amazing breath control. Ask her, `So how are you?` and five minutes later she`ll still be rattling off words without drawing air: `How would I be with the reckless war policies of the Bush administration filling our fields with genetically modified organisms and oppressing the Palestinians by investing their pension funds in 401Ks managed by Cheney and his buddies at Halliburton.` I paid tribute on air to her dazzling long-windedness; later it occurred to me that I`d seen this microphone-hugging stunt often before on the hard left."

We anxiously await Katrina`s online counterpunch.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Charlton Heston`s Last Sneer
The NRA retires its crusty king, with the country more violent and gun happy than ever
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/



He is 78 and fragile and suffering from symptoms of Alzheimer`s and hasn`t made a decent movie in decades, unless you count how he sadly made himself look quite the undereducated, largely unsympathetic, defensive fool in the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine."

And now, Charlton Heston is stepping down as the High Lord Gunmaster Poobah (or whatever they called him) of the phallically righteous increasingly paranoid adorably manly National Rifle Association. They are sighing in tribute. They are hugging each other and giving reassuring pats though not in an icky scary gay way. They are raising their rifles in salute.

And they are actually erecting, in front of the NRA`s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., a 10-foot bronze statue of Heston, in character from a manly 1968 western flick no one has really ever seen called "Will Penny," in full bogus mythological cowboy gear, holding a handgun. Isn`t that great? Other nations erect statues of poets, artists, thinkers, revolutionaries. We erect statues of craggy actors holding a pistol. God bless America.

It`s a thoroughly appropriate icon for the NRA, actually. A character that never really existed, a gun-totin` Wild West that never really happened, a studly kill-the-bad-guys posture that, well, the NRA pretty much invented and frantically clings to as its own raison d`etre. Actors are, by definition, all about illusion, the propogation of manufactured myth, of collective delusion, as opposed to genuine human ideas and perspective. Voilè -- the perfect icon for America`s gun culture.


Heston`s departure is a good time for reflection, truly. Arguably, the man has done more to promote the desperately macho causes of the NRA than any leader in the group`s carefully racist, white-power history (as "Bowling..." so effortlessly describes).

Which is to say, because he is a reasonably articulate and well-known actor, he single-handedly did more to promote the NRA`s trademark causes of fear and paranoia than any outspoken gun lover in 25 years. No wonder they are so proud.

Because this is the great myth of the NRA. This is the true foundation. Despite the careful PR, the NRA is not much about the promotion of safe firearm use. It is not about enforcing the rules and sportsmanship of hunting, or about appreciating firearm artistry or improving your clay-pigeon target-practice technique. Maybe a little.

One peek into America`s 1st Freedom: The Official Journal of the NRA reveals that the group is, more than anything else, all about paranoid defensiveness and the simple promotion of the right-wing brand of dread.

You know the one. That fear of the great ugly Other coming from somewhere "out there" -- someplace probably Muslim, or pagan, or inner city, or foreign or San Franciscan -- to steal your children and eat all your apple pie and take away your precious guns. Always, always to take away your guns. This is the Biggest Fear of All.

Like pyromaniac children hording precious matches, the loss of unfettered gun-ownership rights ranks right up there with castration and the outlawing of beer in Worst Possible Evils for the NRA. The magazine is packed with lib-hating articles, attacking everyone from the progressive U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the entire country of Canada and its national gun registry.

Every single alarmist article delineates how "those damn anti-gun liberals" are skewing the statistics, lying and manipulating, trying to chip away at your God-given right to keep 157 sawed-off shotguns and a few submachine guns in your garage, for, you know, "hunting."

That this stance, this viewpoint, is sad and shortsighted and misguided is only half the problem.

Let`s make one thing clear: Guns will never be wholly banned in America, not in this lifetime, anyway. It simply will not happen. There are an estimated 200 million firearms in circulation in the nation. They are far too ingrained in the culture, in the national mind-set, in the laws of the land. And most Democrats, and even most progressive liberals, wouldn`t care to ban them entirely in the first place. They simply want to make our ridiculously easy access to deadly weaponry a little less, you know, easy.

But any proposed restrictions on gun ownership -- strict licensing, a national gun registry, mandatory gun-safety locks and so on -- represent, of course, a horrifically slippery slope for the NRA. They are a dangerous precedent that would lead to one thing and one thing only: someone taking away their guns -- that thing that will, let us repeat, never happen.

The NRA is, of course, wildly easy to hate. Easy to see the group as a cliched cadre of twitching socially inept boy-men with a seriously compensatory need to display their gun barrels. Problem is, such hyperzealous groups only feed on such sentiment -- it simply adds fuel to the cause.

And, moreover, the stereotype is largely wrong, and unfair. The NRA has some very smart, very passionate people who truly value their rights and their country. It`s true. Let`s admit it.

The tragedy, then, is how deeply this powerful group of rabidly passionate uber-Americans has bought into the lie, the myth, of what America really stands for, and has become a part of the tyranny of fear, a mouthpiece for that very divisiveness and paranoia and antagonism that keeps America volatile and childish and so bitterly derided the world over.

Do you see? It`s not the love of guns, it`s the love of the bogus illusion of what guns actually do -- that is, how they allegedly serve to protect that vicious, isolationist Us-versus-Them mentality so beloved by BushCo and the warmongers and Fox News.

It is a vision of America as this faux-virtuous, good-guy, white-hatted, monosyllabic brute, the well-armed hero enforcer of all that is righteous and pure and bullet ridden -- you know, just like the bogus and hollow Wild West of Heston`s "Will Penny."

Heston`s most famous contribution to the NRA cause? That thing for which he will be most remembered? His trademark catchphrase. Raising a rifle in the air at the end of his speech at every NRA rally, Heston would get that sly gun-nut gleam in his eye and exclaim (to wild applause), "From my cold, dead hands!"

Sadly, and with absolutely no progress made toward the true reduction of rampant gun violence and the tyranny of right-wing fear in this nation, it looks like the rapidly aging Heston will soon get his wish.


©2003 SF Gate

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Jordan warned the United States on Sunday against supporting Iraqi opposition figure Ahmad Chalabi, saying he lacked credibility and support among Iraqis and was a convicted fraud (Those were the qualifications to the Bush regime).
Apr 27, 2003

Jordanian Foreign Minister Warns U.S. Against Backing Chalabi to Run Iraq
The Associated Press

Jordan warned the United States on Sunday against supporting Iraqi opposition figure Ahmad Chalabi, saying he lacked credibility and support among Iraqis and was a convicted fraud.
"We believe that Ahmad Chalabi does not have credibility, either inside Iraq or in the region," Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said on NBC`s "Meet the Press."

Muasher said Jordan "made it very clear to everyone in the United States government and around the world" that Chalabi is divisive. Chalabi is leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which spearheaded opposition to Saddam Hussein from London for years.

"We believe the region and the Iraqis, most importantly, do not want him. And if anybody tells us otherwise, I think the test should be given to the Iraqi people," Muasher said.

Chalabi, 58, has routinely denied Jordan`s charges. In 1992, a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement, fraud and breach of trust after a bank he ran collapsed with about $300 million in missing deposits.

The court sentenced him to 22 years in prison.

Chalabi, who left Jordan before the case went to trial, denies the charges, saying Saddam was behind them.

Muasher said under Jordanian law, Chalabi must stand another trial as he was outside the country when the 1992 verdict was handed down.

Jordan`s monarch, King Abdullah II, told CNN during an interview in London that Chalabi may not be Iraq`s best choice to lead the country because of the Jordanian embezzlement charges against him and his long absence from Iraq.

"What contacts does he have with the people on the street?" Abdullah asked.

Abdullah has said postwar Iraq should be run by those who lived and suffered under Saddam and that exiled Iraqi opposition groups should have only a minor role in running the country.

Chalabi, who left Iraq in 1958 and returned to Baghdad last week, has been promoted by some in Washington as a possible political leader. But he has said he has no political ambitions in Iraq.

Chalabi, too, made the Sunday talk-show rounds. On "Fox News Sunday," he said American companies are likely to get preferential treatment from a future Baghdad government both because Iraqis are grateful for their liberation and because they are disappointed in European nations that opposed the campaign to topple Saddam.

"The Iraqi people feel very let down by such countries, especially Germany and France, and I think it is a difficult decision for them to on how to deal with such countries," he said.

Chalabi claimed that before the fall of Baghdad, Saddam obtained bomb vests from Iraq`s intelligence service and was trained on how to use them.

In interviews with CNN and Fox, he said he couldn`t speculate on whether Saddam getting vests like those used by suicide bombers meant the ousted Iraqi leader had decided to kill himself to avoid capture.

"But I`m saying that he has the ability to do so, should he decide to do - to commit suicide or blow people up with him when they come to catch him," said Chalabi.

Chalabi said he had learned from former Iraqi intelligence officers that Saddam asked for the bomb vests on April 1, eight days before his regime evaporated.

Chalabi said information is still coming in that Saddam and his two sons, Qusai and Odai, are alive and on the run in Iraq. He said the tips indicated the three men are not together.

This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAXCIQE1FD.html

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[Joerver]

18 JANUARY 2001


WASHINGTON, DC—Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."


Above: President-elect Bush vows that "together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us."
"My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."

Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton`s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we`re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.

Wall Street responded strongly to the Bush speech, with the Dow Jones industrial fluctuating wildly before closing at an 18-month low. The NASDAQ composite index, rattled by a gloomy outlook for tech stocks in 2001, also fell sharply, losing 4.4 percent of its total value between 3 p.m. and the closing bell.

Asked for comment about the cooling technology sector, Bush said: "That`s hardly my area of expertise."

Turning to the subject of the environment, Bush said he will do whatever it takes to undo the tremendous damage not done by the Clinton Administration to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He assured citizens that he will follow through on his campaign promise to open the 1.5 million acre refuge`s coastal plain to oil drilling. As a sign of his commitment to bringing about a change in the environment, he pointed to his choice of Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior. Norton, Bush noted, has "extensive experience" fighting environmental causes, working as a lobbyist for lead-paint manufacturers and as an attorney for loggers and miners, in addition to suing the EPA to overturn clean-air standards.

Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as "a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman`s right to give birth."

"Soon, with John Ashcroft`s help, we will move out of the Dark Ages and into a more enlightened time when a woman will be free to think long and hard before trying to fight her way past throngs of protesters blocking her entrance to an abortion clinic," Bush said. "We as a nation can look forward to lots and lots of babies."


Above: Soldiers at Ft. Bragg march lockstep in preparation for America`s return to aggression.
Continued Bush: "John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state."

The speech was met with overwhelming approval from Republican leaders.

"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton`s America."

"For years, I tirelessly preached the message that Clinton must be stopped," conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said. "And yet, in 1996, the American public failed to heed my urgent warnings, re-electing Clinton despite the fact that the nation was prosperous and at peace under his regime. But now, thank God, that`s all done with. Once again, we will enjoy mounting debt, jingoism, nuclear paranoia, mass deficit, and a massive military build-up."

An overwhelming 49.9 percent of Americans responded enthusiastically to the Bush speech.

"After eight years of relatively sane fiscal policy under the Democrats, we have reached a point where, just a few weeks ago, President Clinton said that the national debt could be paid off by as early as 2012," Rahway, NJ, machinist and father of three Bud Crandall said. "That`s not the kind of world I want my children to grow up in."

"You have no idea what it`s like to be black and enfranchised," said Marlon Hastings, one of thousands of Miami-Dade County residents whose votes were not counted in the 2000 presidential election. "George W. Bush understands the pain of enfranchisement, and ever since Election Day, he has fought tirelessly to make sure it never happens to my people again."

Bush concluded his speech on a note of healing and redemption.

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there`s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation`s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

"The insanity is over," Bush said. "After a long, dark night of peace and stability, the sun is finally rising again over America. We look forward to a bright new dawn not seen since the glory days of my dad."

http://www.theonion.com/onion3701/bush_nightmare.html

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PRESIDENT GORE: A LOOK BACK
Tue Apr 29,12:02 PM ET Add Op/Ed - Ted Rall to My Yahoo!


By Ted Rall

DAYTON, OHIO--Few political observers anticipated the widespread resentment that followed Al Gore`s controversial assumption of the presidency in December 2000. "The U.S. Supreme Court merely adhered to the Constitution when it refused to hear Bush`s appeal of the Florida ruling," notes a Harvard law professor now living in exile in France. "Federal courts have no jurisdiction over election disputes, which in the United States are a state matter." Although the ensuing recount ultimately gave Florida to Gore by a comfortable thousand-vote margin, Republicans refused to accept the results. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh continued to refer to Gore as "Vice President Gore" and "Resident-in-Chief" and listed the time remaining in Gore`s first term as "days left in captivity for the American people."

Republican candidate George W. Bush, meanwhile, refused to concede defeat. "Make no mistake," the former Texas governor declared from self-proclaimed "internal exile" in Crawford, Texas, "that man will never be my president." The GOP filed a slew of lawsuits challenging the election results, and right-wing militia groups issued dark threats about overthrowing Gore`s "illegal junta."


Despite Gore`s attempts to govern from the center--he appointed several Republicans to his cabinet, including Secretary of Defense Colin Powell--Congressional Republicans and their conservative Democratic allies stonewalled early Gore Administration attempts to deliver on key campaign promises. The Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty on global warming. Bills to slash federal taxes for poor and middle-class workers, ban oil drilling in national wildlife refuges and crack down on corporate crime failed to make it out of Republican-controlled committees in the House. Senator Trent Lott let the President know that he could expect more of the same in the future: "It is my party`s duty to represent the 48 percent of the voters who did not support Al Gore, and that`s exactly what we`re going to do," he said.


Gore`s polls, already falling due to the lagging economy, hit rock bottom in the weeks after the September 11th attacks. "People rightly blamed the Commander-in-Chief for not doing anything to intercept planes that had clearly been hijacked and for ignoring warnings of an imminent threat," says a GOP pollster. "But concern about incompetence quickly segued into the `wimp thing.` Disgust at Gore`s cowardice became widespread when he abandoned Washington to the terrorists and flew off to hide in that silo under Nebraska. Diligent journalists then reminded Americans how he`d wussed out of Vietnam by joining the Tennessee Air National Guard and then going AWOL, and for many voters that was that."


In a bizarre and cynical ploy to exploit 9-11, the President attempted to turn things around by dispatching troops to one war after another--and made a mess of each one.


Choosing to ignore Pakistan`s role as chief host and financier of Al Qaeda, Gore waged a strange too-little-too-late bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan . Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden escaped. Night after night David Letterman mocked Gore`s pledge to capture the Saudi dissident: "Dead or alive? Shuck and jive is more like it." Gore`s lack of military experience led him to go along with CIA schemes to bribe Afghan warlords. "From the Afghan perspective, the warlords were even worse than the Taliban," says an expert on Central Asia. "They should have bombed both." In 2002 The New York Times revealed that oil companies with close political connections to the Democratic Party had schemed with Gore to run an oil pipeline across Afghanistan from Turkmenistan to Pakistan--and that this was why he had attacked Afghanistan and cozied up with the Pakistani dictatorship. Tens of thousands of veterans marched on Washington, screaming "no blood for oil" and Senator Orrin Hatch suggested that "a president who wages war to line the pockets of his golfing buddies merits impeachment."


Incredibly, the next move of the man dubbed "Gore out of control" by Fox News was to declare an unprovoked war on Iraq. "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he`s an evil dictator and he`s a threat to world peace," Gore railed to a joint session of Congress. When the United Nations refused to support Gore`s request for an international coalition, even Congressional Democrats decided that they had had enough of their bellicose leader, and joined their counterparts across the aisle. "There`s no proof that Saddam Hussein has WMDs," declared Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. "Until that changes, we have no grounds for a preemptive strike--an act that violates every precept of international law." Nonetheless, Gore relied on the War Powers Act to order in the Marines.


As we know, Saddam Hussein didn`t use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons to defend his dying regime. American forces never found any. And news soon began leaking that Gore was awarding lucrative Iraqi rebuilding contracts to oil companies that had contributed to his 2000 campaign. A Gallup poll showed that 88 percent of Americans considered Gore a liar, and that 79 percent favored his removal from office and prosecution for the wanton murder of thousands of Iraqis. As Iraq degenerated into sectarian violence amid growing signs of a possible radical Islamic revolution, Gore brazenly categorized the mayhem he had wrought on an innocent people as liberation. "They don`t know it yet," he proclaimed, "but they`ll thank us for this someday."


When it comes to Teflon, recent events demonstrate that Ronald Reagan had nothing on Al Gore. It turns out, for example, that among the more than 600 Afghans illegally held at a U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba are three children, aged 13 to 15. Meanwhile, Democrats have just announced plans to hold the latest national convention in their party`s history, in early September in New York, so that President Gore can capitalize on the memorials for the third anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. The 2004 confab will end on September 10th, allowing Gore to shuttle back and forth between Ground Zero and Madison Square Garden. True, Gore`s behavior has given him single-digit popularity ratings--but he`s still president.


What will it take for the American people to turn this madman out on his ear once and for all? It`s impossible to say. As things stand now, he could put babies on the White House menu and claim he was fighting overpopulation.


(Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=%2Fucru%2F2003…

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Defense CEOs are big winners of Iraq war

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 4/30/2003

MORE THAN 130 American soldiers died in a dubious war in a dusty, oil-rich land. In dust-free boardrooms, the CEOs behind our bombs, missiles, tanks, and planes went to corporate heaven. On the dust, 12 teenagers paid the ultimate sacrifice. In the boardroom, men in their 50s and 60s filled their sacks with cash. Twelve soldiers will never see 20. At least 13 weapons executives took home more than $20 million in compensation since 2000. The young paid dearly. Middle-aged and graying CEOs were dearly paid. Neither the clouds of dust nor the closed doors of the boardroom can hide the bankruptcy.

The Boston-based watchdog group United for a Fair Economy, known in general for its reports on the vast pay gap between CEOs and workers, this week published a report on the even more insane gap between soldiers and weapons CEOs. Using federal, corporate, and think tank data, the group found that while the average army private in Iraq earns about $20,000 a year, the average CEO among the 37 largest publicly traded defense contractors made 577 times more money in 2002, $11.3 million.

Since 2000, the 37 defense contractor CEOs (actually, given our first-strike war, it is more appropriate to refer to them as offense contractors) have taken home $1.35 billion. That may not be Bill Gates, but it still means that just 37 men have made enough money in the last three years to, for instance, pay for two years of running the Boston public schools. Meanwhile, everyone knows how the budget cuts have turned public school systems into their own little Baghdads because our governments say there is no more money after war, tax cuts, corporate giveaways, and sports stadiums.

In a less predatory America, it would be rude to brag about financial ``winners`` as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the attack on Iraq. Yet between Homeland Security, Afghanistan, destroying Iraq, and rebuilding Iraq it was hard to tell whether offense contractors were patriotic eagles or pouncing vultures. Sacrifice? Not when the $11.3 million average pay of offense industry executives is nearly $4 million a year more than the average for the largest 365 companies surveyed by Business Week.

CEO pay at Lockheed Martin went up from $5.8 million in 2000 to $25.3 million in 2002. It went up at General Dynamics (tanks and submarines) from $5.7 million in 2001 to $15.2 million in 2002. It went up at Honeywell (aircraft systems) from $12.9 million in 2000 to $45 million in 2002. It went up at Northrop Grumman from $7.3 million in 2000 to $9.2 million in 2002.

Pay went up at Alliant (bullets and bombs) from $1.4 million in 2000 to $10.5 million in 2002. It went up at Cardinal Health (medical supplies) from $2.9 million in 2001 to $17.7 million in 2002. It went up at United Defense Industries (guns and cannons) from $794,000 in 2000 to $2.7 million in 2002. At Raytheon (missiles and bombs), it went from $8 million in 2000 down to $2.6 million in 2001 and back up to $8.9 million in 2002.

In a radio address in May 1940, during the defense buildup prior to US entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: ``Our present emergency and a common sense of decency make it imperative that no new group of war millionaires shall come into being in this nation as a result of the struggles abroad. The American people will not relish the idea of any American citizen growing rich and fat in an emergency of blood and slaughter and human suffering.``

In the same speech, Roosevelt also said, ``We must make sure, in all that we do, that there be no breakdown or cancellation of any of the great social gains which we have made in these past years. We have carried on an offensive on a broad front against social and economic inequalities and abuses which had made our society weak. That offensive should not now be broken down by the pincers movement of those who would use the present needs of physical military defense to destroy it.``

Six decades later, war millionaires run the country, whether that be Vice President Dick Cheney`s old connections to Halliburton to the $13.6 million that Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and United Technologies have given in political contributions since 2000. Military spending, after falling from $320 billion in 1991 to $266 billion in 1996, has soared to the $400 billion level.

As the war millionaires soar, using the majestic patriotic masks of eagles to disguise the ugly vulture waiting for a handout, the United States is creating a new definition of friendly fire for the budget broadsides in schools, health care, and city and state services of every kind. Sixty-three years after Roosevelt`s speech, a new group of war millionaires came into being both as a result of America`s struggles abroad and its abandonment of the struggle at home.


Derrick Z. Jackson`s e-mail address is [e-mail].


This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 4/30/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Look into the eyes of Ali Ismail Abbas: what do you see?

April 30 2003


This is the story of Ali Ismail Abbas. Ali is the 12-year-old boy who had the misfortune to be at home in Iraq when a United States rocket arrived.

According to one newspaper report, the "hovel" he lived in was destroyed. So were his father and his five-months pregnant mother. He lost his brother. Some of his sisters were injured. Cousins and other relatives were also killed. The number of relatives who died varies from report to report.

What happened to Ali himself is not in dispute. After the terrible explosion, Ali woke up, soaked in blood, his sheets on fire. The Times of London reported that Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker correspondent who saw him in hospital, was shown a photograph of Ali before his treatment, his body blackened, one of his hands "a twisted, melted claw. The other arm had apparently been burned off at the elbow... two long bones were sticking out of it."

That is not the photograph of Ali that we see now, however. We see photographs of Ali after his arms were amputated, the stumps and his body swathed in bandages, his face somehow unscathed, his eyes... What do we see in his eyes?

Almost all of us will retain images of this invasion of Iraq. There is the shot of a dead child, taken by Akram Saleh of Reuters, his or her face like porcelain, intact, appearing strangely at peace as only the dead can, but the rest of the head and body bound together, as if to stop bits falling out. There is the symbolism of statues toppling, footage of crowds (with one person wearing a Beckham shirt), a mother sobbing next to her injured toddler, suspects stripped and kneeling in the dirt, a boy liberating a bag of sugar as big as he is. The blood on a BBC cameraman`s lens. Those are my images. You will have yours.


The full cruelty and catastrophe of war has become something we cannot avoid. We are assaulted by it even when we try to avoid it. Susan Moeller, an American journalism professor, describes us all as "passive receivers of images". That is akin to blaming the victim. The images home in on us, no matter how much we duck and weave. They are wrapped around our papers, they are inserted into television programs, even our children`s programs are "updated".

Children have always suffered massive damage in war. Even when they are not themselves killed or maimed like Ali, they lose mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. As in my parents` families, in the London Blitz, they lose uncles and aunts and other relatives, both actual and potential.

The world has a long history of treating children cruelly. Children worked as chimney sweeps, encouraged to work faster by the fires lit under them. Children were used to dip pottery figures into poisonous lead glaze. Slain infants, it was believed, could benefit sterile women, cure disease. Buried in the foundations of buildings, dead children strengthened the structure. The unwanted child was abandoned. Children were mutilated to alter their appearance.

Perhaps our new technologies have provided new ways of using children.

Most of us will now have an image of Ali Ismail Abbas, although it is hard to believe that the images we see are sanitised.

We do not see (but can read about) his arm that looked like, in Jon Lee Anderson`s words, "something that might be found in a barbecue pit". Perhaps we are shown what it is believed we can tolerate, what is judged to be useful, what is required to show that he has been rescued.

As ABC TV`s Media Watch observed, Ali`s future is brighter "with the help of The Daily Telegraph, "his rescue was organised by The Courier-Mail team", "by the Herald Sun`s team", "by The Australian". Many newspapers claim a part in his recovery.

Several charities and other papers have claimed his image. London`s Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror are reported to be using his face and torso to raise money for good causes.

What do we see when we look at the photographs of Ali? What do we see and think when we look into his eyes? I see the confusion and random cruelty of war. I see a child who, in the words of his uncle, "wants to be normal again" but can never be. I look for other children`s eyes, other bodies, other children we should be caring for but are not.

I think, such are our relations to children, that we need a particular child to "adopt". Just as we "adopted" the bruised and battered face of Daniel Valerio, dead and beyond repair, so we "adopt" Ali Ismail Abbas who can never be mended. Perhaps, at heart, we tend to be indifferent to the present suffering of children in general, of children who need our help every day, but we find it difficult to ignore a child, a clearly identified, named, photographed, damaged and distant or dead child.

I wonder what Ali Ismail Abbas is thinking. I think of the words he has said, his anger at being repeatedly exposed to the stares of strangers. I wonder if we do this to him because he is 12 years old and because he is an Iraqi. After all, that is how he came to lose his arms, skin, parents, family and home. I reflect upon our sensitivities to photographs of "our" soldiers as prisoners. I wonder if any of the newspapers and charities have thought to ask his permission to use his photograph around the world in this way. Perhaps we use his photograph rather than that of a wounded adult because we do not feel we have to ask a child. Perhaps some of us believe that, after all he has lost, he will not miss his dignity and privacy.

I wonder if Ali Ismail Abbas knows that, perhaps, we need him more than he needs us, that he is helping us more than we can ever help him, that we didn`t want to do what we have done, that we really don`t know what to do now.

I see Margaret Drabble`s words, in The Millstone, that we claim that children forget and recover so readily because we dare not contemplate the fact that, in reality, they will always remember, they will never forget.

That is perhaps another part of the story of Ali Ismail Abbas.

Dr Chris Goddard is head of social work in the school of primary health care at Monash University and director of the Child Abuse and Family Violence Research Unit, a joint initiative with Australians Against Child Abuse.
Email: [e-mail]


This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/04/29/1051381946931.h…

[Joerver]

Wenn es den eigenen Interessen dient

Florian Rötzer 30.04.2003
Das Pentagon hat ein Abkommen mit einer iranischen Widerstandsorganisation im Irak geschlossen, die bislang als Terrororganisation galt

Der Feind des Feindes wird zum Freund. Dieser Devise sind die USA schon oft gefolgt. Man hätte annehmen sollen, dass nach den Erfahrungen mit den Taliban und Bin Ladin sowie mit Saddam Hussein langsam ein strategisches Umdenken erfolgen könnte. Jetzt aber hat die US-Regierung mit dem bewaffneten Arm der iranischen Volksmudschaheddinhttp://www.terrorismanswers.com/groups/mujahedeen.html, die sich im Irak aufhalten und von dort aus die iranische Regierung bekämpfen, einen Waffenstillstand angeboten, nachdem die Organisation zuvor noch als Terrorgruppe galt.

Dass Syrien und vor allem der Iran zu den Staaten zählen, die nach dem vorerst nur militärischen Sieg gegen das Hussein-Regime zu den amerikanischen Zielen zählen, die unter Druck geraten würden, war schon lange zuvor klar. Besonders nachdem bekannt wurde, dass die iranische Regierung ein Atomwaffenprogramm betreiben könnte und dass womöglich die irakischen Schiiten beeinflusst werden sollen, hat sich die Lage zwischen den beiden Ländern zumindest rhetorisch zugespitzt. US-Präsident Bush hatte den Iran neben dem Irak und Nordkorea zur "Achse des Bösen" gerechnet.

Die US-Regierung warnt den Iran vor einer Einmischung in den Irak. Der iranische Außenminister Kamal Charrasihttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/international/worldspecial… wies die Beschuldigungen zurück und mokierte sich über die US-Regierung, die sein Land warne, sich in die inneren Angelegenheiten eines anderen Landes einzumischen, in das sie gerade einmarschiert sind. Wohl auch, um Informationen aus dem Iran zu erhalten, vielleicht zudem, um die Stabilität der iranischen Regierung zu untergraben, oder gar, um dereinst vielleicht über alliierte Bodentruppen zu verfügen, wurde mit den Volksmudschaheddin ein Waffenstillstand vereinbart, nachdem man zuerst einige Lager bombardiert hatte.

Wie jetzt bekannt wurde, trat das Abkommen bereits am 15. April in Kraft. Danach darf die Organisation die Waffen behalten und verspricht das Pentagon, keine feindlichen Handlungen gegenüber der Organisation durchzuführen oder ihren Fahrzeugen und ihrer Ausrüstung zu beschädigen. Im Gegenzug haben die Volksmudschaheddin versprochen, ihrerseits nicht die US-Truppen anzugreifen, nichts im Irak zu zerstören und die Artillerie nicht auf bedrohliche Weise aufzubauen. Der in Paris lebende Sprecher der Mudschaheddin, Mohammed Mohaddesin, erklärte denn auch, dass es keinen Grund für eine Feindschaft zwischen den USA und der iranischen Widerstandsgruppe gebe: "Die Mudschaheddin stehen für Säkularismus und Demokratie, während das Regime der Mullahs im Iran eine große Bedrohung für den Frieden und eine Quelle für den Fundamentalismus ist."

Dass die Mudschaheddin auch bereits von Hussein unterstützt wurden, scheint wiederum für das Pentagon kein Problem darzustellen. Für die iranische Regierung zeigt das Abkommen hingegen die "Scheinheiligkeit" des Krieges gegen den internationalen Terrorismus der US-Regierung.http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/2450.htm Der Iran hat bereits auf das Abkommen reagiert und den Mitglieder der Gruppe Amnestie angeboten, während die Auslieferung der Anführer verlangt wird. Die EU hatte neben der PKK auch die Volksmudschaheddin oder "Modjahedin-E-Khalq" (MEK) letztes Jahr auf ihre Terrorliste gesetzt. In den USA wurde sie seit 1994 zu den terroristischen Organisationen gerechnet. Auch auf der im Januar 2003 veröffentlichten Liste der ausländischen Terrororganisationen wurde sie noch auf Platz 20 http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/fs/2003/17065.htmaufgeführt. Außerhalb des Iran wird die Organisation durch den Nationalen Widerstandsrat (NWRI) als ihren politischen Arm vertreten.

Die einst links-islamistische Gruppe wurde bereits in den 60er Jahren gegründet, kämpfte ab Beginn der 70er Jahre gegen den Schah, war daher auch anti-amerikanisch eingestellt, und wandte sich nach der Revolution im Jahr 1979, als der von den USA gestützte Schah gestürzt wurde und die Ajatollahs einen muslimischen Staat aufbauten, unter der Führung von Masoud Rajavi gegen die neue Herrschaft. Noch 1979 aber unterstützten sie Besetzung der amerikanischen Botschaft in Teheran und sprachen sich gegen die Freilassung der Geiseln aus. In den 80er Jahren führte die Organisation eine ganze Reihe von Anschlägen gegen die Machthaber im Iran durch, nachdem diese brutal die demokratische und linke Opposition unterdrückt und zahlreiche Menschen exekutiert hatten.

Nachdem die Gruppe während des Krieges zwischen Iran und dem Irak in den 80er Jahren mit Hussein zu kooperieren und ab 1987 im Irak Lager einzurichten begann, verloren die Mudschaheddin, die einst eine Massenbewegung gewesen waren, die Unterstützung des ehemaligen iranischen Präsidenten Abdol Hassan Bani-Sadr, mit dem Rajavi im Pariser Exil das National Council of Resistance (NCR) gegründet hatte. Auch der Rückhalt in der Bevölkerung im Iran ging zurück. Angeblich sollen die Volksmudschaheddin auch den Hussein Truppen geholfen haben, die kurdischen Aufstände nach dem Golfkrieg 1991 niederzuschlagen. 1992 haben die Volksmudschaheddin Bombenanschläge gegen mehrere iranische Botschaften, darunter auch die in Bonn und in New York ausgeführt.

Revolutionär für islamische Rebellen ist, dass die Volksmudschaheddin auch für die Gleichberechtigung der Frau eintraten. In der Gruppe sollen sie die gleichen Rechte wie die Männer besitzen. Geführt wird der militärische Arm der Gruppe ebenfalls von einer Frau, auch die Hälfte der Kämpfer sollen Frauen sein. Allerdings scheint die Gruppe intern stalinistisch-autoritär geführt zu werden - und einem Persönlichkeitskult zu frönen . 1993 wurde symbolisch entschieden, dass Rajavis Frau Maryam Präsidentin werden sollte, wenn die iranische Regierung gestürzt würde. Über wieviele Kämpferinnen und Kämpfer die Organisation noch verfügt, ist nicht wirklich bekannt. Sie selbst gibt an, es seien über 30.000, manche sagen es seien bis zu 10.000, andere sprechen nur von einigen Hundert.

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Blairs Weltpolitik

Tritte für den Schoßhund

Von Markus Becker

Die USA haben den Krieg im Irak gewonnen, die "alten Europäer" zeigten sich widerborstig. Nur einer sitzt zwischen allen Stühlen: Tony Blair. Mit vollem Einsatz versucht der britische Premier, die internationalen Beziehungen zu kitten. Die verprellten Europäer aber spielen nicht mit.
London/Moskau - Vor laufenden Kameras entgleisten dem britischen Regierungschef die Gesichtszüge. Zwei Stunden lang hatte er am Dienstagabend mit Russlands Präsident Wladimir Putin in Moskau verhandelt. Dass die Diskussion für Blair nicht einfach verlief, schien festzustehen, doch die wahre Bestrafung sollte erst in der anschließenden Pressekonferenz folgen.

"Wo ist Saddam?", fragte Putin rhetorisch. "Wo ist sein Arsenal - wenn es denn wirklich eines gab?" Mit beißendem Spott fuhr er fort: "Vielleicht sitzt er irgendwo in einem geheimen Bunker, um seine Waffen im letzten Augenblick noch hochzujagen und Hunderte von Menschenleben zu gefährden." Nebenbei erklärte Putin, dass er strikt gegen die von den USA und Großbritannien geforderte Aufhebung der Uno-Sanktionen sei, bevor nicht die Frage der Existenz von Massenvernichtungswaffen geklärt sei.

Nackte Angst in London

Auf der Insel sorgten Putins öffentliche Ohrfeigen für mehr als nur eine hochgezogene Augenbraue. Die Tageszeitung "The Independent" berichtete unter Berufung auf Regierungsmitarbeiter, Putins Attacke habe Blair vollkommen unvorbereitet getroffen.

Nach Informationen des "Guardian" soll in Whitehall gar die nackte Angst vor den weltpolitischen Folgen des Irak-Kriegs umgehen. Denn während Putin seinen britischen Kollegen vor aller Augen abwatschte, berieten Deutschland, Frankreich, Belgien und Luxemburg in Brüssel über die ersten Schritte zu einer europäischen Verteidigungspolitik und einigten sich auf die Einrichtung eines gemeinsamen militärischen Planungs- und Führungsstabes schon im kommenden Jahr. Blair sagte am Mittwoch, er sei froh, nicht an dem Treffen teilgenommen zu haben.


Dass die Länder in der Tat willens und vor allem finanziell in der Lage sind, eine schlagkräftige Europa-Armee aufzubauen, hält Hans-Georg Ehrhart vom Institut für Friedensforschung und Sicherheitspolitik der Uni Hamburg für mehr als fraglich. "Was die Zahl der Soldaten betrifft, ist Europa stark", sagt der Forscher im Gespräch mit SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Im Hinblick auf militärische Fähigkeiten aber ist Europa schwach." Bis die Europäer allein die Ausrüstung für international relevante Armee besäßen, sei das jetzige Jahrzehnt wohl abgelaufen.

"Vieles von dem, was in Brüssel gesagt wurde, ist reine Show", meint Ehrhart. Allerdings sei eine Avantgarde, die in der Frage der europäischen Verteidigungspolitik vorangeht, der einzige Weg, überhaupt zum Ziel zu kommen. "Bei der Einführung des Euro und beim Schengen-Abkommen war das ähnlich", erklärt Ehrhart.

Blair will unipolare Welt

Die teils radikal unilateralistische Außenpolitik Washingtons aber, glaubt der Forscher, könnte auch in Europa Dinge ins Rollen bringen, die lange Zeit festbetoniert schienen. Blair ahnte wohl das Unheil: Schon während der Pressekonferenz mit Putin malte er die finstere Vision einer zweigeteilten Welt an die Wand, in der sich die USA und Großbritannien auf der einen und Alt-Europa auf der anderen Seite als Rivalen gegenüberstehen. Eine "strategische Partnerschaft" sei die einzige Alternative zu einer Welt, die "in verschiedene Machtpole zerfällt, die in Rivalität zueinander stehen". Ein solches Szenario sei "eine wirkliche Gefahr".

Wie sich Blair die künftige Weltordnung vorstellt, hatte er freilich tags zuvor im Interview mit der "Financial Times" beschrieben: Das einzige Machtzentrum dieser Welt liege in den USA - und Europa tue gut daran, Washington nicht zu reizen, sagte Blair. Schon frühzeitig wurde Blair im eigenen Land als "Bushs Pudel" verspottet. Nun hat er seine Vasallentreue zu den USA zum Modell für ganz Europa erhoben - in Berlin, vor allem aber in Moskau und Paris dürfte ein solches Szenario wenige Freunde haben.

Unterdessen fragen sich auf der Insel und auf dem Festland manche, was den britischen Premier reitet, der vor Jahren angetreten war, in Europa eine Führungsposition zu übernehmen - und davon jetzt weiter entfernt ist denn je. "Wer die Konfrontation sucht, kann keine Führungsrolle spielen", sagt Ehrhart. "Vermutlich hat Blair innenpolitische Gründe, da er seine Reformversprechen zu großen Teilen nicht erfüllt hat und sich nun als Weltpolitiker profilieren will."

Die offene Dividende des Krieges

Selbst konservative britische Kommentatoren fragen sich, wo für das Vereinigte Königreich der Vorteil der Vasallentreue zu den USA liegt: Bisher habe der Krieg lediglich tote Soldaten und hohe Kosten mit sich gebracht. Ob es je eine Kriegsdividende gebe und wie hoch sie ausfallen werde, sei dagegen alles andere als klar.

"Wenn es um die eigenen Interessen geht, fahren die USA auf der nationalistischen Schiene", sagt Ehrhart. "Blair könnte durchaus Gefahr laufen, seinen Einfluss auf Bush zu überschätzen." Anlass zu dieser Befürchtung hat die Regierung in London zur Genüge. Schon nach den ersten US-Bombardements im Irak hieß es, Blair sei erst eine halbe Stunde zuvor informiert worden. Auch während des Feldzugs gab es keinen Zweifel daran, wer im Felde das Sagen hat und wer der Juniorpartner ist.

Zum entscheidenden Test, ob Blair für seine Treue zu Bush belohnt wird, dürfte die künftige Rolle der Uno im Irak werden. Vermutlich auf Druck von Blair versprach Bush eine "vitale Rolle" der Uno. Wenig später aber ließen US-Regierungsmitglieder keinen Zweifel daran, dass sie den Vereinten Nationen allenfalls eine untergeordnete Helferrolle zubilligen wollen, am liebsten aber ganz aus dem Irak verbannen würden.

Folgerichtig versucht der Briten-Premier seit Kriegsende, die Risse in den internationalen Beziehungen zu kitten - was der historischen Rolle Großbritanniens durchaus entsprechen würde, die zwar seit Churchill an der Allianz mit den USA keinen Zweifel aufkommen ließ, stets aber in einer Mittlerfunktion zwischen Kontinental-Europa und Amerika bestand.

Ob Blair zur angestammten Rolle zurückkehren kann, als wäre nichts gewesen, erscheint jedoch spätestens seit der denkwürdigen Putin-Pressekonferenz fraglich. "Blair hat mit seinem Interview deutlich gemacht, dass er die Idee einer unipolaren Welt vertritt", sagt Hans-Georg Ehrhart. "Diese Ansicht wird von einigen Europäern nicht geteilt."



© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

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April 30, 2003
Report Finds Number of Black Children in Deep Poverty Rising
By SAM DILLON


The number of black Americans under 18 years old who live in extreme poverty has risen sharply since 2000 and is now at its highest level since the government began collecting such figures in 1980, according to a study by the Children`s Defense Fund, a child welfare advocacy group.

In 2001, the last year for which government figures are available, nearly one million black children were living in families with after-tax incomes that were less than half the amount used to define poverty, said the new study, which was based on Census Bureau statistics and is to be released publicly today. The defense fund provided a copy in advance to The New York Times.

The poverty line for a family of three was about $14,100, the study said, so a family of three living in extreme poverty had a disposable income of about $7,060, the study said.
In early 2000, only 686,000 black children were that poor, the study said, indicating that the economic circumstances of the United States` poorest black families deteriorated sharply from 2000 to 2001.
Deborah Weinstein, the director of the division of the Children`s Defense Fund, who oversaw the research that produced the study, said its release had been timed to influence the national debate over President Bush`s tax cut proposal, which her group opposes, as well as deliberations in the Senate, where the 1996 law that reshaped the nation`s welfare landscape is up for reauthorization.
The Children`s Defense Fund has been a consistent critic of the vast overhaul of the American welfare system carried out during the 1990`s.
"The study shows that in the first recession since the welfare law took effect, black children who have the fewest protections are falling into extreme poverty in record numbers," Ms. Weinstein said. "So as we consider our federal policies, are we going to help children who need help the most, or rich people who don`t need help at all?"
Supporters of the welfare changes of the past decade characterized the study as an effort to focus on a narrow slice of bad news, while ignoring what the supporters see as the overwhelming benefits that the overhaul had for most poor families.
"The Children`s Defense Fund searched with a laser for something that was negative to say, because the poverty picture in America since the 1996 welfare reform is unambiguously positive," said Jason Turner, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who as New York City`s commissioner of human resources from 1998 to 2001 was in charge of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani`s welfare policies.
The study focused not just on poor black children, but specifically on black children living in extreme poverty.
Mr. Turner said that such a study ignored the gains made in recent years by the larger population of poor black children. In 1995, he said, 41.5 percent of black children lived below the poverty line, but by 2001, only 30 percent were living in poverty.
The generalized decline in poverty among black children was not in dispute.
"Recent studies show overall poverty has declined among black children, but fail to show the record-breaking increase in extreme poverty among these children," the Children`s Defense Fund said in a statement that accompanied the study. "Today`s analysis further shows that safety nets for the worst-off families are being eroded by Bush administration policies that cause fewer extremely poor children of all races to receive cash and in-kind assistance."
Margy Waller, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton for welfare issues, said that other recent research, including her own, had supported the conclusion that the gradual disappearance of safety net programs had driven some of the country`s poorest families deeper into poverty, even as the status of other poor families improved. Mr. Clinton signed the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system into law.
"This data is not surprising to me because other work I`ve seen has shown that since the welfare reform there have been some increases in extreme poverty, resulting from lost public benefits," Ms. Waller said. "I think that the `96 welfare reform law has been beneficial for many families. But we also know that some families are worse off."




Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030512&s=miller


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Rumsfeld`s Untidy World
by JONATHAN MILLER

[posted online on April 25, 2003]

On April 11th--the day of the most widespread and uncontrolled looting in Iraq--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld produced one of the more sour notes of the nascent postwar period. As CNN aired scenes of frantic mobs hauling off or smashing anything not nailed down, Rumsfeld, on the other side of a split screen, testily implied that the chaos was to be expected. "Stuff happens," he huffed, explaining that "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." After all, he noted, national transitions are generally accompanied by "untidiness." And the situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld added, is "untidy. And freedom`s untidy."

Untidy? Crowds ransacking hospitals, banks and the national museum? It wasn`t neat, sure, but "untidy" seemed an understatement. Yet it turns out that Rumsfeld finds much in the world "untidy."

§ On fighting terrorism: "I think we`re unlikely to be successful in changing the nature of human beings. That`s for others. What we need to do is to recognize that we live in a world that`s a dangerous world, it`s an untidy world." (September 20, 2001)

§ On violent confrontations between US allies in Afghanistan: "It`s an untidy situation, but I`m not staying up at night worrying about it." (November 30, 2001)

§ On a botched Special Forces operation in which dozens of Afghan troop loyal to the pro-US government were either killed or detained for days: "I don`t think it is an error. I think it`s just a fact that circumstances on the ground in Afghanistan are difficult. It`s untidy." (February 21, 2002)

§ On why much of the "war on terror" has not received press coverage: "This is a most unusual conflict. It is not a set of battle lines.... It`s terribly untidy." (March 4, 2002)

§ On whether other world events distract the Administration from its war on terrorism: "It`s a big world. It`s a complicated world. It`s a dangerous world. It`s an untidy world." (June 3, 2002)

§ On justifying military spending increases: "I hate to, you know, fuss at folks--well, I really don`t. We live in a dangerous and untidy world." (June 5, 2002)

§ On reports of warlord-sponsored violence against aid workers in Afghanistan, including the gang-rape of an American: "I hope there was nothing I said that suggested that Afghanistan was a perfectly peaceful, placid place. It isn`t. It`s untidy." (June 26, 2002)

§ On why Americans should not be judged by the International Criminal Court: "The world is a more peaceful and stable place, as dangerous and untidy as it may be, because of the United States of America." (July 2, 2002)

§ On the lack of security in Afghanistan: "It`s an untidy place. But--and it`s not unique to that country. There are plenty of countries where people get shot at. I mean, I`m from Chicago." (July 29, 2002)

§ On why Iraq was targeted for "regime change," not other nations posing an arguably greater threat: "The policy of the United States has been regime change for Iraq.... It has not been that for some other countries. And I guess life`s just untidy." (July 30, 2002)

§ On the continuing lack of security in Afghanistan: "And because it`s reasonably democratic, it`s kind of untidy. And one looks at the untidiness and says, `Oh my goodness, it`s untidy.` Well, my goodness, democracy is untidy. Freedom is untidy. Liberation is untidy." (August 9, 2002)

§ On the number of Iraqi POWs taken early in the war: "It`s untidy. We get mixed reports from different places, and I wouldn`t want to start adding them up." (March 21, 2003)

§ On continuing resistance in southern Iraq: "Most of the resistance has ended in the Basra area, but there will, I suspect, continue to be some dead-enders who will continue to fire at coalition forces. The oil wells in the south have been secured, quote-unquote, but there again, there could be some untidiness as we go forward." (March 23, 2003)

Rumsfeld`s obsession with "untidiness"--rather than with "tidiness"--appears to have rubbed off on Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who often stands at the podium shoulder-to-shoulder with Rumsfeld during Pentagon briefings. At an April 17 "town hall" meeting at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was asked what "could be done to turn around the media`s overwhelming negative coverage of the war." Rumsfeld replied, "I think there`s not anything you can do, with our Constitution, which is a good one, that allows for free speech and free press, about it except to-you know, penalize the papers and the television and the newspapers that don`t give good advice and reward those people that do." He then asked Myers if he had anything to add. "It`s untidy at times," Myers said, "but we have a great Constitution."

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To delay the only decision that matters will prove fatal
Ducking a euro referendum would drive Britain into a nationalist dead end

Hugo Young
Thursday May 1, 2003
The Guardian

As the great euro decision approaches, most politicians talk about its drama only in personal terms. Will Tony outface Gordon? Or will Gordon impose an iron rejection on Tony? Either way, the victory will be what counts, and most observers think that Gordon has already won it. There will be a big hubbub when the decision is announced, but language will be constructed to save faces all round, and normal Labour life will resume on a diet of foundation hospitals and welfare reform. Europe and the euro will be put painlessly on the back burner, to be taken up at the convenience of the combatants. Nothing will have changed except the timing of ultimate entry.

I believe this is a blind misreading of what will follow from a decision not to hold a referendum. It entirely underestimates the case. The deepest consequence will be to push Britain towards becoming a still more anti-European country than it already is. There will be a seismic shift in the limits of what`s possible for a government that pretends to be pro-European but will find itself presiding over a national mood it has just done a great deal to poison.

Naturally this isn`t how ministers will present the matter. Quite the reverse. Whatever text results from the wrangling between Blair and Brown will be clogged with earnest avowals of Britain`s European destiny. The more emphatic the assertion that the economics are not right, the more passionate the promise that the UK will be at the centre of the EU. Blair could live with nothing else.

But this tactical gesture would have to ignore what had happened strategically. The strategy of the Eurosceptics would have scored an enormous victory. Stopping a referendum in this parliament was their first objective. They would have succeeded at a time when objective circumstances were much less favourable than they once envisaged. After all, this is a strong government. It has no meaningful opposition. It has just won a war. It is running a strong economy. The economic case about the euro, whether pro or anti, is and always will be finely balanced. Yet despite all this, the cabinet will have turned tail and run away from asking the people to make a choice.

And victory feeds on victory, like bullying on cowardice. Where in future could ministers dare to make a European rather than nationalist decision, after the rightist press has tasted such succulent blood? The declaration that we`re still notprepared to enter fully into the EU project has only one logic: that in other upcoming decisions about Europe, not least the EU constitution, ministers recognise their vulnerability to the same attack. Far, therefore, from a referendum retreat creating a comfort zone, turbulence will intensify. The forces not merely of scepticism but phobia will flourish, as scorn and hatred for the EU, given still more rein by a crowing press, redouble.

These forces have their own agenda, which is to distance Britain ever further from the EU. They will discover new, ferocious energy. The notion of Britain remaining in the outer group of the EU will become current, as a prelude to becoming further out still. What once seemed impossible - Britain`s eventual exit from the EU - will become a bit more politically credible in the great scheme of things. Not immediately, but as a new part of the national consciousness: a default condition now to be contemplated as among the possibilities.

Against this, what countervailing force will be heard? Judging by what has happened in the past half-decade, a feeble one. Since 1997, we`ve had a government led by a man dedicated to the EU and Britain`s part in it, who has signally failed to spread the message. He may be an enthusiast, and so are a handful of younger ministers. But the language and vision remain hesitant to the point of morbidity. If this was true from 1997-2003 - as can be shown from hundreds of speeches not given, persuasive opportunities missed, evasions perpetuated - can we seriously expect it to change after the choice is made to scuttle away from the only decision that matters? The Straws and Blunketts, who see nothing in Europe but the strictly mechanistic, will sink back whence they came, into contemptuous inanition about almost anything to do with the EU.

So those who talk about the politics of the euro not mattering compared with the economics have an obligation to be, at least, honest. The politics do matter, first of all, in the familiar sense of how Britain is seen and listened to inside the EU. There`s no way, after deciding not to commit to the euro, that London can hope to rebuild her EU bridges in the way that seems crucially necessary after the Iraq war. Some EU leaders may remain polite. But the British interest in what comes out of the Giscard d`Estaing convention, for example, will be ruthlessly downgraded. Those who say that`s unimportant, compared with the unresolvable economic tests, need to give us their answer. So do ministers.

But the politics matter in this other, more corrosive, less regarded way. A statement will have been made to the British about themselves. It will say they can`t be persuaded to make a favourable decision about the EU. It will legitimate the anti-EU attitudes that few politicians have ever done enough to counter. It will let loose a triumphant cataract of Europhobic vigilance in a press that has reason to inquire, after the euro is abandoned indefinitely, what business Blair has making any concessions whatever to a European view of Britain`s future.

This will be a remarkable way to launch the seventh year of office, not to mention the 51st year of the strongest placed European leader Britain has ever had. It would concede a huge triumph to his enemies, among whom I do not include Gordon Brown, even though it would be Brown who had managed to enforce his will against this same leader. That is why I still cannot believe that such a fate, the rebirth of a Thatcherite anti-EU Britain of the kind both men totally reject, is already determined.

To avoid it, however, it`s necessary to abandon illusions. The danger of what is now unfolding is that illusion will triumph. Ministers will persuade themselves that they can box the compass; that keeping away from the euro, they can get closer to Europe; that this is merely a small delay in one of the great transactions of history; that while they indulgently hesitate, like every British leadership before them, nothing will change in the EU; that having taken their anti-euro stance for the next few years, they can reverse it at their convenience on the basis of arguments that would actually have become harder not easier to make.

This is profoundly unrealistic. The big truth would be the triumph the Europhobes have been patiently waiting for: the beginning of the reversal of history, back to the dismal past when the offshore island comforted itself in the belief that it really is not a European country.

Tuesday: One risk against another

· [e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Labour fears Iraq war backlash from voters
Patrick Wintour, Nicholas Watt, Kirsty Scott and Kevin Maguire
Thursday May 1, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair is bracing himself for a middle class backlash in today`s round of elections as New Labour voters punish the government for waging war against Saddam Hussein without a second UN security council resolution.

Senior ministers fear that voters in affluent areas, who were attracted to the party by Mr Blair, will flock to the Liberal Democrats in today`s English local elections. One cabinet minister said: "We have got to to work hard to get the New Labour voters back into the fold."

His remarks came after ministers with many middle class voters in their constituencies reported strong opposition to the government`s stance on Iraq. A meeting in Dulwich and West Norwood, the reasonably affluent south London constituency of the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, was packed with more than 300 people who wanted to protest against the war.

Ministers are not expecting traditional working class voters to change their votes over the war. This view was underlined by John Prescott, who told an eve of poll press conference that no voters had complained to him about Iraq.

Amid the uncertainty, the Labour leadership has attempted to focus today`s elections on public services. "We have campaigned to deliver a stronger economy and better public services," Mr Prescott said.

Nearly 40 million people across Britain will be able to go to the polls today in the biggest test of electoral opinion before the next general election. Seats are up for grabs in 308 councils across England, as well as in Scotland and Wales.

Iain Duncan Smith claims he will be happy with net gains of 30 seats after the Tories` strong performance in 1999, when the same seats were last contested. Labour, which has suffered a series of losses in recent years after its stunning successes in the mid 1990s, is braced for further losses.

The party is expected to fare better in the elections to the Scottish parliament after a collapse in support for the opposition Scottish National party. After level-pegging with Labour during the war, the SNP has now fallen 10 points behind.

A poor performance by the SNP, which does not appear to have convinced Scots that independence is the best option, could see the toppling of party leader John Swinney and question the party`s very rea son for existence. Mr Swinney has struggled to make an impression after succeeding the charismatic Alex Salmond as leader.

Even if the SNP`s support collapses, Labour is unlikely to secure an outright majority in the 129-seat parliament because of the proportional representation system. Jack McConnell, the Scottish first minister, is likely to go into coalition again with the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Jim Wallace, yesterday had a pre-election scare when his helicopter crashed shortly after he left it on a campaign visit.

One issue which will dominate today`s Holyrood election is whether Scots endorse the existence of their fledgling parliament by turning out to vote. All the Scottish parties have been united in their fears that turnout could be low enough to damage the credibility of devolution. The latest polls suggest a turnout of 52%, although some estimates have put it as low as 45%.

The minority parties, however, could provide the biggest surprise when the votes are tallied. Healthy poll ratings and Holyrood`s twin voting system mean the Scottish Socialists might send up to eight more MSPs to join leader Tommy Sheridan in the chamber.

Few expect the Scottish Conservatives to have much to celebrate. They are predicted to lose some of their 19 seats.

Labour in Wales, which has also shared power with the Liberal Democrats, will attempt to form a minority government if it fails to secure an outright majority in the 60-seat Cardiff assembly. An NOP survey for HTV Wales put Labour on 30 seats, two more than 1999 but a crucial one short of the minimum target set by first minister Rhodri Morgan.

Mr Morgan, who flew across Wales yesterday in a helicopter, is braced for a backlash if Labour fails to win an overall majority after the party ran a strongly personal campaign centred on the leader.

There will also be elections to all of Scotland`s 32 councils.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Press Statement
Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
April 30, 2003


A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict


The following is a performance-based and goal-driven roadmap, with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through reciprocal steps by the two parties in the political, security, economic, humanitarian, and institution-building fields, under the auspices of the Quartet [the United States, European Union, United Nations, and Russia]. The destination is a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005, as presented in President Bush’s speech of 24 June, and welcomed by the EU, Russia and the UN in the 16 July and 17 September Quartet Ministerial statements.

A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only be achieved through an end to violence and terrorism, when the Palestinian people have a leadership acting decisively against terror and willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty, and through Israel’s readiness to do what is necessary for a democratic Palestinian state to be established, and a clear, unambiguous acceptance by both parties of the goal of a negotiated settlement as described below. The Quartet will assist and facilitate implementation of the plan, starting in Phase I, including direct discussions between the parties as required. The plan establishes a realistic timeline for implementation. However, as a performance-based plan, progress will require and depend upon the good faith efforts of the parties, and their compliance with each of the obligations outlined below. Should the parties perform their obligations rapidly, progress within and through the phases may come sooner than indicated in the plan. Non-compliance with obligations will impede progress.

A settlement, negotiated between the parties, will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors. The settlement will resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and end the occupation that began in 1967, based on the foundations of the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UNSCRs 242, 338 and 1397, agreements previously reached by the parties, and the initiative of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah – endorsed by the Beirut Arab League Summit – calling for acceptance of Israel as a neighbor living in peace and security, in the context of a comprehensive settlement. This initiative is a vital element of international efforts to promote a comprehensive peace on all tracks, including the Syrian-Israeli and Lebanese-Israeli tracks.

The Quartet will meet regularly at senior levels to evaluate the parties` performance on implementation of the plan. In each phase, the parties are expected to perform their obligations in parallel, unless otherwise indicated.

Phase I: Ending Terror And Violence, Normalizing Palestinian Life, and Building Palestinian Institutions -- Present to May 2003
In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below; such action should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel. Palestinians and Israelis resume security cooperation based on the Tenet work plan to end violence, terrorism, and incitement through restructured and effective Palestinian security services. Palestinians undertake comprehensive political reform in preparation for statehood, including drafting a Palestinian constitution, and free, fair and open elections upon the basis of those measures. Israel takes all necessary steps to help normalize Palestinian life. Israel withdraws from Palestinian areas occupied from September 28, 2000 and the two sides restore the status quo that existed at that time, as security performance and cooperation progress. Israel also freezes all settlement activity, consistent with the Mitchell report.

At the outset of Phase I:

Palestinian leadership issues unequivocal statement reiterating Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to end armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.
Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitment to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.
Security

Palestinians declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere.
Rebuilt and refocused Palestinian Authority security apparatus begins sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. This includes commencing confiscation of illegal weapons and consolidation of security authority, free of association with terror and corruption.
GOI takes no actions undermining trust, including deportations, attacks on civilians; confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property, as a punitive measure or to facilitate Israeli construction; destruction of Palestinian institutions and infrastructure; and other measures specified in the Tenet work plan.
Relying on existing mechanisms and on-the-ground resources, Quartet representatives begin informal monitoring and consult with the parties on establishment of a formal monitoring mechanism and its implementation.
Implementation, as previously agreed, of U.S. rebuilding, training and resumed security cooperation plan in collaboration with outside oversight board (U.S.–Egypt–Jordan). Quartet support for efforts to achieve a lasting, comprehensive cease-fire.
All Palestinian security organizations are consolidated into three services reporting to an empowered Interior Minister.
Restructured/retrained Palestinian security forces and IDF counterparts progressively resume security cooperation and other undertakings in implementation of the Tenet work plan, including regular senior-level meetings, with the participation of U.S. security officials.
Arab states cut off public and private funding and all other forms of support for groups supporting and engaging in violence and terror.
All donors providing budgetary support for the Palestinians channel these funds through the Palestinian Ministry of Finance`s Single Treasury Account.
As comprehensive security performance moves forward, IDF withdraws progressively from areas occupied since September 28, 2000 and the two sides restore the status quo that existed prior to September 28, 2000. Palestinian security forces redeploy to areas vacated by IDF.
Palestinian Institution-Building

Immediate action on credible process to produce draft constitution for Palestinian statehood. As rapidly as possible, constitutional committee circulates draft Palestinian constitution, based on strong parliamentary democracy and cabinet with empowered prime minister, for public comment/debate. Constitutional committee proposes draft document for submission after elections for approval by appropriate Palestinian institutions.
Appointment of interim prime minister or cabinet with empowered executive authority/decision-making body.
GOI fully facilitates travel of Palestinian officials for PLC and Cabinet sessions, internationally supervised security retraining, electoral and other reform activity, and other supportive measures related to the reform efforts.
Continued appointment of Palestinian ministers empowered to undertake fundamental reform. Completion of further steps to achieve genuine separation of powers, including any necessary Palestinian legal reforms for this purpose.
Establishment of independent Palestinian election commission. PLC reviews and revises election law.
Palestinian performance on judicial, administrative, and economic benchmarks, as established by the International Task Force on Palestinian Reform.
As early as possible, and based upon the above measures and in the context of open debate and transparent candidate selection/electoral campaign based on a free, multi-party process, Palestinians hold free, open, and fair elections.
GOI facilitates Task Force election assistance, registration of voters, movement of candidates and voting officials. Support for NGOs involved in the election process.
GOI reopens Palestinian Chamber of Commerce and other closed Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem based on a commitment that these institutions operate strictly in accordance with prior agreements between the parties.
Humanitarian Response

Israel takes measures to improve the humanitarian situation. Israel and Palestinians implement in full all recommendations of the Bertini report to improve humanitarian conditions, lifting curfews and easing restrictions on movement of persons and goods, and allowing full, safe, and unfettered access of international and humanitarian personnel.
AHLC reviews the humanitarian situation and prospects for economic development in the West Bank and Gaza and launches a major donor assistance effort, including to the reform effort.
GOI and PA continue revenue clearance process and transfer of funds, including arrears, in accordance with agreed, transparent monitoring mechanism.
Civil Society

Continued donor support, including increased funding through PVOs/NGOs, for people to people programs, private sector development and civil society initiatives.
Settlements

GOI immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001.
Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).


Phase II: Transition -- June 2003-December 2003
In the second phase, efforts are focused on the option of creating an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty, based on the new constitution, as a way station to a permanent status settlement. As has been noted, this goal can be achieved when the Palestinian people have a leadership acting decisively against terror, willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty. With such a leadership, reformed civil institutions and security structures, the Palestinians will have the active support of the Quartet and the broader international community in establishing an independent, viable, state.

Progress into Phase II will be based upon the consensus judgment of the Quartet of whether conditions are appropriate to proceed, taking into account performance of both parties. Furthering and sustaining efforts to normalize Palestinian lives and build Palestinian institutions, Phase II starts after Palestinian elections and ends with possible creation of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders in 2003. Its primary goals are continued comprehensive security performance and effective security cooperation, continued normalization of Palestinian life and institution-building, further building on and sustaining of the goals outlined in Phase I, ratification of a democratic Palestinian constitution, formal establishment of office of prime minister, consolidation of political reform, and the creation of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.

International Conference: Convened by the Quartet, in consultation with the parties, immediately after the successful conclusion of Palestinian elections, to support Palestinian economic recovery and launch a process, leading to establishment of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders.
Such a meeting would be inclusive, based on the goal of a comprehensive Middle East peace (including between Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon), and based on the principles described in the preamble to this document.
Arab states restore pre-intifada links to Israel (trade offices, etc.).
Revival of multilateral engagement on issues including regional water resources, environment, economic development, refugees, and arms control issues.
New constitution for democratic, independent Palestinian state is finalized and approved by appropriate Palestinian institutions. Further elections, if required, should follow approval of the new constitution.
Empowered reform cabinet with office of prime minister formally established, consistent with draft constitution.
Continued comprehensive security performance, including effective security cooperation on the bases laid out in Phase I.
Creation of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders through a process of Israeli-Palestinian engagement, launched by the international conference. As part of this process, implementation of prior agreements, to enhance maximum territorial contiguity, including further action on settlements in conjunction with establishment of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.
Enhanced international role in monitoring transition, with the active, sustained, and operational support of the Quartet.
Quartet members promote international recognition of Palestinian state, including possible UN membership.


Phase III: Permanent Status Agreement and End of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict -- 2004 – 2005
Progress into Phase III, based on consensus judgment of Quartet, and taking into account actions of both parties and Quartet monitoring. Phase III objectives are consolidation of reform and stabilization of Palestinian institutions, sustained, effective Palestinian security performance, and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at a permanent status agreement in 2005.

Second International Conference: Convened by Quartet, in consultation with the parties, at beginning of 2004 to endorse agreement reached on an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and formally to launch a process with the active, sustained, and operational support of the Quartet, leading to a final, permanent status resolution in 2005, including on borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements; and, to support progress toward a comprehensive Middle East settlement between Israel and Lebanon and Israel and Syria, to be achieved as soon as possible.
Continued comprehensive, effective progress on the reform agenda laid out by the Task Force in preparation for final status agreement.
Continued sustained and effective security performance, and sustained, effective security cooperation on the bases laid out in Phase I.
International efforts to facilitate reform and stabilize Palestinian institutions and the Palestinian economy, in preparation for final status agreement.
Parties reach final and comprehensive permanent status agreement that ends the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 2005, through a settlement negotiated between the parties based on UNSCR 242, 338, and 1397, that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and includes an agreed, just, fair, and realistic solution to the refugee issue, and a negotiated resolution on the status of Jerusalem that takes into account the political and religious concerns of both sides, and protects the religious interests of Jews, Christians, and Muslims worldwide, and fulfills the vision of two states, Israel and sovereign, independent, democratic and viable Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security.
Arab state acceptance of full normal relations with Israel and security for all the states of the region in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.

[End]

Released on April 30, 2003

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May 1, 2003
Attack Injures 7 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


Filed at 4:28 a.m. ET

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) -- Attackers lobbed two grenades into a U.S. Army compound Thursday, wounding seven soldiers just hours after the Americans had opened fire on Iraqi protesters in the street outside, a U.S. intelligence officer reported.

None of the injuries to soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Fallujah was life-threatening, said Capt. Frank Rosenblatt, 26, of Hampton, Va.

The troops inside the walled compound -- a former police station -- opened fire on men fleeing the area, but no one was captured or believed hit, said Rosenblatt, whose 82nd Airborne Division is handing over control of Fallujah to the Armored Cavalry.

The 1 a.m. attack Thursday came after soldiers in the compound and in a passing Army convoy opened fire Wednesday on anti-American demonstrators massed outside, killing two and wounding 18, according to hospital officials.

American officers said that barrage was provoked when someone fired on the convoy from the crowd.

Wednesday`s march was to protest earlier bloodshed on Monday night, when 16 demonstrators and bystanders were killed and more than 50 wounded, according to hospital counts. In that clash, an 82nd Airborne company, whose members said they were being shot at, fired on a protest outside a school occupied by the U.S. soldiers.

Residents of Fallujah said they had heard relatives of victims vow to avenge Wednesday`s shootings -- and many in the city have told reporters they want the American troops to leave.

Resistance to American troops is especially sharp in Fallujah, a city of 200,000 people 30 miles west of Baghdad, because it benefited more than most from Saddam Hussein`s Baath regime, toppled last month by the U.S.-led coalition.

The regime built chemical and other factories that generated jobs for Fallujah`s workers and wealth for its businessmen. The city sent many of its young men to elite regime forces such as the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard. The protest Monday came apparently in celebration of Saddam`s 66th birthday.

U.S. military officials met Wednesday with local religious and clan leaders on the security situation.

``We asked the commanding officers for an investigation and for compensation for the families of the dead and injured,`` said Taha Bedaiwi al-Alwani, the new, U.S.-recognized mayor of Fallujah.

Al-Alwani and other Iraqis at the meeting also asked that U.S. troops be redeployed outside the city center. A U.S. paratrooper company has already left one school where they were staying, which was the focus of Monday`s protest.

Residents told reporters they were troubled by soldiers who gaze on Fallujah women, and some believed the Americans` goggles or binoculars could ``see`` through curtains or clothing.

In other developments around Iraq, heavily armed troops of the 4th Infantry Division raided a house late Wednesday in Tikrit, Saddam`s hometown, and arrested a local Baath Party official accused of trying to run a ``shadow regime`` opposing coalition forces.

U.S. troops refused to release the name of the official.

Five Bradley Fighting Vehicles surrounded the two-story villa in a neighborhood formerly reserved for Baath Party members. One of the Bradleys slammed through a 10-foot wall surrounding the compound. About 40 infantrymen of the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment swarmed through the hole, fanning across the lawn and breaking down the wooden front door.

Inside, the soldiers found three men -- the suspect and his two sons -- five women and four children. The three men were led from the house blindfolded and with their hands bound behind their backs.

Col. Don Campbell, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said the suspect was ``a prominent Baath Party member whom we suspect of trying to run a shadow regime.``

In Baghdad, the U.S.-led team charged with rebuilding Iraq`s civil society has been screening government employees trying to return to work.

The 150 people who showed up at the Planning Ministry on Wednesday faced tough scrutiny from the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which is struggling to weed out Baath Party officials and potential provocateurs from the ranks of a reconfigured civil service.

Charles Heatly, a spokesman for the reconstruction office, said U.S. and British officials working with Iraqis had met with bureaucrats at most of the country`s 23 ministries that operated under Saddam`s regime. Many were eager to return to work.

As plans for the new government proceeded apace, three top opposition leaders met in Baghdad to discuss how they would work together.

Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan began a series of meetings Wednesday night, according to the INC`s London office. It offered no details, citing security, but said the meetings would continue Thursday.

Chalabi is a controversial figure, and many Iraqis are deeply suspicious of him because he lived outside the country for years and did not suffer alongside them under Saddam.



Copyright 2003 The Associated Press

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washingtonpost.com
The Price of Opposition




Thursday, May 1, 2003; Page A26


ONE REASON the Bush administration attracted less diplomatic support than it should have for the war in Iraq was the perception in many nations that President Bush had conducted foreign policy with an arrogance and unilateralism that made the United States appear threatening. After not just strategic adversaries, such as Russia and France, but also dependable friends, such as Chile and Mexico, failed to back the American position at the U.N. Security Council, the administration might have drawn a lesson that it should seek to repair its international relations after the war. Instead, there are signs that the White House has adopted the opposite approach: Rather than swallowing a dose of the humility that Mr. Bush once promised in foreign affairs, the administration is making a show of punishing countries that opposed the war. Senior policymakers met last week to consider a range of sanctions for France, brushing off President Jacques Chirac`s phone call to Mr. Bush and his offer of "pragmatic" conciliation. Now officials have let it be known that Chile, a Latin American democracy and a rare success story in a troubled region, will have to suffer the delay of its free-trade agreement with the United States. This mean-spirited payback will only compound the damage to America`s standing in the world.

Administration spokesmen contend that France, which succeeded in making U.S. power rather than Iraqi disarmament the focus at the Security Council, must "pay a price" for its behavior. Yet Mr. Chirac has already been chastened by the scenes of Iraqis celebrating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and will suffer still greater political losses if U.S. forces succeed in uncovering Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and guiding Iraq toward democratic government. Overt U.S. measures, such as excluding France from NATO decision-making, will only help Mr. Chirac prove the point he has been trying to make to Europe and the rest of the world -- that the United States has become a reckless colossus and needs to be balanced by coalitions of other nations. Such steps may also ensure that rather than "pragmatically" accept U.S. plans for postwar Iraq, France will continue to obstruct them in the Security Council.

The attack on Chile is even more senseless. For two decades Chile has been far and away the leader of the Latin American movement toward free-market economic policies and the clearest success story; for the past dozen years it has also been a model of moderate and stable democratic politics. As many of its neighbors, including regional powers Argentina and Brazil, struggle to make open economies work and debate whether policies that draw them closer to the United States still make sense, the free-trade pact with Chile offers the Bush administration a chance to demonstrate that such strategies pay off. It is also a teaser for the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas that the administration once described as a top priority -- and a rare positive step by this administration in a region it has badly neglected. Eighty-five percent of Chileans opposed a war in Iraq; their government responded by supporting a compromise in the Security Council that was intended to delay the war while making possible its eventual endorsement. If this solid hemispheric citizen is now to be punished for failing to fall in line with the United States, the world will indeed take a lesson -- and not the right one.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Eine schöne Geschichte von Schlapphüten mit Sex garniert. Wird ganz bestimmt ein Renner.

washingtonpost.com
Another Spy Fiasco




Thursday, May 1, 2003; Page A26


THE STORY LINE would make a good spy flick: A modern-day Mata Hari close to the Chinese leadership becomes a paid FBI informant and seduces not one but two high-level FBI counterintelligence officials. One of these, her supposed handler, lets her see and copy reams of classified information over the course of a long-term affair -- and the Los Angeles socialite dutifully passes this material on to the Chinese. She meanwhile becomes a prominent Republican fundraiser and contributor and flaunts her ties to the Chinese leadership while engaging in civic, business and political activity. Yet even after it becomes clear that she is having unauthorized contacts with Chinese intelligence, both agents continue their affairs with her, and the flow of classified information from her handler-lover does not stop until the couple are arrested.

Unfortunately, the story of Katrina M. Leung is not a script -- at least not if you believe federal authorities, who have filed charges against her and former FBI special agent James J. Smith. Both are innocent until proven guilty, but if a tenth of the government`s allegations are true, the case is the latest example of incompetence at an agency that has seen too much of it. Like other recent revelations about the battered FBI, it raises the question of whether this is really the agency Americans want to handle counterespionage. The bureau apparently regarded Ms. Leung, to whom it paid more than $1.7 million, as a particularly prized informant, so the Chinese could have used her not merely to garner information but to pass on bad intelligence to American policymakers. Particularly dispiriting is that FBI headquarters appears to have known as far back as 1991 that Ms. Leung was playing both sides and to have done nothing about it.

But the Leung case has yet another disturbing dimension, for Chinese counterintelligence has been an area of notable and high-profile frustration for American authorities in recent years. Major investigations of allegations that China was trying to route money into the American political system and also of allegations of nuclear espionage have fizzled. We still don`t know what the Chinese money scandal was all about or how much American nuclear technology was used in Chinese warhead modernizations.

And it turns out that the agents who were involved with Ms. Leung were key players in these probes. Mr. Smith debriefed fundraiser Johnny Chung, for example, and the other former agent, William Cleveland Jr., was a part of the nuclear espionage investigations of Gwo-Bao Min -- against whom charges were never filed -- and Peter Lee, who pleaded guilty to passing secrets to China but served only 12 months in a halfway house. The more famous case of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee also ended with an inconclusive plea bargain. Is it possible that one reason these investigations ended so frustratingly is that Ms. Leung compromised them?

Neither party in Congress is itching to reopen these cans of worms. The Asian money scandal wasn`t helpful to Democrats, and Republicans can`t be too eager to visit similar scrutiny on their own party`s relationship with a contributor now alleged to be a spy. The Bush administration, having entered office suspicious of China`s Communist leaders, now is more intent on cooperating with them on terrorism, North Korea and other issues. But whether American nuclear secrets were compromised and whether China made a significant covert effort to influence American democracy are questions that are no less important today than they were a few years back. The Justice Department`s inspector general and the FBI itself are examining the matter; Congress should return to it as well.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
The Blair Democrats: Ready for Battle


By Will Marshall

Thursday, May 1, 2003; Page A27



The U.S.-led coalition`s stunning success in liberating Iraq is undoubtedly a triumph for President Bush. But Karl Rove shouldn`t get too giddy, because it may be a boon for some Democrats, too.

After all, four of the leading Democratic presidential contenders -- Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sens. Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards -- not only voted to support the war but also joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair in demanding that Bush challenge the United Nations to live up to its responsibilities to disarm Iraq. This position put these "Blair Democrats" in sync with the vast majority of Americans who said they would much rather attack Saddam Hussein`s regime with United Nations backing than without it. And it puts them at odds with what Kerry called the "blustery unilateralism" of the president, which combined with French obstructionism to rupture not only the United Nations but the Atlantic alliance as well.

Like Bush, these Democrats did not shrink from the use of force to end Hussein`s reign of terror. Like Blair, they saw the Iraq crisis as a test of Western resolve and the United Nations` credibility as an effective instrument of collective security. Their "yes-but" position on Iraq irked the antiwar left and some political commentators, who prefer the parties to take starkly opposing stands on every issue, no matter how complicated. But the Blair Democrats faithfully reflected Americans` instinctive internationalism. While neoconservatives may yearn for a new Augustan age based on unfettered U.S. power, most Americans still see strategic advantages in international cooperation.

Just as the swift liberation of Iraq has strengthened the Blair Democrats, it has weakened the party`s antiwar contingent, whose worst fears failed to materialize. The outcome deals a near-fatal blow to the presidential prospects of Howard Dean, whose staunch opposition to the war thrilled Iowa`s left-leaning activists but is out of step with rank-and-file Democrats, about two-thirds of whom approve of the war. Moreover, because 75 percent of all voters back the war, the odds that Democrats will make Bush`s day by serving up an antiwar nominee as his opponent in 2004 seem long indeed.

Like the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, the Iraq crisis was a critical test of the Democratic Party`s willingness to use force in the national interest. Thanks to the Blair Democrats, it was a test that Democrats largely passed.

The emergence of the Blair Democrats should be no great surprise. Historically, they are lineal descendants of the party`s great internationalists: Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. Recognizing that U.S. global leadership requires strong military forces and the will to use them, they reject the left`s attempts to cast Democrats as a reflexively antiwar party. Indeed, the Iraq debate revealed a party that is moving away from McGovernism and back to its internationalist roots.

In 1991, for example, only 10 Democratic senators voted for a resolution authorizing President George H.W. Bush to forcibly expel Iraqi invaders from Kuwait. Last October, a majority of Democratic senators (28 in all) approved a U.S. attack to disarm Hussein. (In the more partisan House, a majority of Democrats opposed the resolution.) But what best reveals the party`s collective mind on national security is its selection of a presidential nominee. That the Blair Democrats seem to be leading the pack is a welcome sign the party is serious about challenging GOP dominance of security issues.

The Blair Democrats see no contradiction between national strength and international cooperation, between the willingness to use America`s power for liberal ends and the recognition that working through global alliances and institutions makes us stronger, not weaker. For example, they favor internationalizing Iraq`s reconstruction, to share economic burdens and political risks with our allies and the United Nations and to quell widespread fears in the region that America will become the new colonial overlord. They believe it`s also urgent to start repairing the breach in the Atlantic alliance, by expanding NATO and refocusing it on the new common threats of terrorism and proliferation.

As internationalists, the Blair Democrats are poised to itemize for Americans the high political costs of the Bush administration`s belligerent unilateralism. While successful in war, the White House was anything but in the months leading up to the attack on Iraq, triggering the most virulent wave of anti-American sentiment in decades. Count on the Blair Democrats to hold President Bush accountable for these diplomatic failures as the presidential election heats up.

The writer is president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Myths Debunked
Thanking the Clintons
Now that Bush`s post-war ratings are about to fall, it`s refreshing to see that the anti-Clinton forces have once again crawled out of the woodwork to try to demean him and his wife with lies and innuendo.

Here’s part of the text of a message from the 2000 campaign that’s making the rounds again.

Thanking the Clintons

Dear Mr. Ex President Clinton:

I recently saw a bumper sticker that said, "Thank me, I voted for Clinton-Gore." So, I sat down and reflected on that, and I am sending my "Thank you" for what you have done, specifically:

1. Thank you for introducing us to Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Dolly Kyle Browning, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broderick. Did I leave anyone out?

2. Thank you for teaching my 8 year old about oral sex…

Here’s my answer:

It was Special Persecutor Ken Starr, not Bill Clinton, who made the details of Clinton`s relationship with Monica Lewinsky public. It`s Ken Starr who put pornography into the Congressional Record.

Bill Clinton lied about a consensual sexual affair with an adult of the opposite sex, but Republicans lie about life and death matters, and matters that cost us taxpayers a great deal of money. Let`s talk about some substantive wrongdoing, shall we?

Republicans have, three times in my lifetime, used trickery, and possibly treason, to gain the White House. Richard Nixon appears to have, before he was president, negotiated with Thieu of Vietnam to keep Thieu from the bargaining table before the 1968 election.
Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001, Verso)

Ronald Reagan is accused of having negotiated, before he was president, with Iranian terrorists holding U.S. embassy employees hostage. Reagan promised to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the terrorists’ waiting until after Reagan’s inauguration to release the hostages.
Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (1993, Sheridan Square Press)

It is against U.S. law, in fact it is considered treason, for private citizens to negotiate with foreign governments or, presumably, terrorists.

George W. Bush, of course, used every means at his disposal to stop legal vote counts in Florida, thereby gaining, with the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, that state’s electoral votes. Bush asked for and was granted recounts in New Mexico that he fought against in Florida.

Richard Nixon inaugurated “dirty tricks” in politics. He used government agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, to harass people on his “enemies” list. He created the kind of environment in his administration that made his minions think he would approve of a burglary of the opposition party’s campaign offices. Nixon and many members of his administration lied and obstructed justice in attempts to hide responsibility for that burglary.

Ronald Reagan approved and encouraged the sale of arms to Iran, as he promised the terrorists holding our hostages, against the express will of Congress. He approved and encouraged the use of profits from those illegal sales to support Nicaraguan rebels, also against the express will of Congress.
Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up (1997, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)

Reagan deregulated savings and loans without implementing proper safeguards for federally insured deposits, an oversight that cost us taxpayers more than $500 billion. Reagan’s contributors helped themselves to HUD funds, costing us taxpayers more billions of dollars. According to Haynes Johnson, “By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of number of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever.”
Haynes Johnson, Sleep-Walking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (1991, Doubleday), p. 184.

George H.W. Bush was involved in Iran/Contra, but we will never know the full measure of his participation because he pardoned those who could have implicated him before they could be tried. Never was there such a QUID PRO QUO for a presidential pardon.
Lawrence Walsh, op. cit. Also, the original New York Times article is archived on bartcop.com.
http://www.bartcop.com/pardon.htm

Just before he left the presidency, Bush père sold the rights to a U.S. taxpayer owned mine to a Canadian company. The company paid the U.S. $10,000 for the rights to more than $10 billion worth of gold. Bush went to work for this company immediately after leaving office.
Gregory Palast, “Poppy Strikes Gold”, UTNE Reader, April, 2003. Archived at GregPalast.com:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=207&row=1

The persecution of Bill Clinton was a cynical attempt to do several things. It was an attempt to unseat a legitimately elected president. It was an attempt to smear the leader of the Democratic party so forcefully that he would have to either resign or hide. A more dangerous objective was to sour all Americans except the most right-wing party faithful on all things political, so that we would stay away from the polls, allowing Republicans to win by default.

The demonization and persecution of Democrats continues because the Republicans` policies fail on all counts. As the ancient Chinese proverb says, "Strong and bitter words indicate a WEAK CAUSE."

We can thank Bill Clinton for eight years of peace and prosperity. We can thank the current Bush administration for deficits, the loss of millions of jobs, and never-ending war.

How many people can you send THIS to?

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
April 2003

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Deciphering the Democrats` Debacle
Why the Republican majority (probably) won`t last.

By Ruy Teixeira
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Last year, John Judis and I published a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that a series of economic, demographic, and ideological changes was laying the basis for a new Democratic majority that would materialize by decade`s end--not certainly, we argued, but very probably as long as the Democratic Party put forth decent political leadership to challenge the dominant, but dwindling, current Republican majority.

Our book arrived in stores last September. Two months later, in the midterm elections, the Republicans surprised nearly everyone by winning control of the Senate and further solidifying their majority in the House, unifying Republican control of the federal government for only the second time in half a century. Needless to say, this wasn`t my ideal outcome. In the annals of publishing, this wasn`t quite so unfortunate as, say, James Glassman`s prediction of a 36,000 point Dow just before the 2000 stock market crash, but it still evoked a fair amount of understandable ribbing and forced me to think hard about our thesis. So after the election, I pored over survey data, county-by-county voting returns, and a great deal of underlying demographic data and thought long and hard about what the data showed. And as a result, I`ve decided that ... we`re still right!

The Myth of a 9/11 Majority

First, despite the Republican tsunami described by many media outlets, the actual electoral shift was quite mild. Though politically the election was a landmark, the underlying numbers suggest a continuing partisan balance. Democrats lost two seats in the Senate, six in the House, and gained three governorships. As nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook has pointed out, "A swing of 94,000 votes out of 75,723,756 cast nationally would have resulted in the Democrats capturing control of the House and retaining a majority in the Senate on Nov. 5. If that had occurred, obituaries would have been written--inevitably and prematurely--about the presidency of George W. Bush. Instead, we are entertained by predictions that the Democratic Party, as we know it, may cease to exist."

Given the very evenness of partisan division in this country, even minor fluctuations in public sentiment can cause sudden lurches in political power. Indeed, the last election differed markedly from 1994, when huge Republican gains (52 House and nine Senate seats, 10 governorships) really did change the partisan balance dramatically.

Nevertheless, the shock of `02 initially devastated Democratic morale. Many in the party seemed helpless before the Republican success, ready to concede the 2004 election. For their part, Republicans were riding high, canonizing Karl Rove, and mentally fitting Bush for a spot on Mount Rushmore. Conservatives like Fred Barnes even spoke fondly of an "emerging 9/11 majority."

But that`s begun to change. Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu`s December runoff victory in Louisiana put Republican triumphalism in perspective. Subsequent events have revived Democratic hopes, as Bush`s approval ratings, especially on the economy, have fallen and his diplomatic failures leading up to the Iraq war have been exposed. That`s not the only encouraging news. A careful reading of the election and its aftermath suggests the GOP position has serious underlying weaknesses. In fact, the Republican victory depended on a series of unsustainable advantages that a tough, smart Democratic effort should be able to counter, forcing a competitive 2004 election and the likely--though not certain--ascendancy that Judis and I predicted by the end of the decade.

The White Stuff

The GOP`s midterm wins depended heavily on their advantages in five areas that are either unlikely to persist or were overrated to begin with: a reliance on white voters, the growth of exurban voters, heavy GOP turnout, the tax-cut issue, and war. I`ll tackle these in order.

Last November was all about the white vote. For all the talk of Republican minority outreach, the voters who showed up for the GOP on election day were, with few exceptions, white. In the 2000 election, 54 percent of whites voted for Bush and 56 percent for congressional Republicans; in 2002 that figure rose to 58 percent, which, coupled with higher turnout of whites, especially conservative whites, was enough for victory. Viewed one way, that`s good news for Republicans, since whites comprise the overwhelming majority of U.S. voters. Trouble is, that majority is steadily diminishing. What`s more, Republicans` core constituencies among white voters--those in rural areas, married men, married homemakers, and so forth--are also shrinking relative to other voter groups, which makes the demographic challenge of maintaining a majority even tougher.

As Matthew Dowd, polling director at the Republican National Committee, has pointed out, if minorities and whites vote in 2004 as they did in the 2000 election, Democrats will win by 3 million votes, for just that reason. In the long term, unless the GOP can make inroads among minority voters, they`ll lose. In 2002, they made essentially no inroads at all. Recall that in the 2000 election, Al Gore got 90 percent of the black vote; in 2002, blacks appear to have voted at similar rates--if not slightly higher--for Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates. Hispanic support for Democrats was similarly rock solid, despite strenuous GOP outreach efforts. For example, California governor Gray Davis beat his Republican challenger Bill Simon by 65 to 24 percent among Hispanics--figures essentially identical to those by which Davis beat his 1998 challenger, Dan Lundgren. Nationally, a Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner poll taken after the 2002 election indicated that Hispanics supported Democrats by 62 to 38 percent, figures nearly identical to 1998 numbers.

Research by political scientist James Gimpel confirms that Hispanic voting patterns haven`t shifted. He found that Hispanics in 10 states polled by Fox News supported Democrats over Republicans in Senate races by more than two to one (67 percent to 33 percent). Democrats didn`t fare quite so well among Hispanics in governors` races in these states (54 percent to 46 percent), but that result probably had a great deal to do with the inclusion of Florida and the noncompetitive Colorado election in their sample. Gimpel found little evidence that Latinos are moving toward the Republican Party, despite all the talk of Hispanics as swing voters.

What limited data there are on Asian voters indicate that they, too, haven`t wavered in their support of Democrats. In California, Asians voted for Davis over Simon by 54 to 37 percent, similar to their preference for Al Gore over George Bush in 2000. In other words, practically all the available data indicates that minority support for Democrats didn`t budge in this election. For the GOP, that`s a very bad sign.

County Line

Republicans naturally want to make the case that their strong showing wasn`t simply a result of demagoguing craven Democrats on national security. Surely, they`ll tell you, there were deeper trends at work. One of the most fashionable of the theories put forward is that Republican gains reflected the rise of "exurbs"--those fast-growing edge counties on the fringes of large metropolitan areas that tend to vote Republican. Since these areas are booming, argue conservatives like David Brooks, who wrote an influential post-election article in The New York Times, the future belongs to the GOP.

But while Brooks is correct that exurbs contributed to the 2002 Republican victories, his assertion that they were central to these victories is much shakier. Consider his two main examples, Colorado and Maryland. Colorado`s quintessential exurb, Douglas County, just outside Denver, did vote overwhelmingly Republican in the state`s Senate race, choosing Wayne Allard over Democrat Tom Strickland, 66 to 32 percent. That`s about the same margin by which Bush beat Gore in Douglas County in 2000. But pull back a bit and the picture changes: The Denver-Boulder area as a whole voted for Democrat Strickland by a 6-point margin; that`s larger than the 3-point victory Gore won in 2000, which in turn improved on Michael Dukakis`s 1-point loss in 1988.

How can this be? Partly it`s the influence of vote-rich Denver County, which is strongly Democratic and becoming more so. But another part of it is suburban Arapahoe and Jefferson counties around Denver that, as they`ve grown bigger, denser, and more diverse--less "exurban," if you will--have also become much less Republican. Arapahoe voted for Reagan in 1980 by 39 points, for Bush I in 1988 by 22 points and for W. in 2000 by only eight points. In the same period, Jefferson favored Reagan by 34 points, Bush by 15, and his son by just eight. These swings have contributed to a pro-Democratic trend in the Denver-Boulder area--a trend that buoyed Strickland`s candidacy, rather than hurt it. The real story in Colorado was Strickland`s poor showing elsewhere in the state, especially in small towns and rural areas.

Maryland`s gubernatorial election is an even stronger refutation of the exurban thesis. To begin with, Democrats picked up two House seats in the 2002 election, and Gore beat Bush by 17 points in the last presidential election. While Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert Ehrlich did very well in exurban counties like Frederick (north of Washington, D.C.) and Harford (north of Baltimore), both of which already tend to vote Republican, Ehrlich`s real coup was carrying counties Brooks doesn`t mention--closer-in counties like Baltimore (the state`s third-largest) and Howard (the state`s fastest-growing county with more than 100,000 in population), both of which traditionally vote Democratic and have become more so over time. In other words, the real story is that Ehrlich`s opponent, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, ran a lousy race and lost many counties she should have won, and lost badly where she should have at least come close. Consequently, Ehrlich`s victory hardly suggests an impending era of Republican exurban dominance in the very Democratic state of Maryland.

Elsewhere, examples of the exurban phenomenon run into the same problem: They are usually examples of--not the reasons for--pro-Republican voting. Take Northern Virginia`s Loudon County, the sixth-fastest-growing county nationwide, cited by Brooks in another article. As Loudon has grown, it has grown more Democratic, moving from a 66-33 Republican advantage in 1988 to a much more modest 56-41 advantage in 2000. And, critically, the northern Virginia suburbs as a whole have shifted from a 20-point Republican edge to a mere two-point edge over that same period. Evidently, Loudon`s booming growth isn`t enough to stop a political trend toward voting Democratic, much less start one toward voting Republican.

In fact, Loudon County illustrates an important, and--for Democrats--positive trend: Many of these fast-growing, Republican-leaning exurban counties are part of larger metropolitan areas that are actually trending in the opposite direction. That`s because exurban counties are generally too small to outweigh pro-Democratic developments elsewhere in large metropolitan areas, and also because as exurban counties become bigger, denser, and more diverse, they generally become less--not more--Republican. So, in a sense, today`s right-leaning exurb is tomorrow`s left-leaning suburb. This makes a strategy based on exurbs as they appear today--nearly all white and low density--a tenuous one. If the GOP expects long-term political dominance from the growth of these same counties, it`s likely to be disappointed.

Turn On, Tune In, Turnout

The 2002 election was also an aberration from the perspective of voter turnout. Usually, it`s the Democrats who fire up their base and deliver a bravura performance of getting voters to the polls. Last year, however, Democrats dragged their feet, while Republicans did an outstanding job. The GOP`s "72-Hour Project" did particularly well, boosting white turnout. But Democrats didn`t match this effort among their base; while minorities supported them at typically high rates, fewer showed up at the polls. In California, a Los Angeles Times exit poll--the only functioning exit poll in the nation--indicated that only 4 percent of voters in 2002 were black, compared to 13 percent in 1998. That`s almost certainly an underestimate, but it does suggest a substantial falloff. The same poll indicated that just 10 percent of California voters in 2002 were Hispanic, down from 13 percent in 1998. And Gimpel`s study of Fox News polls in 10 states indicates that Hispanics of low to middle income and education were much less likely to vote last year than those of high income and education, meaning that not only was Hispanic turnout likely lower in 2002, but those who did show up were unusually unrepresentative of the Hispanic community in a way that hurt Democrats and helped Republicans. (Turnout was especially low among independent Latinos with middling levels of education, who tend to vote heavily Democratic.)

More broadly, county-level voting returns suggest that turnout in Democratic-leaning large cities and inner suburbs, even where it did not decline, did not keep pace with increases in Republican-leaning exurbs and rural areas, which, on the whole, were highly mobilized. In Missouri, for example, the increase in votes cast over the 1998 election was much more moderate in heavily Democratic St. Louis city and Democratic-leaning St. Louis County than in the heavily Republican suburb of St. Charles County and especially in rural and extremely Republican Cape Girardeau County. The same pattern was true in Minnesota, where many Republican-leaning rural counties seemed to show exceptionally high turnouts, while Democratic-leaning urban ones lagged behind.

Of course, the relatively low turnout among minorities and in Democratic areas probably didn`t matter much in states like California, where the Democrats prevailed by a large margin, or Florida, where they were so far behind that no reasonable increment of minority turnout could conceivably have saved them. But in close races like Missouri`s, it may have cost the Democrats victory--and perhaps nationwide also, since it only took a swing of two seats for Republicans to take the Senate.

So the GOP was clearly the turnout party in 2002. But it`s unlikely to be able to repeat this. To begin with, Democrats won`t be caught napping again. They`ve launched their own version of the "72-Hour Project" called "Project 5104"--shorthand for winning 51 percent of the vote in `04. The labor movement will match this expanded turnout initiative with its "Partnership for Working Families," which will target not just union voters, but also non-union liberals and Democratic-leaning voters in the party`s 158 million-voter database.

Of course, better mechanics alone can`t make up for low motivation, which was clearly one of the reasons Democratic voters didn`t turn out in 2002. But three things will be different next time around. First, the 9/11 effect will have dissipated, and far fewer voters will be patriotically inclined to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt. Second, the Democrats are learning that "No ideas don`t beat bad ideas." In 2002, they had no agreed upon economic policy, no plausible alternative foreign policy, and a handful of domestic program proposals like prescription drug benefits for seniors that Republicans neutralized with vague proposals of their own. Leading Democrats now know they need a broader agenda to give Democratic-leaning voters reason to show up. Finally, nothing drives voters to the polls like anger--the desire to strike a blow against the opponent. That desire was absent in 2002 due to a short-term confusion among many Democratic voters and lawmakers about whether and how to oppose Bush. But the president`s virulent partisanship has erased such concerns among Democratic-leaning voters. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, for example, 95 percent of Republicans approved of Bush`s job performance, compared to just 28 percent of Democrats. This extraordinarily high point spread shows that non-Republican voters have become alienated by the administration`s hard-right policies on everything from tax cuts and Medicare to Iraq. Bush may indeed be mobilizing his own base--but in the process he`s mobilizing the other side`s, too.

Tithes that Bind

It is an article of faith in the GOP these days that there is no such thing as a bad tax cut. Indeed, this extraordinary concept has overshadowed the "compassionate conservatism" Bush touted in his 2000 campaign. So the Republicans are betting, at least domestically, on the political appeal of tax cuts. They had an easy time of it in 2001, and now they`re proposing a new round, including the complete elimination of the dividend tax. The Democrats didn`t dare run against tax cuts last November, they reason, so why should the future be any different?

But early reaction to Bush`s new tax-cut plan is remarkably tepid considering that the public`s initial reaction to any new economic proposal (if no potential drawbacks are cited) tends to be positive. In this case, the lack of enthusiasm has a great deal to do with the fact that just 22 percent of the public paid any direct dividend tax at all last year. And a closer examination of the general apathy toward Bush`s latest cuts reveals a remarkable fact: More people now think the amount of federal income tax they pay is "about right" (50 percent) than think it is "too high" (47 percent). Someone resuscitate Grover Norquist! According to Gallup, the last time the public felt this good about paying their taxes was March 1949. Perhaps this wasn`t the ideal time to propose a large, deficit-ballooning tax cut for the rich after all.

Sure enough, survey data from a Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner poll shows that Bush`s new plan is sparking much less interest than his first tax cut did in January 2001. Back then, 49 percent thought Bush`s proposal was good for the middle class, while 42 percent disagreed; this time just 37 percent think it`s good for the middle class, compared to 48 percent who don`t.

Other recent survey questions reveal that the public may have had its fill of tax cuts. By more than two to one, people would prefer more spending on education, health care, and Social Security to Bush`s proposed tax cut (ABC); 61 percent believe the Bush plan will be "just somewhat" or "not very" effective in stimulating the economy (NBC); almost twice as many think the Bush economic plan would benefit the wealthy over Americans as a whole (NBC); 56 percent believe that if the Bush plan mostly benefits the wealthy, it will be an ineffective way to stimulate the economy (NBC). The public also expresses a preference for a stimulus program focused on infrastructure spending (roads, bridges, schools) rather than tax cuts, and by a whopping margin is nervous about the prospect of Social Security funds helping to fund the government if Bush`s tax cut goes through. In other words, it`s a considerably less friendly world for tax cuts in 2003 than it was in 2001 and--partly reflecting this fact--this time Democrats are lining up to oppose them.

Polling data suggests that this is a doubly smart move. Not only are tax cuts unpopular, but voters believe them to be an ineffective remedy for the public`s real area of concern: the lousy economy. A recent Pew poll revealed that more people disapprove of Bush`s performance on tax policy (44 percent) than approve of it (42 percent). On the economy, the president fares even worse. Before the invasion of Iraq, he was regularly drawing approval ratings in this area in the low 40s (and only in the high 30s among political independents, the best simple proxy for swing voters), with disapproval ratings in the low 50s. He received a slight bump from the war (rallying around the president on one issue commonly bleeds into unrelated areas), but is heading right back down. Should that continue into `04, being identified with tax cuts is likely to be a liability, even in the short term. Over the long term, the fiscal damage wrought by tax cuts drains the economy, generates huge deficits, and ensures that voters` priorities can`t be met: hardly a recipe for political dominance.

The Spoiler of War

That brings us to the GOP`s biggest advantage in the last election and the one they`re clearly relying on to carry them through the next: war and national security. Right now, the Bush administration`s war in Iraq enjoys the support of about 70 percent of the American public. But even this advantage is unlikely to last. The war is temporarily suppressing Americans` genuine skepticism about the administration`s approach to foreign policy, and the underlying softness of their support means that they could quickly tire of a lengthy occupation and the ancillary foreign and security problems.

For example, before the invasion, polls showed that Americans opposed invading Iraq without U.N. support and strongly supported giving weapons inspectors more time, reflecting the public`s overwhelming view that Iraq was a long-range, not an immediate, threat. And while general, no-conditions-specified questions about military action against Saddam Hussein always elicited support, this ebbed once stipulations were raised about U.S., and even Iraqi, casualties or about the possibility of a long-term occupation--now a certainty. Moreover, moderates and independents held these viewpoints more strongly than the broader public, indicating that this was the true center of U.S. public opinion.

In other words, the public held a very different view of Iraq than the president did. The administration espoused an evolving ideology that essentially relies on asserting unilateral American power, while the public preferred a more nuanced and pragmatic approach of working through allies--more Wesley Clark, if you will, than Donald Rumsfeld. And, like Clark, they were inclined to see Iraq as more of an "elective war" than one waged out of necessity.

Of course, after the troops hit the ground, these doubts and nuances gave way to patriotic support. But they remain, evident even in post-invasion polls--such as Gallup`s--that consistently find just 59 percent supporting the war as "the right thing to do," while the remaining 11-13 percent who favor it do so out of a desire "to support the troops" (25-27 percent oppose the war outright). There is more doubt and even opposition than during the first Gulf War or the attack against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Consequently, the public is less likely to cut Bush slack if the Middle East situation worsens than it was immediately following 9/11.

Besides, to truly benefit from being hawkish, it helps if your opponent is a softie whose party is implicated in a major foreign policy debacle. Today`s Democratic Party is not handicapped by this and seems more intent on channeling the spirit of John F. Kennedy than George McGovern or Jimmy Carter. Four of the five leading candidates for the Democratic nomination voted for the resolution supporting Bush on Iraq. And the voguish term for today`s Democratic frontrunner, decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry isn`t "pinko," but "tough dove."

The Road Ahead

Despite all the evidence that Republicans are not assured of winning in 2004, Democrats are hardly certain to knock off a sitting president. What the 2002 election and its aftermath reveal is that the underlying trends identified in The Emerging Democratic Majority have not been negated; they`ve been temporarily overwhelmed by Republican successes. The country is still changing in ways congenial to Democrats. A Democratic Party that practices smart, tough politics and fields viable candidates faces no fundamental obstacle to achieving political dominance by decade`s end.

But let`s get serious--can we really expect that from the Democrats? That`s what Republicans ask--and even many Democrats, who see the weaknesses in the current GOP position, but can`t quite bring themselves to subscribe to the message of my book. The truth is that many intelligent members of both parties believe the Republicans to be the only true practitioners of effective politics.

Perhaps this is why my party is currently out of power, but I believe differently. Take the Democrats` minority vote. Skeptics will point out that that devious Karl Rove has access to the same numbers I`ve laid out above and will certainly devise a plan to snare minority voters for Republicans in 2004 and beyond. True as far as it goes, but it doesn`t mean he`ll succeed. The 2002 elections showed just how little success Republicans have enjoyed so far. The fact of the matter is that the partisan affiliations, policy priorities, and views on the role of government of blacks and Hispanics skew dramatically toward the Democrats. It`s going to be difficult for Republicans to change their own priorities and approach to government enough to appeal to these groups and break down their Democratic affiliations.

So what about the gender gap? Isn`t the GOP making headway there as smart, tough Republican operatives take advantage of women`s sensitivity to public safety issues to move them away from the Democrats? Not really. Survey data from the 2002 election indicates that the gender gap favored Democrats about as much as it ever has. Gallup, whose pre-election poll nailed the result almost perfectly, had the gender gap slightly larger last year than in 2000. And Gallup data indicate that what really drove the surge toward Republicans just before the election was not security-conscious women, but those reliable Republican stand-bys: white men.

Now, it is true that women are substantially more likely than men to fear being the victim of a terrorist attack (see "Homeland Security is for Girls," The Washington Monthly, April 2003). So, even though it wasn`t much of a factor in 2002, perhaps those worried women will gravitate toward the GOP`s national security toughness over the longer haul? Not likely. On virtually every poll question one might care to look at, women are less likely than men to trust and support Bush administration policies on Iraq and related issues, the main vehicle through which the president is supposedly fighting terrorist attacks. Before the war started, a Los Angeles Times poll showed that more women opposed a U.S. invasion of Iraq without Security Council blessing than supported it; and even after war began, far fewer women than men approve of the way Bush is handling the situation.

Beyond that, look at the record Bush has amassed on his 2000 campaign promises. "Compassionate conservatism" flummoxed hapless Democrats the first time around, but by now the administration has several years of not-so-compassionate baggage to explain away. And its hard-right policies on the environment, Medicare, Social Security, tax cuts, and Iraq have polarized Democrats against them (so much for being "a uniter not a divider") and alienated moderates and independents--the principal targets of compassionate conservatism in the first place. In other words, a party`s policies and track record set real limits to what smartness and toughness can accomplish. The idea that Karl Rove can negate all this simply by waving his magic wand should not be taken seriously by Democrats or anyone else. What the Democrats should take seriously is the need to fight back and fight back hard, so they can exploit the underlying trends that are moving the country in a Democratic direction.

But these are trends, not guarantees. They`re meaningless unless Democrats can find the right combination of politics and ideas to fire up their base while appealing to independents and other swing voters. Can they do it?

There are encouraging signs. From Sen. Landrieu`s hard-fought special election to congressional Democrats` relentless campaign against the latest Bush tax cut to the hawkish position of most Democratic frontrunners, the party is in the process of refashioning itself to take advantage of Republican weaknesses and--just as important--avoid dumb mistakes. They need to build on this in 2004 and beyond by articulating an agenda that goes beyond reining in Republican excess and defending Social Security. Again, the signs are encouraging. The Democratic frontrunners, who set the tone for the party, have advanced serious proposals in areas like education, health care, pension reform, and international relations that could give voters a reason to back the Democrats.

John Judis and I argued that a Democratic majority was likely by the decade`s end. That`s still where I`d place my bet. But all the evidence I`ve laid out here suggests that Bush and the Republicans are vulnerable sooner, if Democrats can exploit those weaknesses. That would mean new ideas and compelling candidates. But, if they pull it off, that majority could come much sooner than you think--maybe even in 2004. You can say you read it here first.



Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and the author, with John B. Judis, of The Emerging Democratic Majority.


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0305.teixeira…

[Joerver]

US will provide no estimate of Iraqi war casualties
By Jerry Isaacs
28 April 2003
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Bush administration and Pentagon officials have made it clear they have no intention of providing an official estimate of the number of Iraqi soldiers and civilians who were killed or wounded by US and British forces during the three-week war.

According to the military brass, the US no longer does “body counts,” a reference to the often-inflated battlefield reports that contributed to galvanizing international and domestic opposition to the Vietnam War. In line with its efforts to sanitize the image of the US military, the Pentagon and the US news media have decided to conceal from the world and the American public the extent of the massacre that has occurred in Iraq.

The military is following the precedent established by then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who declared after the first Gulf War that he was “not terribly interested” in establishing how many Iraqi soldiers had been killed. This undisguised indifference to the human cost of the US invasion, and contempt for world public opinion, reflects the real thinking that predominates in the White House and the top echelons of the US military, where the Iraqi masses are looked upon as barely human.

The New York Times reported that the question of Iraqi casualties was not discussed at the daily briefings for senior commanders at Central Command. The newspaper said the military no longer requires its field commanders to count the number of enemy soldiers killed and wounded.

Captain Frank Thorp of the Navy, the chief spokesman at Central Command, said commanders had not been asked to keep track because it was “too time consuming” and “risky” to count corpses on the battlefield. “Out there in the combat environment,” he said, “the commander on the ground is focused on the present, the future and how his troops are doing. We are not going to ask him to make specific reports on enemy casualties.”

This attitude, reminiscent of the genocidal policy toward the American Indians and the haughty barbarism of European colonialists in Africa and Asia, has been directly encouraged by President Bush, who declared on several occasions that the US would not stop at “half measures” in its war of conquest against Iraq.

Casualties throughout Iraq were so high, according to the International Red Cross, that many hospitals—already overstretched as a result of bombing, looting and a lack of electricity, medicine and clean water—were too busy to keep track of the dead and wounded. There is no Iraqi authority left to count the dead and inform their families.

Anecdotal accounts, however, give a picture of the extent of the killing and maiming. In the southern city of Basra alone ambulance drivers and hospital workers estimate they have handled between 1,000 and 2,000 corpses since the outbreak of war March 20.

The Washington Post noted that in a cemetery in Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, cemetery workers spoke of hundreds, even thousands being buried from dawn to dusk during the three weeks of war. The newspaper wrote: “In a procession of sorrow, they came in minibuses and pickups, in taxis and vans, with simple wood coffins lashed to the roofs. Some bodies were hardly recognizable, exhumed after days, even weeks, from hastily dug graves. Others were only recently discovered at hospitals and mosques where they had been stashed with other corpses in the chaos of war.

“‘Everything we have in Iraq is rich, our oil, our resources, our land,’ said Shamil Abdel-Sahib, a 33-year-old who performed ritual washing of the bodies as they were brought to the cemetery. ‘The only thing that is cheap in Iraq is its people.’”

While the Pentagon has refused to release any official figures, the US Central Command reported that in just one engagement—the April 5 rampage by a column of US tanks and armored vehicles in Baghdad—2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed.

Unnamed US military officials have said that between 10,000 and 15,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed, but reports about the so-called “degradation” of Iraqi units’ combat strength would suggest that the number is considerably higher.

Before the war, military analysts said Iraq had 389,000 full-time active duty military personnel, including 80,000 Republican Guard soldiers. According to US military reports, these forces have been reduced to below 20 percent of combat strength. This would suggest that tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers were killed or wounded. With two-thirds of Iraq’s army drawn from conscripts—who are required to serve once they reach the age of 18—the net effect of the US assault was to wipe out a large portion of the young generation of Iraqi men.

After it became clear that the US was facing stiff resistance to the invasion, the Bush administration and the Pentagon decided to unleash massive firepower against the Iraqi defenders, regardless of the number of civilian and military casualties. The aim was to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible with precision weapons before any US ground forces came in contact with them.

“The bombing campaign that accompanied ground actions to squeeze Iraqi military units into ever-smaller ‘kill boxes’ almost certainly left thousands of soldiers dead, perhaps tens of thousands,” the New York Times reported.

This strategy was summed up by Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy, the commander of the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, a force of 1,500 soldiers that was equipped with tanks and armored vehicles, and backed by artillery, helicopter gun ships and fighter jets. This was one of the first units to reach Baghdad.

McCoy told a Times reporter his strategy of establishing “violent supremacy” meant killing anyone who took up a weapon against the US-British invaders, even if they were running away. He said, “We’re here until Saddam and his henchmen are dead.... It’s over for us when the last guy who wants to fight for Saddam has flies crawling across his eyeballs. Then we go home.”

McCoy’s equation of resistance against the invasion with political support for the regime of Saddam Hussein is typical of the war propaganda pumped out by the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the mass media. It was clear in the television reportage and the coverage in the print media that the word had gone out to always refer to resisters as die-hard Hussein partisans, supporters of the regime, etc. This language was calculated to induce in the public mind the notion that all those who opposed the American conquest of Iraq were implicated in the repressive policies of the regime, and presumably deserved to die, while discounting any possibility that Iraqis who opposed the regime also opposed the US invasion and occupation of their country.

Accounts from the perspective of the Iraqi soldiers have begun to be reported in the international media. For example, an infrantryman in the 6th Corps of the Republican Guard described how nine days of bombing decimated his unit of 2,000 men deployed to defend the town of Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Although the US media regularly portrayed Republican Guard soldiers as the best-trained and fiercest Iraqi fighters, Baha Aldin Jalal Abdul Ameer was a 21-year-old math student when he was conscripted after college and sent to defend Kut after only two months of training.

He told the Toronto Globe and Mail, “From the start, lots of my friends were killed by the bombs. There were at least 150 that I knew who died in the first few days. The bombs fell everywhere, blowing people apart and destroying everything.... At any moment you thought you were going to die.” At night, Ameer said, US forces had “night-vision goggles and they came at us constantly from the dark. We couldn’t see them, and they could kill us at will.”

The one-sided slaughter reportedly disturbed many American soldiers, who had been told that Iraqi soldiers would surrender without a fight. An article in the Christian Science Monitor noted that after one battle, a Marine from the Third Battalion said privately, “For lack of a better word, I feel almost guilty about the massacre. We wasted a lot of people. It makes you wonder how many were innocent. It takes away some of the pride. We won, but at what cost?”


Civilian casualties

The disdain towards Iraqi lives extends to civilians. Despite their efforts to portray the aim of the war as the “liberation” of the Iraqi people, US officials have said they will not quantify the number of dead and injured civilians, nor assess the property damage done to the civilian infrastructure.

Initial hospital reports, news media accounts and other sources estimate at least 3,500 civilians were killed and another 5,000 wounded. These numbers are mounting, as occupation forces continue the use of violence, particularly against anti-American demonstrators, and thousands more face the threat of unexploded ordinance, hunger and chronic diseases, such as cholera and diarrhea, caused by the lack of clean water and other unsanitary conditions.

Pentagon officials have dismissed these estimates of civilian deaths, claiming many of the dead were combatants dressed in civilian clothes or victims of the Iraqi defenders, rather than US cruise missiles, bombs and invading ground forces.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told a BBC reporter April 13, “We really don’t know how many civilian deaths there have been, and we don’t know how many of them can be attributed to coalition action, as opposed to action on the part of Iraqi armed forces as they defended themselves.”

In a bid to shore up the increasingly threadbare pretense that the war was fought on behalf of ordinary Iraqis, the US Congress inserted a measure into the recent $78.5 billion emergency spending bill for the war to provide token assistance to the families of “innocent” civilians killed or injured by US forces. The money will come out of the $2.5 billion relief and reconstruction fund earmarked for food, water, health care, transportation and other needs.

A spokesman for Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who sponsored the measure, said Congress, however, did not intend to create a formal claims process for the Iraqis or obligate the military to identify individuals or communities that suffered injury.

The Pentagon issued a two-sentence reply to the measure, saying the Defense Department “has no plans” to determine the total civilian casualty toll.

The claim that US officials have no way of knowing how many Iraqis were killed and injured is a lie. The Defense Department has the most advanced means of assessing the destructive impact of its weaponry, including the satellite “bomb assessment” photos that are regularly displayed before the media at Pentagon press conferences.

Moreover, military officials have confirmed that US soldiers, following the Geneva Conventions protocols on handling remains, recorded the identification of dead enemy soldiers and sent the information to “mortuary affairs” personnel in Kuwait before burying them in marked graves. Such documentation could be compiled, along with numbers from reliable witnesses, to obtain a low-end estimate of the number of Iraqi dead. The refusal to do so is a political decision.

Robert Turner at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that because the long-term plan includes running Iraq after the war, the military wants to keep casualty numbers as low as possible. “The more mothers and fathers lose children, the more wives lose husbands, the more anger there will be toward the people who killed them,” Turner said.

Moreover, the Pentagon wants to perpetuate the fraud that the war was waged against a formidable enemy that threatened the US with weapons of mass destruction. The fact that 165 coalition soldiers were killed versus tens of thousands of Iraqis underscores that the US used the most terrifying weapons of mass destruction to carry out the colonial conquest of an impoverished and defenseless country.

The ratio of US troops lost to enemy troops killed has few precedents. One, according to German military historian Ralph Rotte, was the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 in the Sudan, where the British, armed with rifles and machine guns, mowed down thousands of Sudanese tribesmen armed only with swords and lances.

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The Secrets of September 11
The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?


NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE


April 30 — Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks.
AT THE CENTER of the dispute is a more-than-800-page secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the attacks--including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001.
The report was completed last December; only a bare-bones list of "findings" with virtually no details was made public. But nearly six months later, a "working group" of Bush administration intelligence officials assigned to review the document has taken a hard line against further public disclosure. By refusing to declassify many of its most significant conclusions, the administration has essentially thwarted congressional plans to release the report by the end of this month, congressional and administration sources tell NEWSWEEK. In some cases, these sources say, the administration has even sought to "reclassify" some material that was already discussed in public testimony--a move one Senate staffer described as "ludicrous." The administration`s stand has infuriated the two members of Congress who oversaw the report--Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and Republican Rep. Porter Goss. The two are now preparing a letter of complaint to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Graham is "increasingly frustrated" by the administration`s "unwillingness to release what he regards as important information the public should have about 9-11," a spokesman said. In Graham`s view, the Bush administration isn`t protecting legitimate issues of national security but information that could be a political "embarrassment," the aide said. Graham, who last year served as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, recently told NEWSWEEK: "There has been a cover-up of this."

Graham`s stand may not be terribly surprising, given that the Florida Democrat is running for president and is seeking to use the issue himself politically. But he has found a strong ally in House Intelligence Committee Chairman Goss, a staunch Republican (and former CIA officer) who in the past has consistently defended the administration`s handling of 9-11 issues and is considered especially close to Cheney.

"I find this process horrendously frustrating," Goss said in an interview. He was particularly piqued that the administration was refusing to declassify material that top intelligence officials had already testified about. "Senior intelligence officials said things in public hearings that they [administration officials] don`t want us to put in the report," said Goss. "That`s not something I can rationally accept without further public explanation."

Unlike Graham, Goss insists there are no political "gotchas" in the report, only a large volume of important information about the performance and shortcomings of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies prior to September 11.

And even congressional staffers close to the process say it is unclear whether the administration`s resistance to public disclosure reflects fear of political damage or simply an ingrained "culture of secrecy" that permeates the intelligence community--and has strong proponents at the highest levels of the White House.

The mammoth report reflects nearly 10 months of investigative work by a special staff hired jointly by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and overseen by Eleanor Hill, a former federal prosecutor and Pentagon inspector general. Hill`s team got access to hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents from the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other executive-branch agencies. The staff also conducted scores of interviews with senior officials, field agents and intelligence officers. (They were not, however, given access to some top White House aides, such as national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice or other principals like Secretary of State Colin Powell or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.) The team`s report was approved by the two intelligence committees last Dec. 10. But because the document relied so heavily on secret material, the administration "working group," overseen by CIA director George Tenet, had to first "scrub" the document and determine which portions could be declassified.

More than two months later, the working group came back with its decisions--and some members were flabbergasted. Entire portions remained classified. Some of the report--including some dealing with matters that had been extensively aired in public, such as the now famous FBI "Phoenix memo" of July 2001 reporting that Middle Eastern nationals might be enrolling in U.S. flight schools--were "reclassified." Hill has since submitted proposed changes to the working group, pointing out the illogic of trying to pull back material that was already in the public domain. But officials have indicated the "review" process is likely to drag on for months--with no guarantees that the "working group" will be any more amenable to public disclosure.

A U.S. intelligence official cited international distractions as at least one reason for the delays. "In case you hadn`t noticed, there have been two wars going on," the official said. The official added: "We`re working this [report] to try to get it out without putting lives at risk and without endangering sources and methods." Asked why the working group was refusing to permit disclosure of material that had already been made public, the official said: "Just because something had been inadvertently released, doesn`t make it unclassified."

The administration`s tough stand, some sources say, doesn`t augur well for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks--which is conducting its own investigation into the events of 9-11. Already, flaps have developed on that front, as well. When one commissioner, former congressman Tim Roemer, last week sought to review transcripts of some of the joint inquiry`s closed-door hearings, he was denied access--because the commission staff had agreed to a White House request to allow its lawyers to first review the material to determine if the president wants to invoke executive privilege to keep the material out of the panel`s hands.

"I think it`s outrageous," says Roemer, who plans to raise the matter at a commission hearing this week. But a commission staffer says he expected the White House review to be finished by the end of the week, and it was unclear whether the president`s lawyers would try to invoke executive privilege--a stand that would almost certainly provoke a major legal battle with the panel.

The tensions over the release of 9-11 related material seems especially relevant--if not ironic--in light of recent reports that the president`s political advisers have devised an unusual re-election strategy that essentially uses the story of September 11 as the liftoff for his campaign. The White House is delaying the Republican nominating convention, scheduled for New York City, until the first week in September 2004--the latest in the party`s history. That would allow Bush`s acceptance speech, now slated for Sept. 2, to meld seamlessly into 9-11 commemoration events due to take place in the city the next week.

Some sources who have read the still-secret congressional report say some sections would not play quite so neatly into White House plans. One portion deals extensively with the stream of U.S. intelligence-agency reports in the summer of 2001 suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning an upcoming attack against the United States--and implicitly raises questions about how Bush and his top aides responded. One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic. It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike "in the coming weeks," the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing went on to say: "The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

The substance of that intelligence report was first disclosed at a public hearing last September by staff director Hill. But at the last minute, Hill was blocked from saying precisely who within the Bush White House got the briefing when CIA director Tenet classified the names of the recipients. (One source says the recipients of the briefing included Bush himself.) As a result, Hill was only able to say the briefing was given to "senior government officials."

That issue is now being refought in the context over the full report. The report names names, gives dates and provides a body of new information about the handling of many other crucial intelligence briefings--including one in early August 2001 given to national-security adviser Rice that discussed Al Qaeda operations within the United States and the possibility that the group`s members might seek to hijack airplanes. The administration "working group" is still refusing to declassify information about the briefings, sources said, and has even expressed regret that some of the material was ever provided to congressional investigators in the first place.

A NEW HAND IN HOMELAND SECURITY
The White House is once again shuffling the deck in the staffing of top terrorism jobs, NEWSWEEK has learned. Gen. John A. Gordon--who has wielded broad if largely unseen powers as deputy national-security advisor in charge of combating terrorism--is moving up to become White House homeland-security adviser, a post formerly held by Tom Ridge. The new job is expected to give the brusque and secretive Gordon even more power as a "principal" with direct access to Bush. (Ridge is now secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.) Sources say Gordon beat out ex-FBI official James Kallstrom--an old ally of former FBI director Louis Freeh--for the key post.

The elevation of Gordon is the latest sign of the increasing prominence of intelligence-community veterans throughout the upper reaches of the government under Bush. (FBI director Robert Mueller, for example, recently reached outside the ranks of his law-enforcement agents to select Maureen A. Baginski, a former National Security Agency deputy director, to oversee FBI intelligence efforts.) For his part, Gordon was a former deputy CIA director with a reputation as a "a results-oriented guy" who has little patience for bureaucratic procedures, according to one former government official who has worked with him.

Gordon`s departure, however, leaves vacancies at the two top White House counterterrorism jobs: Gordon`s old post and that of his former deputy, Rand Beers, who resigned the week the war in Iraq began. On the surface, the vacancies seem conspicuous in an administration that has made combating terrorism the centerpiece of its policies. But sources say a vigorous search has been underway and replacements are likely to be named shortly.



© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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[Joerver]

Texas State Quarter Recall: The United States Treasury has announced they are recalling the new Texas quarters. "We are recalling all of the new Texas quarters that were recently issued," Treasury Undersecretary Russell Shackelford said in a press conference Monday.

"This comes in the wake of numerous reports to this agency that the quarters will not work in parking meters, toll booths, vending machines, pay phones, or other coin-operated devices." "We believe the problem lies in a design flaw," said Shackelford. The winning design for the Texas quarter was submitted by Texas A&M student William Doutrieux. "Apparently, the duct tape holding the two dimes and nickel together keeps jamming the coin-operated devices."

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Thom Hartmann: `Crime of the century: A never-ending `war against terrorism``
Posted on Thursday, May 01 @ 09:53:08 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Thom Hartmann

During this lull in the fighting between the 2002 election cycle Iraq conflict and the soon-to-come 2004 election cycle conflict, it`s a good time to (anonymously) sit in a library or bookstore and browse "The Turner Diaries" and Gore Vidal`s "Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace."

The former was the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh; the latter includes his self-written eulogy. Together, they show how terrorist McVeigh choose the wrong administration - and terrorist Osama bin Laden, by luck of the draw, chose the right one - to harm American democracy.

The Turner Diaries is an apocalyptic novel that opens with a convenience store robbery and ends with an Armageddon-style worldwide holocaust leaving only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants standing. The government of the United States responds to a terrorist attack (the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma) by cracking down on dissent, expanding the power of the Executive Branch, and shredding constitutional civil rights protections. White "patriots" respond by declaring war against the government that had once tried to take away their guns. Thus begins the cycle of violence that ends with the ultimate worldwide war, a vision straight out of the Book of Revelation.



But Tim McVeigh`s expectation of a repressive federal reaction to his right-wing terrorism ran into a snag: Bill Clinton knew the difference between a rogue nation and a rogue criminal.

Like every President since George Washington, Bill Clinton knew that nations only declare war against nations. While armies deal with rogue states, police deal with criminals, be they domestic or international.

Like Germany`s response to the Red Army Faction, Italy`s response to The Red Brigades, and Greece`s response to the 17 November terrorist group (among others), Clinton brought the full force of the criminal justice system against McVeigh, and even had Interpol and overseas police agencies looking for possible McVeigh affiliates. The result was that the trauma of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing was limited, closure was achieved for its victims, the civil rights of all Americans were largely left intact, and the United States government was able to get back to it`s constitutionally-defined job of ensuring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for its citizens.

Every President from Washington to Clinton understood the logic expressed by our founders when James Madison, on April 20, 1795, wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

"In war, too," Madison continued, "the discretionary power of the Executive [Branch of Government] is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

Although numerous recent presidents have declared "wars" on abstractions like poverty, illiteracy, drugs, and a variety of other social ills, all were well aware that these so-called "wars" were, in truth, just politically useful rhetoric. Real war can only be declared by one nation against another: it`s not possible to declare a war against an abstraction.

The crime of 911 has been often cited to rationalize the loss of civil liberties and the ongoing traumatizing of the American people with daily "Terror Alerts" and a never-ending "war on terror."

But 911 wasn`t an act of war, because it wasn`t done against us by a nation. It was, instead, a crime, perpetrated by a criminal and his followers.

It was a horrific crime, certainly. A crime that required strong, swift, and sure response. A crime that other nations, corporations, and individuals may have abetted and must be held accountable for both domestically and in the international venues of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. A crime deserving a thorough investigation (which has yet to begin).

But Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are not nations. Bin Laden was a criminal, and his group was a Middle Eastern sort of mafia with terrorist ambitions, initially funded by Poppy bin Laden, who was coincidentally a business partner with Poppy Bush. And, according to most of the world`s police and intelligence agencies, Osama is dead (or dying) and his organization is in tatters.

To continue using our military against a criminal organization will only compound the horrific crime of 911, because armies aren`t particularly good at police work.

It`s time to restore civil liberties to Americans; reign in an Executive Branch intoxicated by warfare; and hand over to American and international police agencies the very real and very big job of dealing with the remnants of al Qaeda around the world, and prevent a recurrence of 911 by investigating who was involved and how they pulled it off in the first place.

Anything less will simply perpetuate this crime of the century.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is the author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise Of Corporate Dominance And The Theft Of Human Rights" and hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio talk show on the i.e. America Radio Network. www.thomhartmann.com and www.ieamericaradio.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this

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April 30, 2003 Halcyon Days Home

There’s that socially awkward moment after you’ve knocked the girl to the ground and you don’t know whether to rape her or steal her purse.

If you’re the United States in Iraq you say, Let’s do both!

With America walking tall and much of the world succumbing to let’s-move-on itis, the Bush administration figures now is the time to railroad a resolution through the U.N. ending sanctions and shifting disbursements of Iraq’s oil profits either to Jay Garner’s regime or to the IIA, the Illegitimate and Impotent Acronym, oops “Iraqi Interim Authority”, now morphing into the Chalabi-ready “Iraq Transitional Government”.

Under normal circumstances, getting the world’s approval for turning Iraq into the private ATM of Halliburton, Bechtel et.al.might not be easy.

After all, the U.S. and the U.K. invaded Iraq without a U.N. mandate, received no surrender from the Iraq government, and have yet to find any WMDs that might provide an ex post facto veneer of legitimacy to the war.

In other words, a pretty straightforward case of unprovoked aggression, conquest, and occupation. Not exactly what the U.N. was designed to promote or reward.

Most likely the Bush administration will fall back on the same sophisticated approach it has been using with the U.N. since last year: I’m going to do it anyway, so you might as well approve it. And if you don’t, well f*ck you.

Russia and France might try to withhold the UN’s approval, and try to saddle the US with the “You broke it you buy it” approach of having America pay for the mess it’s making. But the US will seize the oil revenues anyway.

After the Bush administration starts using Iraq’s oil to finance its plans for Iraq without UN interference—or the need to go cap in hand to Congress cap in hand for a hundred billion to put Humpty Dumpty together again—the question of what to do with Iraq comes to the forefront.

Rumsfeld now has an interesting dilemma. The neocon think-tank recipe for Iraq--a federated sack of sand without control of its own military, security, or intelligence portfolios--is seemingly ripped from the cookbook Ariel Sharon wrote for Palestine. In both instances, the intent is to impose a weak, compromised leader conspicuously beholden to a foreign power (Mahmoud Abbas/Israel and Ahmed Chalabi/US), thereby guaranteeing an impotent, illegitimate, and insecure state providing ample and continuous pretexts for foreign interference and control.

If all goes according to plan, the US can officially bail out of Iraq and leave a mess--because it wants to leave a mess.

Unfortunately, the Shi’ites are apparently ready to clean up Rummy’s mess for him. So if the U.S. needs to do some serious nation-building i.e. fragment Shi’ite power through a combination of force, bribery, propaganda, and subversion and forestall the rise of a politically united and hostile Iraq nation, we can’t cut and run. Our creeped-out troops will have to hunker down, with the unpleasant prospect of gunning down rock-throwing civilians mixed with armed provocateurs for a few years to come. It will be interesting to see how eager our Polish and Danish auxiliaries will be for that kind of duty.

Ironically, instead of solving Israel’s West Bank problem through a massive, intimidating injection of American might into the Middle East, which is what the Iraq war was supposed to do, the U.S. may have simply duplicated and magnified the problem on the scale of a country the size of California.

Although Ariel Sharon is probably giving America good advice on how to handle popular insurrection and terrorism in Iraq (“Just line up a row of tanks and bulldozers from Turkey to the Gulf, drive east, and don’t stop until New Delhi”), Sharon may have to pull another bloody and less successful example out of his bag of tricks—his catastrophic foray into Lebanon.

If Shinseki was right, Wolfowitz was wrong, and our little force cannot effectively occupy all of Iraq, the problem is not just Israelized, it’s Lebanized, with U.S. forces occupying only sectors of a hostile country without being the controlling or legitimizing power. Or as we say in America, Shalom, Vietnam!

Meanwhile, another brazen power play is taking place within the United States over the historical record of the war and its runup.

Seemingly in direct proportion to the lack of WMDs found, the war party is trumpeting the humanitarian justification for its invasion of Iraq, just as idiotic French bashing escalates in response to the lukewarm local and international reception given to our occupation.

The purpose of course is to impale the anti-war party on a cleft stick, torn between its abhorrence of American imperialism and its desire to do the right thing by the Iraqi people.

Of course, an “invasion of liberation” was never on the ideological agenda during the pre-war period simply because it’s absurd. You don’t show your love for people by bombing and killing them. And the floundering and frantic effort of the United States to improvise a post-Saddam regime (Calling All Quislings!) indicates that democratic future of the “valued” Iraqi people was never a priority.

History offers a long but inglorious list of “invaders welcomed as liberators”. A striking instance occurred not so long ago in an empire not so far away.

The technologically and tactically pre-eminent force of its day stormed into a land that had groaned under the most ferocious oppression. Ecstatic civilians showered the invading tanks with the local victory mix: flowers, salt, and bread. The evil oppressor: The Soviet Union. The victims: Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. The liberator: Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

The Japanese army experienced similar scenes in colonial Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and Vietnam as they chased away the unpopular British, French, and Dutch overlords.

In each case, the honeymoon was over in a matter of weeks. The conquerors got back to the grim business of shooting people and knocking things down with their usual ferocity, and the thoughts of the subjugated turned from liberation to survival and resistance.

In our fast-paced, made-for-TV age, even though our outnumbered and isolated occupying forces are laboring mightily to keep civilian casualties per incident in the double digits, the sheen seems to be wearing off the Iraq occupation just as quickly.

The true value of the example of the Ukraine and the Baltic states lies in their precious second chance at liberation. It occurred almost exactly 50 years after Adolf’s botched invasion.

A measured policy of containment, rapprochement, and encouragement of human rights, freedom of expression, and self-determination by the U.S. and NATO abetted not only the collapse of the Soviet empire, but the rapid and relatively non-violent creation of indigenous and popular democratic institutions.

It also relied upon a legitimate, popular, and non-coercive alliance between the United States and the European nations whose commitment to the economic development of the independent states made the whole thing work.

This policy requires patience, principle, and a certain degree of respect both for our allies and the people being liberated, traits all conspicuously absent from our current Supremo’s profile and our adventure in Iraq.

Parenthetically, it also yielded the only truly enthusiastic (if largely non-martial) national allies in Bush’s COW herd: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other ex-Soviet bloc states.

The war we saw on TV apparently lacked the horrific intensity and collateral catastrophe (no anti-US terrorism, no explosion of rage on the Arab street) needed to persuade our armchair imperialists that war is a bad thing, or make us nostalgic for the non-military alternatives for Iraq that the Bush administration willfully pre-empted or foreclosed.

There is still hope that oil money, frantic effort, and the noble willingness of the American press to draw a decent veil over our ineptitude in Iraq will allow us to declare that we have won the peace, at least to the satisfaction of those who refuse to count the human, political, and financial cost.

Even so, the unwillingness of the Iraqis to live under overt US hegemony should dispel the American illusion that the world is begging for our foot up its ass. Love for the democratizing and fructifying power of the American boot does not trump nationalism, sovereignty, and the desire for self-determination and cannot legitimize our unilateral military aggression.

Probably our moral confusion will manifest itself as guilty indifference, racist condescension, impatience, and resentment for the looting, fanatical, and ungrateful Iraqis who presume to take the snap out of our carflags by showing that a war fought well does not a good war make.

But let’s just wait and see how many other peoples line up and beg us to bomb and invade them.

It’s too late to put the toothpaste back into the tube, uninvade Iraq, and legitimize our 12-year campaign against Iraq by replacing sanctions, bombing, lies, and subversion with diplomacy, engagement, and multilateralism.

But maybe next time we’ll realize we don’t have to rape the world in order to save it.


Copyright 2003 Peter Lee

http://halcyondays.home.attbi.com/index/power.html

Re: Peter Lee: `Power play` (Score: 1)
by ber on Thursday, May 01 @ 10:32:00 EDT
(User Info)

Apparently, we`re in negotiations right now to pay the Poles to send peacekeeping troops. Blair met with eight countries of the willing to arrange for replacement troops for the UK soldiers who are going to leave; the Poles say they`d love to help out but they`re broke. But, hey! Aren`t we already giving them a bunch of dollars in loans so they can buy those F-18s or whatever number they are??

As for setting an interim authority, government, whatever -- as long as the US refuses to deal with the UN, this effort looks doomed. It may be that Lee is right and that some in the administration want the effort to be doomed. But I think failure won`t make it easy or easier for us to extract Iraqi resources. I think it will make it increasingly dangerous and unprofitable. And then what will we do? Simply install permanent military bases around the oilfields? Even Fox News would have to admit that looks just a tad suspicious.

There are days and this is one of them when this situation strikes me as simply insane. I really don`t understand how our government let this happen. We simply refused to look honestly at the Israeli-Palestinian situation and then recapitulated the formula in Iraq. All in the name of making the world secure. It really is demented.

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Spun dizzy by Dubya

by Jeremy Voas
4/30/2003 8:00:00 AM

What some are calling a new strain of McCarthyism.

Isn’t it amazing, my friend asks, how the White House successfully spun the war in Iraq to win the support of the majority of Americans?

No, I am not surprised at all, I respond. Americans are malleable, like Silly Putty. Any society that can be convinced that $150 sneakers are the key to status is easily swayed by the power of suggestion. Repeat a notion often enough on television, and Americans will buy it. Or buy into it. Or kill someone to get it.

The administration has proved beyond a doubt that as long as there’s a leering bogeyman, you can even alter the pitch in mid-campaign. First it was Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. When the United Nations didn’t buy that, it became — voilà — liberation of the Iraqis.

Of course, the United Nations never debated the latter question, and neither did we Americans. It was a classic bait-and-switch made possible by the steamrolling of opposition wherever it appeared. Complicit in the effort were the putative “opposition” on Capitol Hill and the mainstream media, which were either too timid to ask competent questions or too bloodthirsty (for Yankee vengeance and huge ratings) to want to.

Now that he’s conquered Iraq, our esteemed leader has launched a campaign for a cause as nonsensical as invading far-flung Third World countries. His remedy for the loss of 2 million U.S. jobs since he took his oath is to eliminate the tax on dividend earnings.

Last week, he mobilized his monosyllabic juggernaut and invaded the great state of Ohio, whose dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican U.S. Senator, George Voinovich, has demonstrated the temerity to derail Bush’s tax giveaway. Voinovich and Maine’s GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe are the bogeymen du jour, because they joined Senate Democrats in limiting Bush’s $726 billion subsidy for Wall Street investors to a paltry $350 billion.

Displaying his trademark eloquence, the Liberator of Baghdad told a flag-waving gallery in Ohio that a $350 billion cut was “itty bitty.”

The attempt at fiscal responsibility has earned these two Republicans the wrath of Dubya, whose braying sycophantic allies bought a six-figure TV ad campaign attacking Voinovich and Snowe. The message was ever so subtle, clumsily issued under the brand name “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

“At home, President Bush has proposed bold job-creating tax cuts to boost the economy,” the ads say. “But some so-called Republicans like [Voinovich or Snowe] stand in the way.”

In the TV spots, Voinovich and Snowe appear next to the flags of France. They’re cheese-eating traitors, though both voted to give Bush the authority to make war on Iraq.

It’s a manifestation of what some are calling a permutation of McCarthyism — the bellicose and methodical demonization of any and all who deign to oppose. Tail Gunner Joe rose to prominence by hurling frequently baseless accusations against his foes, and many in the press, fueled by Cold War fervor and the lust for a headline, unquestioningly abetted the character assassin.

Or perhaps current events evoke the memory of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, wherein liberals and intellectuals were subjected to often lethal persecution under a program of “rectification.”

The shrill vilification of artists and “celebrities” (who’ve stepped forward to fill the void of dissent created by spineless politicos) suggests a new strain of cultural coarseness and vacuity.

The fact that American forces ignored repeated warnings — and, indeed, their own occupation plan — in allowing the looting and destruction of irreplaceable artifacts and documents from Iraq’s museums and libraries only buttresses the suspicion that since Dubya don’t talk so purdy (never will), cultural history and heritage and any whiff of refinement are conveniently antithetical.

As the sacking was in progress, Bush went on TV to tell the Iraqi people in subtitles that they are “the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.”

Rather, they were the heirs.

Meanwhile, back in Lima, Ohio, Bush continued his martial plan with a photo opportunity-pep rally at the plant that produces the M1-A1 Abrams tank, one of the stars of Bush’s TV miniseries in Iraq. Our buff prez clambered atop one of the machines to sing the praises of the vehicle and of Yankee ingenuity, to shamelessly quicken America’s atavistic pulse.

The tank maneuver, like virtually everything else orchestrated by Bush’s chickenhawk brain trust, drips with irony.

Many Americans know that the commander in chief ducked military service in Vietnam with a cushy assignment in the Texas Air National Guard. It was arranged by the speaker of the Texas House at the request of George H.W. Bush, then a congressman.

But how many know that Dubya couldn’t even be troubled to fulfill those obligations? In 1973, his two superior officers could not perform his annual evaluation because, they wrote, “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report.” There is no statute of limitations on the crime of desertion.

Americans can’t put the image of Bush on a tank into objective context because they are abysmally informed. Many lack the skill to absorb — or desire to seek — diverse data. Most get their news from TV. Did you know that the entire text of a half-hour network news report would fit on a page or two of the paper you’re reading? That superficiality might help explain why half the people in this country believe Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the terror attacks of 9-11. That’s exactly what the president wants them to think.

I wonder about the correlation between a person’s level of education and attitudes regarding the war in Iraq. I call Larry Hugick, vice president and director of political polling for Princeton Survey in New Jersey.

He laughs when I pose my question.

“There is a correlation, sure,” he says. “Sometimes the gap isn’t as large as you’d think, but yeah, of course, there is a correlation.”

Specifically, when Princeton Survey conducted a poll for Newsweek magazine on April 10-11, as the fighting was still raging, respondents were asked: “Whatever your feelings about the Iraq war now, do you think the United States should have begun military action against Iraq when it did, or do you think the United States should have waited longer to try to achieve its goals in Iraq diplomatically?”

Seventy percent of the overall sample said the war should have begun. Twenty-six percent said the United States should have waited longer.

Among college graduates, however, a lesser number, 60 percent, said the timing was right. The percentage of those approving of the invasion went up to 77 percent among respondents with a high school diploma or less.

It’s difficult to make a sweeping conclusion based on one poll. Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, whose findings mirror those of the Princeton Survey’s, attributes the disparity to the probability that highly educated people tend to be Democrats.

I wonder if it’s simpler than that — a matter of information. Or rather, the ability and desire to be informed.

Before you tar me for some foray into elitism, I must disclose that I am a statistical anomaly. I have no college degree.

And I don’t think one is required to recognize that Americans are being spun like tops. Sooner or later, equilibrium vanishes.


Jeremy Voas is the editor of Metro Times. E-mail [e-mail].
Copyright 2003, Metro Times, Inc.

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=4856

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May 1, 2003
New Defendants in Enron Case Surrender in Houston
By KURT EICHENWALD


Seven of eight new defendants expected to be charged with taking part in various frauds at Enron surrendered to federal authorities in Houston today. They included Lea Weingarten Fastow, wife of Enron`s former chief financial officer, Andrew S. Fastow.

Mrs. Fastow, 41, a former Enron assistant treasurer, walked into the Internal Revenue Service office just after dawn. At the same time, six men who once worked for Enron`s Internet division were surrendering at an F.B.I. office in Houston.

About an hour later, Mrs. Fastow was escorted in handcuffs into Federal District Court in downtown Houston. The six men were also taken to the courthouse in handcuffs.

The eighth person had a family emergency today but was expected to turn himself in later, The Houston Chronicle reported.

Indictments against the eight, the most important charges in the case so far, were scheduled to be unsealed in court this morning, people involved in the case said on Wednesday.

The indictments will name the eight in different fraud schemes. The defendants include a former treasurer and a former head of one of Enron`s most prominent divisions. Mrs. Fastow`s husband is already facing criminal charges.

The new charges, filed earlier this week under seal, will be included in what are known as superseding indictments, which effectively supplement other charges already filed by adding new accusations or new defendants. In this case, charges superseding two indictments will name the eight new defendants, in addition to three already charged, people involved in the case said.

The first set of charges involve assertions of illegal activities in the company`s finance division, headed by Mr. Fastow, the architect of the byzantine partnerships that contributed significantly to Enron`s collapse. Mr. Fastow was indicted in October on charges that he used the partnerships to enrich himself illegally and manipulate the company`s income statements.

In documents filed in the case against Mr. Fastow, his wife appeared to have played a role permitting him to disguise illegal payments he received from an associate, Michael Kopper. Mr. Kopper has already pleaded guilty to fraud and is cooperating with the government. Mrs. Fastow`s charges were said to involve wire fraud and possible tax accusations. A spokesman for the Fastows declined to comment on the possible indictments.

Another executive who people involved in the case said would be named in the Fastow indictment is Ben Glisan, who was handpicked by Mr. Fastow in 2000 to take on the crucial role of treasurer. About that same time, the government says, Mr. Fastow provided Mr. Glisan with the opportunity to invest in a risk-free deal called Southampton, which enabled him to transform a few thousand dollars into a million dollars in a matter of weeks. Lawyers for Mr. Glisan did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The last official to be named in the Fastow indictment, people involved in the case said, is a midlevel executive who helped to structure the financing for what the government asserts was a bogus sale by Enron of a group of Nigerian barges that it owned. People involved in the case said that among the evidence that the government found compelling against the executive were two e-mail messages to him from Mr. Glisan.

The second set of charges expected to be unsealed today will supersede an indictment brought in March against two executives in the company`s broadband division, which was formed in the final years before Enron`s bankruptcy.

Among those to be indicted in the new charges are Kenneth Rice, head of the division known as Enron Broadband Services, which the company heralded at the time as its means of profiting from the high-speed Internet business. A special Enron grand jury handed up the sealed broadband indictment on Tuesday, a development reported on Wednesday by The Houston Chronicle.

People involved in the case said that the new charges center largely on what the government thinks was false information about the prospects and capabilities of the broadband unit. In particular, the charges are said to focus on positive statements that some of the executives made at an analyst conference in January 2000, which the government has already attacked in an indictment against two broadband executives, Kevin Howard and Michael Krautz.

In that indictment, the government asserted that "many of the representations made about Enron`s network and software at the Jan. 20, 2000, analyst conference were false."

All of the other broadband executives to be named in the indictments to be unsealed today — including Joseph Hirko, Kevin Hannon, Rex Shelby and Scott Yeager — each had different roles in representing the potential and abilities of the growing business. Many of these executives did not work at Enron long, having either joined the company in the late 1990`s after its acquisition of their former employer, Portland General, or joined after subsequent high-technology acquisitions.

The new charges will also spell out further details of the transaction that was at the heart of the original charges against Mr. Howard and Mr. Krautz, people involved in the case said. That complex transaction, known as Braveheart, permitted Enron to convert a joint venture it had with Blockbuster to provide video-on-demand services into $111 million in earnings through a sale that the government asserts was bogus.

Lawyers for the various executives either declined to comment or could not be reached on Wednesday.

The charges raise some interesting issues. For example, while Mr. Hirko will be charged criminally with fraud, a federal judge last week dismissed him from the civil case against Enron executives, effectively asserting that there was insufficient evidence that he played a role in fraud. Moreover, Richard Causey, the former chief accounting officer who was specifically identified by title in the original Fastow charge as taking part in crimes, will not be charged today.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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COMMENTARY
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-masters…
Media Monopolies Have Muzzled Dissent
By Ian Masters
May 1, 2003

If information is the oxygen of democracy, the United States has just been gassed, not by weapons of mass destruction but by a weapon of mass distraction.

With George W. Bush basking in glorious ratings and Fox News climbing in the ratings, we may be moving toward a coronation instead of a reelection in 2004. It was, after all, Rupert Murdoch`s unilateral anointment of Bush as the winner in the early hours of the morning after the undecided 2000 election that led Al Gore to foolishly concede, because he and the other networks believed what they saw on Fox Television.

Now the marriage between a government and its volunteer information ministry has been consecrated by the blessed victory of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the geopolitical equivalent of an O.J. meets "Joe Millionaire" wrapped in the flag.

Totalitarian regimes don`t tolerate any distinction between journalism and propaganda, but in most democracies it is unprecedented for the free press to abandon Joseph Pulitzer for the methods of Joseph Goebbels.

How did a born-again, family-values administration get in bed with a purveyor of misogyny and mayhem, trash and titillation? The common thread, for all the public piety, has to be the late Lee Atwater, who was friend, mentor and role model to George W., Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, the head hound in the Fox pound of junkyard attack-dog journalism.

This undemocratic confluence of politics and propaganda has long been in the making as corporate media have been incrementally empowered while public influence, input and "interest" have been eliminated.

The transformation of active citizens into passive consumers was enabled by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan`s Mark Fowler, who declared "the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants."

Welcome to America, Mr. Murdoch: You can buy the airwaves and, who knows, some day the presidency.

TV`s Fox could not get away with its shameless shilling for the White House if the Fairness Doctrine were still in place, and radio`s Clear Channel monopoly would not be able to impose wall-to-wall Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage, etc., on the public if broadcasters were accountable to public opinion rather than the dictates of plutocrats.

How could it be that in the land of the free and the home of the brave Americans are afraid of opinions? Where are the Tom Paines, the Mark Twains, the Menckens, the Ida Tarbells?

Dissent has not gone away; it has just been marginalized by monopolies and relegated to the interstices of the Internet.

But the hammer is about to drop on the Internet too. The head of the FCC, Michael Powell, wants to give away what`s left of the store to the broadband cable and satellite providers and make them gatekeepers or tollbooths on the information highway.

It used to be that the Internet was accessed via a common carrier, the phone company, but as technology has moved forward, these new unregulated media monopolies have increasing control over the information pipeline. Without regulation, they have the ability to choose what content they provide.

Two FCC commissioners want to delay this hand-over and encourage public debate, but the public is largely unaware of what is at stake.

Obviously you can`t expect the Limbaughs, O`Reillys and their bosses or their president in the White House to give them talking points on preserving diversity of opinion while there is a tax cut to sell.

So speak up, America: It`s your country, they`re your airwaves. Maybe you can pursue the American dream while you are asleep, but it will be too late to reclaim your country`s freedom when you wake up.



If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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Published: Apr 30 2003


Don`t Try This At Home
Preemption Strikes Back

Barry Lando is a former CBS producer of 60 Minutes, and has also contributed to CBS News, Time magazine and Time-Life.


September 11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq have drastically rewritten the rules of international politics. Neoconservatives are jubilant. But around the world, other leaders are drawing their own conclusions, conclusions which may come to haunt the United States.

No nation has watched with more interest than India, locked for the past 50 years in an intractable struggle with Pakistan over control of Kashmir. With tension mounting again between those two nuclear powers, President George W. Bush is sending Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the region.

His visit could be preceded by a presidential phone call to Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee, which could go something like this:

G.W. Bush: Good day, Mr. Prime Minister. I am calling to urge you to seek a peaceful solution to your conflict. We stand ready to help, but I have to say I disliked your foreign minister`s latest remarks. Where does he get off saying a preemptive Indian strike against Pakistan would be more justified than our attack on Saddam?

P.M. Vajpayee: Mr. President, you`ve got your Perle and Cheney and Rumsfeld. Well, I`ve got my own hardliners trying to shape policy. But I fight for peace. I have just announced I`m ready to sit down with the Pakistanis. But there is no way we can discuss peace until they stop supporting terrorist attacks against our country.

G.W. Bush: Well, the Pakistanis also say they`re ready to talk, and that they have stopped supporting terrorism.

P.M. Vajpayee: Another Pakistani lie! We estimate there are 3,000 Pakistani-backed terrorists in Kashmir. Militants in the Pakistani Army and intelligence services have supported them for years! Don`t tell me your State Department and CIA don`t know that.

G.W. Bush: We accept terrorism from no one. You can be sure Armitage will make that clear when he talks with President Musharaff.

P.M. Vajpayee: Your Mr. Armitage came here twice last year, and promised to halt Pakistan`s support of terrorists. But they continue. Just recently terrorists backed by the Pakistanis walked into a village in Kashmir and slaughtered 24 of the 52 Hindus living there.

G.W. Bush: I sympathize, Mr. Prime Minister. But now is a time for restraint, for the common good.

P.M. Vajpayee: Mr. President, we understand that you support Musharaff. You needed his help in Afghanistan and Iraq. But what do you expect us to do? You, the most powerful leader on the globe, called Saddam Hussein a threat to your country. Yet you were never able to connect him to Al Qaeda, and you`re still frantically looking for his weapons of mass destruction. But Pakistan has the bomb, and harbors more Al Qaeda and Taliban members than any other country. Talk about an axis of evil!

G.W. Bush: We are going to deal with that. Mark my word.

P.M. Vajpayee: And so will we, Mr. President. I am trying to calm the passions. But you have shown that a democracy must defend itself, even if it means acting in defiance of the world. I`m hearing that line every day now from our religious and nationalist extremists. And believe me, I have some real crusaders. If extremists had the same influence in my country that they do in yours, we`d have already bombed Pakistan.

G.W. Bush: That would be a disaster for all mankind.

P.M. Vajpayee: Frankly, Mr. President, you say you went into Iraq to bring democracy to that country. But in a recent newspaper poll here, 80 percent of the people said they don`t believe that line. Most think you`re after oil.

G.W. Bush: Well that`s dead wrong. We are a great nation. We are not after conquest.

P.M. Vajpayee: Maybe so, Mr. President. But look at our situation: Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Extremists could take over any day. Just last week their foreign minister boasted that their missiles were better than ours.

G.W. Bush: I believe one of your ministers also said that India could wipe Pakistan right off the map. Be reasonable, Mr. Prime Minister. We`re your most important source of foreign investment and trading partner. We don`t want to twist arms, but several U.N. resolutions call for India to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir. You`ve refused to do that.

P.M. Vajpayee: Mr. President, you can`t be serious. Sacrifice our nation`s security because of some U.N. resolution? How many resolutions has Israel ignored while you say nothing?

G.W. Bush: Yes, well, we`re talking to Sharon about that. Things are going to change there. We`ve got a road map.

P.M. Vajpayee: Put yourself in my shoes, Mr. President. India is a crazy patchwork of Hinduism and Islam. If we allowed Kashmir to break away because it`s mostly Islamic, India could come apart at the seams. If I cave to Pakistani demands, I`ll be gone the next day. Gandhi was assassinated. So were two of my predecessors. Our fanatics are like yours -- they don`t fool around.

G.W. Bush: I am calling on you to be courageous, Mr. Prime Minister. This is a time for men of principle to take a stand.

P.M. Vajpayee: You know what some of my hardliners want me to do? Test our hydrogen bomb. Really send a signal -- and not just to Pakistan. Believe me, everyone gets uncomfortable these days when your hardliners talk about who`s next on your hit list. In fact, from here it looks like it`s Rumsfeld running your foreign policy.

G.W. Bush: Look, Mr. Prime Minister, you can be sure it`s me calling the shots.

P.M. Vajpayee: Well, believe it or not, some of my aids think you`ll come after us one day, maybe to support your ally Musharaff. Who knows? After all, we do have weapons of mass destruction, our congress passed a resolution protesting your attack on Iraq, your CIA says we helped Libya produce ballistic missiles....

G.W. Bush: Believe me, Mr. Prime Minister, that scenario is off the wall. We regard you as an ally in our war against terrorism.

P.M. Vajpayee: In that case, I`d like your help. We`ve been impressed by your tactics in Iraq. We`re organizing several new Special Forces battalions, modeled after your own, and specially trained in cross-border operations.

G.W. Bush: You mean into Pakistani-controlled territory?

P.M. Vajpayee: Exactly. Maybe beyond.

G.W. Bush: That would set off Pakistan and others if they found out.

P.M. Vajpayee: Mr. President, you have shown us the way. We are not going to sit here and wait for them to come at us. As one of your CIA people said of Al Qaeda. "When we`re through with them, they`ll have flies walking across their eyeballs."

We`d like your Special Forces to give us some pointers. You`re the best.

G.W. Bush: I`ll talk to Rumsfeld about it.

P.M. Vajpayee: Thank you, Mr. President. And I will continue to work for peace. But summer is coming -- the mountain passes will be open again, and that may mean more terrorism and further escalation. But I promise you, if I am forced to go to war, I will make sure our military gives one-quarter of the slots reserved for embedded journalists to American reporters.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7670

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Die Zahl der Terroranschläge ist 2002 zurückgegangen

Florian Rötzer 02.05.2003
Für den US-Außenminister ist dies ein Erfolg der Politik seiner Regierung, doch der Trend ist schon länger vorhanden und stützt so nicht unbedingt die Sicherheitspolitik von Präsident Bush

Seit Einführung des Homeland Security Advisory System, das den Grad der Bedrohung der USA durch terroristische Anschläge auf einer Skala anzeigt, wurde noch nie der unterste Wert, nämlich niedrig, angegeben. Jetzt ist die Gefahr seit geraumer Zeit bereits "erhöht". Allerdings ist beispielsweise im letzten Jahr kein einziger Anschlag in den USA ausgeführt worden. Und weltweit ist die Zahl der Anschläge um 44 Prozent, also fast die Hälfte, zurück gegangen.

US-Präsident Bush am 1. Mai auf dem Flugzeugträger USS Abraham Lincoln. In seiner Rede stellte er den Irak-Krieg als Teil des fortdauernden Kampfes gegen den Terrorismus dar: "Die Schlacht im Irak ist ein Sieg in einem Krieg gegen den Terror, der am 11. September 2001 begonnen hat - und noch immer weiter geht."

Nach dem eben vom US-Außenministerium veröffentlichten Terrorismusbericht, der jährlich vorgelegt werden muss, könnte man den "Krieg gegen den internationalen Terrorismus", den die US-Regierung weltweit führt und dabei auch bereits zwei Kriege hinter sich gebracht hat, weitestgehend zurückfahren. Die Zahl der Anschläge ist letzten Jahr von 355 auf 199 zurückgegangen und steht damit erstmals wieder auf der Höhe, die zuletzt im Jahr 1969 erreicht worden ist. Auch die Zahl der durch Terroranschläge weltweit Getöteten ist von 3.295 auf 725 zurückgegangen. Und viel geringer wurden auch die gegen die USA gerichteten Anschläge: Sie fielen um 65 Prozent von 219 auf 77.


Allerdings ist die Zahl der Anschläge bereits im Jahr 2001 zurückgegangen, auch wenn die Zahl der Toten durch die Anschläge vom 11.9. drastisch, aber wahrscheinlich vorerst einmalig, in die Höhe schnellten. 90 Prozent der Getöteten waren darauf zurück zu führen. Im Terrorismusbericht 2001 wurde die Zahl der Anschläge noch mit 346 (jetzt 355) angegeben, im Jahr zuvor waren es 426. Die Hälfte der Anschläge im Jahr 2001 waren übrigens Bombenanschläge auf die internationale Pipeline in Kolumbien. Zieht man diese Anschläge im Jahr 2002 (41) von der Gesamtsumme ab, so gab es 148 andere Anschläge. Auch so ist die Zahl der Terroranschläge noch zurückgegangen. Die weitaus meisten Anschläge fanden zudem in regionalen Konflikten statt: im palästinensisch-israelischen Konflikt und im pakistanisch-indischen Kaschmirkonflikt. Am meisten Anschläge gab es Ende der 80er Jahre.

US-Außenminister Powell will den schon längere anhaltenden Trend, sieht man von den Anschlägen auf die kolumbianische Ölpipeline ab, aber vor allem auf die Leistung der Bush-Regierung und der von ihr gebildeten weltweiten Allianz gegen den Terrorismus zurückführen. Insgesamt konstatierte er einen "bislang nicht vorhandenen Fortschritt" im Kampf gegen den Terrorismus. Powell wies darauf hin, dass unter der Führung der USA viele Länder Antiterror-Maßnahmen ergriffen haben und von der UN Sanktionen gegen Terrorgruppen und ihre Helfer verhängt worden sind.



"Als Ergebnis all dieser Bemühungen wurden Tausende von Terroristen gefangen und eingesperrt. Für diejenigen, die noch in Freiheit sind, ist das Leben entschieden schwieriger geworden. Es ist schwieriger für Terroristen geworden, sich zu verstecken und einen sicheren Hafen zu finden. Terroristenzellen wurden zerstört, Netzwerke gestört und Anschlagspläne vereitelt."




Staaten, die Terrorismus fördern, seien unter Druck geraten und würden zunehmend isoliert. Große Fortschritte habe man mit den beiden Befreiungskriegen in Afghanistan und im Irak gemacht. Zu groß aber dürfen die Erfolge wohl auch nicht gezeichnet werden, weswegen Powell betont: "Aber der schreckliche Schatten des Terrorismus fällt noch immer auf die ganze Welt." Und auch just in dem Moment, in dem er diese Rede hält, so versichert Powell, würden Terroristen schreckliche Taten planen und versuchen, Massenvernichtungswaffen zu erhalten. Man dürfe also weder im Kampf noch in der Aufmerksamkeit nachlassen. Das Gefährdungsbarometer des Heimatschutzministeriums also wird vorerst noch erhöht bleiben, auch wenn im Inland keine Anschläge geschehen. Die iranische Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK oder MKO), mit der man gerade ein Abkommen im Irak geschlossen hatte, steht noch immer auf der Liste der Terrororganisationen. Aber das sei nur eine "taktische Entscheidung" gewesen, man verhandele nicht mit Terroristen ( Wenn es den eigenen Interessen dient).

Der Bericht weist darauf hin, dass während der letzten Jahrzehnte der staatlich geförderte Terrorismus abgenommen hat. Im Jahr 2002 seien vor allem sieben Länder als Förderer des Terrorismus hervorgetreten: Kuba, Iran, Irak, Libyen, Nordkorea und Sudan. Cofer Black, zuständig im Außenministerium für Antiterror-Maßnahmen, meinte, man könne nach dem Krieg jetzt Irak von der Liste entfernen, doch die übrigen Länder hätten nicht genug dafür getan, sich vom Terrorismus ganz loszusagen. Der Bericht behauptet weiter, dass der Irak al-Qaida-Terroristen einen Zufluchtsort und Stützpunkte gewährt hätte.

Kuba soll beispielsweise Agenten zu verschiedenen US-Botschaften geschickt haben, um falsche Spuren bei den Ermittlungen über die Anschläge vom 11.9. zu legen. Überdies sollen sich einige Terroristen etwa von Kolumbien oder der IRA auf Kuba aufhalten, zudem einige amerikanische Flüchtlinge.

Der Iran aber sei der aktivste Unterstützer des Terrorismus gewesen. Die Revolutionären Garden und das Geheimdienstministerium seien direkt in der Planung und der Unterstützung von Anschlägen beteiligt gewesen. Manche al-Qaida hätten hier einen "virtuellen sicheren Hafen" gefunden. Vor allem aber seien anti-israelische Aktivitäten und Gruppen wie Hisbollah, Hamas oder Islamischer Dschihad unterstützt worden.

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Sowas kann es auch nur in England geben ein Saddam Contest

The dictator on the 8.43
When Stephen Moss went for an audition for a Saddam Hussein-lookalike, the real test wasn`t the interview itself - but the commuter train into town

Stephen Moss
Friday May 2, 2003
The Guardian

The embedded journalists in the Iraq war were, of course, very brave, but there is courage too in dressing up in Ba`ath party uniform and catching the 8.43 from Kingston to Wimbledon, en route to an audition of Saddam Hussein lookalikes at the Riverside Studios. The audition - for a new play about the war by satirist Alistair Beaton - was advertised in theatre newspaper the Stage last week, and burly, moustachioed men from all over Britain are heading for Hammersmith in west London.

When I first try on the beret, it feels more Frank Spencer than Saddam Hussein, and several members of my immediate family remark on the campness of my appearance. Naturally, I have them butchered. I am also aware of the greyness of my hair. Saddam was not, it seems, prepared to die, but he was always willing to dye. The photographer advises me to look "genial but sinister". He also clips my moustache - "it should be double the length of Hitler`s". It is far too thin for the part - more Clark Gable than Saddam Hussein - but the show must go on. The uniform is perfect, apart from the gunbelt which keeps popping open.

At Kingston station, the ticket collector says he has my face on a playing card - this is the first time he has ever spoken to me - and a man asks "Is this a spoof?" I am tempted to say "No, but don`t tell Donald Rumsfeld," in the rasping, metallic voice I have been practising. On the platform, schoolboys laugh at me, but the adults (most of whom look sinister and not especially genial) ignore me, acting for all the world as if Saddam frequently takes the 8.43.

I buy a copy of the Daily Telegraph at Wimbledon - "There you go, dear," says the cheery woman behind the counter in Smith`s - and take the tube to Earl`s Court. "Where are your weapons of mass destruction?" asks an elderly man, enjoying the joke. Everyone else looks stern/perplexed/mortified by the interruption to their tedious routine.

The moustache makes me sneeze and I suddenly remember that I`ve left the glue remover at home. At Hammersmith, I have breakfast at Pret a Manger. "I`ve always wanted to meet Saddam," says one of the staff with pleasure. I assume that he is humouring me. Hammersmith Broadway is crawling with police, but they are more interested in an incident at Barclays bank than in the fact that Saddam`s in town.

I make it to the theatre bang on time and am immediately descended on by about 100 journalists and camera crews - dog eat media dog. I try not to give interviews, but Russian TV insists - "we are great friends of Saddam". The New York Times is taking Polaroids of every Saddam that turns up. Just in case? One interviewer wants to know what I would bring to the part. "A large stomach," is the only answer I can think of. "What do you think of the real Saddam?" asks another. "A brute," I say diplomatically. But if this scrum is anything to go by, now a figure of fun, too.

About 15 Saddams have shown up and within a few seconds it is clear - to me, anyway, and I`m sure to the director, Jeff - who the winner will be: a sixtysomething ex-manager from the Royal Shakespeare Company who looks just like the real thing and has Saddam`s slow, deliberate movements off to a tee. "Pretend you are a statue," he tells me. "Just make tiny, barely discernible movements of the hand."

One female Saddam has turned up in a huge moustache. "You look like Groucho Marx," says Jeff, who himself has a wonderful walrus moustache that, if dyed, would be perfect for the part. An especially rotund Saddam does some comic business with a mobile phone, but Jeff is not amused. The competition is tough - one actor has previously played Stalin. Big moustaches seem to be his speciality.

We audition separately - slowly walking across the stage, waving, acknowledging the applause of the crowd. The man from the RSC is brilliant - he must get the part. But there are some good runners-up - a man with an east London accent who looks like Omar Sharif and an elderly Indian who waves with real panache. Beaton is sure to need a few look-alikes for the lookalike. Shame the currently unemployed members of the Baghdad branch of Equity can`t be contacted.

I do my turn with what seems to me real aplomb - so in character that the reporter from the Guardian doesn`t recognise me - but Jeff is cutting. "A touch of the John Cleeses there, I think." Would Kenneth Branagh be treated this way? On reflection, perhaps we did overtrim the moustache and I`ve ended up looking more Bognor than Basra. I give my phone number to the studio manager, but I don`t suppose he`ll be calling. (An early Ba`ath?) Maybe I could play Comical Ali instead?

On the way back, I stop at Lillywhite`s to buy a cricket ball. Thinking I`m an anti-war protester, the security man refuses to let me in. I go to a newsagents in Leicester Square instead and treat myself to a large cigar. The shopowner insists on taking my photograph. At last, adulation.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Weapons of mass distortion
The concept of WMD is dishonest. When they are in friendly hands we call them defence forces

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Friday May 2, 2003
The Guardian

If the first casualty of war is truth, then language itself sustains the heaviest collateral damage, as Orwell used to point out (before "collateral damage" proved his point by entering the vocabulary of poisonous euphemism). The Iraq war has produced its own rich crop of Newspeak, but the choicest of all is the phrase "weapons of mass destruction".

Even the most credulous supporters of Tony Blair`s war are beginning to see they were sold a pup. MPs angrily demand evidence of the WMDs, which they, in their innocence, believed were the reason for the war, rather than its flimsy pretext, while the prime minister insists that WMDs will be found.

But what are they anyway? The very phrase "weapons of mass destruction" is of recent coinage, and a specious one. It replaced "ABC weapons", for atomic, biological and chemical, which was neater, although already misleading as it conflated types of weaponry quite different in kind and in destructive capacity. WMD is even more empty and dishonest as a concept.

By definition atomic and hydrogen bombs cause mass destruction. Ever since they were first built and used in war (by the US, in case anyone has forgotten), they have cast a peculiar thrall of horror, although this is not entirely logical. The quarter-million dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been preceded by nearly a million German and Japanese civilians killed by "conventional" bombing, whose conventionality was small consolation for the victims.

Even supposing that nuclear weapons are uniquely horrible, the Iraq war and its aftermath have only served to confirm what Hans Blix learned, and what the International Institute for Strategic Studies said last summer: that Saddam had no fissile material to build atomic warheads. Nor did he have (for all the shockingly mendacious propaganda) the wherewithal for acquiring such material. Had he possessed warheads, he never had the means of striking London, let alone New York. And if he had ever been tempted to lob one at Israel, he would have been constrained by the certain knowledge that Baghdad would have been nuked minutes later.

Certainly he possessed the biological and chemical material in ABC, although here again the "W" in WMD is notably misleading: "weaponised" was just what this material was not, a fact which makes the pretext for war even more phoney. And certainly Saddam had used biological and chemical weapons against Iran as well as the Kurds. Very nasty they are, but that does not make them mass-destructive in the same sense as nuclear warheads.

A height of absurdity was reached with the claim that one of Saddam`s WMDs was mustard gas - a weapon we were using in 1917, and which British politicians at the time defended as comparatively humane beside high-explosive artillery and machine-gun fire.

Even terrorism isn`t always more dangerous because of access to toxic substances, and doesn`t need a dictator like Saddam to provide them anyway. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman have written about biological and chemical weapons in their book, A Higher Form of Killing. Harris has pointed out that "a reasonably competent chemist could produce nerve agent on a kitchen table".

In 1995, a terrorist religious cult in Japan did just that, thereby providing an illuminating comparison. Those cultists released sarin nerve gas - another of Saddam`s alleged WMDs - into the Tokyo metro during rush hour. Last February in the South Korean city of Daegu, an underground train was attacked, with a milk carton containing inflammable liquid. Twelve people died in the "WMD" attack; old-fashioned arson killed 120.

Soon after September 11, a number of letters containing anthrax spores were posted in America. In the overwrought climate of the moment, it was claimed that this batch of "WMD" could kill the American population many times over, and that may have been true according to some abstract calculation. In the event, five people died.

While terrorism is murderous, it mostly remains technologically primitive. Three people were killed in Tel Aviv on Tuesday by a suicide bomber`s belt of explosive and metal scraps, and the IRA have shown how bloodthirsty "spectaculars" can be mounted with nothing more than fertiliser, sugar, and condoms for the timers.

As for the greatest spectacular of all, Blair has repeatedly linked September 11 with the threat of WMDs. But the 3,000 victims in New York weren`t killed by WMDs of any kind, they were murdered by a dozen fanatics armed with box cutters. Although it has been irritating subsequently to have the contents of one`s sponge bag confiscated at the airport in the name of security, that scarcely makes a pair of nail scissors a WMD.

The truth is that "weapons of mass destruction" is a concept defined by the person using it. "I like a drink, you are a drunk, he is an alcoholic," runs the old conjugation. Now there`s another: "We have defence forces, you have dangerous arms, he has weapons of mass destruction." As usual, it depends who you are.

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May 02, 2003

A shameful theft of the crown jewels of memory
Simon Jenkins



Beware of memory. For the time being, 2003 marks the fall of a hated tyrant. In years to come it may mean something else, the destruction of the greatest treasure from the oldest age of Western civilisation. We know of the sacking of the Library at Alexandria in AD624. Who cares what caused it?

Until this week only soldiers and reporters had witnessed the devastation of the National Museum of Baghdad, the seventh biggest in the world, and the burning of the National Library, containing some 5,000 of the earliest known manuscripts. On Tuesday a team led by John Curtis from the British Museum returned from Iraq and agreed with the senior archaeologist, Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, that we face the greatest heritage catastrophe since the Second World War. Though it is early days, two vast repositories of world history appear simply to have vanished.

There seems little argument over what happened. As early as January, and continually during the planning and execution of the Iraq invasion, museums in Britain and America pleaded with coalition commanders to respect the treasure houses of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. Serious looting had occurred during the bombing in 1991. Archaeologists prepared lists of buildings and these were respected by the Air Force target teams. Warnings about looting were disregarded. Tessa Jowell, the British Culture Secretary, said two weeks ago that the looting was “not predictable”. That is not true. As Lord Renfrew wrote in The Times last week, it was predicted explicitly the whole way to Downing Street.

On April 10 — the day after the “fall of Baghdad” — a museum official pleaded with a US Marine captain, Jason Conroy, to move his Abrams tank 50 yards down the road to guard the museum gates. Conroy called his commander for permission and told the official that it had been refused. This was in clear breach of the Hague Convention requiring an occupying force to take “all measures within its power” to maintain law and order and guard cultural property. Tanks were guarding the Oil Ministry. For three days Conroy’s unit stood by while crowds poured into the museum, from child vandals to gangs with cutting equipment and vehicles.

On April 13, the museum director, Donny George, again pleaded for Marine protection and was again refused. Not until April 16, after worldwide publicity, did four tanks arrive. By then the museum’s galleries and shelves were empty. Other than small objects moved to strong rooms, everything not taken had been smashed. The famous statues of 26 Assyrian kings had been decapitated. All three blocks of the National Library, with five centuries of Ottoman records and scrolls of the earliest known writing, appear to have been destroyed by fire. The museums in Basra and Mosul were looted after being hit by bombs. According to Mr Curtis, Iraq has virtually no historical archive left.

Three weeks ago the Iraqi people were freed from Saddam Hussein. Whatever view is taken of the war, that fact is undeniably good. But on April 10 a terrible mistake was made. The Iraqis were liberated not just from their immediate past, but from their past in toto. Troops seem to have regarded museums as no different from regime offices and palaces. Looters were seen as ordinary people taking revenge on Saddam. True, they were Iraqis destroying their own museum, but remove guards from any museum and looters will do the same. The fact is that for three crucial days after authority was removed from Baghdad’s streets, a coalition to which Britain was party had clear “measures within its power” to stop museum looting, and refused requests to do so. It guarded oil instead.

Much water will doubtless flow under this bitter bridge. But even the Bolsheviks protected the Hermitage during the Russian Revolution. In the Second World War, armies were under specific orders to spare historic sites and museums, even at cost to themselves. Chartres was not shelled though it contained snipers. Museums were looted, but by soldiers who respected what they were looting. They knew that a museum is not a warehouse. It is the custodian of the identity of a people. Robbing it is like seizing the crown jewels of a collective memory. It seeks to erase that memory.

While Mr Curtis was making his report, upstairs his museum was staging an eerily relevant exhibition. “The Museum of the Mind” was not of objects beautiful in themselves but the symbols of the gathered memory of individuals and nations, things that give depth and meaning to our collective existence. Here is the footprint of the Buddha, a head of Augustus, a reliquary casket, an Australian banknote. Each is an actor in the “theatre of memory”, a trace of the cultural gene.

The message is thunderous. People know who they are only by reference to their past, to group memories and the objects which absorb and reflect them. Britons honour the flag, Magna Carta, an Elizabethan tapestry, the Queen’s image on a mug. Adults take comfort, or sometimes sadness, in a school uniform, a family album, a holiday souvenir. For Proust even smell and taste play a role, “waiting and hoping for their moment amid the ruins . . . ready to bear the vast structure of recollection”. The exhibition essay by John Mack goes further. “Memory,” he writes, “has never been overly concerned with authenticity . . . it does not bother to search the archives for confirmation of its assertions.” It is rather a tracing on “Freud’s mystic writing pad”. A Nigerian juju is as “true” a record of the past as is Salisbury Cathedral. Memory is perpetually entwined with the retelling of stories. A Scotsman will believe the nonsense movie Braveheart, because that is how he wants to “remember” his tribe.

This view of memory is deeply disturbing. It seems to validate false myths. The mental museum from which two British suicide bombers travelled to Tel Aviv was polluted by distorted “memories” of Islam’s relations with the West. Yet such myths are hugely potent, and seemingly beyond our power to contest. All we can do is keep bashing them with reality, with the evidence of history. That is a job of a museum. When all else fails, history is our last resort.

The Iraqis have been stripped of the raw material of their history, the evidence with which to bash such myths. They have lost the relics of the Mesopotamian culture that deepened their historical perspective. We who claim to crusade for civilised values could not summon one tank to defend their earliest repository. We stood and watched as a first link in the chain of our memory snapped. To tear off Saddam’s head we tore the heads off all his predecessors.

On Tuesday the British Museum’s director, Neil McGregor, began the task of reassembling that chain. He welcomed experts from Russia, France, Germany, Philadelphia and New York to begin perhaps the greatest task of cultural rescue. Black markets must be scoured for faces and torsos. Some shattered pieces may be reassembled. Offers of money came from Japan, Italy and Germany, but none from the clearly embarrassed Governments of Britain and America, scurrying for cover. Coalition troops have even refused border searches for looted items. A private donor had to pay for last week’s survey by the British Museum team.

I am now told that Washington is preventing the Iraqi antiquities staff, the most experienced in the Middle East, from conducting their own audit of what they have lost. This is an urgent task if police forces are to be warned of what might be recoverable. A US military base has been stationed in a wing of the museum. The coalition wants no more bad publicity about cultural losses. The insult could hardly be better designed to fuel the rumour machine.

Saddam will never return to power. But what is power? In years to come, young Iraqis will fabricate “memories” to replace those lost two weeks ago. The British Museum exhibition reminds us that “the museum of memory is not a static place but a gallery under constant refurbishment”. And what refurbishes it? The way the Americans and British are behaving in Iraq may yet replace the broken Assyrian kings with the ghost of their sinister successor — or with another like him. Memory need not be true to be real. Russians wept when Stalin died.

We should be helping the Iraqis to recapture their pride in their lost past. Instead we give them new injuries to turn into evil myths and false memories. And all for want of a tank.



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May 2, 2003
A Long Way From Victory

s presidential spectacles go, it would be hard to surpass George Bush`s triumphant "Top Gun" visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln yesterday off the California coast. President Bush flew out to the giant aircraft carrier dressed in full fighter-pilot regalia as the "co-pilot" of a Navy warplane. After a dramatic landing on the compact deck — a new standard for high-risk presidential travel — Mr. Bush mingled with the ship`s crew, then later welcomed home thousands of cheering sailors and aviators on the flight deck in a nationally televised address.

The scene will undoubtedly make for a potent campaign commercial next year. For now, though, the point was to declare an end to the combat phase of the war in Iraq and to commit the nation to the reconstruction of that shattered country. No fair-minded person would begrudge Mr. Bush and the crew members of the Abraham Lincoln this celebratory moment. America`s armed forces performed courageously in Iraq, dislodging a brutal dictatorship in a swift, decisive campaign. They deserve the nation`s thanks and a warm welcome home.

But as the president acknowledged, America`s work in Iraq is far from done. If anything, securing a durable peace in Iraq will be harder than winning a military victory.

Millions of Iraqis are facing a collapse of law and order and wrenching interruptions of vital services, including water, electricity and health care. Word was circulating in Washington yesterday that Paul Bremer, a veteran diplomat and terrorism expert, would soon be named as Iraq`s chief civilian administrator. Mr. Bremer will need to act with greater alacrity and skill than Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general the Pentagon put in charge of Iraq last month.

Security remains a critical problem in much of Iraq, as this week`s repeated deadly clashes between American soldiers and Iraqi civilians in Falluja demonstrated. Subcontracting local responsibilities for law and order to hastily organized Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish security patrols is not the right solution. For now, American forces need to be put on the streets in adequate numbers, including more military police officers and others trained in maintaining civil order.

America also has a clear responsibility to ensure an early restoration of vital services. Iraq has no lack of trained engineers, doctors and other professionals. What is needed most urgently are people who can direct the recovery and refit Iraq`s government agencies with office equipment, telephones and other vital equipment removed by looters. American military and civilian teams with appropriate training can do this work, but they need to be dispatched quickly and given ample financial and logistical resources.

The Pentagon`s effort to establish a transitional Iraqi leadership as soon as possible is well intentioned, but could short-circuit chances for democracy by giving an inside track to well-organized exiles and religious groups. A longer transition period would allow firmer institutions to be built and other candidates to emerge, improving the odds for stability in the years ahead.

From the moment that Mr. Bush made his intention of invading Iraq clear, the question was never whether American troops would succeed, or whether the regime they toppled would not be exposed to the world as a despicable one. The question was, and still is, whether the administration has the patience to rebuild Iraq and set it on a course toward stable, enlightened governance. The chaotic situation in Afghanistan is no billboard for American talent at nation-building. The American administration of postwar Iraq has so far failed to match the efficiency and effectiveness of the military invasion. But as the United States came to the end of one phase of the Iraqi engagement last night, there was still time to do better.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 2, 2003
The Acid Test
By PAUL KRUGMAN


There is, alas, only one Eliot Spitzer. And while you want to stand up and cheer when Mr. Spitzer, New York`s attorney general, wins another round against malefactors of great wealth, his side — our side, unless you happen to be a corporate insider — is losing the war.

On Monday, thanks mainly to Mr. Spitzer, a group of investment banks paid $1.4 billion to settle charges that their stock analysts had been shilling for corporate clients. This was, however, a mere slap on the wrist. And it`s increasingly obvious that neither the investment bankers nor corporate evildoers in general are feeling chastened.

Indeed, last week Stanley O`Neal, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, wrote an op-ed article caricaturing the likes of Mr. Spitzer — though without naming him — as enemies of capitalism who teach investors that "if they lose money in the market they`re automatically entitled to be compensated." By the way, Henry Blodget — the analyst whose internal e-mail famously used a scatological term to describe a stock he was publicly touting, and who was permanently banned from the industry under Monday`s settlement — worked for Merrill Lynch.

Mr. Spitzer`s scathing reply, addressed to "Mr. C.E.O.," is a classic. ("Indeed, you did not want to tolerate risk. Because what you did was shift the risk to unknowing investors while you got the fees up front.") But it`s revealing that Mr. O`Neal felt empowered to write that piece in the first place. Like the New York Stock Exchange, which tried to appoint Citigroup`s Sanford Weill to its board — Mr. Weill is now forbidden to talk to his own company`s analysts unless a lawyer is present — Mr. O`Neal overreached. But he clearly knows which way the wind is blowing.

And it`s not just investment bankers: corporate insiders across America are feeling their oats. Consider the executives at American Airlines, who paid themselves big bonuses and secretly set up a special trust to secure their own pensions, even while demanding pay cuts from their workers to save the company. Well, why not? Trust funds protecting executive pensions even when ordinary workers` pension plans are underfunded, and hefty "retention" bonuses for executives of near-bankrupt companies, are all the rage these days.

Warren Buffett has called C.E.O. compensation the "acid test" for reform. Between 1970 and 2001, in an orgy of mutual back-scratching by C.E.O.`s and their boards, median pay among the top 100 executives soared from 35 times that of the average worker to more than 500 times as much. So what happened in 2002, as unemployment rose, wages failed to keep up with prices and stocks declined — and stories of corporate malfeasance filled the news? Nothing. O.K., not exactly nothing: some of the huge options grants at the top went away, reducing the average among the top 100. But according to Fortune, which put a pinstripe-clothed pig on its cover, median pay among top executives rose another 14 percent.

Last summer it seemed, briefly, as if the torrent of scandals — and the revelations about how closely some of our politicians were tied to scandal-ridden companies — would bring about a public backlash against corporate malfeasance. But then the topic largely vanished from the news, driven out by reports about Iraq`s nuclear weapons program and all that. And after the midterm elections, which put apologists for corporate insiders back in control of all the relevant Congressional committees, we might as well have had the sirens sound the all-clear. Only Mr. Spitzer still has both the inclination and the power to make trouble.

I also wonder about the demonstration effect. I don`t want to sound like those Clinton-haters who attributed every immoral act in America to the president`s bad example: Bill Clinton didn`t invent sex, and the Bush administration didn`t invent greed. But when insiders at major corporations see top officials getting away with it — moving unscathed between stints as crony capitalists and high office or even, as in the case of Richard Perle, playing both roles at once — they have to feel that old rules no longer apply, and that they can get away with even more self-dealing than before.

In the end the corruption of our corporate system will bring retribution; even if political action never comes, investors will eventually lose faith and put their money elsewhere. But right now the bad guys, though they lose an occasional battle, are winning the war.







Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 2, 2003
A Heretic Amid the Hibiscus
By DONNA SCHAPER



CORAL GABLES, Fla.
I don`t know that I will ever receive a formal letter of rejection from the Coral Gables Garden Club. I know of the rejection only because one of my sponsors for membership told me. The reason had nothing to do with the quality of my flower arrangements. Nor did it stem from my spotty record as a tropical gardener. (I am a pretty good Northern gardener, but the tropics have stumped me more than once.)

The reason offered to my sponsor for my rejection was that I was "too liberal." The club members have a point: I spoke out against the war in Iraq, and I`ve been arrested for protesting against other wars and marching for abortion rights and racial justice.

With this rejection, I thus join Tim Robbins in this strange season: he was disinvited to a Baseball Hall of Fame event on similar grounds. I join Susan Sarandon, who was disinvited by the United Way of Tampa Bay for antiwar comments. I join the poets who were disinvited to the White House because they might have embarrassed the president. At least I am in good company.

Being blackballed by the green-thumb crowd — blue-haired or otherwise — is a sobering experience. But I can change. If a dyed-in-the-wool Zone 5 gardener can toss away her forcing forsythia, picking up her roots and replanting them in the land of the bougainvillea, then surely the garden club can consider me again.

In hopes of having another chance at membership, I have thought of renaming my French string beans, which are miraculously giving a daily crop. Perhaps henceforth they should be called liberty beans. Same for the French lettuces. There is really no need to give the lettuce a nationality. We can just call it lettuce and leave it at that. I could bathe my night-blooming jasmine in red, white and blue lights and put bunting around the orange jasmine.

The dozens of bromeliads in my front yard could be a problem: they all have spikes of pink flowers. Might the garden club think, shades of Joe McCarthy, that I am a pinko?

I am writing a third garden book to spruce up my credentials. Did I mention that when I first came to town the club featured me as a speaker? When I finished speaking, the audience clapped. In the question and answer session, no one asked about politics. Many people bought the books. Perhaps they found evidence of my politics in the pages. Was there something suspicious about the way I mulch? Are my rock decorations a threat to homeland security?

Perhaps I should write a new book called "Politically Correct Gardening." In it I could show the single right way to plant, hoe, seed and compost. I would focus on native plants (or ones that originated in countries among America`s coalition of the willing). I would avoid pink flowers altogether. Nothing French would be mentioned. All plants would have to look good in bunting.

Gardening is my hobby. I wanted to join the club because its members know stuff I want to know. I`m not going to get in, but I have learned something in the process. A good gardener — even a liberal one — can`t take this sort of rejection on her gardening kneepad. She takes off her gloves, puts down her shears and stands up.


Donna Schaper, senior pastor of the Coral Gables Congregational Church, is author of "The Art of Spiritual Rock Gardening."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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The Shiite `Menace`


By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, May 2, 2003; Page A31


Before the war even began, the critics were predicting that Iraq was going to be the Bay of Pigs (plus "Desert One, Beirut and Somalia," said the ever-hyperbolic Chris Matthews). A week into the war, we were told Iraq was Vietnam. Now, after the war, they`re telling us that Iraq is Iran -- that Iraq`s Shiite majority will turn it into another intolerant Islamic republic.

The critics were wrong every time. They are wrong again. Of course there are telegenic elements among the Shiites who would like fundamentalist rule by the clerics. But even the majority of Iranians oppose the rule of the mullahs and consider the Islamic revolution a disaster. The Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority, many of whom are affiliated with, infiltrated by and financed by Tehran, the headquarters for 20 years of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

These Iranian-oriented Shiite extremists are analogous to the Soviet-oriented communists in immediate post-World War II Italy and France. They too had a foreign patron. They too had foreign sources of money, agents and influence. They too had a coherent ideology. And they too were highly organized even before the end of the war. They too made a bid for power. And failed.

There is no reason to believe that Iranian-inspired Shiite fundamentalists will be any more successful in Iraq. Iraqi society is highly fractured along lines of ethnicity, religion, tribe, region and class. It is in the interest of all of them, most particularly the Kurdish and Sunni minorities, who together make up about 40 percent of the country, to ensure that no one group wields absolute, dictatorial power over the rest. And as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld correctly pointed out, America is there to make sure that doesn`t happen. One man, one vote, one time is not democracy.

Moreover, Shiism is not a hierarchical religion like Roman Catholicism. It is extremely decentralized. Among the Shiite majority itself are myriad ideological and political factions. Islamic scholar Hillel Fradkin points out that Khomeiniism -- the seizure of political power by clerics -- is contrary to centuries of Shiite tradition and thus alien and anathema to many Iraqi Shiites.

Does this mean that Jeffersonian democracy is guaranteed in Baghdad? Of course not. But the United States is in a position to bring about a unique and potentially revolutionary development in the Arab world: a genuinely pluralistic, open and free society.

The administration erred, however, by going initially for an occupation "light." It did so understandably at first, victory having come so swiftly and crushingly that there were no existing institutions such as police or army to fill the vacuum, and simply not enough American soldiers for adequate seizure of full power.

But there also appeared to be a conscious decision to play down the occupation, lest we stoke Iraqi nationalism and resistance. This was a mistake, rooted, as are most Middle East mistakes, in the inextinguishable myth of the "Arab street." The critics always predict that the "street" will rise at any show of American power. It invariably rises at any show of American weakness or indecision; it becomes quiescent at the showing of American power.

Our problem in postwar Iraq has been a paucity of force, rather than an excess. The way to succeed is with an occupation "heavy." The administration is hurriedly sending in about 4,000 more soldiers, heavy with MPs, and not a moment too soon. Occupation light has permitted the ad hoc seizure of power in pockets of the country by various ambitious nasties. America needs to fill the vacuum, so it can then devolve power on those committed to a truly democratic outcome.

What the administration has done right, on the other hand, has been to exclude all the foreign latecomers and meddlers who want to get in on the reconstruction. The administration gave the perfect response to the United Nations` claim that it alone can confer legitimacy on the running of Iraq: It ignored it.

It does not even merit a rejoinder. The idea that legitimacy flows from the blessings of France and Russia, Saddam Hussein`s lawyers and suppliers, is on its face risible. Legitimacy does not come out of U.N. headquarters in New York; it will come out of the ground in Iraq, as more and more factions join in the construction of a provisional government.

Tellingly, even the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq sent a delegation to the last meeting with Jay Garner, our proconsul in Baghdad. Even the Islamic radicals know the Pentagon is prepared to move with or without them. They know who`s in charge. We need to keep it that way.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
Another Place for Bush to Be Decisive


By David Ignatius

Friday, May 2, 2003; Page A31


PARIS -- The argument always comes up eventually when you`re traveling in the Middle East: The United States cannot play the role of peacemaker, your Arab host will insist, because the pro-Israel lobby in Washington is too strong.

This is a conversation I have grown to hate -- partly for its not-so-veiled anti-Semitism, partly because it ignores the reality that most Israelis want peace, whatever right-wing lobbyists may say, and partly because of its cynical, one-dimensional view of U.S. politics.

America is a country of surprises, I like to remind my Arab hosts. In U.S. foreign policy, values and strategic vision count for more than narrow political interests. The anti-communist Richard Nixon went to Mao`s China; the liberal Jimmy Carter persuaded conservative Menachem Begin to make peace with Egypt. And perhaps now George W. Bush can help create a Palestinian state that lives in peace with its neighbor.

That`s my hope as the "road map" to Middle East peace is finally published. But when I read the skeptical comments in yesterday`s papers declaring the road map a political nonstarter, I am reminded of the cynicism of the Arab world.

"I don`t think he [Bush] gets anything politically if he has a peace deal," one pro-Israel GOP lobbyist told The Post.

The chorus of know-it-all naysayers is nearly deafening, and maybe it`s right. Perhaps only a fool would imagine that Bush would follow his triumph in Iraq by waging peace. Perhaps this president does listen more to Karl Rove`s political calculus than to his own conscience.

But I don`t want to believe that. And I certainly don`t want to let the Israel-haters in the Arab world say: "See, we told you so." So I`m going to take Bush at his word and believe that the road map is for real.

What will it take to move two stubborn adversaries, Israel and the Palestinians, along the road toward peace by 2005? The obvious first answer is that it will take a personal commitment from Bush. But here are some other suggestions:

• Peace is too lofty a notion. It will take a generation for these two sides to forgive each other and embrace. Needed now are a truce and a separation, signified by the borders of a Palestinian state. What`s good about the road map is that it`s short on rhetoric and long on practical specifics. The two most important words in the document are "reciprocal steps," but each side is likely to insist that the other go first.

• To achieve a truce, both sides must give up the idea they can "win" the conflict. Once upon a time, it was the Israelis who seemed to believe they could win -- keep the land and impose peace, too. But then came the disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the two Palestinian intifadas and the nightmare of the suicide bombers. Frustrated Israelis began to play for a tie.

At that point, in the sickening balance wheel of Middle East politics, the Palestinians began to imagine they could "win" -- to believe that their human bombs could break the resolve of the Jewish state. That`s what made the iron fist of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon inevitable. He told Palestinians, in the savage language of military force, that Israel would never give up. For the road map to succeed, the Palestinians must now decide to play for a tie, too.

• In the end, a peace agreement will reflect American political will. The road map may have European and international support, but it`s still an American game. Here`s where the neo-imperialists at the Pentagon get their payoff, if they`re wise enough to seize it.

American power is unchallenged. In three weeks, the U.S. military destroyed the most significant threat on Israel`s eastern front. In the process, it also destroyed the rationale used by successive Israeli governments for settlements on the West Bank. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told me four months ago, Washington should demand a freeze on Israeli settlements once the Iraq war ends.

The Palestinian left and the Israeli right will resist this push for peace. That`s not a risk, it`s a certainty: Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli assassination squads have both been active since the road map was announced. How Bush deals with this resistance will test his presidency once again.

The American people have come to admire a president who backs up deeply held values with decisive action. If Bush can show that he`s serious about the road map -- and that he will not tolerate obstruction -- a skeptical world will applaud his leadership.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Wut auf Amerika

Racheschwur vor dem Toten-Gebet

Von Matthias Gebauer, Falludscha

In dem Ort Falludscha nahe Bagdad kocht die Stimmung gegen die US-Besatzer. Nachdem Soldaten 19 Demonstranten erschossen, schwören die Einwohner blutige Rache. Eine Attacke mit zwei Granaten auf die US-Basis war der Auftakt, bei der heute angesetzten Beerdigung könnte die Wut explodieren.


Es war gegen 1 Uhr am Donnerstagmorgen, als zwei Granaten die Stadt Falludscha erschütterten und die Ruhe in der Stadt schlagartig beendeten. Mehr oder weniger blind feuerten die US-Soldaten von dem Gelände auf mehrere flüchtende Männer, trafen aber keinen von ihnen. Auch eine Suche nach den möglichen Tätern der Raketenattacke blieb erfolglos, sie verschwanden unerkannt in der Nacht. Zurück blieben nur die Reste der Granaten, die sieben US-Soldaten in der schwer bewachten Basis verletzten und ein Fahrzeug der Armee schwer beschädigten.

Fast zur gleichen Zeit feilte Tausende Kilometer entfernt US-Präsident George W. Bush an der letzten Fassung seiner Rede an die Nation. Das Ende des von den USA geführten Kriegs im Irak wollte er seinen Landsleuten verkünden, den großen und schnellen Sieg über das verkörperte Böse, Saddam Hussein, und seine Truppen. Den befreiten Irakern versprach Bush in seiner Rede eine "beständige Freundschaft", die noch Jahre anhalten werde. Ob er vor der Rede von den Granaten der irakischen Freunde in Falludscha erfahren hatte, weiß wohl niemand - erwähnt hat er sie jedenfalls nicht.


Aus den Befreiern wurden Besatzer

In das US-Konzept eines freien Iraks, der sich nun schnell und ohne große Probleme in eine Erfolgsnation entwickeln soll, passen die Granaten in Falludscha nicht. Die Attacken auf US-Soldaten in dem Ort geben einen bitteren Vorgeschmack auf die schwierigen Prüfungen, die den USA in den nächsten Monaten noch bevorstehen. Wie schnell und vor allem heftig sich die Stimmung gegen die Befreier von gestern wenden kann, ist in Falludscha gut zu sehen. Innerhalb von Stunden wurden die Soldaten mit dem Sternenbanner auf dem Arm für viele Iraker zu brutalen Besetzern, zu Gegnern in einem neuen Kampf. Von der ungefragt angebotenen Freundschaft der USA wollen immer weniger Iraker etwas wissen.

Einen Tag nach den Granatenattacken ist die Stimmung in Falludscha keineswegs beruhigt. Eine aufgebrachte Menschenmenge protestiert vor dem Gebäude des eingesetzten Bürgermeisters Taha Bedaiwi al-Alwani. Mit Plakaten und Sprechchören fordern die Demonstranten den sofortigen Abzug der Amerikaner aus dem Ort. Entweder, so suggerieren die Banner, ziehen die USA ab, oder sie würden getötet. "Die US-Armee hat hier nichts mehr zu suchen", spricht Scheich Abdul Shaker Wahed den rund hundert Männern laut vor, "wenn sie nicht abzieht, wird sie den Preis zu zahlen haben." Die Menge geht begeistert mit und singt, dass die Armee Mohammeds überall und zu allem bereit ist.

Noch halten die Scheichs die Kämpfer im Zaum

Als Beweis der Schlagkraft dieser imaginären Armee des Propheten fahren vor dem Gebäude immer wieder vermummte Männer mit Toyota Pick-ups auf. Statt geladener Kalaschnikows halten sie noch Stöcke in der Hand. Doch die Gestik der Gewalt ist deutlich. "Noch halten wir unsere Kämpfer zurück", sagt der Scheich mit drohend erhobenem Finger, "doch lange wird das nicht mehr gehen." Fast die Hälfte der Einwohner sei bereit, gegen die US-Besetzer zu kämpfen, glaubt er. Junge Männer mischen sich immer wieder von der Seite ein und brüllen, dass der Kampf schon heute Nacht mit den ersten Selbstmord-Bombern beginnen solle. Noch aber reicht ein Handzeichen des Scheichs, um die Hitzköpfe zum Schweigen zu bringen.

Die Wut der Einwohner des ehemaligen Vorzeigeorts des Saddam-Regimes hat viele Gründe. Schon vor den tödlichen Schüssen am Montag und Dienstag waren sie gereizt und gewaltbereit. Nachdem die Soldaten aber erst 16 und dann noch mal drei Demonstranten erschossen, sitzen die reichlich vorhandenen Waffen locker. "Die Menschen wollen Rache", weiß Scheich Zafer Subhi al-Obeida zu berichten, "die USA müssen sich schnell entschuldigen."

Daneben fühlen sich viele der Menschen in Falludscha getäuscht. "Wir hatten ein Abkommen mit der Armee, dass wir sie nicht angreifen", sagt Scheich Zafer Subhi al-Obeida, der einer großen Sunniten-Gemeinde vorsteht, "doch nun führen sie sich als Besatzer auf." Im Ort selber hätten die US-Soldaten in dem ehemaligen Polizeilager eine Basis errichtet. "Warum sollten sie das tun, wenn sie hier nur kurz bleiben wollen", sagt der Scheich und spricht vielen Menschen aus der Seele. Auch er fordert, dass sich die Soldaten sofort an den Stadtrand zurückziehen müssen. Und auch er lässt die jungen Männer nicht unerwähnt, die sofort bereit seien, ihr Leben für einen Anschlag zu opfern.

Die nächste Prüfung am Freitag


In Falludscha zeigt sich exemplarisch, wie schwierig der Umgang der US-Soldaten mit Irakern in den Tagen nach dem Sieg ist. Nach den Kämpfen mit eindeutigen Zuordnungen von Freund und Feind machen sich die großen kulturellen Unterschiede zwischen den Amerikanern und den Irakern bemerkbar. Aus dem Volk müssen sich die Soldaten diffuse Anklagen anhören. So werfen die Iraker ihnen vor, dass sie mit ihren Ferngläsern die verschleierten Frauen auf den Straßen beobachten und sie so entehren würden. Passanten erregen sich darüber, dass die US-Soldaten mehr oder minder nackt in der Basis herumlaufen. Dass die Soldaten die Vorwürfe als absurd abtun, trägt nicht zur Verbesserung der Stimmung bei.

Am Freitag wollen die Menschen in Falludscha von ihren Toten Abschied nehmen. US-Soldaten hatten sie am Montag und am Dienstag erschossen, nachdem angeblich mehrere Schüsse aus der Menge der Demonstranten auf die Militärbasis abgegeben wurden.
REUTERS

Der 14-jährige Ahmed Muthanna sitzt in dem Auto, in dem sein Vater durch Schüsse von US-Soldaten verletzt und sein Onkel getötet wurde


Nach dem Abendgebet könnte sich schnell eine ähnlich heikle Situation ergeben, wenn Hunderte von aufgebrachten Männern sich an der Moschee sammeln. "Wenn die US-Soldaten sich dort sehen lassen, endet es nicht gut", orakelt Scheich Zafer Subhi und ist sich seiner Drohung ganz bewusst. "Für die Soldaten wäre es das Beste, wenn sie einfach in ihrer Kaserne blieben", meint er. Dass die US-Armee dieser Empfehlung folgt, ist unwahrscheinlich.



© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

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Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Americans have good reason to be afraid of their leaders

28.04.2003 -

Freed from the oppression of their dictator, Iraqis are now free to complain. From tens of thousands of marchers chanting "down, down USA - don`t stay, go away" to individuals spitting at soldiers, Iraqis are flexing a muscle that, paradoxically, had atrophied under Saddam Hussein.

But now here`s an irony that no one expected. Back in America, complaining about America is the one thing that`s pretty much disappeared, lost under the weight of a collective patriotism and increasing constitutional limitations.

Voicing any sort of anti-war opinion is just not done any more and a number of organisations have sprung up with the express purpose of blacklisting celebrities who speak out.

Susan Sarandon is obviously on the list. She`s quoted as saying she doesn`t remember ever being in a climate where people were too afraid to even have a conversation about an issue, let alone a debate.

But then in America, uttering any threatening remark about the President is illegal and likely to land you in jail. Writer Jonathan Freedland, looking at America`s history of tolerance and diversity, said in the Guardian that the country was turning into a very un-American America, "where the limits of acceptable discussion have narrowed sharply and anyone commenting negatively on the war or the President is denounced as unpatriotic".

It shouldn`t come as a surprise. A quick reading of the 2001 Patriot Act, formed in the dark hours after 9/11, clearly shows it`s all part of a bigger plan. Under the guise of security, the act allowed all kinds of incursions into private life.

Some - like the right to track organisations suspected of funding terrorists - made sense in light of the attacks. Others - like the right to seize library lending records or the recruitment of posties, pizza delivery guys, and local shopkeepers into a national network of informers - did seem draconian.

But it turns out it was not enough. Sweeping new amendments to the bill have been drawn up. The Patriot Act II or as the brave would have it, the Liberty for Security Act, was leaked to the press in February and in its present form makes for scary reading. It allows things like random arrests, secret military tribunals for presidentially designated terrorists, and concealment of presidential records.

It even proposes reversing a federal court decision authorising the release of the names of the hundreds of people still detained, without representation, in the dragnet following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Perhaps you believe that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear? The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, in New York, warns that for the first time in United States history, the act will explicitly authorise secret arrests, not to mention sneak-and-peek searches.

That cute term means federal agents can enter your home, download your computer and internet viewing history, take your private business records and any other material, including confidential library and bookstore records - without telling you, without proof of probable cause, or without getting a court order.

And the best part? The legislation does not restrict searches to people suspected of being involved in terrorism.

It gets worse. The act not only increases Government power while decreasing checks on its invasive power. If passed (and that looks likely), the Government will be able to sample and catalogue genetic information, without a court order or your consent. The act also broadens the term "terrorist" to include anyone with views that differ from the Government.

And forget being a whistle-blower. That`s set to become illegal, even if your motive is to protect the public from corporate wrongdoing or Government neglect.

But then to whistle-blow you need access to information. Under Patriot Act II information such as the environmental safety of local factories will be off-limits. And you won`t be able to contribute to meaningful dialogue on the future of such resources as forests (that constitutes belonging to a "special interest group").

In addition if you don`t like a secret decision made by a Government organisation - say, clear-felling ancient sequoia trees - you`ll have no right to appeal. And even the press will be barred from publishing contentious information.

Feeling a tingle up your spine yet? Richard Woods, the head of our own spy service, the SIS, wouldn`t comment. Even his receptionist Mary "I don`t give my second name" would not comment on questions about New Zealand`s response to the Patriot Act II.

But in comparison to the US draft, the proposed amendments to our own 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act are puny procedures - like we require a court warrant to use electronic tracking devices.

So for now - while Americans are waking up to a world where, if you`re not for your Government, you`re a traitor - New Zealanders are safe from the tyranny of an apparently unfettered Government.

America is changing. And it`s changing fast and that raises an apposite question. Are we, tucked away in our comfortable corner of the world, up with their play and, if so, how do we intend to respond to it?




©Copyright 2003, NZ Herald

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3451379&t…

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Patriot Raid

By Jason Halperin, AlterNet
April 29, 2003

Two weeks ago I experienced a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and U.S. citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will and without warrant or cause, under the USA PATRIOT Act. While I understand the need for some measure of security and precaution in times such as these, the manner in which this detention and interrogation took place raises serious questions about police tactics and the safeguarding of civil liberties in times of war.


That night, March 20th, my roommate Asher and I were on our way to see the Broadway show "Rent." We had an hour to spare before curtain time so we stopped into an Indian restaurant just off of Times Square in the heart of midtown. I have omitted the name of the restaurant so as not to subject the owners to any further harassment or humiliation.


We helped ourselves to the buffet and then sat down to begin eating our dinner. I was just about to tell Asher how I`d eaten there before and how delicious the vegetable curry was, but I never got a chance. All of a sudden, there was a terrible commotion and five NYPD in bulletproof vests stormed down the stairs. They had their guns drawn and were pointing them indiscriminately at the restaurant staff and at us.


"Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled.


I hesitated, lost in my own panic.


"Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded.


I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen.


The police placed their fingers on the triggers of their guns and kicked open the kitchen doors. Shouts emanated from the kitchen and a few seconds later five Hispanic men were made to crawl out on their hands and knees, guns pointed at them.


After patting us all down, the five officers seated us at two tables. As they continued to kick open doors to closets and bathrooms with their fingers glued to their triggers, no less than ten officers in suits emerged from the stairwell. Most of them sat in the back of the restaurant typing on their laptop computers. Two of them walked over to our table and identified themselves as officers of the INS and Homeland Security Department.


I explained that we were just eating dinner and asked why we were being held. We were told by the INS agent that we would be released once they had confirmation that we had no outstanding warrants and our immigration status was OK`d.


In pre-9/11 America, the legality of this would have been questionable. After all, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."


"You have no right to hold us," Asher insisted.


"Yes, we have every right," responded one of the agents. "You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation."


The USA PATRIOT Act was passed into law on October 26, 2001 in order to facilitate the post 9/11 crackdown on terrorism (the name is actually an acronym: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.") Like most Americans, I did not recognize the extent to which this bill foregoes our civil liberties. Among the unprecedented rights it grants to the federal government are the right to wiretap without warrant, and the right to detain without warrant. As I quickly discovered, the right to an attorney has been seemingly fudged as well.


When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."


We insisted that we had every right to leave and were going to do so. One of the policemen walked over with his hand on his gun and taunted: "Go ahead and leave, just go ahead."


We remained seated. Our IDs were taken, and brought to the officers with laptops. I was questioned over the fact that my license was out of state, and asked if I had "something to hide." The police continued to hassle the kitchen workers, demanding licenses and dates of birth. One of the kitchen workers was shaking hysterically and kept providing the day`s date – March 20, 2003, over and over.


As I continued to press for legal counsel, a female officer who had been busy typing on her laptop in the front of the restaurant, walked over and put her finger in my face. "We are at war, we are at war and this is for your safety," she exclaimed. As she walked away from the table, she continued to repeat it to herself? "We are at war, we are at war. How can they not understand this."


I most certainly understand that we are at war. I also understand that the freedoms afforded to all of us in the Constitution were meant specifically for times like these. Our freedoms were carved out during times of strife by people who were facing brutal injustices, and were intended specifically so that this nation would behave differently in such times. If our freedoms crumble exactly when they are needed most, then they were really never freedoms at all.


After an hour and a half the INS agent walked back over and handed Asher and me our licenses. A policeman took us by the arm and escorted us out of the building. Before stepping out to the street, the INS agent apologized. He explained, in a low voice, that they did not think the two of us were in the restaurant. Several of the other patrons, though of South Asian descent, were in fact U.S. citizens. There were four taxi drivers, two students, one newspaper salesman – unwitting customers, just like Asher and me. I doubt, though, they received any apologies from the INS or the Department of Homeland Security.


Nor have the over 600 people of South Asian descent currently being held without charge by the Federal government. Apparently, this type of treatment is acceptable. One of the taxi drivers, a U.S. citizen, spoke to me during the interrogation. "Please stop talking to them," he urged. "I have been through this before. Please do whatever they say. Please for our sake."


Three days later I phoned the restaurant to discover what happened. The owner was nervous and embarrassed and obviously did not want to talk about it. But I managed to ascertain that the whole thing had been one giant mistake. A mistake. Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control. A mistake. And, according to the ACLU a perfectly legal one, thanks to the Patriot Act.


The Patriot Act is just the first phase of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. From the Justice Department has emerged a draft of the Domestic Securities Enhancement Act, also known as Patriot II. Among other things, this act would allow the Justice Department to detain anyone, anytime, secretly and indefinitely. It would also make it a crime to reveal the identity or even existence of such a detainee.


Every American citizen, whether they support the current war or not, should be alarmed by the speed and facility with which these changes to our fundamental rights are taking place. And all of those who thought that these laws would never affect them, who thought that the Patriot Act only applied to the guilty, should heed this story as a wake-up call. Please learn from my experience. We are all vulnerable so speak out and organize, our Fourth Amendment rights depend upon it.


Jason Halperin lives in New York City and works at Doctors Without Borders/Medicins San Frontieres. If you are moved by this account, he asks that you consider donating to your local ACLU chapter.

[Joerver]

U.S. media losing global respect
Stephan Richter

With his "preemptive" war against Iraq, U.S. President George Bush took a gamble of historic proportions. But what is far less acknowledged is that the same is true for the U.S. media.

American news reporters and major media outlets used to command great respect around the globe. However, in the age of "embedded" reporters, how much longer will that be the case? There have certainly been journalistic heroes with an American passport. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for example, are part of the global media lore. With their courage and relentlessness, they took down the Nixon Administration during the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

Of course, most U.S. journalists endeavor to live up to that reputation. They dream that one day they, too, will score a media coup of similar proportions.

Unfortunately, the U.S. journalistic profession as a whole today seems to have a somewhat exaggerated sense of its own importance. Too many journalists — in particular many of those based in Washington — are too docile in not wanting to challenge the powers-that-be. They much prefer to stay within the general consensus.

As a result, they regale news-hungry audiences with such "strategic" insights as the information that Bush gave up eating sweets on the day the Iraq invasion started — as USA Today recently reported on its front page.

Even when U.S. reporters go into the field of battle and risk their lives, they are not necessarily doing a service to their profession.

In fact, the decision by virtually all U.S. media organizations to accept the Pentagon`s offer to "embed" themselves with the advancing U.S. troops made some of the problems of the media industry glaringly obvious.

First, there`s the obviously troublesome terminology. "Embedding" reporters implies that they are "in bed" with the troops they accompany. The fact of the matter is that by embedding themselves, the journalists have lost much of their independence — at least as far as perceptions are concerned.

Not only are they forced to accept some censorship but also a plethora of restrictions on what they can and cannot report.

By joining up with individual military units and coming under fire along with their comrades, they also cannot help but become imbued by the battlefield solidarity that is the glue of any fighting force. This, of course, tends to skew their reporting.

And then there are those "reporters" whose breathlessly triumphant pieces leave readers and viewers with the distinct impression that they are being treated to a curious revival of German battlefield reporting from World War I.

Of course, there are embedded reporters, too, who are worth their salt. But these are the exceptions. As a group, the embedded reporting pool has gotten dangerously close to reducing its role to supplying real-time video of the U.S. victory parade — a peculiar kind of celebration of American might in the joystick era.

Just ask yourself how many images U.S. audiences got to see of Iraq`s population in the weeks and months leading up to the war. Virtually all material that was broadcast involved U.S. military preparations.

The Iraqi people were not really present in the U.S. reporting until the victory parade emerged.

If you wanted to see images of Iraqi citizens before that, you better have had access to non-U.S. media like those from "nasty" France or Britain`s unruly BBC.

Most amazingly of all, the handful of journalists who had the sense of self-respect to go into Iraq on their own are called, ironically, "unilateralists."

They do provide some of the most informative reporting and even let the U.S. public get a feel for the story from the Iraqi side as well.

Now, as lamentable as all of that is in and by itself, what the U.S. media do not realize is this: Regardless of one`s sense of self-importance and global status, what really matters on the world stage is one`s reputation - and the true respect that one garners in the four corners of the globe.

And on that front, the U.S. media — in the eyes of many people around the world — are actually in a position that is very similar to that of the U.S. military.

Nobody in his right mind would dispute the "overwhelming force" of the U.S. military. On a global basis, the U.S. media are very much in the same position.

U.S. media organizations are simply larger and better financed than those from nearly all other countries. But that material superiority does not translate into more meaningful or better journalism.

All it really adds up to is more channels and other media outlets that need to be filled with more material.

Witness the near-identical coverage of the war on numerous U.S. cable news channels, as well as on the major networks. The pressures of filling more hours can become oppressive and result in journalism losing its teeth.

Why would that be happening? In part, it is because of the pressures of advertising.

Typically, the reporters cannot offend their advertisers - and they cannot "offend" — read: challenge — the public, either. As long as the public wants to hear reassuring news, that`s what it gets.

Now, undoubtedly, there are a lot of hard-working print reporters trying to undig the "real" story.

But with newspaper readership declining, especially among young audiences, the influence of television on keeping the public informed is clearly paramount.

Ultimately, the problem is two-fold: First, major corporate media all mimic each other — which means that they are increasingly less willing to going beyond the implicit consensus on almost any debate. The reason for this herd mentality is simple.

In fact, it`s the same as with all those economists who seek to forecast future growth by always staying inside the "consensus." As long as they don`t stick their necks out, these people believe, nobody can berate them for getting out of line.

The second problem is that the same herd effect also works in reverse, making the whole U.S. media business, especially in print and cable news reporting, highly pro-cyclical.

What this means in practical terms is that the media tend to enhance, rather than counter, the preconceptions and viewing preferences of the public-at-large.

On a comparative basis, there is relatively little opposition spirit in them. That`s at least how journalists in many democracies would define the most essential character ingredient in their chosen field.

Having the guts to stand up to the "big guys," not to go with the flow, but to challenge the powers that be — that`s the distinguishing criteria for journalists all over the democratic world.

For a multitude of reasons, among journalists in the media in and around Washington — as well as on U.S. TV — that vital ingredient is increasingly in short supply.

The tragedy in all this is that the American people do not get enough forward-thinking reporting from their media. Instead, many U.S. media endeavor to achieve little more than to ratify the consensus. That is no way to behave if you`re the fourth estate in the world`s only remaining superpower.

April 17, 2003

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=comment&id=397

[Joerver]

ONLINE JOURNAL™
www.onlinejournal.com
A View From Abroad
A simple idea
By Linda Deak
Online Journal Contributing Editor
April 29, 2003—The Dutch neighbor of an American friend of mine said this recently: "I`m so mad at that
Bush. Every time he says ‘God Bless America’ I want to ask him, why not ‘God Bless the Whole World?’"
I do not think we can influence the patriotic rhetoric that Bush sprays into the limp and sodden brains of
his brainwashed supporters, but we can certainly begin to throw around our own ideas into the collective
conscience. Many people in the United States have no idea how grating it is to the outside 96 percent of
the world when Bush and his cronies wear their American flag fraternity lapel pins and use the exclusive
chauvinistic “patriotic” slogans that have been flowing for too long from a country that should feel more
grown-up by now.
Billions of people are aghast. Our appointed cowboy president believes that the world is his own private
Ponderosa. He may have been to the manor born, but he did a strange Horatio Alger reversal, going
backward and downward instead of onward and upward. Then, the awful miracle of his candidacy and his
appointment happened. The outside world, as all who are reading this are aware, is in a state of serious
dismay. Soggy, shallow selfish brains were suddenly de rigueur.
There are a few things that we must do to stimulate minds and prod the American public back into the
thinking world and we do not want to stoop to “You are an idiot and I am not” word-jousting. We can
remind the 50 percent who do not vote that caring about politics is caring about the future and the shared
earth. We can be truth’s ambassadors through speaking up and out and encouraging others to do this as
well. Has there been a twenty-eighth amendment added to our constitution that I missed? Are we
required to hunker down to the Homeland, close our eyes minds to the outside world unless we decide to
go bash another country? We can meet with each other, on the Internet and in person, to brainstorm and
prepare for the future, which is going to have to be full of reforms, redress, restitution and restoration for
us to reenter the family of nations and regain some of the old respect.
Maybe someone can compose a world anthem for us all. It is the Bush-led America that has caused the
schisms in today’s world. He has insulted those on the outside and entrenched ignorant xenophobia with
his followers on the inside. Bush probably has no idea how he has united the outside world. When he
called himself a ‘uniter, not a divider,’ he did not mean that he wanted to unite the people of the world
against him and against our country, but that is exactly what he has done. How wonderful that would be
for our country and for our world if an effort to bless the world, rather than any one country, came from us,
the problem-making Americans. Maybe you cannot take part in the protest. But everyone can take part in
expanding the focus of Americans. Last I checked no religion requires an American passport to enter the
Afterlife, although Ashcroft is probably working on this.
God bless the world.
Linda Deak is an American currently residing in The Netherlands.
Copyright © 1998–2003 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.

[Joerver]

Tax cut man von Mark Fiore

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/fiore/

Shut Up And Vibrate Already
Because you just know it`s not all toxic war and BushCo and homophobic senators, right?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 2, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/



So you look straight out into that winking sunset or up at that star-gashed sky or over at that frolicking goofy mutt in the park or at that funky yellow Mini Cooper or deep into the rich burgundy flesh of that goblet of wine or over at the soft gorgeous rhythmic rise and fall of your lover`s chest as s/he sleeps and you think, this is proof, isn`t it?

This is proof that there`s something more, something richer and more divine and far, far more profound and enthralling and cosmic and worthy and wet and delicious about this damnable existence, right? You can just feel it, that divine kick, that lick, that juice? Of course you can.

You just know, in other words, that this can`t be all there is.

Surely, you think, it`s not all smirking inarticulate presidents and gutted economies and bogus wars and international resentment, factories belching venom into the sky and the oceans with decreasing federal restriction and increasing corporate glee.

Surely it`s not all rabid psychopatriots and fear-happy Bible huggers and homophobic Republican senators promoting their tyranny of sexless ignorance, garbage-food conglomerates consciously poisoning the population with toxic foodstuffs far more full of synthetic goo and Agent Orange by-products and bioengineered rat dung than actual food from which the body can draw life and energy and funk and satisfied karmic burps.

You think: No way can it be all about thuggish 8 MPG SUVs and inexplicably dying sea otters and 45 percent of the country actually believing Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11. Can it?

Millions of people invoking the name of God as justification for war and hate and death, more homeless, more poverty, more rampant population growth, more bitch-slapped civil rights, political corruption and bizarre viral disease and Dick Cheney making you question the very definition of sympathetic animate biped?

Because it`s just so easy to forget. It`s so easy to let the crush and rush and chain-saw babble of the world, of the major media`s prepackaged hysteria, overwhelm your senses and numb your id and pile-drive your innate ability to look, really look at the world around you, and ultimately let them effectively asphyxiate what you deeply sense to be true.

Not simply that everything is connected. Not simple that there is a throbbing pulsing extant ever-present scientifically proven energetic vibration to every damn thing on the planet, animate and inanimate, breathing or not, each and every organism radiating forth its sacredness and its profanity and just waiting for you to raise your consciousness just a little so you can receive your divine epiphanic ass-slap.

It`s not just that. It`s that you, right now, at this moment, are much less removed from those pulsing vibrational things than They want you to believe. You are closer than you think.

Here is the basic formula: The more They get you to ignore and detach from and hurl sticks of dismissive ignorance at that divine interconnectedness, the more you feed the common tyranny of fear, the collective cultural moan, and the easier it is for corporations and the government and the masters of televised dread to convince you to buy into, say, a noxious war. Or toxic fast food. Or ultraviolent entertainment. Or Celine Dion.

Conversely, the more you work to feel nature, imbibe it, soak up that juicy interconnectedness like wine into a mattress, suck up that vibrational hum and awe and kiss, the more you realize the value of protecting and preserving and treading lightly, actually taking the time to taste your food, integrate with those objects, feel that breath of your lover. Simple, really.

And, hence, the less you require of the material world. This is what scares them the most. This is why They don`t want you to notice, to feel, to remember, or to question their motives.

Because the less you believe that everything around you is just a tedious lifeless resource to be consumed and shrugged off, the less you feel the need to share in the massive force-fed belief that we are here to devour as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and blow the living crap out of everything that gets in our way.

And then you take the idea one step further. You realize that by soaking up that interconnected juice and raising that vibrational consciousness just that little bit, on a day-to-day basis, you are directly and immediately affecting everything around you, inspiring it, them, us to do exactly the same.

The final kicker: It`s all accessible right now. All you gotta do is ask. Invite it in. Literally. Just ask.

Want to be healthy? Strong? More open and lickable and less bitter and baffled and cynical? Ask for it, place some divine intent behind it and breath it in and imagine what it would feel like to radiate health and sexual vibrancy and self-defined joy and really cool taste in shoes. That`s how you start.

Because this is the biggest collective delusion of all, that you can`t get at it, that it`s so much wimpy tofu-hugging BS, so much fluffy New Age psychobabble. What a convenient excuse that is to remain wallowing and acidic and humming at a simplistically low, want-based pitch, happily drunk on the disinfo They want to sell you. It`s just too easy. And lazy.

And it does require work. It takes some concentrated and open-hearted effort to raise that awareness, to tune in on that level, sift through the bogus media and healers and teachers and pretentious yoga classes, gurus, smarmy inane Chicken Soupy books to find the authentically divine heat and rush and thrust.

You gotta get off your ass. You gotta question everything. You gotta see the world anew, always, every moment, to progress and evolve and vibrate higher. And, to be sure, it can be a total divinely annoying pain in the ass.

But, really, when you get right down to it, what else is there?


Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

©2003 SF Gate

[Joerver]

Auch das ist Amerika, 50 Jahre Playboy. Haben wir uns nicht alle den Playboy wegen seinen guten Geschichten gekauft.
After 50 years of Playboy, we all live in Hef`s world
David Shaw

May 4, 2003

Forty years ago or so, someone bought me a gift subscription to Playboy. For reasons as obvious as they are embarrassing, I quite liked the magazine.

Actually, to be fair to my younger self, it wasn`t only the pneumatic nudes that appealed to me. Playboy publishes good prose, both fiction and nonfiction, and as someone who fancies himself as something of an amateur cultural anthropologist, I thought Playboy also did an excellent job of not just inspiring but also chronicling the changing sexual mores of mid-century America.

Indeed, it was with that thought in mind that within a year of receiving my gift subscription, I found myself haunting used magazine stores, trying to track down every issue of Playboy since its December 1953 debut.

I succeeded — and I continued to read and collect Playboy for the next 25 or 30 years. But about a decade ago, for a variety of reasons, I began to lose interest in the magazine.

So I let my subscription lapse and sold my collection.

I didn`t look at Playboy again until two weeks ago, after I received an e-mail invitation to "this year`s Playmate of the Year celebration at the Playboy Mansion."

Playmate of the Year? I thought. Do they still have Playmates? And what`s to celebrate? Although Playboy is still the top-selling men`s magazine, circulation is less than half its 1970s peak of 6.5 million; Maxim outsells it more than 2-1 on the newsstand. And with photos of naked women so ubiquitous on the Internet that they show up on my computer, unbidden and unwanted, several times a day, why would anyone care about Playmates?

But this is Playboy`s 50th anniversary year, a cultural milestone of sorts, so I decided to go.

What a gas.

More than 500 people gathered under a big white tent for the Playmate announcement, and while most were — surprise — men, largely advertisers and others in business with Playboy, there were many women. Most of them seemed to feel that the nature of the event compelled them to wear dresses with deeply plunging necklines, their age and the amplitude (or absence) of the relevant assets notwithstanding. Never have I been surrounded by so much cleavage.

Because the luncheon doubled as a kickoff to the 50th anniversary festivities, 50 Playmates from years past attended — among them, Dolores Del Monte, Miss March 1954, still spry and attractive (and modestly dressed) at 71.

Hugh Hefner, the magazine`s founder and editor in chief, welcomed them all. Hefner — graying, two weeks past his 77th birthday, clad in a cream-colored, double-breasted suit and a pink, open-neck shirt — sat front and center, at a table with his seven nubile girlfriends. All were young, all were blond, all had vapid smiles permanently affixed. The local electronic media were out in force, and almost everyone else seemed to have a camera as well. Every time I turned around, someone was asking to have his picture taken, either with Hefner and his harem or with any one of the many other examples of anatomical overspill.

A `victory parade`

Before the brief program began, I asked Hefner if he thought Playboy was an anachronism in today`s world.

"Just the opposite," he said. "We all now live, to some extent, in a Playboy world. I can see the effects of the magazine and its campaign for sexual openness everywhere.

"When George Will was here the other day, interviewing me, he said, `You won` and he`s right. It`s nice to have gone through the battles with all those Puritans all those forces of repression and hypocrisy, and to live long enough to see the victory parade."

Hef — as everyone calls him, even his daughter, Christie, now the chairman and chief executive of Playboy Enterprises — quite rightly noted that while Playboy`s circulation is down, its "global brand identification" is strong and growing. Profits from the sale of Playboy licensing and merchandising, video and cable programming, and online services now dwarf the publishing operation. Last year, Playboy magazine accounted for only $94.7 million of the company`s $277.6 million in total revenue.

But the magazine is the heart and soul of Playboy, and Hefner is determined to "keep it relevant for today`s young male." After all, despite its decline, it still sells 3.2 million copies monthly to 2.5 million for No. 2 Maxim.

The Puritans are still among us, of course, and Playboy continues to be a valuable voice against them. If Playboy, at times, takes itself a bit too seriously, Maxim and its ilk are too silly, too frenetic to have (or even want) any real role in the ongoing struggle against what I think of as the "pleasure police," those anhedonics who, as H.L. Mencken put it, suffer from "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

When Arthur Kretchmer, Playboy`s editorial director for 36 years, announced his retirement last year, Hefner hired a new editor, James Kaminsky, 42 — from Maxim.

"Playboy is still the only men`s magazine with beautiful women, great literature, great journalism and a good, long interview every month," Kaminsky says, "and I don`t intend to change that. We`ll have an 8,000-word piece of fiction by T.C. Boyle in our August issue, for example.

"But because of ESPN, MTV and the Internet, today`s male, 18 to 34, processes information differently. He wants more access points, more ways to get into stories."

So the new Playboy, like Maxim and other, newer magazines, has more short pieces and more boxes and illustrations, especially in the front of the book, and it uses these devices to break up longer stories and draw readers into them.

"You might skip the first page of one of our long stories," Kaminsky says, "but I don`t want you to skip all of it, so I hope these sidebars will catch your attention and hook you."

Kaminsky has also hired Playboy`s first "celebrity wrangler" to lure stars into the pages of Playboy, with or without their clothes.

We live, increasingly, in a celebrity culture, but as the magazine that put Marilyn Monroe on the cover — and nude, inside — in its first issue, Playboy is no J. Lo-come-lately to this arena. Besides, with all that nudity available online today, readers are no longer satisfied to see just any naked woman; they want to see a naked woman they think they`ve come to know, on television or in the movies, and would like to know better — even if her celebrity is both artificial and temporary, as in the case of Sarah Kozer of Fox TV`s "Joe Millionaire," whose body, in various stages of undress, graces 10 pages of the June issue of Playboy.



Playing a vital role

Although Kaminsky edits the magazine from its New York editorial offices, and Christie Hefner runs the company from its headquarters in Chicago, Hefner continues to be directly involved, by phone, fax, modem and memo, from his mansion in Holmby Hills.

"I don`t do a lot of reading of the text," he says, "but I still pick all the centerfolds and the cartoons, and I approve all the covers and the photos and the layouts."

And with that, Hefner went off to introduce the Playmate of the Year — Christina Santiago, 21, tightly sheathed in a red dress, with a very low-cut back. As he handed her the keys to a new BMW and a check for $100,000, he beamed and said, "She comes from Chicago, my hometown, where all this began."

Flashbulbs flashed. Peacocks strutted across the lawn. Ducks glided by on the mansion pond. And everyone was given a copy of the magazine and the Playboy merchandise catalog, filled with offers for "barely there" thongs, see-through bras, jars of "potency elixirs," and videos and DVDs guaranteed to put purchasers on "the path to a better sex life."

Although I wasn`t interested in any of these products, I left the mansion with newfound appreciation for the Hefner merchandising machine. More important, I had renewed appreciation for the vital role Hefner played in the sexual revolution.

On this sunny afternoon, with bosoms displayed as far as the eye could see, it was difficult to think of him and his seven personal playmates as revolutionaries — "Give me libido or give me death"? — and there is no doubt that in some sense, Playboy has been guilty of both objectifying women and turning them into air-brushed Barbie dolls.

But there is also no doubt that in the buttoned-down, closed-up 1950s, Hefner helped open many Americans to the idea that sex should not be regarded as a dirty little secret.


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David Shaw can be reached at [e-mail]

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-turley2…
Appetite for Authoritarianism Spawns an American Gulag
By Jonathan Turley

May 2, 2003

Last week, the United States confirmed it is holding children under the age of 16 at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In keeping with the other shadowy facts about this camp, it is not clear how large the children`s wing at Camp Delta has become. Before the Marine guards launch a Toys for Terrorist Tots campaign, it is time to get some answers about our government`s plans for the growing number of detainees, including children, held in Cuba.

The camp`s children are among 664 detainees from 42 countries. Some were captured in Afghanistan; others were rounded up elsewhere. Many have been held without trial for more than two years.

The Bush administration has argued that these detainees are not "people" under the Constitution but, rather, legal nonentities it may hold, release or even execute at its sole discretion. Recent reports indicate that the Justice Department has no intention of trying the vast majority of these prisoners. Rather, estimates on possible tribunal trials rarely exceed two dozen. The administration has simply decided to hold hundreds of people without trial or judicial review at the president`s whim. There is a term for that type of prison: gulag.

Although certainly tiny compared with Chinese or Soviet models, the facility operated by the U.S. can no longer be defined as a prison or even a military camp. It is an American gulag, holding hundreds of prisoners without trial or access to the courts. In fairness to the Soviets, it must be noted that at least their prisoners got sham trials. This makes Camp Delta an even more extreme variation on the gulag theme.

Camp Delta was originally justified as a holding area for alleged war criminals from the Afghanistan conflict. The administration now has broadened its use to include anyone whom it defines as a terrorist suspect or a person suspected of aiding or abetting terrorists. Of course, suspicion in the Bush administration is as good as a conviction because the vast majority will never be submitted to a tribunal, let alone a legitimate court of law.

Administration officials like Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft appear to covet the authority to hold individuals indefinitely. Ashcroft recently announced that legal immigrants would be held indefinitely based on a simple declaration that such confinement served national security. As for citizens, Ashcroft has previously claimed that he has the unilateral authority to declare U.S. citizens to be "enemy combatants" and to strip them of all constitutional rights — including access to the courts or counsel. Alternatively, Ashcroft is seeking new powers in Congress giving him the ability to strip people of citizenship, subjecting them to deportation or indefinite incarceration.

Camp Delta, the enemy combatant policy and the new alien policy are all examples of a certain appetite in the administration for the trappings of authoritarian power. While the number of affected individuals remains relatively small, the taste for such unilateral power is clearly growing into a craving.

It is tempting to dismiss these measures as mere indulgences on the edges of society — akin to a frolic or fringe benefit for the autocratically inclined. Yet the construction of facilities like Camp Delta require the destruction of something irreplaceable in a nation of laws.

Ironically, Americans were appalled when Iraqi citizens looted their own national museum. Many asked how a people could destroy their own cultural treasures and history. Yet such looting is openly occurring in this country. As a relatively young nation, we have few gilded treasures like those from the Mesopotamian period. In fact, our greatest treasures tend to be documents, like the Bill of Rights, that define us as a nation. It is that legacy that is being looted and destroyed through the creation of places like Camp Delta.

Since his arrival, Ashcroft has rushed through the U.S. legal system with the same rampaging rage as a Baghdad looter, thoughtlessly shattering artifacts in looking for things of instant value. What remains are pieces of Americana, like the presumption of innocence and due process, that lay in shards after only a two-year period.

What is tragic is that, like the Iraq Museum looting, none of this was necessary or inevitable. If there was evidence that these detainees were terrorists or war criminals, they could have been handled in the very legal system that they sought to destroy. Instead, it is American hands that are pulling down that system and constructing a gulag in a new American image. Meanwhile, Congress remains silent.

Just as the military watched as the Iraq Museum was plundered, Congress has adopted a pedestrian role concerning the this administration`s excesses. The only preservation that appears to motivate our representatives is self-preservation.


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Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington Law School.

[Joerver]

May 1, 2003
The Fog of Peace
By MICHAEL R. GORDON


BAGHDAD — Apache helicopter gunships zoomed toward a band of paramilitary fighters who were stealing crates of ammunition from an arms cache near Saddam Hussein`s hometown, Tikrit. As the Iraqis tried to make a getaway, the Apaches opened fire, turning the paramilitaries` truck into a hunk of twisted metal and killing 14.

This is not an old war episode. It took place Wednesday night, just a day before President Bush flew to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq. And it illustrates the complicated mission American forces now face as they try to bring stability to Iraq.

American forces are operating in a netherworld between war and peace. One moment they may be working on restoring electrical power and the next they may be involved in a vicious firefight. The foe is any of a broad array of forces that oppose the new order: die-hards from the old regime, criminal bands, Iranian agents, suicide bombers and power-hungry Iraqi political factions.

"We are moving into stability operations, and stability operations are characterized by momentary flare-ups of violence," Brig. Gen. Daniel Hahn, the chief of staff for the Army`s V Corps, said on Thursday. "It will look at times like we are still at war."

By conventional measures, the war in Iraq has been over for weeks. Allied forces have overthrown the government, moved into Saddam Hussein`s palaces and started to patrol the streets of the capital.

But the United States` ultimate goal was not just to topple Mr. Hussein but to stabilize the country and install a friendly government. The American calculation is that as basic services are restored, leaders take power and oil revenue begins flowing, most Iraqis will conclude that they have stake in the emerging order. Gradually, Iraqis will take over policy and other security tasks so they can run the country on their own.

The American military`s task is to provide the security in the meantime. The new mission now involves destroying forces that disrupt the new order, prevent agents from Iran and Syria from meddling in Iraq`s affairs, and prevent power grabs like the one attempted by Muhammad al-Zubeidi, the self-appointed Baghdad administrator whose insistent efforts to take control landed him in American detention last Sunday.

This is more of an endurance contest than a sprint. It also depends heavily on good intelligence and the cooperation of Iraqi citizens to help locate troublemakers. American forces have shifted from a campaign that was measured in days and weeks to a mission that will take months, if not years.

"As these things move out, more and more people will want to turn away from the violence," General Hahn said. "I expect it to become easier and easier to get rid of these bad actors. Then there will be just a few elements that will go to ground and we will just have to deal with that. It is not to be expected that everything will be rosy and benign. For some time in the future, elements will remain that will not like the direction that the new Iraqi nation is taking."

The past few days have been a taste of what is in store.

On Wednesday, a man was shot near Kut as he tried to run over two marines at a checkpoint.

The same day, soldiers from the Third Infantry Division in Baghdad found a truckload of bombs. They were hidden inside soccer balls, according to the division`s report to the V Corps. A soldier from another of the division`s units was wounded during a patrol in the capital.

In Falluja on Thursday, two grenades were thrown at soldiers from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, wounding seven. The attack followed several days of disturbances in the city where American soldiers exchanged fire with an unknown number of attackers as civilians carried out demonstrations against the American presence. As many as 17 Iraqis — including civilians, according to local residents — were killed.

In response to those attacks, American commanders plan to seek out former Baath Party officials they believe are behind the provocation. Crowd control techniques — the use of loudspeakers to influence mobs, rubber bullets and pepper spray — will also be added to the repertoire of the American troops stationed there.

In Tikrit, the attempted ammunition heist began when scouts from the Fourth Infantry Division detected paramilitary fighters raiding an arms cache. About five of the paramilitary fighters were attacked and killed. When more returned, they were blasted by Apache gunships.

Civil affairs forces have been focusing on restoring essential services and helping Iraqis get back on their feet. But they, too, have been targets at times. Four were recently shot by a lone gunman as they made their way through congested traffic to the Ministry of Health. One of the wounded soldiers shot and killed the attacker.

Each day provides a fresh list or incidents, which are reported up the chain of command. It is part of the routine. The combat phase may be over but the war is not.

The ultimate success of the American military intervention in Iraq will depend on political factors that are beyond the control of American forces, including the emergence of an effective Iraqi leadership. But the political goals cannot be achieved unless order is maintained and the Iraqis understand that the die-hard defenders of the old regime are neutralized once and for all.

The task will require the ability to take setbacks in stride, efforts by the military to forge a good working relationship with the Iraqi population and one of the rarest of American characteristics: patience.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

TWO KILLED IN NEW IRAQ DEMO SHOOTING


From Chris Hughes In Al-Fallujah. Pictures by Julian Andrews


IT started when a young boy hurled a sandal at a US jeep - it ended with two Iraqis dead and 16 seriously injured.

I watched in horror as American troops opened fire on a crowd of 1,000 unarmed people here yesterday.

Many, including children, were cut down by a 20-second burst of automatic gunfire during a demonstration against the killing of 13 protesters at the Al-Kaahd school on Monday.





FIRST SHOTS: Soldier opens fire on crowd yesterday

They had been whipped into a frenzy by religious leaders. The crowd were facing down a military compound of tanks and machine-gun posts.

The youngster had apparently lobbed his shoe at the jeep - with a M2 heavy machine gun post on the back - as it drove past in a convoy of other vehicles.

A soldier operating the weapon suddenly ducked, raised it on its pivot then pressed his thumb on the trigger.

Mirror photographer Julian Andrews and I were standing about six feet from the vehicle when the first shots rang out, without warning.

We dived for cover under the compound wall as troops within the crowd opened fire. The convoy accelerated away from the scene.

Iraqis in the line of fire dived for cover, hugging the dust to escape being hit.

We could hear the bullets screaming over our heads. Explosions of sand erupted from the ground - if the rounds failed to hit a demonstrator first. Seconds later the shooting stopped and the screaming and wailing began.

One of the dead, a young man, lay face up, half his head missing, first black blood, then red spilling into the dirt.





MAYHEM: Iarqis run for cover and others dive to the ground to escape bullets

His friends screamed at us in anger, then looked at the grim sight in disbelief.

A boy of 11 lay shouting in agony before being carted off in a car to a hospital already jam-packed with Iraqis hurt in Monday`s incident.

Cars pulled up like taxis to take the dead and injured to hospital, as if they had been waiting for this to happen.

A man dressed like a sheik took off his headcloth to wave and direct traffic around the injured. The sickening scenes of death and pain were the culmination of a day of tension in Al-Fallujah sparked by Monday`s killings.

The baying crowd had marched 500 yards from the school to a local Ba`ath party HQ. We joined them, asking questions and taking pictures, as Apache helicopters circled above.

The crowd waved their fists at the gunships angrily and shouted: "Go home America, go home America."

We rounded a corner and saw edgy-looking soldiers lined up along the street in between a dozen armoured vehicles. All of them had automatic weapons pointing in the firing position.

As the crowd - 10 deep and about 100 yards long - marched towards the US positions, chanting "Allah is great, go home Americans", the troops reversed into the compound.

On the roof of the two-storey fortress, ringed by a seven-foot high brick wall, razor wire and with several tanks inside, around 20 soldiers ran to the edge and took up positions.





TRAGEDY: Shot man lies dead in the street as blood pours from his head wound

A machine gun post at one of the corners swivelled round, taking aim at the crowd which pulled to a halt.

We heard no warning to disperse and saw no guns or knives among the Iraqis whose religious and tribal leaders kept shouting through loud hailers to remain peaceful. In the baking heat and with the deafening noise of helicopters the tension reached breaking point.

Julian and I ran towards the compound to get away from the crowd as dozens of troops started taking aim at them, others peering at them through binoculars.

Tribal leaders struggled to contain the mob which was reaching a frenzy.

A dozen ran through the cordon of elders, several hurling what appeared to be rocks at troops.

Some of the stones just reached the compound walls. Many threw sandals - a popular Iraqi insult.

A convoy of Bradley military jeeps passed by, the Iraqis hurling insults at them, slapping the sides of the vehicles with their sandals, tribal leaders begging them to retreat.

The main body of demonstrators jeered the passing US troops pointing their thumbs down to mock them.

Then came the gunfire - and the death and the agony.

After the shootings the American soldiers looked at the appalling scene through their binoculars and set up new positions, still training their guns at us.

An angry mob battered an Arab TV crew van, pulling out recording equipment and hurling it at the compound. Those left standing - now apparently insane with anger - ran at the fortress battering its walls with their fists. Many had tears pouring down their faces.

Still no shots from the Iraqis and still no sign of the man with the AK47 who the US later claimed had let off a shot at the convoy.

I counted at least four or five soldiers with binoculars staring at the crowd for weapons but we saw no guns amongst the injured or dropped on the ground.

A local told us the crowd would turn on foreigners so we left and went to the hospital.

There, half an hour later, another chanting mob was carrying an open coffin of one of the dead, chanting "Islam, Islam, Islam, death to the Americans".

We left when we were spat at by a wailing woman dressed in black robes.

US troops had been accused of a bloody massacre over the killings of the 13 Iraqis outside the school on Monday. Three of the dead were said to be boys under 11.

At least 75 locals were injured in a 30-minute gun battle after soldiers claimed they were shot at by protesters.

Demonstrators claimed they were trying to reclaim the school from the Americans who had occupied it as a military HQ.

The crowd had defied a night-time curfew to carry out the protest.

[Joerver]

Friedman ist einer der bekanntesten Kolumnisten der NYTimes

John Chuckman: `Thomas Friedman`s life as a pet hamster`
Posted on Friday, May 02 @ 10:00:40 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By John Chuckman

If you ever had a pet hamster when you were young, you know what I mean about hearing its regular scrambling and spinning on the exercise wheel. The squeak-squeak sound becomes an amusing background noise of everyday life.

There is a powerful analogy in the life of a pet hamster to the work of mainline American columnists, but I think there are few it better suits than Thomas Friedman, and I am not referring to his pudgy, whiskered looks.

Apart from time on the wheel, pet hamsters` lives are pretty well limited to nibbling food pellets and taking refreshment from a water bottle. Thomas receives his pellets and refreshment from the public-influence departments of the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department. Between feedings and rests to digest, you can hear Thomas periodically scamper over to his wheel for a spin.



I know, I know, he`s a Pulitzer laureate, but people citing this qualification haven`t examined the distinction they make. A serious reader of history knows the Pulitzer has gone to mediocre books while wonderful ones were overlooked. In journalism, the Pulitzer is more doubtful, having been awarded for out-and-out fraud.

Of course, Americans have an obsession with prizes and lists, as though one could count on them as a way of identifying worth and integrity, but the main purpose most of them serve is juicing-up products.

The New York Times spends gobs of money bolstering Thomas the hamster`s aura of authority. He is sent regularly to distant points, but if you go somewhere to gather quotes and local color, absorbing little of its truths, the net effect resembles the blow-dried correspondents on network television who use foreign locations for background shots while droning out what might just as easily have said been said in the studio.

A recent spin of Thomas`s wheel, gave us this, "As far as I`m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war…. Mr. Bush doesn`t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons….in ending Saddam`s tyranny…."

This is an upgraded version of Ari Fleischer`s demented-person-on-a-subway-car muttering about the absence of any strategic weapons in Iraq meaning the invasion had been exactly what forced Hussein to destroy them. Hussein was a tyrant indeed, but the United States has no history of fighting tyranny. Even World War II was the culmination of America`s long, bitter rivalry with a rising Japan over who would dominate the Pacific. Hitler declared war on America, not the other way around. America`s power has been used dozens of times to put tyrants into power, just so long as they were "its" tyrants.

Squeak, squeak. "So why isn`t everyone celebrating this triumph? Why is there still an undertow out there, a holding back of jubilation? There are several explanations. For me, it has to do with the nature of Iraq and the Middle East. You always have this worry that in the Middle East, fighting evil is like holding back the desert. The minute you fight off one evil, three others blow in to take its place."

You might think anyone writing for a major publication would be ashamed to see this printed: it very much resembles "Terry and the Pirates in Western Asia" or "The Hardy Boys Join the Foreign Legion." The people of the desert are mysteriously, inexplicably evil; in fact, they are hydra-headed, and when you hack one head off, several more grow in its place.

Squeak, squeak.goes the wheel, "I will whoop it up only when the Iraqi people are really free — not free just to loot or to protest against us, but free to praise us out loud, free to speak their minds in any direction, because they have built a government and rule of law that can accommodate pluralism and stand in the way of evil returning."

Well, Thomas, that is a truly amazing jumble. Iraqis are supposed to praise the people who have defeated and humiliated them. Indeed, when they do, it will be evidence of their true freedom. This is the arrogance of power, raw and ugly, with no hint of shame. One senses O`Brien setting Winston Smith on the path towards a proper attitude about Big Brother in 1984.

In one jump, after being smashed, the Iraqis are expected to produce a modern pluralistic society, but history`s few examples of that happening are in states which were essentially modern but had temporarily slipped into tyranny under terrible and unusual circumstances; e.g. Nazi Germany. The road to modernism, democratic values, and pluralism through all of history is a long one for states that are underdeveloped. It displays immense arrogance and ignorance to believe you can smash an underdeveloped society and then see a modern one emerge from the ruins.

Squeak, squeak. "France and Russia refuse to acknowledge that any good was done in Iraq because if America`s war ends justify its unilateral means, their power will be further diminished."

Sorry, Thomas, it wasn`t just a couple of uppity, jealous countries that opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq. It was virtually the entire planet. Only one ally, Tony Blair`s inexplicable Britain, did any real fighting. The other members of Bush`s pathetic "coalition of the willing" gave virtually no material support. They simply agreed to keep their mouths shut following months of Washington`s browbeating and bribing leaders all over the world.

Why is it when Americans like Thomas write about Russian or French or German objections to America`s blasting its way into Iraq that it is always put in terms of their seeing their own power diminished, of experiencing a kind of international penis envy? Does this tell us more about Thomas than the Russians or the French perhaps?

Here, again, is raw arrogance and lack of understanding. It isn`t possible the people of these countries are right to fear America`s four percent of the world`s population arbitrarily invading a place which has not threatened them, violently changing international arrangements affecting everyone, and ignoring the voices of unprecedented world opposition? Where`s the spirit of pluralism or democratic values in this? Thomas, isn`t this precisely what people fear from tyranny?

I won`t go into the immense shortcomings of democracy in America which can, for example, produce a President who was not elected, but even assuming it to be a generally democratic society, do democracies not often do stupid or terrible things? Look at what America did to its black citizens. Look at its bloody slaughter in Vietnam. Look at what Israel does to the Palestinians. Further, America`s voters, maybe two percent of the world`s population, can be viewed effectively as a kind of aristocracy vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Can you not appreciate that, Thomas?

In another recent piece, Thomas, cleverly pretending he is Hussein addressing the President, gives us, "Mr. Bush, I know you`re wondering why I did not do more to avoid this war, which ended my political life. What in the world was I thinking? Who was I listening to? The answer is: I was listening only to myself. Don`t make my mistake."

But, Thomas, has Bush ever listened to anyone other than himself and his narrow crew of advisors? What else does the invasion of Iraq represent? What else do the lies about terrible weapons represent? What else does sabotaging the UN`s weapons inspectors represent? So, now, this lethal-injection loner from Texas is supposed to act like a gracious world statesman?

You really can`t have it both ways, Thomas. When you embrace this kind of leadership, you take all that comes with it. And that, as it turns out, is a pretty nasty bundle of goods, including the clearest lack of respect and understanding for the rights of Americans themselves and the dignity and worth of everyone else.

Squeak, squeak. Thomas further advises Bush, "Always remember: This [Iraq] is an Arab country. Iraqis want to be first-class Arabs, not second-class Americans."

I feel fairly confident claiming that few writers can beat Thomas for being crudely patronizing. What in God`s name is a "first-class Arab"? Is it anything like an American black with "a pure-white heart"? And I do think, Thomas, that before you invade a country, kill thousands of people, dismember children, destroy water, sanitation, and communications, thrust everyone into unemployment and anarchy, and manage to have some of the world`s greatest cultural treasures plundered is the time to remember the people belong to a different society.

Squeak, squeak.

[Joerver]

Ist er nun geflogen, oder hat er fliegen lassen?

Bush`s Top Gun Photo-Op
05/01/2003 @ 4:59pm
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Winning a war or two goes a long way toward redefining a man.

As the cable news networks enthusiastically covered George W. Bush`s trip to the USS Abraham Lincoln--cool military hardware, guys in uniforms, the Big Man, and a touch of can-anything-go-wrong drama--there were plenty of references to Bush`s days in the Texas Air National Guard, when he flew F-102 fighter jets. (Well, sort of--but we`ll get to that.) On MSNBC, correspondent George Lewis noted that Bush, with his tailhook landing on the aircraft carrier, was "becoming one of" the troops on board. He didn`t add, only 25 years late. That is, neither Lewis nor any of the other television journalists covering this gee-whiz event (whom I saw) mentioned Bush`s rather spotty (to be kind about it) record in the National Guard.

Those of you who closely followed the 2000 campaign might already be familiar with the tale of Bush`s service--or non-service--in the Guard. It received some, but not much, coverage. Not as much as Al Gore`s not-quite-true remark about the cost of meds for Tipper`s mother`s dog. Bush dodged a bullet on this, for he offered dubious explanations in response to serious questions about his military record--and never was called on it. Here`s an all-too brief summary:

Getting into the Guard. Enlisting in the Guard was one way to beat the draft and avoid being sent to Vietnam. Is this why Bush signed up? During the campaign, Bush said no. Yet in 1994, he had remarked, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Not was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." That sure sounds like someone who was looking to avoid the draft and pick up a skill. Obtaining a slot in the Guard at that time was not usually easy--for the obvious reason: lots of young men were responding to the call of self-preservation. (Think Dan Quayle.) Bush, whose father was then a congressman from the Houston area, has said no strings were pulled on his behalf. Yet in 1999, the former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives told The New York Times that a Houston oilman who was a friend of Bush`s father had asked him to grease the skids for W. and he obliged.

What Bush did in the Guard. In Bush`s campaign autobiography, A Charge To Keep, he wrote that he completed pilot training in 1970 and "continued flying with my unit for the next several years." But in 2000, The Boston Globe obtained copies of Bush`s military records and discovered that he had stopped flying during his final 18 months of service in 1972 and 1973. More curious, the records showed Bush had not reported for Guard duty during a long stretch of that period. Had the future commander-in-chief been AWOL?

In May 1972, with two years to go on his six-year commitment to the Guard, Bush moved to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign. He asked if he could do his Guard duty there. This son-of-a-congressman and fighter pilot won permission to do "equivalent training" at a unit that had no aircraft and no pilots. The national Air Reserve office then disallowed this transfer. For months, Bush did nothing for the Guard. In September 1972, he won permission to train with a unit in Montgomery. But the commander of the unit and his administrative officer told the Boston Globe that they had no recollection of Bush ever reporting for duty. And when Bush returned to Texas after the November election, he did not return to his unit for months, according to his military records. His annual performance report, dated May 2, 1973, noted he had "not been observed at this unit" for the past year. In May, June and July of that year, he did pull 36 days of duty. And then, as he was on his way to Harvard Business School, he received permission to end his Guard service early.

The records suggest Bush skipped out on the Guard for about a year. (And during that time he had failed to submit to an annual physical and lost his flight status.) A campaign spokesperson said Bush recalled doing duty in Alabama and "coming back to Houston and doing duty." But Bush never provided any real proof he had. Asked by a reporter if he remembered what work he had done in Alabama, he said, "No, I really don`t." A fair assumption was that he had gamed the system and avoided a year of service, before wiggling out of the Guard nearly a year before his time was up. It looked as if he had served four, not six years.

When he enlisted in the Texas Air Guard, Bush had signed a pledge stating he would complete his pilot training and then "return to my unit and fulfill my obligation to the utmost of my ability." Instead, he received flight training--at the government`s expense--and then cut out on his unit. He had not been faithful to the Guard. He had not kept this particular charge

But that was then. After 9/11, after Afghanistan, after Iraq--and before who-knows-what--Bush has become a man with no past. He is a different fellow, that`s for sure, and now wears the commander-in-chief uniform more comfortably than before those airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But could Bill Clinton--even in a similar situation--have gotten away with joy-riding a S-3B Viking aircraft onto a carrier for a mega-photo-op without commentators reminding viewers of his sly draft-dodging ways?

Bush looked quite heroic--so Tom Cruise-ish--hopping out of that plane dressed in a flight suit and striding across the flight deck. What imagery. This entire trip was only about imagery. He flew out to the Lincoln to announce that the major combat operations are done. What a news flash. Who didn`t know that? And he could not have made such an announcement from Washington? Bush did not even plan to say that the war was officially over, because then Geneva Accords provisions pertaining to occupation would kick in and impose obligations upon the United States, such as releasing POWs. So what really was the point? Could it have been to score free television time during an hour that tends to draw one of the biggest viewing audiences of the week? Bush`s communications people just so happened to have scheduled his Lincoln speech for the time slot usually inhabited by CSI on CBS and Will & Grace on NBC. Last week, these two shows attracted 43 million viewers. Bush`s primetime one-on-one with Tom Brokaw earlier this week only drew an audience of 9 million and lost out to an America`s Funniest Home Videos rerun featuring dog tricks. (A nod of thanks to Lisa de Moraes, The Washington Post`s television columnist for pointing this out.)

Was this, then, just a campaign stunt? Nah, Bush and Karl Rove wouldn`t waste taxpayer money and exploit a war that claimed the lives of 128 Americans--and thousands of Iraqis--for crass political advantage. And Bush really did serve honorably in the Guard.

[Joerver]

The neo-confidence game
Are you ready for ‘World War IV’?
BY RICHARD BYRNE
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WASHINGTON, DC — It’s one of those perfect spring evenings that often graces the nation’s capital in late April. The day’s bright sunshine has dimmed to twilight, and the air is cooling to a sweet and clear nectar. But under a big white tent in the Decatur House — a historic dwelling from Washington’s earliest days, located just a stone’s throw from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — a few dozen of us have forsaken an al fresco dinner to listen to talk about war at a reception organized by the Jamestown Foundation.

Waiters bring drinks around as we listen to Jamestown Foundation president Barbara Abbott talk about how the group, founded in 1984 to analyze Soviet-era threats and provide a conduit for Soviet defectors, is now shifting its ideological and strategic assets to the war on terrorism. We listen as bluff and gregarious Evgueni Novikov — a 1988 Soviet defector and the newly appointed director of Jamestown’s International Terrorism Program — gives his analysis: that oil money offers a chance for terrorists to " challenge American power. "

But mostly we’ve come to hear James Woolsey — director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Clinton administration and one of the most powerful advocates of war with Iraq — gaze into the crystal ball and tell us what’s next. Woolsey is vice-chair of Jamestown’s board of directors, and the foundation’s shift from Cold War to new war aligns perfectly with his own recent comments. He received gobs of recent media attention, including an April 20 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, when reports about a speech he gave at a GOP-student-organized " teach-in " at UCLA on April 2 appeared on TV networks and newspapers worldwide.

In that speech, the former CIA director argued that in its battle against terrorism, the United States is fighting " World War IV, " a formulation he credited to scholar Elliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. It took " four-plus decades " to win " World War III " — the Cold War — and the current conflict will also be a long one, Woolsey said. He continued:


As we move toward a new Middle East over the years ... we will make a lot of people very nervous. And we will scare, for example, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, or the Saudi royal family, thinking about this idea that these Americans are spreading of democracy in this part of the world.... Our response should be, " Good! " We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you — the Mubaraks, the Saudi royal family — most fear: we’re on the side of your own people.


Coming on the heels of the ups and downs of war in Iraq, Woolsey’s remarks made Americans as " nervous " as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak or the House of Saud that rules Saudi Arabia may be. The Bush administration’s recent saber rattling toward Syria, which it warned not to harbor fugitive Iraqi officials, has also reinforced Americans’ jitters about ongoing conflict.

But the " world war " conceit that Woolsey has adopted is nothing new. Right after the September 11 attacks, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dubbed the war on terrorism " World War III. " President George W. Bush also adopted the " global " and " total " war concept, telling the US Congress in a speech given in the wake of 9/11 that " Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. "

In the aftermath of 9/11, Woolsey has become one of Washington’s most ardent ideological stumpers for extending Bush’s vision. One such " stumping " incident even created an embarrassment for the Pentagon early on. In a November 2001 article in the Village Voice, writer Jason Vest reported that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dispatched Woolsey to Great Britain on a government plane in September 2001 to investigate links between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Iraq. Vest reported:


Woolsey’s pursuit of the World Trade Center connection led him to the small town of Swansea, Wales, where his sleuthing piqued the curiosity of the local constabulary, whose chief decided to ring the U.S. Embassy in London for clarification as to whether Woolsey was visiting in an official capacity. This was the first anyone at State or CIA had heard of Woolsey’s British expedition, and upon being apprised of it, [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and [CIA director George] Tenet were not amused. " It was a stupid, stupid, and just plain wrong thing to do, " an intelligence consultant familiar with the " operation " said.


Such mishaps haven’t checked Woolsey’s rise to new prominence as a neoconservative advocate, however. And in light of his high profile as a former CIA director, his hawkish enthusiasm for the war of ideas (as well as the war of regime change) has helped transform a scholarly conceit into a call for a sort of perpetual American jihad.

After all, the concept of World War IV underscores the notion that we’ve only recently emerged from a " war " — albeit one labeled " cold " with good reason, since it was fought by bankrupting the Soviet Union through massive military spending rather than by actual armed confrontation — and that we’re fighting another one now. It’s a portrait of a perpetually martial society at war for 50 years — with only the recent 10-year respite between major conflicts. It also doesn’t square with concrete reality. The US was involved in three wars during the 1990s, that supposed decade of post-WWIII/Cold War peace — including the Kosovo campaign, which was the first-ever military action taken by NATO, the bulwark of WWIII.

Nonetheless, the World War IV conceit is a genius stroke of propaganda in support of continuing war and US-prompted regime change in other countries. A nation that President Franklin D. Roosevelt called an " arsenal of democracy " has changed its role to that of active agent of democratic regime change abroad. And the linking of the " war on terrorism " to the Cold War transforms recent US military experience from a string of more-or-less-successful conflicts into a grand march of history. Forget the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam. Forget the 1990-’91 Gulf War that left Saddam Hussein in power. Forget the messy and fussy Balkan wars. We won the Cold War, right? This new one is just like that one.

AT THE DECATUR House, Woolsey picked up the thread of that analysis — the new anti-terror war as Cold War redux — within minutes of taking the podium. " We are in a long war, " he argued, " with a lot of parallels with the Cold War. " It is a war of ideas, he continued, " and we have to win it ideologically. "

The Arab world is swimming with ready-made internal dissidents, Woolsey observed. We just need the time to win them over. The Cold War, he noted, was won in part " by convincing the Lech Walesas and Václav Havels and Andrei Sakharovs and the Solidaritys that we were right. " In those years, he reminded the audience, " socialism " — set up as the ideological opposite of " capitalism " — actually encompassed a wide spectrum of beliefs. " A lot of people called themselves socialists, " he observed. " Helmut Schmidt. George Orwell. All the way to the Khmer Rouge. What we wanted was more Helmut Schmidts and George Orwells.... The Khmer Rouge was isolated. "

Woolsey saw a neat parallel between the old war and the new. Just like the communist world, the Muslim world has within it a large and diverse bandwidth of fanatic intensity, from " Shia to Sunni to blatant dictators like [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi and [Syrian president] Bashar Assad. " He called for the US to " move to isolate, in their fanaticism, the Islamists. "

Of course, all that sounds reasonable. But what could be scary about Woolsey’s talk was the almost glib way he dismissed the problems confronting the US, and the differing cultures with which it must deal, as it fights terror. Woolsey tends to demonize rather than humanize — and to scare the listener rather than to stare down our adversaries. In one interesting riff, the former CIA director called Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis " an extremely hateful sect " and compared them to the Spanish Inquisition. Both the Wahhabis and the Inquisition married church and state to practice cruel religious intolerance, he opined. Then Woolsey mentioned what he sees as the scary twist: the Wahhabis amount to an Inquisition funded by oil money. " Move Torquemada and that Spain and put an oil field under them, " Woolsey quipped, and you’d have the Wahhabis.

The " fantastic wealth " bankrolling Islamist extremism is, in Woolsey’s view, what makes the threat it poses so great and the war against it so potentially long. " There’s a different cast on this one than on the Cold War, " he argued. " We’re going to be fighting this one a long time We’re facing the wealth of the Gulf and its support of terrorism. " It’s a Middle East that’s filled, he added, " with pathological predators and vulnerable autocracies. "

Nonetheless, Woolsey’s rhetoric about World War IV offers hope and glory to counterbalance the fear and loathing. He asked listeners to cast back to 1917, when the world possessed only a handful of democracies. " It was a world of empires and colonies and dictatorships, " he said. Today, on the other hand, the world has more than 120 democracies. " It’s a huge challenge, but not impossible, " he argued, to create more democracies in the Middle East. And more than that, it is absolutely necessary for our own survival. " We will not win, " Woolsey warned, " unless we change the face of the Middle East. "

In the May 2003 edition of the Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall offers a thoughtful review of Paul Berman’s latest book, Terrorism and Liberalism (W.W. Norton). Though Marshall speaks of Berman’s attempt to link historical elements of Islamic and terrorist thought, one particular section of his analysis applies to Woolsey’s arguments as well:


Though this is a serious book, it is shot through with an equally serious flaw: the desire to inflate the threat of Islamist violence — and particularly its intellectual stakes — to levels beyond what they merit and to force them into a template of an earlier era, for which Berman has an evident and understandable nostalgia. Over the course of the book, the disjointedness between what the radical Islamist menace is and what Berman wants to make it ranges from merely apparent to downright painful, and ends up obscuring as much as it clarifies. And, unfortunately, the obscuring elements may be the more important ones. Given the role intellectuals are playing in this war, these are mistakes that could have dire real-world costs.


There is no doubt that rhetoric of perpetual threat and perpetual war can pluck deep chords in the American psyche. But is it the threat real? And will the wars be as relatively quick as the two US-led forays into Iraq have been? We’re still waiting to hear those questions answered by those who favor peace and diplomacy over weaponry. Meanwhile, the flights of fear and fancy offered by Woolsey are taking firm root in their absence.


Issue Date: May 2 - 8, 2003

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stor…

[Joerver]

U.S. Hires Christian Extremists to Produce Arabic News

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, AlterNet
May 2, 2003

The U.S. government this week launched its Arabic language satellite TV news station for mostly Muslim Iraq. It is being produced in a studio – Grace Digital Media – controlled by fundamentalist Christians who are rabidly pro-Israel. That`s grace as in "by the grace of God."


Grace Digital Media is controlled by a fundamentalist Christian millionaire, Cheryl Reagan, who last year wrested control of Federal News Service, a transcription news service, from its former owner, Cortes Randell. Randell says he met Reagan at a prayer meeting, brought her in as an investor in Federal News Service, and then she forced him out of his own company.


Grace Digital Media and Federal News Service are housed in a downtown Washington, D.C. office building, along with Grace News Network. When you call the number for Grace News Network, you get a person answering "Grace Digital Media/Federal News Service." According to its web site, Grace News Network is "dedicated to transmitting the evidence of God`s presence in the world today."


"Grace News Network will be reporting the current secular news, along with aggressive proclamations that will `change the news` to reflect the Kingdom of God and its purposes," GNN proclaims.


The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. government agency producing the television news broadcasts for Iraq, likes to say it is the BBC of the USA. BBG runs Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Radio Sawa – Arabic language radio for the Middle East.


"Our mission is clear," BBG`s Joan Mower told us. "To broadcast accurate and objective news about the United States and the world. We don`t do propaganda, leafleting – we are like the BBC in that respect."


Well, then why hook up with Grace?


BBG`s Joan Mower said that Grace Digital Media is a mainstream production house used by all kinds of mainstream news organizations.


"Grace will have nothing to do with the editorial side of the news broadcast," she said. "They are renting us equipment, space, studio. The Grace personnel we use include technicians, production people but no editorial people."


But Mower said she couldn`t get us a copy of the contract between BBG and Grace Digital Media. Nor could she say how Grace Digital was chosen as the production studio.


Grace News Network proclaims that it will be a "unique tool in the Lord`s ministry plan for the world," according to the company`s mission statement. "Grace News Network provides networking links and portals to various ministries and news services that will be of benefit to every Christian believer and seeker of truth."


The CEO of Grace News Network is Thorne Auchter. The same Thorne Auchter who began the dismantling of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under Presidents Reagan and George Bush I. Auchter did not return our calls seeking comment for this story.


While it`s unclear whether Grace News Network actually produces any news, it has produced a documentary movie titled "Israel: Divine Destiny" which it showed at the National Press Club in September 2002. The film is about "Israel`s destiny and the United States` role in that destiny," according to Grace News Network.


Grace News said that it could not make a copy of the film available to us at this time, since it is now undergoing post-production editing. Nor could it provide a transcript.


The mainstream media has documented strong and growing ties between right-wing Republican Christian fundamentalists and right-wing Sharonist Israeli expansionists. This alliance is personified in Ralph Reed`s Stand Up for Israel, a group formed to "mobilize Christians and other people of faith to support the State of Israel."


President Bush has very strong ties to fundamentalist Christians, most notably Franklin Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham. Last week, Franklin Graham delivered a Good Friday message at the Pentagon, despite an uproar over his previous slander of Islam as "a very evil and wicked religion."


Don Wagner, a professor of religion and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University, an evangelical Christian college in Chicago, has written extensively about what he calls Christian Zionism, whose leaders he identifies as, among others, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and Franklin Graham.


"Christian Zionists have historically pointed to Genesis 12:3-96 – I will bless those who bless you. And the one who curses you, I will curse," Dr. Wagner said. "They have interpreted this to mean that individuals and nations who support the state of Israel will be blessed by God. It has come to mean political, economic and moral support, often uncritically rendered to the state of Israel."


Grace News Network seems to fit the mold.


Joan Mower says that BBG is currently producing and transmitting six hours of news into Iraq including a dubbed version of the daily evening news from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS, plus three hours of original news programming from BBG.


BBG says it sees no problem in having Grace produce the evening news broadcast for Iraq. Given the brewing anti-American revolt through all sectors of Iraqi society, maybe it should reconsider.


We called Grace Digital Media to speak with Cheryl Reagan. Her secretary told us that she has been away in extended vacation for more than a month – in Israel.


When will she back? we asked. No one knows, the secretary said.


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.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15801

[Joerver]

Strong-arm tactics leave the world a weaker place
Martin Woollacott
Friday May 2, 2003
The Guardian

The United States today is discovering what other great powers have found before it, which is that military victories can have results quite opposite to those intended. The world has not been made more pliant and respectful by a demonstration of American might, but is, on the contrary, more recalcitrant, sulky, and difficult than it was before the war.

That recalcitrance is visible in many ways and at many levels, from the violence on the streets of Falluja or Tel Aviv to the stubborn Israeli reinterpretations of American policy issuing forth in Jerusalem, from the sharp criticism of American pretensions heard in Moscow to the more muted defiance of France and Germany in Brussels, and from the fire fights on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the verbal fisticuffs at the talks between the United States and North Korea in Beijing.

President Bush, declaring the war against Iraq to be over, cannot help but suggest that large dividends for all are to be expected. Such dividends may in time emerge, by design or by accident. But what is not now evident is any extra readiness to take notice of what America says or wants. Or, rather, there may be more notice taken, but it is matched by an additional degree of determination to oppose or subvert American purposes. Syria may regret its wartime statements and move to expel members of the Iraqi regime who took refuge there, but that does not mean it will give in on matters more closely affecting its interests.

North Korea may have agreed, in part, to come to the negotiating table because of the American victory in Iraq, but, once there, it not only restated its known demands but actually expanded them. Israel and the Palestinians both signal their intention of following the road map, but the Israelis, at least, have long been redrawing it in private to suit their purposes, and are now doing so in public. In Europe and in Russia, the reaction to American policies seems almost worse than it was before the war, and certainly worse than it was just after the fall of Baghdad, when an Atlantic reconciliation seemed closer.

To understand why, it is necessary to begin with the proposition that the US has been weakened rather than strengthened by the Iraq war.

First, it was the only occasion since Vietnam that America has failed to carry its allies with it in a big enterprise, a stunning diplomatic failure. It now seems possible that it will deepen that failure by refusing to make the gestures needed to repair some of the damage.

Second, America has acquired a greatly increased responsibility for the future of Iraq, and of the wider region, which it cannot easily shed, and that will be true however quickly, or however belatedly, its administrators and troops leave Mesopotamia. This responsibility may not be a curse, but it is already clear that it is far from a blessing.

Whenever the phase of direct American administra tion ends, it is obvious that the US wants to maintain a long-term political, corporate, and military presence in Iraq. To do so effectively and without reducing Iraq to transparent client status is not going to be easy. Indeed it may be simply impossible and, if so, an American defeat of large proportions lies ahead.

Thirdly, it is in the process of losing, or it may already have done so, the possibility of sharing responsibility for Iraq with friendly countries because of its refusal to make a few concessions, symbolic rather than substantive, over the role of the UN. That threatens to leave America more on its own with its Iraqi burden. Not completely alone, because other states and the UN recognise a responsibility and do not want a complete break with Washington, but nevertheless it is America which will be left holding the difficult baby.

Who now imagines, for instance, that Nato troops will be in Iraq soon to help the Americans as peacekeepers, a possibility that seemed not too remote only a couple of weeks ago? That underlines a fourth way in which America has been weakened, which is that it is militarily overstretched and in need of a long rest.

Finally, America is weak because it has failed to develop what the historian of American foreign policy, Walter Russell Mead, calls "a coherent, politically sustainable strategy for American world leadership in peacetime". The Bush administration is split much more profoundly on foreign policy than the usual picture of neo-conservatives versus Colin Powell would suggest.

A diplomatic dance since the fall of Baghdad has seen those American allies who opposed the war take a few guarded steps toward Washington. America wanted the money in the UN`s Oil for Food fund and the legal right to control and sell Iraq`s oil to pass back to Baghdad. Reasonable prices for that, most agreed, could include all or some of the following: the UN resuming arms inspections, taking a part in the political reconstruction of Iraq, and co- ordinating humanitarian aid. But the Bush administration`s view seems to be that in defeating Iraq, it also defeated opponents of the war. UN "help", yes, in the American sense of service, but anything that appears to cede even nominal control to the UN over any aspect of the work in Iraq, no.

Indeed, for some in the administration the question is how and to what extent members of the anti-war league, and, in particular France, should be punished. Although there are important technical arguments about the UN in Iraq, the primary issue is symbolic. In no way would power in Iraq, such as it is, pass from America to the UN if the UN took up the duties envisaged. France and the others wanted a symbolic concession to their view of the world in return for their symbolic concession to the administration`s view of the world. It doesn`t appear they are going to get it. Hence Tony Blair`s unpleasant passage in Moscow, when Vladimir Putin responded to the British prime minister`s peroration about the need to heal divisions essentially by saying that the fault lay with an America that would not respond to overtures from Europe and Russia rather than the other way round.

Even the European and Russian rebels are not strong in the positive sense, being less than united in the extent to which they oppose Washington, and having no viable alternative schemes for the world, as the rather pathetic defence summit this week of France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg illustrated. Still less links them with China or India, or with countries on the American enemies list like Iran, Syria or North Korea, except the sense that America is a lot weaker than it looks, and capable of making things worse for itself.

The truth is that a weakened America faces a weak world, not the best combination imaginable for the 21st century.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Rummy`s North Korea Connection
What did Donald Rumsfeld know about ABB`s deal to build nuclear reactors there? And why won`t he talk about it?
FORTUNE
Monday, April 28, 2003
By Richard Behar


Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rarely keeps his opinions to himself. He tends not to compromise with his enemies. And he clearly disdains the communist regime in North Korea. So it`s surprising that there is no clear public record of his views on the controversial 1994 deal in which the U.S. agreed to provide North Korea with two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for Pyongyang ending its nuclear weapons program. What`s even more surprising about Rumsfeld`s silence is that he sat on the board of the company that won a $200 million contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors.

The company is Zurich-based engineering giant ABB, which signed the contract in early 2000, well before Rumsfeld gave up his board seat and joined the Bush administration. Rumsfeld, the only American director on the ABB board from 1990 to early 2001, has never acknowledged that he knew the company was competing for the nuclear contract. Nor could FORTUNE find any public reference to what he thought about the project. In response to questions about his role in the reactor deal, the Defense Secretary`s spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told Newsweek in February that "there was no vote on this" and that her boss "does not recall it being brought before the board at any time."

Rumsfeld declined requests by FORTUNE to elaborate on his role. But ABB spokesman Bjoern Edlund has told FORTUNE that "board members were informed about this project." And other ABB officials say there is no way such a large and high-stakes project, involving complex questions of liability, would not have come to the attention of the board. "A written summary would probably have gone to the board before the deal was signed," says Robert Newman, a former president of ABB`s U.S. nuclear division who spearheaded the project. "I`m sure they were aware."

FORTUNE contacted 15 ABB board members who served at the time the company was bidding for the Pyongyang contract, and all but one declined to comment. That director, who asked not to be identified, says he`s convinced that ABB`s chairman at the time, Percy Barnevik, told the board about the reactor project in the mid-1990s. "This was a major thing for ABB," the former director says, "and extensive political lobbying was done."

The director recalls being told that Rumsfeld was asked "to lobby in Washington" on ABB`s behalf in the mid-1990s because a rival American company had complained about a foreign-owned firm getting the work. Although he couldn`t provide details, Goran Lundberg, who ran ABB`s power-generation business until 1995, says he`s "pretty sure that at some point Don was involved," since it was not unusual to seek help from board members "when we needed contacts with the U.S. government." Other former top executives don`t recall Rumsfeld`s involvement.

Today Rumsfeld, riding high after the Iraq war, is reportedly discussing a plan for "regime change" in North Korea. But his silence about the nuclear reactors raises questions about what he did--or didn`t do--as an ABB director. There is no evidence that Rumsfeld, who took a keen interest in the company`s nuclear business and attended most board meetings, made his views about the project known to other ABB officials. He certainly never made them public, even though the deal was criticized by many people close to Rumsfeld, who said weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from light-water reactors. Paul Wolfowitz, James Lilley, and Richard Armitage, all Rumsfeld allies, are on record opposing the deal. So is former presidential candidate Bob Dole, for whom Rumsfeld served as campaign manager and chief defense advisor. And Henry Sokolski, whose think tank received funding from a foundation on whose board Rumsfeld sat, has been one of the most vocal opponents of the 1994 agreement.

One clue to Rumsfeld`s views: a Heritage Foundation speech in March 1998. Although he did not mention the light-water reactors, Rumsfeld said the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea "does not end its nuclear menace; it merely postpones the reckoning, with no assurance that we will know how much bomb-capable material North Korea has." A search of numerous databases found no press references at the time, or throughout the 1990s, noting Rumsfeld was a director of the company building the reactors. And Rumsfeld didn`t bring it up either.

ABB, which was already building eight nuclear reactors in South Korea, had an inside track on the $4 billion U.S.-sponsored North Korea project. The firm was told "our participation is essential," recalls Frank Murray, project manager for the reactors. (He plays the same role now at Westinghouse, which was acquired by Britain`s BNFL in 1999, a year before it also bought ABB`s nuclear power business.) The North Korean reactors are being primarily funded by South Korean and Japanese export-import banks and supervised by KEDO, a consortium based in New York. "It was not a matter of favoritism," says Desaix Anderson, who ran KEDO from 1997 to 2001. "It was just a practical matter."

Even so, ABB tried to keep its involvement hush-hush. In a 1995 letter from ABB to the Department of Energy obtained by FORTUNE, the firm requested authorization to release technology to the North Koreans, then asked that the seemingly innocuous one-page letter be withheld from public disclosure. "Everything was held close to the vest for some reason," says Ronald Kurtz, ABB`s U.S. spokesman. "It wasn`t as public as contracts of this magnitude typically are."

However discreet ABB tried to be about the project, Kurtz and other company insiders say the board had to have known about it. Newman, the former ABB executive, says a written summary of the risk review would probably have gone to Barnevik. Barnevik didn`t return FORTUNE`s phone calls, but Newman`s Zurich-based boss, Howard Pierce, says Rumsfeld "was on the board--so I can only assume he was aware of it."

By all accounts Rumsfeld was a hands-on director. Dick Slember, who once ran ABB`s global nuclear business, says Rumsfeld often called to talk about issues involving nuclear proliferation, and that it was difficult to "get him pointed in the right direction." Pierce, who recalls Rumsfeld visiting China to help ABB get nuclear contracts, says, "Once he got an idea, it was tough to change his mind. You really had to work your ass off to turn him around." Shelby Brewer, a former head of ABB`s nuclear business in the U.S., recalls meetings with Rumsfeld at the division`s headquarters in Connecticut. "I found him enchanting and brilliant," he says. "He would cut through Europeans` bullshit like a hot knife through butter."

None of them could recall Rumsfeld talking about the North Korea project. But if he was keeping his opinions to himself, others were not. The Republicans attacked the deal from the start, particularly after gaining control of Congress in 1994. "The Agreed Framework was a political orphan within two weeks after its signature," says Stephen Bosworth, KEDO`s first executive director and a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea. It`s not hard to understand why it was controversial. North Korea is on the list of state sponsors of terrorism and has repeatedly violated the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Robert Gallucci, the assistant secretary of state who spearheaded the 1994 agreement, doesn`t disagree, but says, "If we didn`t do a deal, either we would have gone to war or they`d have over 100 nuclear weapons."

The problem, say a number of nuclear energy experts, is that it`s possible, though difficult, to extract weapons-grade material from light-water reactors. "Reprocessing the stuff is not a big deal," says Victor Gilinsky, who has held senior posts at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "You don`t even need special equipment. The KEDO people ignore this. And we`re still building the damn things."

Given the Republican outcry over the reactor deal, Rumsfeld`s public silence is nearly deafening. "Almost any Republican was complaining about it," says Winston Lord, President Clinton`s assistant secretary of state for East Asian/Pacific Affairs. Lord can`t remember Rumsfeld speaking out. Nor can Frank Gaffney Jr., whose fervently anti-KEDO Center for Security Policy had ties to Rumsfeld. Gaffney speculates that Rumsfeld might have recused himself from the controversy because of his ABB position.

By 1998 a debate was raging in Washington about the initiative, and the delays were infuriating Pyongyang. Inspectors could no longer verify North Korea`s nuclear material inventory. Still, at some point in 1998, ABB received its formal "invitation to bid," says Murray. Where was Rumsfeld? That year he chaired a blue-ribbon panel commissioned by Congress to examine classified data on ballistic missile threats. The commission concluded that North Korea could strike the U.S. within five years. (Weeks after the report was released, it fired a three-stage rocket over Japan.) The Rumsfeld Commission also concluded that North Korea was maintaining a nuclear weapons program--a subtle swipe at the reactor deal, which was supposed to prevent such a program. Rumsfeld`s resume in the report did not mention that he was an ABB director.

In his final days in office, Clinton had been preparing a bold deal in which North Korea would give up its missile and nuclear programs in return for aid and normalized relations. But President Bush was skeptical of Pyongyang`s intentions and called for a policy review in March 2001. Two months later the DOE, after consulting with Rumsfeld`s Pentagon, renewed the authorization to send nuclear technology to North Korea. Groundbreaking ceremonies attended by Westinghouse and North Korean officials were held Sept. 14, 2001--three days after the worst terror attack on U.S. soil.

The Bush administration still hasn`t abandoned the project. Representative Edward Markey and other Congressmen have been sending letters to Bush and Rumsfeld, asking them to pull the plug on the reactors, which Markey calls "nuclear bomb factories." Nevertheless, a concrete-pouring ceremony was held last August, and Westinghouse sponsored a training course for the North Koreans that concluded in October--shortly before Pyongyang confessed to having a secret uranium program, kicked inspectors out, and said it would start making plutonium. The Bush administration has suspended further transfers of nuclear technology, but in January it authorized $3.5 million to keep the project going.

Sooner or later, the outspoken Secretary of Defense will have to explain his silence.

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,447429,00.html

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Mittwoch 30. April 2003, 23:15 Uhr
Immer mehr schwarze Kinder in USA leben in bitterer Armut
Washington (AP) Immer mehr schwarze Kinder in den USA wachsen in bitterer Armut auf. Rund 932.000 Schwarze unter 18 Jahren lebten im vorvergangenen Jahr in extremer Armut, hieß es in einem am Mittwoch in Washington veröffentlichten Bericht der Kinderschutzorganisation Children`s Defense Fund. Das sei ein Anstieg um fast 50 Prozent im Vergleich zu 1999 und um rund 25 Prozent seit 2000. Die Zahl ist den Angaben zufolge auf dem höchsten Stand seit Beginn der entsprechenden Aufzeichnungen 1979. Die Sozialpolitik von Präsident George W. Bush dränge immer mehr schwarze Familien in die Armut, sagte die Präsidentin der Organisation, Marian Wright Edelman.

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Sehen - Hören - Schreiben - Schweigen

Katja Schmid 02.05.2003
Medienberichterstattung in Zeiten des Krieges

Nein, 2002 war kein gutes Jahr für die Pressefreiheit: 25 Journalisten sowie vier Medienmitarbeiter wurden in Ausübung ihres Berufes getötet. In 1420 Fällen wurden Medienvertreter bedroht oder schikaniert. 692 Journalisten saßen im Jahr 2002 zeitweilig hinter Gittern. Und in 389 Fällen wurden Medien zensiert. Soweit die vorläufige Bilanz für 2002 der internationalen Menschenrechtsorganisation zur Verteidigung der Pressefreiheit Reporter ohne Grenzen. Der komplette Jahresbericht wird erst am 3. Mai - am Internationalen Tag der Pressefreiheit also - veröffentlicht, und man muss damit rechnen, dass diese Zahlen nicht nach unten korrigiert werden konnten.

Aktuell sieht die Lage kaum besser aus: Seit Jahresbeginn wurden 15 Journalisten getötet, 246 Journalisten bedroht oder schikaniert, 110 Journalisten festgenommen, 120 Medien zensiert oder eingestellt, und 128 Journalisten sitzen zur Zeit im Gefängnis.

Besonders prekär war die Lage der Berichterstatter im Irak, deshalb luden ‚Reporter ohne Grenzen` und Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger ( BDZV) anlässlich des Internationalen Tags der Pressefreiheit zur Podiumsdiskussion: Sehen - Hören - Schreiben - Schweigen. Medienberichterstattung in Zeiten des Krieges nach Berlin.


Auf dem Podium saßen Christoph Maria Fröhder, freier Journalist, der bis vor kurzem für die ARD aus Bagdad berichtete; Bettina Gaus, politische Korrespondentin der "tageszeitung", Berlin; Don F. Jordan, US-Journalist, Bonn; Michael Rediske, Sprecher des Vorstands von Reporter ohne Grenzen, Berlin, sowie Aktham Suliman, Deutschlandkorrespondent von Al Dschasira, Berlin. Moderiert wurde die Diskussion von Thomas Roth, Leiter des Hauptstadtstudios der ARD in Berlin.

Natürlich gibt es das Klischee vom draufgängerischen Kriegsreporter - doch gelte laut Roth insbesondere in Kreisen der Kriegsberichterstatter das Motto: "no story is worth dying for" (Keine Geschichte verdient es, dass man sein Leben aufs Spiel setzt). Allerdings zeige das Beispiel des Focus-Reporters Christian Liebig, dass auch vermeintlich sichere Aufenthaltsorte zur tödlichen Falle werden können. Nur zur Erinnerung: Liebig war einer der insgesamt rund 500 ‚embedded journalists`. Am Tag seines Todes hatte er sich aus Sicherheitsgründen dagegen entschieden, ein Kommando ins Zentrum von Bagdad zu begleiten und ist stattdessen im Hauptquartier geblieben - das kurz darauf von einer Rakete getroffen wurde.


Ganz unabhängig von dieser tragischen Geschichte hält Christoph Maria Fröhder die so genannte "Einbettung" von Journalisten für eine krasse Fehlentscheidung und lehnt "das ganze Konzept der "embedded journalists" ab". Das beginne schon bei der Ausbildung, die meist durch Militärs erfolge - stattdessen sollte dies unter Federführung von Journalistenverbänden wie dem DJV geschehen - und ende mit der Unmöglichkeit, unterschiedliche Positionen zu dokumentieren, weil man seinen Bewegungsspielraum von vornherein eingegrenzt hat. Übrigens sei ihm der Bericht eines Teams, das hinter der Front hermarschiert, letztlich lieber als die Berichterstattung live aus dem Panzer: denn das nachfolgende Team sieht unter Umständen mehr, jedenfalls mehr Opfer, und kann auch besser entscheiden, was es filmt und was nicht. Denn das Ergebnis der eingebetteten Journalisten ist bekannt: jede Menge Berichterstattung, die viele Fragen offen lässt.

Auf dem Podium war sich einig: die Auswirkungen dieser Quasi-Live-Berichterstattung aus dem Irak werden sich erst in den nächsten Wochen zeigen, wenn es an die mediale Aufarbeitung des Kriegsgeschehens bzw. an die mediale Aufarbeitung der Berichterstattung als solche geht. Wenn man sich also Rechenschaft darüber ablegen muss, ob es journalistisch noch vertretbar ist, Kollegen quasi als Vorhut den kämpfenden Truppen vorauszuschicken und diese Aktion dann live zu übertragen - und zwar auch dann noch, wenn das Team unter Beschuss gerät und der Mann vor Ort Gefahr läuft, live zu sterben. So geschehen im Falle von CNN-Korrespondent Brent Sadler, der auf dem Weg nach Tikrit unter Beschuss geriet.


Was diesen Fall besonders brisant macht: Sadler hatte Bodyguards dabei, die das Feuer erwiderten. Damit hat Sadler - wenn auch indirekt - gegen den Grundsatz verstoßen, wonach Journalisten keine Waffen tragen dürfen, jedenfalls nicht, wenn sie nach Artikel 79 des Ersten Zusatzprotokolls der Genfer Konvention als Zivilisten behandelt werden wollen. Es ist durchaus möglich, dass Sadler vermittels seiner schießenden Bodyguards einen Präzedenzfall mit tödlichen Folgen geschaffen hat: Wenn nämlich nicht mehr generell davon auszugehen ist, dass Journalisten - und deren Begleiter - unbewaffnet sind, dann kann in Zukunft auf Journalisten geschossen werden, ohne dass das sofort als Kriegsverbrechen gilt.

Weil die Angreifer ja immer damit argumentieren können, dass manche Journalisten - bzw. deren Bodyguards - durchaus bewaffnet sind und deshalb nicht mehr wie Zivilisten behandelt werden müssen. Aus diesem Grund verurteilte schon Séverin Cazes von der Pariser Zentrale der Reporters sans frontières (Reporter ohne Grenzen) das Vorgehen von Brent Sadler (vgl. Schutzsichere Westen zu vergeben) - Schutzsichere Westen zu vergeben]. CNN dagegen bestreitet, dass hier ein Präzendenzfall geschaffen wurde - (CNN defiant after Tikrit firefight). Die Teilnehmer des Podiums waren freilich anderer Meinung und verurteilten die Bewaffnung von Journalisten.


Ebenfalls diskutiert wurde die Frage, ob es sich bei der Attacke auf den Sender al-Dschasira in Bagdad (vgl. Bombenzensur oder "Kollateralschaden"?) um einen gezielten Angriff und damit um einen Akt der Zensur handelte. Trotz zahlreicher Nachfragen von Moderator Thomas Roth blieb Aktham Suliman von al-Dschasira diplomatisch: solange es dafür keine handfesten Beweise gebe, hüte er sich vor solchen Anschuldigungen. Allerdings hege er einen gewissen Verdacht, nicht zuletzt weil den Militärs durchaus bekannt war, wo sich das Studio von al-Dschasira befand. Allerdings sei festzuhalten: "wer so einen Krieg führt, auf diese Art und Weise, der nimmt auch solche "Kollateralschäden" in Kauf." Insofern sei die amerikanische Regierung durchaus verantwortlich für den Angriff auf den Sender al-Dschasira. Natürlich könne man den Angriff auch einem einzelnen, übereifrigen Offizier in die Schuhe schieben - doch das ist für Suliman von geringerer Tragweite als der Generalverdacht, unter den die amerikanische Regierung insgesamt gerät, wenn man sie für die Taktik als Ganzes verantwortlich macht.

Was Suliman viel mehr beschäftigte als der Angriff auf al-Dschasira: die merkwürdigen Vorgänge auf dem Flughafen von Bagdad am selben Tag. Nachdem es nämlich lange Zeit geheißen habe, Bagdad und insbesondere der Flughafen seien doch nicht so leicht einzunehmen wie geplant, spazierten die Amerikaner scheinbar ohne Probleme in den Flughafen hinein. Das könne Suliman sich nur als Ergebnis einen seltsamen Deals erklären. Seine Vermutungen zu den Hintergründen tendierten "eher in Richtung einer Verschwörungstheorie", doch bevor er näher darauf eingehen konnte, versagte sein Mikrophon - worauf Suliman belustigt fragte: "War das jetzt zu kritisch?"

Und was den Beschuss des Hotel Palestine angeht, so hatte nicht zuletzt Christoph Maria Fröhder seine Zweifel an der offiziellen Version, wonach die Amerikaner lediglich reagiert hätten auf Schüsse aus Richtung des Hotels. Zum einen habe Fröhder, der zum fraglichen Zeitpunkt selbst im Hotel war, keinerlei Schüsse gehört. Zum anderen passe die Position des Panzers nicht ins Bild: Der Panzer befand sich bei der Brücke gegenüber vom Hotel, die Einschüsse dagegen auf der Rückseite des Hotels. Um also die Einschüsse auf der Rückseite des Hotels zu verursachen, hätte der Panzer in der Lage sein müssen, um die Ecke herum zu schießen. "Das," so Fröhder, "können nicht einmal die Amerikaner." Außerdem sei nach Fröhders Erfahrung der Einschuss selbst zu klein - jedenfalls im Vergleich mit den sechs bis sieben Quadratmeter großen Löchern, die solch ein Panzerbeschuss normalerweise hinterlässt.


Übrigens habe Fröhder die Ablehnung von freien Journalisten im Irak seitens der Amerikaner durchaus zu spüren bekommen. Anhand der unterschiedlich gefärbten Akkreditierungen konnte man nämlich sofort sehen, ob es sich um ‚eingebettete` Journalisten handelte oder nicht. So wurde Fröhder in einer Situation massiv an der Weiterfahrt gehindert, indem man ihm mit Beschuss drohte. Tatsächlich wurde gezielt an seinem Fahrzeug vorbeischossen. Fröhder ließ sich nicht schrecken und verlangte stattdessen den Namen des Verantwortlichen - um beim Pentagon Beschwerde einzureichen.

Manchmal müsse man auch bluffen: so sollte Fröhder 1991, bei seinem ersten Einsatz in Bagdad, eine etwa 30-seitige Verzichtserklärung unterschreiben, in der festgehalten war, was er alles nicht schreiben, zeigen, dokumentieren dürfe - ein klarer Verstoß gegen seinen Arbeitsauftrag, vorbehaltlos zu berichten und doch üblich, wenn man sich den Regeln des "embedded journalism" unterwirft. Fröhder verweigerte nicht nur die Unterschrift, sondern zerriss das Regelwerk vor den Augen des Offiziers. Dann behauptete er, dass solche Auflagen nach deutschem Recht verfassungswidrig wären und er sich in seinem Heimatland strafbar mache. Ebenso der Offizier, denn der habe ihn gezwungen, diese Gesetzesbrüche zu begehen. Fröhder: "Danach hatten wir eine vernünftige Arbeitsbasis."


Freilich wäre auch Fröhder lieber, wenn die Truppen vor Ort besser vorbereitet wären auf den Umgang mit freien Journalisten und diese von vornherein - ohne Schikanen - ihre Arbeit machen ließen. Tatsächlich sei es in Vietnam - einer von Fröhders ersten Einsätzen - einfacher gewesen, für Reportagezwecke die Fronten zu wechseln als im Irak. Insofern hat sich in Sachen Pressefreiheit in den letzten dreißig Jahren zwar so manches, aber eben doch nicht alles verbessert.

Bedenklich fand Thomas Roth insbesondere die Tendenz, dass sich Kriegsberichterstattung zu einer neuen Form des Entertainment entwickle - was man nämlich viel dringender brauche, ist eine nachhaltige Form der Berichterstattung. Eine Berichterstattung also, die nicht sofort das Feld räumt, sobald die spektakulären Bilder abgefeiert sind. Aus diesem Grund haben Fröhder und andere Reporter das Netzwerk Recherche ins Leben gerufen. Der Verein setzt sich nicht zuletzt dafür ein, vernachlässigte Themen zurückzuholen in die Medien. Er verleiht auch alljährlich die Auster an den Nachrichtenblocker des Jahres - im vergangenen Jahr was das Innenminister Otto Schily. Denn auch in Deutschland herrscht nicht immer und überall uneingeschränkte Pressefreiheit.

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More US forces will be based in eastern Europe
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
02 May 2003


A dramatic shift of American military forces from bases in Germany to locations in "new" Europe, including Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Hungary, is being brought forward after the war in Iraq.

According to reports in the US, the 17,000-strong 1st Armoured Division, most of which was sent to Iraq from Germany, will not return there. Meanwhile, Romania`s Defence Minister, Ioan Mircea Pascu, has announced that talks will begin shortly with Washington on the deployment of more American forces to bases in his country.

The decision to scale down American forces in Germany, as well as Pentagon plans to remove troops from Saudi Arabia, underlines the extent to which the Iraq war has changed Washington`s military priorities. The aftermath of the conflict is being used to help reshape the international security framework and mount the biggest US military reshuffle since the Second World War.

Europe is used to playing host to more than 112,000 American troops, 80 per cent of whom have been based in Germany. But with the German and French governments singled out for criticism by Washington for their opposition to the war in Iraq, the Pentagon seems intent on shifting many of its forces eastwards.

Former communist countries which have been accepted into Nato`s ranks not only offered political support for Washington`s war effort but can provide strategic bases.

The pattern likely to emerge is of a dispersal of limited numbers of American troops to several, smaller-scale centres in Eastern Europe, with some soldiers returning home. That would fit with the objective of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, of creating leaner, more mobile and faster forces.

The senior US commander in Europe, General James Jones, has called for the creation of a "family of bases" that can go "from being cold to warm to hot if you need them".

This blueprint would permit the periodic expansion of forces when necessary while averting a political problem with Moscow. As part of its deal with Russia over the expansion of Nato, Washington agreed not to set up new military bases in the former communist countries. At a meeting this week at Nato headquarters in Brussels the Americans said they will honour this commitment and that any deployments to the former Soviet bloc would require only minimal improvements to existing infrastructure. The purpose would be to allow joint training exercises, a senior American official said.

Diplomats say some of the bases which are likely to play host to US troops have already been upgraded as a condition of entry into Nato, and could accommodate more troops.

European diplomats do not expect the US entirely to abandon its German bases, keeping a presence, for example, at Ramstein near Frankfurt.
2 May 2003 23:35


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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George W. Bush als Pik As

Brigitte Zarzer 03.05.2003
Greenpeace bannt die "bösen Buben" in Sachen Nuklearwaffen nach US-Vorbild auf ein Kartenspiel

Es muss nicht immer alles schlecht sein, was von der US-Army kommt. Das kürzlich präsentierte Kartenspiel, das US-Soldaten helfen soll, ranghohe irakische Politiker leichter zu identifizieren, hielten Greenpeace-Aktivisten für eine ausgezeichnete Idee. Anlässlich der noch bis 9. Mai in Genf laufenden Internationalen Vorbereitungskonferenz zur Zukunft des Atomwaffensperrvertrags verteilten die Umweltaktivisten nun ihre eigene Version des Spiels.



1968 wurde der von den so genannten Verwahrmächten USA, Großbritannien und der Sowjetunion ausgehandelte Atomwaffensperrvertrag und verabschiedet. Bis Ende 2002 ratifizierten 188 Staaten das von der Internationalen Atomenergiebehörde (IAEA) überwachte Abkommen. Dieses verbietet es Atommächten, Nuklearwaffen an Nicht-Atommächte weiterzugeben, denen die Produktion und der Erwerb dieser Waffen untersagt wurde. Am Ende einer - der alle fünf Jahre stattfindenden - Überprüfungskonferenz sagten die fünf offiziellen Atommächte (USA, Russland, Großbritannien, Frankreich und China) im Mai 2000 schließlich die Reduktion respektive die völlige Beseitigung ihrer Arsenale zu - allerdings ohne Terminangabe.

Tatsächlich hat sich bis heute nur wenig bewegt. Auf dem Herzbuben des Greenpeace-Kartenspiels wird vermerkt: "1968 gab es weltweit ungefähr 38.000 Nuklearwaffen. Heute sind es rund 30.000." Pik As George W. Bush hält in seinem Land noch etwa 10.600 Nuklearwaffen, gerade wurde die US-Atomwaffen-Produktion neu gestartet. Herz As Wladimir Putin besitzt 18.000 Waffen, China rund 400, Frankreich immerhin noch 350, gefolgt von Großbritannien mit 200. Auch jene Staaten, die bis jetzt nicht den Atomsperrvertrag unterzeichnet haben, wurden natürlich mit Karten bedacht. Israel verfügt danach über 200 ( Israels Atompolitik), Pakistan über etwa 50 und Indien würde rund 30 Atomwaffen halten.

Besonders brisant ist derzeit die Drohung Nordkoreas, gänzlich aus dem Vertrag auszusteigen, was grundsätzlich rechtlich möglich wäre. "Nordkorea nutzt den Atomwaffensperrvertrag vor allem, um wirtschaftliche Hilfe zu erpressen, konstatierte Jozef Goldblat vom International Peace and Research Institut in Genf am Rande der Konferenz. Greenpeace fordert in dieser Krise wiederum stärkeres diplomatisches Engagement. So müsse Nordkorea unbedingt als deklarierter "Nicht-Nuklearwaffen-Staat" in das Abkommen zurückgeholt werden. Ein "Nicht-Agressions-Pakt" zwischen den USA und Nord Korea könnte ein Schlüssel zur Lösung dieser Krise sein, heißt es in einem Greenpeace-Papier.

Mit der Kartenspiel-Kampagne will Greenpeace auch Tendenzen entgegen wirken, die auf ein Aufweichen des Atomwaffensperrvertrages bei der nächsten Überprüfungskonferenz 2005 hindeuten. "Sie können uns als altmodisch bezeichnen, aber wir glauben dass eine Lektion aus der Irak-Krise sein muss, dass internationale Gesetze und Verträge strenger werden müssen und keinesfalls aufgeweicht werden dürfen", heißt es in einer Greenpeace-Aussendung.

Bei der Genfer Konferenz wurden an die Delegierten rund 600 Greenpeace-Spiele verteilt. "Wir hatten keine einzige negative Reaktion - nicht einmal von der US-Delegation", berichtete William Peden, Sprecher der Greenpeace "International Disarmament Campain". Im Gegenteil, die Delegierten würden die Karten sogar gerne für ihre Reden benutzen.

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Shia clergy push for Islamist state
Majority sect builds up power base and ridicules western `liberty`

Ewen MacAskill in Najaf
Saturday May 3, 2003
The Guardian

The acting director of the Qadissiya hospital in Sadr City, Baghdad, is Sheikh Tahsin al-Ekabi, a Shia cleric. As he chatted to three people at the same time amid the chaos of post-Saddam medical services, a woman knocked on his office door and requested two tins of powdered milk. He signed a piece of paper and told her to take it to the local mosque, where she would be given the milk.

While the US and their Iraqi allies discuss the country`s future, Shias have taken control on the ground.

The Shia - the majority sect of Islam in Iraq - who were suppressed by Saddam, are running not only hospitals but every aspect of life, including community and cultural centres and police stations.

Mr Ekabi said: "When the US invaded, there was a power vacuum. We are providing security. Most of the patrols in the streets are being done by clerics because the people will obey the clerics more than they will obey foreigners. There have been no US patrols in Sadr City for two days."

Sadr City , formerly Saddam City and home to two million Shias, has been renamed after one of the most revered Shia clerics, Imam Mohammed al-Sadr. He was killed by Saddam in 1999. Freshly painted pictures of Sadr have replaced those of Saddam all over Sadr City.

The US is not happy that Shia gunmen are guarding the hospitals and have said they will confront the problem. But even if the Shias hand over control voluntarily they are well-entrenched at local level.

This takeover has been replicated in other parts of Baghdad and in the cities further south, such as Basra, Kerbala and Najaf.

The future of Iraq will be decided not in the US-led talks among the approved opposition parties but behind a battered grey metal door in Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, that protects the Hawza, the city`s main Shia seminary where Iraq`s leading clerics teach.

One of them, Sheikh Mohammed al-Yacobi, a former civil engineer who joined the clergy 12 years ago, is emerging as one of the key figures in the new Iraq. While some senior clerics are wary of becoming involved in politics, his supporters are not. Sheikh Yacobi told the Guardian: "Ninety-eight per cent of the people are Muslims. The Iraqi constitution must not commit to anything that will go against sharia [Islamic law]."

He was guarded about saying what an Islamic constitution would mean in practice. But it was clear enough in the sermons delivered at mosques all over Iraq yesterday.

Preaching to tens of thousands worshippers at the Qadhimaya mosque in northern Baghdad, Sheikh Mohammed al-Tabatabi said: "The west calls for freedom and liberty. Islam is not calling for this. Islam rejects such liberty. True liberty is obedience to God and to be liberated from desires. The dangers we should anticipate in coming days is the danger to our religion from the west trying to spread pornographic magazines and channels."

Under Saddam, Iraq was a secular society. Women had equal rights with men and freedom to dress in western clothes. It was more lax than many of its neighbours about alcohol.

But Sheikh Tabatabi said: "We will not allow shops to sell alcohol and we ask for the closure of all such places and we ask you to use every available means to bring this about."

He added that women should not be allowed to wander unveiled around Qadhimaya City.

The former US general appointed by George Bush to help create a new government, Jay Garner, has said he would not allow an Islamist state.

But in the Hawza another cleric, Quais al-Khazaaly, said: "I think the right decision is to have an Islamist state. If the US blocks such a state and people want it, this will lead to lots of trouble with the US."

If Shias act in unison, they will rule Iraq. But they are fragmented. The Hawza is dominated by two groups, those around the Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Sistani, a conservative, and those who follow Sadr, a more radical figure. There is also the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, led by Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, which has been operating from Iran with a 15,000-strong army.

All the political parties vying for power in Iraq acknowledge the dominance of the Shia clergy. The Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon`s choice, has pictures of Sadr on the walls of its offices in Baghdad. The Iraqi Communist party offered its condolences on the anniversary of the death of one of the leading figures in the Shia hierarchy.

At the Qadhimaya mosque yesterday, clerics told worshippers not to support any party until the Hawza decides. That decision, when it comes, will dictate Iraq`s future.

Vying for control

· Shias are dominant sect in Iraq but were suppressed by Saddam Hussein, who is from minority Sunni sect. The Hawza in Najaf is the leading Shia seminary in Iraq · Leading figure in Hawza is the Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Sistani. He is a conservative and lost credibility for never criticising Saddam

· Other dominant group in Hawza and most popular among Iraqi Shias are followers of Mohammed al-Sadr, killed bySaddam. His picture has replaced Saddam`s in Shia areas. More radical than the supporters of Sistani

· Third grouping claims to be part of Hawza but is not recognised by other two. Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim heads Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. As an exile he does not command as much support as other two but he is well-organised and has private army, the 15,000-strong Badr Brigade

· Al-Da`wa party, fourth group, also suffers from having been in exile. Political offshoot of Sadr grouping, set up in 1950s as bulwark against secularism


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Aid agencies say UN should run the country
UK charities say troops can`t deliver food and stability

Charlotte Denny and Ian Black in Brussels
Saturday May 3, 2003
The Guardian

Aid agencies called for the United Nations to take over running Iraq yesterday and warned that the power vacuum was threatening to undermine efforts to deliver vital relief supplies.

Just a day after President Bush declared military operations over, Britain`s five biggest aid agencies and their Muslim counterparts described the situation in the country as "serious and deteriorating".

Broken water plants and sewage systems threaten to spread disease epidemics, according to the agencies, and hospitals, already under strain before the war, are struggling to cope with serious outbreaks of disease.

"The people of Iraq are suffering," the agencies said. "In parts of the country, the situation is critical. Hospitals are overwhelmed, diarrhoea is endemic and the death toll is mounting. Clean water is scarce and diseases like typhoid are being reported in southern Iraq."

The agencies said occupying forces were failing in their duties under the Geneva convention to ensure the orderly delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Local militias have forced people out of their homes and threatened hospitals, aid workers reported.

"In a country made up a mosaic of ethnic, religious and tribal groups, this can only lead to more turbulence and more misery for those civilians caught in between."

To fill the power vacuum, the agencies said the UN had to be put in charge of Iraq`s transition to democracy.

"For any solution to be sustainable, the UN has to have a central role in overseeing and managing the transition to a representative, accountable and democratic Iraqi government," the agencies said.

"Time is running on, and still there has been no agreement on the role of the UN in the coordination or reconstruction of the country."

Britain and the rest of Europe would prefer to see the UN in charge of running the country, but hardliners in Washington have scorned the idea, preferring to put a `made in America` stamp on the reconstruction effort led by the retired US general Jay Garner.

Poul Nielson, the EU`s aid commissioner is expected to stress the need for the UN to be given a central role when he visits Baghdad next week.

Mr Nielson, a critic of the US-led war, is to meet senior officials from the UN and the Red Cross. It is not clear whether he will meet Mr Garner.

EU countries want a new UN resolution to create a clear international legal framework for postwar Iraq.

The union has allotted allocated €31m (£24m) aid to Iraq since the war began, distributing the money through the Red Cross, Unicef, and other aid agencies. It is now considering whether to set up its own Baghdad office.

The EU`s first aid delivery was held up last night after the US refused permission for its plane to land in Baghdad.

A diplomatic source said the plane was to have flown via Turkey, but the United States was concerned it might be shot at when it entered Iraqi airspace.

Virgin`s chief executive, Richard Branson, flew into Basra airport yesterday with 60 tonnes of medical supplies aboard the first commercial airliner to arrive in Iraq since the war.

The UN also landed its first supplies last night in Umm Qasr in a ship carrying 14,000 tonnes of rice.

But with the security situation preventing free movement around the country, aid agencies said delivering the supplies would be a challenge.

The World Food Programme said rice would be distributed by the end of May, when households are are likely to run short of supplies.

Before the war, Umm Qasr handled most of the humanitarian aid shipped to Iraq under the UN oil-for-food programme, which allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food and medicine.

About 60% of Iraq`s population was estimated to be dependent on food rations delivered since 1997 to offset the effects on civilians of international sanctions.


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Loneliness of the long-distance PM
Leadership is a sad affair and Tony Blair, 50 next week, has been changed by the isolation of office

Martin Kettle
Saturday May 3, 2003
The Guardian

In one of my notebooks from 1994, there is an account of a conversation with Tony Blair. It took place just after the death of John Smith in May of that year, but before Blair decided to run for the Labour leadership. In his heart, Blair already knew that he would be a candidate, but he was still adjusting to everything that this would mean.

"These are life-changing decisions," Blair said back then. "It`s a complete commitment. This is not a job you can do part-time. It means nothing will ever be the same for me, or Cherie, or for the family." Then, a few lines further on, there is a scribbled note. "May see GB tomorrow." The legendary Granita showdown with Gordon Brown, it seems, was only hours away.

Nine years on, it is not just Blair`s life that has changed but British politics. This week Blair clocked up six years in Downing Street. This spring, unrecorded even by the political anoraks, he became Labour`s longest serving leader since Harold Wilson. In August his government will have been in office longer than Clement Attlee`s. And on Tuesday, Blair himself will be 50 (thanks to the IRA, he will now spend much of his birthday in Dublin).

It would have been odd, back in 1994, if Blair had ever thought that his life was not going to change. But what is really strange these days is that Blair and those around him all now insist that, nine years later, he himself is just the same person and the same politician now that he was then.

In fact it seems a collective article of faith among the closest Blairites that power and office have not altered either Blair`s personality or his politics. "To me he hasn`t changed at all" is the universal assertion of his intimates. It is as though the famous soundbite - "We have campaigned as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour" - has been read across to Blair as a person.

Common sense alone says that this cannot really be so. Blair`s life changed utterly in 1994, and again in 1997. Each time, as a result, Blair himself has changed too. Part of this is down to the sheer unremitting nature of the life. When you are prime minister, you don`t get to switch off. You don`t stop being prime minister in the evenings, or at weekends, or over the summer. As Americans would say, it is a 24/7 existence.

But there is also the security, which since September 11 has become tighter and more restrictive even than it was before. Ten years ago - and even when he was merely the leader of the opposition - Blair liked nothing more than to take a break from his Westminster office and wander down to Victoria to look at CDs in the Virgin record store. He can`t do that now. Nor can he wander across St James`s Park towards Piccadilly to look at shoes and books, as he also used to do. The rest of us probably have no idea of the extent to which a prime minister trades freedom for power.

There was a time, it is said, shortly after the birth of his son, Leo, three years ago, when the prime minister of the United Kingdom could occasionally be seen wheeling his baby in a buggy through St James`s Park, to enjoy the flowers and feed the ducks. Incredibly, the press never found out about these private wanders. But 9/11 stopped that sort of thing dead. Now Blair cannot go anywhere without an armed escort. A thing like that removes the impulsive dimension from life, even if he had the time for such things.

And then there`s the media. Like any celebrity, a prime minister has his life defined by the cameras. If Blair does go out for the evening, he is almost certain to be seen and photographed - even if he does not want to be. When he goes on holiday, he never knows when a distant lens may catch him out. For someone like Blair, who has always preferred to dress down than to dress up, this is an enormous constraint. One false move and they`ll get you is the way he puts it.

It is hard for the rest of us to appreciate the effect of all this, or just how much he leads his life behind walls, whether in Downing Street or at Chequers. In the last few years, Blair has become a fitness fanatic. He works out most days in the small private gymnasium on the top floor of his Downing Street flat. He is proud he has got his weight down to 13 stone. He is proud of his muscles. He says he has never been fitter.

Good for him. And he certainly looks great these days. If only we could all say the same. Yet it comes at a poignant price. It is hard to get the image out of your head. There he is, the prime minister in his secure private exercise room, reeling off the miles on a running machine high above Downing Street, listening to his sons` favourite music, surrounded by armed guards and security gates, running hard and going nowhere.

It is a lonely image. And Blair is in a lonely position these days, politically as well as personally. Is he, in fact, a lonely person? He would deny that. And the size, age and closeness of his family means that he has every right to do so. John Major, after all, spent quite a lot of his premiership living in Downing Street on his own. But some of those who are close to Blair use the word lonely about him, and it is not hard to see why they do.

Part of this slight sense of sadness goes with the job. Most people he meets want something from him. They want to be with him because of what he is, not who he is. He dislikes that. It makes him more suspicious - brittle is a word that some observers use - than he used to be. Blair has a very great capacity for friendship and loyalty. He sees the best in people and not the worst - most obviously in the case of Peter Mandelson. It is one of the qualities that annoys his advisers. But it has all been put to the test these past years, above all in the intensifying crisis of the epic relationship with Brown, and he was shaken by Alastair Campbell`s unexpected hostility during the Cheriegate furore.

The extraordinary thing, really, is that in many personal respects he has changed as little as he has. Nine years ago, weighing the future, he would often say that he never particularly wanted to be a political leader, let alone prime minister. His oldest friends agreed. They never dreamed that he would end up in Downing Street. Blair often used to say he could easily walk away from it all, and be just as happy doing other things. He still says that today, and it is only marginally less convincing now than it was in the old days.

Many of his critics think he has too much of a blind spot about the rich and powerful. The former Blairite trade unionist Jack Dromey is currently running for the top job in the transport workers union on precisely this platform. But Blair says he has no rich friends, and it is certainly true that he is not an acquisitive person himself. Money has never mattered much to him. Apart from his guitars, he rarely gives the impression that possessions matter much either.

There is a connection here with Blair`s attitude to power and position. He is much less impressed with status and institutions (including the monarchy) than most people seem to imagine. Six years ago, Blair`s old Australian friend Peter Thompson summed it up this way: "The thing you have to grasp about Tony is that he`s an Aussie," he told me. He meant, I think, that Blair is fundamentally undeferential and unfussed by class. Some of those closest to him remain emphatic that Blair is a socialist.

Certainly he is an intellectual meritocrat. But the openness to new ideas, the iconoclasm and the scepticism that were such obvious hallmarks a decade and more ago have withered with office. Blair has unmistakably hardened - toughened up is how he puts it. He says he has gone through another pain barrier in the past two years, not unlike the big change in 1994. He is more sure-footed and more confident than in the past. His greatest admirers think he is just better than before.

This greater confidence was especially striking over Iraq. It was a sign that the open-minded and pragmatic Blair has given way to a more focused and a more inflexible Blair. Some people think the key to understanding this is that Blair is still a barrister, sticking to his brief in defiance of the evidence. But it could simply be that he was wrong, and that he is getting too arrogant to see it. Matthew Parris, in a recent article, even suggests Blair is going mad.

A more serious criticism is that Blair has simply not moved with the times. People of every generation continue to see things through the prism of the events that formed them - events like economic depression, war, the 60s, privatisation, the dotcom boom. Blair was formed more than anything by Labour`s need to respond to Thatcherism with new thinking and new disciplines. He forced his party to make huge changes in order to make itself electable. He succeeded - brilliantly.

The imperatives of 1994-97 were not eternal. But Blair often acts as though they are. The old fears - of taxation, of the tabloids, of civil liberty, of the unions, of being thought too pro-Europe or too anti-American - have continued to shape Blair. As he trains on his running machine for fresh challenges, he is in danger of refighting too many old battles.

As he approaches his latest milestone, it is obvious that Blair has changed. Of course he has. So it is not merely silly to pretend he has not. It is also dangerous. Perhaps his real problem is that he has not changed enough.

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May 03, 2003

`I`m ready to meet my Maker and answer for those who have died as a result of my decisions`
By Philip Webster, Political Editor



TONY BLAIR believes that he will be called to account for the Iraq War before God, and can justify to his “Maker” decisions which led to hundreds of deaths.
The Prime Minister lays bare the secrets of his soul in a behind-the-scenes account of the Iraq crisis that is published in The Times Magazine today.

The magazine charts Mr Blair’s actions from the inside over 30 days of war. His declaration of faith came on April 2, the day after seven Iraqi women and children were shot dead at a checkpoint.

Asked how he responded to deaths caused as a result of his own actions, Mr Blair admitted to feeling the strain, saying “it really gets to you".

He then cast aside his usual caution about discussing how his religious faith guides his political actions to tell the former Times Editor Peter Stothard that he was ready to meet his Maker and answer before God for “those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions”. Mr Blair nevertheless also accepted that many others who believe in “the same God” may assess that the final judgment will be against him.

The Times account of Mr Blair’s Thirty Days of War reveals the inside story of how the Downing Street machine coped with public hostility to the war, Robin Cook’s resignation, Labour revolts, the demands of diplomacy with President Bush and the pressures of the Middle East peace process.

The Prime Minister gives the most intimate glimpse yet into the strains of leadership, revealing how music and family help him to cope. But it is the role religion plays that will command the greatest attention. The Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman was rebuked for asking the Prime Minister if he and Mr Bush prayed together before meetings, but the centrality of Mr Blair’s faith to his actons is apparent from the Magazine account.

His confidence in the Christian virtue of prosecuting a controversial war is likely to inflame Muslim opinion, which is already firmly against the Gulf conflict.

Mr Blair had to be persuaded to drop the phrase “God Bless You” from his broadcast to the nation at the start of the war. One adviser told him that invoking God’s name would be a mistake because “you are talking to lots of people who don’t want chaplains pushing stuff down their throats”. Mr Blair responded by telling his aides that they were a “most ungodly lot” — but he was finally persuaded and closed his address with the words “thank you”.

Mr Blair has shied away from discussion of his religion after an interview in 1996 when he implied that radical Tory views were inconsistent with Christianity. Even so, his faith has caused controversy. Roman Catholic authorities have objected to his attending Mass with his family.

The account of Mr Blair’s war leadership also reveals the depth of his exasperation with those allies who failed to back him at crunch moments — for example, his fury when he learnt that President Chirac would veto any second resolution permitting an automatic attack on Iraq.

On being told he said: “This is such a foolish thing to do at this moment in the world’s history. The very people who should be strengthening the international institutions are undermining and playing around.” A few days later the two met at a summit in Brussels. The account reveals how M Chirac approaches Mr Blair, detaches him from Alistair Campbell, takes him along an empty corridor and makes his points to Mr Blair. Aides are waved away, but watching from the sidelines is Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor.

The Times account suggests that Mr Bush will take far longer to forgive Herr Schröder than M Chirac over their opposition to the war, a stance that may have far-reaching implications. It suggests that Mr Bush’s team accepts M Chirac never gave anyone his word. He is French and takes a different view. But for Herr Schröder, the mood was not so forgiving. The view at Camp David was that his anti-American language during the German elections was beyond the pale.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-667521,00.html

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May 3, 2003
U.S. Is Now in Battle for Peace After Winning the War in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS and IAN FISHER


BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 2 — The war in Iraq has officially ended, but the momentous task of recreating a new Iraqi nation seems hardly to have begun. Three weeks after Saddam Hussein fell from power, American troops are straining to manage the forces this war has unleashed: the anger, frustration and competing ambitions of a nation suppressed for three decades.

In a virtual power vacuum, with the relationship between American military and civilian authority seeming ill defined, new political parties, Kurds and Shiite religious groups are asserting virtual governmental authority in cities and villages across the country, sometimes right under the noses of American soldiers.

There is a growing sense among educated Iraqis eager for the American-led transformation of Iraq to work that the Americans may be losing the initiative, that the single-mindedness that won the war is slackening under the delicate task of transforming a military victory into political success.

"Real freedom is organized and productive," said S. S. Nadir, a prominent art critic in Baghdad. "It is productive with real institutions of civil society that can do work. It needs groups of smart, educated, free, liberal people who can build projects."

"The Iraqi people have always been prepared for freedom," he said. "But we need help, and we are not sure the Americans can provide that."

Of course, little time has passed, and it is clearly too early to say how well a plan as ambitious as America`s in Iraq — the foundation of a federal democracy in a place that has never known such a thing — will work. But some of the initial signs are mixed.

Anti-American sentiment remains palpable. West of Baghdad, United States troops this week shot dead 18 or more anti-American protesters.

Faced by such violence, no one American or one Iraqi currently seems to lead the country. Various figures with uncertain powers work for the Pentagon, the State Department or others. Jay Garner, a retired American lieutenant general who heads the civilian reconstruction authority, has been virtually invisible to Iraqis in the two weeks since he landed here.

Up to now, General Garner has appeared to lack the resources to promote that promised democracy. He presides over a tiny staff that lacks phones, e-mail or even minimal security to travel around the country. His future and his authority appear uncertain now that L. Paul Bremer, a former counterterrorism director in the Reagan administration, is expected to direct the selection of a transitional Iraqi government.

Alongside General Garner stands Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of all ground forces. Last week, amid looting and political turmoil, General McKiernan took the bold move of issuing a "proclamation to the people of Iraq" declaring, essentially, that he was in charge.

"As the head authority in Iraq," he wrote, "I call for the immediate cessation of all criminal activity to include acts of reprisal, looting and attacks on coalition forces."

But the proclamation, in English and Arabic, did not receive wide distribution. Some senior military officials suggested that the commander`s statement was too strong. General Garner`s men, charged with passing out the flyers, could summon neither the resources nor the energy to do it.

"Do you think we have hundreds of people to go around the city plastering things on walls?" one of General Garner`s assistants asked.

The dilemma facing American officials is complex: they must assert authority, it seems, in order to stop disorder, but avoid doing so in a manner that suggests to Iraqis that the United States has come to dominate the land and its oil. Suspicions of such American ambitions are rife in this conspiracy-filled country.

The suspicions are fueled by the United States` relative isolation. Although the Bush administration plans to broaden the military administration of postwar Iraq by bringing in nations like Poland that supported the war, it appears more vulnerable because it finds itself acting for the moment without a United Nations mandate and without the support of major NATO allies like Germany and France.

Holding Back the Kurds

The United States also faces a tremendous challenge in trying to dampen the ardor of the Kurds for their own state, and in managing the resurgence of the largest religious group, the Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq`s population.

For now, the Kurds seem willing to play loyal friend to the Americans, who have guaranteed the virtual autonomy of their territory in northern Iraq since 1991, and to wait and see if some kind of acceptable federal structure emerges.

Like the Roman Catholic clergy in Communist Poland, Shiite leaders in Iraq became the main font of resistance to Mr. Hussein`s repressive government, and were long persecuted for their stand. Now that Mr. Hussein is gone, the Shiites appear to have an undisputed moral authority in wide areas. Across Iraq, including large parts of Baghdad, Shiite leaders have begun to assert control and take up essential public services.

For many of these Shiite leaders, their efforts represent the genesis of an Islamic state, modeled in no small way on their Shiite-majority neighbor, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Such a project is clearly incompatible with the American quest to install a democracy. Some of the leading Iraqi clerics have issued proclamations expressing intense hostility toward the United States, viewed as an infidel power whose temptations will ultimately corrupt the kingdom of Islam.

Still, despite such hostility, America has made some short-term headway. The looting and chaos of the early days have subsided. The rhythms of daily life are returning. Police officers are walking the streets of the capital, and shops and restaurants are slowly beginning to open. Large stores of ammunition, an omnipresent danger to Iraqis, have been destroyed.

For all the complaining, Iraqis still seem willing, for the moment, to give the Americans the benefit of the doubt: to wait for the schools to reopen, for instance, and American promises of democracy to emerge.

For now, General Garner seems hard pressed in trying to deliver on American promises. In his first three days, he did tour around, but mostly in the Kurdish north, where he was already known and liked for helping to organize crucial aid after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

Without electricity, hardly any Iraqis could watch television footage of that trip. When he returned to Baghdad, he disappeared with his team of American and British officials into the Republican Palace, once the innermost sanctuary of Mr. Hussein.

General Garner meets in tight security with selected groups of Iraqi officials, has video conferences several times a week with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and speaks with his own team of former American generals and ambassadors. Since his first tour, there has been no sign of him walking the streets or even driving through neighborhoods. In the dozen or more new newspapers appearing on Baghdad`s streets, there have been no Garner interviews, no Garner photographs.

On the key question of a future Iraqi government, American officials have called for a meeting in a month to chose an interim authority. The messy reality will probably result in some difficult balance among the groups competing for power.

Balancing the Parties

Two of those groups already have established a fair share of authority: the Kurds in the north, who have lived in de facto autonomy since the gulf war in 1991; and the Shiites in the south and in parts of Baghdad, who have a large, devoted following and have already taken over some public services.

There will also be Sunni Muslims, scores of home-grown political parties that have cropped up in the last three weeks and, most contentiously, the many Iraqi exiles who have returned home with the hope of some share of power.

Many Iraqis worry that a pragmatic balancing of those forces may prove elusive and the freedoms the Americans promised illusory.

Since the Americans and their allies deposed Mr. Hussein`s government, their progress in restoring life`s basic necessities has been uneven. In some parts of the country, like Basra, electricity and order have returned to large areas, drawing shoppers to the city`s central market well into the evening.

Abbas Mustafa Hussein, a 42-year-old juice vendor who had just reopened his stand in Baghdad after 26 days, seemed to speak for many when he spelled out his feelings about the Americans, saying: "I don`t want the Americans here forever. But if they left in the next couple of days, there would be even more chaos."

But for now in Baghdad, heaps of garbage pile up in the streets. Electrical power and running water are still absent much of the time. Across downtown, many merchants are still too frightened to open their shops.

Part of the explanation lies in the relatively small number of American troops being asked to control the country. Only 12,000 American soldiers have been assigned to Baghdad, a city of 5 million people. Only 150,000 American soldiers are being asked to maintain order across all of Iraq, population 25 million, and that number may be substantially reduced by the fall.

A week ago, a reporter driving across the length of Baghdad at 2 a.m. spotted only a handful of American soldiers, and those were standing around the Sheraton Hotel.

Apart from Baghdad`s police force, hastily brought together amid the rioting and looting, 20 ministries lie in ruins. The Americans have begun to identify the employees of government departments and to cull those believed to have maintained close ties to Mr. Hussein`s government. Otherwise, there is very little activity apparent in the ministries.

Without a central authority, many Iraqis are answering the calls of self-appointed leaders. Earlier this week, several hundred people stood outside a Baghdad social club that had been used only days before by Muhammad al-Zobeidi, a businessman who had proclaimed himself mayor.

The Americans had arrested Mr. Zobeidi, and he and all of his men were gone. But still the crowd came, heeding his earlier promise to put Iraqis to work.

The result was pandemonium, with hucksters selling bogus job applications and absconding with the cash.

"I am just doing what everyone else is doing," said Nawfal Abdul Razaq, 23, who had just bought a phony application. "I just want a job."

Scapegoating Americans

In such chaos, increasingly, the Iraqis — overwhelmingly glad to be rid of Mr. Hussein — are finding scapegoats in the Americans.

On Thursday, in the west Baghdad district of Alawi Hilla, an explosion at a gas station set off by celebratory gunfire over the return of electricity to the area turned rapidly into an anti-American fracas. One Iraqi man was killed in the explosion, and dozens were injured, but the subject that galvanized the locals was the American presence in Iraq.

"First it was Saddam`s fault for bringing the Americans here," said Abbas Hatu, 23, a demonstrator. "Then the Americans` fault for not providing security for these poor people. They are only concerned about their soldiers` safety."

Often, the American authorities seem out of touch. In a meeting with Western news reporters this week, a senior member of General Garner`s team expressed complete ignorance of an incident that was then some 40 hours old — the first altercation involving American troops in the town of Falluja, in which 15 Iraqis were killed.

"I am operating in something of a news void," the official said apologetically. "I just did not know about it."

If there is no single American who firmly governs Iraq, there is no single Iraqi who does so either. The man who has received the most attention is Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile known here as "America`s man" for the long support he has received in Washington. That association does not necessarily help his ambitions here, nor nurture a favorable image of America.

The scion of a wealthy Shiite family, Mr. Chalabi left Iraq in 1958. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud in Jordan over the operations of bank he founded there; he denies those charges, saying they were fostered by the Iraqi government. Since his return to Iraq last month, the behavior of his entourage has outraged many Iraqis, and even some Americans.

"What we have done is import mafias into Baghdad," said one American official, who insisted on anonymity.

The official was referring to the takeover of many of Baghdad`s best houses by groups of men claiming to have formed new political parties. Kurdish parties have taken over a Baath Party headquarters and the engineering building of Mr. Hussein`s office. Some have set up roadblocks and established militias, sometimes saying they are operating with the authority of the American military.

An early expropriator was Mr. Chalabi, whose supporters seized the elite Hunting Club, apparently with the permission of American soldiers. Various groups associated with him took over other expensive houses in the same area.

Last weekend, General Garner appeared to give tacit approval by dining with Mr. Chalabi at the club. All that, critics here say, has only encouraged other groups to go house-taking.

"What right does Chalabi have to take over these clubs?" asked Saif Hikmet al-Dujaili, a 25-year-old pharmacist who was thrown out of the Hunting Club.

General Garner emphasized last week that Mr. Chalabi was "not my candidate, not the candidate of the coalition."

The problems of managing Mr. Chalabi pale, however, in comparison with the difficulties of curbing the Shiite religious revival. In a recent fatwa — a religious pronouncement — Kadhem al-Husseini al-Haeri, one of the most influential Iraqi clerics, urged his followers to spurn their American occupiers.

"People have to be taught not to collapse morally before the means used by the Great Satan, if it stays in Iraq," the fatwa read, referring to the United States. "It will try to spread moral decay, incite lust by allowing easy access to stimulating satellite channels, spreading debauchery to weaken peoples` faith in schools, governments and homes."

Already, Shiite leaders loyal to Mr. Haeri claim control over much of Najaf, Karbala, the sprawling Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad and a string of other Iraqi cities.

To date, the Americans say they are fostering "Islamic democracy," a hybrid that might satisfy the American desire for Western institutions while dulling the harder edges of an Islamic republic. In practice, the Americans have engaged even the more radical of Shiite clerics, while trying also to strengthen those like Ayatollah Ali al-Sisteni, who appears to support a democratic, parliamentary system.

Offering ID Cards

The potential pitfalls of the American approach seemed to reveal themselves in a recent conversation between a young American soldier and an Iraqi man in Sadr City, a neighborhood of Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City.

The soldier, Maj. Kelly Ward, was trying to pass out American identification cards to a group of about 20 Iraqis who had been trying to maintain security in the area. The cards carried an inscription declaring the bearer to be "recognized as a local guard by the Cougar Squadron commander."

The Iraqi men, who carried their own ID cards issued from an influential council of clerics called the Hawzah, were resisting. They believed that they were acting under divine authority.

"This is to prove to us that you are volunteers working with the coalition forces," Major Ward insisted, pressing his ID cards on the men.

One Iraqi said they had ID`s from the Hawzah, "We want to use those," he said. "Why can we not use these?"

"We cannot do that, because then we would not recognize you," Major Ward replied. "If we found weapons with anyone, we might start shooting."

"But we submit to the Hawzah," the Iraqi man said with finality, "and we have to carry the ID`s that represent the Hawzah, and not the coalition forces. We do not take orders from anyone else."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 3, 2003
How to Get Syria Out of the Terrorism Business
By FLYNT LEVERETT


WASHINGTON
The military victory over Saddam Hussein`s regime has empowered some officials in the Bush administration to push for similarly decisive action against other state sponsors of terrorism. For the hardliners, Syria has become the preferred next target in the war on terrorism.

I know because I`ve been hearing the argument a lot in recent days. For the last eight years, I have been directly involved in United States policymaking toward Syria, as a C.I.A. analyst, on the State Department`s policy planning staff and at the White House. In all that time, I have never seen officials as willing to take on the Syrian regime as they are today.

The current concern about Syria is understandable. A longtime supporter of terrorist groups, Syria has developed weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Syria backed Saddam Hussein to the bitter end, demonstrating a troubling willingness to challenge American interests.

But Syria also presents the administration with a strategic opportunity that would be imprudent not to explore. Since the 9/11 attacks, the problem of how to get states out of the terrorism business has been a defining question for American foreign policy. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we achieved this end by toppling irredeemable regimes. But can we change the behavior of a terrorism-sponsoring state like Syria without unseating its regime? Is it possible to reform Syria`s posture not through force, but through diplomatic engagement?

The answer is a qualified yes. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell`s visit to Damascus today has the potential to be the first stage in this experiment.

The success of engagement depends in large measure on Syria`s president, Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Assad is not an ideological fanatic like Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, or an incorrigible thug like Saddam Hussein. He is young, educated partly in the West and married to a British-born woman who was once in J.P. Morgan`s executive training program. He has also made it clear that Syria needs to modernize, and that its long-term interests would be served by better relations with the United States.

While Mr. Assad`s inclinations make engagement plausible as a strategy, constraints on his effective authority mean that diplomatic success is far from assured. Mr. Assad was only 34 when he became president upon the death of his father, Hafez, in June 2000. Until then, most of his political career had been spent as head of the government-run Syrian Computer Society. Still encumbered by several of his father`s key advisers, he does not yet have the standing to make fundamental changes in policy on his own. One has only to observe the Syrian president in meetings where he is accompanied by his foreign minister (in office since 1984) or his vice president (a key regime figure since the 1970`s) to appreciate the constraints he faces.

For this reason, it will not be enough for American officials simply to show up in Damascus, present a list of complaints about Syrian ties to Hezbollah and Hamas, and expect Mr. Assad to take action. Syria`s leaders have heard these complaints before and have offered little more than canned rhetoric as a response.

This time around we should avoid generalities and consistently identify for Mr. Assad the specific steps he needs to take. These might include closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, expelling terrorist leaders like Jihad`s Ramadan Shallah, and stopping Iranian supplies for Hezbollah from moving through Syria on the way to Lebanon.

We should then outline a series of measures we would undertake if Syria fails to act. We might start with additional economic sanctions — like barring Syria from participating in Iraqi reconstruction or imposing a comprehensive trade embargo — and end with covert and possibly overt attacks against terrorism-related targets in Syria or Lebanon.

But given Mr. Assad`s political constraints, sticks alone will not produce more than short-term tactical adjustments in Syrian behavior. To bring about real change, we must also offer concrete benefits in exchange for meeting our demands. Doing so would enable Mr. Assad to demonstrate to the regime`s inner circle that Syrian interests would be better served by cooperation with us than by a gradually intensifying confrontation.

In this regard, an important incentive to offer Mr. Assad is a role in a genuine strategic discussion about the region`s future. In the years after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Syria`s principal forum for having its regional interests considered by the United States was the Syrian track of the Middle East peace process. Since President Bill Clinton`s summit with Hafez Assad in Geneva in April 2000, however, there has been no Syrian track. Diplomatic marginalization has been a source of frustration for Syria — and it`s one that will probably intensify as the country becomes encircled by pro-Western states (including, now, Iraq). We should therefore indicate a willingness to begin talking with Mr. Assad about Syria`s regional interests, but only on the condition that he take steps to cut his country`s links to terrorism.

The United States should also make clear that it is prepared to remove Syria from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. In the 1990`s, we made Syria`s removal from the list contingent on a peace treaty with Israel that never came; we should now tie removal to changes in Syria`s relations with terrorists. Taking Syria off the list would allow American economic aid to flow to the country for the first time in decades and substantially increase assistance from international financial institutions.

Getting Syria out of the terrorism business through diplomatic engagement would be a major achievement in itself, both for our counterterrorism campaign and our Middle East policy. Perhaps more significantly, success with Syria could establish hard-nosed engagement as the most effective way to confront, and eventually to change, the behavior of states that back terrorism. In this regard, Secretary Powell`s journey to Damascus could mark a new stage of the war on terrorism — one that will enable the Bush administration to match its military achievements with even more impressive diplomatic accomplishments.


Flynt Leverett, a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, was senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from February 2002 to March 2003.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Published on Wednesday, April 30, 2003 by the Times of India
Yes, But Where Are the Saddam Look-Alikes?
by Siddharth Varadarajan

Ever since the fall of Baghdad, everyone`s been asking where`s Saddam and where are the weapons of mass destruction he allegedly had. Fair enough. But the question that intrigues me the most is this: Where on earth are his famed look-alikes? If Saddam is dead, did they all, to the last man, die with him? And if he`s slipped out of the country -- to Syria, Belarus, wherever -- did he manage to take each and every one of his replicas with him? Are there, even as we speak, a dozen Saddams sadly sipping vodka (doubles, no doubt) in some seedy bar in Minsk or Vitebsk?

From the first day, Iraqi television began broadcasting footage of a defiant Saddam untouched by the US `decapitation strike` against him, the American and British media have been telling us not to trust our own eyes. Even though you think you`re seeing Saddam, reporters told us breathlessly, you can`t be sure because the Iraqi leader is known to use a series of body doubles for his public appearances. This claim was often simply asserted as fact, or at best sourced to "Iraqi exiles" and "Western intelligence agencies".

To tell you the truth, I was always a bit skeptical about this explanation. First of all, in the 38 years I`ve been around on this planet, I`ve yet to see any human being with an exact body double, let alone several such human replicas so perfect in every manner as Saddam`s were said to be.

And then there was the administrative aspect which bothered me. Was there a special department of the Iraqi government which kept track of the look-alikes, graded them according to quality and reliability, and decided whether Saddam 1, 4 or 8 should be used for such and such appearance? Finally, what would happen if one of the look-alikes - or his handlers - were to assert that the real Saddam was actually an impostor and order his summary execution? Was there a procedure laid down conclusively to identify the real McCoy? DNA tests, blood groups, perhaps a conveniently inflicted scar on the derriere?

On my part, I`m willing to bet that the failure of the US occupiers to locate and capture even one of the alleged Saddam doubles strongly suggests the Iraqi leader never had any. I reckon the story about body doubles is a classic psy-op, a theory probably floated by the Pentagon`s erstwhile Office of Strategic Influence in order to demoralize and disorient the enemy. I don`t know who or how this bit of information warfare was first foisted on the media but once it was out there, there was no shortage of journalists and editors gullible enough to retail an obviously suspect, nonfalsifiable theory.

But the psy-ops didn`t end there. Throughout the war, the Pentagon used the media to spread disinformation about the course of the fighting, inventing civilian uprisings where there were none (Basra), chemical weapons factories where there were none (near Najaf), Iraqi anti-aircraft fire falling back onto earth to kill civilians (rather than US missiles being responsible), and bizarre claims about Iraqi soldiers "pushing women and children on to the street" and firing at "coalition forces" from behind these "human shields." Though the last claim has by now entered war lore, there is not even one credible eyewitness account from an embedded journalist to substantiate this charge, let alone establish that this was a widespread, pervasive Iraqi tactic. What the claim did, however, was to shift the blame for civilian deaths away from the invading army and on to the defenders.

The most impressive psy-op of the war, however, occurred on its last day, when US soldiers toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdous Square, Baghdad. The square is right opposite the Palestine Hotel where foreign journalists were staying. All US TV stations showed carefully framed, close-up footage of what seemed like a largish crowd toppling the statue with the assistance of a US army vehicle. The footage was shown live for hours, repeatedly broadcast throughout the day, especially by CNN and BBC, and cited by US leaders as proof of the `legitimacy` of the war.

While most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam, they had been reluctant to perform in large numbers for the invading army. With the blood of 2,000 Iraqi civilians and 10,000 soldiers on their hands, Bush and Rumsfeld needed cathartic footage of the oppressed masses surging forward towards freedom. The Firdous Square statue toppling was conceived for this purpose and executed brilliantly.

Had TV cameras shown a long shot of Firdous Square, the impression the toppling would have created would be very different. There is a long shot posted on the web (http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=55384&group=w… which shows a largely empty square cordoned off by US tanks. Small clusters of Iraqis outside the square can be seen watching the toppling of the statue, as silent spectators rather than active participants.

Now, the question is, who were the few dozen Iraqis trying to bring the statue down? Obviously people the Americans trusted because the footage clearly shows some two dozen boisterous men clambering on top of the US army vehicle and charging at the statue. Remember, this was barely ten days after the suicide attack in central Iraq which claimed the lives of four US soldiers and a few days after nervous, trigger happy marines had mowed down a whole family when their car didn`t slow down at a checkpost.

But even if the statue topplers were men the Americans could trust, who were they? Photographs doing the rounds on the Net strongly suggest they were members of Ahmed Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress militia who had been flown into Nasiriya on April 6. One INC man in uniform shown with Chalabi at Nasiriya reappears in civilian clothes in a Reuters photograph from Baghdad on April 9, the day the statue is toppled, celebrating the entry of US soldiers. Readers can view and compare the two photographs at the same website mentioned above.

The only explanation for the coincidence is that like Saddam, the Chalabi supporter also has a body double. Wily aren`t they, these Iraqis?

Siddharth Varadarajan is the Deputy Chief of National Bureau of The Times of India.
Email: [e-mail]

Copyright 2003 Times Internet Limited

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Our Imperial Adventure Inflames the World
by Nicholas von Hoffman



If for nothing else, Bush II should find a place in history as the guy who dropped the bunker-buster on the Garden of Eden. It’s not everybody who can lay claim to having destroyed the Mesopotamian cradle of Western Civ, but given the administration’s indifference to the past (i.e., "old Europe" vs. "new Europe"), you won’t find many in Washington tearing their hair out over the sacking of a few museums.

In recognition of Mr. Bush’s achievement, we might consider memorializing his august puss, if not on Mount Rushmore, then by erecting a new Sphinx. The stones might be hauled to the building site by captured Arabs, who have been convicted of "links" or being "linked," as the American officialdom is wont to say. It may be farfetched, but in light of reports that at least some of the thefts from the Baghdad museum were done by gangs with connections to shady art dealers in the West, one might wonder if money had been passed to ensure that the American military didn’t get to the scene of the crime until the thieves had made their getaway with their swag of priceless antiquities.

What an unpatriotic thought on my part! I retract it: Our military never takes bribes and accepts only medals. Besides, agents of our scandal-ridden F.B.I. are reported to be on the scene, and we know what comfort we can take in the knowledge that these fearless, incorruptible and efficient detectives are on the track of the criminals.

If some American officer had been paid to turn a blind eye, it might indicate some appreciation of what has been destroyed. The truth probably is that the American military let these places be ruined simply because they didn’t give a good goddamn one way or the other.

Robert Fisk, reporting for the London Independent, added weight to this hypothesis when he wrote, "Yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists …. The National Library and Archives, a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq, were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze. When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning … I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that ‘this guy says some biblical library is on fire.’ I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English …. it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air." At about the same time, American TV viewers could see members of the American military speeding through the anarchic streets of Baghdad to foil a gang of bank robbers.

So Bush II will go into the history books as the philistine he is—but as Henry Ford was famously quoted as saying, "History is bunk." Nevertheless, those favoring the invasion of Iraq have a lot of American history, bunky and not so bunky, on their side. If precedent is a justification for breaking and entering, the President and his neocon friends have plenty of it, dating at least as far back as Andrew Jackson driving the Seminoles out of Florida, through the theft of Texas and California from Mexico, the seizure of Hawaii and the bloody occupation of the Philippines. How the United States obtained the Guantánamo Bay enclave, currently being used as what is beginning to look like a concentration camp for Arabs, is best not closely scrutinized.

Starting with the Spanish-American War, the nation began fissuring over militarism, nondefensive war and the rights and wrongs of stealing other people’s real estate. While most Republicans couldn’t wait to enlist, the Republican Speaker of the House, Tom Reed, was unable to stomach going to war against the decrepit Spanish empire. He was too loyal a party man to go public with his girlish qualms, so he wordlessly resigned the speakership and his Maine House seat and disappeared into private life. Sentiment was turning against attacking people and nations which posed no threat to us. In 1910, the idea of internationalism came into existence when President William Howard Taft came out for binding arbitration, not war, in conflicts between nations.

On the other side of the argument stood Theodore Roosevelt, who, sounding like an editorialist in today’s Weekly Standard, sneered at what he called "unrighteous peace" and "mollycoddles" who wouldn’t fight. Taft considered Roosevelt, who had seen action in the Spanish-American dustup, to be "obsessed with his love of war and the glory of it," and in 1915 Taft took a leading role in the newly established League to Enforce Peace and its effort to create a system of international law.

Until Iraq, the Spanish-American War was the last one the United States fought for self-aggrandizement; the last large theft of property by the U.S. was Theodore Roosevelt’s taking a chunk of Colombia, which we converted into the nation/colony of Panama for canal-building purposes. In the 19th century, such thefts were glorious acts of extending civilization into lands inhabited by backward, savage people who worshipped inferior gods and lacked proper sanitation. England, France, Germany, Belgium and Japan prowled the world for places to steal and colonize in the name of progress and modernity.

Then came Woodrow Wilson, the most important or the least appreciated 20th-century President. The age of empires ended with his proclamation of the self-determination of peoples. Speaking the language of liberty and democracy, Wilson denounced going to war to steal the lands and patrimony of others. In place of rivalries among the powerful, he proposed a system of collective security, international law and justice which found its fullest expression in the League of Nations.

From Wilson forward, no President would use Theodore Roosevelt’s language of imperial conquest. After Wilson, America abjured war for profit, war for territory or war for other people’s possessions. In this third year of the 21st century, George Bush is also using the Wilsonian rhetoric. But he lies. After saying we sought no territory from Iraq but were engaged in an altruistic crusade (sorry—poor choice of words), it comes out that America is helping itself to this and that military morsel in that bedraggled land. According to news reports, Washington is planning what The New York Times called a "long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region." The expression "long-term relationship" is Orwellian English meaning theft.

The next time a red-white-and-blue-sodden individual asks: "Why do they hate us?", the proper reply should be: "Because we cheat, lie and steal." The supine American press may not make a big thing out of it, but abroad they remember. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

One is tempted to ask whether Mr. Bush and his people ever seriously believed that Iraq was a threat. Was this charade of war a put-up job from the start, and from before the start? More largely, can they get away with turning Iraq into a colony or a protectorate? Is the nation which threw off its colonial chains now going to take Iraq’s independence and make it a de facto colony? A century ago, such things were approved of. But not in the Wilsonian epoch, and not now—when, if there is one principle universally agreed on the world over, it’s the self-determination of peoples as Woodrow Wilson first enunciated it. Even in the imperial age, America was unable to successfully digest its Spanish-American War conquests. For 100 years, relations between the United States and Cuba have been poisoned by it.

Internationally, no President—not Franklin Roosevelt, not John Kennedy, no one—was as idolized by the people of the world as Woodrow Wilson. In his 1919 tour, he walked the streets of Europe as millions turned out to shower him with flowers and adulation. George Bush can’t step out of the United States without being surrounded by thousands of armed men, and even then he is in constant and real danger. He is as hated as Wilson was loved.

As opposed to President Bush, "Mr. Wilson rose to intellectual domination of most of the civilized world. With his courage and eloquence, he carried a message of hope for the independence of nations, the freedom of men and lasting peace. Never since his time has any man risen to the political and spiritual heights that came to him," wrote Herbert Hoover, in perhaps the only biography of one President by another. Elsewhere in the book, as if to make it clear who is who and what is what, he wrote of Wilson, "Had he lived, he would have seen the League concept rise again from the second bloodbath of mankind under the name of the United Nations. The spirit of Woodrow Wilson came to the world again."

You may reach Nicholas von Hoffman via email at: [e-mail].

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Das ist ein Wechselrahmen

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-war-embed3ma…
COLUMN ONE
The War, Up Close and Very Personal
An embedded reporter has an exhilarating, if terrifying, window on the unscripted world of men in combat. In ways, he was one of them.
By David Zucchino
Times Staff Writer

May 3, 2003

BAGHDAD -- Our troop truck lost its way in a dust cloud at night, somewhere near the holy city of Karbala. It careened across a dirt causeway and plunged into the murky brown waters of a canal. Men pitched headfirst to the bottom, dragged under by the weight of their flak jackets. Heavy boxes of bottled water and rations tumbled down on them. Soldiers hacked away with bayonets at gear straps tangled around their necks.

After several terrifying minutes, 24 soldiers and one embedded reporter were pulled to safety, all accounted for. Some of the men vomited on the slick canal bank. Two had to be revived by medics. A few shivering young soldiers seemed ready to weep as their sergeants berated them for losing their night-vision goggles.

I felt like crying, too. My computer, satellite phones, clothes, tape recorder, cash, notebooks and everything else I carried was lost or ruined.

It was 5:30 a.m. on April 4. Journalistically speaking, I had become what the military calls "combat ineffective." My military embed, having brought me closer than I ever imagined to the perils of the front, seemed to have ended at the bottom of the canal.

Embedding -- that awkward and ephemeral term for being in the Army but not of it -- is a remarkable contrivance. It can be bent and manipulated by commander or reporter, often to the benefit of neither. It can also provide an exhilarating, if terrifying, window on the unscripted world of men under stress and fire.

Not since the Vietnam War have journalists worked so closely with soldiers in combat. The embed, in which reporters live 24 hours a day with their assigned units, was instituted on a limited basis in Afghanistan after the heaviest fighting had ended. Expanded, it was to be the grand journalistic experiment of the Iraq war, and a departure from the briefing coverage of the Persian Gulf War 12 years earlier. About 600 journalists volunteered.

During seven weeks spent with half a dozen units, I slept in fighting holes and armored vehicles, on a rooftop, a garage floor and in lumbering troop trucks. For days at a time, I didn`t sleep. I ate with the troops, choking down processed meals of "meat, chunked and formed" that came out of brown plastic bags. I rode with them in loud, claustrophobic and disorienting Bradley fighting vehicles. I complained with them about the choking dust, the lack of water, our foul-smelling bodies and our scaly, rotting feet.

At 5:30 a.m. on April 7, precisely 72 hours after plummeting into the canal, I was in the belly of a Bradley, its 25-millimeter cannon pumping out rounds, as an armored column of the Army`s 3rd Infantry Division rumbled under fire into downtown Baghdad. And 72 hours after that, I was sleeping on the marble floor of Saddam Hussein`s Presidential Palace.

I saw what the soldiers saw. And, like most of them, I emerged filthy, exhausted and aware of what Winston Churchill meant when he said that "nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect."

Getting the Story

Most important, I wrote stories I could not have produced had I not been embedded -- on the pivotal battle for Baghdad; the performance of U.S. soldiers in combat; the crass opulence of Hussein`s palaces; U.S. airstrikes on an office tower in central Baghdad; souvenir-hunting by soldiers and reporters; and the discovery of more than $750 million in cash in a neighborhood that had been the preserve of top Iraqi officials.

Yet that same access could be suffocating and blinding. Often I was too close or confined to comprehend the war`s broad sweep. I could not interview survivors of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. soldiers or speak to Iraqi fighters trying to kill Americans. I was not present when Americans died at the hands of fellow soldiers in what the military calls "frat," for fratricide. I had no idea what ordinary Iraqis were experiencing. I was ignorant of Iraqi government decisions and U.S. command strategy.

Embedded reporters were entirely dependent on the military for food, water, power and transportation. And ultimately, we depended on them for something more fundamental: access. We were placed in a potentially compromised position long before the fighting began, and we knew it.

Lt. Col. Patrick Fetterman, who commands an elite infantry battalion of the 101st Airborne Division, told me many times that the most lethal thing on the battlefield was his own forces.

For journalists, the greatest enemy was ourselves -- our ingrained human tendency to identify with those beside us. Bombarded with drama and emotions, it was impossible to step back, or to report every story with absolute detachment. We didn`t just cover the war -- we were part of it.

This newspaper, like many, also assigned reporters and photographers to Iraq who were not embedded with U.S. troops. They covered what we could not -- the Iraqi government, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, military strategy, political fallout and everything else beyond our cloistered existence.

Reports from embedded reporters did not dominate newspaper war coverage. They were part of it, giving an intimate look at the 250,000 U.S. troops in the gulf. But the raw reporting emerging from embeds was weighed and balanced by editors against information from other reporters spread far and wide. In that context, embedding provided a valuable contribution.

In most cases, the officers and soldiers I accompanied were too busy or distracted to pay attention to what I was doing. There was no public affairs minder to keep me in line. Not a single soldier or officer I encountered refused to be interviewed. I attended countless intelligence briefings. I listened to radio communications crackle in the heat of battle. I walked through battle rehearsals that choreographed every angle of attack.

Some officers seemed to expect reporters to serve as boosters for their unit`s exploits. A few pointed out that my presence in a Humvee or Bradley deprived them of one more fighting man.

Others strictly interpreted the ground rules all reporters signed, which prohibited us from identifying positions, revealing war plans or describing U.S. combat losses. For instance, I was ordered to withhold information about extensive damage to nearly three dozen Apache gunships in one battle, yet reporters with other units reported every detail.

I quickly learned to push the rules. Under combat conditions, the embed restrictions softened. Without official permission, I moved from unit to unit, trying to get closer to battle. I would stumble onto a unit, seek out the commander, and get his permission to jump aboard. With my greasy jeans and sweat-stained shirt, I felt like a homeless man cadging a meal.

But if I had not abandoned my original unit, I would have sat out the war in Kuwait, where that unit remained for the bulk of the fighting.

After my new battalion plunged me into the canal, I joined a brigade that took me to the core of the battle for Baghdad.

Pinned Down

Along the way, I discovered it is not combat that men detest most. It is the tedium, the petty rules, the filth, and the common soldier`s state of utter ignorance regarding where he is going, when or why.

With the troop truck submerged near Karbala on April 4, the soaked troops and I were dumped onto other trucks already packed with soldiers. Shivering and sleep-deprived, we bounced toward Baghdad for the next 20 hours.

Our convoy was ambushed south of the capital, then lost its way. We stumbled into an idyllic water garden of lilies and marble columns. Under fire and assaulted by mosquitoes, we were pinned down there much of the night, our second in a row with no sleep.

The men cursed and moaned and were ordered by their noncommissioned officers, in bursts of loud profanity, to shut up. But the NCOs also complained bitterly that no one higher up was telling them what was happening.

Just before dawn, the convoy snaked its way to a group of buildings. The troops slept inside on an oily floor for three hours, expecting to take part that morning in the fight to seize Baghdad`s international airport, which they believed was several miles away. But when the men awoke, they discovered they had spent the night at the airport. It had been taken by the 3rd Infantry the day before. And the water gardens turned out to be one of Hussein`s nearby palaces.

The battalion`s commanders knew all this, of course. But word never leaked down to the fighting men.

Ordinary soldiers are constantly foraging for scraps of information beyond their platoon or company, hoarding any precious nuggets.

"What`s the news, man?" was the constant greeting I received from soldiers, and it shamed me to have to confess, usually, that I didn`t know any more than they did. Anyone in the United States reading a newspaper or watching TV had a far better understanding of the war. I was like a scientist squinting into a microscope, oblivious to anything else in the lab, much less the world beyond the door.

At the airport that morning, I walked out onto the tarmac and stumbled upon a convoy of bullet-riddled tanks and Bradleys of the 3rd Infantry rumbling across the runway. The tankers told me they had just completed a harrowing run through Baghdad, killing roughly 1,000 soldiers while losing one tank and an American tank commander.

I sought out the 2nd Brigade commander, Col. David Perkins, and asked to link up with his men. He pointed to the open door of an armored personnel carrier. "We leave in 30 minutes," he said.

I ended up at the brigade command post on Baghdad`s southern outskirts. Until then, I had spent my time at the battalion level and lower. Now I was privy to the planning of the assault on Baghdad with a brigade about to descend on the capital. My battle fog lifted.

When I was thrown with soldiers into combat on April 7, I wasn`t just a reporter covering a story. I was in effect a crew member of Lightning 28, a Bradley whose gunner was setting Iraqi pickup trucks afire and cutting men in half with ragged bursts from the Bradley`s "co-ax," its clattering M-240 machine gun.

When Iraqis fired RPGs -- rocket-propelled grenades -- at the Bradley and peppered it with small-arms fire, they were trying to kill everyone inside, including me.

That is the subtle and insidious alchemy of the embed. The seven soldiers in the Bradley were much more than news subjects. They were fellow Americans fighting desperately to stay alive, and my fate was linked inexorably to theirs.

The strangers launching RPGs at us from bunkers weren`t just Iraqi fighters. They were the enemy.

War is an intensely selfish and personal experience. When I scanned the smoky streets through the Bradley`s tiny glass vision blocks, searching for "Iraqi dismounts," as the tankers called infantrymen, I wasn`t just recording the scene for a story. I was searching for targets.

Placed in a soldier`s seat, I had been asked by an officer to perform a soldier`s job. He said, "Hey, watch that vision block."

I saw flaming trucks and shadowy figures in the thick haze, but nothing stationary enough to be targeted and killed. Yet if I had spotted an exposed Iraqi fighter with an RPG aimed at the Bradley, I believe I would have screamed, "Dismount at 9 o`clock!" like anyone else inside. I was relieved that I did not have to make that decision.

In It Together

A Bradley under fire cannot be covered dispassionately, like a news conference or a political rally. The vehicle commander, setting off shattering booms with each cannon round fired into Iraqi bunkers, wasn`t an anonymous soldier to me. He was crew-cut Mark Jewell, a garrulous Marine major, a father of two troubled about missing his wedding anniversary that week.

The Bradley fought its way to a traffic circle near a presidential palace that morning. We watched through the vision blocks as the big guns on the tanks and Bradleys of Cyclone Company ripped into half a dozen suicide drivers speeding across the 14th of July bridge. They kept coming -- wild-eyed men, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, some firing AK-47s from passenger windows.

The gunners inside the tanks and Bradleys kept up a wall of fire, ripping open chunks of roadway with warning shots before pulverizing pickup trucks and sedans and human beings in flaming red explosions. Some vehicles exploded more than once as incendiary rounds set off ammunition or explosives stored inside.

"There`s brains and guts all over that bridge," Staff Sgt. Anthony J. Smith said with the spare and brutal commentary typical of so many soldiers I encountered.

We sat buttoned up in the Bradley, all hatches locked, as stray RPG and small-arms fire spattered the roadway. Suddenly the main cannon jammed, and Maj. Jewell radioed another vehicle for a repair tool. Minutes later, someone was pounding on the heavy rear hatch. The door swung open to reveal the helmeted form of Geoffrey Mohan, my colleague at The Times, a wrench in his hand.

Mohan had been in the next armored vehicle for the entire battle and had volunteered to deliver the tool in order to step outside to use his satellite phone to call in his story to the newsroom in Los Angeles.

Mohan was a godsend. With my computer and phone lost to the canal, I had no way to send my story on the pivotal battle of the war. Mohan lent me his laptop and phone.

I climbed outside for the first time in two hours. I was overcome by the stench of cordite and the peculiar sour odor of scorched human flesh, the remains of an Iraqi soldier who had been blown apart. His AK-47 and helmet were still there, arranged in a messy still life. His face was contorted in a grimace, but I felt no pity. I wanted to feel compassion for a fellow human being who had been slaughtered, but I could not stop thinking that his RPG could have left me dead on the spot.

Lt. Matthew Hanks noticed an RPG launcher lying in the dirt in a small grassy park a few yards from the Bradley. Then he saw several bunkers.

Close Call

The radio man, Marine Sgt. Dennis Parks, grabbed a flashlight and Jewell`s 9-millimeter Beretta. He volunteered to be a "tunnel rat" and explore the bunkers. I watched him disappear into a hole that had been covered with a sheet of corrugated metal and camouflaged with palm fronds.

Inside the bunker, around a bend in a tunnel, Parks found Iraqi soldiers huddled in the dark, their arms upraised, begging not to be shot. Parks cursed and shouted for help. As he put it later, "My heart hit my [spine] and I started yelling at them" to get out.

Only after the Cyclone crews had hog-tied 15 prisoners and collected seven RPG launchers, 60 rockets, 40 grenades and 5,000 rounds of ammo did Parks fully comprehend the lethal threat. He was a compact, nimble young man from Michigan, a 21-year-old with uncommon maturity and decisiveness.

"They could have easily killed us all. They could have hit us before we even knew where they were," he said. He seemed more mystified than relieved.

I survived, but other reporters did not. More than a dozen have died covering the war in Iraq, including Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly, who drowned along with a soldier when their Army Humvee plunged into a canal similar to the one that claimed my troop truck a day later.

Embed access also claimed Julio Anguita Parrado, a gentle, boyish reporter from El Mundo in Spain.

Parrado and I had shared the unnerving experience of listening to Col. Perkins lay out for his staff the plan to smash into the heart of Baghdad with just three battalions consisting of about 970 fighting men, 74 tanks and 54 Bradleys, backed by air and artillery.

It was the night of April 6, just hours before the tanks and Bradleys rolled out from the brigade command post on Baghdad`s southern cusp.

Chilling Assessment

Parrado was disturbed by a chilling assessment from the brigade intelligence officer, Maj. Joffery Watson, of the firepower still in the hands of the Special Republican Guard units protecting the capital.

Parrado approached me afterward, confessing his fear that the mission was too dangerous. He asked whether anyone would consider him a coward if he decided not to go along. I told him that I was afraid, too, and so were most of the soldiers. No one would think poorly of him.

Later that night, Parrado told me that he and a colleague, German photographer Christian Liebig, had decided to stay behind. Aware that I had lost my notebooks and was writing on scraps of paper, Parrado offered me a notebook.

I respected their decision, but I was going into the city. I had come too far to turn back just as the war was reaching a climax.

Soon after I left in the armored convoy, an Iraqi missile screamed into the brigade headquarters. Parrado and Liebig were killed instantly. Three soldiers also died and 17 were wounded, some of them horribly burned by a fireball that engulfed the command post.

My first reaction was shock and grief. It did not seem possible that men I had seen hours earlier were gone, or that a missile had pierced what seemed to be a haven at the rear.

My second reaction -- one that many soldiers admitted they also experienced when hearing of combat casualties -- was: Thank God it wasn`t me. I hated myself, but it was true.

For me, the deaths underscored what may be obvious from afar but is easy to overlook at the front: War is capricious. No decision in combat can be fully rational, and there is no safe place in a war zone.

That war turns men callous was driven home to me again later that day as I sought out Perkins for an assessment of the battle raging through the city center.

I rode to his command post with a medic, Staff Sgt. Luther Robinson, a free spirit from Atlantic, N.C., whose armored vehicle was transporting a wounded Iraqi fighter from one of the bunkers.

The Iraqi, who gave his name as Aziz, was ashen-faced and writhing in pain from a terrible wound to his foot. It hung grotesquely, attached only by ligaments and held fast by a bandage Robinson had applied.

Aziz seemed determined to carry on an idle conversation with me. I had spoken a few words of Arabic to him from my limited supply of phrases. Now I was trying to write my story on Mohan`s laptop.

I found myself becoming irritated at Aziz as he jabbered through his pain. A bloodied, half-delirious stranger, certain to lose his foot and perhaps his life, was trying to make polite conversation in the middle of a battle -- and I was absorbed in a laptop.

To shut Aziz up, I handed him a bottle of water and told myself it was an act of mercy.

At that moment, I noticed an Iraqi grenade resting next to me on the gurney where I sat. An American soldier apparently had taken it from a bunker and left it there. Aziz saw it, too, and he shrugged. I moved the grenade out of his reach.

Outside, a tremendous explosion made the Bradley shudder. Robinson, standing in the hatch, bent down and grinned at me, his face red and smeared with sweat. He hollered: "I love this stuff!"

I understood what he meant. We had been transported from the ordinary and the mundane, and every sound and sight and emotion was intense and brilliant. Each moment seemed infused with a meaning that was difficult to comprehend. And when the battle was over, I felt enormous relief, but also a sense of deflation and an elusive feeling of loss.

After the worst of it, I lived in the Presidential Palace for a week. I watched GIs feed live sheep to the lions and cheetahs in the palace`s private zoo. I roamed the halls and climbed to the roof to inspect four enormous sculpted heads of Hussein mounted there.

I had hundreds of rooms to choose from and selected a sunny ground-floor room overlooking a small garden.

When I had stayed up to write the night before, I slipped upstairs in the afternoons to one of the luxurious bedrooms with marble balconies overlooking the palace gardens. There, with the spring breeze carrying the scent of honeysuckle, I found a king-size bed and slept like a thief.

The adrenaline had drained by then, and the soldiers turned anxious and distracted. I felt the same way. There was a void. The battle had focused everyone`s mind on a clearly defined goal. Now we were in the dangerous twilight between war and reconstruction.

The chaplains had soldiers lining up for counseling. They poured out tales of eviscerating strangers with fat rounds from their .50-caliber machine guns.

It wasn`t that the soldiers felt guilty, the chaplains told me later. They had done what they were trained to do but had never fully comprehended what was required to destroy the enemy. This realization troubled them deeply.

I had never seen an armored brigade in action. The destruction inflicted by the tanks and Bradleys was astonishing. But more remarkable was the thorough and businesslike way the gunners went about their work. They were anxious and afraid and stimulated, of course. But they also were focused, methodical and deadly efficient.

"We`re in the business of managing violence," explained Maj. Mark Rasins, who fought in the city for the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment.

Embedding taught me much about the way the American military functions under combat pressure. The military loves meetings, and paperwork about meetings. It loves to do things at night, preferably late at night. It spends days planning complex missions, only to cancel them abruptly. It loves to have everyone sit in vehicles with the engines running for long, maddening stretches. It prefers orders to logic, rules to imagination.

Yet with overwhelming air power and just three battalions on the ground in central Baghdad on April 7, the military had ripped out the heart of a major Arab capital with alarming speed.

I did not encounter any soldiers who reveled in killing. In fact, many men told me beforehand that they hoped they would not have to kill. But some laughed and mugged every time they passed an Iraqi corpse whose head had been flattened by a tank, and many spoke in a clinical and detached way of killing other men.

When I asked one company commander about events of Tuesday, April 8, he replied casually: "Uh, Tuesday, yeah. Tuesday afternoon we spent killing enemy dismounts."

Soldiers wearing chemical suits joked endlessly about the effects of biological or chemical weapons. They laughed about "doing the funky chicken," referring to convulsions caused by exposure to nerve agents. They nominated one another for "least mission critical" -- that hapless soldier who would be the first one ordered to take off his gas mask after a chemical or biological attack.

In a convoy south of Baghdad on April 4, several soldiers and I watched a pair of A-10 Warthogs destroy trucks full of Iraqi fighters in the hazy distance. My companions were thrilled by the low growl of the planes as they unleashed barrages from their 30-millimeter Vulcan cannons at 4,700 rounds a minute. They cheered and shouted: "Yeah, man! They`re gettin` some!"

Staff Sgt. Richard Clinton, a muscular Army Ranger, listened to them and said: "Somebody just died right now."

Pride and Fear

Outside the city of Najaf one afternoon, I asked Lt. Col. Fetterman whether his soldiers admitted to fear before battle. He was preparing to lead his men on an air assault mission, his pistol on his hip and two letters from his wife in his helmet liner.

"Here`s what I tell my soldiers: What makes a man is the counterbalance between pride and fear," he said. "You reach down and find your pride and overcome your fear."

Embedded reporters had their own fears -- of being killed or maimed, of missing a story, of being compromised by their craving for access or manipulated by commanders.

Last week, I wrote about five soldiers from the 3rd Infantry who were suspected of stealing $12.3 million from hidden Iraqi caches totaling $768 million in $100 bills.

I knew one of the suspects. He had told me about his children and his quarrels with his wife and his conflicted feelings about living in strangers` homes and pawing through their bedrooms. His predicament pained me.

There was no question I would write the story. But a staff officer later confronted me, accusing me of tarnishing his unit`s reputation. He told me I should not have reported the thefts, that I was abusing my embed access.

"We don`t need this negative publicity right now," he said, and I realized that by "we," he was including me.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/battle/la-war-e…

U.S. Expedites Reshuffling of Europe Troops
The Pentagon pursues a leaner, faster force at new bases in the former East Bloc. Publicly, officials deny any link to Iraq war politics.
By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

May 1, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Fueled by resentment over the opposition of "Old Europe" to the war in Iraq, the Pentagon is accelerating plans to move tens of thousands of U.S. troops out of Germany and to establish new bases in the former East Bloc countries of Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

The first concrete evidence of the shift is the movement of the Army`s 17,000-strong 1st Armored Division, which deployed to Iraq mostly from bases in Germany but will not return there, senior military officials said.

The plans represent the most significant reshuffling of U.S. forces in Europe since the end of World War II, when American troops tore the swastikas off hundreds of German army facilities and moved in to protect the emerging West Germany against Soviet ambitions.

With the Pentagon`s recent expansion across Central Asia, the move into Eastern Europe means the U.S. military will span the globe as never before.

"If you want to talk about suns not setting on empires, you know, the Brits had nothing compared to this," said John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, an intelligence and military policy think tank based in Alexandria, Va.

But even as the Pentagon proposes deploying troops to new places, it envisions more temporary assignments, allowing larger numbers of troops to be based in the United States.

More than 112,000 U.S. troops are based in Europe, 80% of them scattered around Germany. But with some Western European nations increasingly reluctant to house U.S. troops and with formerly communist countries signing up for NATO and eager to play host to the Americans, Pentagon officials say change is imminent.

The move is also being driven by the vision of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — who coined the dismissive "Old Europe" tag when France and Germany balked at supporting the war in Iraq — for a leaner, faster military. Moving out of some of the hundreds of small, scattered U.S. military installations in Europe and into countries along or near the Black Sea coast would make it easier to quickly deploy troops to the Middle East and Africa.

"Why do we need a joint force to be in Germany, where there`s nothing happening?" a senior military official asked. "You have to have troops close to ports and airfields that are closer to the action. And you also want to have them in a place where people agree with what you`re doing, so they don`t shut down ports and they don`t shut down airfields."

With its clear military supremacy, the Pentagon feels free to flex its muscle with little regard to the diplomatic consequences of moving into Russia`s backyard or leaving the impression of snubbing Germany.

"The U.S. is this staggering military power and, the fact is, the Russians lost the Cold War," said Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University professor of strategic studies who is highly influential with senior Bush administration officials.

Referring to Russia`s opposition to the Iraq war, he added, "We were very sensitive to their feelings for quite some time, and I think what might begin to happen is, particularly after their behavior in this conflict, we may begin to be less sensitive."

As for Germany and France, Cohen said: "Whereas there may have been a lot more hesitation about doing this in the past, I think that is now less likely because of where the Germans were on the war and the extent to which they sided with the French."

Initial Pentagon plans call for building U.S. bases at the Sarafovo airfield in Bulgaria and the nearby Black Sea port of Burgas, where U.S. KC-135 refueling tanker aircraft and more than 200 troops were based during the Iraq war.

U.S. facilities will also be built at the Romanian air base of Mihail Kogalniceanu and the Black Sea port of Constanta, both of which were used to ferry troops and equipment into Iraq.

The Pentagon also plans to take over vast military training grounds and firing ranges once used by the Soviet armed forces in Hungary and Poland, including the Krzesiny air base outside Poznan in western Poland.

Major U.S. bases in Germany and Italy, including the largest facilities in and around Ramstein Air Base near Frankfurt, will remain, although they will house fewer troops. Details of how many troops will be pulled out of Germany and where they will go have not been announced.

Pentagon officials publicly deny that the repositioning of U.S. forces in Europe is motivated by the recent politics of the Iraq war. Rumsfeld assigned top aides to study such moves even before he took office.

"We have been examining our posture and presence across the globe," Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. "Our decisions about where we want to base, exercise and stage our forces are not being driven by transient considerations of current events."

Privately, however, senior military and civilian officials at the Pentagon say the speed with which the Defense Department is moving forward with its plans in Europe is being driven in large measure by tensions with Germany, France and Turkey.

The Turks were demanding billions of dollars in aid for letting U.S. ground troops enter northern Iraq from Turkey, before they finally refused the U.S. access. In April, the Pentagon withdrew 30 of 80 aircraft and almost half the 4,500 troops from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

"This is a purposeful effort to possibly leave places where they may not want us or they are snubbing us," one senior military official said. "The Eastern Bloc countries have reached out to us. They are not looking for outright bribes like some countries did recently that shall go unnamed. They are looking for a partnership."

One key issue within the Army is whether the tradition of families accompanying troops overseas — a costly perk that is good for morale — will continue.

Under the original "lily pad" vision of Rumsfeld and Marine Gen. James L. Jones, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, the new bases, ports, airfields and training grounds would be staffed with limited numbers of highly mobile units that would be deployed without their families for six-month rotations. They would be able to jump from country to country on a moment`s notice.

That proposal aroused the ire of Army officials, whose Europe-based troops and their families now stay for two years. Although the lily pad plan hasn`t been rejected, a revised proposal, still under discussion, would staff the new bases with skeleton crews and pre-position equipment there. The bases would be used periodically for military exercises by troops based permanently in the United States.

"I don`t think we`re talking about building another Ramstein or another ... large installation where you have the small-town USA come with it, like families and schools and everything else," Jones said in Washington this week. "But what we`re trying to do is develop a family of bases that ... can go from being cold to warm to hot if you need them, to be very efficiently and economically built."

The point is to increase the speed and flexibility with which U.S. troops can deploy.

Germany was uniquely suited to rapid deployment of U.S. troops when America`s primary adversary was the Soviet Union. Armored battalions based in Germany could literally roll their tanks into position against a Soviet foe within minutes.

But with Europe now primarily a platform from which to send U.S. troops elsewhere, the limitations of basing personnel in places such as Germany and Italy are becoming evident. It took many days to move American armored divisions and their equipment out of Germany to ports to be ferried by sea to the Persian Gulf region.

And when the Army`s 173rd Airborne Brigade left its base in Italy to parachute into northern Iraq, it was delayed several days while the Pentagon obtained the Italian government`s permission to allow the brigade to deploy from that country.

"Everything we`re doing is about speed," said one admiral briefed on operational planning at the Pentagon. "Our goal is to swiftly defeat the adversary.... We can`t do that unless we can get in better position to move faster."



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Published on Friday, May 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Proud to be American? Not While it Chooses Bombs Over Bread
by Frida Berrigan

Jay Garner wants us to be proud. The man in charge of rebuilding Iraq was quoted in the New York Times on Thursday saying, "We ought to look in the mirror and get proud, and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, `Damn, we`re Americans.`"

Well Jay, I am sorry to say that I am not feeling it. American soldiers shooting unarmed Iraqi demonstrators and killing at least 17 in two separate incidents. American police officers firing rubber and wooden bullets at unarmed American demonstrators outside of Oakland. Thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in a so-called precision war for their liberation. A multibillion dollar empire building effort underway in Iraq that is masked as a humanitarian reconstruction effort, while children are hungry, seniors are without medication, and education is less and less accessible right here in USA.

There are people profiting from war- and Jay Garner the proud American is one of them. And there are those who are not.

General Jay Garner the head of the Pentagon`s new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. In that capacity he is overseeing and coordinating the relief and rebuilding efforts in Iraq. He is also a personal friend of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

He is also the president of SY Coleman, a subsidiary of L-3 Communications, a high tech defense contractor that specializes in missile-defense systems and makes the targeting systems for conventional weapons. He is not retired from that position, he is on "leave" or on "loan." And he is profiting from war.

In February Garner`s company announced that its revenue in the most recent quarter had soared to $1.3 billion-up from $705 million a year ago. They attribute the windfall to a doubling of military communications and electronics sales. Overall, the company expects a 20% increase in sales and earnings this year.

This is good news for the company and its stockholders, but how can the people of Iraq trust a man who has garnered millions making the targeting systems for missiles that destroyed their country?

If the Bush administration were to consciously set out to pick a person most likely to raise questions about the legitimacy of the post-war rebuilding process, they could not have selected a better man for the job than Jay Garner. As one observer noted, "If it`s not a conflict of interest, it`s certainly being tone deaf."

The weapons industry- companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman- are also pretty tone deaf. With the country on a permanent war footing, the sky is literally the limit for America`s second most heavily subsidized industry.

A new report from United for a Fair Economy, "More Bucks for the Bang: CEO Pay at Top Defense Contractors," found that the boys with the big guns making the big bucks.

Median CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors rose 79 percent from 2001 to 2002, while overall CEO pay climbed only 6 percent. The typical U.S. CEO made $3.7 million in 2002, while the typical defense industry CEO got $5.4 million.

The average Army private risking his or her life in Iraq is paid just $19,585- just about the national poverty rate. The average defense CEO made 577 times as much in 2002, or $11,297,548.

So, we know who is benefiting from war- but who is on the losing side? We are. We are more insecure and more threatened than ever before.

There is plenty of cash to pay for war and empire building in Iraq, but when it comes to meeting the American public`s need for housing, health care, food, education and other necessities, the cash drawer is empty.

The Bush administration asked Congress to provide the Pentagon with $399.1 billion for 2004. That is a huge amount of money. That is more than a billion dollars a day. That is more than $12,000 a second- a year of college tuition.

To put it in relationship to what other countries spend, the U.S. military budget is almost seven times larger than what the second largest spender- Russia budgets for defense. It is more than 26 times the combined spending of the seven countries the Pentagon identifies as enemies. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that military spending will continue to increase at an average of 8% a year through the end of the decade. Meaning that by 2010, the military budget will top out at almost $700 billion.

The military budget does NOT include the costs of war in Iraq. The administration has put those costs in a separate $75 billion "emergency supplemental."

The United States is spending more than a billion dollars a day on the military, while a whole spectrum of domestic needs are severely under-funded. As the Congress prepares to figure pay top dollar for war, they are planning cuts in just about everything else, including veterans benefits and education. House Republicans are suggesting $14.6 billion in cut to veterans programs, including money for disabilities caused by war wounds, rehabilitation and health care, pensions for low income veterans, education and housing benefits, and even burial benefits. They are also proposing to cut the education budget by 10.2 percent below the already reduced level proposed by President Bush.

We see the effects of budget cuts and neglect already. According to the Children`s Defense Fund, nearly one million black children live in dire and extreme poverty. In an alarming increase over 2000, the economic circumstances of black children further deteriorated so that more families were living on just over $7,000 a year-- that is half the national poverty line of $14,100 for a family of three.

I developed a factsheet for the War Resisters League that compares what the United States spends on war to the costs of educating and caring for children.


President Bush has asked Congress for $75 billion to pay the initial costs of the war in Iraq. For that same amount, we could hire 1,155,715 Elementary School Teachers to educate America`s children.

Five days of war in Iraq = Eliminate illiteracy world wide ($1.1 billion) ($5 billion, World Game Institute)

2.8 hours of war in Iraq = Nutrition supplements for 200,000 families ($45.8 million per hour) ($130 million, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

1 minute of war in Iraq = Headstart Education for 115 children ($763,000 a minute) ($6,633 per child, National Priorities Project)

1 second of war in Iraq = Twice what U.S. spends per year, per child ($12,730 per second) in primary education ($6,043, Digest of Ed. Stats)
We have a lot of work to undo the damage, repair the hurt and rectify the imbalances of the "bombs over bread" policies of the Bush administration. Until we do that it will be hard for me to take Jay Garner`s pep talk seriously.

Frida Berrigan is a Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute`s Arms Trade Resource Center. She can be reached at [e-mail]

[Joerver]

Bush`s Military Defeat: The SuperPower of Peace is our only hope
May 2, 2003
Harvey Wasserman, Columbus Free Press


George W. Bush has fittingly stopped short of declaring victory in Iraq. He doesn`t want to claim a definitive triumph because it would legally obligate the US to begin cleaning the place up and enforcing human rights obligations.

But in fact, the US attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan have been shattering defeats.

Let`s count the ways:


At least three times US troops have fired live ammunition against angry crowds of "liberated" Iraqis. Far from "dancing in the streets" over the American presence, the people of Iraq have made it clear they want the US out just days after the removal of Saddam Hussein, who most Iraqis understand was put in power by the US in the first place.


US troops have now killed at least twenty Iraqis in demonstrations that appear to be nonviolent. Military claims of self-defense are reminiscent of lies that Kent State students fired weapons during the 1970 massacre there. Those four deaths put the US in an uproar; in Iraq, 1/20 the size of the US, the equivalent of 20 dead would be 400.


By independent count at least 3,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by the US in the removal of Saddam Hussein. That would equate to 60,000 Americans if the attack had been by Iraq on the US.


Like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein is widely believed to be alive, but has yet to be found.


The weapons of mass destruction used as a pretext for the American attack have also yet to be found. None were used in Iraq`s defense.


The pillaging of Iraq`s most treasured museums, for which the US is directly responsible, has been widely ranked as one of the most barbaric and indefensible acts of cultural desecration in world history.


US corporate media coverage of the Bush attack was so absurdly one-sided and nationalistic it drew unprecedented contempt from critics worldwide.


The "victory" which has so enamored the US corporate media was an assault by a rich nation of 280 million people which spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined, against an impoverished, disunited nation 20 times smaller which has been ruled by a hated dictator installed by the US, subjected to international sanctions for 12 years, continually bombed through that time, and which was recently disarmed by United Nations weapons inspectors. Far from a military triumph, its martial conduct drew mocking derision from the global media outside the US.


The first female US soldier killed in Iraq was a divorced Hopi-Navajo mother of two small children who joined the military to escape poverty. Her death, and the grim future facing her children, received virtually no media attention, while the dubious "rescue" of her white friend, Jessica Lynch, received ecstatic---and wildly distorted---saturation hype.


Defense Secretary Rumsfeld openly and willfully violated explicit US law by failing to establish a baseline health study of American troops entering combat, reinforcing the failure to deal with Gulf War Syndrome from the previous attack on Iraq.


Though less than a thousand US troops were killed or wounded in the 1991 Gulf War, 220,000 or more are now disabled. Similar casualties are almost certain to surface in the wake of the latest attack, though Rumsfeld`s illegal refusal to lay the statistical groundwork for a health study will again make these casualties hard to trace.


It is widely believed Bush launched a lethal attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad with the express intent of killing and intimidating foreign journalists.


While profoundly disinterested in protecting the region`s cultural history, or its civil institutions, the US military took great pains to guard Saddam`s ministries of interior and oil, where crucial information on Iraq`s petroleum reserves are stored.


US military encampments during the attack were named after major oil companies.


No major nations of the world except Great Britain joined the attack on Iraq, and none have come forward since to endorse it, despite Bush`s alleged "victory".


Though leading Bush hawks have raised the possibility of attacking Syria, Iran or North Korea, all other major nations of the world---including Great Britain---have denounced the possibility.


Bush has scorned his previous promise to Great Britain`s Tony Blair, his one major ally, that the rebuilding of Iraq would be largely done through the United Nations.


Afghanistan, has sunk into tribal warfare, complete with the rebirth of the "defeated" Taliban. American soldiers are still fighting and dying there.


Despite Bush`s effusive pre-war promises, there is virtually no money in the latest US budget for rebuilding Aghanistan, or even for repairing the damage done by the US attack.


Drug production, particular opium poppies, is back in full swing in Afghanistan after having been successfully repressed by the Taliban.


Bush`s violent assault and undiplomatic arrogance have infuriated much of the Muslim world and made it highly likely fundamentalist Iran-style regimes will eventually sweep over both Afghanistan and Iraq.


That likelihood has been enhanced by anti-Islam statements from close Bush cronies, including Rev. Franklin Graham, who`ve confirmed Bush`s initial proclamation of a "crusade".


While crowing over "democracy" to Iraq, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says he will not "allow" fundamentalists to take power in Iraq, but has not explained how he would stop it within a democratic framework.


By infuriating the Muslim world and isolating the US, Bush`s conquests of Iraq and Afghanistan will likely guarantee a horrific increase in terrorist attacks against the US in years to come. Polls show a large portion of the American population fears precisely this outcome.

In short, the Bush "triumph" has the taste and smell of a profound defeat. The Iraqi people have made it clear they want the US out, and that the demonstrations can only escalate. Afghanistan is in ruin and chaos.

World opinion, so profoundly sympathetic to the US after the horrors of September 11, has swung wildly against us. To the vast bulk of humanity---especially 1.2 billion Muslims---the US is an out-of-control bully that invaded Iraq without legitimate provocation, primarily to grab its oil.

Only the grotesquely unbalanced and intolerant US corporate media has supported this attack with any consistency. Worldwide, its credibility has sunk below zero.

The United States may currently be the only military superpower. But it`s a hollow shell, with its domestic economy in profound crisis and the dollar in fast decline.

The cynicism, arrogance and brutality with which Bush has carried out these attacks has provoked a profound, deep-rooted worldwide hostility.

Far from victory, the US has never been more weakened, isolated or insecure. In the long run, only one superpower---the one for peace---holds any hope for any of us.

http://www.freepress.org/columns.php?strFunc=display&strID=5…

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[Joerver]

Aftermath: Cleaning Up the Mess
By Conn Hallinan | April 29, 2003

www.fpif.org



When the Bush administration totals up the cost of the Iraq War it had best be prepared to tack on billions more to clean up the toxic residue of how this country wages war, specifically its widespread use of cluster weapons and Depleted Uranium (DU). While the shooting has wound down, the consequences of using these controversial weapons will be around for a long time to come, with clusters taking a steady toll on the unwary and the young, and DU poisoning the air and water.

Cluster munitions--bombs, shells, and rockets that release highly explosive canisters that shred everything from people to tanks--have been an environmental nightmare since the war in Southeast Asia. Of the 90 million cluster munitions dropped on tiny Laos from 1964 to 1973, 30% failed to explode. The result is a national minefield that has killed and maimed more than 12,000 people and which continues to exact an annual toll of 100 to 200. In one 20 square kilometer area, the British Mines Advisory Group, the world`s leading bomb clearing organization, recently found 376,000 unexploded weapons, the vast majority of them cluster munitions. More than 50 million clusters were used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the two years following the war, they killed 1,400 Kuwaiti civilians and, as late as last year, 200 cluster weapons were found there each month.

According to Colin King, the author of Jane`s Explosive Ordinance Disposal Guide and a disposal expert in Gulf War I, clusters caused "massive problems" in Kosovo, the Gulf, and Afghanistan, and they are "going to cause massive problems in the Gulf again." The most notorious cluster is the Vietnam era "Rockeye," the CBU-99, armed with MK-118 bomblets, which have a failure rate as high as 30%. A U.S. company hired to clear cluster weapons from Kuwait found 95,700 unexploded MK-118 submunitions in one small area. More recent cluster weapons, like the CBU-103, 104, 105, and AGM-154 A and B, have better track records, but even these can fail anywhere from 5 - 23% of the time. Children are particularly in danger because some of the canisters are yellow, like the American emergency food packs.



The Ubiquity and Illegality of Depleted Uranium
Depleted Uranium is ubiquitous on any recent American battlefield. The U.S. used 320 tons of it during the first Gulf War, and 10 tons of it in Kosovo. Its resistance to enemy projectiles and its ability to turn hardened armor into margarine gives the U.S. an enormous advantage over any opponent who lacks it. It is, however, illegal. In August of last year, a United Nations subcommittee found that the use of DU violated seven international agreements, including the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. Used in 120 mm tank shells and 30 mm cannon ammunition, DU has an ignition threshold of 1132°C, one-third that of tungsten. It can punch through four inches of steel, roasting the inside of tanks and armored vehicles with a 10,000°C fireball.

Anywhere from 30% to 70% of DU turns into tiny dust particles, which may travel as far as 40 kilometers. DU is not very radioactive--about the same as naturally occurring uranium--but if ingested, according to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute, it "has the potential to generate significant medical consequences." DU has long been a suspect in Gulf War Syndrome, the melange of physical woes afflicting up to 30% of the veterans from the 1991 conflict. The Department of Defense doesn`t consider low-level radiation a threat, but a recent study by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute may force a reevaluation of that conclusion. "People have always assumed low doses are not much of a problem," Alexandra Miller of the Institute told The Guardian (British), "but they can cause more damage than people think." The study indicates that DU damages bone marrow chromosomes.

The effects of low-level radiation are hard to track, because many "solid" cancers don`t show up for 16 to 24 years. However, Iraqi medical authorities claim the cancer rate in the Basra area has jumped ten-fold. The area was saturated with DU during the 1991 war. Besides being radioactive, DU is also a toxic metal that can damage kidneys and livers. Another worry are DU "misses," where the enormous weight and speed of DUs drive them as deep as 24 inches into the ground. "A major concern of the potential environmental effects by intact [DU] penetrators or large penetrator fragments," notes the World Health Organization, "is the potential contamination of ground water after weathering." Cluster bomb and DU cleanup is likely to be enormously expensive, and who pays for it will be a major question.



Who Will Pay for the Clean Up?
The Bush administration is depending on Iraqi oil sales to foot most of the bill. But the figures don`t add up. At most, Iraqi oil could bring in $18 billion a year, barely enough to feed the 60% of the population dependent on food handouts. Nor does this even address rebuilding the country`s infrastructure, ravaged by 12 years of sanctions and the recent war, a price tag that, according to PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm, will probably run in excess of $300 billion.

Iraq also has a debt burden that may be as high as $383 billion, and no one seems to be stepping forward to write it off. Indeed, the Financial Times called Deputy of Defense Paul Wolfowitz`s call for debt cancellation, "mischievous." As Russian Vice Premier and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin pointed out, no one forgave his country`s enormous debts.

Unlike in Gulf War I, where the allies picked up most the tab, the Bush administration`s "Coalition of the Willing" is flat broke, and the White House has only allotted $2.4 billion to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. On top of that, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have been hesitant to step in without United Nations authority.

In part, the IMF is nervous about getting into the business of cleaning up after the American military. "I don`t see that for the long-term future you can keep together a world of peace and prosperity just based on military might," IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler told the Financial Times.

In the end it will likely be Iraqi civilians and U.S. occupation troops who will pay the price for the way we choose to wage war.

(Conn Hallinan <[e-mail]> is the provost at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a political analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org

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On MSNBC, correspondent George Lewis On MSNBC, correspondent George Lewis noted that Bush, with his tailhook landing on the aircraft carrier, was "becoming one of" the troops on board. He didn`t add, only 25 years late. That is, neither Lewis nor any of the other television journalists covering this gee-whiz event (whom I saw) mentioned Bush`s rather spotty (to be kind about it) record in the National Guard.

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I`ve been waiting for something to happen

For a week or a month or a year

With the blood in the ink of the headlines

And the sound of the crowd in my ear

You might ask what it takes to remember

When you know that you`ve seen it before

Where a government lies to a people

And a country is drifting to war


And there`s a shadow on the faces

Of the men who send the guns

To the wars that are fought in places

Where their business interest runs


On the radio talk shows and the T.V.

You hear one thing again and again

How the U.S.A. stands for freedom

And we come to the aid of a friend

But who are the ones that we call our friends -

These governments killing their own?

Or the people who finally can`t take anymore

And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone

There are lives in the balance

There are people under fire

There are children at the cannons

And there is blood on the wire


There`s a shadow on the faces

Of the men who fan the flames

Of the wars that are fought in places

Where we can`t even say the names


They sell us the President the same way

They sell us our clothes and our cars

They sell us everything from youth to religion

The same time they sell us our wars

I want to know who the men in the shadows are

I want to hear somebody asking them why

They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are

But they`re never the ones to fight or to die

And there are lives in the balance

There are people under fire

There are children at the cannons

And there is blood on the wire

- Jackson Browne

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Theatrics of War
The president’s speech on the aircraft carrier was great TV. But the problems in Iraq, like Afghanistan, are just beginning


May 2 — Speaking to the nation from the deck of an aircraft carrier heading home is a metaphor designed to leave the impression that the war is over and American troops are leaving Iraq. But the fighting continues, and the troops aren’t coming home. The Pentagon dispatched fresh reinforcements this week.

BY STOPPING SHORT of declaring victory, Bush prepared the country for continuing casualties. Here’s a prediction: more Americans will die in Iraq after the statue of Saddam came crashing down than died during the three-week takeover of the country. For that reason we’ll be pulling up stakes in Iraq much sooner than we should to make the war a success. Bush knows that the minute he says the war is over, pressure will escalate for rebuilding the ravaged nation. By leaving the war open-ended, Bush insulates himself at home and keeps the international community at bay.
Give Bush this much: celebrating aboard an aircraft carrier before a crowd of polished and pressed sailors giddy at the prospect of returning home is clever public relations. Most Americans will remember the president’s dramatic televised address as marking the end of the war in Iraq even though the hard work of nation-rebuilding is just beginning.
The White House spared no theatrics. Bush originally wanted to go in on a two-seater jet. The Secret Service rejected the idea because there’s only room for the pilot and Bush, and the agents would not leave the president unguarded. Bush settled for a four-seater, which still had plenty of dramatic effect as its tail hook caught the steel cable on deck and screeched to a halt.
Bush has already gotten most of the glowing media coverage he’s going to get out of Iraq. The prevailing sentiment in Washington is that we’re headed for the Iraqi equivalent of the liberation of Afghanistan: a few weeks of good news followed by a long, slow, steady deterioration. Bush is counting on the fact that people won’t know or care about what’s happening just as they are ignorant of the conditions in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in Kabul this week taking a victory lap. When a reporter asked about the “deteriorating security situation,” Rumsfeld demurred, referring to the “ebb and flow” of the sporadic violence as though it were a natural occurrence.
For those who need a refresher course on Afghanistan, it is once again the world’s leading exporter of poppy, which is refined into heroin. Despite the $1 billion a month the United States is spending to preserve a semblance of order in Afghanistan, outside the capital, Kabul, the country is back in the hands of warlords and a resurgent Taliban. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is belittled as the “mayor of Kabul” because he can’t go anywhere else without fear of assassination. Appearing with Rumsfeld at a news conference, Karzai said, “Can we provide the whole country with a strong administration? No.” Asked why, he cited the “severe lack of human resources,” to provide security.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich got attention last week for his broadside against Colin Powell and the State Department. Gingrich, a discredited extremist who is a Pentagon adviser, assailed the Agency for International Development (AID) for not building roads in Afghanistan. AID is forbidden to operate without military protection. The AID administrator in Kabul recently complained to a Senate staffer on a fact-finding tour, “I can’t even leave my office without a three-car team of Green Berets.” Where does the blame lie, with the guidelines governing the security of Americans abroad or with the Bush administration’s hasty retreat from Afghanistan?

Everybody from the president down promised we would not repeat past mistakes, yet that’s what the Bush administration is doing. In Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy Franks bombed the caves in the mountainous region of Tora Bora that borders Pakistan, but didn’t send U.S. ground troops to clean out Al Qaeda fighters. The strategy spared American casualties but allowed Al Qaeda to escape like roaches under a bright light. The country has returned to chaos much as in the early 1990s after the Soviets pulled out and the mujahedin, the Islamic fighters, took charge.
In Iraq, the shock and awe of a three-week war may have dispersed the weapons of mass destruction much as the bombing of Afghanistan scattered Al Qaeda. So far, search teams have come up with nothing. Based on intelligence briefings, a Senate staffer says he still thinks evidence of chemical and biological weapons will be found, though he is not 100 percent certain.
Disarming Saddam was the stated reason for invading Iraq. Bush invoked the specter of another 9-11, this time with a mushroom cloud, suggesting Saddam could pass nuclear material to the terrorists of his choice. A CIA report concluded there was little danger that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction against the United States unless provoked and left with no other option. “From a danger standpoint, the weapons of mass destruction may already have been sold to the highest bidder,” says the Senate aide.
Democrats are hoping the voters will wake up to the reality that the country is billions of dollars poorer but may not be any safer after the display of military might in Iraq. Americans like the idea of a strong, decisive leader, but dropping bombs and overcoming a fifth-rate military doesn’t make you a leader. Bush has sacrificed the good will of much of the world, and America’s troubles may be just beginning.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/908531.asp?0sl=-23

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May 3 — Although most Americans—65 percent—give George W. Bush high marks on his handling of the presidency, Bush’s ratings have fallen 6 percent from mid April, when American troops entered Baghdad, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll.
NOW THAT THE WAR has officially ended, American confidence in the Bush administration’s ability to maintain peace and create a workable democratic government in Iraq seems to be wavering slightly. Three weeks ago, 74 percent of Americans—an all-time high—said they approved of the way Bush was handling Iraq; that number has since fallen by 5 points. While most Americans—63 percent—are very confident or somewhat confident that the United States will be able to establish democracy in Iraq, 33 percent are not as sure it can be done.

And people also seem more anxious for troops to leave Iraq than in weeks past. Twelve percent think the U.S. military should remain in Iraq only for another week or two—up 6 percent from mid-April, when Saddam Hussein’s regime was first toppled. Those who think troops should remain for between one and two years is down 7 points, to 26 percent. And there is increasing uncertainty: the number of Americans who say they don’t know how long a military presence should remain is up 4 points since mid-April, to 12 percent.
The NEWSWEEK poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, which interviewed by telephone 1,007 adults, aged 18 and older on May 1 and 2, 2003. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

As the focus on Iraq ebbs, the U.S. economy is again weighing heavily on American minds. Sixty-two percent say the economy and jobs will be the determining factor in who they vote for in the 2004 presidential election, although half of those polled did not think a Democratic president would handle the economy any better than Bush.
But that doesn’t mean they are happy with the current economic climate: Fewer than half of those polled—45 percent—think Bush is doing a good job with the economy, down 8 percent from the end of March. Still, Americans remain slightly more optimistic about where the economy is headed than they were about a year ago: 46 percent believe the economic climate will improve during the next year, up 1 point from July 2002, while only 11 percent think it will get worse, down from 15 percent last July.
Americans perceive their personal financial situation as slightly worse than in March 2001, with the number of people who say their financial situation is good down 4 points, to 38 percent, and those who say their financial situation is poor up by 2 points, to 16 percent.
In domestic policy matters, Bush received his lowest grades in health care—with only 39 percent approval. Although the highest approval ratings—74 percent—were for Bush’s policies toward terrorism at home, that number has declined n 4 percent from three weeks ago, when Americans were feeling especially confident about the outcome in Iraq.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/908850.asp

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Pfeifen im Wald. Friedman wurde gestern in einem Kommentar als `Pet Hamster` bezeichnet, natürlich als Bush`s Hamster.

May 4, 2003
Our New Baby
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


President Bush may have declared the war in Iraq effectively over. But, judging from my own e-mail box — where conservative readers are bombing me for not applauding enough the liberation of Iraq, and liberals for selling out to George Bush — the war over the war still burns on here.

Conservatives now want to use the victory in Iraq to defeat all liberal ideas at home, and to make this war a model for America`s relations with the world, while liberals — fearing all that — are still quietly rooting for Mr. Bush to fail.

Friends, whether you like or hate how and why we got into this war, the fact is America — you and I — has assumed responsibility for rebuilding Iraq. We are talking about one of the biggest nation-building projects the U.S. has ever undertaken, the mother of all long hauls. We now have a 51st state of 23 million people. We just adopted a baby called Baghdad — and this is no time for the parents to get a divorce. Because raising that baby, in the neighborhood it lives in, is going to be a mammoth task. If both Republicans and Democrats don`t start looking clearly and honestly at what is evolving in Iraq, we`re all going to be in trouble.

How so? The pulling down of Saddam`s statue was not the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sorry. That statue was pulled down by U.S. troops and a few Iraqi youths. What Iraqis were doing in much larger numbers that day was looting — not because they are criminal in nature, but because the war had left a power vacuum and people were so poor, desperate, hungry and full of rage toward the old regime that they just wanted to grab anything.

We have not fully liberated Iraq yet — we have created the conditions for its liberation. That is still hugely significant. But the feelings of Iraqis right now are a jumble of liberation, hope and gratitude, mixed with anxiety, humiliation, fear of lawlessness, fear of one another, grief for sons killed in the war and suspicion of America. Conservatives, though, are so intent on proving George Bush right and liberals wrong — so the Bush team can drive its radical right agenda at home — they have rushed to impose a single liberation story line on this much more complex reality. Eastern Europe was liberated when the wall came down, because the civil society and democratic roots were already there to fill the void. In Iraq, that order and self-governing civil society will have to be created from scratch. I believe that with enough effort, it can be done, and if it is done, Iraq will be liberated. If it isn`t done, Iraq will be a mess.

One senses, though, that liberals so detest Mr. Bush that they refuse to acknowledge the simple good that has come from ending Saddam`s tyranny — good for Iraqis and good for America, because it will inhibit other terrorist-supporting regimes. Have no doubt about that. If Democrats` whole analysis of this war is determined by whether or not it helps Mr. Bush, then they are never going to play the role they must play — constructive critics of how we rebuild Iraq.

This is such an important moment in U.S. foreign policy. How people view American power is at stake in the outcome in Iraq, and Democrats can`t be missing in action. They have to help shape this moment, and not leave it to the Bush Pentagon. But it won`t happen if Democrats are sulking in a corner, just trying to point to everything that is going wrong in Iraq, and not offering their ideas for making it better.

Why should Democrats trust the Bush people to win the peace in Iraq the way they won the war? It is clear the Bush team had no coherent postwar plan in place. This administration, with its deep mistrust for diplomacy and diplomats, may be way too ideological and Pentagon-centric for nation-building. We need alternative voices. What is the Democratic view on the proper role of the U.N. or NATO in rebuilding Iraq? How much emphasis do Democrats believe the U.S. should put into the Arab-Israeli peace process to support peace in Iraq? Is a principled and muscular internationalism now the private property of the Republican Party?

If conservatives exaggerate what has already been accomplished in Iraq, they`re going to misread how much more needs to be done and blow the opportunity to meaningfully liberate Iraq. If Democrats underestimate the importance of what has already been accomplished by Saddam`s removal, and its huge potential, they are going to miss the opportunity to shape — and help make happen — one of the most important turning points in U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Krieg ist gut fürs Geschäft

Florian Rötzer 04.05.2003
Der Konzern Halliburton, dessen Direktor Vizepräsident Cheney bis zu seinem jetzigen Amt war, verdiente gut am Afghanistan- und Irak-Krieg

Wer die Politik der US-Regierung kritisiert, der ist für die angeblichen Verfechter von Freiheit und Demokratie unten durch. Dass die Kriegs-Neinsager zumindest unter ihrer Haltung noch zu leiden haben könnten, solange die Bush-Regierung im Amt ist, hatte gerade wieder Robert Zoellick, der Handelsbeauftragte des Weißen Hauses, gesagt. Dafür kann es denjenigen gut gehen, die dem Weißen Haus möglichst nahe stehen. Das ist etwa der Fall beim Konzern Halliburton, der u.a. weltweit zweitgrößter Anbieter von Dienstleistungen für die Erdölförderung, aber auch sonst in vielen Bereichen tätig ist. Das ist aber auch der Konzern, bei dem Vizepräsident Dick Cheney vor seinem jetzigen Regierungsamt als Präsident tätig war und dabei schon einmal zum reichsten Regierungsmitglied geworden ist ( Bush-Cheney Inc..



Für das erste Quartal dieses Jahres meldete Halliburton noch bessere Geschäfte als bislang. Der Umsatz hat sich fast verdoppelt. Dazu hat nicht nur die gestiegene Erölförderung in Nordamerika beigetragen, sondern förderlich waren auch die vielen Geschäfte mit dem Pentagon - unter anderem auch im Irak.

Dabei ist der Vertrag zum Löschen von brennenden Erdölquellen nur ein kleiner Fisch. Nachdem dann doch einmal Kritik lauter geworden ist, als das Entwicklungsministerium USAID ohne Ausschreibung unter fünf Unternehmen auch Halliburton auswählte, um für Hunderte von Millionen von US-Dollar die Infrastruktur des eroberten Landes wieder aufzubauen ( Die Gewinner des Krieges), wurde der Auftrag sicherheitshalber nicht dem Cheney-Konzern gegeben. Das sah ganz so, als würde man versuchen wollen, jede Amigo-Verbindung zwischen Regierung und Wirtschaft im Rahmen des irakischen Wiederaufbaus zu trennen.
Das anscheinend verlorene Geschäft schmerzte den Konzern aber sicherlich nicht sehr stark, denn stillschweigend hatte er sich mit der Bekämpfung der brennenden Erölquellen auch unter Umgehung einer Ausschreibung die Inspektion und Reparatur aller Erölquellen im Irak gesichert. Nach einem Brief von Army Corps of Engineers an den demokratischen Abgeordneten Henry Waxman könnte aber auch schon dieser unscheinbare Vertrag sieben Milliarden Dollar wert sein ( Doch ein bisschen Öl für Blut?).

Halliburton verdiente aber bereits an den Kriegsvorbereitungen gutes Geld, da der Konzern 2001 für die Dauer von 10 Jahren zum logistischen Alleinversorger der amerikanischen Armee geworden ist. Das Erstaunliche an diesem Vertrag war, dass es keine Begrenzung nach oben für die dadurch entstehenden Ausgaben gibt: eine verlässliche Geldquelle also, die sprudelt, auch wenn man Mist macht oder viel mehr verlangt als Konkurrenten (was Halliburton bereits eine Untersuchung wegen der US-Stützpunkte in Bosnien einbrachte). Und sie sprudelt schon länger, denn auch im Afghanistan-Krieg verdiente bereits Halliburton-Ableger Kellog Brown & Root Engineering & Construction (KBR) an der Errichtung und der Versorgung neuer Stützpunkte in und um Afghanistan. Gut fürs Geschäft war auch das Gefangenenlager in Guantanamo, das KBR teilweise errichtete. Auch für den Bau von Camp Arifjan in Kuwait war man zuhanden.

Insgesamt hat KBR mit 35 Projekten in Afghanistan und dem Irak nach Informationen von MSNBC schon 518 Millionen Dollar umgesetzt. Allein im Rahmen von Operation Iraqi Freedom hatte die US-Armee an KBR 425 Millionen Dollar gezahlt oder Aufträge vergeben. Das macht den von Cheney und Co. schon lange geplanten Irak-Krieg aus der Perspektive von Halliburton natürlich wesentlich lukrativer als den Afghanistan-Krieg, der nur den Auftakt zum Krieg gegen den Terrorismus bildete, der auch mit dem Sieg über den Irak, wie US-Präsident Bush eben in seiner Rede in passender Kulisse auf einem Flugzeugträger der Welt bekannt gab, keineswegs zu Ende ist.

Die Armee rechtfertigt ihren Geldsegen für Halliburton dadurch, dass besonders in Kriegszeiten einfach keine Zeit vorhanden sei, jeden Auftrag über eine Ausschreibung zu vergeben. Man brauche eine verlässliche Firma, die sofort 24 Stunden an Tag die Kleidung der Soldaten wachen, ihre Malzeiten liefern, ihre Unterkünfte errichten oder andere Dienste erfüllen kann. Bei der langen Vorbereitungszeit für den Irak-Krieg hätte man vermutlich schon einige Angebote einholen können. Allgemein verdient Halliburton an jedem neuen "Footprint" der Armee in der Welt, also auch an jedem Krieg.

Natürlich hat Cheney offiziell mit den Geschäften seiner alten Firma nichts zu tun. "Der Vizepräsident ist nicht an der Vergabe irgendeines Vertrages durch Verteidigungsministerium oder eine andere Behörde der Regierung beteiligt gewesen und hat keine Gespräche in Bezug auf die in Frage stehenden Verträgen mit Angehörigen des Verteidigungsministeriums oder Angestellten von Halliburton geführt", erklärte das Büro von Cheney letzten Freitag. Halliburton selbst meinte, es sei eine Beleidigung des Vizepräsidenten, ihm zu unterstellen, er habe seine Finger mit ihm Spiel gehabt.

Das kann und wird wahrscheinlich auch stimmen. Die Beteiligung von Cheney an den Geschäften ist auch gar nicht notwendig. Schließlich war Cheney seinerzeit schon einmal Verteidigungsminister unter Bush sen. und damit Irak-Erfahrung, bevor er zu Halliburton ging und dort Direktor wurde. Schon dadurch blühte Halliburton durch Verträge mit dem Pentagon auf - und auch das Bankkonto von Cheney, dessen Vermögen auf etwa 100 Millionen Dollar geschätzt wird. Als Cheney schließlich 1995 Direktor von Halliburton wurde, verdiente KBR jährlich 350 Millionen Dollar, vier Jahre später bereits 650 Millionen Dollar über das Pentagon. 1999 konnte ein weiterer 5-Jahres-Vertrag in Höhe von 730 Millionen für Versorgungsleistungen in Bosnien und im Kosovo abgeschlossen werden.

Man kennt sich, Geschäfte werden informell gemacht, es schadet auch nichts, wenn zwischen dem Pentagon und Halliburton Verträge geschlossen werden, denn die Regierung wird mit ihrem Vizepräsidenten Cheney dem wohlwollend zusehen. Wenn Wahlen kommen, brauchen Politiker Geld, und es gibt eine Zeit nach der Politik, wo dann wieder neue lukrative Posten auf gute Politiker warten, die zudem Geschäftsverbindungen mit bringen. Die Bekanntschaft mit Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld geht übrigens schon weit zurück. Rumsfeld als Chef des Office of Economic Oppurtunity (OEO) Cheney schon im Jahr 1968 ein. Auch als Rumsfeld 1975 Pentagon-Chef wurde, holte er wieder den dann 32-jährigen Cheney, um seinen Platz im Weißen Haus als Personalchef unter Präsident Ford zu übernehmen.

MSNBC zitiert einige kritische Stimmen, wie beispielsweise Charles Lewis vom Center for Public Integrity, der den Fall kommentierte: "Wir haben wirklich eine sehr, sehr kleine Bruderbande, die fette Verträge erhalten, und Halliburton ist eine dieser Firmen."

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US-Militärs zu Massenvernichtungswaffen

"Wir haben nicht gelogen, aber ..."

In der Öffentlichkeit gibt sich US-Präsident Bush weiter zuversichtlich: Früher oder später werde man im Irak Massenvernichtungswaffen finden. Doch selbst führende US-Militärs räumen inzwischen ein, dass die USA aus ganz anderen Gründen in den Krieg zogen als öffentlich angegeben.

Crawford - Die Stimmung war famos, als George W. Bush den australischen Premier John Howard besuchte. Vielleicht lag das daran, dass Howard den US-Präsidenten auf einer Ranch empfing und der sich daher zu Hause fühlen könnte. "Du bist irgendwie wie ein Texaner", lobte der US-Präsident seinen Gastgeber.

Hinterher gab sich Bush in einer Pressekonferenz sicher: Früher oder später würden im Irak Massenvernichtungswaffen gefunden werden. "Irak hat die Größe von Kalifornien", wusste der Präsident. "Es gibt Tunnel, Höhlen, alle Arten von Komplexen. Wir werden sie finden, und das ist nur eine Frage der Zeit."

Der Ende April festgenommene, ehemaligen Vize-Premier des Irak, Tarik Asis, ist auf der Suche nach "Tunneln und Höhlen" offenbar keine große Hilfe. Bush warf ihm mangelnde Kooperation vor. Von Asis hatten sich die USA Informationen über das irakische Programm für biologische und chemische Waffen sowie den Verbleib von Präsident Saddam Hussein erhofft. Bush sagte: "Wir erfahren, dass Tarik Asis immer noch nicht weiß, wie man die Wahrheit sagt. Er wusste nicht, wie man die Wahrheit sagt, als er im Amt war, und er weiß es immer noch nicht als Gefangener."

Zuvor hatte Bush seine Entschlossenheit betont, Bedrohungen gegen die USA notfalls durch Präventivschläge abzuwenden. Der Krieg gegen den Terror gehe auch nach dem amerikanischen Erfolg im Irak weiter in seiner wöchentlichen Rundfunkansprache. Es gebe nach wie vor Terror- Komplotte, und die Weiterverbreitung von Massenvernichtungswaffen bleibe eine erste Gefahr. "Wir werden weiter unsere Feinde jagen und stellen, bevor sie zuschlagen können."

Trotz aller Beteuerungen, die Suche nach Massenvernichtungswaffen gehe weiter: Die Fahndung nach der "Smoking Gun" im Irak blieb bisher erfolglos. Obwohl die US-Regierung keinen Aufwand scheute, danach zu suchen. Hunderte Experten schickte das Pentagon an den Tigris, um einen Beleg für den offiziellen Kriegsgrund zu liefern. Vergangenes Wochenende erklärten die Behörden, dass die Zahl der US-Waffeninspekteure auf 1500 aufgestockt werden soll. Das wären fünf Mal so viele Kontrolleure wie Uno-Chefwaffeninspekteur Hans Blix zur Verfügung hatte.

Zwar äußern führende US-Militärs im Irak immer noch die Ansicht, sie würden früher oder später fündig. Saddam habe Jahre lang Zeit gehabt, die gefährlichen Waffen zu verstecken, doch die Wahrheit werde bald ans Licht kommen. Doch gleichzeitig mehren sich die Stimmen, die preisgeben, dass die Vernichtung von Massenvernichtungsmitteln und die Furcht davor nicht Hauptkriegsgrund der Bush-Regierung war. Es sei primär darum gegangen, Saddam zu beseitigen. Diese längst bekannte Lesart wird nun durch Regierungsbeamte in Washington stark gemacht.

Die Warnung vor Massenvernichtungsmitteln habe vornehmlich dafür gedient, das amerikanische Volk und die internationale Gemeinschaft dazu zu bringen, sich hinter die Kriegsabsichten Bushs zu stellen. In Wirklichkeit sei es dem Weißen Haus darum gegangen, einen Brückenkopf der Demokratie gegen den Terrorismus im Nahen Osten zu errichten. "Wir haben nicht gelogen", sagte ein Beamter gegenüber "ABC`s Nightline", "doch es war eine Frage der richtigen Betonung."

Auch der britische Premierminister Tony Blair scheint die Fokussierung auf die Vernichtung der angeblich vorhandenen Massenvernichtungsmittel aufzugeben. In einer Pressekonferenz vergangenen Montag erklärte er, das Aufspüren dieser Waffen sei von geringerer Priorität als den Irak zu stabilisieren. Eine Aussage, die Russlands Präsident Wladimir Putin zu spöttischen Äußerungen gegenüber Blair veranlasste. Er meinte ironisch, Saddam könnte sich in einem Bunker voller Massenvernichtungsmittel aufhalten und darauf warten, den ganzen Irak in die Luft zu jagen.

Die "Financial Times" zitiert einen führenden Beamten der Bush-Regierung, der nicht genannt werden wollte, mit den Worten: "Ich wäre überrascht, wenn wir waffenfähiges Plutonium oder Uranium finden würden." Er bezeichnete es außerdem als äußerst unwahrscheinlich, dass große Mengen an biologischen oder chemischen Stoffen gefunden würden. Der Beamte ging sogar so weit, zu sagen, dass es seiner Regierung nie darum gegangen sei, riesige Waffenarsenale im Irak zu finden. Die USA hätten viel mehr befürchtet, dass Saddams "Team der 1000 Wissenschaftler", so genannte "nukleare Mudschaheddin" in Zukunft eine Gefahr darstellen könnten.


© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

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Unease as Blair lays soul bare
Kamal Ahmed assesses the political fallout of Blair`s declaration of faith in `his Maker`

Kamal Ahmed
Sunday May 4, 2003
The Observer

He has been described as messianic, a man who believes himself driven by a higher calling. And yesterday it was revealed that Tony Blair really does put God at the heart of his politics when he admitted in an interview that he will be judged on the Iraq war not only by the electorate and the pages of history but by `my Maker`.

In a country where church and state are viewed as separate entities, his admission brought both praise and criticism. Matthew Parris, the political commentator and former Tory MP, said Blair was in danger of looking `somewhat unhinged`. Graham Dale, head of the Christian Socialist Movement of which Blair is a member, said that revealing his genuine beliefs was a positive move for the PM.

But the laying bare of Blair`s religious soul will cause consternation among his inner circle. Alastair Campbell, the PM`s communications director and one of his closest confidantes, is known to be uncomfortable when Blair speaks about his religious beliefs. Other key officials also believe it `plays badly` with the public.

Blair has always been cautious about speaking about his faith. He side-stepped questions from Sir David Frost last year and Jeremy Paxman earlier this year who both asked if he prayed with the American President when they met at war summits.

Katie Kay, who lived next door to Blair in Hackney in the 1980s and now works for him in Downing Street, revealed in The Observer last week that he regularly reads the Bible on holiday. He is also known to take an intense interest in other faiths, particularly Islam.

`There has always been an anxiousness,` Dale said when asked about Blair`s public declarations on religion, `particularly when you have had a lot of criticism of the fundamentalist tendencies of the Bush administration. The Prime Minister was anxious at the time of the war that this was not seen as a Christian crusade against Islam.`

Blair made his latest comments in an interview with the Times published yesterday. The death of anyone in war `really gets to you`, Blair told Sir Peter Stothard, the paper`s former editor who spent 30 days travelling with the Prime Minister during the Iraq war. Blair said he was ready to `meet my Maker` and answer for `those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions`.

The Prime Minister said that those who believed in `the same God` would understand that there was a final judgment for all Christians.

Stothard said: `His faith, his deep sense that what he was doing was right and that he was prepared to justify it to anybody was what made him do it. I was completely convinced of the sincerity of it.`

Blair`s religious beliefs have regularly put him in the firing line. He was criticised at the launch of Labour`s election campaign in 2001 when he was pictured at a school before a stained glass window with a hymn book. Party officials insisted the launch was to promote education. Others were not convinced. `The appearance of the Prime Minister standing shirt-sleeved with a hymn book in front of a cross and a stained-glass window made him look more like an American television evangelist than an educator,` Alexander Chancellor wrote in the Guardian.

He was also attacked when it was revealed he was taking Catholic communion despite being a member of the Church of England. Blair`s wife, Cherie, is a committed Catholic and was instrumental in arranging the couple`s private audience with the Pope shortly before the war.

Parris said in an interview with Radio 4`s Today programme yesterday: `He has an unhinged belief, firstly in the purity of his own intention, secondly in the fact that his own good intentions can only lead to good results, and thirdly that he`s going to win people over, that he`s going to persuade people.

`Prime Ministers ought to take a cool view on the balance of calculations. There is this slightly unhinged optimism that comes from a belief in his own intentions.

`Gladstone used to do this kind of thing. He called it rescue work. He went out into the streets of London and picked up loose women and brought them back and read them the New Testament and then whipped himself afterwards.

`In one of Blair`s long time past speeches at a conference, and I think with unconscious mimicry, he actually said that Labour activists who supported him should expect to be reviled in public and he went on in the language of "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and speak all manner of evil against you".

`I think there is a belief that just by demonstrating his own goodness, just by demonstrating the purity of his intentions he will win or, even if he doesn`t, he will have won in the eyes of his Maker.`

David Runciman, political scientist at Cambridge University, said it was always difficult when Prime Ministers were pushed to wear their religious beliefs on their sleeves.

`The obvious contrast between Tony Blair and William Gladstone, the Prime Minister to whom he is often compared, is that Blair does like to torture himself in public - Gladstone did this in private,` Runciman said.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Seize `historic` euro opportunity, economists urge
Kamal Ahmed and Faisal Islam
Sunday May 4, 2003
The Observer

Eleven of the world`s top economists will announce this week that Britain should seize the `historic opportunity` to join the single currency or face years in the economic wilderness, affecting billions of pounds of investment into the country and the wages of millions of people.

The findings of the first major report on the economic costs of staying outside the single currency will be seized on by euro-enthusiasts in Number 10 as further evidence that it would be folly to rule out a single currency for the lifetime of the Parliament.

Its contents were being circulated to Ministers this weekend ahead of an expected Cabinet debate on the issue before the end of the month. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, are engaged in tense discussions over the exact wording of the announcement of the five economic tests, the cornerstone of government policy on the euro, expected in the next three weeks.

Although the Government will say that the tests for joining the single currency have not yet been met, Blair is pushing the Treasury to ensure that the assessment of when Britain might join is not put off until the indefinite future.

The pro-euro camp will be further strengthened this week when Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, will say that, alongside the economic costs, there will also be a political cost of staying out. Cook, in his first comments on the single currency since he quit the Cabinet earlier this year, will say that Britain will be in danger of losing influence over the future direction of Europe if it does not give a firm indication of its desire to join the euro.

The Begg Commission of leading economic experts was put together by Britain in Europe, the organisation campaigning for Britain to join the single currency.

But BiE officials insist the report is independent. Many of the economists on the commission are not euro-enthusiasts. `It may look tempting to reject the euro on the grounds that, by keeping the pound, the UK can simply continue as it is today,` the report will say. `But things will not stand still if the UK rejects the euro. In the long run, eurozone members will trade more with one another. They will have beneficial effects on which the UK will miss out.

`UK profitability and/or wages will suffer.` If Britain does not join, `investment is likely to relocate towards the eurozone`, the report continues. `Some financial markets and institutions will follow.`

The commission says that Britain has a unique window of opportunity to join now and delay will not guarantee that joining `will be easier` in the future.

The commission does criticise some elements of the eurozone economies, pointing to problems with the European Central Bank and continental rules on tax and spending, the so-called Stability and Growth Pact.

Business leaders are becoming increasingly agitated that entry to the euro may be indefinitely delayed until after the next general election, and even for as long as a decade. Many, particularly foreign investors, have been informally assured by Blair that there would be a referendum before the end of the Parliament.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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`If fish can feel pain, then maybe Iraqi children can, too`
Terry Jones
Sunday May 4, 2003
The Observer

The recent report by the Royal Society suggesting that fish can feel pain will come as a severe blow to all those anglers who have hitherto operated on the principle that fish are incapable of feeling anything. It comes as an even bigger shock to those of us who have for so long applied the same principle to human beings.

If fish can feel pain, does this mean that a 13-year-old child, picked up in Afghanistan, hooded, flown several thousand miles to Cuba and kept in a chicken coop, may also experience physical sensations bordering on the uncomfortable?

Like Tony Blair, I thought the Guantanamo Bay camp was `an unsatisfactory situation`, but it never occurred to me that the human beings in there would be capable of feeling discomfort.

In much the same way, I suppose, George Bush must have assumed that all those prisoners on death row, whose death sentences he signed as Governor, would never undergo distress at the prospect of imminent death. Like him I always firmly believed that human beings were incapable of feeling any unpleasantness.

Otherwise, I used to point out, why would civilised people like Donald Rumsfeld even contemplate dropping cluster bombs all over the Middle East where kids will pick them up or tread on them and get blown to pieces or have their legs ripped off? If fish can feel, there must be a strong possibility that small Iraqi children will be unhappy at losing bits of their bodies.

If fish can feel, perhaps we should rethink some of our other policies. I mean maybe it`s not such a good idea to dump mentally ill people on the streets in the hope that some passers-by will give them `community care`? Just suppose that - like fish - the mentally ill can feel miserable?

At least there is no suggestion that fish suffer from the cold and wet, so there`s no problem in leaving the mentally ill out on the streets through the winter, but that`s not the point. The point is that we ought to re-examine some of our long-held and most cherished assumptions.

Like, for example, the idea that being out of work is just something that happens to some schmucks but has no bearing on their quotient of personal contentment. If fish can feel, maybe George Bush should be more worried about the US unemployment rate reaching 6 per cent than about how fabulous it is that his military can drop so many bombs and fire off so many missiles in such a short time.

If fish can feel, perhaps Tony Blair should reconsider his support for a US administration that is publicly pledged to visiting war and destruction on any other country that dares to oppose them.

If fish can feel, perhaps we ought not to allow the men and women who currently run the White House to run the world in the way that they clearly intend.

If fish can feel pain, perhaps it`s time to govern human affairs on the principle that human beings feel pain too.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Heute 2 `Monty Python` Terry Jones

Why look in the crystal ball?
Terry Jones
Sunday May 4, 2003
The Observer

"I can see the future."

"How were you blessed with this mystic ability, O Prophetic One?"

"I received my gift through watching George W. Bush on NBC News."

"What does this gift tell you of the future, O Prophetic One?"

"I see US Weapons Inspectors touring Iraq and discovering chemical or biological Weapons of Mass Destruction in convincing quantities."

"How come the US Weapons Inspectors find them when the UN Inspectors failed?"

"I see a White House spokesman saying: the US Inspectors have been told where to look by captured "human Iraqis" - to use George W. Bush`s telling phrase. I see Donald Rumsfeld assuring us that anything the US does will be much more efficient than anything the UN does."

"What does `efficient` mean, O Prophetic One?"

"It means `helpful to the plans of Donald Rumsfeld`. What else could `efficient` mean, O Tiny-Brained Picker Of Other People`s Noses?"

"What else does the future hold?"

"I see Jack Straw with a dreadful smirk on his face. I see Anthony Blair with a dreadful smirk on his face. I see them both holding endless press conferences in which they repeat: "We told you so!" over and over again.

On the other hand, I see many people thinking that the US Weapons Inspectors did not learn anything from the captured "human Iraqis" and that the US Inspectors themselves have planted the Weapons Of Mass Destruction specifically so that Jack Straw and Anthony Blair can hold press conferences and say "We told you so.""

"But surely no one can really believe that where the UN Inspectors failed to find Weapons of Mass Destruction the US Inspectors really have found some?"

"I see Jack Straw and Anthony Blair repeating "We told you so" so often that it doesn`t matter. The finding of the Weapons of Mass Destruction becomes a `fact` that is endlessly repeated in the press until everyone forgets that the people who found the Weapons of Mass Destruction had a vested interest in finding them - in fact if they hadn`t found them they would be liable to prosecution as war criminals."

"But if Iraq had these weapons why didn`t they use them?"

"I see a White House spokesman telling journalists that Iraq didn`t use its WMD because it was too scared and that shows that it was right to bomb them. No! Wait there is another press conference! In this one the White House spokesman is saying that the US military strike was so fast and effective that the Iraqis simply didn`t get the chance to use their WMD."

"And do the people believe such rubbish, O Prognosticator Of Political Poppycock?"

"What people really believe doesn`t matter. It`s how you get them to conform that matters. That`s what worked for Saddam Hussein and there`s no reason why it shouldn`t work for George W. Bush."

"What does you gift of prophecy tell you about the UN`s role in the rebirth of Iraq, O Gifted Seer?"

"I see a "For Sale" sign hanging outside the UN building on the East River. I see another sign on the same building. It says: "Trump Casino Resort". I see an office somewhere in Boston, outside a sign reads: "Oxfam America - now incorporating the United Nations."

"But surely George W, Bush promised Anthony Blair that the UN would play a `central role` in the future Iraq."

"That was in Belfast, O Brain Of A Christmas Turkey Without The Stuffing. No promises made in Belfast mean anything."

"What else do you..."

"I see US spending on the military rising to 3.5 and 3.9% of the GNP. I see the US waging `multiple simultaneous large-scale wars`. I see US planes making pre-emptive strikes on any nation that might threaten American superiority. I see the US destroying any ballistic missiles and WMD that might `allow lesser states to deter US military action by threatening US allies and the American homeland itself.`"

"O Far Seeing One! You could tell all this simply from seeing George W. Bush interviewed on NBC News?"

"No, I was quoting from Rebuilding America`s Defenses the blueprint for the present US Government`s foreign policy. And, blessed as I am with the gift of foresight, it scares the shit out of me."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Gilles Kepel: Despair: the terrorist`s best recruiting officer
The `road map` for peace cannot succeed without respect for Palestinian claims, says Gilles Kepel
04 May 2003


While the governments of the United States, Europe and Russia, together with the UN, have put the Middle East "road map" for peace back on the table, watchers of Arab satellite television see quite a different picture. Day in day out, two juxtaposed stories unfold on al-Jazeera or Abu Dhabi television. On the one hand, there are images of suicide attacks in Palestine, followed by scenes of Israeli repression, and of the burial of "martyrs" watched by angry crowds of bearded youths and close shots of veiled female mourners. And on the other, images of Iraqi hostility towards American troops, scenes of armed retaliation and, again, burials where turbaned sheikhs chant defiant slogans against America, and followers praise Allah the Almighty, as well as close shots of spilled blood on the streets.

These distressing images are a far cry from the virtuous circle the Americans wanted to implement in the Middle East as a result of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (or OIF – preferred to "Operation Iraqi Liberation", which bore the somewhat embarrassing acronym OIL). The toppling of a brutal tyrant in Iraq was meant to engineer gradual prosperity and democracy in the whole region, and facilitate the re-floating of the sunken Israeli-Palestinian peace of the 1990s via the process known as the "road map". This would involve a restoration of Palestinian democracy mixed with Israeli territorial concessions, and would lead to mutual recognition of the two states, while appeasing political and religious tensions between the Mediterranean and the Gulf. Cheap oil would flow securely to consumer markets of the West and Asia, while petro-dollars, Arab workforce and Israeli know-how would combine to shape a new and strong economic region.

This dream of a reconciled Middle East is, up to a point, nothing new. President George Bush Snr had tried to make it come true in the aftermath of another war against Iraq won by US forces, Operation Desert Storm of 1991. Then, Saddam Hussein`s armies were pulled out of Kuwait following a strikingly victorious blitzkrieg, although no effort was made to get rid of the master of Baghdad. George Bush Snr had used the wide consensus of nations that backed America and took part in the military operations as a lever to put major pressure on Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Shamir. Both were coaxed into the peace process that would lead to the Madrid conference, and then to the Oslo agreements, by American muscle-flexing. Both were unable to resist: one ruined politically by his backing of Saddam, with a Palestinian society exhausted by the first intifada (which started in December 1987), the other unauthorised to retaliate to Iraqi scuds falling on Tel Aviv, and morally damaged by the severe blows inflicted upon Israel`s image by this very same intifada.

Today`s "road map" process also builds upon American victory in Iraq to achieve peace in the Holy Land – although the picture rather differs from 12 years ago. First, President Bush Jnr`s military success in Iraq was a lonely one, with little backing from a fragmented Western alliance, from Russia and European public opinion, and ambivalent hostility emanating from most US allies in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But the "road map" is deemed to be the outcome of a global consensus. Second, while his father was eager to put equal pressure on Palestinians and Israelis, "Dubya" seems reluctant, to say the least, to hurt any of Ariel Sharon`s vested interests and, instead, all the pressure has been exerted on Palestinians. Arafat, never to be forgiven by Washington or Tel Aviv for his political mistake of launching a second intifada in September 2000 that was soon taken over by Hamas and Islamic Jihad`s repugnant suicide attacks against civilian Israeli targets, has been forced out of the scene.

Though there is little doubt that a failed political leader is bound to disappear, Palestinians are left with no figure of standing, let alone charisma, as they begin a final negotiating process. They are not even made to believe they make their own decisions in this matter: they are being cornered, and obviously so. The belief in Washington and Tel Aviv is that the Palestinian prime minister designate, Abu Mazen, will be a more amenable negotiator. But one also needs domestic legitimacy to convince one`s own people that they have to make major concessions in a negotiating process, something that Mazen still lacks.

Instead, Washington, right after the fall of Baghdad, twisted Syria`s President Bashar Assad`s arm with a combination of threats and economic sanctions. This was because the Americans considered that the major obstacle to peace was the action of armed Islamist movements, such as Lebanese Hizbollah, Palestinian Hamas and Jihad. Without Syrian backing those groups would soon enough become inefficient and innocuous. Such a strong-arm approach is certainly bound to weaken the Palestinians` hand, and quite possibly lead to political concessions by Mazen, such as complete renunciation of violence. It is not without its own logic.

But, as the latest deadly attacks on Israeli territory – perpetrated by Britons converted to radical Islam – show, political despair is still a fertile ground for terrorism, and resilient terror is enough to ruin all efforts, unless there is a clear-cut rejection of violence by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. They won`t do it just because they are beaten on the head until they yield. Instead they need to be convinced not only that terror is a dead end, but also that they can reap political, social and economic benefits of peace. The past decade, however, is more of a liability than an asset. They also need to be persuaded that the peace brokers are honest, and that brutal Israeli re-occupation of Palestinian territory in the course of the second intifada, together with its targeted "elimination" of Palestinian activists and "collateral damage" calling for an endless vicious circle of bloody revenge, is condemned on an equal footing in Washington.

Can the present American administration deliver? President Bush will soon begin the re-election race, and he is torn between domestic, short-term tactics and international, long-term strategies. For what it is worth, common wisdom in Republican circles maintains that Bush Snr, in spite of the 1991 military triumph, lost re-election because he had alienated the pro-Israel American lobby by forcing too many concessions on Tel Aviv for the sake of the peace process. Though non-partisan political analysts rather tend to think that Clinton`s victory in 1992 stemmed from the incumbent`s poor economic record, it is fair to believe little will be implemented by the United States in the Middle East today if it jeopardises the Republicans` 2004 re-election prospects. Alienating the pro-Israel lobby, strongly "embedded" as it is in the neo-conservative Pentagon civilian elite, therefore seems totally unrealistic.

On the other hand, so much was invested, and so many lives of young American soldiers were exposed to danger that Dubya risks his political future if no significant breakthrough is achieved to bring the whole Middle East region back to normality. This involvdes the ccurbing of terrorism, comforting Israeli security, belittling Saudi Arabia, enhancing Iraqi democracy and ensuring a steady flow of cheap Middle East oil into America`s fuel tanks – an ambitious international agenda indeed. More suicide attacks in Tel Aviv`s streets, leading to a stalemate in the Holy Land, would be enough to ruin the whole building up of this grand strategy and precipitate an infamous electoral defeat in 2004. As such, the implementation of the "road map" is a crucial issue for the Israeli, Palestinian and, not least, American political leadership. But the sound and fury of weapons won`t suffice: nothing durable can be achieved without a negotiating process that takes into account legitimate Palestinian claims for a state. In the Middle East temporary losers may prove, in the long run, a major impediment to any form of lasting peace, unless they are treated with dignity.

Gilles Kepel is chair of Middle East Studies at the Institut d`Etudes Politiques in Paris, and the author of `Jihad` (London, IB Tauris, 2003, updated edition) and `Bad Moon Rising: A Chronicle of the Middle East Today` (London, Saqi, 2003)
4 May 2003 11:11

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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Sie ist wohl die Beste.

May 4, 2003
The Iceman Cometh
By MAUREEN DOWD


LONG BEACH, Calif. — The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds.

Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.

Compared to Karl Rove`s "revvin` up your engine" myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer`s movies look like "Lizzie McGuire."

This time Maverick didn`t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning. Mav swaggered across the deck to high-five his old gang: his wise flight instructor, Viper; his amiable sidekick, Goose; his chiseled rival, Iceman.

MAVERICK: I feel the need . . .

GOOSE: The need for speed!

ICEMAN: You`re really a cowboy.

MAVERICK: What`s your problem?

ICEMAN: Your ego`s writing checks your body can`t cash. You didn`t need to take all that water survival training in the White House swimming pool. The Abraham Lincoln was practically docked, only 30 miles off shore, after 10 months at sea. They had to steer it away from land for you. If you`d waited a few hours, you could`ve just walked aboard. You and Rove are making a gorgeous campaign video on the Pacific to cast you as the warrior president for 2004, but back on shore, things are ugly. The California economy`s bleeding, even worse than other states`. When you took office, the unemployment rate in San Jose was 1.7 percent; by February of this year, it had risen to 8.5 percent. Your motorcade didn`t bother to stop in the depressed high-tech corridor in Silicon Valley. Every time you cut taxes and raise deficits while you`re roaring ahead with a pre-emptive military policy, you`re unsafe. National unemployment goes up to 6 percent and you just hammer Congress to pass your tax cut. The only guys sure about their jobs these days are defense contractors connected to Republicans and the Carlyle Group, which owns half of the defense plant you visited here. You`re dangerous.

MAVERICK: That`s right, Iceman. I am dangerous.

ICEMAN: You can fly, Maverick. But you, Cheney and Rummy are strutting around on a victory tour when you haven`t found Osama or Saddam or WMD; you haven`t figured out how you`re going to stop tribal warfare and religious fanaticism and dangerous skirmishes with our soldiers; you don`t yet know how to put Afghanistan and Iraq back together so that a lot of people over there don`t hate us. And why can`t you stop saying that getting rid of Saddam removed "an ally" of Al Qaeda and was payback for 9/11? You know we just needed to jump somebody in that part of the world.

MAVERICK: That part of the world is what I call a target rich environment, sorta like a Democratic debate. Hey, Miss Iceman, why don`t you head to the Ladies Room? John Kerry and John Edwards are already there, fixin` their hair all pretty-like. Howard Dean`s with `em, trying on a dress, and Kucinich is hemming it for him.

VIPER: You`re arrogant, son. I like that in a pilot. You`re a hell of an instinctive flyer. You`re a lot like your old man. He was a natural, heroic son of a gun. I flew with him in his torpedo bomber in `44. Is that why you fly the way you do? Trying to prove something by doing the opposite? He tried to get deficits down. He did it right. And he knew you had to have wingmen among the allies. You can`t buzz the tower of the world every time you go up. You can`t just jettison the Top Gun global rules of engagement.

MAVERICK: Sure I can. Like greed, aggression is good. Aggression has marked the upward surge of mankind. Aggression breeds patriotism, and patriotism curbs dissent. Aggression has made Democrats cower, the press purr and the world quake. Aggression — you mark my words — will not only save humanity, but it will soon color all the states Republican red. Mission accomplished.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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An Unfinished Mission


Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page B06


THE VICTORY celebration held aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday was well-deserved, both for President Bush and for the servicemen who cheered him. Thanks to those who gathered on the carrier`s deck and their comrades in arms, Saddam Hussein`s homicidal hold on Iraq was broken in three weeks, with relatively small, if painful, losses of Iraqi and American lives. None of the disasters feared before the war has come to pass: neither burning oil fields nor bloody street-to-street battles; neither Arab revolutions nor armed interventions by Iraq`s neighbors. Mr. Bush acknowledged before the war that these risks were real, but argued that they were outweighed by the risks of not acting: So far, he has been proved right. Nor can there now be any doubt that most Iraqis welcomed the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of his apparatus of terror. When the horrors of the Baathist regime -- now being confirmed in terrible but necessary detail -- are set against even the destruction and deaths of the war, it`s impossible not to conclude that the United States and its allies have performed a great service for Iraq`s 23 million people.

Still, it`s also impossible to agree with the banner that was draped near Mr. Bush on the carrier deck, proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." Aides say the slogan was chosen in part to mark a presidential turn toward domestic affairs as his campaign for reelection approaches. But neither Mr. Bush nor the American public can afford to put Iraq on the back burner. There is much to be done; the greatest tests and risks still lie in the future. Perhaps Mr. Bush understands that reality; yet his reluctance to fully explain it to Americans or to work for the support he will need is troubling.

Remarkably, Mr. Bush described the Iraqi victory mainly as an episode in the war on terrorism, focusing on purported connections among Iraq, al Qaeda, and the attacks of 9/11 that have yet to be firmly established. He failed to mention Saddam Hussein and devoted only one sentence of 22 words to weapons of mass destruction -- which the United States presented to the United Nations and the world as the decisive reason for military action. Odds are that the dictator will eventually be found, and evidence that has surfaced so far strongly suggests that illegal weapons or weapons programs will be uncovered as well. But the Bush administration should not treat the matter as an afterthought: The weapons could still prove deadly to Americans if they are not secured, and American credibility will be seriously damaged if proof of chemical, biological or nuclear arms is not eventually produced and certified by U.N. inspectors or other independent experts.

Even more important will be the consolidation of a democratic government in Iraq. Mr. Bush has now promised this outcome so often and unambiguously that he has greatly raised the stakes of achieving it; in particular, the future of American relations with the Arab world is riding on it. Mr. Bush noted in passing on Thursday that the transition "will take time," but he has done little to prepare Americans for the large and sustained commitment of U.S. troops and resources that will be needed. He may even be kidding himself: Though history shows that it has taken many years and a coalition of nations to successfully guide other countries from dictatorship to representative government, Pentagon officials are racing to unilaterally put together an Iraqi transitional government within a month and speak glibly of completing the process within a year or two.

In reality, success in Iraq as well as in the war on terrorism will require considerable initiative on a front Mr. Bush hardly mentioned: alliances. The war on terrorism, as the president has frequently acknowledged, requires not just military operations but cooperation with many nations on intelligence, finance and police work. Yet the Iraq war has damaged U.S. ties with a number of states and weakened the United Nations. Before the war began, Mr. Bush said he would work to repair institutions and alliances when the fighting was over; instead, an administration intent on punishing antiwar Europeans and excluding the United Nations from Iraq`s postwar administration is widening the rifts. If the mission in Iraq is really to be accomplished, Mr. Bush will have to change course.


© 2003 The Washington Post Company



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Challenge and Opportunity In a Transition Economy

By Daniel Yergin
Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page B07

There is a reason, beyond the visual images, that the toppling statues of Saddam Hussein should remind one of what happened in 1989-91. As communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, countries such as Poland, Hungary and Russia became known as "transition economies," the transition being from communism to market economy. Iraq can be seen as the newest addition to this list.

Just like the transition economies of the 1990s, Iraq faces immense economic challenges. Some 35 years of Baathist rule have devastated the economy. The GDP has shrunk by 75 percent since 1979. Yes, the country has oil, lots of it. But an estimated $100 billion in reconstruction costs and more than $350 billion of debt and reparations far exceed what even a rehabilitated oil industry can generate in the next few years.

These circumstances provide plenty of reasons for a pessimistic view of what might be ahead -- an Iraq destabilized by political conflict, terrorism and violence, and by religious extremism and ethnic strife. This is the scenario in which, while the war was won in weeks, the peace is lost over the years -- leaving the economy in long-term disarray.

There is a relevant, alternative view, however, that deserves attention. It is not the traditional one from the Middle East but one seen through the framework of the story -- the story of the sweeping changes that transformed Asia from the poorest continent in the world four decades ago to the forefront of economic dynamism, that turned international trade and globalization into engines of economic growth and brought the former communist countries into the market economy.

After all, Baathist Iraq modeled its economy on Eastern European communism. It had the whole rigmarole -- central planning, price controls, extensive state ownership and grinding regulation of every nook and cranny of activity. In the 1960s, Iraq even collectivized its agriculture, with predictably disastrous results. As Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland`s post-communist reforms and one of the world`s leading experts on transition economies, recently observed, "Iraq`s present condition is no more difficult than that of the Central European countries 12 years ago."

As a transition economy, Iraq has several strengths, beginning with a well-educated, technologically adept population. Long before the Baath Party took over, Iraq had strong trading and entrepreneurial traditions, and those have survived. It can also benefit from the large number of Iraqis outside the country -- equivalent to almost 20 percent of the population. The obvious analogy is China, whose stunning economic growth has been partly driven by the "overseas Chinese" from Taiwan, Singapore and elsewhere who have gone back to mainland China with capital, technology and links to the world economy. The overseas Iraqis could do exactly the same, often working through their family ties. Their contribution will be amplified by neighbors from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries who, building on old trading links, are likely to be the early providers of capital and services. When the heavy hand of state control is pulled back, the incentives for corruption will be reduced and there will be much more room for innovation, flexibility and responsiveness. Driving it all will be an enormous need for investment and a huge, pent-up demand for goods and services. All of this could help Iraq come back sooner than expected.

Certainly immense challenges lie ahead. At this point, the country does not even have a national currency. As the Russians found in the 1990s, to move from a "bazaar" to a market economy requires the establishment of the rule of law, the sanctity of contracts and respect for property rights -- which does not happen overnight. A whole body of law needs to be created, and it is not at all clear how or when that will happen.

Yet one of the most important lessons of the transition economies is the restorative powers that can arise from that natural human tendency succinctly identified by Adam Smith more than two centuries ago, "the propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another." For this to work, of course, there must be relative security and political stability. But, as the latest of the transition economies, Iraq could succeed economically more readily than many might now imagine.

Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Research Associates, is executive producer of the PBS series "Commanding Heights: the Battle for the World Economy."


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Bush gg Bush Comedie, Video Player


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There is no media
Part One of a three-part expose` of right wing bias in the media.
http://fp.enter.net/~haney/mh050203.htm
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By: Mike Hersh - 05/02/03



Greg Dyke, the BBC`s director general and editor-in-chief decried what he calls the "unquestioning" US news media. According to the UK Guardian, Dyke expressed shock at the "committed political position" in favor of the Bush administration by American media conglomerates.

The Guardian quoted Dyke, "We are genuinely shocked when we discover that the largest radio group in the United States was using its airwaves to organise pro-war rallies," a reference to "the global media giant Clear Channel, which owns 1,225 radio stations in the US." Dyke also specifically chastised Fox News for its unflagging support of Bush and the right wing.

"Maybe it was always like this and the requirements of impartiality in the UK were always different to those in the USA, but that`s not how I remember it," this top British media executive says, "Personally, I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war." See: Dyke strikes out at US media, by Matt Wells, The Guardian, 25 April 2003: http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,94…

There should be no such shock because there is no real news media in the United States today. What masquerades as a free press is largely the propaganda arm of the right wing of the Republican Party. Few brave souls still present the news in a balanced way. Most of them are "opinion" writers like Paul Krugman. Few liberals get to speak out on television - where most Americans get their "news" - except on "roundtable shows" where right wingers shout down their comments.

This right wing tilt in the news is hardly news. It`s no accident either.

In the mid-70`s, Nixon`s dishonesty brought him down and the Vietnam War ended in failure. These events disgraced and even traumatized right wingers who insisted Nixon was innocent and claimed our national security depended on winning in Vietnam. They cursed the campus radicals and mainstream media who proved them wrong.

As usual, the right wingers refused to take responsibility for their heroes` recklessness and crimes. They blamed liberals instead. They organized and used their immense financial power and elite connections to remake America in their right wing image, claiming they were retaking America from perceived socialists in academia, the media and even business boardrooms.

Nixon`s former Treasury Secretary William Simon felt frustrated by progress in economics, science and learning. Inspired by a Joe McCarthyite certainty that liberals were arch-communists in league with Moscow and infuriated by news reports unfavorable to right wing business and political aims, Simon went on the attack. He called for a "crusade" against those he claimed were trying to destroy America.

In his book A Time For Truth, Simon called upon the wealthy and powerful to "mobilize" against what he called the "dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy which prevails in much of the media, in most of our large universities, among many of our politicians and, tragically, among not a few of our top business executives." He introduced his call to arms asking, "What, then, will this crusade or this mobilization involve?" and then listing a point-by-point order of battle as follows:

1. Funds generated by business (by which I mean profits, funds in business foundations and contributions from individual businessmen) must rush by multimillions to the aid of liberty, in the many places where it is beleaguered. Foundations imbued with the philosophy of freedom (rather than encharged with experimental dabbling in socialist utopian ideas or the funding of outright revolution) must take pains to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty and whose work will supplement and inspire and enhance the understanding and the work of others still to come. This philanthropy must not capitulate to soft-minded pleas for the support of "dissent."

Simon explained exactly what he meant by "liberty." Unencumbered elitism and unabashed hostility to "egalitarianism" -- equal rights, equal protection, and equal opportunity:

One does not work from "within" the egalitarian world to change it; one can only work from without-and this absurd financing of one`s philosophical enemies must not be tolerated in the new foundations. On the contrary, they must serve explicitly as intellectual refuges for the non-egalitarian scholars and writers in our society who today work largely alone in the face of overwhelming indifference or hostility. They must be given grants, grants and more grants in exchange for books, books and more books.

Simon`s prejudice against academic freedom matched his narrow view of acceptable thought. He wrote in the late 70`s:

2. Business must cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism and whose faculties will not hire scholars whose views are otherwise. Again, the essence of this is a recognition of the fact that in the universities of which I speak, capitalism is no longer the dominant orthodoxy. That has important implications. There was a time, 40 or 50 years ago, when capitalism was the dominant orthodoxy, not just in government and in the marketplace but in our universities as well.

Leaving aside the fact that Simon is clearly wrong accusing colleges and universities of intolerance. His definition of tolerance is faulty as it allows support for only those "orthodox" with the views Simon claims dominant socialists suppress. Simon`s version of history is at least as bizarre. He blames academics -- rather than bank closures, massive unemployment, and years of dark Depression -- for sparking widespread demands for a more robust, balanced and egalitarian economic system!

Simon blames "departments of economics, government, politics and history" which he declared "hostile to capitalism" for the loss of faith in the failed laissez-faire doctrine. Perhaps Simon thinks unorthodox academics rather than the massive failures of "orthodox" capitalism caused the Great Depression? Once more, note the right wing tendency to scapegoat their rivals rather than owning up to their own failures? Simon spells out his views and vision:

Indeed, it is through the very generosity and tolerance of capitalism that the enemies of capitalism have come to dominate our campuses today. However, now that they have achieved dominance, there is no longer any reason for capitalism to support them....

In sum, America`s major universities are today churning out young collectivists by legions, and it is irrational for businessmen to support them. Conversely, business money must flow generously to those colleges and universities which do offer their students an opportunity to become well educated not only in collectivist theory but in conservative and Libertarian principles as well.

If Simon and those who adhere to his "orthodox" views really believed in supporting diverse viewpoints, I would agree with him when he claimed, "This is no interference with the First Amendment rights of the intellectuals presently working in our universities. They remain free as the wind to express the views they choose." However Simon contradicts himself in the very next line when he explains his aim: "It merely ensures that the citadels of anti-capitalist thought will be deprived of the funds generated by a system they consider to be corrupt and unjust." Emphasis in original.

Simon exhorted "any businessman with the slightest impulse for survival" to join his "crusade" against "anticapitalist groups, the collectivists, and the advocates of centralized planning," and many did. They now impose their narrow views on colleges and universities, punishing "unorthodox" professors and institutions by depriving them of funds. They also support revisionists who blame their colleagues for causing the failures they merely report. Simon succeeded in the academic arena, but was far more influential leading his "mobilization" against the free press which he described as follows:

3. Finally, business money must flow away from the media which serve as megaphones for anticapitalist opinion and to media which are either pro-freedom or, if not necessarily "pro-business," at least professionally capable of a fair and accurate treatment of procapitalist ideas, values and arguments. The judgment of this fairness is to be made by businessmen alone-it is their money that they are investing.

Simon demands a "pro-business" or "fair" media, and he makes these terms synonymous proclaiming business will define fairness. But is his definition of "fairness" anything other than rigid censorship? Simon equates any criticism of any corporate action -- pollution, unfair labor practices, hazardous products -- with attempts to "destroy him" and efforts to "assault the capitalist system" itself:

If a newspaper or magazine or broadcasting station wishes to serve as a voluntary public relations agency for those who assault the capitalist system, it should be entirely free to do so. Without capitalist money. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and of the press from governmental intervention. It does not require that any citizen finance those that seek to destroy him.

Simon`s unabashed bias and his demand that the media echo his bias could not be more plain. However he continues explaining in detail what he planned and what he and fellow right wing millionaires and billionaires accomplished, the silencing of any media criticism of any business activity. This tortured history and histrionic -- nearly paranoid -- ranting energized the elite right wing. For a strong Republican rebuttal to Simon`s revisionist economic history, see Kevin Phillips` books below.

Simon`s extremism -- taken up by a legion of media magnates -- seeks to protect any and all corporate and right wing political activity from any scrutiny -- including criminal, even deadly practices. It brands as despotic any efforts to balance power in society using alarmist terms we hear over and over from the increasingly power-hungry but never satiated right wing.

Projecting onto others his own lust for control, Simon summarizes his blue print for America: "These are the three fronts on which to act aggressively if we are to create a sophisticated counter-force to the rising despotism" by which he refers to bullying and buying foundations, universities and the media to suppress "unorthodox" dissent and impose control.

Simon proposed, and the wealthy right imposed a "restriction placed on the beneficiaries of the new foundations" including colleges and universities which found themselves in philosophical straight jackets imposed by restrictions on grants. Led by Simon, right wing plutocrats decided if they couldn`t beat the free press, they`d buy it. If they couldn`t outdebate or out-reason university experts, they`d attack their funding and create a system of "new foundations" and "think tanks" beholden to the right wing agenda. In this way, they control and censor information and thought in the United States.

This effort actually began during Watergate. Nixon`s allies tried to get Richard M. Scaife, the Clinton-hater behind the infamous "Arkansas Project" to buy the Washington Post. If he had, the cover-up would have worked. Nixon would have remained in office, his crimes never brought to light. This exactly what happened during the 80`s when halfhearted efforts by a bought off media refused to expose massive crimes by the Reagan administration. Again, this was no accident.

During the 80s, the Reagan administration relaxed regulations which protected us against monopolization and abuse. Right wingers -- including Simon, the king of junk bonds and leveraged buyouts -- quickly cashed in. They used their $billions and Reagan`s lax or purposely weak enforcement to expand their monopolization of the media.



Mike Hersh is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant
www.mikehersh.com

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Hunt Goes on for War`s Motives
By Ken Fireman
WASHINGTON BUREAU

Washington -- On March 17, with war in Iraq just 48 hours away, President George W. Bush laid out in clear and succinct terms the rationale for the military action he was about to unleash.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," the president said in a televised address to the nation from the White House.

"This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq`s neighbors and against Iraq`s people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaida.

"The danger is clear. Using chemical, biological or -- one day -- nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people, in our country or any other."

Now, with Saddam Hussein`s regime consigned to history and U.S. and British forces in control of Iraq, some observers are looking back at these justifications for the war with a coldly skeptical eye. At least one believes it was either a failure of intelligence or a deliberate attempt to mislead Americans.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq to date, although the hunt continues and Bush said yesterday that it was just "a matter of time" until they were found.

But U.S. officials now acknowledge that Hussein may have destroyed or transferred at least part of his alleged arsenal before the war began. No new evidence has been uncovered on Hussein-al-Qaida links to buttress an administration case that many analysts have long regarded as tenuous. And an Iraqi army that Washington repeatedly portrayed as a major security threat to the region proved to be incapable of defending its own territory, let alone waging offensive operations against a neighbor.

This state of affairs has led some foreign affairs analysts to conclude that the Bush administration had something else in mind when it planned, organized and launched the war: a high-profile demonstration of American military might and the political resolve to use it that would reverberate through the Middle East and beyond, causing governments as near as Syria and Iran and as far away as North Korea to recalibrate their actions.

These observers point to Bush`s Feb. 26 speech to a conservative think tank as the key to understanding the underlying motivation for the war. In this address, the president for the first time publicly associated himself with the thinking of a group of neoconservatives within and without his administration who advocated toppling Hussein from power for years. They argued that such a move would not only remove an odious and dangerous dictator but also reorient the politics of the entire region in a pro-western and pro-democratic direction.

"I think the president and other senior officials were captivated by the neoconservative vision of a world transformed by American military power," says Joseph Cirincione, an arms control expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It promised a quick, dramatic improvement in U.S. national security, and control of a critical global resource, that the United States could do completely on its own without bothersome multilateral bodies."

The question, in the minds of Cirincione and other like-minded experts, is whether an administration determined to remove Hussein from power grossly inflated his military capabilities in order to sell its policy to the public.

"It was the only way to get the American people to go to war against Iraq," Cirincione said. "You couldn`t get the American people to go to war to free the Iraqi people and overthrow an evil regime, because there are lots of evil regimes in the world. So they cited two reasons: that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and Hussein had operational ties to al-Qaida.

"Neither appears to be true. I think this story is still developing. I think we`re on the edge of realizing that this was either a massive intelligence failure -- or a deliberate campaign to mislead the American people."

Administration officials strongly deny they hyped the threat posed by Hussein in order to launch a war for ulterior motives. A democratized Iraq and a transformed Middle East would be beneficial by-products of the war, they say, but it was launched for precisely the reason Bush repeatedly stated: because Hussein`s regime posed a serious threat to America`s national security.

"Heavens, no," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said when asked if administration officials felt any embarrassment over the lack of evidence to date confirming some of the accusations against Hussein. "We continue to have high confidence that the weapons of mass destruction will be found. Iraq is a regime that was a master at hiding it, and there are thousands and thousands of sites where it could be hidden, and they will be pursued as increasing evidence comes along."

White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett says the U.S. intelligence community "was about as unanimous as you will ever find them on the notion of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction" during the months leading up to the war. "And it will take time to unearth it -- in some cases maybe literally," he said. "And we will do so. And it`s a key objective and it`s one that will continue to be pursued."

Asked if the achievement of freeing Iraq from dictatorship has now made the issue of illicit weapons irrelevant, Bartlett rejected that proposition. "The president made very clear that he made his decision based on the security of the American people and of our friends and allies across the world," he said.

As for the threat posed by Iraqi forces in the region, Fleischer said, "they may not have been much of a military threat for our armed forces ... but for the neighborhood they were one powerful military threat, and they proved that by attacking their neighbors multiple times."

Bush, for his part, barely mentioned Hussein`s alleged illicit arsenal in his Thursday night speech bringing down the curtain on the war. He asserted, without providing any fresh evidence, that the Iraqi campaign was part of the broader war against terrorism, and offered what might be called a minimalist defense of that proposition: "This much is certain; no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more."

British Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon offered a new explanation last week for the failure to find any illicit weapons. In an interview with The Times of London, Hoon said the return of United Nations inspectors to Iraq last fall led Hussein to scatter his chemical and biological weapons in order to hide them from the inspectors, and was then unable to reassemble them for use when the conflict began.

When asked by The Times how that explanation squared with his government`s assertion last fall in an official dossier on Hussein`s illicit weapons that some could be ready for use within 45 minutes of an order to do so, Hoon replied, "I do not recall ever saying that. I specifically did not put a time on it."

Cirincione finds these explanations unconvincing. An illicit weapons program large enough to present the kind of threat Bush talked about could not be hidden, dispersed or destroyed just before the war started, he says. Moreover, the disappearance of such an arsenal would itself pose a huge security threat and trigger an all-out effort by U.S. forces to locate it; yet he says the search now under way for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction seems more "lackadaisical" than urgent.

"If these weapons existed at the levels the president said they did, this should be our number one priority globally, to find those weapons before others get control of them," Cirincione said. "The fact that the administration is not doing that makes me believe that they themselves don`t believe the weapons exist in these numbers. They would be desperate to find them, and they`re just not."

Leon Fuerth, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University who served as former Vice President Al Gore`s national security adviser, says the administration`s claim that the Iraqi weapons will be found in time is at odds with its pre-war assertion that it had hard intelligence about their existence. "One has to assume that if they had high-quality intelligence as to the location of these weapons, they would have steered the inspectors or elements of the U.S. military to them," he said. "One ought not to jump to conclusions ... but if the president presented the image that it would be piled high and easy to find, that hasn`t happened yet."

Cirincione says the available evidence suggests Iraq once had an ambitious plan to develop weapons of mass destruction, but cut it back in the face of post-Gulf War sanctions and weapons inspections to a bare-bones program involving only a small core of scientists and technicians and small amounts of chemical and biological agents.

The process by which this modest effort was inflated into a major threat to American security, he says, seems to have involved two stages. The first was what he calls the "politicization of the intelligence process," in which U.S. intelligence staffers were encouraged to develop information that supported the administration`s preconceived position. In the second stage, he said, administration officials took these already exaggerated estimates and pumped them up even further by always stressing the highest end.

Now, with the war won and Hussein`s abuses under a spotlight, Cirincione says the administration does not seem overly concerned about the failure to validate its earlier arguments. "I think the president and his senior officials feel completely vindicated, and the fact that no weapons have been found is just a bothersome detail, because that`s not what the war was really about," he said. "It wasn`t about weapons of mass destruction; that was just a pretext. But this has happened before. Remember the Maine? Remember Tonkin Gulf?"
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/iraq/ny-bush0504,0,7…

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DID THE IRAQI ARMY TAKE A DIVE FOR THE U.S.?
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- After the opening week of battle in Iraq, many feared the worst.

The supply lines were stretched too thin. There were few reserves available. Fighting was unexpectedly tough in southern cities such as Basra and the toughest fighting was still ahead in Baghdad. The "cakewalk" predicted by the hawks in the Bush administration wasn`t happening.

Then, the situation totally changed within a few days. The Iraqi army seemingly disappeared and the U.S. forces swept into Baghdad with a minimum of resistance.

With overwhelming superiority in firepower and total control of the air, a U.S. victory in Iraq was certain. But few believed it would take barely four weeks to achieve nearly all of the military objectives.

It all looked so easy. Maybe too easy.

In the days after the fall of Baghdad, reports started bubbling up that there was a reason why the U.S. won Gulf War II so easily: the fight was fixed.

The French newspaper Le Monde reported on April 15 that the commanding general of Iraq`s Republican Guard, Maher Sufyan, cut a deal with U.S. forces in exchange for his escape.

The Republican Guard had 20,000 well-equipped troops defending Baghdad. This was the force that was fully prepared to raise hell with U.S. forces, but suddenly melted away without a fight. Why?

Citing anonymous sources, Le Monde`s correspondent in Baghdad wrote that Sufyan ordered his troops to lay down their arms and go home. A short time later, an Apache helicopter escorted Sufyan from the Al Rashid camp, east of Baghdad, to an undisclosed safe haven.

Sufyan was not included in the deck of cards created by the U.S. Defense Department that contained pictures of the 55 most wanted members of Saddam Hussein`s regime. His whereabouts are still unknown.

The deal may have been sweeter than Le Monde knew. The Arabic-language weekly Arab Voice reported that there had been secret talks between U.S. forces and the Republican Guard. A deal was allegedly approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that offered large sums of money to the top echelon of the Republican Guard and offers of American citizenship for commanders and their families. If they chose to stay in Iraq, those commanders would be offered official roles in post-war Iraq, provided they hadn`t committed war crimes.

The capper to the deal, according to Arab Voice editor Walid Rabah, was for the Republican Guard commanders to give information about the exact location of Saddam and the rest of the Iraqi leadership. U.S. forces then used it to launch a missile attack on April 7 on a building in a Baghdad suburb where the Iraqi leadership was meeting. Nobody knows for certain if Saddam or his sons were killed in that attack.

The Russian Ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Titirenko, also said there may have been a deal. "I am confident that the Iraqi generals entered into a secret deal with the Americans to refrain from resistance in exchange for sparing their lives," Titirenko told Moscow`s NTV.

According to the Iranian news agency Baztab, Saddam Hussein and Russian intelligence worked out a deal 13 days before the war began where Saddam allegedly pledged to hand over Baghdad with minimal resistance to U.S. forces in exchange for sparing the lives of Saddam and his family. The U.S. then promised to give Saddam`s entourage safe passage to an unnamed third country, while Russia would get $5 billion to broker the deal.

How plausible are these stories? More than a few military analysts believe that one part of this tale is true - that the bulk of Iraq`s army did take off their uniforms and took off for home.

A recent story from the Knight Ridder news service contained an interview with Major Sallah Abdullah Mahdi al Jabouri, a 17-year Iraqi army veteran and a Republican Guard battalion commander.

Even though U.S. airstrikes had killed one-third of his 4,000-man brigade, Jabouri said his men were prepared to defend Baghdad when he and his fellow field commanders received orders on April 8 to withdraw and return to their bases north of the city.

When they arrived at their base, they were told go home. The next day, U.S. forces swept into central Baghdad unopposed.

"We went to war expecting everybody was going to die; we imagined the worst," said Jabouri. "But to lose your country is bigger."

Some would say all this is foolish speculation. The U.S. won the war and Saddam is gone. Why worry about how it may have happened? It`s worth talking about when you consider how the Bush administration`s whole case for invading Iraq was built upon lies.

ABC News reported on April 25 that the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam`s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction to gain the legal justification for war and scare Americans into supporting an attack.

"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was a matter of emphasis."

According to U.S. and British intelligence agencies, Iraq did not pose a threat to the U.S. But that information was ignored in the run-up to this war, and the information that was emphasized by the Bush administration was apparently fabricated. The proof of that fabrication is that none of those weapons have yet been found and probably didn`t exist in the first place.

The Bush administration`s real rationale for invading Iraq was, as ABC White House correspondent John Cochran described it, to put on "a global show of American power and democracy."

It didn`t hurt that Iraq had been effectively disarmed and had been regularly bombed for the past dozen years since the end of Gulf War I in 1991. Or that it was located between Syria and Iran - two nations that the Bush administration has on its hit list, but would be much tougher military targets. Or that with things still bogged down in Afghanistan, the Bush administration wanted a quick and easy military victory in the "war on terror."

View the case of the missing Iraqi soldiers through this line of thinking, and it seems all too plausible that an administration willing to lie, cheat and steal to achieve its political objectives would resort to rigging the outcome of a war.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books).



Copyright 2003 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.american-reporter.com/2096W/1.html

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Da tauchen die alten Geschichten wieder auf, die Amis tragen Sonnenbrillen, mit denen sie die Frauen nackt sehen können. Der Irak ist alles andere als eine moderne Gesellschaft.

We will bomb if you don`t go, US told
By Ed O`Loughlin, Herald Correspondent in Falluja
May 3 2003


Residents of the central Iraqi town of Falluja say they will mount further bombing attacks against US troops unless the soldiers evacuate a position they occupy in a former Baath party building.

The warning comes as resentment runs high in the city, a stronghold of Bedouin tribesmen, a day after a grenade attack on the position left seven US soldiers injured.

Locals say the attack was in revenge for two incidents this week that left at least 15 Iraqis dead and scores injured. On Wednesday at least two Iraqi civilians died when US troops outside the compound opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators. On Monday at least 13 civilians, including children, died in a similar shooting outside a nearby school occupied by troops of the 82nd Airborne Division.

In both shootings the US troops say they came under fire first, a charge denied by locals.

The small city of 300,000 Sunni Arabs was braced for further violence yesterday, the Muslim day of prayer. US tanks checked vehicles entering and leaving town, and a helicopter circled overhead. At the contested position troops scanned the area with binoculars from behind sandbags on the roof.


Captain Bren Worman, public relations officer for the 3rd Armoured Cavalry, said the unit was prepared for anything that might come its way. "We believe very strongly in proportional response," he said.

"If someone is throwing rocks at us we don`t shoot weapons at them; if someone uses weapons against us we will shoot back. We reserve the right to defend ourselves."

Local people say the tension in Falluja stems from their anger at seeing US troops basing themselves in the town.

"The people here are not part of any organisation, but this area is very tribal and it`s very opposed to the American troops being here in our district," said Mustafa Munem, one of a group of men discussing the situation on a street corner. "We have given the Americans a warning to go and gave them three days to leave Falluja."

"This area never had any looting," said Salih Ahmed. "Everyone here knows everyone else and we live very quietly, so why are the Americans here? We don`t need them."

The cultural gap between locals and US soldiers runs deep. "We have heard that the Americans` sunglasses allow them to see through our women`s clothes," said a man standing across the road from the contested US headquarters. "We are very angry to think that they can see our women naked."

The group on the corner said the Americans had been warned that if they did not evacuate the town by yesterday - others said by today - they would face further attacks and perhaps even suicide bombs.

They strongly rejected the US Army`s claim that the townspeople were supporters of Saddam Hussein, and that Monday`s demonstration was in honour of his birthday.

"That is a total lie,` said Mr Munem. "They went to the school to ask the Americans to leave so the children could go back to classes. Most of the men present were deserters from the army. They just say that to mislead the world."


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/02/1051382098090.html

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AFTERMATH OF WAR
Analysis
The Bush Doctrine: Exporting democracy benefits the U.S.
But using military might to pursue ideal has some nations wondering, What now?
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Sunday, May 4, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar…


Washington -- On a carrier deck off the Southern California coast, in command of the most powerful military in world history, President Bush laid out a doctrine to defeat terrorism by exporting democracy -- at the barrel of a gun if necessary.

Recalling President Ronald Reagan`s challenge to the Soviet Union`s "evil empire," Bush declared, "The advance of freedom is the surest strategy to undermine the appeal of terror in the world. Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. . . . American values and American interests lead in the same direction."

Where this doctrine leads next, after Iraq, is a question rattling ministries in the Middle East and around the world -- as some contend it is exactly intended to do.

Iran and North Korea, the other two nations on Bush`s "axis of evil," are developing weapons of mass destruction, administration officials warn, and Syria, they say, has a history of harboring terrorists. A democratic Iraq, they contend, could serve to undermine dictatorships across the Middle East.

"If we make a big enough commitment I think we can continue moving both Afghanistan and Iraq along the road of representative government," said Max Boot, a neoconservative who is an Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"It`s a big job, but we`re a big country, and we need to do this in our own self-interest to prevent places like Iraq and Afghanistan from once again becoming a breeding ground for terrorism."

The basics of the Bush Doctrine are laid out clearly in the National Security Strategy of the United States, issued by the White House last September, a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that inspired it.

Unapologetically muscular, it insists on unchallenged U.S. military hegemony, and permits the unilateral, pre-emptive use of force to protect America against any "imminent" threat as defined by the president. Iraq, say the doctrine`s supporters, met this test.

The second, democracy-building half of the Bush Doctrine is just as ambitious, wrapping military power in an idealistic vision of spreading democracy across the globe.

It is an idea propounded for the past decade by so-called neoconservative thinkers, like Boot, who have sought to reshape U.S. foreign policy from Washington`s think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century.

"The notion that you can`t export democracy through the barrel of a gun is simply wrong," said Boot. "We did it in Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere."

Bush the candidate eschewed these ideas for a "humble" foreign policy, but he appointed several of their adherents to key administration posts and adopted their ideas with vigor after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the senior administration official most closely identified with this policy, but other adherents include Douglas Feith, undersecretary for defense policy. They have received support from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In a recent article in the Weekly Standard, whose editor, William Kristol, is a leading neoconservative, Boot outlined how to take the Bush Doctrine to the next step, confronting Iran and Syria militarily if they meddle in Iraq, and forcing Saudi Arabia to clearly choose sides in the war on terror.

"Iraq should not be seen as an aberration, but rather as another important step in a larger campaign to make the world safe for democracy," Boot wrote, borrowing former President Woodrow Wilson`s formulation once mocked by conservatives.

"We have already vanquished Nazism and communism; only one of the 20th century`s evil ideologies -- fascism, this time in its Islamist variant -- remains to be defeated for liberalism to breathe easier. Victory is almost in sight. We ought not return to passivity now."

Yet much of the world remains skeptical of this combination of idealism and power. Even many in Republican circles warn that military force, even when used with the best intentions, is a blunt tool likely to backfire.

"There is a profound tension between the neoconservative goal, which is to promote democracy and freedom in the world, and the neoconservative style, which is to act unilaterally whenever we want to and feel like it," said Larry Diamond, a democracy expert at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Promoting democracy has long been a staple of U.S. foreign policy, on the theory that democracies seldom make war on other democracies. But it has usually been pursued through the "soft" tools of persuasion and example, commerce and cultural exchange.

The neoconservative vision, by contrast, contemplates the more aggressive use of American power to force hostile non-democracies to capitulate.

"The risk of course," said Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies for the libertarian Cato Institute, "is that it will encourage potential enemies to defend themselves, to form countervailing alliances against the United States, to increase their own military spending and or engage in other activities, terrorist activities, for example, which have been traditionally the vehicle for weak states or institutions to challenge the strong."

Middle East experts on the left agree.

"You will stay in Iraq," said As-ad Abu Khalil, an adjunct professor of political science at UC Berkeley, "but what will you do to deal with the mounting opposition in that country against the United States? That will mean you will have to project more forces, deploy more troops. That will upset the population further, and this will continue to escalate."

The cost of the neoconservative enterprise also gives many pause. Rebuilding Iraq alone could cost as much as $100 billion, much of it likely be paid out of U.S. coffers. The cost of maintaining the U.S. military is already roughly $400 billion a year, and with a few years could rise to $600 billion or more.

"And this is in perpetuity," Preble said. "If you are intending to police an empire, it certainly will require a very large military force."

Critics also note contradictions in the neoconservative doctrine, pointing to U.S. allies such as Egypt and Jordan that are far from democratic yet do not figure on the neoconservatives` target list.

"Democracy at the barrel of a gun is more rhetoric than reality," said Susan Rice, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution. "If they`re going around the world making it safe for democracy, they`ve missed a whole lot of places along the way."

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at [e-mail].

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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The Next War
The Iraq conflict was a preview, but not the whole script, of battles to come
John Arquilla
Sunday, May 4, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/04/…


The adage that generals always fight the last war is only partially true. They also fight some of the next war each time they go into action.

Wars are time portals, waged in the present but reflecting both the staying power of older ideas and the allure of unproven new concepts.

In World War I, for example, the centuries-old tradition of massed infantry assaults was still adhered to -- with appalling casualties the result. On the first day of the Somme offensive alone, the British lost 20,000 men to German artillery and machine guns -- and gained only a few yards of ground.

This same war also saw the debut of the tank at Cambrai, where it enabled the capture of a huge swath of ground in a few hours -- with almost no casualties -- and heralded the rise of armor to its long-dominant role in military affairs.

Thus wars carry both the past and the future within them. The art of generalship lies in knowing when to jettison the old in favor of the new. This has proved true again in our second war with Iraq, but some of this conflict`s implications for the next war may prove quite uncomfortable for the Pentagon.

The biggest casualty of the war in Iraq should be the much-hyped notion of shock and awe -- a warmed-over variant of the belief that strategic aerial bombing can bring any adversary quickly to heel.

Every major conflict beginning with World War II has featured the bombing of cities and civil infrastructure, with noncombatants often deliberately targeted. Enormous destruction has been done, yet it is hard to see any air campaign as having worked by itself.

During the Korean War, U.S. bombers flattened every building in Pyongyang, yet we could manage only a draw. The Air Force dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than in any other campaign, yet we lost that war. Bombing may have worked in Kosovo, but the Serb retreat there could just as likely have resulted from President Bill Clinton`s decision, after 77 days, to consider a ground invasion.

In this latest war, we dropped seven times the amount of explosives that fell in 1991 -- with little effect on Iraqi will. Only a successful ground invasion brought down the regime.

Despite knowing the limitations of air bombardment, triumphalists in and out of uniform tried to sell this war to the American public and to the world on the basis of the patently false claim that big explosions would prompt surrender in a day or so.

Instead, the steady pattern of past strategic bombing failures was borne out again, the lesson for the next war being to stay away from such delusions. Bombing doesn`t win by itself, and the killing of innocent noncombatants in such attacks undermines the justice of any cause.

The second cautionary lesson of the war in Iraq was highlighted by the multidivisional march up Mesopotamia -- another blast from the past. Tanks and humvees made a beeline for Baghdad and had to rely on vulnerable supply lines that stretched for hundreds of miles.

The Iraqis correctly avoided our combat teeth and went after our long logistical tail -- causing us some real problems for a while. In the end, we were able to cope with their small-unit attacks, but the lesson for the next war should be to avoid creating such soft, juicy targets. Our next opponents may prove better armed or more skillful than the Iraqis. Or both.

It is high time, then, in the military evolutionary process, to lose our tails.

So much for residual elements of past conflicts that should disappear. The campaign in Iraq also gave us some tantalizing glimpses of the next war. The most important aspect of the future of conflict on display was the way in which small forces were empowered by networking.

That is, by being connected to each other in ways that allowed our forces to identify, target and strike the enemy within minutes of detection. In the last Gulf war, this process generally took several hours.


SMALLER IS BETTER
In this latest campaign, Anglo-American forces undertook a mission several times bigger than in the last Gulf war -- with less than half the force. The only way this could be done was by packetizing our forces in small task groups,

then linking them to each other and to aircraft overhead in mutually supporting ways.

Indeed, aircraft found their proper use in close support of ground troops, allowing the allies to fight with less than one-tenth of the artillery that was used 12 years ago. This accounts for the speedy advance to Baghdad because it is hard to move artillery along swiftly.

The tremendous hitting power of small but highly networked combat formations also made it possible to strike at the enemy from many directions simultaneously -- i.e., to use swarm tactics. Thus the campaign featured the quick disabling of the Iraqi Scud missile fields in the west, the saving of the oil fields in the south, and the launching of a Kurdish attack in the north, led by our special forces.

These aspects of the campaign came off far better than the bombing of Baghdad or the march up Mesopotamia. There was a shift this time from Desert Storm to Desert Swarm.

It seems clear what we should discard and what we should keep when thinking about the next war. But the opposition to meaningful change in the American military is on guard and well entrenched.

The first warning shot fired at military traditionalists came earlier, in the fall 2001 Afghan campaign. This was a time war, too, as it featured similar images from the past and glimpses of the future.

First, there was a month of unsuccessful strategic bombing of Kabul, Kandahar and other fixed targets. At that point, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compelled senior military officials to unleash small teams of special forces highly networked with aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles. In a few weeks, just over 300 special forces operators -- for the most part riding on horses -- toppled the Taliban and al Qaeda from power.


DEBATE OVER STRATEGY
Between the Afghan and Iraq conflicts, a sharp policy debate erupted, characterized by innovators` calls for radical downsizing of field armies and creating a fully networked military. Traditionalists held that Afghanistan was an exceptional case at best, with some, like Stephen Biddle of the U.S. Army War College, writing official studies that saw little new in the campaign.

To them it was just a clash between two ground forces, in which air support proved decisive. Rumsfeld`s sympathies were clearly with the innovators, but he had to manage and maintain an equilibrium between both camps.

He did so by compromising on the campaign in Iraq, where the innovators wanted to send no more than 75,000 troops and the traditionalists wanted 500, 000. He split the difference, coming in with an expeditionary force of about 300,000.

When the first hitches in the campaign arose -- the spectacular failure of shock and awe and the Fedayeen attacks on our supply lines -- traditionalists renewed their calls for larger forces. Whether observing events from inside the Pentagon or from television studios, traditionalists were unwilling or unable to see that the only problems with the campaign had arisen from the inclusion of the very elements that they had insisted upon or supported in prewar planning.

All soon came out right, though, leaving us military analysts with the need to think through what the next war ought to look like. At present, the most likely place where a new conflict might erupt is Korea, as the communist regime in the north determinedly seeks to expand its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. It also has a million-man army, about 10 percent of which is comprised of special forces.

The North Korean military is in far better shape than the Iraqis, and the terrain on which it would fight is far tougher than the flat, open desert of the Tigris valley. How then should insights from our most recent conflict inform contingency plans for this possible next war?

Military traditionalists will view Iraq as another exceptional case and seek ways to emphasize the need for more troops on the ground in Korea and for more strategic bombing capability.


STRATEGY FOR KOREA
Innovators (of whom I am one) will argue that the campaign in Iraq should lead us to discard large forces and strategic bombing and replace them with a distributed network of small ground units that can call in close fire support from missiles and aircraft. Also, this approach would work whether we were on the defensive from the outset or if we engaged in hot pre-emption.

A smaller, networked approach to this possible next war would complement South Korean forces and would mitigate our serious vulnerability to North Korean attacks with bugs, poison or nuclear weaponry. We wouldn`t provide any juicy targets for such weapons. Further, the rough terrain on the Korean peninsula would channelize any attack from the north, allowing us to swarm the invaders from all directions.

However, we should be concerned that the North Koreans will have been watching events in Iraq closely and that they are preparing their own surprises for us if war breaks out. They will likely deploy their special forces in swarming attacks on our supply lines, flying them in on canvas- covered, radar-evading AN-2 Colt biplanes that can carry a dozen soldiers each.

They might also think about detonating a nuclear weapon at high altitude, generating an electromagnetic pulse that could cripple our communications.

But these are solvable problems. If we stay away from using heavy forces, their commandos will have no supply lines to hit. Communications can be hardened against pulses, and replacements and redundancies can be used to mitigate this risk.

The question about fighting a war is always about finding the proper mix of old and new. Right now, the U.S. military is at a tipping point. Our second Gulf War was roughly a half-and-half affair, with old and new ways of fighting employed in equal doses.

This is hardly likely to remain the case. The implications of the war in Iraq clearly point to moving away from strategic bombing and big, heavy force packages.

However, these are the two most cherished items in the U.S. defense establishment. They have long been quintessential elements of what historian Russell Weigley calls the American way of war.

They also cost a great deal, doing much to justify our current rate of defense spending, which is more than $1 billion per day. Small, networked forces pose the prospect of fighting more effectively at much lower cost -- a dire threat to the current system, which will be resisted.

What is to be done?

Very simply, the debate between the traditionalists and the innovators must be fully and publicly aired, and presidential candidates next year must be urged to be explicit about their positions on this aspect of defense policy. In the meantime, consider this the opening salvo in the fight over the next war.

John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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Freedom Chopper ist gut

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A mean-spirited America
By Jill Nelson, MSNBC contributor


These days, a sense of apprehension and foreboding lurks in the back of my head and the pit of my stomach. It`s a gut-wrenching reminder that something very bad has happened and is about to happen anew. It is an anticipation of the next insult and injury in an America that has been defined under the Bush administration by a profound meanness of spirit.

THE EVIDENCE OF this overwhelming meanness of spirit is everywhere, abroad and at home. Even the administration`s efforts to justify the war in Iraq as one of liberation and declare victory cannot mask the human costs to American troops and their families. How many thousands of Iraqis are dead? Where are the ridiculously named "weapons of mass destruction" that Bush used to justify this invasion? Witness the looting of priceless antiquities, kitsch and cash from Iraqi museums and Saddam Hussein`s palaces and homes, allowed and participated in not only by Iraqis but members of the American armed forces and their ``embedfellows," the media.
Yet to question this war and its aftermath is characterized as at worst treason and at best anti-American cynicism. And woe unto those who criticize Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root and the rest of the corporate sponsors of the Bush administration as they line up at the trough of government contracts to rebuild Iraq and control its oil. Now, the armed forces in Iraq have turned to shooting Iraqi demonstrators, the very people they supposedly came to "liberate" with democracy.

UNDER SIEGE AT HOME
Here on the home front, our e-mail communications, bookstore purchases, and even our public library withdrawals are open to government surveillance. The attorney general lengthens the arm of government repression every day, seeking the right to revoke an American`s citizenship if he alone decides their words or deeds fall within his definition of treason. Slowly chipping away at our civil and democratic rights.

The Internal Revenue Service announces that it will scrutinize the returns of the poorest taxpayers, those claiming the earned income tax credit. This is a credit offered to taxpayers who earn under $35,000 for a family of four, and it averages less than $2000. The Bush administration wants to spend $100 million to go after these working-poor Americans in search of fraud rather than concentrate on corporations who, according to some estimates, defraud the government by tens of billions of dollars every year.

And what of the move in many states to curtail or severely cut back Medicaid benefits to the 50 million people that program currently insures, a move that will result in the loss of insurance, cuts in benefits, and an increasingly unhealthy population? And unemployment, and the awful school system, and systemic poverty, and gun violence? The list goes on.

This as President Bush crisscrosses the country like a snake-oil salesman in an effort to sell his tax-cut program, one that will again reward the wealthiest Americans and increase the tax burden on the poor and middle class. This after already pushing through a tax cut two years ago that failed to stimulate the economy but succeeded in resurrecting a deficit that, at the end of the Clinton administration a year before, was a surplus.

LIVING IN FEAR
Meanwhile, here in our great democracy, Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character.

I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century.

RECIPE FOR CHANGE
It is none too early to begin organizing for the 2004 elections. Each of us must take a hard look at the changes that have been wrought by this administration internationally and domestically and ask ourselves: Is this the democracy we cherish? We must hold our elected officials accountable and make them take a stand against what increasingly looks like fascism. If they will not, we must vote them out of office.

Three years ago, before the bloodless coup d`etat that made George W. Bush president, America was a far-from-perfect nation. Yet there was the possibility, almost gone now, that our country might evolve into a place that lived up to its loftiest democratic rhetoric. Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies. It is time to take our country back before it is too late.

Jill Nelson is a journalist, teacher and author. She is a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.


http://www.msnbc.com/news/907766.asp

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"I saw President Bush on that aircraft carrier in the Pacific yesterday.
Incidentally, that`s the closest he`s ever got to the War in Vietnam."
-- Senator Fritz Hollings


"I want him killed I can do that, you know - legally.
The Democrats gave me that power - they really did."

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Ich möchte auf ein Lexicon hinweisen. Bush und Orwell

http://www.thedevilsdictionary.com/

.

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Worship me, I went AWOL for Jim Beam.

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Und hier noch einmal zum mitschreiben
http://www.redrat.net/BUSH_WAR/cards/index.htm

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Ein Symbol der USA verschwindet.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Death of a Killing Machine
By Christopher Shea
Christopher Shea is a Washington, D.C., writer.

May 4, 2003

WASHINGTON — Overshadowed, understandably, by news of war, a milestone in the history of the American death penalty has been sneaking up on us. Nebraska`s legislators were expected to vote this spring to quit using the electric chair, sanctioning a switch to lethal injection as the state`s execution method of choice. Nebraska will be the last death-penalty state to make that switch. Consumed by a budget crisis, lawmakers gave electrocution a reprieve until January. But it`s clear that, very soon, the era of the electric chair, the most symbolically potent execution method since the guillotine, will come to an end.

Granted, condemned men and women are still free to choose the chair in several states, but they rarely do so. It`s possible that the last person in human history deliberately killed with a burst of electricity will have been Lynda Lyon Block, a cop-killer and anti-government extremist whom Alabama dispatched last May, just before that state also changed over to lethal injection.

The end of the electric-chair era is an occasion for humility. That`s because it is now clear that the chair, first used in 1890, was a 113-year mistake by the United States. (No one followed our lead in adopting it.) Not so much a moral outrage, although it may be that too: It was an actual mistake. The electric chair never worked as advertised. The story of how we got duped into thinking it would work, and why it took so long to correct the error, is an odd, sad, tale — one that historians are just starting to grapple with. It`s a story about blind faith in technology and behind-the-scenes maneuvering by unprincipled corporate leaders — including Thomas Edison. And it`s a story that makes you wonder, given the capacity for self- delusion of our ancestors, what we are blind to today as we consider the death penalty and various methods of carrying it out.

The father of the electric chair was a dentist by the name of Alfred Southwick. He lived in Buffalo, N.Y., and had also been trained as an engineer. His macabre "eureka" moment came in 1881, when he saw a drunk stumble into an uninsulated wire and get killed instantly (and, Southwick guessed, painlessly). The culture was on the lookout for a new execution method, as Americans were beginning to view hanging as a medieval throwback. Stories of torturous strangulations or surprise decapitations — the all-too-common results of hangings gone wrong — were widely disseminated. In 1834, the New York Legislature had come within three votes of banning capital punishment altogether, precisely because of public disgust over such barbarities.

In this environment, Southwick`s peculiar idea of harnessing electricity to zap condemned inmates gained a foothold — and some odd cheerleaders. One of the most distasteful was a gung-ho engineer named Harold Brown, who rented out an auditorium at Columbia University, affixed wires to cages holding dogs and killed them before horrified audiences — even jaded reporters shouted at him to stop — to demonstrate the efficacy of electrocution. It turned out he had a secret sponsor for his "research" (more on that later).

In 1888, a committee appointed by New York`s governor endorsed electrocution. The next year, the sadist Brown, in the journal North American Review, painted a picture of the new world of executions that beckoned, capturing well the optimism of the era: "Dials of electrical instruments indicate that all the apparatus is in perfect order and record the pressure at every moment," he wrote, rapturously. "The deputy-sheriff throws the switch. Respiration and heart activity instantly cease There is a stiffening of the muscles but there is no struggle and no sound. The majesty of the law has been vindicated, but no physical pain has been caused — such is electrical execution." Like others, Brown assumed that a painful electrocution was an impossibility, since electricity traveled faster than nerve impulses.

Yet a funny thing happened at the very first electrocution, on Aug. 6, 1890, in New York`s Auburn Penitentiary. A very unfunny thing, that is. The "scene was so terrible," the New York Times reported, "that the word fails to convey the idea." After the first 1,000-plus volt jolt of electricity, ax-murderer William Kemmler started twitching, and witnesses screamed. The executioners slammed down the switch again. Kemmler`s blood vessels broke, pushing blood through the skin. His skin and hair burned, and a stench filled the room. The electricity magnate George Westinghouse later offered this pithy summary of the ghastly scene: "They would have done better with an ax." Yet New York persuaded itself that the method was not at fault: Human error had simply slipped into the proceedings.

Of course, Kemmler`s death, not the North American Review fantasy, served as the model for electrocutions down the years. "Botched" electric chair episodes were so common as to be the norm. Executions that went "smoothly" were still brutal, brutalizing events. By the 1990s, even grizzled Southern judges started saying enough is enough.

What had gone wrong? On a technical level, the problems with the electric chair were simple enough. Electricity doesn`t kill by "frying" the brain or "polarizing" nerves or whatever else people usually think. As Theodore Bernstein, a retired University of Wisconsin engineer — and one of the few scientists who has studied the electric chair — has explained, electricity kills by disrupting the beating of the heart. The heart, though, can snap back from even a large shock. In a grim twist, it is especially likely to bounce back if another large shock is administered. (Think television`s "ER" and its shouts of, "Clear!") The typical American electrocution involves delivering several shocks of varying intensity. And so the electric chair was designed in such a way that it would kill, revive and kill again. That huge levels of voltage might sometimes cause burns should not exactly have stunned anyone, either.

Why did it take a century to figure this out? Anyone who read about Kemmler`s fate should have suspected something was amiss. In a recent issue of the Journal of American History, respected German historian Jurgen Martschukat offers one explanation for why we Americans failed to see what was before our eyes: technological intoxication. The 1870s and 1880s, he reminds us, were decades that witnessed awesome, even sublime, technical advances. It was a time when people who saw outdoor lighting for the first time would drop to their knees and cross themselves. One problem after another fell before the creativity of hero -engineers. In such an environment, to suggest that electricity might contribute to a step backward just didn`t compute.

Yet Americans weren`t only self-blinkered. Some powerful forces were also working hard to obscure the truth about electrocution, as Mount Holyoke College sociologist Richard Moran explains in a fascinating new book, "Executioner`s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair." Moran argues that New York might not have adopted electrocution — many leading citizens preferred, from conservative inclinations, to stick with hanging — had Edison, American hero, not put his considerable clout behind it. But Edison`s intentions were entirely ignoble, as Moran meticulously documents.

Edison wanted New York to adopt the technology of his corporate rival, Westinghouse — against Westinghouse`s wishes — to execute criminals. Edison wasn`t motivated by an interest in reducing the cruelty of the death penalty. Rather, he hoped Westinghouse`s technology, which was clobbering Edison`s in the marketplace, would be tarnished by an association with state-sponsored death. (Hence the title of Moran`s book: title: Would you want the "executioner`s current" running through your children`s bedroom walls? Call it an early negative-ad campaign.) It was Edison who, on the sly, paid Harold Brown to execute those dogs — and later calves and horses — in experiments rigged to make Westinghouse`s current look deadlier than Edison`s.

Edison won the battle but lost the war. Westinghouse`s alternating current — not Edison`s direct current — killed Kemmler. Yet Westinghouse also won the competition to light America. The collateral damage from this corporate clash was the infliction of the electric chair upon America.

Our 19th century predecessors let themselves believe they could solve the moral problems of the death penalty through technology. Once they`d instituted the "solution," they let wishful thinking continue to blind them to bloody reality. Soon, Nebraska will join the ranks of states that think they`ve resolved their problems by switching to lethal injection. Have we succeeded this time around — or simply updated our self-delusion?


If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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REMEMBERING JOE McCARTHY: PRESIDENT BUSH HONORS AMERICA`S GREATEST SENATOR AND PATRIOT ON THE 46th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS UNTIMELY DEATH
Statement by the President

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Today, with America`s vast, bloodthirsty force of bravely unquestioning military grunts entering the final days of its totally justified mission to effortlessly annihilate Iraqazoid trash like blowflies on a roadside armadillo carcass, I wanted to take a few minutes off from my demanding schedule of aircraft carrier campaign commercial shoots to commemorate the passing of our nation`s greatest-ever patriot – not counting me, of course.

46 years ago today, at the tender age of just 49, Senator Joseph McCarthy received a personal escort from Jesus Christ to a new permanent residence in one of Heaven`s most luxurious and ethnically homogeneous gated communities. And though at the time, I myself was little more than a parasitic gummi worm in my momma`s Cadillac-like uterus, I can still remember the muffled sounds of her anguished shrieks and the distinctive clank of her ill-fitting dentures gnashing on faux pearls upon hearing of his passing. Indeed, it was a dark day in our nation`s proud history of fearmongering – for when the sun set, the most accomplished Republican demagogue to ever violently poke a liberal in the eye and cry "TRAITOR!" was no more.

Fortunately, though Joseph McCarthy cannot be here with us today as we wrap ourselves in the flag and denounce anyone who questions my God-like perfection as an America-hating faggot, we can still look to his shining example. You know it`s not every day that a dead Irishman leaves behind much more than some empty Jameson flasks and a sack of rotten spuds, but in Senator Joe`s case, we have inherited a timeless and invaluable blueprint for intimidating political opponents into pussy-whooped silence. Why, back when Joe when was in his prime, you didn`t so much look sideways at him unless you wanted that burly mick to march on over and tear your commie nuts off with his bare, all-American hands.

Today, America is once again threatened by an unseen, all-pervasive menace which corrupts and destroys all that it touches. No, I`m not talking about Joe McCarthy`s Communism. And no, I`m not talking about terrorism, either. I`m talking about critical thinking, open dialogue and dissent. But not unlike the red menace of Communism, this sickening new pink menace can and will be eradicated from the planet. Sure, there are those who would argue that Communism remains a reality for more than half the world`s population, but I`m only counting real people here – no Chinkies or Cubo-Ricans.

Were he alive today, Senator McCarthy would be approaching his 96th birthday. And though he`d likely be about as continent as Strom Thurmond at a kegger, he would also no doubt be proud. Proud to see how far we`ve come, and how close we are to realizing his vision of a quasi-Orwellian parody state. For you see, Senator McCarthy was a man years ahead of his time. Things were different back when he was in Congress. There was no FOX News around to heed his call to spin his enemies` words and positions into hard evidence of ideological treason – which, in an earlier, more wholesome era, would have been grounds enough for lifetime imprisonment. Nor was there any Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to work in tandem with FOX News and whip up the entire corn and Bible belts into a paranoia-fueled rage so white-hot and irrational, they`d be hard-pressed to make it through jury selection on a 17th Century witchcraft trial. But worst of all for poor Joe, the Senate of the 1950`s actually included a number of Democrats who were also... vertebrates.

How things change in just 46 short years! Why, just imagine what old Joe could be accomplishing in today`s America. Come to think of it, you don`t need to imagine. All you have to do is try talking shit about me in public for more than five seconds and see what happens. And they said mob lynchings and blacklists had gone out of style!

And so today, on the anniversary of Senator McCarthy`s untimely passing in a tragic autoerotic asphyxiation accident in J. Edgar Hoover`s pool cabana, I am proud to nevertheless state outright that his nefariously brilliant tactics and strategies constitute the cornerstone of my family`s gameplan for retaining control of the White House for the duration of pre-apocalyptic time.

God Bless Senator McCarthy, and God Bless America. Thank you.

http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2003/050203.asp

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

An Islamic state doesn`t have to be Bush`s nightmare

http://www.sundayherald.com/33568


Iraq: Denying Shia muslims the right to achieve their aims through the ballot box will only stoke the fires of militancy, warns Yasir Suleiman



Few doubted that the Americans would win the war in Iraq, but many fear that they may still lose the peace, and that they may do so in a way that will haunt Iraq, the region and US policy-makers for generations. The writing is on the wall. Rebuilding Iraq as a nation will need time. But time is not on America`s side. The longer the Americans stay in Iraq, the greater the danger that they will be perceived as an occupying force that is in Iraq to stay. In fact, now that the euphoria of `liberation` is abating, this perception seems to have started in earnest. There is no doubt that, if it continues, the Iraqi anger will turn into the engine that transforms ordinary complaints into hostile actions.
Paradoxically, if anything, it is the promise of democracy to the Iraqis that will prove most fatal to American policy. Speaking on the USS Abraham Lincoln last week, President George Bush declared that the `transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth the effort`.

Bush is right to raise the horizons of expectation of ordinary Iraqis to the ideals of liberal democracy, but the test of his intentions will come later if they, as many observers expect, produced a Shia-dominated government through the ballot box. This is highly likely, because the Shia constitute the majority in the country. And the president`s sternest test would come if the elected government then chose to bring Iraq closer to Iran politically. Would the American administration be willing to accept this as a legitimate outcome of their `liberation` of Iraq? Or would they try to subvert the will of the Iraqi people by declaring the elections null and void, just as the Algerian military, with French instigation, did to the Islamic Salvation Front in 1991, with all the consequent strife, loss of life and political instability that followed? Or would the US administration act pre-emptively by putting in place a political formula to curb the `excesses` of the democratic principle of one-person one-vote, thus running the risk of alienating the majority of Iraqis irredeemably?

In the short to the medium term, Iraq faces an uncertain future. The Shia of Iraq have started the ball rolling to convert their demographic majority into tangible political gains. Those who count among them boycotted the Nasiriyah conference last month, and declared that they would not take part in any deliberations over the shape of a future Iraqi government as long as the Americans were in charge of the process.

Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia organisation, is still in Iran where his Badr Brigade of approximately 10,000 men was stationed before the fall of the Saddam regime. The Americans gave him permission to enter Iraq recently, but he refused because of their insistence that he did so through Kuwait.

Al-Hakim knows what he is doing: he is signalling to the Americans where his political allegiances lie, which must be worrying to Washington. His decision has nothing to do with the Kuwaitis, who stood by him during the last decade, but with the calculation that those who come politically close to the Americans at this stage in Iraqi history will end up as the firewood for any political blaze in the future. Recognising this mood, even Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress opposition group, has started to distance himself from any organic alliance with the Americans, although nobody believes him. In Newsweek magazine recently, he is quoted to have said: `Anyone who thinks that America can rule Iraq is sadly mistaken. I`m very happy to have US support, but I certainly don`t want to be a candidate imposed by America.`


Support for Iran among the Shia is expressed obliquely in street protests. In the city of al-Kut, in eastern Iraq, Shias have called on the coalition to expel the Mujahidi Khalq, an anti-Iranian military organisation to which Saddam offered sanctuary. In fact, the Iranians attacked their bases in Iraq, with Iraqi Shia help, last week. The political message from the Shia is clear: `We will not tolerate anything that undermines the stability of the Islamic regime in Tehran, our main strategic ally.`

The Shia of Baghdad have proved to be the best organised group in the city. They have renamed Saddam City, where over a million of them live, Al-Sadr City in honour of one of their religious leaders who was murdered by the Saddam regime. They have proved effective at providing their people with security and some basic services. They have protected their local hospitals and demanded that all stolen goods be returned to the mosques to allow these goods to be reclaimed by their rightful owners. They have also demanded that the Shia of Iraq submit to the will of their religious leaders in the famous howzas (religious seminaries).

The Najaf Howza, under Moktada al-Sadr, has exploited its historical pre-eminence in Iraq to ask for an Islamic government. In this, it is joined by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This confidence in the Shia world has reverberated outside the borders of Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, 450 Shia activists presented Crown Prince Abdullah with a petition in which they demanded formal recognition, institutional representation and full employment rights. This unprecedented action would have been impossible a few months ago.

The Shia of Iraq are committed to achieve their aims through the ballot box. This is their preferred option. To this effect, they have started to organise on the ground. They know they can achieve their political objectives in any free and fair elections, but it is unlikely that the Americans would tolerate such a result. Should this happen, the Shia would resort to militancy to impose their will or, as they are bound to see it, to restore the power they had been illegitimately denied. A bloody confrontation with the Americans and their Iraqi allies would ensue.

Contrary to conventional wisdom in the West, not all Islamic movements prefer the route of militancy. Some are in fact capable of forming working democracies, although these may not conform to the standards of Western democracies. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a successful example of this kind. The Shia of Iraq may choose to emulate this example. Denying them this democratic right would be a sure way of stoking the militant fires that fundamentalist movements can ferociously ignite.


Professor Yasir Suleiman is director of the Institute For The Study Of The Arab World And Islam at the University of Edinburgh

[Joerver]

During his fifth year as a guardsman, Bush`s records show no sign he appeared for duty.

May 24, 1972: Bush, who has moved to Alabama to work on a US Senate race, gets permission to serve with a reserve unit in Alabama. But headquarters decided Bush must serve with a more active unit.
Sept. 5, 1972: Bush is granted permission to do his Guard duty at the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery. But Bush`s record shows no evidence he did the duty, and the unit commander says he never showed up.
November 1972 to April 30, 1973: Bush returns to Houston, but apparently not to his Air Force unit.
May 2, 1973: The two lieutenant colonels in charge of Bush`s unit in Houston cannot rate him for the prior 12 months, saying he has not been at the unit in that period.

Under Air National Guard rules at the time, guardsmen who missed duty could be reported to their Selective Service Board and inducted into the Army as draftees." --Boston Globe, 5/23/00

Bush Suspended From Flying For Failure To Take Medical Exam, Including Drug Test

"THE Republican frontrunner for the White House, George W Bush, was suspended from flying as a young pilot for failing to take a medical examination that included a drug test.

"Documents obtained by The Sunday Times [UK] reveal that in August 1972, as a 26-year-old subaltern in the Air National Guard, Bush was grounded for failing to "accomplish" an annual medical that would have indicated whether he was taking drugs....While he has consistently admitted to a "misspent youth", Bush has evaded questions about cocaine or other drug use, implying only that he has not taken illegal substances since 1974, the year after he left the Air National Guard....

"Bush was not required to face drug tests when he first entered the reserve unit as a Yale graduate in 1968. It was only at the end of 1971 that the US Air Force, facing a backlash against drug-fuelled escapades in Vietnam, introduced a screening policy. In April 1972 the Pentagon implemented a drug-abuse testing programme that required officers on "extended active duty", including reservists such as Bush, to undergo at least one random drug test every year. The annual medical exam that year included a routine analysis of urine, a close examination of the nasal cavities and specific questions about drugs....

"Bush was said to have been unable to take the medical because he was in Alabama while his doctor was in Houston. [Last week] his campaign official, however, said Bush was aware that he would be suspended for missing his medical as soon as he left Houston because the air force was unable to process his new status before the August deadline for the test. "It was just a question of following the bureaucratic procedure of the time," he said. "He knew the suspension would have to take place."

"William Turnipseed, a retired general who commanded the Alabama unit at the time, said Bush never appeared for duty. Two commanders at Ellington air force base in Houston said in his record they were unable to perform his annual evaluation covering the year from May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973. "Lt Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report," they wrote.

"...Chris Lapetina, a former marine and Democratic political consultant, said controversy about the medical exam could hurt Bush`s chances among several voting blocks, including pensioners and veterans. Many servicemen would be upset if they thought a possible future president had avoided an obligatory military examination that included a drug test, he said. `When someone doesn`t take a physical in the military there`s got to be very good reason," Lapetina said. "It looks like he made a decision not to take it because the alternative was unpalatable.` " --Sunday Times (UK), 6/17/00

Mehr hier:
http://www.awolbush.com/index.html

[Joerver]

Hier die ganze Geschichte, Bush hat sich durch Beziehungen bei der Texas Air National Guard (AWOL) für 6 Jahre verpflichtet, um nicht nach Vietnam zu müssen, damals gab es in den USA noch die Wehrpflicht. Mai 68 wurde er eingezogen und hat auch seinen Dienst bis Anfang 72 wahrgenommen. Für die letzten 2 Jahre wurde er nicht mehr gesehen. Ab April 72 hat das Pentagon einen obligatorischen Drogen Test eingeführt, diesen hat Bush niemals mitgemacht.
Später hat er behauptet nach seiner Zeit bei der AWOL keine Drogen mehr genommen zu haben.
Während der ersten Jahre hat er auch geflogen und soll ein guter Pilot gewesen sein.

Yeah, the mainstream media have really kept a lid on this one. We wouldn`t know anything about Bush going AWOL if it hadn`t been for that obscure underground newspaper the Boston Globe, which broke the story nationally in May 2000. But you`re right that coverage has been pretty thin. A few months after the 2000 election, former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala said he`d done a Nexis search and found 13,641 stories about Clinton`s alleged draft dodging versus 49 about George W. Bush`s military record. Why the disparity? We`ll get to that. First the basics: Yes, it`s true, Bush didn`t report to his guard unit for an extended period--17 months, by one account. It wasn`t considered that serious an offense at the time, and if circumstances were different now I`d be inclined to write it off as youthful irresponsibility. However, given the none-too-subtle suggestion by the Bush administration that opponents of our Iraqi excursion lack martial valor, I have to say: You guys should talk.

Here`s the story as generally agreed upon: In January 1968, with the Vietnam war in full swing, Bush was due to graduate from Yale. Knowing he`d soon be eligible for the draft, he took an air force officers` test hoping to secure a billet with the Texas Air National Guard, which would allow him to do his military service at home. Bush didn`t do particularly well on the test--on the pilot aptitude section, he scored in the 25th percentile, the lowest possible passing grade. But Bush`s father, George H.W., was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, and strings were pulled. The younger Bush vaulted to the head of a long waiting list--a year and a half long, by some estimates--and in May of `68 he was inducted into the guard.

By all accounts Bush was an excellent pilot, but apparently his enthusiasm cooled. In 1972, four years into his six-year guard commitment, he was asked to work for the campaign of Bush family friend Winton Blount, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. In May Bush requested a transfer to an Alabama Air National Guard unit with no planes and minimal duties. Bush`s immediate superiors approved the transfer, but higher-ups said no. The matter was delayed for months. In August Bush missed his annual flight physical and was grounded. (Some have speculated that he was worried about failing a drug test--the Pentagon had instituted random screening in April.) In September he was ordered to report to a different unit of the Alabama guard, the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Bush says he did so, but his nominal superiors say they never saw the guy, there`s no documentation he ever showed up, and not one of the six or seven hundred soldiers then in the unit has stepped forward to corroborate Bush`s story.

After the November election Bush returned to Texas, but apparently didn`t notify his old Texas guard unit for quite a while, if ever. The Boston Globe initially reported that he started putting in some serious duty time in May, June, and July of 1973 to make up for what he`d missed. But according to a piece in the New Republic, there`s no evidence Bush did even that. Whatever the case, even though his superiors knew he`d blown off his duties, they never disciplined him. (No one`s ever been shot at dawn for missing a weekend guard drill, but policy at the time was to put shirkers on active duty.) Indeed, when Bush decided to go to business school at Harvard in the fall of 1973, he requested and got an honorable discharge--eight months before his service was scheduled to end.

Bush`s enemies say all this proves he was a cowardly deserter. Nonsense. He was a pampered rich kid who took advantage. Why wasn`t he called on it in a serious way during the 2000 election? Probably because Democrats figured they`d get Clinton`s draft-dodging thing thrown back at them. Not that it matters. If history judges Bush harshly--and it probably will--it won`t be for screwing up as a young smart aleck, but for getting us into this damn fool war.

--CECIL ADAMS

[Joerver]

Boy, 14, killed in Basra army incident
Ewen MacAskill in Baghdad
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

The army is investigating the shooting dead of a 14-year-old Iraqi boy in Basra yesterday, reportedly by a British soldier.

The boy was playing and laughing with a soldier near a school used by troops from the Queen`s Dragoon Guards, according to BBC correspondent Jane Peel. The Ministry of Defence said last night there had been "a tragic incident involving a British soldier which is being investigated by the Royal Military Police".

The BBC, on its Ceefax service, reported that the boy, Ali Salim, was shot in a suburb of the southern Iraqi city near a school used by troops of the dragoon guards. The MoD spokesman could not confirm whether the boy had been shot by a British soldier, but said there had been a "shooting incident" and a boy had died. "We won`t know how the incident occurred until the investigation has been completed," he said.

Captain Crispian Cuss, a British army spokesman in Basra, said initial inquiries showed the incident was "in no way malicious". He said: "It appears to have been a very unfortunate accident rather than anything else."

The shooting came as the joint US-British force in Iraq appeared to be putting itself on a collision course with some of the most powerful groupings in the country by trying to impose its own western-style brand of government. The Americans and British have been hosting a meeting at a hotel in Baghdad with representatives of the five main Iraqi exile groups who met in London before the war, including the Pentagon`s choice to lead Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi.

But the meeting, to put together a blueprint for post-Saddam government, has angered Iraqi religious and political groups from inside the country, who complain of being marginalised or excluded.

Abdul Karim al-Anizi, spokesman for al-Dawa, one of the Islamist parties which enjoyed popular support before being suppressed by Saddam Hussein, said: "This coming government will fall because it does not have the support of Iraqis." He said opposition parties excluded from the process, such as al-Dawa, were holding their own talks about creating a popular front. The blueprint being drawn up in the Babel hotel is for a western-style democracy in a secular, rather than Islamist, state, which will have a free-market economy in which the dollar will be the main currency for at least the next two years. It includes:

· A conference in Baghdad to choose a provisional government. The conference will choose a cabinet of about 25, who will select a prime minister. There will also be a president.

· A census will be held to determine those eligible to vote, including any of the 4 million exiles wishing to return.

· An election will be held in about two years.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Taking over the oil industry
Los Angeles Times
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

A retired American oilman, an Iraqi expatriate and a Baghdad insider have been named to try to reconcile potentially conflicting priorities in the postwar energy industry.

But Valerie Marcel, a Middle East oil specialist at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said: "There`s a deep concern about how things will turn out if America tries to impose its values and its ideas on the management of Iraq`s oil industry."

The former Shell chief executive Philip Carroll and former Iraqi oil marketing chief Fadhil Othman become chairman and vice-chairman respectively of an advisory board to oversee Iraq`s oil industry until a new government is in place.

Thamir Ghadhban, who was director of planning at Iraq`s oil ministry, will serve as chief executive officer of an interim oil industry management team.

· Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

The world won`t forgive or forget
A vast global majority opposed the war - and nothing has changed

Peter Preston
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

So that`s all right, then? George W proclaims the fighting over; Tony Blair shifts his adjectives of mass persuasion to the home front; house-trained local mandarins begin talking about consensuses restored, bridges rebuilt. Time to move on. We must give a lead. But why is nobody following?

The assumption - the American and British governments` assumption - is that, as always, facts have to be faced. It isn`t any longer a question of whether Saddam should be deposed. He and his boys are history. Those who doubted or denounced us are therefore living in a particularly futile version of the past. We (famous words) are where we are.

But I keep remembering where I was just before the war started and just after it finished. Before was a meeting of editors (not diplomats or politicians) from the 34 Commonwealth countries. After was a meeting in Kazakhstan for 200 or so journalists from all over Europe, Asia and the Middle East. A sampling of Barbadians, Fijians, Zambians, Russians, Pakistanis, Italians, Danes, Azerbaijanis - and many more. Opinion formers, all of them. And the fascinating thing is that nothing has changed. Victory in the desert hasn`t made a blind bit of difference.

The rest of the world is neither forgiving nor forgetting. Its rulers may, or may not, Mr Putin, be trying to change the record, but the people they rule have elephants` memories and a view which mere outcomes do not affect. They proved nothing down the barrel of their own guns.

Why, in the beginning, were the Commonwealth editors so shocked? Because they didn`t like being pushed around. Because the United Nations is their link to central control, not a drag anchor on superpower ambition. Because (in too many cases, at least) they also felt vulnerable. If one dodgy regime can suffer American wrath, then what about the dodgy government I am stuck with at home?

Such views do not change with Jay Garner. On the contrary, they`re reinforced. The ease of victory, however predictable, makes military inferiority all the more obvious. The swaggering over Syria implicitly asks: who`s next? The UN seems even more of a back number than it did in March. Why should one simple act of conquest make anything different?

And those gathered a few days ago in Almaty, with the Gobi desert just over the next mountain range, felt exactly the same. Here comes democracy? Not where we live, cried the Pakistanis. Not very noticeably to central Asia, muttered many Kazakhs. (Did you know that Turkmenistan, one of the most ludicrous, barbarous states on earth, had joined the coalition of the willing?) The Europeans - even from countries whose leaders had signed up for the war - looked glum or angry. Those few Americans in sight declined to play Rumsfeld`s greatest hits. I was treated kindly, almost pityingly. There, there ... we know it wasn`t your fault. But what in the world did your Mr Blair think he was doing?

Now, perhaps the mandarins are right. Perhaps, over time, the Chiracs and the Schröders will have to crawl back into line. Putin`s Russian-language press didn`t go a bundle on his lecture to Blair. Spin breaks every which way. Money talks. But sullen acquiescence at the top does not mean parallel acceptance down below. On the contrary, those missing weapons of mass destruction open fresh wounds of mistrust. Did Washington and London just make it all up? Did they play the UN for suckers? Did they hang the awful Saddam out to dry with a ruthlessness even he might envy? If they did, then indeed we, or any of our regional allies, could be next. What price Blair`s higher morality now? Whenever Bush sneezes, we could all catch a cold.

Some of these perceptions, perhaps, are a nuance or two short of the full insight. They can be dismissed, in mandarin-speak, as naive, simplistic, only part of a much bigger picture. They won`t be what governments themselves say in a year`s time. Yet that does not make them matters of insignificance. Absolutely, I think, the reverse.

The Russians I talked to didn`t just agree with Putin - they were way ahead of him. The Germans didn`t just agree with Schröder - they were far in the lead. The Pakistanis` sincere despair for their country was manifest.

We still assume that leaders lead and people follow. We forget that sometimes it`s the other way round, that maybe Schröder and Chirac did what they had to do; that publics have their fixed opinion, too.

There was no war bounce for Labour when local Britain voted last week. And why should there be, you ask? What`s Baghdad got to do with holes in the road in Brum? But it is not fanciful to discern a rather more subtle connection.

Scotland said it best. Labour, SNP, Lib Dem? None of the above if at all possible. Bring on the Greens and the red Sheridans. Bring on the single issue mavericks. There was absolutely no smack of higher authority here. Voters, when they turned out, brusquely declined to conform. Adjectives slid off them as from duck feathers.

And that may be the final, wider lesson of this war. We groundlings, down below, we Zambians and Azerbaijanis, didn`t see the case to begin with. We scornfully reject it now. Whatever those guys in the presidential palaces or state houses have to say, we know the truth - and it both alarms and disgusts us. Bush? That`s a shudder; but in only six years at most he`ll be history. Britain? That`s a longer shrug. Britain chose what it thought it had to choose, what it will probably always choose. Britain defined itself for the 21st century. And we from the rest of the world, with our elephants` memories? We shall remember.

[e-mail]


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Die Daten der Europäer haben sie wohl schon.

How US paid for secret files on foreign citizens
Latin Americans furious in row over selling personal data

Oliver Burkeman in Washington and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

Governments across Latin America have launched investigations after revelations that a US company is obtaining extensive personal data about millions of citizens in the region and selling it to the Bush administration.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) last year in return for its data, which includes Mexico`s entire list of voters, including dates of birth and passport numbers, as well as Colombia`s citizen identification database.

Literature that ChoicePoint produced to advertise its services to the department of justice promised, in the case of Colombia, a "national registry file of all adult Colombians, including date and place of birth, gender, parentage, physical description, marital status, passport number, and registered profession".

It is illegal under Colombian law for government agencies to disclose such information, except in response to a request for data on a named individual.

One lawyer following the investigations described Mexican officials as "incensed", and experts said the revelations threatened to destroy fragile public trust in the country`s electoral institutions. In Nicaragua, police have raided two firms believed to have provided the data, and the Costa Rican government has also begun an inquiry. Other countries involved include Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina and Venezuela.

The identities of the firms supplying ChoicePoint with the data are unknown, since the company says its contracts ensure confidentiality, although it insists all the information was obtained legally.

Exactly how the US government is using the data is also unknown. But since it focuses so heavily on Latin America, it would appear to have vast potential for those tracking down illegal immigrants. It could perhaps also be used by US drugs enforcement agents in the region.

ChoicePoint, though, which is based near Atlanta, is far from unfamiliar to observers of the Florida vote of 2000 that decided the US presidency in George Bush`s favour. Its subsidiary Database Technologies was hired by the state to overhaul its electoral registration lists - and ended up wrongly leading to the disenfranchising of thousands of voters, whose votes might have led to a different result.

Investigations in 2000 and 2001 by the Observer and the BBC`s Newsnight programme concluded that thousands of voters had been removed from the lists on the grounds that DBT said they had committed felonies, preventing them from voting. In fact, the firm had identified as "felons" thousands of people who were guilty of misdemeanours, such as, in at least one case, sleeping on a park bench.

Then it produced a revised list of 57,700 "possible felons", which turned out to be riddled with mistakes because it only looked for rough matches between names of criminals and names of voters. James Lee, a vice-president of ChoicePoint, told Newsnight that Florida, governed by Mr Bush`s brother Jeb, had made it clear that it "wanted there to be more names [on the list] than were actually verified as being a convicted felon". Mr Bush`s eventual majority in Florida was 537.

Since the election, ChoicePoint has been the beneficiary of a huge increase in the freedom of government agencies to gain access to personal data. The USA patriot act, passed after September 11, allows government investigators to gain access to more information on US citizens without a search warrant, and to see data on private emails with such a warrant but without a wiretap order. The act also means banks must make their databases accessible to firms such as ChoicePoint.

In Mexico, the president of the federal electoral institute, Jose Woldenberg, revealed that his investigators had talked to the Mexican company that said it paid a "third person" 400,000 pesos (£24,500) for a hard disk full of personal data drawn largely from the electoral roll. It sold this to ChoicePoint for just $250,000, indicating the huge profitability of ChoicePoint`s contracts - last year`s $11m payment was part of a five-year contract worth $67m.

"The companies had to know that it is forbidden to use the information in the electoral register for any other purpose than elections," said Julio Tellez, a specialist in Mexico`s information laws at the Tec de Monterrey University. "It is a federal crime to misuse the information, and they did that by selling it and putting it in the hands of a foreign government."

Mr Tellez said he believed that this makes the companies and the US government liable to prosecution.

The sale of information from the electoral register is particularly devastating in Mexico, because the electoral institute enjoyed a close to unique reputation for honesty and transparency in a country plagued by corruption.

"We feel betrayed. The IFE [federal electoral institute] was the only Mexican organisation we could trust," said Cesar Diaz, a Mexico City supermarket administrator whose feelings were echoed by many. "I mean, if we can`t trust them who can we believe in? I think it will have repercussions in the next elections."

Britain`s much stronger data-protection framework probably means ChoicePoint could not make similar wholesale purchases of databases from the UK, and a similar situation exists across the rest of the EU. But the Latin American states "don`t have data protection on the level of Europe", said Chris Hoofnagle, deputy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a Washington-based pressure group which obtained the purchasing and advertising documents.

ChoicePoint was taking advantage of those more relaxed laws to profit from the US`s "increasing reliance on private companies to obtain data on persons of interest to law enforcement", he said.

But the US government has shown itself eager to enhance the amount of data it can gather on people across the world, including those in the UK. In February, Washington announced that it would be seeking access to credit card details and other information on all travellers entering the US. Britain, too, is proposing laws which would give state agencies wide-ranging access to information regarding telephone and email use, though ministers insist their plans will not now include the content of such communications.

In a statement provided to the Guardian, ChoicePoint strongly denied breaking any laws and said it was cooperating fully with Mexican authorities. "All information collected by ChoicePoint on foreign citizens is obtained legally from public agencies or private vendors," the statement said.

The statement insisted that "ChoicePoint did not purchase election registry information and our vendor has verified that the information we purchased was not from the padron electoral [Mexico`s central registry of electors]". But that claim is called into question by the company`s advertising documents. Those documents, dated September 2001, explicitly boast that ChoicePoint can offer a "nationwide listing of all Mexican citizens registered to vote as of the 2000 general election - updated annually".

Asked how the US government is using the data, Greg Palmore, a spokesman for the bureau of immigration and customs, said it was helping to trace illegal immigrants but only if they were guilty of another crime. Asked to confirm whether the data was used by his bureau only to pursue criminals, he said: "Mainly."

ChoicePoint insists that it requires all its subcontractors to sign pledges that they are not breaking the law. But legal experts say that would offer it scant protection if the Latin American police inquiries were to result in others being convicted.

"If you know that a practice is actually illegal, you can`t immunise yourself" with a pledge, said Mr Hoofnagle. "There`s a strong principle in US law of being responsible for the actions of your agents."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Joerver]

Ein Schelm der Böses dabei denkt.

Firm in Florida election fiasco earns millions from files on foreigners
Oliver Burkeman in Washington and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained.

US government purchasing documents show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) from the department of justice last year to supply data - mainly on Latin Americans - that included names and addresses, occupations, dates of birth, passport numbers and "physical description". Even tax records and blood groups are reportedly included.

Nicaraguan police have raided two offices suspected of providing the information. The revelations threaten to shatter public trust in electoral institutions, especially in Mexico, where the government has begun an investigation.

The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company`s subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida`s voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes.

Legal experts in the US and Mexico said ChoicePoint could be liable for prosecution if those who supplied it with the personal information could be proven to have broken local laws. That raises the possibility that any person whose data was accessible to American officials could take legal action against the US government.

"Anybody who felt they were affected by this could take the US government to court," said Julio Tellez, an expert in Mexican information legislation at the Tec de Monterrey University. "We could all do it ... We are not prepared to sell our intimacies for a fistful of dollars."

How the US is using the information remains mysterious, although its focus on Latin America suggests obvious applications in targeting illegal immigrants. Whatever the reasons, its commitment to ChoicePoint is long-term: last year`s $11m payment was part of a contract worth $67m that runs until 2005.

ChoicePoint denied breaking any laws. "All information collected by ChoicePoint on foreign citizens is obtained legally from public agencies or private vendors," it said. It also denied purchasing "election registry information" from Mexico.



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Was ist mit den großen Experten, hat er Recht?

A little dollars and sense
Richard Adams
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

A variety of strategic reasons have been suggested for the US assault on Iraq, some plausible and others on the wilder fringes of speculation. One idea been popular in the twilight world of conspiracy theorists - alongside the notion that the Rothschilds secretly control the US central bank - is that the war was about protecting the US dollar`s international economic dominance.

On this view, the "real reason" for the war on Iraq was Saddam Hussein`s decision in 2000 to take Iraq`s oil revenues in euros rather than dollars. The invasion, so this argument goes, was to warn away other Opec member countries from doing the same.

One of the internet`s conspiracy theorists, William Clark, put it this way: "Although completely suppressed by the US media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking - it is an oil currency war." Sadly for the swivel-eyed conspirati, this "simple yet shocking" answer is completely wrong.

People who worry about the dollar`s international primacy are confused about how exactly currencies are used, as well as exaggerating by how much the US economy benefits from oil sales between, say, Kazakhstan and South Korea being denominated in dollars.

Yes, international oil trade is generally conducted in US dollars, as is much other trade in commodities and goods, and the dollar`s use in international transactions is larger than the US economy`s share of world trade. But, then, so is the Swiss franc`s share. All that tells you is that most companies and countries prefer to do business in some currencies (dollars, Swiss francs, euros) than others.

Open any reputable economics textbook and you will find a chapter on the role of money. They pretty much all say the same thing: money is a unit of account, a store of value and a medium of exchange. The US dollar is regarded a reliable store of value - in the same way that gold, sterling or Swiss francs are - because of the strength of the US economy and the stability of its institutional support.

But the "medium of exchange" and "unit of account" elements are just functions of liquidity and convenience. If South Korea buys oil from Kazakhstan by converting Korean won into US dollars, then Kazakhstan can either keep the payment in dollars or convert it into Kazakh tenge for domestic use. In any case, all that happens is a transfer from one bank account outside the US to another one.

For all three reasons of value, exchange and account, the world`s central banks tend to hold large proportions of their foreign exchange reserves in US dollars - in part because, as in the Kazakhstan example, that`s what they receive a lot of in the first place.

So what does the US gain from the dollar`s international role? In theory it means the US can borrow money more cheaply, receiving a lower interest rate for dollar-denomi nated loans or bonds than would otherwise be the case, because those dollars have to go somewhere. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that US interest rates would be higher if the dollar were not a widely held reserve currency - for many years Germany paid lower interest rates on its bonds than the US, despite the German mark not being internationally as popular.

The only tangible benefit comes from forgone interest that would have been paid on US currency - actual notes - held outside the US. According to the Federal Reserve, about $300bn in hard cash circulates outside the boundaries of the US, with much of it held by criminals and black-economy participants.

The US economy does gain a benefit from this, but it is only a tiny benefit. If this hoard were kept in interest-bearing assets, the US economy would be paying out about $10bn a year in one way or another. Instead, the US economy is subsidised to that extent. In an economy the size of the US, that is chicken-feed - the equivalent of £25 a year to an average full-time wage earner in Britain.

Let`s be clear what this does not mean. Just because Kazakhstan has a US dollar-denominated bank account in London or Basle does not mean that it is in hock to the US, or that it is forced to buy American assets or exports. Nor is Kazakhstan subsidising the US economy, at least not to any appreciable extent.

It certainly does not mean the US somehow gets to import oil for "free" because it pays for it in dollars - it can`t simply print money to pay for barrels of black stuff. Or, to be theoretically correct, it could do so but not for long - the value of the US dollar would sink on foreign exchange markets as a result, and cost the US economy far more.

If Opec tomorrow switched to demanding that its contracts be paid in euros, would the US economy collapse, as some have predicted? No. The US economy has its own problems, but how Kuwait or Algeria gets paid for oil is not one of them. There are enough plausible, worrying justifications for why the US administration was so determined to invade Iraq without the US dollar being one of them.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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May 1, 2003
A Different Approach for the 2004 Campaign
Eighteen months from now, citizens will vote for president. If the 2004 campaign is anything like the last one, the election returns will mark the culmination of a depressing media spectacle.

For news watchers, the candidates and the coverage can be hard to take. Appearances on television are apt to become tedious, nauseating or worse. Campaign ads often push the limits of slick pandering. Journalists routinely seem fixated on "horseracing" the contest instead of reporting about the huge financial interests that candidates have served.

Media-driven campaigns now dominate every presidential race, badly skewed in favor of big money. And while millions of progressive-minded Americans are eager to have an impact on the political process, they often face what appears to be a choice between severe compromise and marginalization.

Remarkable transitions occur during presidential campaigns. People who are usually forthright can become evasive or even downright dishonest -- in public anyway -- when they declare themselves to be fervent supporters of a particular contender. Nuances and mixed assessments tend to go out the window.

Too often, "supporting" a candidate means lying about the candidate. Flaws rapidly disappear; virtues suddenly appear. Replicated at the grassroots, some kind of PR alchemy transforms longtime opportunists into profiles in courage and timeworn corporate flacks into champions of the common people.

This sort of dissembling was a big problem in 2000, when many left-leaning supporters of Al Gore ended up straining to portray the vice president as a steadfast foe of injustice. Under the perceived rules of the media game, they could not acknowledge Gore`s sleazy aspects or the reality that he had done a lot to help move the nation`s center of political gravity to the right. In countless media debates, Gore supporters tried to promote their standard-bearer as an implacable enemy of privilege -- notably unlike the actual candidate.

For a long time, many Democratic Party activists have privately bemoaned the party`s subservience to corporate power while publicly extolling Democratic leaders as exemplary. The rationale for this schizoid behavior is that it`s necessary for promoting a coherent media image.

There`s at least one big problem: For millions of potential voters, that tactic just doesn`t ring true. When they`re invited to go along with a political line that lauds nominated hacks as visionaries, a lot of people would rather not vote -- or would much prefer to cast ballots for a small-party candidate who has no chance of winning but whose campaigners at least seem interested in being truthful and building an honest movement.

But what if progressive supporters of the Democratic presidential nominee tried something different next year? What if they resolved to be candid for all the world -- including all the news media -- to hear? The contrast would be striking.

Old mode: "Candidate X is an inspiring leader."

New mode: "Candidate X is rather phony, but compared to President Bush he`s a knight in shining armor."

Old mode: "The record of Candidate X shows that he will return integrity to the White House."

New mode: "The record of Candidate X shows that he`s a craven servant of corporate America. But I`m going to vote from him because George W. Bush is even worse."

Old mode: "Candidate X will bring balance to U.S. foreign policy."

New mode: "Candidate X is a deplorable militarist, but Bush is even more dangerous."

The new mode might sound a bit strange, even bizarre. But that ought to tell us something -- when candor seems weird and preposterous claims seem quite normal.

Such an approach could attract many progressives who want to end the Bush presidency but also want to be truthful in the process. For those who find the Democratic nominee to be odious but not as odious as George W. Bush, a new option would emerge -- what might be called "denunciatory support."

Candor during an election year may seem like a radical departure with hazy consequences. Admittedly, it`s no guarantee of anything -- except more clarity and less obfuscation in American politics.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Solomon writes a syndicated column on media and politics. He is co-author (with Reese Erlich) of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn`t Tell You," published this year by Context Books.

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Open Ending

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7718
John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His current book is Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.


President George Bush`s grand entrance last night -- in flight gear, aboard a Navy shuttle plane, greeted by homesick troops aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln returning from the recent war -- set the stage for a ringing declaration of victory in Iraq. The media managers intensified the buildup by predicting that the president would declare the war over.

Instead, the president`s message was muddled. True, Bush said the United States has "prevailed" in Iraq, and he spoke of the lightning drive in which coalition forces captured Baghdad. But he went out of his way to frame the Iraq war as one battle "in a war on terror that still goes on."

The message was directed not so much at Americans as at others. "Let tyrants fear," he said. And then -- an evocation of John F. Kennedy`s inaugural address -- "all can know, friend and foe alike," that the United States will act. States that harbor or protect terrorists, "outlaw regimes," terrorist groups and individuals were all specifically called to account.

George Bush`s allusion to John Kennedy was not accidental. The Kennedy speech, or at least that passage, assured an international audience that the United States would remain steadfast in the Cold War.

There were at least three other historical allusions in Bush`s speech, and all of them were to war, not peace. Bush mentioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt`s Four Freedoms, a formula FDR advanced in January 1941. In the abstract, freedom of speech, of worship, from want and from fear make for a good social program -- but FDR in 1941 was stating the reasons why America would fight, and he was working up to enter World War II.

Aboard the Abraham Lincoln, Bush next referred to the Truman Doctrine, a classic 1947 commitment to prosecute the Cold War. In the same sentence Bush leaped to 1983, when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." There Reagan tossed a propaganda hand grenade as part of the same Cold War. Peace -- by treaty, negotiation or any other mutual process -- went unmentioned.

Bush`s last historical reference was likewise far from comforting. It came in a passage on the evolution of warfare. Bush declared that unlike World War II, when to unseat the warmongering leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan those nations had to be destroyed, today the United States possesses the power to unseat regimes without breaking nations. Aside from the fact that the price tag (for Iraqis) on the recent war has yet to be filled in, the posture was again one of threat and not conciliation.

President Bush sees that "we also have dangerous work to complete," and he spoke of task forces rousting terrorists from Afghanistan to the Philippines to the Horn of Africa. "The war on terror is not over," Bush declared, "Yet it is not endless.... We have seen the turning point."

These claims are simultaneously underwhelming and extravagant. First, Bush and his advisers insist on elevating individual and particular situations to the level of a general conflict. If there is ever to be an end to this war it will not come by finding more enemies to fight against.

Next, President Bush was never able to convince a significant number of Americans, much less the world as a whole, that Iraq figured as part of the terrorist struggle. A victory in Iraq, far from being a turning point in the war on terror, affects that conflict not at all. Al Qaeda is no weaker after Iraq than before. Indeed, we have yet to see how international cooperation against terrorism will be affected by the hostility the Bush administration`s pre-war arm-twisting evinced.

Third, Bush`s description of the achievement in Iraq is overblown. He entered the war aiming to get Saddam Hussein and seize Iraq`s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Weeks after the fighting -- long enough for the Abraham Lincoln to steam out of the battle zone and be within 24 hours of home -- the United States has neither captured Saddam Hussein nor found any weapons of mass destruction.

Amid social and political chaos, and now wartime destruction, it becomes clearer by the day that the main problems in Iraq will come now, after the guns have fallen silent. Whether Iraq will in the end be a victory remains to be seen. To describe it as a turning point is, at best, premature.

President Bush several times invoked the horror of 9/11 in this speech ostensibly about the Iraq war. He seeks to shift the ground, to retain some old notion of what this is all about, while pressing ahead with new threats.

Whatever happens next, this is George Bush`s war now.


Published: May 02 2003

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Rich Procter: `Over our dead bodies`
Date: Saturday, May 03 @ 09:35:45 EDT
Topic: Commander-In-Thief


By Rich Procter

Enough is enough. First we had to stare in horror as Bush and the Mayberry Machiavellis stymied the 9-11 investigation, covered up their shocking lack of `due diligence,` hijacked the tragedy for partisan political purposes, and then used it to gin up a public relations "war" based on bellicose assertions, faked evidence and endlessly repeated lies.

Then we winced in agony as Bush, the man who left his post in time of war (even when that post was 7,000 miles from actual combat) starred in a nauseating, taxpayer-financed "Top Gun" Disinfo-mercial, "thumbs-upping" the crowd, acting like he himself was a "wind in the hair, lead in the pencil" fighter pilot, rather than a passenger.

Now comes the news that Rove and the audacious campaign `04 team are going to pull off their most cynical maneuver yet - possibly the most cynical ploy in American political history.



They have decided to push back the date of the Republican National Convention in New York City to the first week of September. This violates the "gentlemen`s agreement" between the parties that both conventions will be over by Labor Day. More importantly, it announces to God and everybody that, yes, the Republicans are going to seize Ground Zero and use it as backdrop for Mr. Bush`s Re-Coronation Pageant.

I was hoping Bush and his pals would someday reveal some small shred of decency. I was hoping there`d be some line they wouldn`t cross - some sacred custom they wouldn`t defile. This proves how wrong I`ve been. Heck, they`re willing to lie to the world, to fake evidence and sacrifice Colin Powell`s credibility in front of the UN, to sacrifice over a hundred American troops (and thousands of Iraqis) for a bounce in the polls. They`re willing to slash school lunch programs so that billionaires won`t have to have their stock dividends taxed. They`re willing to send out their shock troops (Limbaugh, O`Reilly, ad nauseum) to question the patriotism of any American who dares challenge these insane policies, and to bless all this death and destruction by telling us that Mr. Bush is the "Chosen One," actually selected by God and the Lord Jesus Christ to lead this nation into a Holy War with the Heathen Hordes.

And now, at the place where 3,000 Americans died on one of the most tragic days in American history, George Bush - the man who swore to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" but doesn`t seem to remember that promise - he`s going to dress this charnel house with red, white and blue bunting, hire a band to play "Hail To The Chief" and put on his best earnest, "presidential" face while he tells America to ignore the economic devastation his reign has produced - he`s Mr. National Security.

I have a suggestion. I`d like to see a million Americans with signs outside the convention. I figure we`ll need at least a million to get on television - any less and the pundits will ignore us. I want all those signs to say the same thing:

OVER OUR DEAD BODIES.

It`s time we as Americans stand up and make ourselves heard. It`s time we tell Bush and Rove and his arrogant cronies that they`ve fatally over-stepped. Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to consecrate that ground, and to give the horrible carnage of that battle meaning - to provide a sacred purpose for America. Can you imagine Lincoln going back to that battlefield, setting up a Chautauqua Tent and using that ground to re-nominate himself in 1864? Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt giving a fireside chat on Normandy Beach, as a way to insure his re-election in 1944? Americans died here, people. They didn`t die so that George Bush would have a swell place to rally the faithful for four more years of Middle East wars, swelling deficits, tax cuts for billionaire campaign contributors, and environmental plunder.

OVER OUR DEAD BODIES

This is not an appeal to the Democrats. By letting this outrage fade after one news cycle, they`ve proven they`re so cowed by Bush and Rove`s awesome hubris they`re all but useless in this battle. Outraged Americans - led by outraged New Yorkers -- are going to have to ignite this firestorm.

Let this be the "tipping point" of rage toward Bush and Company. Every tin-pot dictator finally oversteps. Joe McCarthy`s popularity was in the 60th percentile when he finally went too far, smearing an innocent colleague of the Attorney for the Army, Joseph Welch during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Let me now paraphrase, for my own purpose, Mr. Welch`s famous words - the words that brought down McCarthy.

"Until this moment, Mr. President, I think I had never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do injury to our great nation by using Ground Zero, the site of this indescribable tragedy, for the naked, partisan political purpose of gaining re-election. I fear our nation shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness, for the heinous act of defiling the site of some much death, will have to come from someone other than me."

You really want to be re-elected that much, Mr. Bush? Then you`ll have to win the election...

OVER OUR DEAD BODIES.

See you in New York next September.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=11258

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8,8 Mio ohne Arbeit, 4,4 werden nicht mehr gezählt,weil sie in der begrenzten Zeit keine Arbeit gefunden haben.
13,2 Mio Arbeitslose. Das sind auch 10%.

washingtonpost.com
Jobs and the Jobless

Monday, May 5, 2003; Page A20


PRESIDENT BUSH used the latest unemployment figures to pitch his tax cut in California last week, but the grim new numbers must have caused palpitations back at the White House. The unemployment rate ticked up two-tenths of a percentage point, to 6 percent. April was the third straight month the economy had shed jobs -- although the rate of loss has thankfully slowed somewhat. As disturbing as the overall total of 8.8 million unemployed is, the more worrying fact is that almost 2 million have been without work for 27 weeks or more and that the average length of unemployment is almost 20 weeks, the highest since 1984. An additional 4.4 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force because they haven`t found work (and therefore aren`t counted among the unemployed), and 4.8 million are employed part time, not by choice but because they can`t find full-time work. The number of jobs is at its lowest point in 41 months.

For the political crew at the White House, the situation is becoming scarily reminiscent of the jobless recovery that helped defeat the president`s father. Thus, it`s not surprising that Mr. Bush is casting his tax cut as a job creation vehicle. The dismal new unemployment numbers, Mr. Bush said, "should say loud and clear . . . we need robust tax relief so our fellow citizens can find a job." One response to that battle cry is that the most disputed piece of Mr. Bush`s tax cut -- dividend tax relief -- is apt to do the least in creating jobs in the short term and that most of the president`s proposed tax cuts would occur after 2004, by which point the economy should have recovered.

Another is that if Mr. Bush is so worried about the unemployed -- and about boosting the economy -- the administration and its allies in Congress ought to support an extension of federal unemployment benefits, set to expire at the end of this month. Workers typically get about 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits, replacing on average 38 percent of wages. But in economic hard times, the federal government has stepped in to provide additional, temporary help after state benefits run out. During the recession of the early 1990s, for example, the federal program lasted 27 months and gave workers 20 weeks of extra benefits. The program that will expire this month was enacted 15 months ago, when unemployment was lower than it is today, and provides 13 weeks of extra benefits.

Congress has already extended the program once -- albeit belatedly, after it had expired -- and it ought to do so again. More than 43 percent of workers are exhausting their state benefits without finding work. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 1 million people are without unemployment benefits entirely, having run through both their state and federal benefits. That suggests it`s too soon to pull the plug. In addition to the question of compassion, unemployment insurance represents a particularly efficient form of economic stimulus, because it goes to people who will spend it immediately. A study by the financial research group Economy.com put unemployment spending at the top of the list of stimulative measures, estimating that each dollar spent on the program would boost the economy by $1.73; by contrast, reducing the taxation of dividends would return just 9 cents on the dollar, the study found. An argument against extending benefits is that it would reduce incentives for the unemployed to find work. But as Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress, when jobs are evaporating, the limits "almost surely ought to be eased to recognize the fact that people are unemployed because they couldn`t get a job, not because they don`t feel like working." Mr. Greenspan made his remarks in November. Since then, the economy has lost nearly half a million jobs.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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washingtonpost.com
. . . That`s Blatant Flimflam


By William Raspberry

Monday, May 5, 2003; Page A21


Do they think we`re stupid, or merely greedy?

Surely they don`t think any reasonably bright grade-school graduate believes that the way to pay for the Iraq war, create jobs and revive our sluggish economy is to short the Treasury several hundred billion dollars.

But if they know the logic of it doesn`t work, they must be counting on us to support the tax cut proposals in the hope that it will put a couple of bucks in our pockets, even if the effect on the country is disastrous.

I don`t mean this as a partisan attack on President Bush, or on Republicans in general, though the tax-cut-as-panacea crowd tends to be Republican. My condemnation applies also to those jellyfish congressional Democrats who are so loath to offend the greedy among us that they go blithely along with the tax-cutters. Do they think cutting taxes by amounts ranging from a half-trillion up will set the economy right? Or do they see it as the surest way to reelection?

The centerpiece of the president`s tax cut package is the elimination of the federal income tax on stock dividends. I leave it to people smarter than I am to figure out whether that`s the fair thing to do -- taxing dividends amounts to double taxation of corporate earnings, the argument goes. But what would it do for the economy?

Why, simply everything, backers of the plan insist.

Two months ago, Charles Schwab (yes, that Charles Schwab) wrote a Post op-ed piece that promoted dividend tax relief as an elixir that would "revive investor confidence in equity investing, restore an appropriate balance between the interests of corporate executives and shareholders and create new jobs." Its impact, said the founder and chairman of the investment company that bears his name, would boost the stock market by 10 percent to 15 percent in the short term and send "an immediate bolt of renewed confidence through our entire economy."

Well, my own little portfolio includes a few shares of Schwab stock, so I do wish the gentleman success.

But surely he knows what observers of the market have been saying for many, many months now: that the problem with the market is that too much money is "sitting on the sidelines." That`s the phrase they use to describe those people with investable cash who are not investing it.

How can giving these people more money to keep on the sidelines create jobs, restore the economy, pay for the war, etc., etc.?

I think it can`t. Maybe that`s why there`s so much congressional buzz about another proposal to reduce the top tax rate on dividends and on capital gains from stock sales to 15 percent. That proposal, by Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), would cost the Treasury less than the Bush plan and, perhaps as important, seem less blatantly calculated to help the rich. Hmm, maybe a tax cut isn`t such a bad idea if a little of it comes my way.

As my accountant will tell you, I`m no big fan of taxes. I try to pay as little as I can get away with, and I grumble about that. Show me how I can get away with significantly less and I`m listening.

But I don`t imagine that my finding a new way to save on taxes is doing anything for my country. The thousand bucks I might save isn`t going to create a job or tempt me into investing in any sector that already has me gun-shy.

For me, the issue is simple. America has bills to pay, and taxes are the wherewithal for paying them. I look askance at people who tell me we can reduce the wherewithal and miraculously end up with more money to pay our bills.

I get the same feeling I get when some hack smears paint (or excrement) on a canvas and tries to make me believe it is great art, when some joker plays the piano with boxing gloves (or throws odds and ends into its works) and wants me to call it music, or when some wiseguy utters a string of incomprehensible sounds and insists that I accept it as poetry.

I don`t like it when people try to flimflam me -- whether they do it by appealing to my greed or because they think I`m stupid.

This tax cut thing is flimflam. Won`t anybody stand up and say so?



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Die NYTimes veröffentlicht regelmäßig Spiegel Artikel, die in dieser Form, meiner Kenntnis nach, nicht im Spiegel erscheinen. Da dieser Artikel bald ersetzt wird, und ins Archiv von NYT nur gegen Cash reinzukommen ist, Sicherung diese Artikels.

April 21, 2003
The Masters of the World; The World Order of the Superpower
By DER SPIEGEL


ollowing the overthrow of the despot, Saddam Hussein, the Americans are claiming the right to reorder the world according to their beliefs. In the future, dictators will be challenged and rivals will be prevented from coming to power in the first place.

It was intended as a celebration of Europe. Last week on the Agora in Athens, the marketplace of the ancient world, at the base of the magnificent marble staircase leading up to the Acropolis, 25 heads of state signed a treaty to expand the European Union. Ten states, most of them former communist countries between the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, were entering into an alliance with their Western European partners. Most of these states had been separated from one another for decades by the Cold War.

In Athens, however, there was little evidence of the giddiness of reunification so evident after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And the only sign of godly participation was a pompous fireworks display in the sky above the Parthenon.

The speakers, in their 25 brief addresses, certainly highlighted the fact that they were creating a colossus: 450 million Europeans with a combined gross domestic product of 11.1 billion Euros, the world`s second-largest domestic market after the United States, a community without precedent in the history of mankind.

Even more significantly, all of this was taking place on a continent whose states had spent the bulk of the past few centuries at war with one another. Now they had bonded together by treaty, and had sealed their alliance on the anniversary of a revolutionary national constitution called democracy. Even those at the US Pentagon who view themselves as the world`s saviors could only dream of achieving such a domino effect of infectious liberalism: "We are no longer prepared to accept," mumbled German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, "that policy is made over our heads." On the high road to Washington? Moscow? Delhi? Beijing?

In fact, his apologists see the reunified, peaceful European empire as a model. "We have been able to overcome wars and rivalries," said German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, adding that it is Europe`s obligation "to use precisely this experience to develop a long-term outlook for a world characterized by security and cooperation."

The fact that the prevailing mood on this brilliant spring day in Athens was celebratory but not exactly jubilant was due to someone who was not even present: American President George W. Bush.

That`s because this is the man, the leader of a superpower that is preparing to restructure the world according to its own taste, who had just demonstrated to the Europeans how painfully incomplete and lacking in influence their highly-acclaimed political alliance still is. The dispute over America`s war in Iraq had split Europe`s governments into two camps that, notwithstanding their newfound proclamations of harmony, had until recently viewed each other with some mistrust.

Great Britain`s Tony Blair and Spain`s José María Aznar, leaders of the more bellicose European contingent, which, incidentally, also includes most of the Eastern European countries now entering the European Union, were cursed by angry demonstrators in Athens. France` Jacques Chirac and Germany`s Gerhard Schröder who, together with Russia`s Vladimir Putin, are disdainfully referred to in Washington as the "Axis of the Defeated," must have realized that their grand objective of a common European foreign and security policy remains an elusive goal. Fischer predicted that without radical reform within the EU and closer collaboration in matters of foreign policy, the Europeans will be forced, in future, to accept what others dictate, "just as Switzerland is now forced to accept the decisions we make within the EU."

The contrast could not be more striking. On one side, there is Europe. Although it views itself as a model, the image it projects to the remainder of the world is unconvincing. On the other side, there is the superpower USA, which, its ego once again boosted by a triumph of its weapons, wishes to impose a new order on the world.

In their armed conflict against Saddam Hussein, America`s optimists, who had demanded this war ever since the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, have seen their initial predictions confirmed, at least for now: Baghdad was captured quickly and the enemy`s forces simply evaporated under a hail of American artillery.

The popularity of the American president, who had placed his prestige and authority on the line, has risen to new heights on the home front. And America does not seem to be tired of war just yet. A sense of rage and a tremendous thirst for revenge gripped the country on September 11, 2001, and these feelings do not appear to have abated.

So who`s next? Would the United States, emboldened by its speedy victory in Iraq, march on to Damascus, if only to prevent America`s conservatives from accusing Bush Junior of making the same mistake his father once made, of having stopped a Gulf war too soon? The country the Assads have claimed as their family property fulfills the two key criteria that, according to the Bush doctrine, can lead to regime change through war: Syria is a sponsor of terrorist organizations and - presumably - has weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, the same applies to Iran, where the mullah-controlled regime is supposedly in the process of developing nuclear weapons. And North Korea has undoubtedly taken the top slot on the list of rogue states, ever since stone-age communist Kim Jong Il issued his one-of-a-kind challenge to the world`s superpower: He wants the United States to sign a non-aggression pact designed to protect him from suffering the same fate that has befallen Saddam.

When asked which country will be the next victim of America`s preventive war, Bush` answer was that "every situation requires its own response." This isn`t exactly reassuring. It seems quite apparent that he dreams of a new world order, one in which the strongest world power in human history will deploy its military forces wherever terrorists hide and dictators build secret weapons laboratories.

His predecessors have had the same aspirations, but during the 1990s their tendency was to apply US military might more haphazardly, motivated not as much by national interests as by heart-wrenching television images of faraway conflicts. America`s soldiers in Mogadishu and its jets over Baghdad embodied an overweight but ultimately good-natured gorilla, one that would only intervene when crises could not resolve themselves.

Bush is different. He takes it upon himself to implement his plans to the letter. Under his presidency, the military is in the process of transforming itself into a deadly viper than can attack anywhere with lightning speed. The accidental president, who had led a nebulous existence until September 11, 2001, is inadvertently turning into an imperial president. He is well on his way to fundamentally changing the world and America.

IMPOSING A NEW ORDER ON THIS BLOOD-SOAKED REGION IS ABOUT OIL AND A SHOW OF RESOLVE.

President Bush has waged war twice within 17 months. When he had the Taliban regime eliminated, the principal objective was the hunt for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. At the same time, however, the strategic advantage to be gained by installing military bases across Central Asia could certainly not be overlooked. In addition, just as in the Middle East, imperial ambitions in this corner of the world clearly go hand in hand with gaining a wealth of new oil resources.

As the man in the White House began to list more and more reasons for waging the most recent Gulf war, the world outside America was already filled with suspicion as to what his true motives could be. Although one objective is certainly to topple a dictatorship, a more overriding goal is to use Iraq as a launching pad for changing the status quo in the Middle East. Although weapons of mass destruction are certainly an issue, a greater issue is to set an example for other regimes in the neighborhood. And while oil is a factor, the true objective is to provide a show of resolve to reorder this rich, stagnating, blood-soaked region.

The world order Bush has in mind is based on the unfettered freedom of a superpower that treats war as a conventional political tool and prefers solo performances over any alliances. But is this the way to create more peace?

Until recently, the United States defined itself as a "superpower," a rather abstract term for an unquestionable superiority that extends beyond military might to include economic and cultural power. A superpower is an imperial power in the making. It has the potential to exercise its supremacy and to redefine its spheres of interest, but it does not necessarily take advantage of this potential.

However, Bush` America possesses a pronounced urge for hegemony. It has the missionary zeal that calls for spreading its ideas of order, good behavior and democracy to even the most explosive regions of the world, such as the Middle East. This is about the conviction that peace can be achieved through war.

Hegemony, spheres of interest, imperialism? Such terms were once used as expressions of the greatest possible contempt, particularly in the United States. They were reserved for the other, now-faded, superpower, the Soviet Union, because it had the Berlin Wall built in 1961, sent its tanks to Prague in 1968, and expanded its sphere of influence to other continents, such as Africa. But America always wanted to lead the realm of the good, the free West, democracies on all continents, until it reached a point in the Vietnamese jungle where its moral believability began to disintegrate.

But ever since the ignoble collapse of the Soviet empire, the days of imperialism were supposed to have been relegated to the past, once and for all. After all, a few other relics of glorious powers of the past are still in evidence today. Great Britain is currently seeking to regain the importance it has long since ceased to possess by declaring its unqualified solidarity with the United States. France is a textbook study in the phantom pains a country experiences when only fragments of its erstwhile colonial splendor remain.

It is no coincidence that Bush is currently being compared with another president who was of a similar persuasion and, for this reason, has been permanently underestimated: Harry Truman. He created the underpinnings of the UN and NATO, and was responsible for rebuilding and integrating Japan and Germany into the Western system of states, for the entire architecture on which US influence in the post-war era was principally based.

And now the early days have returned. The speeches that Condoleeza Rice and George W. Bush are giving these days resound with echoes of the post-war years. What happened then in Europe and Asia is now being reenacted in the Middle East. It, too, is to become a stage for democracy, and a heretofore isolated region of the world is to move closer to the West. Does this spell visa-free travel from Baghdad to Berlin?

However, there is a decisive difference between Truman and Bush. Bush questions every aspect of the institutions, alliances and treaties that have survived from the former world order. It seems that the internationalism of classic US foreign policy is being replaced by a rabid unilateralism. This approach could be effective in building an empire, but certainly not a world comprised of allies that expect to be taken seriously. In Washington, the phrase "a new empire" has long since lost its derogatory ring.

In contrast, Helmut Schmid, a dedicated atlanticist, wrote in the publication "Die Zeit": "The nationalist-egocentric influence of imperially-minded intellectuals on the strategy of the United States is currently greater than it has been since the end of the Second World War."

America is no longer pushing for coalitions and alliances. Washington is demanding allegiance. This claim is now so all-encompassing and pompous that American intellectuals have already complained that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld no longer speaks in prose, but instead proclaims his views on the state of the world in full lyrical verse: a modern-day Nero reciting poetry to the world.

Under Bush, the administration views as amoral the former national purpose of maintaining stability, one that was once touted as the premier objective of US foreign policy by such statesmen as Henry Kissinger, and it now considers destroying the status quo a necessity. According to the logic of Washington`s improvers of the world, any outcome of this policy, whatever it may be, will represent a moral step forward.

Of course, the old master of realpolitik is no friend of such adventures. Last Monday, Henry Kissinger, who is generally exceedingly reluctant to criticize the White House, published a cool summary of US foreign policy since September 11th: "The initial solidarity was weakened when the United States gave the challenge a military cast by declaring war on terrorism. And it disappeared with the elaboration of a strategy of preemption, which ran counter to established principles of sovereignty."

It goes without saying that Kissinger prefers the restoration of beleaguered alliances over any form of triumphant unilateralism: "A continuation of these trends would involve the progressive erosion of the Atlantic alliance - the centerpiece of American foreign policy for half a century."

DURING THE NINETIES, THE AMERICANS HAD NO TASTE FOR WAR. TURBO-CAPITALISM HELD THE PROMISE OF QUICK WEALTH.

A major shift is looming, one not unlike that which enveloped Europe after the discovery of the New World. At that time, Columbus may have represented the first American for many Europeans. He agreed whole-heartedly with his critics, who claimed that discovering the New World was quite easy - as easy as balancing an egg on a sharp object.

Legend has it that when no one was able to accomplish this feat, he said: "One simply has to know how to do it," and dropped the egg onto a table with such force that it remained in place. The fact that it was also cracked open disturbed neither America`s erstwhile discoverer nor today`s inventors of a new world order.

There have rarely been such crass contrasts between foreign policy goals on either side of the Atlantic, and it has rarely been so clear that the different sets of principles are based on the experiences of different generations. On the one side, there are the traditionalists, veterans from earlier administrations, including Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, but also the current secretary of state, Colin Powell. On the other side are the neo-conservative revolutionaries led by the president. The fact that this rift even passes through the Bush family, between the father and his eldest son, lends a special note to the controversy.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the communist empire imploded, George Herbert Walker Bush, an aloof, unimaginative but experienced president, was in the White House. Unlike François Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, he felt confident that things would take their course. In particular, he had confidence in Mikhail Gorbachov and Helmut Kohl. His essential condition was that the unified Germany remain a member of NATO. Due to a lack of imagination, this Bush America did not draw any consequences from the monopoly of power it had unexpectedly gained as a result of the demise of its ideological opponent. Everything remained essentially as it had been.

When Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, the United States, as a matter of course, formed a coalition with as many partners as possible, obtained the approval of the UN Security Council, and entered into a limited war: no regime change, no change in the status quo, no hegemonic ambitions, and no imperial objectives.

The junior Bush, whose political career had just suffered a blow after he had lost an election, was then a frequent visitor to the White House. He was still considered one of his father`s most important advisors.

At that time, his current radical aspirations to establish a global power were being cultivated elsewhere. In 1991, the Secretary of Defense, whose name happened to be Richard Cheney, instructed two of his most gifted strategists, whose names happened to be Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, to describe the political consequences to be drawn from the end of the Cold War. As all those involved, after many years, are now part of an administration that derives the guiding principles of its foreign policy from those ideas of the past, their pasts have taken on virtually legendary proportions. In one case, these ideas have even taken on the poetic title of "Cheney`s Song for America."

Powell`s ideas were moderate and pragmatic. In his view, the United States was the only remaining factor promoting order in the world, and it was to prepare itself for poorly controllable regional conflicts and unpredictable surprises. His belief was that America must maintain its monopoly as a single global power and, to do so, should strengthen such traditional alliances as NATO.

For the most part, Democrat Bill Clinton heeded such recommendations. He embarked on his presidency with neither substantial experience nor a particular interest in foreign policy. In Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999, he only intervened after considerable delay, and took pains to prevent his soldiers from being exposed to any risks. Clinton did not deploy any ground troops, only the air force. To achieve his goals, he involved the UN in one conflict and NATO in the other.

Wars were not popular in the America of the 1990s. The country was experiencing a boom that had lasted longer than ever before, and it was self-involved and intoxicated with the New Economy. Turbo-capitalism, which promised rapid growth, was more important than a unipolar moment in global politics. In the light of this collective mood, even Osama bin Laden`s first attacks only generating fleeting attention. When Clinton launched a barrage of cruise missiles against supposed Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, he was acting in concert with the nation.

At the time, Wolfowitz` more radical version of "Cheney`s Song for America" was making the rounds of the neo-conservatives, who were spending their time in exile from the administration working in think tanks not far from the White House. Wolfowitz also considered the fall of the socialist half of the world to be of fundamental importance. But his concept of a world order was filled with pessimism. At times, the United States came across as the good guy among many evildoers, and at times as a Gulliver fettered by treacherous Lilliputians.

The principal theme in his global plan is unilateralism, because, as Wolfowitz believes, treaties and institutions represent nothing but obstacles to a monopolistic global power`s ability to act. The key purpose of today`s military superiority is to intimidate potential competitors of tomorrow, be they China or the European Union.

The basic constellation in this neo-conservative manifesto was still that of the Cold War, but with an empty slot created by the fall of the "Evil Empire." This gap was only closed after September 11th. Communism was replaced by terrorism, and the Bush administration declared war on it.

Today, Wolfowitz is the most influential neo-conservative intellectual with a position in the administration. President Bush has gradually taken on his basic ideas. The right to wage preventive war and the need for unilateral action, presented for the first time in a speech at the military academy in West Point, were incorporated into what has long since become known as the Bush doctrine.

Even before the war in Iraq, National Security Advisor Rice made it clear that this represented a turning point in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet empire: "It is now possible, and even likely, that this transitional period is coming to an end. If this is indeed the case, we are not just living in a time of serious danger, but also one of tremendous opportunities."

Bush knew how to take advantage of this. California political scientist Chalmers Johnson blames Washington`s political elite for his contention that the "irreplaceable nation," as the Americans like to call themselves, are attempting to assume "the role of an ersatz Rome," and that America has become "arrogant, overbearing and self-confidant." 65 major military bases around the globe help guarantee the superpower`s global dominance.

But history teaches us that sooner or later global powers reach critical stages, particularly when they become imperially overextended. The Roman Empire began to break apart during a period when the Romans simultaneously had to control the Teutons, the Persians and other barbarians. Ultimately, the Habsburg Empire also failed because it overestimated itself and overextended itself.

In the 19th century, only the British Empire was aware of the limits of its power. London`s mission to civilize its colonies was based on its proud notions of "Rule Britannia," or, as Rudyard Kipling said, "the white man`s burden." But the British were satisfied to exploit their colonies, and were clever enough not to attempt to control the entire world.

The United States, however, in the assessment of British historian Eric Hobsbawm, "wants global dominance." This universal scholar believes that the Americans could prevail in any war today, "except against China," but also believes that Washington runs the risk of destroying itself: "The occupational disease of a superpower is its megalomania."

"EXPORTATION OF THE CAPITALIST-DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION CREATES AN ENDLESS SERIES OF MILITARY CONFLICTS."

For French historian Emmanuel Todd, whose "Obituary" of US superiority is at the top of European bestseller lists, Bush` America is no longer a beneficent hegemony, but a colossus on the verge of tipping over. In his opinion, the United States conjures up such insignificant enemies as Iraq "because it will do anything in its power to create the impression that it is the center of the world." This, Todd believes, creates fear, and fear creates diplomatic and political opposition, such as that faced by the US during the debates on Iraq in the Security Council.

Todd the augur predicts that the masters of the world will come into great difficulty as a consequence of the war in Iraq. The decline of the United States as the sole superpower will accelerate and, according to this optimistic Frenchman, an emancipated Europe will emerge as a counterweight: "America`s might will be broken."

The fact that the Lilliputians of this world, for fear of the new Gulliver, the United States, are also looking for new support has rarely become more apparent than in their reactions to America`s military campaign in Iraq. People throughout the region are embittered by the prospect of an "American Kalif" being in charge on the banks of the Tigris.

It is for this reason that the focus of discussion in what has become a cynical Middle East is not on prospects for peace, but rather on how states in the region can avert further military action by the new crusaders from the United States. In Teheran, where the government issued official proclamations of its sympathy for America in the wake of the attacks of September 11th, Washington`s policies have for the first time led to a closing of the ranks between the reformers surrounding President Mohammed Khatami and religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei`s hardline supporters.

In spite of official denials, there is considerable evidence that Teheran is continuing its efforts to build a nuclear bomb. The prevailing belief there, as in the presumed nuclear power North Korea, is that this represents the only guarantee against US attack. Incidentally, it is only now, after having been included, together with Iraq, in US President Bush` "Axis of Evil," that these two states have banded together. According to intelligence sources, Pyongyang is helping the Iranians in their efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Teheran is also attempting to further expand its strong ties with Russia, particularly in the military arena. Iran has intensified its dealings with nuclear power Pakistan (which is in turn involved in a highly explosive conflict with India) and, after years of cool relations, has renewed ties with Saudi Arabia.

Even the Saudi princes are concerned about US plans to restructure the region, since they are fully aware that they are the prime targets of such intentions. The US administration has distanced itself from Riyadh ever since it became known that 15 of the 19 terrorists of September 11th were from Saudi Arabia, and that the Saudi royal family protected itself from attacks for years by funding terrorists. Access to Iraqi oil reserves will enable the United States to become more independent of Saudi Arabian resources in the long term, and will increase Washington`s ability to exert pressure.

For this reason, ruling crown prince Abdullah, a cautious reformer, dispatched a secret delegation to Moscow to negotiate a military assistance pact. Two weeks ago, Abdullah also paid a visit to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, which resulted in the two leaders proclaiming "a common Arab initiative to protect Iraq from foreign control at all levels."

A new orientation is also emerging in Moscow. At one time, Russian President Vladimir Putin may have dreamed of Russia`s return to superpower status while under the protection of a strategic partnership with the United States. But now the man in charge at the Kremlin is increasingly turning his attention to Europe. It was certainly no coincidence that he chose to meet with like-minded allies Schröder and Chirac last Friday in the expensively restored "Europa" Hotel on Nevski Prospect in St. Petersburg.

Using rather old-fashioned diction, Putin referred to the US administration`s strategy as "exportation of the capitalist-democratic revolution," claiming that it would provoke "an endless series of military conflicts" and therefore create a "very dangerous situation." At the same time his defense minister, Sergey Ivanov, assured rogue nation North Korea that Russia is prepared to guarantee its "independence and territorial integrity."

But instead of relying on what may ultimately prove to be unreliable allies, the Muscovites are focusing again on their own military power. Following the outbreak of the Gulf war, Defense Minister Ivanov recalled the words of Czar Alexander III who, at the end of the 19th century, concluded that Russia had only "two friends in the world: the army and the navy."

The Chinese leadership is also alarmed over America`s show of force in the Gulf. It was already concerned after the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the United States has since gained a foothold in Central Asia and, in doing so, has fanned the flames of China`s fear of encirclement. In the opinion of the Chinese, by invading Iraq Washington has finally demonstrated that it is pursuing a "hegemonic strategy," and that it is prepared to disregard international law and ignore the UN.

As a veto power on the Security Council, the Chinese have thus preserved their claim to international influence. The communist party newspaper, the "Peoples` Daily," complained that "it looks as though the 21st century will remain an era of the politics of power."

For the Chinese, the new situation bears both political and economic risks. By gaining influence over the world`s largest oil reserves, America could keep its potential strategic rival China "on the ground," forecasts Su Jingxiang of the Beijing Research Institute for Modern International Relations. Experts estimate that by 2030 the Chinese will be forced to cover 84 percent of their oil needs through imports.

But the Middle Kingdom cannot afford a confrontation with the Americans, since the Peoples` Republic is still a long way from attaining the status of a rival to be taken seriously today. Without US intervention, Beijing would have trouble funding its reforms, and without exports of electronics and textile to the United States, it would be impossible to feed China`s millions of workers and farmers.

Of course, Beijing also expects something from the Americans in return for its temporary good behavior, such as US restraint with respect to China`s conflict with Taiwan. Beijing also hopes to gain contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. Most of all, party functionaries are speculating for a contract for the use of oil wells, thereby securing their country`s energy needs. "We wish," declared diplomat Wu Chunhua, "to participate enthusiastically in the reconstruction of Iraq."

WASHINGTON TREATS ITS ERSTWHILE PROTECTORATE EUROPE LIKE A TROUBLESOME COMPETITOR.

Nonetheless, old Europe has thus far voiced the greatest opposition to the Americans` new world order. French President Chirac, in particular, repeatedly chants his mantra of political beliefs: International stability, security and peace can only be guaranteed in a multipolar world, since the dominance of a single power, however well-intentioned it may be, will inevitably trigger resistance against it by the rest of the world. French diplomats believe, however, that the United States under Bush is acting on one principle, and that is: Our security, which is insecurity for everyone else.

In late March, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin gave a policy speech before the London Institute for Strategic Studies. The speech was conceived as a political and philosophical counterproposal to US neo-conservative theories, a deliberate "confrontation of two world views."

A hegemonic system, explained Villepin, will always be perceived as unjust. If, according to Villepin, the power systematically appears to prevail while disregarding the rule of law, and if the views of the people are not taken into account, the forces of chaos will be strengthened, anti-Western ideologies will blossom, and the war of cultures will ultimately become reality.

In the face of the American challenge, the Europeans even demonstrated a willingness to compromise on the issue of upcoming EU reforms at the special summit in Athens. Should the organization, in response to external pressures, succeed in its efforts to stabilize as a political union - and Fischer, upon taking office at the end of next year as Europe`s first foreign minister, might even be prepared to contribute to such a goal -, emancipation from the dominant power, the United States, would almost inevitably lead to alienation. After all, Washington is already treating Europe, its former protectorate, as a troublesome competitor.

For some time, the US has been pursuing an unfortunate policy of trying to create friction among European countries. Nevertheless, the Bush administration cannot depend on the permanent loyalty of the EU`s Eastern European newcomers. "They will conform and will not repeat certain mistakes," assures Expansion Commissioner Günter Verheugen, concluding with a threat: "After all, they know where their markets are and where their money will be coming from in the near future."

The United States has also long since lost its attraction to NATO, the transatlantic security alliance. The superpower is not pleased by the fact that its decisions must be approved by an organization soon to comprise 26 member states, as the principle of consensus still prevails within NATO. Why should the United States, as more and more US politicians are asking, wish to remain a European power when the European states that were once Warsaw Pact members now enjoy freedom and a higher standard of living within the enlarged EU?

In Brussels, concerns are now being raised that the Bush administration could also acquire a taste for economic application of those unilateral practices which - in its opinion - it so successfully applied in the realms of foreign policy and military action in Iraq. American Jeffrey Garten, Dean of the Yale School of Management, suspects that in the future his president will be less likely to view trade and international financial policy as a means of creating prosperity throughout the world, but rather as "instruments of an even bolder foreign policy," a policy that will especially impact the rebellious Europeans.

In fact, last week in Brussels a high-ranking diplomat from Washington made no secret of this intention. He made it clear to his European counterparts that the politics of the strong dollar have become a relic of the past, and that the United States would make a concerted effort to manipulate the dollar exchange rate in a downward direction. The intended consequence is that European exporters would lose market share in the United States as the exchange rate would bring up the cost of their products, while US corporations would improve their positions in Europe. With this approach, the Americans will reduce their large trade budget deficit, which has since grown to about five percent of the US gross national product. And it was certainly not without some derision that the emissary from the Potomac told his anti-war partners: "This will be Europe`s invisible contribution to our Iraq costs."

Even government economies are slowly beginning to fear the gap between America`s expenditures and its income, which has been bridged with Asian and European funds. As the US visitor conceded, financing structures are rapidly deteriorating, while the proportion of debt attributable to short-term debt is growing.

Foreign Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and his colleague Chris Patten, who is in charge of the Commission`s foreign policy, are already concerned that Washington may continue to insist on international treaties to guarantee free world trade. Even before the war in Iraq, Bush was outraged that an international court of arbitration in Geneva had declared that the protective tariffs for US steel manufacturers and subsidies for US exporters are illegal. Now he would be in position to put a stop to further liberalization of global trade. In fact, the Europeans have even provided him with an argument for a US shift to greater protectionism: They themselves absolutely refuse to give up their own farm subsidies.

To counteract possible barriers to trade, Lamy and Patten placed an ad in the "International Herald Tribune" calling for transatlantic cooperation, and have voiced their support of common transatlantic interests. In a foreboding tone, the ad states that both sides have the "responsibility of guaranteeing international leadership." After all, according to the ad, it was not too long ago that today`s dominant power, the United States, "emerged from the ribs of Europe."

Ultimately, the Europeans will be only be taken seriously in Washington if they are able to unify and truly succeed in considerably expanding a common European thread within their domestic foreign policies. This will be the principal task faced by the new European foreign minister, whose position was approved by the heads of state meeting in Athens. He is to be a member of the EU Commission and at the same time serve as the permanent chair of the council of EU foreign ministers. Moreover, if he introduces a foreign policy initiative together with the Commission, it will no longer be possible for a single member state to block such decisions with its veto. From now on, the majority rule will also apply in foreign policy. But without a respectable military power that can protect European interests worldwide, such a foreign policy will not prevail.

In any event, says Fischer, the Europeans have an opportunity to come closer together. "The shock of the Iraq war," says the foreign minister, can "also present an opportunity."

Whether America will immediately plunge itself into new adventures has not yet been decided. Initial demonstrations against the conquerors of Baghdad suggest that it could take some time before Saddam`s defeated realm receives a constitution that can serve as a model to its neighbors.

In addition, there is an unwritten rule that American presidents should not wage war during the year preceding their reelection. Does this also apply to Bush? He is constantly confronted with the fate of his father, whose popularity melted away as soon as the more mundane problems of the economy and the trade deficit caught up with him. As a wartime president, Bush Junior is also at the peak of his popularity. Should he risk this standing in Washington`s relentless political environment, or is a third war the alternative?

RALF BESTE, WINFRIED DIDZOLEIT, HANS HOYNG, OLAF IHLAU, UWE KLUßMANN, DIRK KOCH, ROMAIN LEICK, ANDREAS LORENZ, GERHARD SPÖRL



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Es gab einmal andere Zeiten und andere Präsidenten
Kennedy in Berlin 1962

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Der Artikel ist lesenswert. Weitere Stürme über den Atlantic sind zu erwarten.
But the chasm between them — less on the use of force than on the value of collective action — virtually guarantees more storms across the Atlantic.



WASHINGTON OUTLOOK

A Clash of Personal Freedom and Common Good
Ronald Brownstein

May 5, 2003

MADRID — Robert Kagan, the provocative neoconservative foreign policy thinker, would have been in paradise had he wandered past the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia museum here a few days ago.

In his celebrated new book, "Of Paradise and Power," Kagan argues that a split between Europe and the United States over war in Iraq was inevitable because Europe`s military weakness has encouraged it to favor law and negotiation over force — paradise over power — to resolve conflicts between nations.

Outside the Madrid museum, Kagan surely would have found proof in the tables where activists did a brisk business in T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with a bright red slogan that needed no translation: No a la Guerra! At one end of the bustling square, someone had spray-painted another antiwar slogan over a huge poster of Picasso`s "Guernica" — the monumental memorial to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War that hangs inside the museum.

Yet the sort of instinctive pacifism visible in the square seems only part of the answer for European hostility to the Iraq war, which appears undiminished despite the war`s swift and successful conclusion.

The deeper divide may be that Europe strikes a very different balance than the United States between individual freedom and the common good. In their domestic politics, Europeans have been more willing than Americans to accept limits on their individual choices to build a stronger common community. In direct extension, they are now more willing than President Bush to accept limits on national sovereignty to create a more cohesive international community.

The contrast is most vivid in the role of government. Europeans accept a welfare state that erects much greater barriers to the individual accumulation of wealth — through much higher top tax rates — but provides for a much more comprehensive social safety net than in America, through universal health care and generous subsidies for the unemployed.

Similarly, the constraints imposed by the Kyoto treaty to limit the emission of the gases associated with global warming appear much less onerous in European societies than in the United States because the treaty merely reinforces existing limits — both of natural resources and sheer space in urban areas — that encourage energy conservation and the use of smaller cars than Americans prefer.

In both examples, European societies reached a consensus that the common good sometimes requires individuals to accept greater limits on their own options — whether to amass wealth or to drive mammoth SUVs. The European support for international rules and institutions — from the European Union to the United Nations — extends that principle to govern the relations between nations. This is a point that Kagan, a conservative with a minimalist view of government, obscures.

Yet this core philosophy seems the real source of the European conflict with Bush. At home and abroad, Bush`s priority is the opposite: He consistently aims to reduce constraints on individual choice, even when that weakens collective institutions.

Bush`s tax cuts, for instance, put more income back in individual pockets, but at the price of eviscerating government revenues that support activities society can undertake only collectively — from providing a social safety net to building roads and schools.

On Social Security and Medicare, Bush`s vision is to give individuals increased choice — at the price of almost certainly diminishing the universal benefit guaranteed to all.

In health care, Bush strikes a similar balance. He wants to provide tax credits to help some of the 41.2 million uninsured Americans buy coverage on their own. Over time, that approach could erode the system of group insurance through employers that has allowed society to pool risk by yoking together the young and the old, the healthy and the sick. The likely result would be to increase individual freedom — at least for the young and healthy who probably could obtain better deals from insurers than they do now — at the price of eroding the collective guarantee of decent care for all of the insured.

Bush`s foreign policy vision follows the same principles. At its foundation is a desire to increase America`s freedom to pursue what he perceives as its national interests, even when that weakens collective institutions.

Bush cut the mold when he rejected the Kyoto treaty because he said it threatened the U.S. economy. Neither then, nor since, has his administration appeared much concerned about the effect of such an unequivocal American withdrawal on efforts to forge a common worldwide response to the problem of global warming.

Likewise, on Iraq. Bush was willing to engage the U.N., but only to a point. In the end, Bush was unwilling to accept a collective limit on his individual freedom to launch an invasion that he (and by then most U.S. leaders) believed essential to national security.

Probably no president would have accepted a U.N. veto of military force by that point. But few might have lost as little sleep as Bush about the damage his determination to preserve his freedom of action was imposing on the U.N. and the other traditional institutions of collective international action.

This, more than the imbalance of military power, may be the real difference between the sensitivities of Europe and the United States. In Europe, the dominant opinion sees a value in strengthening collective institutions — domestically and internationally — even when that constrains individual choices.

No U.S. president would strike the balance as far toward the collective as Europe; it`s not in America`s genes. But in his domestic and foreign policies, Bush seems especially distant from the European model; in many of his actions —from his emphasis on tax cuts to his rejection of a meaningful U.N. role even in postwar Iraq — he seems actively hostile to it.

After the war, Bush and European leaders may talk of reconciling. But the chasm between them — less on the use of force than on the value of collective action — virtually guarantees more storms across the Atlantic.


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Ronald Brownstein`s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times` Web site at http://www.latimes.com/brownstein

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Es wird gesagt, dass die LATimes die liberalste amerikanische Tageszeitung ist, obwohl sie zur Hearst-Group gehört.

NEWS ANALYSIS

U.S. Struggles in Quicksand of Iraq
Continuing disorder is fueling skepticism and allowing competing political forces to fill the void.
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer

May 5, 2003

BAGHDAD — Nearly a month after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, the reconstruction effort is struggling to gain visibility and credibility, crime is a continuing problem, Iraqis desperate for jobs and security are becoming angry and the transition to democracy promised by President Bush seems rife with risk.

The continuing disorder in a country accustomed to the repressive but absolute stability provided by Saddam Hussein is fueling at least a deep skepticism about U.S. intentions and at worst a dangerous anti-Americanism. As competing religious, tribal and territorial political forces move to fill the void, they threaten to divide the country rather than unite it.

Interviews with political analysts, exile figures and ordinary Iraqis throughout the country, coupled with developments on the ground, indicate that the United States` power to control Iraq and shape its future is increasingly threatened by the pervasive uncertainty.

On many fronts, U.S. officials appear to have been unprepared for what awaited them in Iraq, from mundane concerns such as how to cope with the lack of telephones to philosophical questions such as how to respond to the desire of many Iraqis for an Islamic state.

"The Americans and the British became obsessed with getting rid of Saddam; they thought he was responsible for all the catastrophes in Iraq," said Wamid Nadmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. "But they have opened a Pandora`s box."

U.S. officials say they are aware that time is of the essence.

"We`re moving as fast as we can," said Lewis Lucke, reconstruction chief for retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the interim administrator. "I don`t ever think it`s fast enough."

U.S. officials point out that electricity is on again in much of the country; oil is being pumped in the southern fields; and many police, fire and emergency workers have been given a $20 stipend and are returning to their jobs. There have been numerous local success stories as well, with individual U.S. military commanders helping to reopen schools and protecting public facilities from looters.

But often, U.S. officials seem stymied by the competing imperatives to get the country running while not appearing to be a dictatorial occupying force. Efforts to restore security, revive services, begin reconstruction and set up a new government are encountering difficulty.

For instance:

• The looting that began the day after Hussein`s regime fell has yet to end. On Sunday, a crowd stormed into one of the palaces recently left unprotected by U.S. soldiers. Without a true police force in place, the wide-scale stealing has spawned a culture of lawlessness. Gun markets flourish on Baghdad`s back streets, and armed robberies and carjackings have become common.

• Garner`s Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, responsible for running the country, has yet to make its presence felt. With mass media in the capital limited to two radio stations, the office hasn`t figured out how to communicate with the Iraqi people. There is no U.S. government office accessible to ordinary Iraqis.

• Many key contracts for rebuilding Iraq were not awarded until after the war started, and many contractors are waiting in hotels in Kuwait for the green light from the U.S. military that it is safe to enter the country.

• As the U.S. tries to help set up a new Iraqi government, the exile groups that many U.S. officials hoped Iraqis would rally around have won little popular support. Meanwhile, the organizations that are showing political strength — including some Shiite Muslim groups backed by Iran — are potentially hostile to U.S. aims.

Although the reconstruction effort is only weeks old, the Bush administration is already stressing that it would like to shift to an Iraqi-led government as soon as possible. At the same time, the lack of a visible American presence has sown doubts about U.S. intentions and frustrated ordinary Iraqis.

Few if any people here have even heard of Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, who has kept such a low profile as to be almost invisible. Last week he issued a proclamation saying he was the lead authority and forbidding looting, reprisals and criminal activity. But it was never widely distributed, and few people even know about it.

As for Garner and his staff, they are just beginning to communicate with the public. Their few reconstruction steps — including giving out money to returning workers — have yet to be applied evenly throughout Iraq.

In Nasiriyah on Sunday, teachers demanded to be paid, and the newly constituted city council threatened to quit unless salaries were distributed to all government workers.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell predicted Sunday that progress would accelerate. "As stability is gained throughout the country and security is obtained, and as the various ministries come back up online, more and more other sorts of organizations will come in," he said on NBC`s "Meet the Press." "U.N. organizations, nongovernmental organizations, lots of our friends and allies will be sending in peacekeeping forces So there is a transition taking place."

But Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed frustration Sunday over reconstruction in general and reports of infighting between the State Department and the Pentagon over rebuilding plans.

"This has had to proceed perhaps sort of on the run, but long ago in our committee we asked for people to give us some idea of how the organization might proceed, and the ideas were fairly sketchy," Lugar said on CNN`s "Late Edition." "They are far too sketchy now."

More than anywhere, it is on the political front that the U.S. faces problems. The country is a barely intact jigsaw puzzle of competing groups divided by religion, tribal affiliation and ethnicity.

Washington`s main entry to Iraq was via the exile groups it had sponsored in Britain and the United States. While those groups are organized and speak in the American idiom of democracy and governance, they have little support among the Iraqi public.

"They are the worst gamble the Americans could make," said Maher Abdullah, an anchor for the Al Jazeera satellite television channel who has followed Iraq for years. "Everybody`s image here is that they are CIA agents. Whether that`s true or false, it`s what people believe. Secondly, most of these guys have been away for years. They don`t know anything about the country, about people`s day-to-day priorities."

That skepticism was on display at Friday prayers in the heavily Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City. As more than 20,000 men prepared their prayer mats for services, Gaylan Tayr, a writer, stood with several friends and rattled off the names of the exile political groups supported by U.S. officials.

"These parties are all new, and we don`t know anything about them. They may be set up by the Americans, so how can we trust them? How can we vote for them?" he said.

As exile groups have sought to create power bases, some have sent signals that they make their own law. They have been traveling with heavily armed bodyguards and in some cases have appropriated homes and buildings for their own use.

A recent meeting of five exile leaders at a downtown Baghdad hotel looked like a scene out of "The Godfather, Part II." Snipers leaned out windows, and the pavement outside was lined with bodyguards who bristled with automatic weapons. A small group of U.S. troops, who escorted the heavily armed exiles to the hotel, was also on hand.

While U.S. officials have spoken repeatedly about the importance of indigenous Iraqi leaders, those who have broad recognition are primarily religious figures who, to varying degrees, support an Islamic government for Iraq. One of the first arrests made by U.S. forces in Baghdad was that of Sheik Mohammed Fartusi, a rising religious figure who is backed by the powerful Al Hawza movement, a Shiite Muslim group. It was unclear why he was detained.

Although the troops let him go within a few hours, the incident appalled many Shiites and raised Fartusi`s profile.

With the U.S. giving limited attention to any indigenous figures, exiles are increasingly confident that they will dominate the next phase of government in Iraq.

"The Americans have realized that the much-talked-about Iraqi leadership who was to emerge from within is largely mythical," said Zaab Sethna, a spokesman for Ahmad Chalabi`s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that has strong backing among some Pentagon officials and has received funding from the State Department. "That`s led them back to the Iraqi opposition, and they do see the Iraqi opposition as the nucleus for a new transitional government."

The Kurdish political parties, who have ruled northern Iraq as a de facto independent area outside of Hussein`s control since the early 1990s, also see little role for indigenous leaders. They have proposed that half the delegates at the National Assembly scheduled for the end of May to choose a transitional government be from exile organizations.

While U.S. attention is focused on this kind of political maneuvering, other groups with little if any allegiance to Washington are quietly gaining ground in Baghdad`s slums, the Shiite Muslim south of the country and Sunni Muslim tribal areas.

Rather than attempting to form political parties, these groups have made the strategic political decision to make themselves indispensable to their people.

Within 10 days of Baghdad`s fall, for instance, mosques began providing crucial services — including water distribution, garbage collection and security guards — that Americans have been unable to organize.

Religious leaders are asserting control over an increasing number of institutions. Walk into any clinic in the former Saddam City and someone will quickly introduce himself as an emissary from the Al Hawza movement. The Shiite Muslim organization, based in the holy city of Najaf, encompasses an array of well-funded charitable organizations. A number of Iraqis believe the group is funded in part by Iran. The group also has connections to a number of Muslim leaders, some with political ambitions.

So far, U.S. officials appear to have had little contact with Shiite groups inside Iraq. An exile Shiite group was added only recently to the inner circle of organizations with which the Americans are working.

Without involving Shiites, it is unlikely that the U.S. will be able to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, analysts say. Although Shiites are hardly monolithic in their views, they make up roughly 60% of the country.

"One day, the Americans will have to hold elections, and it`s clear the Shiites will sweep the polls," said Nadmi, the political scientist. "Americans are selective about the democracy they want. They want democracy that suits their interests and values."

The only potential countervailing force, analysts say, are the supporters of Hussein`s Baath Party who used to run the country. They know how to organize people, they have a political base and they have concrete administrative knowledge.

For the U.S., an alliance with the Baathists would be a double-edged sword. Without them, it would be hard to get the country running, but working with them would thrust the Americans right into the arms of the people they just ousted from power. It also would feed distrust among Iraqis at large about government agencies.

For the moment, U.S. officials are trying to have it both ways with the Baathists. To get the country`s electrical network, telephone system and ministries running again, U.S. officials are working with middle managers from the party. The Americans say that these bureaucrats are apolitical and that only the top Iraqi ministers were tainted by their links to Hussein.

Others, however, say the situation is not so clear-cut.

"We`ve made it very clear to Garner and the U.S. government that it`s a bad mistake to bring Baathists back into a position of power. That`s the fastest way to spawn anti-Americanism," said Sethna, the Iraqi National Congress spokesman. "The U.S. can`t tell the bad guys from the good guys, and there are many, many people who are tainted by the former regime and who were corrupt. And I don`t think the U.S. is even looking at that."

Compounding the problem is the fact that many contractors hired by the U.S. have yet to arrive in Iraq or are just setting up their operations.

North Carolina-based Research Triangle Institute was hired April 11 by the U.S. Agency for International Development to help create 180 local and provincial governments in Iraq. Under a contract worth as much as $167 million, one of RTI`s immediate tasks is to help identify "appropriate, legitimate" Iraqis to assume key government posts in villages and towns.

But the nonprofit group`s first representatives arrived in Baghdad only Wednesday. In their absence, people ranging from former Baathists to pro-Iranian spiritual leaders have assumed government positions.

In another case, DynCorp, a subsidiary of El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp., won a $150-million contract to train a new Iraqi police force. But the contract was awarded just two weeks ago, and the firm has yet to be allowed into the country because the U.S. military considers Iraq too dangerous for DynCorp staff to set up shop.

In the meantime, crime is rife and many businesses are afraid to open. The country feels stalled, and Americans are being blamed. Many Iraqis predict it will be difficult for Americans to improve things and break the cycle of dysfunction, let alone win popular support.

"The Americans promised us jobs, security and safety and none of those have materialized," said Abid Ali Kubaisi, a silk merchant in the Euphrates River town of Fallouja, who shut down his business for fear it would be pillaged.

"People who have no jobs are going to fight, they are going loot, and everyone here has their own weapons," he said.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Staff writers Mark Fineman and Michael Slackman in Baghdad, Megan Stack in Nasiriyah and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Weapons hunt coming up empty

May 5, 2003

BY PAULINE JELINEK


WASHINGTON--In the American hunt for Iraq`s banned weapons, drums of suspicious chemicals turn out to be crop pesticide; a cache of white powder is found to be explosives.

More than six weeks into the Iraq campaign, there has been a string of false alarms but no discovery of what the Bush administration said was its main justification for going to war--chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

``As someone who supported the war ... I wish they`d hurry up and find something,`` said John Pike, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.

But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday: ``I`m not frustrated at all`` by the lack of evidence so far.

A military official involved with the search teams said last week they are under ``intense pressure from Washington to come up with something.`` The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the teams are overwhelmed with work and looking forward to promised reinforcements.

``Clearly the administration has got to deliver the goods,`` said Charles Pena with the Washington-based Cato Institute.

And the United States will, President Bush and Cabinet officers insist.

``We`ll find them, and it`s just going to be a matter of time to do so,`` the president said.

``I`m absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there, and the evidence will be forthcoming,`` Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

But other administration officials privately have stopped promising that. Some now say that instead of finding weapons stockpiles, they might find nothing more than evidence that the program once existed.

``Politically, this could be a big problem,`` said Paul Keer of the Arms Control Association, a Washington disarmament group. ``If it turns out they ... exaggerated, people will say we attacked without justification.``

Before the war, administration officials did not just say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they also said they knew where some of them were.

In an unsuccessful bid for UN approval for the war, Powell showed the Security Council satellite photos and intelligence he said indicated weapons were being moved, and he named sites where he said chemical weapons were held.

``The intelligence community still stands behind that information. I do,`` he said Sunday.

In other developments Sunday in Iraq:

* Jessica Lynch reportedly has amnesia and can`t recall what happened to her when she was in Iraqi captivity. Fox News reported that investigators thought that she might reveal Iraqi war crimes. But Lynch, who is in a military hospital outside Washington, has "mentally blocked out the horrible things we strongly believe she went through," Fox quoted an official as saying.

* Police in Iraq`s capital returned to work in force, but there were few patrols on Baghdad`s lawless streets.

* Rumsfeld said it is ``an open question`` as to how many U.S. troops will remain in Iraq.

* U.S. soldiers explored one of Saddam Hussein`s most elaborate tunnel complexes, puzzled as to why the Iraqi leader built an entire oil refinery encased in rock.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/iraq/cst-nws-iraq05.html

[Joerver]

Wenn man in Californien hoch in den Norden fährt, fährt man in eins der bekanntes Hemp Anbaugebiete. Anfang der 90er hat der alte Bush im Humbold-County mit Sprühflugzeugen versucht die Hanf-Felder zu vernichten und die Bauern haben versucht mit ihren Flinten die Flugzeuge abzuschiessen. Wenn man heute durch Garberville fährt kann man in Läden mit `Hemp sold` und dem Hanfblatt ganz offiziel Hasch kaufen.

With pot and porn outstripping corn, America`s black economy is flying high
Illegal migrants provide the muscle for US black market

Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Friday May 2, 2003
The Guardian

Marijuana, pornography and illegal labour have created a hidden market in the United States which now accounts for as much as 10% of the American economy, according to a study. As a cash crop, marijuana is believed to have outstripped maize, and hardcore porn revenue is equal to Hollywood`s domestic box office takings.

Despite laws that punish marijuana cultivation more strictly than murder in some states, Americans spend more on illegal drugs than on cigarettes. And despite official disapproval of pornography, the US leads the world in export of explicit sex videos, according to Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labour in the American Black Market, by Eric Schlosser.

Although the official American economy has been suffering a downturn, the shadow economy is enjoying unprecedented levels of success, much in the way that the prohibition period fuelled the illegal markets in the 30s. Schlosser found that three specific industries accounted for a major portion of this boom.

No aspect of farming has grown faster in the US over the past three decades than marijuana, with one-third of the public over the age of 12 having smoked the drug.

While the nation`s largest legal cash crop, maize, produces about $19bn (£11.9bn) in revenue, "plausible" estimates for the value of marijuana crops reach $25bn. Steve White, a former coordinator for the US drug enforcement administration`s cannabis eradication programme, estimates that the drug is now the country`s largest cash crop.

Marijuana Belt


Schlosser writes: "Although popular stereotypes depict marijuana growers as ageing hippies in northern California or Hawaii, the majority of the marijuana now cultivated domestically is being grown in the nation`s mid-section - a swath running from the Appalachians west to the Great Plains. Throughout this Marijuana Belt drug fortunes are being made by farmers who often seem to have stepped from a page of the old Saturday Evening Post."

Some of the most expensive crops are grown indoors on the west coast using advanced scientific techniques but the American heartlands account for the largest volume. Some estimates suggest 3 million Americans grow marijuana, although mostly for their own or their friends` use, but between 100,000 and 200,000 are believed to do so for a living.

The laws against the drug are strict. There were 724,000 people arrested for marijuana offences in 2001 and about 50,000 are in prison. Commercial growers can serve sentences far longer than those for murder, but the high risks appear to have had little effect on production or availability: 89% of secondary school students surveyed indicated that they could easily obtain the drug.

The annual number of hardcore video rentals in the US has risen from 79m in 1985 to 759m in 2001. Hardcore pornography in the shape of videos, the internet, live sex acts and cable television is now estimated to generate around $10bn, roughly the same amount as Hollywood`s US box office receipts.

Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined. The industry has mushroomed since the 70s, when a federal study found that it was worth little more than $10m.

Now the US leads the world in pornography; about 211 new films are produced every week. Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and many of those in the trade are otherwise respectable citizens.

Nina Hartley, a porn star, told Schlosser: "You`d be surprised how many producers and manufacturers are Republicans."

The majority of women in the films earn about $400 a scene. At the moment, there is a surplus of women in California hoping to enter the industry.

The internet has provided a fresh and profitable outlet. In 1997 about 22,000 porn websites existed; the number is now closer to 300,000 and growing.

More than a million illegal farmworkers are estimated to be employed in the US, with the average worker being a 29-year-old from Mexico.

Surplus labour


The total number of illegal immigrants is estimated at about 8 million and many are being paid cash in a shadow economy.

Many live in primitive conditions: a survey in Soledad, in the heart of California`s agricultural territory, found that 1,500 of them, one-eighth of the town`s official population, were living in garages. There are mutual economic benefits.

"Migrant work in California has long absorbed Mexican surplus labour, while Mexico has in effect paid for the education, health care and retirement of California`s farmworkers," writes Schlosser. "Maintaining the current level of poverty among migrant farmworkers saves the average American household around $50 a year."

The advantages to the employer are clear, most notably in LA county, where an estimated 28% of workers are paid in cash.

Schlosser believes that the shadow economy will continue to thrive as long as marijuana and pornography remain illicit.

"A society that can punish a marijuana offender more severely than a murderer is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis," he concludes. "Black markets will always be with us. But they will recede in importance when the public morality is consistent with our private one. The underground is a good measure of the progress and the health of nations. When much is wrong, much needs to be hidden."

· Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labour in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser, published by Houghton Mifflin


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Carrier Pigeons
VIEW FROM THE LEFT
Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
Monday, May 5, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/sorensen/



Before you could become a Japanese marine, we were told, you had to prove you had killed either your mother or your father.

That`s how tough Japanese marines had to be during World War II.

We called them "Japs," and we believed that crap. We thought they all had buck teeth and diabolical grins.

We were naive, we World War II kids.

I was reminded of our naïveté last Thursday, when the press and a good part of America went gaga watching President George W. Bush turn an aircraft carrier into a show boat.

If ever there was a cheap publicity stunt (though not cheap in dollars), Bush`s Thursday grandstanding was it.

His flight onto the deck of Carrier Vessel Nuclear 72, better known as the USS Abraham Lincoln, was designed to win favorable headlines the world over. It worked. The suckers bought it, hook, line and sinker.

Politicians and carnival workers, as well as auto salesmen and auto mechanics, play on our gullibility.

George W. Bush, who I see as a glorified country bumpkin, is a master of exploitation. He plays on our naïveté. He doesn`t do it on his own, of course. He couldn`t. Nobody could, not the way he does. He has the help of a team of advisers who determine which gimmick will work, and then tell Bush how to play his role.

To his credit, Bush is as good an actor as Ronald Reagan. He`s gotten over the smirks and the inappropriate winks, and he`s now able to act as if he means it.

He rarely steps out of character these days. He does so on those occasions when he realizes that he, the least bright member of his family, is actually president of the United States of America. It`s as if you or I woke up tomorrow and found ourselves president. We would have trouble believing it, and so does Bush.

Bush gives a sly little smile on those occasions. The same out-of-context smile pops up in some of his speeches, when he says some outrageous thing and realizes his audience is eating it up, such as declaring a tax break for the rich as good for everybody.

Although Bush is a master poseur, he`s not the only one. It`s hard to find a politician on television these days without also finding an American flag somewhere in the picture.

Bill Clinton wanted the nation to believe he was "tough on crime," so he appeared on television countless times with a small army of uniformed police officers behind him. Those prop cops were no different than the prop sailors in Thursday`s show aboard the Abraham Lincoln: They were used by Clinton to enhance his image.

I`m not sure it worked with Clinton.

He never learned how to salute. He always did it as if he felt guilty about it, as if somehow his little pansy salute would highlight his status as a Vietnam draft dodger.

Bush has the advantage of never being bothered by second thoughts, so he can salute with the best of them, in spite of his dubious record with the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam. (Although the case has never been proven, it is commonly believed Bush went AWOL his last year in the Guard. Bush has never publicly disputed that allegation, and the mainstream press has ignored it. For more information, do a Google search for "bush awol.")

Considering his shaky military record, it was the height of chutzpah for Bush to make his dramatic landing on the Abraham Lincoln, but, standing tall and saluting smartly, he got away with it.

Growing old, as I`ve managed to do in recent years, has its advantages and disadvantages. The big disadvantage is the obvious one: Your body starts to fall apart.

The big advantage is that years of observation and experience teaches you things you didn`t know before, so when the carnival barker invites you to pay to see the two-headed woman, you wonder not if there`s a two-headed woman inside the tent but rather how they plan to cheat you.

But you can`t convince your grandchildren of that. They want to see that two-headed woman, so, no matter how much you warn them, they plunk down their money and come out of the tent moments later not quite sure what it was they paid their good money to see.

I`m not saying that old folks can`t be just as gullible as youngsters. I know a woman in her 80s who recently paid a car dealer almost $500 for an oil change dressed up to look like a vitally important high-mileage service.

Anybody, at any age, can be fooled, but, on balance, experience teaches you not to fall for some of the tricks that fooled you in the past.

So, if I were 31 instead of 71, I might have been impressed by Bush`s little aircraft-carrier gimmick last week. In fact, I would have been. My heart would have pounded proudly, and I would have been filled with admiration for our great leader, even if I disagree with his politics.

But I`m not 31, I am 71, and I`m not taken in by that politician`s sleight-of-hand. Bush`s appearance on the Abraham Lincoln was nothing more than a political stunt bought and paid for by the American taxpayer.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist and liberal iconoclast. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [e-mail].

©2003 SF Gate

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George W. Christ?
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 05 May 2003

In the 835 days Americans have passed since the inauguration of George W. Bush, we have come to know him as a man who wears many masks to suit a variety of political purposes. Even before he won the lawsuit that put him in his lofty position, we saw a man who cloaked his vision in terms that smacked of humility. "Ours will be a humble nation," Bush said during the Presidential debates. There are a number of words which can be applied to the actions of this administration, but "humble" is not one of them. At the time, however, it suited his purposes to make Americans believe he saw himself as unassuming, perhaps even small.

This was the same man, however, who mocked Texas death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker so viciously before she rode the lightning to whatever awaits us on the Other Side. He was asked, in an interview for Talk Magazine during the campaign, what Tucker might say to him if she were given the chance to plead for her life. "Please," said Bush with pinched face and lips drawn down in a quivering bow as he imitated the woman about to die, "don`t kill me." Then he laughed.

You would think we`d have known better 835 days ago. We didn`t, mostly because the news media decided such stories were without merit. Now we are a humble nation that brazenly disregards the entire planet as we seek military solutions to diplomatic problems. Now we are a humble nation that breaks treaties by the boatload and `punishes` nations that foolishly believe they can make decisions for themselves. One is forced to wonder if Bush sat in front of a television as the `Shock and Awe` firebombing/cluster-bombing of Baghdad began, face pinched and mouth drawn down, saying "Please, don`t kill me" in the voice of an Iraqi civilian. One is forced to wonder if he laughed afterwards.

We have come to see a new mask in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11. In the 18 months that have passed since that dark day, we have been introduced to Bush the Soldier. Draped in flags and the veneer of patriotism, Bush has spent a great deal of time and energy identifying himself with the very military he described as unfit for service during the 2000 campaign. The metastasizing of Bush into some sort of military hero reached a crescendo during this past week when he landed on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot`s seat of a Navy S-3B Viking combat aircraft. According to the lore that has been rapturously reported on every hour by cable television news services, Bush took the stick "momentarily" to pilot the craft. He hopped out, garbed in the flight suit of a Navy pilot, and flashed a thumbs-up sign across the deck. This, we were told by the media, harkens back wonderfully to Bush`s service piloting F-102 fighters for the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

The problem, as with any mask, is that whatever is underneath bears little comparison to the mask itself. According to the reports, it was appropriate for Bush to don the gear of an actual military pilot, because it mirrors the reality of his experience back in the Texas Guard. In reality, Bush may as well have put on the standard attire of a Mongolian yak herder from the Asian continental steppe. That would have been fitting, too, because neither the Navy suit nor the yak gear have anything at all to do with Bush the Actual Person. Neither has anything to do with history, or with fact.

An article by David Corn entitled "Bush`s Top Gun Photo-Op," which appeared in The Nation magazine`s online publication this past week, described the disturbingly under-reported facts behind Bush`s dalliance with the Texas Air National Guard:

Enlisting in the Guard was one way to beat the draft and avoid being sent to Vietnam. Is this why Bush signed up? During the campaign, Bush said no. Yet in 1994, he had remarked, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Not was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." That sure sounds like someone who was looking to avoid the draft and pick up a skill. Obtaining a slot in the Guard at that time was not usually easy--for the obvious reason: lots of young men were responding to the call of self-preservation. (Think Dan Quayle.) Bush, whose father was then a congressman from the Houston area, has said no strings were pulled on his behalf. Yet in 1999, the former speaker of the Texas House of Representatives told The New York Times that a Houston oilman who was a friend of Bush`s father had asked him to grease the skids for W. and he obliged.

What Bush did in the Guard. In Bush`s campaign autobiography, A Charge To Keep, he wrote that he completed pilot training in 1970 and "continued flying with my unit for the next several years." But in 2000, The Boston Globe obtained copies of Bush`s military records and discovered that he had stopped flying during his final 18 months of service in 1972 and 1973. More curious, the records showed Bush had not reported for Guard duty during a long stretch of that period. Had the future commander-in-chief been AWOL?

In May 1972, with two years to go on his six-year commitment to the Guard, Bush moved to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign. He asked if he could do his Guard duty there. This son-of-a-congressman and fighter pilot won permission to do "equivalent training" at a unit that had no aircraft and no pilots. The national Air Reserve office then disallowed this transfer. For months, Bush did nothing for the Guard. In September 1972, he won permission to train with a unit in Montgomery. But the commander of the unit and his administrative officer told the Boston Globe that they had no recollection of Bush ever reporting for duty. And when Bush returned to Texas after the November election, he did not return to his unit for months, according to his military records. His annual performance report, dated May 2, 1973, noted he had "not been observed at this unit" for the past year. In May, June and July of that year, he did pull 36 days of duty.. And then, as he was on his way to Harvard Business School, he received permission to end his Guard service early.

The records suggest Bush skipped out on the Guard for about a year. (And during that time he had failed to submit to an annual physical and lost his flight status.) A campaign spokesperson said Bush recalled doing duty in Alabama and "coming back to Houston and doing duty." But Bush never provided any real proof he had. Asked by a reporter if he remembered what work he had done in Alabama, he said, "No, I really don`t." A fair assumption was that he had gamed the system and avoided a year of service, before wiggling out of the Guard nearly a year before his time was up. It looked as if he had served four, not six years.

When he enlisted in the Texas Air Guard, Bush had signed a pledge stating he would complete his pilot training and then "return to my unit and fulfill my obligation to the utmost of my ability." Instead, he received flight training--at the government`s expense -- and then cut out on his unit. He had not been faithful to the Guard. He had not kept this particular charge.

The problem with masks is that, after wearing one for a very long time, a person might reach a level of self-delusion that tells them their reality is the mask itself, and not what lies underneath. Bush has been skittering around the fact that he went AWOL during his term of military service for over three years now. The spectacle on the Abraham Lincoln suggests he has finally managed to convince himself that he did, in fact, serve the military of his country with honor and in accordance with the oath he took. Either that, or he is so utterly without shame as to be beyond the scope of normal human understanding.

Neither choice is particularly palatable, and never mind the inherent danger in a civilian commander so energetically equating himself with the military. Americans don`t have a war leader anymore. They have a leader who is war personified. The fact that this personification comes at the expense of fact and truth is merely an accent in the symphony.

Another mask was donned by Bush on the deck of that aircraft carrier, one whose implications are far more dire and disturbing. Bush was there to tell the world that combat operations in Iraq had ceased. He did not go so far as to declare victory, as such a declaration would have required, under the Geneva Convention, the release of POWs and the withdrawal of American forces. The banner hanging across the control tower -- "Mission Accomplished" -- said all that needed to be said.

In his remarks, Bush closed with a paraphrasing of the Book of Isaiah: "In the words of the prophet Isaiah, `To the captives, `come out,` and to those in darkness, `be free,``"

This was a quotation from Chapter 61 of Isaiah, the very book Jesus Christ used when proclaiming that Isaiah`s prophesies of the Messiah had come true. Using this passage from Isaiah, Jesus presented himself as the Son of God in Nazareth. Thus it is told in Luke, Chapter 4, Verses 16-22:

"And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.""

Under normal circumstances, we could write this off as a President reaching for hopeful Biblical language to frame a particular argument. This has been done before, by many American leaders in many situations. In this case, taken on the political surface, we could see a President using the Bible to define the latest reason for war in Iraq -- the `liberation` of the people -- in the conspicuous absence of the oft-repeated reason that started the war -- the presence of mass destruction weapons. A further analysis of George W. Bush himself, however, leads to some serious questions.

The passage of Isaiah referenced by Jesus at Nazareth, and by Bush on the Abraham Lincoln, is part of a larger collection of verses known as the "Servant Songs." The specific verse used by Bush, out of Isaiah 61, is most important; it is widely accepted by both Christian and Jewish scholars as announcing the Messiah. For Christians, the Messiah is Jesus, and so this passage refers specifically to Him and His coming. The fact that Jesus Himself used this passage to announce His presence further confirms this. Bush`s reading of this passage suggests the possibility that he believes this coming, for the second time, has arrived.

It has been oft-reported that Bush witnessed the attacks of 9/11 and came to believe that God Himself, and not Scalia and the rest, put him into the Presidency for the sole purpose of pursuing this war against terrorism. It has likewise been oft-reported that Bush is an evangelical Christian of the vigorous Billy Graham stripe. We have witnessed the failure of every rationalization for making war on Iraq -- the WMDs, the terrorist connections -- and are left now with the rhetorical argument that we did the whole thing to `save` the Iraqi people. Ergo, Bush positioned himself on the deck of that aircraft carrier as a savior.

We are talking about a man who wears masks for the sake of political opportunism, and to survive moments when he has to address himself in the bathroom mirror. Does this newest mask have George W. Bush taking on the mantle of Jesus Christ, Savior and Redeemer?

Here is a man so steeped in self-denial that he can shunt aside his own shameful history in order to pretend he is on the same moral level as the soldiers he abandoned when his time of service came due. Here is a man intent upon making war on as much of the Muslim world as he can put his hands around, while wrapping around himself the image and prophesies of Jesus Christ. What is next? Will we see George W. Bush standing before the American people saying "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing"?

George W. Bush, master of denial. George W. Bush, wearer of masks. George W. Bush, soldier for Christ.

George W. Bush, Christ Himself?

Oh dear God, let there be light.

http://truthout.org/docs_03/050503A.shtml

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence," now available at http://www.silenceissedition.com from Pluto Press. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.

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The Boss:
The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me, they`re terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American.

The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home.

I don`t know what happens next, but I do want to add my voice to those who think that the Dixie Chicks are getting a raw deal, and an un-American one to boot. I send them my support.

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band To Play Denver, CO`s Invesco Field at Mile High September 25, 2003

Tickets go on sale Monday, April 21, at 10am

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band continue to build the U.S. leg of their Summer 2003 tour with the announcement of a date at Denver, Colorado`s Invesco Field at Mile High. Springsteen and the Band will play the stadium September 25, 2003. Tickets for the show go on sale Monday, April 21, at 10am.

Tickets will be available through Ticketmaster by phone (303.830.TIXS or 719.520.9090), www.ticketmaster.com, and all Ticketmaster outlets, including Foley`s, Angelo`s CD`s and More, select Rite Aid stores, Tower Records and Warehouse Music. Tickets will also be on sale Monday at the Invesco Field box office between 10am and 2pm.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band`s Summer stadium tour continues to take shape, with a record-breaking 10-show run scheduled at New Jersey`s Giants Stadium and dates in Boston and Philadelphia. In every case, fans` demand for the first dates announced in those markets spurred the inclusion of additional shows.

The dates scheduled thus far are:
Homepage mit Live Video
http://brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html

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http://navysite.de/cvn/cvn72.html

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[raceglider]

Was seid Ihr doch für Langweiler.

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So Far, Postwar Boom Is A Bust
WASHINGTON, May 5, 2003


The hope had been that a fast and successful war in Iraq would set off an economic boom that would quickly translate into falling unemployment for American households and fatter order books for U.S. businesses. But so far, the boom has been a bust.

U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad in the second week of April, but the military victory did not stem a wave of new job layoffs in the United States.

With April`s job cuts, total layoffs over the past three months topped a half-million workers, a performance usually seen only during the depths of a recession.

The picture looked even bleaker for the nation`s hard-hit factories, which suffered another 95,000 lost jobs last month, the 33rd straight month of declines that have eliminated 2.2 million manufacturing jobs.

Other statistics have shown weakness as well, with a key gauge of manufacturing activity plunging further into recession territory in April and automakers reporting sales declines despite attractive incentive deals.

"Just to say that everything would be hunky-dory because the war was over would not have been a good forecast," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis.

To be sure, not all the economic news since the war has been negative. Consumer confidence, which had fallen for four straight months, rebounded in April as Americans grew less fearful about what a U.S. invasion of Iraq would mean in terms of terrorist attacks and oil prices.

But the new worry is that the sharp increases in unemployment — the rate jumped to 6 percent in April — could quickly dash confidence and cause Americans to curtail spending, the one major force that has been working to lift the economy out of the 2001 recession.

The problem is that the end of the war, while removing fears of various worst-case scenarios, left the country facing many of the same problems that have made the current recovery so lackluster.

"After the war, we have reverted to the economy we had last year before the war," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor`s in New York. "We are still suffering from overcapacity problems in industry and consumers are in debt up to their eyeballs."

American businesses have been the big no-show so far in the recovery. Capital spending has yet to mount a sustained rebound, with corporations reluctant to make new investments when factories are operating at low levels.

Strong home sales and solid consumer spending have taken up the slack, but analysts believe businesses must soon step in as consumers` pent-up demand wanes. They note that even with the return of attractive incentives in dealer showrooms, auto sales fell in April compared with a year ago.

President Bush, eager to end the current jobless recovery and bolster growth ahead of next year`s presidential election, has been pushing Congress to pass another round of tax cuts of at least $550 billion, the level in the House bill. The Senate approved $350 billion.

Economists believe the rising jobless rate will spur Congress to pass a scaled-down version of Mr. Bush`s original $726 billion tax cut package — probably around $400 billion in reductions over 10 years.

The prediction comes even though Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress last week that any tax cuts should be offset in light of rising budget deficits ahead of a wave of baby boomer retirements in the next decade.

A large deficit can put upward pressure on interest rates, which would reduce any jump-start provided by any extra money consumers spend because of the tax cut.

Greenspan, in his first war comments on the economy after the Iraq war, said the economy was poised to grow at a "noticeably better pace." He added, however, that "the timing and the extent of that improvement remains uncertain."

Private economists generally agree with that assessment, although some have marked down their forecasts for coming months based on disappointing results so far.

Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg said he believed the economy would continue growing at a lackluster rate of 1.8 percent in the current April-June quarter, little changed from the first-quarter performance. He said he was looking for a rebound to growth of 3 percent in the July-September period, and then around 2.5 percent in the final three months of the year.

Rosenberg said he had trimmed his second-half forecast by one-half percentage point to reflect the continued weak economic reports.

"We share Chairman Greenspan`s view that while economic conditions are bound to improve from their near-stagnant levels, both the timing and the vigor of the expansion remain in doubt," he said.


©MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc.

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"Krieg basiert auf Lügen"
Der frühere UN-Inspekteur Ritter greift US-Regierung an
Kerstin Krupp

BERLIN, 5. Mai. Der ehemalige UN-Waffeninspekteur Scott Ritter hat den Krieg der USA im Irak mit dem Vorgehen Adolf Hitlers verglichen. "Ich sehe keinen Unterschied zwischen der Invasion Iraks und der Invasion Polens durch Hitler im Jahr 1939", sagte Ritter der Berliner Zeitung. Hitler habe seine Soldaten unter dem Vorwand der Selbstverteidigung in das Nachbarland einmarschieren lassen, George Bush habe sich 2003 genauso verhalten. "Es ist dieselbe Lüge", sagte Ritter. Bush habe die Terroranschläge auf die USA vom 11. September 2001 in der gleichen Weise für seine Zwecke benutzt wie Hitler seinerzeit den Reichstagsbrand. Ritter tut sich seit Jahren durch äußerst scharfe Kritik an der US-Politik hervor.
Nach Ansicht Ritters besitzt der Irak keine Massenvernichtungswaffen. Somit sei die Begründung für den Krieg hinfällig: "130 Amerikaner starben in diesem Krieg für eine Lüge." Ritter kämpfte im ersten Golfkrieg als Soldat der US-Marines. Bis 1998 war er dann an den UN-Waffeninspektionen im Irak beteiligt. Er trat von dieser Funktion zurück, weil sich die Uno nach seiner Einschätzung zu sehr vom Regime Saddam Husseins behindern ließ. Dennoch sagt er heute, die Arbeit sei zwar nicht einfach, aber letzlich doch erfolgreich gewesen. "Es gibt keine Massenvernichtungswaffen mehr in Irak", sagt Ritter.

Der 41-jährige US-Amerikaner hält es dennoch für nötig, die UN-Inspekteure in den Irak zurück kehren zu lassen. "Die Inspekteure müssen ihre Arbeit beenden", fordert Ritter. Erst wenn offiziell und von unabhängiger Seite festgestellt werde, dass Irak die UN-Resolution zur Entwaffnung erfüllt habe, könnten auch die seit 1989 geltenden Sanktionen aufgehoben werden. "Dieses Mal müssen die Inspektoren allerdings auch den Mut besitzen und offen sagen, dass die USA die Unwahrheit gesagt haben", fordert Ritter.

Solange die Vereinigten Staaten nicht angegriffen würden, hält der Waffenexperte einen weiteren Krieg gegen Länder der so genannten Achse des Bösen für unwahrscheinlich, "zumindest nicht vor den nächsten Wahlen im November 2004". Allerdings habe der Irak-Krieg nicht zur Sicherheit in der Welt beigetragen, wie Präsident Bush angekündigt habe. "Der jüngste Krieg zeigt doch Ländern wie Syrien, Iran oder Nordkorea, dass nur derjenige, der Massenvernichtungswaffen besitzt, vor einem Angriff geschützt ist", sagt der Ex-Inspekteur. Irak habe seine Massenvernichtungswaffen zerstört. Gleichzeitig hätten die Sanktionen das Land geschwächt. Am Ende hätten die USA ein nahezu wehrloses Land überfallen, und die Völkergemeinschaft habe dabei zugeschaut. "Damit haben die USA die Verbreitung von Massenvernichtungswaffen nur beschleunigt, statt sie einzudämmen", urteilt Ritter.

Die USA haben nach Ansicht des Historikers eine Ära eingeläutet, in der die Vereinten Nationen jede Bedeutung verloren haben. "Das ist eine sehr gefährliche Situation", sagt Ritter. Die UN müsse Präsident Bush, den er als "christlich-fundamentalistischen Rechtsaußen" bezeichnet, für Verstöße gegen das internationale Recht zur Verantwortung ziehen. "Sonst sind die UN nur noch eine nutzlose Institution."

Scott Ritter nimmt an diesem Dienstag um 20 Uhr an einer Podiums-Diskussion im Potsdamer Einstein-Forum teil.

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Up to his usual stunts
Matthew Engel
Tuesday May 6, 2003
The Guardian

You do have to hand to it to the guy. He swooped on to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln last week - the most spectacular entrance since the last Broadway production of Hello Dolly! - and he did look, in his bomber jacket, quite fantastically butch.

As Lincoln himself said at Gettysburg (wrongly, that time), no one will remember a word the president said. But they will remember the scene and his smile and the cheering soldiery and his bomber jacket, and believe that George W Bush had just defeated all those pesky Eye-raqis single-handed. Of course, it is remotely possible that the American electorate will decide that there are some political stunts so blatantly manipulative that they are actually intolerable. But we can probably rule that one out.

The use of troops as a political backdrop and claque is a fascinating one. There are, presumably, among the 1.4 million members of the US armed forces, people who take the not wholly uncommon view that Bush is a dangerous dolt, and a usurper at that. What happens if one of them decides he/she does not want to cheer their commander-in-chief? Do they face court martial?

Perhaps the problem never arose because, when you have spent the last 10 months on an aircraft carrier, any visitor is welcome. And in this case Bush was telling the troops they had achieved their objective and could go home. (One day they may even find out what that objective was. This was, after all, the world`s first reverse war: the outcome was pre-determined; the reason for it will be sorted out later.)

The contrast between this astonishing piece of political theatre, televised around the planet, and another event a couple of days later, is so staggering, it is bathetic to mention them in the same column. Nonetheless, it should be reported that the nine Democratic politicians who have announced they want to challenge the president next year gathered at a college in South Carolina and debated with each other.

The debate was sponsored by the ABC TV network, but it might as well have been the Yale Skull and Bones club or the Masons for all the publicity it got. It was held at 9pm on Saturday. Despite the ABC connection, only one minor local cable channel (in Washington) showed it live. A fifth of the network`s 250 affiliates broadcast it eventually, mostly straddling midnight. The political junkies` channel, C-SPAN, showed re-runs on Sunday.

The nine candidates can be divided into three equal groups. There are three no-hope doves: the former senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the congressman Dennis Kucinich and the activist the Rev Al Sharpton. There are three rather elderly hawks: congressman Dick Gephardt, who does have one idea, a health plan; senator Joe Lieberman, so pro-war he makes Bush look like Mahatma Gandhi; and senator Bob Graham, whose shtick is that we are all doomed by terrorism and Bush is asleep on the job.

Then there are the three who are actually making if not waves, then at least a few ripples: senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina, and Howard Dean, the peacenik doctor and ex-governor of Vermont. Dean has moved into the front row by waging a tireless and lucid campaign against the war, which is playing well with party activists.

However, he stepped over the edge before the debate by sounding too unenthusiastic not merely about the war but about American strength in general and even about the fall of Saddam. So he is now on the defensive against Kerry. Dean was modestly impressive, actually, but someone I know who had lunch with him said it was like 90 minutes in the surgery: the man was humourless and convinced he knew everything.

The trouble with the front-runners, Kerry and Edwards, is that they are just running on their CVs. Kerry`s full name sounds like John-Kerry-the-Vietnam-veteran: he never lets anyone forget it for a second. He has collared all the best advisers: so many that he no longer seems to know what he thinks. Edwards (less experienced, more personable) is a po`-southern-baw who got rich, and won`t let anyone forget that either.

God, it was depressing. William Safire of the New York Times, no friend of the Democrats, yesterday called it a dead heat between Lieberman and Gephardt. The Washington Post gave it to Lieberman. I thought the only one of the nine who sounded lucid and compelling was Sharpton, generally held to be a rogue. It`s probably lucky hardly anyone watched. The real winner, by a mile, was the stuntman in the bomber jacket.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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May 06, 2003

Thank God for politicians who take their cue from above
Michael Gove
Faith will have taught Blair and Bush humility, conscience and responsibility



Be honest, how did you feel when you read that the Prime Minister had told The Times he was “ready to meet his Maker” and answer for the casualties caused by the Iraq war? Scornful of this Christian Soldier enlisting God to the colours for his Holy War? Or embarrassed that a grown man of 50 entrusted with the fate of the country was rattling his rosaries in the nation’s face?

The British have become uneasy with public protestations of private religious belief, doubly so when the language of faith is entangled with the practice of politics. The Prime Minister’s own closest advisers believe that any overt religiosity on Mr Blair’s behalf is dangerous. When the Prime Minister was asked about his faith by a reporter for Vanity Fair, Alastair Campbell cut in to insist: “We don’t do God.” The Prime Minister was also persuaded not to end his Iraq war broadcast with “God bless you” because his advisers believed “people don’t want chaplains pushing stuff down their throats”. In the party which once owed more to Methodism than Marxism it is now the love of God that dare not speak its name.

Mr Campbell’s almost vampiric aversion to anything that smacks of Christianity reflects the widespread assumption that nothing opens a politician to ridicule like religion. When George W. Bush declared that his favourite philosopher was Jesus Christ, the scorn on this side of the Atlantic could not have been greater if he’d said Homer Simpson. The idea that the President was a fundamentalist crazy itching to turn the US into the Republic of Gilead was confirmed, for many, when it was disclosed that there are White House Bible study classes. To listen to the European reaction, one might have thought they were bringing back witch trials in Massachusetts.

The ruling assumption, in rationalist, relativist, Britain and post-Christian continental Europe is that religion, especially anything that smacks of traditional Protestantism, renders its followers beyond the pale. Bush’s preparedness to use words such as “evil” in the context of foreign affairs betrays the simplistic mindset of the Bible Belt, and renders him incapable of practising the subtle diplomacy a complex world requires. Blair’s willingness to invoke God suggests that he too is over-prone to moralising and insufficiently attuned to the nuances and compromises statecraft requires.

The assumption underlying this unease is the prevailing secular belief that religion is the handmaid of inflexibility, arrogance and intolerance. To open your heart to Christianity is to narrow your mind to others. But do the facts support that prejudice? Is it true that religious faith, in particular the Christianity avowed by Blair and Bush, is a distorting and unhappy influence? I don’t think so, and the facts seem to suggest not.

For non-believers, Christianity is assumed to offer certainty and to incline its adherents towards dogmatism. But the belief that one is answerable for one’s actions before a higher authority, as Blair affirmed in his interview with Peter Stothard on Saturday, inclines a man to humility rather than arrogance. An additional constraint is placed on your actions, beyond a judgment of what the public or the Labour Party will support.

Christian faith, particularly for those schooled in the Protestant tradition, compels an examination of the conscience. As well as weighing the consequences of an action, the genuinely Christian politician will examine the sincerity of his intentions and be acutely aware of the fallibility of human reason. Far from encouraging rashness, Christian belief creates another hurdle a politician must clear before he acts. Subjecting decisions to extra moral tests that have nothing to do with strictly political calculation can only help to foster responsible leadership.

Aggressively secularist critics of Blair and Bush find it hard to understand why those who proclaim belief in a faith that places such a high value on innocent life could have prosecuted a war in which so many innocents would die. But it is precisely because both take religion seriously that they appreciate inaction is itself a positive moral choice, with consequences one cannot escape.

Blair has previously talked of his fascination with Pilate, the quintessential politician who listened too much to his advisers, bowed before public opinion and acquiesced through inaction in the perpetration of evil. To have left Saddam Hussein in power, and let him pursue his ambitions unmolested, would have invited terrible consequences, not just for the Iraqi people but the concept of international order. Blair could not wash his hands of the problem, because inaction would have left them steeped in far more blood.

The Christian faith that Bush and Blair share, and which is also held by Iain Duncan Smith, enriches these men as politicians and extends their sympathies. Although it is not reported here, because it conflicts with the caricature, Bush has made support for the educationally disadvantaged, help for Aids victims in Africa and social action among the poorest, signature elements of his political programme. Blair’s own social vision is palpably Christian Democrat, but so also is Duncan Smith’s. Unnoticed by the metropolitan press, the Tory leader has devoted most of his time outside Westminster to exploring the condition of society’s least well off, whether victims of drug abuse in Glasgow or failing schools in Hackney.

These priorities are not, of course, the exclusive preserve of those who profess religious belief. But Christian faith inclines public servants to look beyond public opinion when they think of service. Far from being embarrassed when our leaders “do God”, we should be grateful when those who wield power over us acknowledge their own humility before a higher power.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-670808,00.html

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May 6, 2003
Hussein`s Son Took $1 Billion Just Before War, Bank Aide Says
By DEXTER FILKINS


AGHDAD, Iraq, May 5 — In the hours before American bombs began falling on the Iraqi capital, one of President Saddam Hussein`s sons and a close adviser carried off nearly $1 billion in cash from the country`s Central Bank, according to American and Iraqi officials here.

The removal of the money, which would amount to one of the largest bank robberies in history, was performed under the direct orders of Mr. Hussein, according to an Iraqi official with knowledge of the incident. The official, who asked not to be identified, said that no financial rationale had been offered for removing the money from the bank`s vaults, and that no one had been told where the money would be taken.

"When you get an order from Saddam Hussein, you do not discuss it," said the Iraqi official, who held a senior position in a bank under Mr. Hussein`s government. He said he had been told about the seizure of the cash by the Iraqi financial officials who had turned over the money to Mr. Hussein`s son and the adviser.

The allegations provide a glimpse into the final days of Mr. Hussein`s rule — which, with its emphasis on family connections, has been compared to the mafia — and perhaps a clue about how he intended to finance his escape and survive out of power.

Qusay Saddam Hussein, Mr. Hussein`s second son, presided over the seizure of the money, along with Abid al-Hamid Mahmood, the president`s personal assistant, the Iraqi official here said. The seizure took place at 4 a.m. on March 18, just hours before the first American air assault.

The two men carried a letter from the president, bearing his signature, authorizing the removal of the money, the official said.

The sheer volume of the cash was so great — some $900 million in American $100 bills and as much as $100 million worth of euros — that three tractor-trailers were needed to cart it off, the Iraqi official said. It took a team of workers two hours to load up the cash. Their work was completed before employees of the downtown Baghdad bank arrived for work.

The seizure of the money was confirmed by a United States Treasury official assigned to work with Iraqi financial officers here to rebuild the country`s banking and financial system.

Iraqi officials said they were uncertain of the effects that the disappearance of $1 billion would have on the Iraqi economy. The Iraqi official said the removal of the money amounted to about a quarter of the Central Bank`s hard currency reserves.

The billion dollars is nearly twice the amount of hard currency believed to have been looted by Iraqis in the three weeks after the collapse of the Iraqi government. American and Iraqi officials said about $400 million in American dollars and at least $40 million in Iraqi currency were taken by looters from banks across the country after April 9.

The disappearance of such a sizable amount of cash as $1 billion is giving rise to fears here that it is being used to finance remnants of Mr. Hussein`s government, many of whose senior members are believed to be hiding in Baghdad or its environs.

Some members of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization for groups that opposed Mr. Hussein, assert that the money may be a central element in what they described as an extensive "post-occupation strategy" devised by Mr. Hussein that envisioned an American takeover of the capital and his eventual return to power.

Neither Iraqi nor American officials claimed to know the whereabouts of the $1 billion or, for that matter, of Saddam Hussein, Qusay Hussein or Mr. Mahmood. All three men are being sought by the United States.

The Iraqi official insisted on anonymity because, he said, he feared that he could fall victim to Mr. Hussein or one of his associates who remain at large.

Some Americans suspect that the money may have been spirited across the border into Syria, in much the same way some senior officials in Mr. Hussein`s government are believed to have fled Iraq.

Col. Ted Seel, a United States Army Special Forces officer who said he was aware of the seizure of money from the Central Bank, said intelligence information at the time indicated that a group of tractor-trailers crossed the Iraqi border into Syria. Colonel Seel, who is assigned to the Iraqi National Congress, said the trucks` contents were unknown.

Mr. Hussein held near-absolute power in his government, and so, in a sense, it is unclear what laws might have been violated by the cash seizure. But the Iraqi bank official said the country`s banks had been largely left alone during Mr. Hussein`s years in power. He said the president and his family would sometimes demand cash from Iraqi banks but not in the amounts said to have been taken on March 18.

"Sometimes they would come in for small amounts, maybe $5 million," the official said.

In the case of the $1 billion, the official said Qusay Hussein and Mr. Mahmood had brought five Iraqi officials with them to the bank: the director of the Central Bank, the Iraqi finance minister and the director of the Iraqi treasury. The only others present, he said, were workers to load the money and the drivers of the trucks.

The Iraqi official, as well as others in Baghdad, said the former Iraqi finance minister, identified as Hekmet al-Azawi, was in American custody.

George Mullinax, an official with the Treasury Department, said the money had been taken by "Saddam Hussein`s people." He put the figure taken at about $900 million.

"If you had $900 million dollars, you would need two or three flatbed trucks to carry it all away," he said.

Mr. Mullinax said it was possible that a large chunk of the money had already been recovered. He said the roughly $650 million in American $100 bills discovered by an American sergeant in one of Mr. Hussein`s palaces last month might be from the Central Bank. He said that had not been determined for certain.

The Iraqi official, however, said the $650 million certainly belonged to Mr. Hussein`s eldest son, Uday, who, he said, was known for hoarding vast stores of personal cash. "That was Uday`s money," he said.

American and Iraqi officials have recovered other large sums of cash since the fall of the Hussein government. Last month, Iraqi bank officials, with the help of American soldiers, recovered an armored car loaded with about $250 million in American currency.

Dhia Habib al-Khyoun, chairman of Rafidain Bank, one of Iraq`s largest, said the $250 million had been gathered into the armored car from branch banks around the country.

While it was unclear for what purpose the $1 billion was taken, it seems clear that Mr. Hussein took steps in the dying days of his government to safeguard at least some of its money.

In early March, Mr. Khyoun said, he was ordered to disburse the Rafidain`s Bank hard currency deposits to branches around Baghdad. He said the goal was to safeguard some hard currency in case the headquarters of the bank was bombed.

Mr. Mullinax, the Treasury official, said he believed that the Central Bank`s vaults had not been opened since the beginning of the war. But the Iraqi official said some 18 billion Iraqi dinars, or about $9 million, had been taken by looters from the bank.

American troops have since sealed off the area around the Central Bank and have barred entry to all but its employees.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 6, 2003
Man on Horseback
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Gen. Georges Boulanger cut a fine figure; he looked splendid in uniform, and magnificent on horseback. So his handlers made sure that he appeared in uniform, astride a horse, as often as possible.

It worked: Boulanger became immensely popular. If he hadn`t lost his nerve on the night of the attempted putsch, French democracy might have ended in 1889.

We do things differently here — or we used to. Has "man on horseback" politics come to America?

Some background: the Constitution declares the president commander in chief of the armed forces to make it clear that civilians, not the military, hold ultimate authority. That`s why American presidents traditionally make a point of avoiding military affectations. Dwight Eisenhower was a victorious general and John Kennedy a genuine war hero, but while in office neither wore anything that resembled military garb.

Given that history, George Bush`s "Top Gun" act aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln — c`mon, guys, it wasn`t about honoring the troops, it was about showing the president in a flight suit — was as scary as it was funny.

Mind you, it was funny. At first the White House claimed the dramatic tail-hook landing was necessary because the carrier was too far out to use a helicopter. In fact, the ship was so close to shore that, according to The Associated Press, administration officials "acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush`s speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline."

A U.S.-based British journalist told me that he and his colleagues had laughed through the whole scene. If Tony Blair had tried such a stunt, he said, the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel.

But U.S. television coverage ranged from respectful to gushing. Nobody pointed out that Mr. Bush was breaking an important tradition. And nobody seemed bothered that Mr. Bush, who appears to have skipped more than a year of the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam, is now emphasizing his flying experience. (Spare me the hate mail. An exhaustive study by The Boston Globe found no evidence that Mr. Bush fulfilled any of his duties during that missing year. And since Mr. Bush has chosen to play up his National Guard career, this can`t be shrugged off as old news.)

Anyway, it was quite a show. Luckily for Mr. Bush, the frustrating search for Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into a good old-fashioned war, the kind where you seize the enemy`s capital and get to declare victory after a cheering crowd pulls down the tyrant`s statue. (It wasn`t much of a crowd, and American soldiers actually brought down the statue, but it looked great on TV.)

Let me be frank. Why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons (a few drums don`t qualify — though we haven`t found even that) a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn`t waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration`s lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq`s main nuclear waste dump wasn`t secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops?

Well, Mr. Bush got to pose in his flight suit. And given the absence of awkward questions, his handlers surely feel empowered to make even more brazen use of the national security issue in future.

Next year — in early September — the Republican Party will hold its nominating convention in New York. The party will exploit the time and location to the fullest. How many people will dare question the propriety of the proceedings?

And who will ask why, if the administration is so proud of its response to Sept. 11, it has gone to such lengths to prevent a thorough, independent inquiry into what actually happened? (An independent study commission wasn`t created until after the 2002 election, and it has been given little time and a ludicrously tiny budget.)

There was a time when patriotic Americans from both parties would have denounced any president who tried to take political advantage of his role as commander in chief. But that, it seems, was another country.






Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 6, 2003
Missing in Action: Truth
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we`ve liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant."

But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about."

I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world.

Let`s fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don`t want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

I`m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president`s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy`s debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It`s disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq`s biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990`s. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel`s debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq`s W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."

"In this administration, the pressure to get product `right` is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said.

"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."

The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan`s policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.






Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
Field of Dreamers


By George F. Will

Tuesday, May 6, 2003; Page A21


COLUMBIA, S.C. -- It could have been worse.

Saturday night`s tossed salad of nine Democratic presidential candidates and their 60-second thoughts on war, peace and other things might have occurred in a state that a Democratic presidential candidate has a prayer of winning. Fortunately, the event of dueling sound bites will not affect next year`s outcome here, where the last successful Democratic presidential candidate was Jimmy Carter, seven elections ago.

The six serious candidates must endure these events until caucuses and primaries weed out the unserious. Carol Moseley Braun is trying to use as a steppingstone to the presidency the ambassadorship to New Zealand, where she went after failing to be reelected to the U.S. Senate from a state, Illinois, that has elected only one Republican -- her 1998 opponent -- to the Senate in the past eight elections. The Rev. Al Sharpton, theologian and thespian, offers his career in the street theater of perpetual New York City protest as his claim to presidential considerations. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is the answer to a trivia question: Who is the only presidential candidate to have presided over the bankruptcy of a major American city? (Cleveland, where he was mayor from 1977 to 1979.) His big idea Saturday night was to "get the profit out of health care," which certainly would change the incentives to provide health care.

Of the serious candidates, one certainty is that Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, will not be elected Mr. Congeniality by the other members of this moveable feast of political maneuvering. Or Mr. Consistency.

It was perhaps severe for Sen. John Kerry`s campaign to accuse Dean of "pathological recklessness with the facts," but Dean has been wrong or tricky with some accusations against fellow candidates, on matters ranging from the war to taxes. And the day Baghdad fell, Dean said of Saddam Hussein`s fate, "I suppose that`s a good thing." But by Saturday night "suppose" had been supplanted by Dean`s being "delighted" that Hussein is gone.

Delighted, but he fears Iraq will now be more dangerous to the United States. He also has said America "won`t always have the strongest military." But here he said "no commander in chief would ever, and I am no exception, willingly allow our military to shrink." Got that?

Dean, who says he represents "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," may have become inebriated by the rapturous reception he has received from his party`s left-wing and antiwar activist cadre. Florida Sen. Bob Graham introduced himself as from "the electable wing of the Democratic Party."

Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman also stressed the folly of nominating someone who cannot pass the threshold test of strength on national security, which Lieberman calls "the first goal of our government." But many -- probably most -- Democratic activists have other first goals, including making the world safe from America`s military.

Lieberman -- supporter of the war and, like Sen. John Edwards, a critic of Rep. Dick Gephardt`s health care plan ("we can`t afford" such "big-spending Democratic ideas of the past") -- is remembering the general election. But you cannot steal first base -- you must get nominated in order to win in November. Watch Gephardt. He supported the war but has red meat for the liberal incorrigibles who choose Democratic nominees -- a health care plan financed by repealing the Bush tax cuts.

Coming immediately after the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses and the Jan. 27 New Hampshire primary, South Carolina`s Feb. 3 primary will the be first time African American voters -- perhaps almost 40 percent of the turnout -- will be so important so early in the nominating process. But Delaware, Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma also may vote that day, and Michigan votes four days later. The nominee almost certainly will be known no later than the evening of March 2, when California, New York, Maryland and perhaps Ohio will vote.

This is perilous. If such a compressed schedule had existed in 1984, when Gary Hart acquired astonishing momentum by upsetting Walter Mondale in New Hampshire, Hart would have won the nomination before Mondale had time to regroup and grind him down. The potential for volatility among Democrats is suggested by a poll conducted April 10-16 by the Pew Research Center showing that 69 percent of Democrats cannot name any of the nine candidates. Kerry, the most frequently named, is named by just 9 percent of respondents. Nine percent think Al Gore is running.

The president has 71 percent job approval. Ronald Reagan had 58 percent in 1984, when he swept 49 states.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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Klassentreffen im Weißen Haus

Gruppenbild mit W.

Von Gregor Schmitz

In Yale war George W. Bush nicht gerade ein Überflieger, später schimpfte er über die intellektuellen Snobs an der Nobel-Uni. Jetzt gibt sich der US-Präsident versöhnlich und lädt zum 35. Jahrestreffen seinen Collegejahrgang ins Weiße Haus - darunter auch ein paar echte 68-er und Kriegsgegner.


Wer davon träumt, beim Klassentreffen mal so richtig auf den Putz zu hauen, muss eingestehen, dass das wohl die ultimative Phantasie ist: Die Lernkameraden von einst zum Wiedersehen in das berühmteste Haus der Welt einzuladen, das man praktischerweise mittlerweile bewohnt - und sie am Gartentor ganz entspannt als mächtigster Mann der Welt begrüßen zu können.

Man darf zwar getrost glauben, dass George W. Bush über solche Angeber-Versuchungen erhaben war, als er unlängst 600 Einladungen für das 35. Jahrestreffen seines College-Abschlussjahrgangs Ende Mai auf dem Rasen des Weißen Hauses versandte - immerhin genoss er schon während seiner Studienjahre in Yale genügend Annehmlichkeiten, die Kommilitonen neidisch machten: eine reiche Familie im Rücken etwa (die auch nicht ganz unwichtig war, als es galt, dem eher mäßigen Schüler überhaupt erst den Weg ins Elitecollege zu ebnen). Oder die Aufnahme in den Geheimbund "Skulls and Bones", wo sich die Mitglieder nicht nur am offenen Sarg ihr Sexleben offenbaren, sondern auch die lukrativsten Jobs für die Zukunft zuschachern.

Dabbeljuh und Yale - eine verhängnisvolle Affäre

Und dennoch wird so mancher von Bushs ehemaligen Hörsaalgefährten beim Schlendern über den ehrwürdigen Rasen gewiss denken: "Der George W. als Gastgeber im Weißen Haus, wer hätte das gedacht?" Denn die öffentliche Yale-Jubelfeier ist auch vorläufiger Schlusspunkt einer komplizierten Beziehung des Präsidenten zu seiner Alma mater.

Zwar hat er dort als Student nach eigener Aussage "eine richtig gute Zeit" erlebt, aber nach rein akademischen Kriterien schien er nicht gerade für Höhenflüge auserkoren. Im Wahlkampf um das Präsidentenamt kam peinlicherweise heraus, dass Bush in Yale einen "C+"-Notenschnitt erzielte. Das Magazin "New Yorker" veröffentlichte ein Zeugnis: miserabel in Astronomie, schwach in Politikwissenschaft, Soziologie und Wirtschaft, passabel in Geschichte, Anthropologie und Philosophie.

Für die Note "C" ist im inflationären Notensystem amerikanischer Elitecolleges eine nahezu komplette Denkverweigerung nötig - erst als der Texaner aus dem Öl-Clan dann doch zum Präsidenten gewählt (oder eher ernannt) wurde, konnte er bei einer Rede zur Diplomverleihung 2001 an seiner alten Hochschule entspannt scherzen, er wolle allen C+-Studenten Hoffnung machen, dass auch aus ihnen etwas werden könne.

Früher in seiner politischen Karriere aber wollte Bush am liebsten überhaupt nicht an Yale erinnert werden. Im hemdsärmeligen Texas fürchtete er seinen elitären akademischen Hintergrund, zu dem sich später noch ein MBA aus Harvard gesellte, eher als Ballast beim Wähler und schimpfte daher als Gouverneur rustikal auf versnobte Intellektuelle von der Ostküste.

Diese Neigung wuchs noch, als das eher liberale Yale sich lange zierte, dem ersten Bush-Präsidenten - Vater George H., auch ein Hochschulehemaliger - einen Ehrendoktorhut aufzusetzen. Auf der nationalen politischen Bühne empfand Dabbeljuh seinen Yale-Abschluss dann aber als nicht mehr so hinderlich, sondern nutzte es eher zum Nachweis einer gewissen intellektuellen Schwergewichtigkeit: Immer mal wieder nützlich, wenn der Präsidentschaftsbewerber Bush etwa die Franzosen geißelte, sie hätten einfach kein Wort für entrepreneur.

Der rechte Haudegen und die Kriegsgegner


Richtig zur Versöhnung kam es indes erst, als eine der beiden Bush-Töchter an die Familientradition anknüpfte und das Studentenleben in Yale zu genießen begann. Die "New York Times" berichtet, es gefalle ihr dort richtig gut - und so habe sich auch der Präsident wieder seiner Alma mater angenähert, erst als Redner und jetzt gar als Gastgeber des Wiedersehenstreffens.

Nun ist der Yale-Abschlussjahrgang von vor 35 Jahren natürlich eine echte Ansammlung von 68-ern. Und so sind nicht alle begeistert vom Ort des Jubiläumsfests. Ein paar Kommilitonen haben abgesagt; einer von Bushs Jahrgangskollegen, mittlerweile Ethikprofessor, erklärte ganz grundsätzlich, angesichts der Toten im Irak sei ihm überhaupt nicht nach Feiern zumute. Andere Kriegsgegner hingegen werden trotzdem kommen und geben als Entschuldigung in US-Presseberichten an, sie seien auch nicht mehr so feurige Ideologen wie in ihrer Jugend.


Wenigstens lassen sie sich ja nicht einladen. Pro Kopf berechnet das Weiße Haus nämlich 195 Dollar für das Picknick. Das haben zur Entlastung des Steuerzahlers auch schon Bill und Hillary Clinton so gemacht, als sie ihre Collegejahrgänge einluden. Allerdings liebten die beiden rauschende Partys im Weißen Haus, während der vom Partylöwen zum Abstinenzler mutierte Präsident George W. selbst im berühmtesten Haus der Welt stets zeitig zu Bett geht - und schon mal vorsorglich angekündigt hat, daran auch für das Wiedersehen mit alten College-Trinkgefährten nichts ändern zu wollen.




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© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003

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Franzosen-Bashing

Florian Rötzer 06.05.2003
McCarthy-Protokolle erinnern an frühere Säuberungsaktionen in den USA, während gegen Frankreich neue Beschuldigungen auftauchen, aber auch neue Gerüchte über den ehemaligen Informationsminister kursieren

Gerade wurden vom Senat die Protokolle http://www.gpo.gov/congress/senate/senate12cp107.htmlvon Vernehmungen veröffentlicht, mit denen Joseph R. McCarthy vor 50 Jahren hinter verschlossenen Türen angebliche Kommunisten, Homosexuelle und andere Verdächtige in der Hochzeit des Kalten Kriegs traktiert hatte. Es konnte zwar mit dieser Art der Hexenverfolgung niemand eines wirklichen Vergehens überführt werden, doch Hunderte von Menschen verloren durch vage Beschuldigungen ihren Job oder zumindest ihr Ansehen.

Ähnlich wie die US-Regierung heute überall verdächtige Schläfer und Terroristen wittert, hatte McCarthy die Angst umgetrieben, dass Kommunisten aus dem damaligen Reich des Bösen die USA, ihre Behörden und ihre Kultur unterwandert hätten. Auch damals spielten die amerikanischen Medien patriotisch vielfach mit und wiederholten, was McCarthy, der möglicherweise von Schauprozessen der stalinistischen Art geträumt hat, so alles behauptete, während er das Land von allem Bösen säubern wollte. Der mit dem Sieg von Dwight D. Eisenhower und den Republikanern stark werdende McCarthy hatte seine Blütezeit 1953 und 1954, wurde aber dann vom Senat gezügelt und entmachtet. Die Erinnerung an die Hatz auf nicht ganz systemkonforme Intellektuelle und Künstler ( Der neue Feind steht links. Und dreht in Hollywood Filme), die sich auch heute wieder unter republikanischer Führung und dem wiedergekehrten Geist des Kalten Kriegs andeutet, kommt zur rechten Zeit.

Kampagnen laufen nicht nur gegen prominente Schauspieler und Künstler, sondern auch gegen die Staaten, die sich den Kriegswünschen der Bush-Regierung nicht angeschlossen haben. Besonders verfolgt wird Frankreich. Gegen französische Produkte gibt es Boykottaufrufe, die man in der Online-Ausgabe der konservativen Washington Times in der Bannerwerbung ebenso oft sieht wie Aufrufe zum Protest gegen die unpatriotischen Schauspieler.

Die Washington Times, die auch genüsslich die vom Telegraph aufgedeckte angebliche Zusammenarbeit mit dem Irak-Regime ausgebreitet hatte, trägt nun ein weiteres Gerücht zum Frankreich-Bashing bei. Wie natürlich anonym bleibende Geheimdienstmitarbeiter berichtet hätten, soll die französische Regierung geflüchteten irakischen Regierungsmitarbeitern in Syrien Pässe ausgestellt haben, um in Europa untertauchen zu können. Damit hat man gleichzeitig noch einmal Syrien in den Blickpunkt gezogen. Auf das Land haben sich auch schon begehrliche Blicke auf höchster Regierungsebene als Fortsetzung für den amerikanischen Befreiungskrieg gerichtet. Allerdings hatte Außenminister Powell gegen den Widerstand mancher aus der US-Regierung gerade Syrien besucht und gesagt, dass er nicht glaube, das Land würde gesuchten irakischen Flüchtlingen Unterschlupf gewähren.

Irgendwelche Beweise werden nicht vorgelegt, das hatte man auch zu McCarthys Zeit nicht nötig. Pentagon, Außenministerium und Geheimdienste seien aber verärgert, so die Times, weil die Suche nach führenden Regierungsmitgliedern dadurch erschwert worden wäre. Mit den Pässen könnten sich die Irakis frei in der EU bewegen. Frankreich streitet die Beschuldigung ab und bezeichnet sie als Gerücht.

Die Washington Times hat aber auch eine Neuigkeit über den ehemaligen Informationsminister Mohammed Said Sahhaf beizutragen. Der hat von den Amerikanern in guter Comic-Tradition auch einen Spitznamen erhalten, der auch in der Überschrift der Zeitung auftaucht: "Comical Ali". Auch die von den Amerikanern gesuchten irakischen Frauen haben natürlich einenleicht einprägsamen, sie charakterisierenden Spitznamen erhalten. So heißt die eben festgenommene Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, die am biologischen Waffenprogramm des Hussein-Regimes beteiligt sein soll und im medienwirksamen Kartenspiel der Meistgesuchten auf Platz 55 steht, "Mrs. Anthrax". Die noch flüchtige Rihab Taha heißt "Dr. Germ". Ihr Mann, der General Amer Mohammed Rashid, der sich unlängst gestellt hatte, läuft unter "Missile Man".

Sahhaf, der wegen seinen Leugnens der Realität vor laufenden Kameras weltweiten Ruhm gefunden hat ( Erhält der irakische Informationsminister den Grimme-Preis?), habe sich nicht selbst umgebracht, wie Gerüchte sagten, sondern sei nach der Erzählung eines pensionierten irakischen Generals, der mit dem US-Verwalter Jay Garner zusammen arbeite, untergetaucht. Der nach diesem Informanten "naive" Informationsminister sei von Saddam des öfteren geschlagen worden und suche nun nach einer Möglichkeit, ins Exil zu gelangen. Eine Verwandte von ihm habe mit dem General Kontakt aufgenommen. Am liebsten wolle er nach Ägypten: "Er hat eine Menge Geld in einer Bank und liebt diese ägyptischen Frauen sehr."

In Ägypten wurde inzwischen ein 12minütiger Film mit dem Titel "Ich bin nicht Sahhaf" über den ehemaligen Informationsminister gedreht. Darin geht es um einen Mann, der den Informationsminister so bewundert, als er immer wieder im Fernsehen während der Pressekonferenzen auftaucht, dass er schließlich glaubt, er sei es selbst. Offenbar sah der Schauspieler auch tatsächlich Sahhaf ähnlich, angeblich hätten viele Menschen bei den Dreharbeiten auf der Straße geglaubt, es sei der wirkliche Informationsminister. Im Film, der immer einmal wieder Szenen aus dem Krieg zeigt, versucht seine Familie am Ende des Krieges den falschen Sahhaf den Amerikanern zu übergeben, um Belohnung zu erhalten. Die letzte Szene zeige einen amerikanischen Soldaten, der das Ölministerium bewacht. Für den libyschen Produzenten des Films ein Hinweis "auf das wirkliche Ziel dieses Krieges".

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The Brawl Over Judges
olitical partisanship over the selection of federal judges reached a new high, or low, last week. On the Senate floor, a controversial Bush administration nominee was blocked by a filibuster — the second judicial nominee to be successfully filibustered this year. Meanwhile, in the Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch, the chairman, accused Senator Charles Schumer of asking "stupid" questions. The rancor showed, once again, that the judicial selection process is broken. The White House and Senate Democrats must sit down and work out their differences.

The week`s biggest fireworks were over Priscilla Owen, an unworthy nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. Opponents of Justice Owen are rightly troubled by her extremely conservative record as a Texas state court judge. Democrats filibustered, and Justice Owen`s supporters fell eight votes short.

In the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Hatch has been using suspect tactics to push through unsuitable candidates. Last week, the committee considered James Leon Holmes, an anti-abortion activist who has written that women must place themselves under the authority of men. When he had trouble winning a majority, Mr. Hatch broke with tradition and had the committee vote to send the nomination to the floor without a recommendation.

The political brawling over judges is likely to get worse. Republicans announced plans to call for yet another vote today on Miguel Estrada, an appeals court nominee Democrats have been blocking by filibuster for months because of his conservative record, and unwillingness to answer questions. And Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, has scheduled a hearing for tomorrow to question the use of filibusters in judicial nominations.

At the heart of this dispute is a simple reality. The administration is intent on packing the courts with right-wing judges, but Democrats have the power to block them. The answer is not to try to twist the rules or demonize Democrats. It is for the White House to consult with the Senate and agree on nominees that senators from both parties can in good conscience confirm.

[CheapThrill]

TOTAL POLICE STATE TAKEOVER


The Secret Patriot Act II Destroys What Is Left of American Liberty


A Brief Analysis of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, Also Known as Patriot Act II
By Alex Jones

(Posted Feb 10, 2003)


Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times that no member of Congress was allowed to read the first Patriot Act http://www.infowars.com/HR_3162.htmlhat was passed by the House on October 27, 2001. The first Patriot Act was universally decried by civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum. William Safire, while writing for the New York Times, described the first Patriot Act`s powers by saying that President Bush was seizing dictatorial control.


On February 7, 2003 the Center for Public, a non-partisan public interest think-tank in DC, revealed the full text of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. The classified document had been leaked to them by an unnamed source inside the Federal government. The document consisted of a 33-page section by section analysis of the accompanying 87-page bill.

*Note: On February 10, 2003 I discovered that not only was there a house version that had been covertly brought to Hastert, but that many provisions of the now public Patriot Act II had already been introduced as pork barrel riders on Senate Bill S. 22. Dozens of subsections and even the titles of the subsections are identical to those in the House version. This is very important because it catches the Justice Department in a bald-faced lie. The Justice Department claimed that the secret legislation brought into the House was only for study, and that at this time there was no intention to try and pass it. Now upon reading S. 22, it is clear that the leadership of the Senate is fully aware of the Patriot Act II, and have passed these riders out of their committees into the full bill. I spent two hours scanning through S. 22 and, let me tell you, it is a nightmare for anyone who loves liberty. It even contains the Our Lady of Peace Act that registers all gun owners. It bans the private sale of all firearms, creates a Federal ballistics database, and much more.

There are other bills in the Senate that grant the Federal government sweeping powers. S.45 states in section one that the office for State and local government coordination for Homeland Security will no longer just oversee, but that now local cities critical functions will be headed by a Federal director. On Tuesday, February 11th, we noted a story in The Times-Picayune with the headline: Nagin announces major overhaul of City Hall --New Homeland Security office to oversee cops, firemen, emergency agency. The Federal power-grab taking place is widespread and all Americans must mobilize to resist it.

Another interesting bill is S. 16. S. 16 is a smorgasbord of Federal funding and control over local police departments and needs to be examined closely.

S. 89, The Universal National Service Act of 2003 is the hallmark of an authoritarian society. The description of the bill is, "To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." We have looked at some of the programs that the Federal government has already been setting up for service here in the "homeland" and they include East German-style tattletale squads of every type, which are just basically a super TIPS program. The nightmare goes on and on. Check it out for yourself.

The Patriot Act II bill itself is stamped "Confidential -Not for Distribution." Upon reading the analysis and bill, I was stunned by the scientifically crafted tyranny contained in the legislation. The Justice Department Office of Legislative Affairs admits that they had indeed covertly transmitted a copy of the legislation to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, (R-Il) and the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney as well as the executive heads of federal law enforcement agencies.

It is important to note that no member of Congress was allowed to see the first Patriot Act before its passage, and that no debate was tolerate by the House and Senate leadership. The intentions of the White House and Speaker Hastert concerning Patriot Act II appear to be a carbon copy replay of the events that led to the unprecedented passage of the first Patriot Act.

There are two glaring areas that need to be looked at concerning this new legislation:

1. The secretive tactics being used by the White House and Speaker Hastert to keep even the existence of this legislation secret would be more at home in Communist China than in the United States. The fact that Dick Cheney publicly managed the steamroller passage of the first Patriot Act, insuring that no one was allowed to read it and publicly threatening members of Congress that if they didn’t vote in favor of it that they would be blamed for the next terrorist attack, is by the White House’s own definition terrorism. The move to clandestinely craft and then bully passage of any legislation by the Executive Branch is clearly an impeachable offence.

2. The second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganizes the entire Federal government as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military command. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship.
I challenge all Americans to study the new Patriot Act and to compare it to the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. Ninety percent of the act has nothing to do with terrorism and is instead a giant Federal power-grab with tentacles reaching into every facet of our society. It strips American citizens of all of their rights and grants the government and its private agents total immunity.


Here is a quick thumbnail sketch of just some of the draconian measures encapsulated within this tyrannical legislation:

SECTION 501 (Expatriation of Terrorists) expands the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” definition to all American citizens who “may” have violated any provision of Section 802 of the first Patriot Act. (Section 802 is the new definition of domestic terrorism, and the definition is “any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law.”) Section 501 of the second Patriot Act directly connects to Section 125 of the same act. The Justice Department boldly claims that the incredibly broad Section 802 of the First USA Patriot Act isn’t broad enough and that a new, unlimited definition of terrorism is needed.
Under Section 501 a US citizen engaging in lawful activities can be grabbed off the street and thrown into a van never to be seen again. The Justice Department states that they can do this because the person “had inferred from conduct” that they were not a US citizen. Remember Section 802 of the First USA Patriot Act states that any violation of Federal or State law can result in the “enemy combatant” terrorist designation.

SECTION 201 of the second Patriot Act makes it a criminal act for any member of the government or any citizen to release any information concerning the incarceration or whereabouts of detainees. It also states that law enforcement does not even have to tell the press who they have arrested and they never have to release the names.

SECTION 301 and 306 (Terrorist Identification Database) set up a national database of “suspected terrorists” and radically expand the database to include anyone associated with suspected terrorist groups and anyone involved in crimes or having supported any group designated as “terrorist.” These sections also set up a national DNA database for anyone on probation or who has been on probation for any crime, and orders State governments to collect the DNA for the Federal government.

SECTION 312 gives immunity to law enforcement engaging in spying operations against the American people and would place substantial restrictions on court injunctions against Federal violations of civil rights across the board.

SECTION 101 will designate individual terrorists as foreign powers and again strip them of all rights under the “enemy combatant” designation.

SECTION 102 states clearly that any information gathering, regardless of whether or not those activities are illegal, can be considered to be clandestine intelligence activities for a foreign power. This makes news gathering illegal.

SECTION 103 allows the Federal government to use wartime martial law powers domestically and internationally without Congress declaring that a state of war exists.

SECTION 106 is bone-chilling in its straightforwardness. It states that broad general warrants by the secret FSIA court (a panel of secret judges set up in a star chamber system that convenes in an undisclosed location) granted under the first Patriot Act are not good enough. It states that government agents must be given immunity for carrying out searches with no prior court approval. This section throws out the entire Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures.

SECTION 109 allows secret star chamber courts to issue contemp charges against any individual or corporation who refuses to incriminate themselves or others. This sections annihilate the last vestiges of the Fifth Amendment.

SECTION 110 restates that key police state clauses in the first Patriot Act were not sunsetted and removes the five year sunset clause from other subsections of the first Patriot Act. After all, the media has told us: “this is the New America. Get used to it. This is forever.”

SECTION 111 expands the definition of the “enemy combatant” designation.

SECTION 122 restates the government’s newly announced power of “surveillance without a court order.”

SECTION 123 restates that the government no longer needs warrants and that the investigations can be a giant dragnet-style sweep described in press reports about the Total Information Awareness Network. One passage reads, “thus the focus of domestic surveillance may be less precise than that directed against more conventional types of crime.”

*Note: Over and over again, in subsection after subsection, the second Patriot Act states that its new Soviet-type powers will be used to fight international terrorism, domestic terrorism and other types of crimes. Of course the government has already announced in Section 802 of the first USA Patriot act that any crime is considered domestic terrorism.

SECTION 126 grants the government the right to mine the entire spectrum of public and private sector information from bank records to educational and medical records. This is the enacting law to allow ECHELON and the Total Information Awareness Network to totally break down any and all walls of privacy.
The government states that they must look at everything to “determine” if individuals or groups might have a connection to terrorist groups. As you can now see, you are guilty until proven innocent.

SECTION 127 allows the government to takeover coroners’ and medical examiners’ operations whenever they see fit. See how this is like Bill Clinton’s special medical examiner he had in Arkansas that ruled that people had committed suicide when their arms and legs had been cut off.

SECTION 128 allows the Federal government to place gag orders on Federal and State Grand Juries and to take over the proceedings. It also disallows individuals or organizations to even try to quash a Federal subpoena. So now defending yourself will be a terrorist action.

SECTION 129 destroys any remaining whistleblower protection for Federal agents.

SECTION 202 allows corporations to keep secret their activities with toxic biological, chemical or radiological materials.

SECTION 205 allows top Federal officials to keep all their financial dealings secret, and anyone investigating them can be considered a terrorist. This should be very useful for Dick Cheney to stop anyone investigating Haliburton.

SECTION 303 sets up national DNA database of suspected terrorists. The database will also be used to “stop other unlawful activities.” It will share the information with state, local and foreign agencies for the same purposes.

SECTION 311 federalizes your local police department in the area of information sharing.

SECTION 313 provides liability protection for businesses, especially big businesses that spy on their customers for Homeland Security, violating their privacy agreements. It goes on to say that these are all preventative measures – has anyone seen Minority Report? This is the access hub for the Total Information Awareness Network.

SECTION 321 authorizes foreign governments to spy on the American people and to share information with foreign governments.

SECTION 322 removes Congress from the extradition process and allows officers of the Homeland Security complex to extradite American citizens anywhere they wish. It also allows Homeland Security to secretly take individuals out of foreign countries.

SECTION 402 is titled “Providing Material Support to Terrorism.” The section reads that there is no requirement to show that the individual even had the intent to aid terrorists.

SECTION 403 expands the definition of weapons of mass destruction to include any activity that affects interstate or foreign commerce.

SECTION 404 makes it a crime for a terrorist or “other criminals” to use encryption in the commission of a crime.

SECTION 408 creates “lifetime parole” (basically, slavery) for a whole host of crimes.

SECTION 410 creates no statute of limitations for anyone that engages in terrorist actions or supports terrorists. Remember: any crime is now considered terrorism under the first Patriot Act.

SECTION 411 expands crimes that are punishable by death. Again, they point to Section 802 of the first Patriot Act and state that any terrorist act or support of terrorist act can result in the death penalty.

SECTION 421 increases penalties for terrorist financing. This section states that any type of financial activity connected to terrorism will result to time in prison and $10-50,000 fines per violation.

SECTIONS 427 sets up asset forfeiture provisions for anyone engaging in terrorist activities.
There are many other sections that I did not cover in the interest of time. The American people were shocked by the despotic nature of the first Patriot Act. The second Patriot Act dwarfs all police state legislation in modern world history.

Usually, corrupt governments allow their citizens lots of wonderful rights on paper, while carrying out their jackbooted oppression covertly. From snatch and grab operations to warantless searches, Patriot Act II is an Adolf Hitler wish list.

You can understand why President Bush, Dick Cheney and Dennis Hastert want to keep this legislation secret not just from Congress, but the American people as well. Bill Allison, Managing Editor of the Center for Public Integrity, the group that broke this story, stated on my radio show that it was obvious that they were just waiting for another terrorist attack to opportunistically get this new bill through. He then shocked me with an insightful comment about how the Federal government was crafting this so that they could go after the American people in general. He also agreed that the FBI has been quietly demonizing patriots and Christians and “those who carry around pocket Constitutions.”

I have produced two documentary films and written a book about what really happened on September 11th. The bottom line is this: the military-industrial complex carried the attacks out as a pretext for control. Anyone who doubts this just hasn’t looked at the mountains of hard evidence.

Of course, the current group of white collar criminals in the White House might not care that we’re finding out the details of their next phase. Because, after all, when smallpox gets released, or more buildings start blowing up, the President can stand up there at his lectern suppressing a smirk, squeeze out a tear or two, and tell us that “See I was right. I had to take away your rights to keep you safe. And now it’s your fault that all of these children are dead.” From that point on, anyone who criticizes tyranny will be shouted down by the paid talking head government mouthpieces in the mainstream media.

You have to admit, it’s a beautiful script. Unfortunately, it’s being played out in the real world. If we don’t get the word out that government is using terror to control our lives while doing nothing to stop the terrorists, we will deserve what we get - tyranny. But our children won’t deserve it.


http://www.infowars.com/print_patriotact2_analysis.htm

[CheapThrill]

Achtung! Are We the New Nazis?

Soldiers, God and Empire

by Douglas Herman

http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/herman/herman3.html


Gott Mit Uns.

I felt a little shock and awe, actually disbelief, seeing the antique belt buckle for the first time. Worn by a Nazi German soldier, the aluminum, World War II era buckle carried the imperial eagle of the Third Reich above the familiar Swastika. Surrounding the eagle and Swastika was the motto, "Gott Mit Uns," or "God With Us."

Certainly the Nazi Germans, villains in history and Hollywood movies, couldn’t really have believed in God, could they? Certainly the common German soldier fought with great courage, discipline and fervor, following orders given by the High Command. Yet the Nazis fought a ruthless war against smaller countries, attacking them after planting false evidence, overpowering them with a combination of vicious air strikes and crushing armored superiority and then installed corrupt or cruel puppet leaders.

The Nazis demonized and then destroyed their enemies, after first intimidating and then liquidating their domestic opponents. The German propaganda machine cranked out misinformation and outright lies in the state-supported media, suppressing the truth and threatening anyone who dared to speak or print opposition to the war regime.

Lutheran minister and German war veteran Martin Niemoller mirrored middle-class German society of that time: “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by then there was no one left to speak up for me.”

Presently, American military veterans—rank and file former soldiers mostly--are speaking out against American Imperialism, as well as ministers, artists, reporters, scientists and educators. But the powerful alliance of media monopolies and corporate-financed political leaders sway public opinion to war. In America, as was the case in Nazi Germany, the imperceptible slide to tyranny increases in direct proportion to the number of voices of conscience that are ignored.

Is it curious or ironic how Blitzkrieg resembles Shock and Awe? Is it curious or ironic how Wolf Blitzer and Charles Krauthammer provide the running commentary for the war? Is it curious or ironic how Rumsfeld and Rommel are so similar, how each needed a desert for a dramatic stage? Yes, I know, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated to the “free” media our “humanitarian” method of war, but then German general Erwin Rommel or Joseph Goebbels could have said the very same thing to the German press.

Are we the New Nazis? Could it happen here? Has it already begun? Absurd, you say. God is on our side. The God of Christians and Jews.

The last time I checked, the Pope was vehemently against the unprovoked war with Iraq, as were most ministers and priests. The National Council of Churches, with 50 million members in 36 denominations, opposed the war. The Catholic Church, with nearly 64 million Americans, did not support the war. Many American Jews did not support the war. Yet according to all reports, we’ve “won” a war and the rumors are we may have another couple of other wars very soon.

God is on our side, but which one? The vengeful God, the one guiding our radioactive armor-sheathed battle tanks as they slice through families of frightened civilians? Or the merciful one, providing protection to those same civilians? Is ours the God of the Gospels and Torah--or the horrible, hydra-like god of cluster bombs? Do our coins--comparable to the Nazi belt buckles-- really carry the motto, “In God We Trust"?

Assuming the support for this war was a mile wide and an inch deep-- generally the case in polls and wars--how many Christian soldiers will continue to take up arms against the “infidel” simply on the summons of Militant Christian Bush and Uber-Zionist Paul Wolfowitz? An instructive book, A Quick And Dirty Guide To War, gives an overview of the entanglement awaiting our armies of occupation. Although the authors fail to mention the term “Islamic Jihad,” they clearly describe the Middle East morass and the fact that Afghanistan has NEVER been conquered by an outside foreign power. America, by the way, is superpower number four to try, and our influence extends only as far as the outskirts of Kabul.

In a prolonged, stepping-stone war of conquest and vendetta, thinly disguised as “liberation,” how many American soldiers will suffice? If the Russians in Afghanistan could not pacify a region at their doorstep with over 150,000 troops, using Gestapo tactics, what makes American leaders think they can do better, using twice the troops over twice the area? Yes, we have the invincible Abrams M1A2 main Battle Tank (MBT), just as the Germans had the invincible Panzer Mark VI Tiger MBT in 1943. But like the Germans, we eventually have to emerge from our tanks, and what then? How many patriotic sons and daughters, heroically fighting for so many American lost causes, will emerge from the backwoods, single-stoplight towns, kids like Jessica Lynch, to serve as very vulnerable yet heavily-armed overseers in impoverished Mesopotamia?

"Do we have ten million men willing to fight and save petroleum resources?" asks Anthony Gancarski in a recent Counterpunch column. "How many millions would it take to provide an occupation force sufficient to pacify the region? Is there any hope of attaining such a fighting force without conscription?"

The answer is NO.

The draft is a done deal if the war spreads. The New York Times recently reported that America’s military power, measured in military spending, exceeded that of all NATO countries combined--plus China, Russia, Japan, Iraq and North Korea--but the need for military men will surpass the capacity of the all-volunteer army if “liberation” spreads to Syria and Iran, as our chief Chickenhawks intend. Former CIA director James Woolsey, handpicked by the Pentagon for the role of Pasha in post-war Iraq, publicly stated to a group of avid young Republicans at UCLA, "This Fourth World War [starting with Iraq and leading God knows where], I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us." Hopefully the students who weren’t scared shitless listening to Woolsey--a name apropos to the imperial designs of this obscene military machine--already have their student deferments ready to file, following the example of our current leaders, many of whom happily avoided the Vietnam War.

Behind this Middle East escapade lurks a cadre of militant Christians, Zionist Jews, and brazen corporate opportunists, all equally embedded in the idea of an Imperialist Grand Design. Yet such Imperial hubris wrecked Napoleon’s France, destroyed Hitler’s Germany and recently ruined the Soviet Union--bled white in Afghanistan—a dissection ably assisted by our recent Mujahadeen ally, Osama bin Laden.

This recent preemptive strike precedent for America is a page taken from the Third Reich playbook. In 1939, the Germans attacked Poland, a fourth-rate military power, having used a phony excursion by Polish soldiers as a ploy for invasion. Our excuse for attacking another fourth-rate power--the search for weapons of mass destruction--worked wonderfully well in Iraq, yet not even Hitler was so draconian as to expose his own troops to the risk of chemical attack or the exposure of depleted uranium. Thus far more than 10,000 American troops who fought in the first Gulf War have died from Gulf War Syndrome, while the House of Representatives voted recently to cut $25 billion from assistance to disabled veterans, according to Veterans For Common Sense. Truly, the pride over our recent “victory” in Iraq--while cause for celebration in shortening the war and ridding the world of one dictator--does not lessen but increases the possibility of other preemptive attacks against far more dangerous foes. Hitler pulverized Poland and Belgium but wrecked half the world when he continued his mad designs against stronger opponents.

The barbarism of conquered Baghdad mirrors the Nazi blueprint for dealing with foreign art and culture: Loot the art and burn the culture. Yet even The German High command never allowed or conspired in the wholesale eradication of French culture to the degree the American Army appeared to do in Baghdad. Reporter Robert Fisk stated in an interview, “We claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people, and yet my own count of government buildings burning in Baghdad before I left was 158, of which the only building protected by the United States Army and the Marines were the Ministry of Interior . . . and the Ministry of Oil.”

Fisk also noted, “The looting was on a most detailed, precise and coordinated scale . . . and within a few days those priceless heritage items of Iraq’s history (those not destroyed by systematic arson) were on sale in Europe and in America. I don’t believe that happened by chance.”

The Nazis, great plunderers of European art, would have been envious of the speed and cohesion of the entire operation. Understandably, they would have been aghast at the waste, however.

Will our soldiers soon be sporting “God With Us” belt buckles over protective, Darth Vader body armor, wielding depleted uranium weapons in the Cradle of Civilization? How many My Lai-style atrocities—already occurring as I write this--or Beirut-type barracks bombings will we accept before we realize our occupation in Iraq is West Bank supersized? Before we commit too many more American troops to the Middle East--future victims of suicide shock and awe bombings or civilian slaughters like the one that happened in al-Fallujah--God-fearing American citizens should ask whether this Bush administration plans to continue expanding this empire at the point of a gun.

Truthfully, to the rest of the world, we already are the New Nazis.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

LANGLEY, VA—In an alarming report released Monday by the Central Intelligence Agency, Syria may be harboring upwards of 15 million known Arabs within its borders.


Above: Suspected Arabs move freely through a Damascus marketplace.
"Reliable intelligence collected by our agency indicates that Syria has conspired to lend physical and economic support to a massive number of people belonging to this group," CIA director George J. Tenet said. "The shocking truth is, there are nearly as many Arabs in Syria as there are people in New York and Los Angeles combined. In fact, Syrians openly refer to their nation as the Syrian Arab Republic, despite knowing full well America`s opinion on these matters."

Explaining the CIA`s methods of gathering data on the rogue ethnicity`s presence in Syria, Tenet said it relied on a combination of satellite imagery, computer-system infiltration, reports from Syrian covert operatives, intercepted radio and television transmissions, and The World Almanac And Book Of Facts 2003.

"It`s practically an open secret these days," Tenet said. "Syrian television brazenly shows Arabs in military uniforms carrying guns, or delivering political speeches to other members of the group. Walk into any house of worship in the country, and you`ll see people reading the Koran and bowing their heads in prayer toward Mecca. It`s almost like they`re daring the United States to get involved."

"Disturbingly, more than 90 percent of these Arabs have been linked to the practice of `Islam`—a defiantly non-Western system of faith whose core principles are embraced by none other than Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein," Tenet added. "If this is true, and we do consider this information to be correct in all particulars, then this is troubling at best."

President Bush, Tenet said, has been aware of Syria`s ties to known Arab political and religious figures since the earliest planning stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Tenet assured reporters that all possible diplomatic avenues of resolving the situation were being aggressively pursued.


Above: In a chilling scene, thousands of Arabs bow toward Mecca in praise of Allah.
"We have informed [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad of the presence of Arabs in his country and have offered any aid necessary to bring this situation under control," Tenet said. "I am confident that a resolution to this crisis can be achieved without resorting to military action."

This is not the first time Syria has been linked to Arabs. Israel found the Golan Heights heavily populated by Arabs when it annexed the region from Syria during 1967`s Arab-Israeli War. Arabs have historically held many influential posts in the Syrian government, and the CIA claims to have data indicating that wealthy Arab businessmen control the greater part of Syria`s economy.

The CIA report prompted concern from many Americans.

"I`m not surprised," said Wayne Early, an Atlanta-area mortgage broker. "I suspect they`re all over that part of the world. First, the government linked them to Sept. 11, then Afghanistan, and then Iraq. It makes you wonder who`s next."

"The more I learn about Arabs, the less I like them," said Carol Schecter of Norfolk, VA. "Beirut, Teheran, Baghdad... everyplace there`s trouble, they`re there, and now we`ve found them in Syria. I just hope they don`t hurt the regular Syrians."

Tenet assured citizens that he is committed to resolving the crisis.

"We don`t want to cause any undue panic, but now that the Arabs are there, we`re going to have to deal with them," Tenet said. "Unfortunately, they`re not just going to go away by themselves."

http://www.theonion.com/onion3916/syria_harboring.html

[Joerver]

On the front line or in the oval office?

[Joerver]

So he thinks it’s all over...

George Bush has announced the end of the war. But try telling that to the Shias and the Badr Brigade, says Robert Fisk

When Iraqi civilians look into the faces of American troops, President Bush famously told the world on Thursday, “they see strength and kindness and goodwill”. Untrue, Mr Bush. They see occupation

So, it’s the end of the war in Iraq, is it? If anyone thinks George Bush Jnr could pass that one off aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln last week – “major combat operations have ended” was the expression he used on Thursday night – they should take a closer look at Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s cosy, sinister little speech to US troops in Baghdad a day earlier.

It was filled with all the usual myth-making: the “many” Iraqis who flocked to welcome the Americans on their “liberation” of Baghdad, the “fastest march on a capital in modern military history” (which the Israelis achieved in three days in 1982). But the key line was slipped in at the end. The Americans, he said, still had “to root out the terrorist networks operating in this country”. What? What terrorist networks? And who, one may ask, are behind these mysterious terrorist networks “operating” in Iraq? I have a pretty good idea. They may not actually exist yet. But Donald Rumsfeld knows (and he has been told by US intelligence) that a growing resistance movement to America’s occupation is gestating in Iraq. The Shia Muslim community, now supported by thousands of Badr Brigade Iraqis trained in Iran, believes the US is in Iraq for its oil. It is furious at America’s treatment of Iraq’s citizens; in three days last week at least 17 Sunni demonstrators were killed, two of them less than 11 years old. And it is not impressed by Washington’s attempts to cobble together an “interim” pro-American government.

Even during the war, you could hear the same sentiments. Yes, the Shias would tell us, the Americans can get rid of Saddam. No one doubted his viciousness. But, always, this sentiment was followed by a desire to see the back of the Americans. Most of the civilian victims of American and British bombs were Shias, especially around Nasiriyah and Hillah. Which is another reason why the Americans did not arrive in Baghdad – where a US armoured vehicle pulled down the famous statue of Saddam – to be greeted by flowers and music. When Iraqi civilians look into the faces of American troops, President Bush famously told the world on Thursday, “they see strength and kindness and goodwill”. Untrue, Mr Bush. They see occupation.

Already it is possible to identify some familiar landmarks in the progress of occupation: a series of brutal incidents for which the Americans are never, ever, to blame. Just like the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the killing of civilians is never the fault of the occupiers. The driver and the old man shot and killed by US forces near a checkpoint in Baghdad, and the little girl and the young woman badly wounded whose tragedy Channel 4 witnessed, received no apology from the United States. A family is shot in its car in southern Iraq; cameramen are killed in the Palestine Hotel; 15 Iraqis, including at least one child, are gunned down in Falujah. For the Americans, it is always “self-defence”. Though, strangely, few if any Americans have been seriously wounded in these incidents. Of course, there must be gunmen shooting at the Americans. But the evidence suggests there aren’t very many. The evidence also suggests that very soon, there are going to be a lot more. You have only to observe how deeply the Iraqi Shias admire the Lebanese Hizbollah to understand how well they comprehend the art of guerrilla resistance. Succoured by Iran – or schooled in Saddam’s torture chambers – they are not going to take orders from ex-General Jay Garner, whose all-expenses-paid trip to Israel to express his admiration for the Israeli army’s “restraint” in the Palestinian occupied territories is well known in Iraq. And they realise full well that America’s big corporations are preparing to make millions from their broken country.

Without waiting for any “interim” government to take such decisions, the US Agency for International Development has invited American multinationals to bid for everything from road rebuilding to new text books. A US company, Stevedoring Services of America, has already gobbled up the $4.8m (£3m) management contract for the port at Um Qasr. US oil executives, many of them chums of George Bush and his administration, are expected to visit the Iraqi oil ministry (one of only two Iraqi ministries that the Americans miraculously saved from arsonists) within a week.

No, Iraq today resembles not some would-be democracy but rather the tragedy that greeted the British when the German occupation of Greece ended in 1944. Hitler, like Saddam, had ensured there were plenty of abandoned weapons lying around to fuel a guerrilla resistance against the new rulers. Churchill supported the nationalist government of George Papandreou – the Ahmed Chalabi of Greece – but the Elas Communist guerrillas wanted power. They had fought the Nazis since Germany’s 1941 invasion and, like many of the Muslim Shia today, feared that they were going to be excluded from power by a new pro-Allied regime.

So the “liberation” of Athens quickly turned into a pitched battle between British troops (for which read the Americans in Iraq) and the Communists, who had received years of support from the Soviet Union. For Russia then, read Iran now. Claiming that he stood for freedom, Churchill remarked that “democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy-gun”. But when martial law was imposed by the British (something the Americans may have to consider) Churchill less charitably told the British commander in a secret message that he should “not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city”. In various battles, there were attempts to find a mediator – not unlike the desperate meetings in Falujah last week between Iraqis and Americans. In the event, Churchill was able to restore order only because he had secretly obtained Stalin’s agreement that Greece should remain in the Western sphere of Europe. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and other eastern European countries paid the price. The parallels are not exact, of course, and a critical difference today is that the nation which might be able to help Washington, as the Soviets helped London, is Iran. And Iran, far from being an uneasy ally, is part of President Bush’s “axis of evil”, which fears that it may be next on America’s hit list. So here is a little prediction.

Mr Bush says the war is over, or words to that effect. Then Shia resistance begins to bite the Americans in Iraq. Of course, Mr Rumsfeld will have warned of this: it will be characterised as the famous “terrorist networks” which still have to be fought in Iraq. And Iran – and no doubt Syria – will be accused of supporting these “terrorists”. The French did much the same in their 1954-62 war against the FLN in Algeria. Tunisia was to blame. Egypt was to blame. So stand by for part two of the Iraq war, transmogrified into the next stage of the “war on terror”. —Independent

[Joerver]

Posted September 13, 2001

Terror in America
by Robert Fisk

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So it has come to this. The entire modern history of the Middle East--the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Balfour declaration, Lawrence of Arabia`s lies, the Arab revolt, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and the thirty-four years of Israel`s brutal occupation of Arab land--all erased within hours as those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people. Is it fair--is it moral--to write this so soon, without proof, when the last act of barbarism, in Oklahoma, turned out to be the work of home-grown Americans? I fear it is. America is at war and, unless I am mistaken, many thousands more are now scheduled to die in the Middle East, perhaps in America too. Some of us warned of "the explosion to come.`` But we never dreamt this nightmare.

And yes, Osama bin Laden comes to mind--his money, his theology, his frightening dedication to destroying American power. I have sat in front of bin Laden as he described how his men helped to destroy the Russian Army in Afghanistan and thus the Soviet Union [see Fisk, September 21, 1998]. Their boundless confidence allowed them to declare war on America. But this is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia--paid and uniformed by America`s Israeli ally--hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.

No, there is no doubting the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States. That Palestinians could celebrate the massacre of thousands of innocent people is not only a symbol of their despair but of their political immaturity, of their failure to grasp what they had always been accusing their Israeli enemies of doing: acting disproportionately. All the years of rhetoric, all the promises to strike at the heart of America, to cut off the head of "the American snake`` we took for empty threats. How could a backward, conservative, undemocratic and corrupt group of regimes and small, violent organizations fulfill such preposterous promises? Now we know.

And in the hours that followed the September 11 annihilation, I began to remember those other extraordinary assaults upon the United States and its allies, miniature now by comparison with yesterday`s casualties. Did not the suicide bombers who killed 239 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers in Beirut on October 23, 1983, time their attacks with unthinkable precision?

There were just seven seconds between the Marine bombing and the destruction of the French three miles away. Then there were the attacks on US bases in Saudi Arabia, and last year`s attempt--almost successful, it turned out--to sink the USS Cole in Aden. And then how easy was our failure to recognize the new weapon of the Middle East, which neither Americans nor any other Westerners could equal: the despair-driven, desperate suicide bomber.

And there will be, inevitably, and quite immorally, an attempt to obscure the historical wrongs and the injustices that lie behind the firestorms. We will be told about "mindless terrorism,`` the "mindless" bit being essential if we are not to realize how hated America has become in the land of the birth of three great religions.

Ask an Arab how he responds to the thousands of innocent deaths, and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime. But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel`s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September--the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored executions--all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for the mass savagery on September 11.

No, Israel was not to blame--though we can be sure that Saddam Hussein and the other grotesque dictators will claim so--but the malign influence of history and our share in its burden must surely stand in the dark with the suicide bombers. Our broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led inevitably to this tragedy. America has bankrolled Israel`s wars for so many years that it believed this would be cost-free. No longer so. But, of course, the United States will want to strike back against "world terror.`` Indeed, who could ever point the finger at Americans now for using that pejorative and sometimes racist word "terrorism``?

Eight years ago, I helped make a television series that tried to explain why so many Muslims had come to hate the West. Now I remember some of those Muslims in that film, their families burnt by American-made bombs and weapons. They talked about how no one would help them but God. Theology versus technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power. Now we have learned what this means.

[Joerver]

A Heavy Purple Heart
Sgt. Charles Horgan`s combat experience in Iraq lasted all of seven minutes. His regret over being wounded before he could fire a shot may last a lifetime.
By Tomas Alex Tizon
Times Staff Writer

May 6, 2003

JEFFERSON CITY, Mont. -- Sgt. Charles Horgan noticed immediately that real war happened without a soundtrack.

Of course he knew this on some level but he didn`t realize how quiet it could be, there, in the desert of southern Iraq. He couldn`t even hear the wind, standing in the turret of a Humvee with his fingers wrapped around the grips of a .50-caliber machine gun.

He was so ready to fight. He`d trained 3 1/2 years for this moment. He`d watched his favorite war movies over and over, memorizing scenes of heroism played out to the sounds of an epic score. He was prepared to be brave.

But before he had the chance, the enemy got to him first. Horgan was among the first American casualties in Iraq. His whole experience in combat lasted about seven minutes.

Today, he`s back home in this one-tavern town in southwestern Montana, a 21-year-old disabled veteran with a shiny new medal, a stirring story and a disappointed heart.

"I wish I did more. I wish I had more time [in battle]," he says. "One measly firefight, and I was done."

He has a lot of time to think these days, recovering at his parents` rustic home in the hills above town. As he goes through the motions of preparing for the rest of his life, his mind constantly brings him back to the scene in the desert outside the city of Nasiriyah six weeks ago.

The Humvee was crossing a bridge when Horgan saw the missile coming. It slammed into the front of the vehicle, tearing through the engine and spraying shrapnel in all directions. Horgan was blown out of the turret and fell flat on the roof.

His right boot simmered with blood, smoke rising from where the heel used to be. He crawled to the ground, and for the next several minutes, watched a firefight unlike any he`d seen in the movies: slow, almost lazy, with long stretches of silence, then deadly bursts of pop-pop-pop.

Soldiers from another vehicle scooped him up and took him to a field ambulance. He was brought to Kuwait and then Germany, where he told anybody who would listen that he wanted to return to Iraq and fight side by side with his buddies.

"That`s all I think about. I play it over and over in my mind," he says. "I beat myself up. It`s like you train all season to play football and then sprain your ankle running onto the field. I had my opportunity and I blew it.

"I didn`t get a single shot off."

The disappointment, he says, is balanced by the fact that he`s alive and home and applying to college, just as he`d always planned. But it`s an uneasy balance. The soldier in him is preoccupied with what should have been: a scene brave and dramatic, like in the movies.

Instead, it was sudden, brutal and weirdly undramatic. Then it was over.


____


Horgan doesn`t seem to mind the term "permanently disabled."

It`s Thursday afternoon, and he has just returned from physical therapy at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Helena, half an hour north. He hobbles through the living room, sinking his lanky 6-foot frame into a leather couch, and props his right foot on a table. It`s in a cast.

Doctors took out one piece of shrapnel, a ragged metal shard the shape of a shark`s tooth. He keeps it in a small see-through container and sometimes stares at it, like a boy studying a bug he`s just caught.

His face, wide-eyed and disarmingly friendly, belongs on a boy. His feet, though, are size 11, man-sized. The foot still holds a dozen small pieces of shrapnel that might remain for the rest of his life. The flesh covering the heel bone is gone. He`ll probably walk with a slight limp or wear a lift in his right shoe.

Spread out on the couch are pencil sketches he has drawn of the attack on the bridge. They portray different angles of the scene: what it looked like from the ground, what it may have looked like from a distance, what he probably looked like as he stared at the remains of his foot.

Two sketches are on a rumpled brown napkin. The others are on white drawing paper. They are his way, he says, of trying to reconstruct what happened.

If he`d had his 35-millimeter camera, he says, he would have snapped some pictures. Even as bullets whizzed past, Horgan instinctively wanted to record what happened. It was the movie buff in him, the novice filmmaker who wanted to document the scene.

But all he has is memory, and every day he searches it for more details.

In Horgan`s mind, the scene on the bridge was a culmination of many other scenes going back to his graduation from Helena High School in 1999. Six months after graduation, he enlisted in the Army out of a sense of patriotic duty. Soon he was stationed at Ft. Benning, Ga., as part of the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment. He was good at shooting, and he became a gunner for a scout platoon.

In 2001, the platoon was sent to Kosovo to conduct security patrols. The fighting had long been over, and Horgan saw no combat during the six-month assignment.

In January, the platoon was sent to Kuwait. As the United States debated whether to go to war, Horgan and his buddies basked in the desert, writing homesick letters and watching war movies. "Band of Brothers" and "Black Hawk Down" were the favorites. Horgan doubted war would actually happen.

Then on March 20, the first American bombs dropped on Baghdad. On March 21, Horgan`s platoon joined a caravan into Iraq toward Nasiriyah. They drove all day and most of the night. The following day, March 22, the platoon spent much of the morning and early afternoon at a roadblock.

"This war is so boring," Horgan recalls telling one of his compatriots. "We`re going to have to make up stories."

An hour later, the unit received an order to check out some activity at a bridge spanning a tributary of the Euphrates River. It was a short detour, and three vehicles went to the site. Horgan`s Humvee led the way, with Horgan at the turret manning his "fifty-cal."

It was a small bridge, maybe 50 feet across, with no aesthetic frills. It was made purely to be driven on, and that`s what the Humvee did. There was a crowd of Iraqis up ahead. Horgan said they appeared nervous. The group started to run away, and it was then that Horgan saw the missile heading toward him.


____


Horgan has left the couch to get something from the bedroom. His mother, Leila Horgan, is chatting on the phone in the kitchen, telling the person on the other end how happy everyone is that Charles is home.

There were a few tense hours back on March 22 when the family was told Charles may have been killed. Then came news he was wounded. The details trickled in, coming like gifts from heaven as it became clearer to the family that their only son, the middle child of three, soon would be home.

One of Horgan`s crutches squeaks slightly as he reenters the living room, holding something in his left hand. He presents it shyly. It`s the medal he was awarded for being wounded in combat, the Purple Heart.

It`s made in the shape of a heart, painted purple and bordered with gold. In the center is an image of George Washington. The medal hangs from a wide ribbon of purple cloth.

"It`s heavier than I thought it would be," he says, weighing it in his hand.

He never says it, but he seems embarrassed by the medal and by anyone calling him a "hero," as some townspeople have. He doesn`t feel like a hero. The medal is a combat medal and he never fired a weapon.

When he thinks about those seven minutes on the ground, his mind tends to focus on what he didn`t do.

"I know, I`m just what-iffing it to death. What if? What if?" he says. "What if I had gone back and got my weapon?"

He recalls that as he crawled on the ground, inching his way toward the second vehicle 40 yards down the road, he went back and forth in his mind on whether to retrieve his M-16, which was inside the Humvee. The sound of AK-47s — the enemy`s choice of rifle — dissuaded him, but not without a lot of angry gut-wrenching.

"I had nothing. It was pathetic. I couldn`t walk, I had no weapon," he says. "It was the most helpless feeling. If I had thrown a grenade in the trench, or got off one shot ...." His voice trails off.

Another soldier in the same Humvee, Staff Sgt. Jamie Villafane, of Brentwood, N.Y., was blown off to the side of the vehicle, his left arm and hand shredded. But he managed to hold on to his weapon, somehow captured four Iraqis and led them at gunpoint back onto the bridge, where Horgan was.

Horgan saw the Iraqis approaching, but he didn`t see Villafane behind them. For a split-second Horgan considered ordering the driver of his Humvee, a private who also was crawling on the ground, to shoot the men before they shot him. What a colossal mistake that would have been, he now says. As it is, he has enough regret to deal with.

What happened next was a sequence of small journeys that spanned half the globe, from ambulance to Black Hawk, from Kuwait to Germany to Washington, D.C., to Helena, and finally, to Jefferson City, an old mining town whittled down to a hamlet of 200 residents.

Horgan was on heavy painkilling drugs for much of it. While being treated in Landstuhl, Germany, he talked long-distance with his parents.

Horgan doesn`t remember what he told his mother, but Leila Horgan does.

"He wanted to go back [to Iraq]. He wanted to be with his friends, he was just so determined," Leila Horgan says.

She says she tried hard to talk him out of trying to return to battle. She pleaded with him to think about the rest of the family.

"We were just happy he was alive. We wanted him home."

A former high school classmate and fellow film buff, Aaron Donaldson, 22, of Helena, says Horgan didn`t want to return "to blow people away. It was a bigger thing. He wanted to back up his friends out there." He wanted to be with his fellow GIs who were in the midst of battle.

Horgan`s homecoming at Helena Airport was intimate, with family and members of his church there to greet him. The local media were not there. His return was as quiet as a Cessna gliding onto the runway in the middle of the night.

Doctors say he`ll be in rehabilitation for about six months, which is about the length of time Horgan has left in his tour of duty.

He`s applying to film school at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he hopes to enroll in the fall of 2004.

Meanwhile, he`ll sit on this old leather couch and ponder the events of the last few months, the minutes on the bridge. He can`t help it; it`s where his mind takes him. He`ll draw more sketches. He`ll rattle the shrapnel in the bottle. He`ll feel the weight of the Purple Heart, and the voices in his head that no one else hears will debate whether he truly deserves it.


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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

The Only Law West of the Tigris
Robert Scheer

May 6, 2003

"We have ways to make you talk."

One hopes that is not how President Bush means to fulfill his promise that Iraq`s elusive, or perhaps phantom, weapons of mass destruction would be found. What methods are U.S. inquisitors using to force captured Iraqis to confirm the president`s justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

As of Monday, 17 former members of the Iraqi elite portrayed in the Pentagon`s "most wanted" playing cards have surrendered or been captured. Evidently none of them have been willing or able to tell their captors what they want to hear.

According to an Associated Press report Sunday, "Expected intelligence from senior captured Iraqis who might have been most knowledgeable about the government`s secrets is not materializing. One by one, they are insisting under interrogation that the government had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs in recent years, U.S. officials say."

This has irritated the petulant Bush, who complained: "We`re learning that, for example, [Iraq Foreign Minister] Tarik Aziz still doesn`t know how to tell the truth. He didn`t know how to tell the truth when he was in office, he doesn`t know how to tell the truth as a captive."

That is the language of a bully who holds all the cards and yet suspects they still might not produce a winning hand. If, in the end, Iraq is not shown to have had truly threatening weapons, it will be Bush who stands exposed as one who didn`t know how to tell the truth.

So what that Aziz is a loathsome fellow? That just makes it all the more depressing to observe that the facts on the ground in liberated Iraq seem to back up the bad guys` accounts.

Our government listed the specific quantities and qualities of Iraq`s weapons, mocked U.N. inspectors as impotent stooges for being unable to find them and even announced days before the invasion that chemical weapons probably had been distributed to some Iraqi military units. Secretary of State Colin Powell named and showed photos of sites where WMDs were said to be.



Now Bush tells us he hasn`t the foggiest notion of where they are, and yet he still won`t allow the U.N. inspectors to return. Powell stands by the intelligence he touted, despite the fact that most of the approximately 100 sites that same intelligence marked as probable WMD hiding spots have been searched and dismissed.

Our intelligence failure indicates that this was a "spec" war, rather than a legitimate preemptive strike launched with hard evidence of a pressing danger. This should make us very uneasy as citizens of a democracy. Either our government lied or it pursued a costly war against a resource-wealthy, militarily weak paper tiger based on vague hopes that incriminating evidence would turn up after the fact.

We have a right, as well as a compelling need as a free people, to know whether the president told us the truth when securing approval for this war. If Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the security of our country or our allies, then the invasion violated the norms of international law and mocked representative government.

If Washington is to prove its war motives, there needs to be transparency in the process of learning what the captured Iraqis know. We must ensure that POWs are not coerced into serving the political needs of the Bush administration. It is a disgrace that the U.S. media have shown little interest in the location, legal rights and treatment of these high-ranking prisoners of war.

What is the situation, for example, of Gen. Amir Saadi, who surrendered on April 12 after telling German television he did not believe Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction for some time. Of course, he could be lying. But after being held incommunicado for weeks under the authority of an administration that has shown no respect for due process in its war on terror, can we trust anything he says from here on out?

If the former Iraqi elite are suspected of war crimes, it would seem all the more compelling to turn them over to an international tribunal to investigate impartially and return a judgment that the world would accept.

Otherwise, Uncle Sam appears to be nothing more than a hanging judge, roaming the world in search of convenient villains on which to impose a crude form of swift, but unsavory, gunslinger justice.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for The Times.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[CheapThrill]

Bush`s Brown Shirts at work



Theatre director attacked over critical US play


The director of a Paris theatre responsible for staging a play critical of George W Bush has been viciously attacked.

Attilio Maggiulli, director of the Theatre of Italian Comedy, was punched and slashed with a box cutter.

He was assaulted in the building`s entrance, said Claudine Simon, his assistant.
One man held him down, while another cut his face. They also splashed paint on the theatre walls, she said.

It is unclear exactly what motivated the beating, said Ms Simon, who said she found her employer bleeding in the entrance.

Since Wednesday, the theatre has been showing a play called "George W Bush, or God`s Sad Cowboy".

She suggested the assailants might have been offended by a poster showing a skull in a cowboy hat to represent Bush, or by a photo of an Afghan man that the theatre showed as part of its publicity display.

They also insulted Jacques Chirac, one of the main opponents of the US-led war in Iraq. The play is critical of Bush but doesn`t directly touch on the Arab world, Ms Simon said.
The attackers fled, and Mr Maggiulli was treated at a Paris hospital.


© Associated Press
Story filed: 20:00 Sunday 4th May 2003

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_777215.html

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Venezuela: USA`s preference is dictatorship over democracy

US YellowTimes.org columnist Matthew Riemer writes: The Bush administration`s 2003 invasion of Iraq marks the fiftieth anniversary of US interventionism in the Middle East, which began with the CIA`s overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. These two events, both noteworthy in their own right, form the perfect pair of bookends for a large shelf of Washington`s Middle East exploits ... from the bombing of Libya in 1986 to the first Gulf War in 1991 to involvement in Lebanon in the early `80s.

The `53 coup is significant because it was the first successful overthrow of a foreign government by the CIA. Its success showed just how much influence Washington could have in Eurasia, especially in regions on the doorstep of the Soviet Union. In short, it was a remarkable projection of power.

The most recent military action in the Middle East ... "Operation Iraqi Freedom" as its been dubbed by the US ... represents a fundamental shift in how Washington chooses to achieve its policy goals ... now with increased unilateralism and nationalism. The policy of preemptive warfare has been both articulated and executed by the Bush administration in Iraq.

-One of the most interesting observations regarding these two events though reveals a strange inverse relationship they seem to have, which possibly comments on broader policy intentions.

In both cases, the United States is carrying out "regime change."

And in both cases, policy makers are concerned with how the oil industry is going to be run (nationalization/privatization). However, in the former case, the CIA removed an appointed leader and replaced him with a dictator who would then rule for 26 (1953-1979) more years. In the latter case, the opposite occurred as the US removed a dictator who ruled for 26 (1976-2003) years and has replaced him with a US civil administration, which will presumably attempt to foster some kind of democratic institutions.

This illustrates that the chief US interest in both cases was resource security and regional hegemony/strategic positioning and not the freeing of people from the yoke of dictatorship. In Iran, the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Company by the Majlis threatened British and American oil interests by shutting foreign investors out of Iran`s lucrative industry, which at the time, the BBC writes, "[was] the UK`s largest single investment overseas." It also further distanced the US and weakened its influence in a crucial Cold War state. So in this situation, it`s dictatorship over democracy.

In 2003, the United States could no longer let Saddam Hussein ... a man who threatened US interests and complicated Washington`s plans just by his presence ... rule Iraq, which had become the epicenter of the world`s most vital region and home to the second largest proven oil reserves. In this example, it`s democracy over dictatorship.

When "democracy" (or, at least, non-dictatorship) happens to be Washington`s goal (even rhetorically) it can make for a great sell, as was surely seen over the past several weeks. On the other hand, just because "dictatorship" can`t be as readily sold to the public doesn`t mean interventions that empower despotic regimes are off-limits.

Forays like the CIA`s in Iran aren`t only for days gone by. In fact, the current situation in Venezuela resembles Iran fifty years ago quite uncannily: upstart leader connected to nationalization of the oil industry from a country with regional strategic importance is overthrown by a plutocratic/military class in the interests of corporations and foreign capital. And even though President Hugo Chavez was able to return to power, the pattern of regime change aimed at governments who resist globalization and the infiltration of their countries by foreign capital continued.

So, in Venezuela, like Iran, it`s dictatorship over democracy.

So democracy is only Washington`s preferred political system when it happens to be one of convenience (coincides with policy). Such is the case with Iraq in 2003 because Washington`s goals ... to a degree ... overlap with a democratic Iraq. But if Iraqi democracy produces the world`s next Hugo Chavez, policy makers will very quickly have little use for such a system.


http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=6832

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US invasion produces human catastrophe in Iraq

By Jerry Isaacs of wsws.org http://www.gooff.com/NM/templates/Breaking_News.asp?articlei…

May 5, 2003


An unprecedented social calamity is confronting the Iraqi people as a result of the US invasion and the widespread looting that followed the removal of the Baghdad government. Virtually every element of the civilian infrastructure—electrical and water supply, telecommunications, health care, schools, transportation, even the financial system—has broken down, threatening the country’s 24 million people with the spread of infectious diseases, hunger and more death.

At least 3,500 civilians were killed and another 6,000 injured by American bombs, missiles and ground attacks during the three-week war. Tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers—the bulk of them young conscripts—were also killed, although the number may never be known because the US refuses to present even an estimate of Iraqi casualties, civilian or military.

In addition to the casualties, the US attacks destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes, workplaces and government offices involved in food distribution and other civil affairs. Severe damage was also done to power generators and water plants leaving much of the population in Baghdad, Basra and other cities without operating pumps that remove sewage and circulate fresh water.

A desperate situation existed even before the war due to 12 years of US-led economic sanctions, which blocked the import of chlorine for water purification, lead for pencils, seeds, fertilizers and many medical supplies on the grounds they could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction. Eighty-five percent of Iraqis had no regular employment, 800,000 of Iraq’s 13 million children were malnourished and less than half of the population (41 percent) had regular access to clean water.

The war deeply exacerbated this already desperate situation. On May 2 eight international relief agencies issued a joint statement, declaring that much of the Iraqi population now faced a “critical” situation.

“Already under severe strain and under-resourced before the war began, hospitals, water plants and sewerage systems have been crippled by the conflict and the looting,” said the statement, signed by among others, the directors of Oxfam, Save the Children in Britain, Islamic Relief and the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (Cafod). “Hospitals are overwhelmed, diarrhea is endemic and the death toll is mounting. Medical staff are working for free, but cannot continue for long. Rubbish, including medical waste, is piling up. Clean water is scarce and diseases like typhoid are being reported in southern Iraq.”

The statement noted that newly armed militia groups were forcing civilians to flee their homes and were offering “protection” against looting for hospitals. The statement warned of the danger of the outbreak of ethnic, tribal and religious violence that could imperil thousands of civilians.

“Unless comprehensive action is taken now by the occupying forces to ensure security and the orderly delivery of humanitarian assistance based on need—which is a requirement under the Geneva conventions—this already acute situation will only worsen.”The statement concluded by calling on US authorities to hand over reconstruction efforts to the United Nations, noting that many of the countries neighboring Iraq had already called for the US to pull out of the country and allow the UN to help form a new government.

The White House has steadfastly opposed any such measures and instead has directly blocked humanitarian aid from agencies connected to the UN or the European Union. Last Friday, US authorities refused to allow a Belgian aircraft, loaded with vaccines, ante-natal care equipment and operating tables, to land in Baghdad, citing security concerns. The action was widely interpreted as an attempted to punish the Belgian government, which had opposed the US war.

Last month, US military forces also stopped a humanitarian flight headed to the northern city of Irbil. The plane, filled with enough medical supplies to help 40,000 people for three months, was also told not to land because of supposed security concerns. A spokesman for the British aid agency Save the Children UK, which has operated in northern Iraq for 12 years, repudiated the claims, saying the city was “as safe as many parts of London.” Brendan Paddy told the BBC, “I can only guess they have other priorities because the suggestion that it is not safe is very difficult to accept.”

US officials have barely acknowledged the social catastrophe in Iraq. The main preoccupation of the Bush administration has been seizing Iraq’s oil resources, securing lucrative “reconstruction” contracts for US companies closely tied to the White House and suppressing the growing number of Iraqi demonstrations demanding an end to the US occupation.
Referring to the US military forces, Irene Khan, the general secretary of Amnesty International last month, noted, “There seems to have been more preparation to protect the oil wells than to protect hospitals, water systems or civilians.”

In fact US efforts to resume the flow of oil from Iraq’s southern oilfields were completed ahead of schedule and the massive northern oilfields near Kirkuk are expected to be up and running in a matter of weeks. The task was assigned to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which set up a special Task Force to Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO). On Saturday, the US appointed Philip J. Carroll, a former chief executive of the Shell Oil company, the US unit of Royal Dutch/Shell, to head the nation’s oil industry, along with two Iraqi figureheads needed to sign over contracts to US and British energy conglomerates.

Meanwhile, the social disaster facing millions of ordinary Iraqis is worsening.

The New York Times noted Sunday that “confusion and frustration reign in most sections of Baghdad, a city of about 4.5 million. Many businesses have yet to reopen and people are complaining of skyrocketing food prices and the lack of paychecks to buy staples.

“Hundreds of angry Iraqis demonstrated today at the Palestine Hotel, where most foreign journalists here are staying, demanding order and jobs. Many protesters complained that they had filled out job applications only to learn that few if any jobs were available.”

The article also noted that none of the city’s teachers have been paid since February and they feared that their salaries—the equivalent of $3 to $10 a month—would not be enough to live on. The head of the US occupation administration, former General Jay Garner, has promised to pay civil servants an emergency allocation of $20 each, but nothing has materialized.

Sixty percent of the population depended on the government for sustenance, as sanctions crippled the country’s agricultural sector and forced the government to import food staples.

Aid agencies have warned that millions could start going hungry in central and southern Iraq if the US does not protect humanitarian deliveries from looting and violence.

Before the war, the Hussein government distributed several months of rations to every Iraqi family but experts expect that food to run out soon. Food is available in private markets in Baghdad and other cities, but the poor could not afford to buy it before the war and now prices have shot up.

The food crisis has been exacerbated by the damage done to Iraq’s irrigation system, which has lost electrical power. Experts expect the country to produce only one-third of the crops it did in 2002.

Health care system in tatters

Many of Baghdad’s 33 hospitals remain closed due to power cuts, medicine shortages, lack of staff and fear of continued looting. Those that remain open are unable to cope with the war wounded and the increased number of patients whose chronic diseases worsened due to stress of war, the lack of medication and forced changes in diets. Scores of Iraqi children have been brought in after being injured from unexploded ordinance and cluster bombs.

Doctors in Baghdad suspect hundreds of children have cholera and typhoid, two potentially fatal diseases caused by filthy water, energy blackouts that have rotted food, tons of garbage that have piled up in the streets and open sewage. More than half of the children brought for treatment at Al-Iskan children’s hospital were suffering from dehydration and diarrhea, according to Dr. Ahmed Abdul Fattah, the assistant director.

The diseases could be controlled with antibiotics, but hospitals have no fully working labs and face critical shortages of medical supplies, due to sanctions and looting. If untreated, cholera kills 50 to 80 percent of its victims. It is most lethal for children under five and for the elderly.
“Unfortunately, we can expect many more young children to die rapidly,” said George Hatim, UNICEF’s chief officer in Baghdad. “Humanitarian groups can do a great deal but they cannot be a substitute for a whole system. We’re talking about a whole population, we’re not talking about a refugee camp or an internally displaced population. Iraq is now in a sense a stateless state and it is the children who are now suffering and paying the price.”

Threat from depleted uranium ordinance

The Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy, has demanded that American and British military forces remove the toxic residues left by up to 2,000 tons of depleted uranium (DU) weapons used during the war. Many scientists believe that DU—used in armor-piercing rounds and “bunker-buster” rockets and bombs—causes cancer and other severe illnesses after its radioactive residue goes into the air or seeps into water supplies.

The Guardian newspaper reported that the society was outraged because the Pentagon had claimed it had the backing of the British scientists in saying DU was not dangerous. In fact, a spokesman for the society said, soldiers and civilians were in danger. Children playing in contaminated areas were particularly at risk.

Professor Brian Spratt, who chairs a Royal Society working group on DU health hazards, said the US and Britain should immediately monitor residential areas, water and milk supplies for any increase in uranium levels. DU has been suspected of causing a rise in cancer among Iraqi civilians, particularly children, following the first Gulf War in 1991, when its use was initiated by the US. Since then, Iraqi health authorities reported that the number of cancer cases in the country had quadrupled, with the greatest concentration in the south, where the largest amount of DU bombs and shells were used.

Another opponent of the use of DU weapons is Professor Doug Rokke, a one-time US army colonel who is also a former director of the Pentagon’s DU project, and a former professor of environmental science in Alabama. He told the Guardian a nation’s military personnel cannot willfully contaminate another nation, cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions.

US officials have said they have no plans for any DU clean-up in Iraq nor will they even test all US soldiers for exposure.

[CheapThrill]

We know you have weapons of ma.... no, wait, I mean, we know you are helping terrorists!



U.S. hands Damascus its last warning

Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad remain defiant: U.S. says `there are consequences lurking in the background` unless aid to terrorists ends

Scott Stinson
National Post, with files from news services

Monday, May 05, 2003

Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, said yesterday he had delivered a final warning to Syria to stop aiding terrorist groups.

He said Damascus would have a price to pay if it failed to meet Washington`s demands to close the offices of Islamic terrorist organizations in its country.

"There are consequences lurking in the background," Mr. Powell said on U.S. television. He did not specifically threaten military action in his meeting with Bashar Assad, the Syrian President, on Saturday -- but he did say George W. Bush, the U.S. President, would "have all his options on the table" should Syria ignore the U.S. edict to change its ways following the destruction of Saddam Hussein`s regime in Iraq.

"There are many ways to confront a nation," he said, adding that diplomatic and economic sanctions and military force are all possible. That stance is a step back from the rhetoric employed by some U.S. officials immediately after the fall of Baghdad, which suggested Syria was the next target for disarmament.

Mr. Powell and other U.S. officials said yesterday that Damascus had already taken action to shut down terrorist offices, but Syrian officials declined to comment on those claims.

"You have to ask him what he meant," said Bouthaina Shaaban, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. "I`m really not entitled to answer."

"We are more interested in what he said about a comprehensive peace rather than what he said about offices," she said.

Officials with the groups identified for closure by Mr. Powell were more blunt: "I haven`t been informed of any such thing," said Usama Hamdan, a Hamas official in Lebanon.

"The Americans know well that our presence is part of the Palestinian presence in Syria and Lebanon and that it`s not voluntary. It is forced, because of the occupation of our land and the expulsion of Palestinians [at the creation of Israel]," he said.

Visitors to the group`s Damascus headquarters, as well as those of Islamic Jihad -- another terrorist faction Mr. Powell demanded Syria shut -- were told senior officials were travelling.

Officials from Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group backed by Syria and Iran, were similarly defiant.
"I doubt anyone would answer [the U.S.] call, for as long as there is [Israeli] occupation, no one can even propose disarming the resistance," said Sheik Hassan Izzedine, a senior official of Hezbollah.
"We are not worried a bit about the future and we consider ourselves people with a just cause and we reject any threat."

Mr. Powell said the Bush administration will closely follow developments in the region, and warned that Syrian promises of action would not suffice.

"There are no illusions in [Mr. Assad`s] mind as to what we are looking for from Syria," he said.
"There was, as we put it in diplomatic terms, a candid exchange of views, but it is not promises that we are interested in -- or assurances -- but it is action. We will see what happens in the days, weeks, months ahead."

Mr. Powell said since Damascus has a new neighbour with a changed power structure in Iraq, the United States "would be watching, and we would measure performance over time to see whether Syria is prepared now to move in a new direction in light of these changed circumstances."

The Secretary of State has long been one of the Bush administration`s most diplomatic voices, and his entreaty to Syria was viewed as a waste of time by some U.S. officials.

Newt Gingrich, a member of the Pentagon Defence Policy Board and former speaker of the House of Representatives, recently said "the concept of [Mr. Powell] going to Damascus to meet a terrorist-supporting, secret police-wielding dictator is ludicrous."

Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Secretary of Defence who has charged Mr. Assad with sending military equipment to Iraq, struck a softer tone yesterday by saying, "Words are one thing, action is another. I know what [the Syrians] have been doing and it`s been unhelpful.... In my view they were making unwise decisions previously. What they`ll do after this visit remains to be seen."

Mr. Powell`s request to stop aiding terrorism side-stepped the issues of military aid to Iraq and Mr. Bush`s earlier accusation that Syria took possession of Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction so they would not be discovered by U.S. and British military forces in Iraq.

Instead, Mr. Powell said he had "a good discussion" about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Mr. Assad, adding Syria has been helpful in the U.S.-led war against terrorism.

Mr. Powell`s trip to the Middle East also included a session with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, where the Secretary of State pushed for the removal of Hezbollah`s armed presence in southern Lebanon. He said the United States has "concern about the continuing terrorist activities of Hezbollah in the region and around the world."

A Lebanese newspaper reported Mr. Lahoud told Mr. Powell Hezbollah "is a legal political party," while Sheik Naim Kassem, Hezbollah`s deputy leader, said "Lebanon refuses to take dictation from America."

Mr. Powell`s discussions with Middle East leaders are part of U.S.-led efforts to implement a three-year "road map" to peace in the region that was unveiled last week. It calls for a separate Palestinian state that is at peace with Israel and is accepted by Arab governments.

White House asks Israel to ease up on the Palestinians, A10 z This road map is more like a roadblock: Comment, A14 z Editorial, Page A15


© Copyright 2003 National Post


http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=E8F9FCDF-6B2F-4B31-8…

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SHOCKER: Bush Administration Now Doubts Saddam Had WMD

By Neil Mackay, The Sunday Herald
May 5, 2003


The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.

Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be `amazed` if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq`s chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.

Bush claimed: `Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.`

The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no `smoking gun` and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.

The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam`s scientists -- which he labelled the `nuclear mujahidin` -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.

This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine`s central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.

Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.


http://www.sundayherald.com/33628

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Eric Zorn: `Media AWOL in noting irony of Bush`s flight`
Posted on Tuesday, May 06 @ 09:52:13 EDT
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By Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune

So much for that myth--the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. During the presidential campaign of 2000, it started going around that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, then the leading Republican candidate, had significant gaps in his military record.

Specifically, that Bush failed to report for duty for an entire year toward the end of his hitch with the Texas Air National Guard.

The short version: In May 1968 the silver-spoon son of a U.S. congressman jumped to the top of a long waiting list despite mediocre scores on his pilot-aptitude test and was allowed to enlist in the Guard, a common way to avoid being drafted into combat in Vietnam.

In May 1972 he sought a transfer from Houston, where he flew F-102s on weekends, to a unit in Montgomery, Ala. There, he worked on the U.S. Senate campaign of a friend of his father`s and, records indicate, blew off his military obligations.



Bush failed to take his annual flight physical in 1972 so Guard officials grounded him, the story went. He never flew again and received an early discharge to go to graduate school. His final officer-efficiency report from May 1973 noted only that supervisors hadn`t seen him or heard from him.

Bush`s campaign biography obscured or misrepresented these details. In the summer and fall of 2000, his spokesmen offered various and evolving explanations for what Democrats said represented a far bigger "character issue" than any of the windy exaggerations of their candidate, Vice President Al Gore.

"If he is elected president, how will he be able to deal as commander in chief with someone who goes AWOL, when he did the same thing?" Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey said to the Boston Globe, where veteran investigative reporter Walter V. Robinson, a former Army intelligence officer, wrote several major stories on the subject. "This stinks."

Yes, but like Bush at the end of his hitch, it didn`t fly. A search of all news publications and programs archived in the LexisNexis database for the last seven months of the 2000 campaign found 114 stories referencing Bush, the Texas Air National Guard and Alabama. Over that same span, nearly 10 times that many stories--1,076 to be exact--referenced Al Gore and the expression "invented the internet," an allusion to the bogus charge then haunting Gore that he had wildly inflated his role in the online revolution.

The "Bush AWOL?" story appeared in this newspaper and was based on good reporting and still-unanswered questions. It faded away--a scant 14 mentions in the database for all of 2001 and 2002 due to the age of the allegations, the lack of any new developments and the urgency of current events.

Last week, though, the president all but wore a "Kick Me!" sticker on the back of his flight suit when he decided to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot`s seat of an S-3B Viking jet.

Imagine the derisive merriment in the columns and on the chat shows if former President Bill Clinton revived the skirt-chasing issue by touring a sorority house or if Gore delivered a lecture to the engineers at Netscape Communications Corp. Think of the snickering and the sardonic rehash of history.

But for Bush in flyboy attire, a discreet silence. The only voices I encountered raising this issue were David Corn in the Nation; Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who asked, "Tell me if you ever heard of anybody with as powerful a resistance to shame as Bush"; and talk station WLS-AM`s token progressives Nancy Skinner and Ski Anderson, who spent a full hour Sunday afternoon savoring the irony of it all.

There was no relentless examination of the damning timeline on cable news outlets, no interviewing the commanders who swear Bush didn`t show up where he was supposed to, no sit-downs with the veterans who have offered still-unclaimed cash rewards to anyone who can prove that Bush did anything at all in the Guard during his last months before discharge.

So much for the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. So much for the myth of the "liberal media."

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/
chi-0305060077may06,1,502324.column

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Is George W. the Demagoguer in Chief?
By P. M. Carpenter
Mr. Carpenter holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Illinois and is a syndicated columnist. Please consider contacting your local newspaper to carry his column.



Anyone with a lick of common sense and a penchant for prophecy could easily call the 2004 presidential election without further ado: a Democrat, almost any Democrat, will mop up the floor with George W.

Forget Iraq. Today`s ill-reasoned hoopla over that wagged dog will be long forgotten tomorrow. And let us even grant that America`s greatest foreign policy blunder - otherwise known as Operation Iraqi Freedom - doesn`t blow up in our face till at least 2005. The economy, our commonsensical prophet would reason, is always the key to electoral success and in that arena W. couldn`t be doing more to ensure victory for the opposition. A massive loss of jobs, unprecedented federal deficits and 50 crumbling state governments are but 3 of the president`s accomplishments so far. What`s more, he has ample time before the close of electioneering to make matters even worse. This he is doing by pushing yet more fiscally traumatic tax cuts.

Yes, by 2004 we`ll all be hurting like nothing we recall; excepting, of course, the top 1 percent of income earners. Those lucky few will sit out the sociopolitical revolution - "Perhaps the Bahamas, my dear?" - that is sure to come, just as it landed with crushing weight on Herbert Hoover in 1932. More recently the mini- and one-term presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush I suffered as well from dismal economies and politically hapless responses. One reminisces their respective Whip Inflation Now (WIN), the frozen-deer look in the "Are you better off …?" spotlight and the courageous but self-annihilating act of raising taxes when needed.

All the indicators are there not only for W.`s loss, but huge Republican losses and Democratic gains in both houses - no matter how typically your average Democrat tries to screw things up. Above all, though, Bush II is toast, our prophet would comfortably forecast with excellent historical reasoning.

But he or she would be wrong, or at the very least standing on precariously shaky ground. For these once-sound indicators of defeat neglect what has become now-s.o.p. politics for the Republican Party at large and George W. Bush in particular: the grotesque exploitation of public deception, better known as sheer demagoguery.

Whenever a fact can be distorted or reality obscured for political gain, Bush, led by his handlers, is light-years ahead of any known Democrat in skillful deployment. From grossly distorting his actual education policy to mountainous fiscal lies and to duping the public on a war`s necessity, W. wields Herculean demagogic powers. He deceives not just willingly, it seems, but eagerly. Barely a White House policy is left untainted.

You want a better education for your children? Fine. Bush publicly touts reform while silently undercutting its called-for budget. You want lower taxes? Just name a price and Bush will meet it - more bogusly than Boss Tweed, more shamelessly than Huey Long. Don`t like massive deficit spending which leads to higher interest and mortgage rates? No problem. His latest economic "growth" package - still more tax cuts for you-know-who - will soon offset those dangers. Honest. Forget what his own metaconservative advisors say otherwise: that their fiscal intent is to wreck social programs by driving headlong into a wall of catastrophic national debt. And, of course, as both a debate-stopper and political cover for violating international law, the administration`s cynical manipulation of patriotism will go down in demagogic history as an epic achievement.

As one might expect, Bush`s preternatural use of deceptive rhetoric didn`t simply materialize one day in 2000 or 2003. Rather, it built on the New Right`s groundbreaking demagoguery of the 1970s and 1980s, whose artificial populism mirrored its Platonic ideals of Joe McCarthy`s smugness and Barry Goldwater`s 1964 holy conception of "morality" politics. Quite ingeniously, the New Right movement ditched any sober discussion of complicated social problems and opted instead for the rhetorical glitz of message simplicity (our cultural values were headed to hell in a handbasket) and constant scapegoating (only elitist liberals were at the helm).

The ploys worked well enough for Republican Machiavellis to occupy themselves ever since with refinements. Based on political expediency, the party subjected its message contents to overnight reconstruction - for example the evil, then goodness, of deficits - and over time conservatism inverted to radicalism. Hence today`s ever-pliable Boss Bush, consiglieri Cheney and Rove and assorted underbosses such as Rummy and Perle. Lumped together these anti-conservative creationists have delivered unto us a doomed Pax Americana with accompanying domestic ransacking - all courtesy the latest in demagogic fashion.

So what is to be done in the way of opposition? The brutish answer is to match demagoguery for demagoguery. The noble answer is to remain above it and pray for a saner day. The winning answer is probably somewhere betwixt - yet therein lies the deeper problematic of closing the demagoguery gap through an escalating rhetorical arms race, a foul but real prospect. The outs may decide that two can play at any-means-to-an-end, and that`ll be all she wrote for any hope of a thoughtful democracy. Perhaps then, the enlightened answer will entail expatriate status to avoid the whole scene.

For now, though, sit back and marvel at W.`s extraordinary aptitude for demeaning honest politics and thus beating the odds. We may never see the likes of such demagogic mastery again.

http://hnn.us/articles/1437.html


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© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter

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Commander-in-Costume
May 6, 2003
By Mike McArdle

Joe McGinniss was present at the birth of modern American politics. His book The Selling of the President chronicled the Nixon campaign of 1968 and described how a group of dedicated men repackaged Richard Milhous Nixon and gave America one of its worst Presidents.

A modern politician is as much a consumer product as a PT Cruiser or a George Foreman grill, and they are sold with the same techniques and often the same advertising people. Richard Nixon was widely believed to have lost the Presidency in 1960 because he appeared devious and insincere in his televised debates with the cool, assured John F. Kennedy.

Nixon learned his lesson and hired professional image makers for his 1968 comeback. They remade Nixon, long thought of as a nasty political knife-fighter, into a more mellow elder statesman. Appearances and speeches were crafted to show the voters only the Nixon that the handlers wanted them to see. Debates were avoided - they were not controllable. Nixon was going end the Vietnam War with a plan that he couldn`t talk about, and crime would be defeated merely by hiring a new attorney general.

It seems so shamelessly corrupt in retrospect because we know that crime got worse and the secret plan to end the war remains a secret to this day. But they pulled it off. Nixon just barely snuck into the office he had sought for so long. Once there, however, the real Nixon returned - the crude political street fighter who made up the rules as he went along and saw enemies everywhere. Nixon eventually brought himself down and degraded the office he had put such a priority on obtaining.

In the decades that followed the art of manipulating the public`s perception has reached levels that the men who had to put a good face on Tricky Dick could have never imagined. A modern campaign - in fact a modern Presidency (campaigns are perpetual nowadays) - is a series of carefully planned images and soundbites designed to manipulate the perceptions of the public.

And it is that manipulation that has brought us George W. Bush, the anti-Nixon.

Nixon was in fact a man of many gifts in an unattractive package. A extremely bright student, he grew resentful of the Eastern elite whom he felt had denied him a place in an Ivy League law school because he wasn`t one of their own. He lost the presidency in 1960 to an Ivy League child of privilege who possessed the good looks and personal skills that Nixon lacked. Nixon`s resentments gradually morphed into the obsessive paranoia that eventually destroyed his career.

Bush is a man of few gifts in an appealing package. He is exactly the type of person that Nixon so despised, a son of Eastern old money who was handed the things that Nixon had to work so hard for. Never studied, never worked hard and yet was never far from wealth or political power.

But it is Bush more than anyone else who`s benefited from the political image-making that Nixon used in the 1968 campaign. Nowhere was this more evident than during last week`s appearance on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

The military personnel on their way back to the US were used as a prop for a publicly financed political photo-op - Bush landing on the carrier deck in a fighter plane dressed as a pilot. Of course Bush`s real military record was nothing short of disgraceful. He used his father`s influence to avoid Vietnam and obtain a spot in the Texas Air National Guard, from which he went AWOL for over a year.

Bush later delivered a speech on the deck in front of a huge banner reading "Mission Accomplished.". The speech, of course, was as fraudulent as his pilot costume. The absurd linking of Iraq with 9/11 and Al Qaeda - evidence of which the administration has never been able to supply - was repeated. The oft-mentioned weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify an attack on a virtually defenseless country have never been found, but were shamelessly dragged out again. "The regime" can`t give anybody the missing WMDs anymore because it no longer exists. Repeat lies often enough and they become truth.

The press, having abdicated its responsibility to scrutinize anything that even remotely involves flag-waving went along for the ride. Chris Matthews of MSNBC actually went so far as gush over how good Bush looked in his jump suit. As Mr. Hardball put it, "He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes west. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was the best picture in the 2000 campaign."

But Matthews inadvertently touched on Bush`s greatest political asset. He can made into anything that the image makers want him to be. He is so utterly vacuous that he can be the cowboy, the soldier, the businessman - and there is no pesky real person to get in the way. He is what the people who remade Nixon could only have dreamed of.

Turn over in your grave, Dick, the Eastern elites that you hated took your makeover gambit to elevate one of their own to power and are using it to keep him there.



© Democratic Underground, LLC

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/05/06_costu…

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TALIBAN FIGHTERS INFILTRATING BACK INTO AFGHANISTAN FROM PAKISTAN
Owais Tohid: 5/05/03

Mir Jan proudly displays what he describes as his badges of honor – two deep scars – one acquired fighting the erstwhile Soviet Union with US assistance; the other, ironically, sustained fighting his former ally in the US-led war in Afghanistan.

The 43-year-old bearded and turbaned Jan is a Taliban fighter, who is based in the Kuchlak refugee camp in Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak. In recent weeks, he has once again started taking part in skirmishes in Afghanistan.

"I am proud to be a part of the jihad which defeated Roosis [Russians] and now fighting against infidel forces of America in my country. I have come here temporarily after this bullet wound I got in Ghazni," Jan says, while reciting verses from the Koran and fingering prayer beads.

"I will go to fight again, as Mullah Omar has ordered us to wage jihad against Americans in Afghanistan," Jan says referring to a recent pronouncement by the Taliban’s elusive one-eyed spiritual leader.

Hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, like Jan, managed to escape the US blitz in Afghanistan, finding refuge in the madrassahs and Afghan refugee camps situated in the hilly terrains of Baluchistan, as well as in the tribal areas in the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan. In recent months they have recovered from the shock of their defeat at the hands of US forces and are renewing armed operations. Units of Taliban loyalists – along with fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the hardline Islamic Hizb-i-Islami movement – have infiltrated back into Afghanistan to carry out attacks against US troops and Afghan government forces.

The upsurge in Taliban activity has coincided with US military operations in Iraq. Many Taliban supporters believe that American attention is focused on Baghdad, a belief that is emboldening them to mount attacks against President Hamid Karzai’s transitional government.

Taliban raids have already caused a few US casualties. For example, one late April clash near Shkin in Paktia province left two American soldiers dead. The skirmishes have resulted in an unknown number of Taliban casualties. Although the Taliban’s military capabilities remain limited, Karzai government officials are clearly concerned about the raids. In particular, officials worry about ongoing Pakistani support for the Taliban.

"There is no hindrance for the Taliban in crossing the border. They just walk into Afghanistan and provide arms for their fighters. It cannot be done without Pakistan’s security agencies’ blessings," said an Afghan intelligence official at Spin Boldak.

Karzai reportedly expressed Kabul’s concern about the Taliban revival during a late April summit meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. [For additional information see the Eurasia Insight archives]. The Pakistani leader pledged to work with Afghan officials to establish a bilateral commission to improve security in the border zone. Other Pakistani officials, however, have denied that Islamabad is aiding or abetting Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

"We have not allowed any terrorist to operate from Pakistan, nor have we given shelter to al Qaeda and Taliban operatives," Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told EurasiaNet. "The past is history and our actions should be gauged by the international community by our commitment to end terrorism."

Despite the official denials, political analysts say geopolitics developments concerning Afghanistan may be pushing Islamabad to maintain ties with the Taliban as a means of influencing the Afghan reconstruction process. "Pakistan ditched the Taliban due to American pressure, but now there are fears that their relationship could be restored due to the increasing presence of Indians in Afghanistan," says analyst Professor Shamim Akhtar, the former chairman of Karachi University’s International Affairs Department.

Before the September 11 terrorism tragedy, Islamabad maintained close ties with the Taliban. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archives]. Since the Taliban’s ouster [for additional information see the Eurasia Insight archives], Kabul and New Delhi have significantly improved relations. Last March, during a Karzai visit to New Delhi, the two countries signed an agreement aimed at stimulating bilateral trade.

Even if official claims are true that the central government in Islamabad has not provided assistance to Taliban and al Qaeda elements in recent months, there are indications that radical Islamic fighters are finding support elsewhere in Pakistan, namely from religious political parties. A coalition of religious parties now holds power in both Baluchistan and North-West Frontier provinces, which border Afghanistan, after a convincing win in elections last October.

"The Taliban are our brothers and soldiers of Islam like us," said Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a senior leader of the extremist Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI). "They [the Taliban] were a symbol of Islam in Afghanistan."

Ahmed, like others in Pakistan, points to India’s rising influence in Afghanistan as reason to increase assistance for the Taliban. "The real power in Afghanistan is with the enemies of Pakistan, the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance is pro-India and not pro-Pakistan and is strengthening military ties with India," Ahmed said. "So the time has come for Pakistan to support the Taliban."


Editor’s Note: Owais Tohid is a freelance correspondent based in Islamabad.

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Ex-weapons inspector and former Marine Scott Ritter is calling for regime change in Washington.
By Jan Barry

Scott Ritter may be the Bush reelection team’s worse nightmare.

The former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq and card-carrying Republican is barnstorming America with a blunt message: George W. Bush’s war on Iraq was waged on a “bodyguard of lies.”

“We need regime change, and we need it quick,” Ritter told a gathering of peace activists in New Jersey on Sunday. “George W. Bush does not have the right…to represent the American people, if he told a lie. And he told a whopper.”

That whopper, said Ritter, was claiming that the US government had evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction and that was why Iraq must be invaded. The facts, he said, are that “the inspections worked. The United Nations did disarm Iraq.”

“I want the president impeached because he lied to the Congress of the United States,” Ritter said. “He may well go out and tell another lie about weapons of mass destruction” being found amid the rubble in Iraq. But, Ritter said, any scheme to plant evidence would run afoul of professional soldiers like those he served with in Gulf War I. “I can tell you, my fellow officers won’t sustain that lie.”

Ritter is a former Marine major who worked as a weapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. These days he’s an antiwar activist on a mission to pacify Washington, DC.

“What happened in Baghdad last month was not in accordance with international law. What happened in Baghdad last month was a west Texas lynching,” Ritter said at New Jersey Peace Action’s annual dinner, where he was the guest of honor. “President Bush is implementing a policy of imperialism.”

Ritter said Americans who don’t want the United States to go the way of all empires—which, he said, die of indigestion—will have to fight an historic political battle over the nation’s future. “We can’t allow a bunch of neoconservatives to hijack America,” he said. “It’s not a right-wing fraternity pin—the American flag, we own it, the American people.”

Ritter said he has been taking his blunt message to college campuses and other forums around the country. And when anyone demands that he support the war in Iraq, he replies: “What part of war do you want to support?” and describes in graphic detail the hell hole of war.

Recounting the story of a Marine in a battle in Iraq, Ritter said that a soldier is only one face of patriotism. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the other face of patriotism—the people of the United States. … The other face of patriotism is the American citizen who gets up in the morning” and carries out the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.

“If you give up now, you are giving up on American democracy,” he said. Ritter urged the assembled peace activists to reach out to Republicans like himself and raise the constitutional issues and uncomfortable facts that Bush has run roughshod over. Among those facts, he said, is this glaring one:

“Bush was a deserter from his unit during the Vietnam War. He doesn’t know what it means to support the troops.”

Jan Barry, a Vietnam veteran, is a journalist living in New Jersey. Jan is also an editor of VAIW and a contributing editor of Intervention Mag.

Posted Monday, May 5, 2003





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Operation Support Garner
The Pentagon`s one-size-fits-all `liberation` is a disaster in Iraq

Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Tuesday May 6, 2003
The Guardian

American efforts to foist new rulers on the people of Iraq are becoming increasingly grotesque. In some cities US troops have sparked demonstrations by imposing officials from the old Saddam Hussein regime. In others they have evicted new anti-Saddam administrators who have local backing.

They have mishandled religious leaders as well as politicians. In the Shia suburbs of Baghdad, they arrested a powerful cleric, Mohammed Fartousi al-Sadr, who had criticised the US presence. In Falluja, an overwhelmingly Sunni town, they detained two popular imams. All three men were released within days, but local people saw the detentions as a warning that Iraqis should submit to the US will.

The Pentagon`s General Jay Garner has taken an equally biased line in his plans for Iraq`s government. He held a conference of 300 Iraqis in Baghdad last week and excluded almost every group which has an organised following.

In a Freudian slip at a recent press conference, Donald Rumsfeld smugly explained democracy as a competition in which rival politicians try to "garner support". His message in Iraq looks like the opposite - Operation Support Garner. Otherwise, you are cut out.

Washington`s failure to hold broad-based consultations at central and local levels is provoking resistance, sometimes armed. In response, US troops have used excessive force, further raising tensions. Ten people died in Mosul when soldiers fired at crowds of protesters on successive days in mid-April. In Falluja the death toll from American shootings over two days last week was at least 16.

The massacre in Falluja was symptomatic. The town was quiet for two weeks after Iraqi troops and local Ba`ath party leaders fled. The imams halted the looting and got much of the stolen property returned. A new mayor arranged for schools to re-open and persuaded police to return to work. Then the Americans arrived, arrested imams, put up roadblocks and occupied a school - all without prior discussion with local leaders.

They seemed to be working from a one-size-fits-all Pentagon textbook. First "liberate", then move in and provide policing whether people want it or not. In Baghdad there were indeed security problems after Saddam`s forces vanished, and many residents asked why US forces did so little to halt the looting of key buildings. Having failed initially there, the US over-compensated elsewhere. It came down too hard in Falluja and other cities where people did not want a US hand.

The contrast with Afghanistan is sharp. For months Afghans pleaded for the US to deploy international peacekeepers beyond Kabul to cities where warlords held sway or were fighting for power. The US refused, either for fear of taking casualties or because of lack of interest in a poor country once its anti-western regime was toppled.

In Iraq, where there are no warlords and people feel they have the expertise to run the country themselves, the US insists on moving in and staying.

It has excluded Iraq`s best-known forces from consultations on forming a central government. The Islamic Da`wa party, which was founded in 1957 and suffered repression under Saddam in the early 1980s, was not invited. Nor was the Iraqi Communist party, which also lost thousands of its activists in the old regime`s prisons. Both opposed the US attack. The communists are weaker than they once were, as a result of decades of propaganda that they reject Islam. But they are part of the Iraqi spectrum which needs to be recognised.

Washington`s biggest omission is its refusal to make overtures to Iraq`s clergy. The Shia Muslims in particular are enjoying a strong revival and cannot be pushed aside. There are family and other rivalries between the main groups. The al-Hakim family, which founded the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq after escaping to Iran 20 years ago, now faces criticism for going into exile. It has a volatile policy towards the US, sometimes meeting officials, sometimes denouncing them. The al-Sadr family, which stayed in the sacred city of Najaf, is gaining ground. Both groups must be brought into discussions on the future.

It is not too late for the UN to play a role. There is no need for foreign troops. Iraqis have shown a high degree of post-war unity and can provide their own security. The much-predicted clashes of Sunnis v Shi`ites, or Kurds v Arabs have not happened.

But the UN should come in, with a short-term mandate, to convene a genuinely representative conference of Iraqis which would choose an interim government and an assembly to draft a constitution. Only the UN can give legitimacy and impartiality to this process. Instead of supporting Washington as Mike O`Brien, the Foreign Office minister, did when he joined Gen Garner in co-chairing last week`s highly selective meeting of Iraqi politicians, Britain should work with the security council to give the UN the same kind of government-brokering role as it had in post-war Afghanistan.

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Poland puts Iraq carve-up in doubt
London meeting hit by insistence on UN mandate for multinational stabilisation force

Giles Tremlett in Madrid and Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday May 7, 2003
The Guardian

Plans to deploy a multinational stabilisation force in Iraq were thrown in doubt yesterday when Poland, one of the expected key troop contributors, insisted that the force required a UN mandate.

The demand throws a shadow over a meeting in London tomorrow aimed at securing pledges of troop deployments for the British zone of control.

The Polish foreign minister, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, presented his position after talks in Washington with the US secretary of state, Colin Powell. "We believe that we need that kind of resolution. I understand that in days ahead there will be some initiatives opening the way to have such a resolution," he said.

The US is preparing to present a comprehensive UN resolution to the UN security council covering the division of responsibilities and powers in postwar Iraq, but it is likely to meet stiff resistance from France, Russia and China.

A drawn-out debate over the resolution could delay the deployment of at least some of the stabilisation force.

Poland was expected to be a key contributor, sending about 1,500 troops and commanding one of up to four zones of control. Some diplomatic sources suggested they would be sent to the port of Umm Qasr.

British forces would be based in Basra, commanding a multinational brigade including Spanish troops, and a mix of forces from other European and Latin American states. Tomorrow`s meeting will focus on shaping that brigade.

American troops would control Baghdad, and Poland would be responsible for central Iraq. Mr Cimoszewicz has proposed a meeting on May 22 in Warsaw to finalise pledges of troop commitments. A fourth zone could be carved out in the north or west, but it is unclear which country would run it.

As negotiations over the stabilisation force continued in Washington yesterday, President George Bush appointed a new civilian administrator for Iraq. Paul Bremer, a diplomat specialising in counter-terrorism, will be in charge of the Pentagon`s envoy for reconstruction and humanitarian assistance, Jay Garner, a former general.

The Spanish defence minister, Federico Trillo, said 1,500 of his country`s troops would operate in the British area that he defined as "zone 4 south".

Mr Cimoszewicz said it was intended "to have all the countries ready to engage" in Iraq by the end of this month.

After meeting Mr Powell, he urged Germany and other European states to contribute to Iraq`s stabilisation and reconstruction. "Success or failure will have broad international consequences," he said.

Spanish newspapers quoted defence ministry officials yesterday saying that Honduras and Nicaragua had offered troops for the "Spanish brigade" only if Spain paid for them. Chile and Argentina had said they would take part in a UN force only, the reports said.

The odd assortment of nations being consulted reflects the difficulties Washington has faced trying to gain support for its occupation of postwar Iraq. Few countries with experience in the Middle East are on board, and no Islamic countries have offered troops.

Most of the willing are relatively impoverished states eager to enhance their relationship with the US but unable to pay their way.

The Polish defence minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, said he had received an assurance from his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, that the US would help raise money from international donors to cover the cost of about 1,500 Polish troops and a headquarters staff. Mr Szmajdzinski estimated the cost at $50m for six months.

Poland`s deputy defence minister, Janusz Zemke, said that the Polish troops could be initially stationed in Iraq for a year and then rotated every six months.

He said they would play an important role protecting energy facilities, telecommunication hubs and transport arteries. Troops from a chemical defence regiment have already been mobilised and are expected to leave for Iraq soon.

Mr Zemke said that up to 11 European countries had expressed an interest in taking part. "We are also getting signs that certain Asian countries, for example India, Pakistan and the Philippines, would be prepared to send troops," Mr Zemke said.

Most of the potential contributors are anxious to ensure their soldiers avoid conflict. Spain has stated that it does not want to have to intervene in demonstrations. "We want somewhere that is as calm as possible," said a government official quoted by El Mundo newspaper yesterday.

A senior US official said the US sector would be patrolled by 20,000 troops remaining separate from the 135,000 combat troops already in Iraq.

Bulgaria`s defence minister, Nikolai Svinarov, said his country would send 450 soldiers to Iraq.

However, Bulgaria, like Poland, wants the US to help find funds to finance its contribution.


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That is a racist slur
Tam Dalyell`s belief that a `cabal` of neoconservative Jews controls Bush is gaining currency in liberal circles

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday May 7, 2003
The Guardian

The good news is that Tam Dalyell`s outburst to Vanity Fair - in which he suggested Tony Blair was unduly influenced by a Jewish cabal - has not been ignored. His remarks made all the papers, proof that anti-semitism is no longer an uncontroversial part of public conversation.

That`s welcome. If there is bad news it`s that Dalyell has been treated as a naughty boy - "incorrigible," said Peter Mandelson - rather than as a man who has uttered a racist slur. Bad news, too, that so far much of the condemnation has come from Jews rather than Dalyell`s comrades in Labour and on the left -who one might have hoped would be queueing up to denounce such a whiskery old prejudice in their own ranks.

In a way, this episode is a test for Britain. American journalists covering the Dalyell story say the same comments would be a career-ender in Washington - much as Republican Trent Lott`s expression of nostalgic sympathy for racial segregation recently cost him his place at the helm of the US Senate. Admittedly Dalyell does not hold leadership rank in Labour, but it seems Britain`s intolerance for intolerance is not quite as advanced as America`s.

We needn`t detain ourselves too long consigning the errant MP`s argument to the dustpile where it belongs. For one thing, his is not even a well-informed rant. Two of his sinister troika - Mandelson, Jack Straw and Middle East envoy Lord Levy -do not identify as Jews at all. (Indeed, only the Linlithgow MP and Hitler`s Nuremberg laws would count Straw and Mandelson as Jewish.) The three men certainly do not operate together.

And they are anything but advocates of a "Likudnik, Sharon agenda": Mandelson and Straw have publicly advocated serious territorial compromise by Israel, while Levy was reported last year to have clashed loudly with Sharon over Palestinian rights. Most important of all, it is Britain which has taken the international lead demanding progress on Middle East peace and the creation of a Palestinian state - hardly proof of a Blair government somehow tricked into doing Sharon`s bidding.

Even if Dalyell`s aim had been more accurate, it would not have made his salvo any more forgivable. The whole business of "naming names" and "claiming the courage to speak out" reeks of McCarthyism - at the very least. It would be good if Labour and British society in general found a way to demonstrate that it holds no place for such poison.

The MP`s defence is that the cabal he really has in mind is in Washington where, he says, a group of neoconservative Jews - the familiar roll call of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith et al - have won the ear of the president. This perhaps deserves more attention than his muddle-headed theories about Britain, if only because versions of this idea are gaining currency in liberal circles.

First, it`s worth doing a reality check. As it happens, George Bush`s cabinet is the first in decades not to include a single Jewish member. The result is that those bent on sniffing out Jewish influence have to go to the second, third and fourth rungs of the administration to find it. Among the neocons the heavyweights are not Jewish: they are Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

So it pays to be clear, when one hears casual references to "the tiny group of men who surround the president", who they are and who they are not. Worthwhile, too, to realise that the umbrella labels don`t always fit: superhawk Wolfowitz, for example, seems to harbour some un-Sharonite views. Earlier this year, he told the Washington Post the case for a Palestinian state was getting more, not less, urgent and that he preferred "concrete steps" - for example tackling Jewish settlements in the occupied territories- to endless diplomatic process.

Second, this group is not and does not operate like a "cabal", with its connotations of secrecy and ulterior motives. On the contrary, it is explicit about its aim: a world dominated by American power and made safe for western-friendly democracy.

Crucially, this is an American aim pursued for American reasons. The people urging it are dedicated proponents of US might - the Jews among them included. They do not construct these grand designs for Israel`s sake, but for America`s. It just so happens that in some cases - though not all - those strategic goals are consonant with Israel`s. Where they differ - as in Ronald Reagan`s sale of Awacs aviation technology to Saudi Arabia - the hawks always choose the US over Israel. Even when they meddle in Israeli politics, it is to serve US ends.

Is there any connection between the Jewish neocons and their Jewishness? Perhaps a good university dissertation could be written on that, drawing on the Jewish tradition of seeking to change the world - from Christ to Marx. But any such thesis would also have to explain the consistent Jewish presence on the left, out of all proportion to their numbers. Maybe Jews are found sitting around the neocon table, but they are also found organising today`s anti-war movement - to say nothing of the white ranks of both the anti-apartheid struggle and the 1960s campaign for civil rights in the US.

Real anti-semites are not troubled by that contradiction: they just say that Jews are behind everything. The Nazis used to depict the Jew as the master Bolshevik and master capitalist - often in the same sentence. But this kind of warped logic can have no place among liberals or the left.

The 19th century German socialist August Bebel called anti-semitism the socialism of fools, the belief that the world can be understood by looking for the hidden hand that makes everything happen. But the real world is not like that. It`s more complex, and no amount of conspiracy theories will make it easier to understand.

Tam Dalyell would have us believe that Bush stands against Yasser Arafat because the Jews made him do it - when the reality is that Bush has his own post-9/11 reasons for seeing all terrorism as an indivisible phenomenon that the US can never again indulge.

There is a wider lesson to draw from this sorry episode. In a way Dalyell is an easy case, because he presented his views so baldly. He did not completely hide behind "Zionist" or "Likudnik" euphemisms, but spoke instead about Jews. In so doing he clearly crossed the line between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism and made himself easy to condemn.

But not all such anti-Jewish feeling expresses itself so directly. A search of the BNP`s own musings shows that even they - the fascists and racists of our age - do not call themselves anti-semites. They too claim merely to be anti-Zionists. Now of course anti-semitism and anti-Zionism can be neatly distinguished, and many learned minds do so all the time.

But it`s worth wondering if that distinction cuts much ice at street level - where anti-Jewish incidents in Britain have gone up by 75% compared with the equivalent period last year. If Zionists are constantly accused of having dual loyalties, of wielding untold power, of pursuing a secret agenda to reshape the world, all classic charges long hurled at the Jews, then one has to wonder whether one is hearing the same racist slur now voiced by Tam Dalyell - just expressed less openly.

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Iraqi weapons scientists too fearful to surrender, UN man claims
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday May 7, 2003
The Guardian

Senior Iraqi weapons scientists who are in hiding from US troops have contacted former UN inspectors to discuss giving themselves up. But they fear they will be jailed if they do not tell their interrogators what they want to hear.

One of the ex-inspectors contacted, David Albright, a Washington-based expert on nuclear proliferation, said the fall of Saddam Hussein`s regime had not brought an end to the climate of fear hanging over Iraqi scientists.

"A sizeable group from the nuclear programme want to cooperate with the US, but they don`t want to be detained if they turn themselves in," Mr Albright told the Guardian. "They worry that if they go in, the US investigation is going to focus on one thing: `If you tell us where the weapons are we`ll treat you kindly.` But they may genuinely know nothing about it."

Mr Albright said that all the Iraqis he had talked to denied knowledge of recent weapons programmes, but he added that that was hardly surprising as they were talking over open telephone lines, and might want to use what knowledge they had as a bargaining chip for better treatment.

Mr Albright, who runs the Institute for Science and International Security, said that after the fall of the regime, he had contacted some of the former Iraqi scientists he had met during earlier UN inspections. Some, including a senior Iraqi nuclear scientist, had sought him out.

The nuclear scientist had been found by journalists but said he would only to talk to them if they could put him in touch with Mr Albright. He said he knew of other former inspectors who had also been contacted by fearful Iraqis.

The scientists, having lived for so long in fear of reprisals if they spoke about Iraqi weapons programmes, are also unconvinced that the threat from the ousted regime has passed.

"We`re worried that if they are seen as cooperating they could be targeted by Saddam loyalists as collaborators," Mr Albright said. "The regime was always ready to punish families. We`re talking about fears here, but given the security problems in Baghdad they`re not unfounded."

Another former UN inspector, Stephen Black, said: "No one has said to these people that there are not going to be trials for people who had been secretly involved in programmes to make weapons of mass destruction. So why should they cooperate?"

"This is a little bargaining game. They have something of use to us. They are looking for ways to maintain their nice lifestyle that they had before," Mr Black said. He added he had not personally been approached by any Iraqi scientists. US-led forces in Iraq have so far failed to find any conclusive proof that Saddam had developed banned weapons in recent years.

Former leaders from the regime already in custody have also denied such weapons programmes existed.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the hunt would turn its focus to lower-level scientists and officials who might be persuaded to talk openly.

In a question-and-answer session with reporters, President George Bush reiterated his conviction that the US would uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Pentagon officials said yesterday that experts are examining an Iraqi trailer suspected of being used as a mobile laboratory for chemical weapons.

"I`m not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons programme of Saddam Hussein because he had a weapons programme," President Bush said. "I will leave the details ... to the experts."


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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-671855,00.html

Bay watch
The myths about Guantanamo are challenged


The proposed release this week of some of the detainees at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay is welcome for many reasons. First, it bears out the repeated contention by the Pentagon and other Bush Administration officials that the 680 prisoners will not be held indefinitely. Secondly, it addresses concerns in Britain as well as other allied nations whose citizens are among those detained. Thirdly, it will undercut the exaggerated stories of torture and inhumane conditions in the camp, which are an easy target for ill-informed criticism.
The September 11 atrocities were so appalling that America concluded that it had no option but to treat the war on terrorism as an operation altogether different from conventional warfare. Those captured in Afghanistan and identified as belonging to al-Qaeda or the Taleban were therefore not seen by Washington as prisoners of war in the normal sense, as this was not a war between sovereign states. They were held instead as “unlawful combatants”. As such, Washington contended that they were not bound by the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war. They have not been charged with any crime, given access to lawyers or consular officials or even told how long they will be detained and their prospects of release.

There is little evidence that the men are badly treated. Those few outside officials, including Mike O’Brien, a Foreign Office minister, who have been allowed access, report that the conditions are reasonable. There was indeed an international outcry at the original pictures of prisoners being held in makeshift cages and paraded in orange suits. But for the Afghans, the vast majority of the detainees, this was small hardship compared with the conditions that they could expect in Afghanistan or the brutality that many had themselves inflicted on others before their capture.

Along with the Afghans, however, are nationals of some 40 other countries, including seven Britons. And their governments have a responsibility to track nationals detained abroad and to offer consular assistance. America’s refusal to allow this has prompted angry representations to the State Department, which itself has been emroiled in an internal battle with the Pentagon over the handling of the centre. There are natural concerns at the advanced age of some of the detainees and the immaturity of others. More significantly, conspiracy theorists outside the US presume that the values enshrined in the country’s legal system are suspended for large sections of American society.

The Pentagon argues that other countries must agree to prosecute their nationals before they can be released, and that time is needed to question them. That may be so, especially as America eschews the interrogation techniques used elsewhere to obtain quick answers. But there is always unease when a society founded and based on law resorts to extra judicial arrangements, even in emergencies. A recent ruling by the US Court of Appeals that the US was not bound by its own laws of habeas corpus because the men were not on sovereign US territory underlines this distinction.

The US has begun to deal with the myths surrounding Guantanamo, which was inevitably an imperfect response to a particularly difficult problem.

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May 7, 2003
Auditioning for Senator McCarthy

Even before he died, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his poisonous encounter with American history were being summarized in a single word, McCarthyism. A half-century later, the word continues to outlive the senator in the public mind, as well it should, for it is defined as the persecution of innocent people by sensational but unproven accusations. This low-blow tactic is ever tempting to someone or other in public life, which makes Congress`s release this week of some of the more odious McCarthy archives a welcome renewal of cautionary history.

McCarthy, it turns out, preferred preliminary, secret committee vettings of the hundreds of Americans he was prepared to accuse of high treason on behalf of communism. This allowed him to weed out the more resilient and articulate witnesses, who in public could give as tough as they got from the senator and Roy Cohn, his dedicated counsel.

The least gifted in speaking in their own defense, whether mumbling in shock or invoking the constitutional right not to answer the senator`s baiting questions, were ordered back for the big show: the open hearings where the senator conducted a thunderous witch hunt that both mesmerized and polarized the nation in exploiting cold war fear. Numerous entertainers, politicians and scholars were blacklisted and punished in the public eye before the senator was brought down by the weight of his own fictions.

Why it took 50 years for Congress to release this latest lode of McCarthyism is a good question. One reason cited is the wish to avoid further abuse of those put through the private grillings. But a stronger reason is the political timidity the senator engendered for decades with his drumhead calumnies. The senator once insisted that McCarthyism was nothing more than Americanism with its sleeves rolled up. It is good to be reminded that it was xenophobia with the gloves off.



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May 7, 2003
Is You Wicked?
By MAUREEN DOWD


James Baker, the former secretary of state who helped make two Bushes president, the first by sniping at Massachusetts, the second by snatching away Florida, is an extremely careful man.

A dignified diplomat with a deep fear of ridicule, Mr. Baker always keeps his suit jacket and his public utterances buttoned.

That is why I was dumbfounded one recent night to see him being interviewed on HBO by a hip-hop guy wearing fatigues, shades, a skullcap and bling-bling and talking like a British gangsta/Rasta rapper.

The young man was asking a skeptical and increasingly impatient Mr. Baker whether it was wise for Iraq and Iran to have such similar names.

YOUNG MAN: Isn`t there a real danger that someone give a message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots, saying, `Bomb Ira——` and the geezer doesn`t heard it properly and bombs Iran instead of Iraq?

MR. BAKER: No danger.

YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?

MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.

YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it`s like a million tons of carrots that you`re giving over there——

MR. BAKER: Well, carrots — I`m not using the term literally. You might send foreign aid — money, money.

YOUNG MAN: Well, money`s better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get given them——

MR. BAKER: Well, don`t get hung up on carrots. That`s just a figure of speech.

YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation——

MR. BAKER: No, no.

YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?

MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.

The interview was a hilarious classic in the seldom-seen subgenre of international relations humor.

Mr. Baker could outfox Al Gore but not Ali G. The 31-year-old British satirist, whose new HBO show has already become a cult favorite among high school and college kids, came to America to do the same sort of interviews he did in England, putting unwitting V.I.P.`s on the spot.

With his white-gangsta-rapper-wannabe persona, Sacha Baron Cohen, a brilliant graduate of Cambridge, sends up the vacuity of the culture in an era when putting people on TV who attract the right demographic is more important than putting people on TV who know what they`re talking about.

But the interviews depend on the subject`s not recognizing Ali G or even realizing that he`s a comedian.

Ali G scammed Mr. Baker and others into granting interviews by sending them flattering letters on fancy stationery from United World Productions, inviting them to be part of a six-part series for Channel 4 on British TV aimed at explaining the U.S. Constitution to young people.

With his crew, Mr. Cohen went into Mr. Baker`s conference room in a dark suit and put on his garish Ali G outfit before Mr. Baker came in.

As in England, Mr. Cohen has left a trail of irritated interviewees in his wacky wake.

Marlin Fitzwater had his doubts when Ali G showed up wearing a red jumpsuit and high-tops and asked inane questions. Like Mr. Baker, Mr. Fitzwater figured that Ali G was dressing for his "hippie" audience. But he ended the interview after Ali G asked him whether Hillary Clinton drank "from the fairy cup."

"I said, `You`re an idiot,` " Mr. Fitzwater recalled. "I`d never been lied to like that. I was two steps away from calling the sheriff."

Donald Trump, who walked out of an interview when Ali G tried to pitch the idea of a glove to eat ice cream cones with, recalled: "I thought he was seriously retarded. It was a total con job. But my daughter, Ivanka, saw it and thought it was very cool."

James Woolsey was good-natured when Ali G brought up the grassy knoll and asked, "Who shot J. R.?" Richard Thornburgh was patient when Ali G misinterpreted the meaning of hung juries. And Brent Scowcroft didn`t flinch when Ali G asked him, "Did they ever catch the people who sent Tampax through the mail?"

"It was anthrax," Mr. Scowcroft corrected pleasantly.

Ali G is wicked. And to him, that`s a compliment.



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What Is the Plan?

Wednesday, May 7, 2003; Page A30

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald H. Rumsfeld was asked the other day how large a force the United States would have to keep in Iraq, and for how long. "We`re going to have as many people in there as we need for as long as we need them," he answered. "We will also have as few people as possible, but as many as there are necessary, and we`ll stay as short a time as possible, but as long as is necessary." Clear enough? If not, too bad: The Bush administration hasn`t been willing to be any more forthcoming about what the U.S. commitment to Iraq will amount to. In fact, says Mr. Rumsfeld, anyone who dares think the administration should offer more specific answers "just doesn`t understand the variables that are involved." No doubt many factors are in play; among them should be congressional and public opinion. But the administration doesn`t want to account to Congress or the public in any detail, and so far Congress hasn`t tried very hard to elicit an accounting.

It has been nearly a month since Saddam Hussein and his regime disappeared from Baghdad, and yet administration officials have offered no clear road map toward President Bush`s goal of stabilizing the country under a democratic government. That`s partly because feuding within the administration has grown so intense that many key decisions have been fudged or delayed. Yet some plans clearly do exist; the administration just won`t discuss them in public. Some officials, for example, told a New York Times reporter that U.S. forces might maintain bases in Iraq for years; at a news conference soon afterward, Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed questions about the possibility. Jay M. Garner, the retired general who has been running the U.S. occupation administration, said Monday that an Iraqi transitional administration would be created within a month; but no plan has been announced for what political process will occur after that, how long it might take or how the United Nations might be involved. Pentagon officials last weekend told reporters of a plan to scale back the U.S. military presence to fewer than 30,000 troops by next fall, while bringing in thousands of European troops under British or Polish command. But an attempt to get Mr. Rumsfeld to explain this ambitious scheme -- which took many European governments by surprise -- merely yielded the Delphic response quoted above.

Members of congressional committees charged with overseeing U.S. commitments abroad know little more than the French or Russians. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a hearing last week that his committee "has many questions for which we have received a few answers." Though Congress quickly appropriated funds for Iraqi reconstruction, Mr. Lugar noted, "we have not yet been consulted or informed" about how the administration plans to spend the money, how responsibilities for managing Iraq will be divided among U.S. agencies or how the administration will coordinate with allies and international organizations. Apparently the administration would like to exclude Congress from these decisions and thereby maintain maximum flexibility to spend money, deploy troops and manage allies as it chooses. Yet the problem, as Mr. Lugar noted, is that Iraq most likely won`t be stabilized quickly or easily; the senator estimates that "stability, reconstruction, disarmament and democratization" will take five years to achieve. If Americans are not told what the burdens will be, and there is no substantial public debate about the administration`s approach, the risk of failure will be far greater. Mr. Lugar was right to speak up, but he shouldn`t be the only one who demands better answers than Mr. Rumsfeld has offered.



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EU and Whose Army?


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, May 7, 2003; Page A31


Europe wants an army. Tony Blair wants a European rapid deployment force that can work through NATO in concert with the United States to build "one polar power" that spans the Atlantic. Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and the leaders of Belgium, Greece and Luxembourg -- the continent`s leading critics of the war with Iraq -- want a rapid deployment force to be the military arm of a distinct European Union (EU) foreign and security policy. They want to get that force up and running by next year, and to establish a headquarters for the command in Belgium.

But Belgium, as the Bush administration has noted with some asperity, is already home to the headquarters of NATO. To both the State and Defense departments, the idea of plunking an alternative to NATO just down the block from our own alliance must seem more devilish French mischief.

Europe`s desire for a continental strike force, however, antedates its current rift with the United States. It derives in part from Europe`s shame at its incapacity to prevent the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia during the `90s. For leaders such as German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Europe`s failure to arrest the massacres and expulsions unfolding in its own backyard underscored the need for a more effective armed force. The European reluctance to resort to force is historically understandable, but, as Fischer above all argued, it cannot be an excuse for inaction in the face of genocide.

The idea of a European army, moreover, was bound to grow more compelling as European unification became more real. With environmental, trade and social policy for the continent increasingly set and enforced by the EU, it would be passing strange if Europe failed to move toward a common defense policy -- and force -- as well.

That said, France and other antiwar nations have realized that absent an effective armed force, their only option in the face of Bush`s insistence on going to war -- just saying Non! -- was singularly ineffective.

The American monopoly on military might, coupled with the administration`s support for preemptive war, means that the United States is free to remake the world as the Pentagon neoconservatives would have it. If Europe wants its say on the nascent new world order, it needs to be able to project its values more affirmatively.

There is, of course, something stunningly perverse in Europe`s developing an armed force to project values that are borderline pacifistic.

But an armed force controlled by democratic states, employed only in instances of genuine threats, and suited not just for combat but also for intrusive inspections of a dangerous rogue state or the tedious task of nation-building, would be a welcome addition to the forces for good in the world. Particularly as these are not purposes to which the Bush administration cares to put our own forces.

In its statement of U.S. strategic policy last September, the administration vowed that no rival military force would be allowed even to approximate American might. But the neoconservative authors of that document failed to consider the rise of a distinct, if allied, democratic superpower (though no one did more to estrange Europe than they). In any event, even if Europe were to triple or quadruple its arms budget -- which no one on the continent is remotely considering -- Europe`s strike force would still pale alongside ours. What such an expansion could do, however, is help create a democratic alternative to the monopoly of American power.

And what`s wrong with that? An American monopoly on power is a great idea -- so long as there`s also an American monopoly on virtue and on smarts.

That the dominant forces in this administration act as though that`s the case only strengthens the need for a largely friendly counterforce (and one that`s stronger than the State Department).

After all, when military force isn`t part of the equation, the world is just as likely to emulate the European model as our own. The former Soviet bloc nations of Donald Rumsfeld`s New Europe were free to remake themselves as they saw fit after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And in creating their electoral and health care systems, they universally eschewed the money-driven U.S. versions for the more socialistic alternatives of bad Old (Western) Europe.

Indeed, in their commitment both to multilateralism and a mixed economy, the Europeans often seem a good deal closer than the current administration does to the America that emerged from World War II. Let them have their army. Without the Old Europe, where could we still see the Old America?

The writer is editor at large of the American Prospect.




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washingtonpost.com
Never Mind the Weapons


By Richard Cohen

Wednesday, May 7, 2003; Page A31


George W. Bush is often compared to previous presidents. Sometimes it`s Ronald Reagan for his staunch conservatism, lack of airs and willingness to delegate. Sometimes it`s William McKinley, who inaugurated a great Republican era, and sometimes it`s George H.W. Bush, who taught his son what not to do in the White House. Reverse mentoring can be invaluable.

My own recommendation would be Andrew Jackson. It is an inconvenient fact, of course, that Jackson was a Democrat and a volcanic personality, but he came to true fame when he won a battle (New Orleans) that need not have been fought. As every high school student knows (or used to know), a peace treaty between Britain and the United States had already been signed. Still, it was a magnificent victory.

I mention Jackson right at the top because I feel that it will hardly matter if, as now seems possible, no large cache of weapons of mass destruction is found in Iraq and the war to disarm that country turns out to have been unnecessary. All that will matter is that the United States won a magnificent victory -- never mind why the war was fought in the first place. Everyone likes a winner, and Bush is a winner.

I supported the war and I like the outcome. I think there`s a chance that Iraq will be democratized, that this will affect the entire Middle East (Syria is already behaving better) and that no matter what, it was good to get rid of the monstrous Saddam Hussein and free the Iraqi people. But more and more I am beginning to think we have fought a good war for the wrong reasons.

Reason No. 1, you will remember, was the link between Hussein and al Qaeda. None has been found. Reason No. 2 -- and the preeminent one in my mind -- was that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program that posed, if not an imminent danger, then surely one that was more than theoretical. It now appears that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program worth speaking of.

The administration official who pushed that line the hardest was Vice President Cheney. Up until the virtual onset of the war, he was repeating the dire warnings he had delivered in the summer of 2002: Iraq was working on a nuclear weapons program. On "Meet the Press" in March he said Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." This was news to many in the intelligence agencies as well as to Mohamed ElBaradei, the much-maligned director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. To this day, Cheney has never explained what in the world he was talking about.

Bush himself alluded to an Iraqi nuclear weapons program in his State of the Union address in January. He referred to a British government report that Hussein had "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" and also to American "intelligence sources . . . that he [Hussein] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

But the alleged purchase of uranium proved to be bogus, and the aluminum tubing turned out, in the view of the U.N. inspectors, to be unrelated to any nuclear weapons program. In other words, the evidence for a reconstituted nuclear weapons program was more imagined than real.

What can we make of this? Right off it has to be said that the jury is still out. Iraq is vast and the country has yet to be thoroughly combed. Maybe there`s something there and we have yet to discover it.

The other conjectures are more disturbing. The first is that the administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat and hyped the sense of urgency because it wanted Saddam Hussein deposed for other reasons. Those reasons are not necessarily nefarious. Hussein was (or is) a bad guy whose nuclear weapons program was merely a matter of grammatical tense: He had one once and would certainly try to have one again.

The second possibility is that an administration bent on war interpreted every morsel of intelligence to buttress its case. After a while, intelligence officers may have learned not to bring the White House information it didn`t want and tailored their reports to fit the preconceived notions of administration officials. Anyone who`s ever had a boss knows how this works.

Nothing succeeds like success -- and the war in Iraq was a splendid success. But we have an understanding in this country that a war will be waged only with the consent of the people and only after the people have been honestly told why. If, as now seems possible, this was not the case in Iraq, then the war may turn out to be a bad bargain. The democracy we want to bring to Iraq will have come at some cost to our own.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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[Joerver]

Media Cheerleaders
Part Three of a three-part expose` of right wing bias in the media.


By: Mike Hersh - 05/04/03


Thomas Jefferson said, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism," but the right wing media joined the right wing politicians attacking the patriotism of Bush`s critics. This after a decade lambasting President Clinton with endless groundless accusations.

When the BBC`s director general and editor-in-chief Greg Dyke says "Personally, I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war," he is far too kind.

The media coverage of Bush`s Iraq war reminds any objective observer of a pompom squad cheering for their team. The mass media claim -- and therefore many Americans think -- this war was not about oil or revenge or geopolitical power games. At various times, Bush and his hired liars told us, and the media parroted to us:

This was about protecting us from Al Queda, although there remain no 9/11 links to Iraq. This was about weapons of mass destruction, although none were found. This was about freedom and democracy in Iraq, although Bush hates both here.

These and various other excuses to attack a weak and helpless nation came and went without the slightest critical mass media examination. The most clever of all the rationales seems to be: This was about removing a brutal dictator who killed and tortured people. If so, then why this dictator and why this destructive, violent way? And why now?

There are many such dictators. Why depose this one by invasion when sanctions had already crushed Saddam`s military capacity? Why when the inspections were working to mop up the rest of Iraq`s degraded weaponry? Why after Reagan, Bush I, and Rumsfeld sent American weapons and $billions of tax dollars to Iraq? Why after Cheney did business with this "brutal dictator" as recently as 1999?

Why war? Why after the top Republicans supported this "brutal dictator?" We should demand Bush`s pompom squad answer those questions before letting them cheer to us.

Against this mindless support for Bush, the media continues their baseless, mean-spirited attacks against Democrats. The biased note by ABC`s "The Note" claimed "In any event, it`s pretty clear that a Democratic party, which still is trying to figure out what it does well with its current array of personnel, is exercising the same muscles that allowed it to score point after point in driving Trent Lott from the leadership."

By reducing Democratic defense of equal and civil rights against Republican hate and bigotry to a game, the Note`s writers expose their own right wing bias. This bias pervades the "Simonized" media.

Encouraged by the right wing media, and specifically citing "The Note," a right wing emailer crowed to our editors: "The Democratic Party doesn`t have a prayer unless things go to hell in this country and people turn to them, simply because there`s nowhere else to go. They do not have one person or one idea that will make people turn to them for positive reasons."

I could not disagree more. Democrats won nationwide in 1992, 1996, and 2000 because most Americans know Democrats are better on the issues. A stolen election and ruthless Republican exploitation of 9/11 aside, Democrats will win again in 2004. Why? Look at what the two parties have to offer.

What can the Republicans offer?

The Republican Party always makes things go to hell in this world. They can`t run the economy as shown by the Great Depression, all but one of the 10 recessions since then thanks to failed Republican trickle-down economics.

Just since AWOL Bush led the illegal coup against America and put his policies in place our economy lost millions of jobs. The stock market lost 2000 points in the past year. Bush squandered $trillions of surplus with failed policies and giveaways to his rich friends and campaign contributors.

Republicans can`t keep us safe. They ran down the military and kept us isolationist leading up to W.W.I and W.W.II. They lost Vietnam, bungled and lied us into two Persian Gulf Wars, and -- at best -- let 9/11 happen.

Huge payoffs to the idle rich and nothing but tax hikes and unemployment for the rest, attacks on freedom and the Constitution, international weakness and humiliation for all. That`s all Republicans have to offer.

The best Republicans do is waste $billions and lives cleaning up their own messes. Case in point: Bush I and other top GOPs actually encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait - I think through arrogance, ignorance and bungling.

They told Saddam the US had no position on intra-Arab conflicts. Bush I sent Bob Dole to Iraq on a goodwill tour, and Cheney and Powell both laughed off intelligence reports warning Saddam was about to invade Kuwait. What a brain trust!

Many of these reckless Republicans who coddled Saddam are (mis)leading us into one more potential catastrophe after another. Look at the chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Consider Bush Republicans are spoiling for a fight with North Korea, Syria and Iran -- with so much unfinished "nation building" left to do already!

What do Democrats offer?

Great liberal ideas and moderate, sane policies. Today and throughout history every good American idea is a liberal idea. This has not changed since liberals demanded and won independence from Britain. Liberals then founded the US. The Constitution and Bill of Rights came from liberals. Today, most liberals and moderates are Democrats.

Liberals fought right wingers every step of the way as we built the United States. Liberals in the 1860`s Republican Party even had to win the Civil War to defend the Union against right wingers. Now the Party of Lincoln -- which once stood for proud progress -- is a disgrace with nothing but failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, and more failure to offer. That`s because today, most right wingers are in the GOP.

So why don`t we read or hear much about Republican foreign policy failures and economic catastrophes? Because William Simon made his vision reality. The media is under the thumb of the corporate right hand.

We cannot rely on the mass media for anything other than right wing cheerleading. On matters as grave as war and peace, life and death, jobs and health they repeat the right wing press releases and turn to right wing "think tanks" for perspective. Sound and balanced reporting is extinct.

What can we do about it? As Turner explained, a few corporations - mostly run by right wingers - dominate everything you see and hear. The mass media won`t do their job, so we must do it for them. Liberal Slant is doing its part, and MikeHersh.com and its partners are raising funds to buy ads exposing Bush`s failures and crimes. Support our efforts. www.mikehersh.com



Mike Hersh is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant
Part 1:
http://fp.enter.net/~haney/mh050203.htm
Part 2:
http://www.liberalslant.com/mh050303.htm
Part 3:
http://fp.enter.net/~haney/mh050403.htm

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[CheapThrill]

The American Media Violates Its Own Code of Ethics

By Lisa Guliani

In mid-April 2002, the Trilateral Commission met for four days at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. As is their custom, this highly influential group of world leaders from North America, Japan, and Europe plotted ways to promote their Globalist agenda. In all, 251 of the most influential businessmen, statesmen, financiers, and academics met in D.C. – and how much did you hear about it in your local or national media?
(Victor Thorn, "The New World Order Exposed" Ch. 54)

Answer: You didn`t hear or read anything about it because nobody in the mainstream press reported the story – even though they attended this important meeting. This is only one example of how the American Media violates its own code of ethics.

I took a look at the professional codes of journalistic ethics of four different media organizations:

1) The American Society of Newspaper Editors
2) The National Federation of Press Women
3) The Radio-Television News Directors Association
4) The Society of Professional Journalists

In reading through the Code preambles of the four above-named media associations, I couldn`t help but wonder if any of our national press members have EVER read the Codes of Conduct of their own profession. The ethical standard of all four organizations spell out essentially the same things. Among them:

1. Journalists should be honest, fair, and courageous in gathering and interpreting information.
2. The public is entitled to as much information as possible.
3. Journalists should "give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid."
4. Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public`s business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection.
5. Journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public`s right to know.
6. Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other.

The above excerpted "code" is supposed to set the standard of conduct for all professional communicators in the United States, or so we`re to believe. How many actually adhere to such criteria is anybody’s guess. We expect our national press – whether we`re talking about newspapers, radio or television media – to maintain a high level of integrity and honesty in their respective reporting of events and issues of public interest. We are entitled to know what decisions are being made and implemented by our leadership; we are entitled to know about taxpayer-funded meetings of elite policymakers; we are entitled to have the truth brought before us – and there is NO justification for the public NOT being told the truth. Members of our national press attend many important (and secretive) functions. For what reason do they remain silent on these events? What has happened to the courageous, honest, comprehensive, accurate, and fair reporting the media is PLEDGED to uphold?

Regrettably, the mainstream press has not only fallen from grace, but they`ve fallen an incredibly long way and crashed through the roof. Public trust in the media has eroded dramatically in the last two decades. Following 9/11, the public has been subjected to a consistent pattern of ethical abuses such as: lack of objectivity in reporting the "news", distortion, misrepresentation, misinformation, fabrication, "staged" coverage, inaccuracies, diversionary reporting, and absolute LIES. So much for their Code of Ethics.

I am hard-pressed to point out even ONE specific example in our local or national media today that even remotely appears to be following some sort of code of ethics within their profession. What I CAN find is a collective of government shills working in collusion with New World Order henchmen that have infiltrated the American government. Our national media provides critical assistance to the elite cabal by promoting their pervasive agenda – and they do this by abusing and violating their OWN obligation to bring the truth to the general public. In these times, what is NEWS is not necessarily TRUTH.

The Associated Press even makes the point that "it should expose wrong-doing or misuse of power, public or private." Well then, why don`t they? Where are all the AP newshounds reporting on the inconsistencies in the official version being presented to the public about 9/ll? Why aren`t we seeing more "unofficial news sources" on our television screens – people like Victor Thorn, John Kaminski, or Rick Stanley? These "unofficial sources" have vitally important, critical information that Americans need to hear. Why is our media suppressing them? Isn`t it part of their own ethical standard that they "give voice to the voiceless"? It doesn`t surprise anybody that this is NOT what is happening. Recently, well-respected political writer John Kaminski was offered an opportunity to infiltrate the mainstream media`s "Blackout on Truth" and appear on FOX News. He was scheduled to appear April 30th, at the very late hour of 12:15 a.m. On that day, he received a phone call from a FOX news producer canceling his appearance. No reason was given, and no new date was offered. Kaminski was effectively suppressed in a manner typical of a press that no longer stands for truth. Here`s what Kaminski had to say about this:

"Fox News is the disgusting standard bearer for fascist propaganda that is decidedly not news. The objectives of Fox are the same objectives for the secret cabal that has hijacked the American government and allowed millionaires to consolidate their oppressive stranglehold over the increasingly poor American citizenry. Freedom and justice have given way to robbery and disinformation, and the major media play a major role in depriving all Americans of their Constitutional rights and their chance to be happy and healthy."

As of this writing, Babel publisher Victor Thorn and I have publicly protested three days in a row on the street directly in front of the corporate offices of our local newspaper, The Centre Daily Times. A couple of our huge signs bore the words "CDT Suppresses News" and "Let Your Readers Decide". Why do we feel it`s so important to protest the newspaper? Because this so-called "beacon of truth" is nothing more than a fluff-rag. The question should be, "Why is a mainstream newspaper suppressing Victor Thorn`s recent political release The New World Order Exposed?"

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, in their own Code of Conduct, asserts the following in their Preamble:

ARTICLE I

Responsibility. The primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve the general welfare by informing the people and enabling them to make judgments on the issues of the time. Newspapermen and women who abuse the power of their professional role for selfish motives or unworthy purposes are faithless to that public trust. The American press was made free not just to inform or just to serve as a forum for debate but also to bring an independent scrutiny to bear on the forces of power in the society, including the conduct of official power at all levels of government (http://www.ijnet.org/5188.html)

It sure sounds nice and respectable, doesn`t it? It`s too bad they don`t practice what they preach. It isn`t enough to simply possess the journalistic/literary skill required for the job. The American press would`ve served us honorably and well if they would have taken the ethical high road and refused to compromise integrity, objectivity, fairness and honesty. The purpose of journalists within our society is to seek the truth and report it in as honest, comprehensive and accurate way as humanly possible.

The American mainstream media has collectively dropped the ball in a HUGE way, and in doing so, has lost all measure of credibility with a growing percentage of the American people. Its concerted efforts to silence the words of independent voices are becoming more and more apparent to the rest of us - and we`re fighting back. Alternative media, political Internet forums, and independent newspapers like The American Free Press – (in a decidedly ironic twist) are gaining more credibility, familiarity and readership in ever-widening circles, and it`s all because we can no longer trust traditional media to seek the truth, and then to report it. We can no longer believe their version of "news" because it is fraught with untruth. We can no longer depend upon the national press to foster the highest professional standards. And if you think about it, why should we continue to accept this from them? We do not need to lower our standards just so the American media can meet them. Explore the alternatives. Learn the truth.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_guliani.html

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Empowering Iraq
The Devil Is In The Details

William Hartung is director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute and the author of The Hidden Costs of War.


Jack Kemp, director of the conservative think tank Empower America, has emerged as a key player in the debate over how best to rebuild Iraq.

Given that Donald Rumsfeld, "our man in Baghdad," used to serve on Empower America`s Board, one has to assume that Kemp has the Bush administration`s ear. Kemp, who was Bob Dole`s running mate in his unsuccessful bid for president in 1996, recently outlined a plan that promises to become a finalist in the competing ideas about Iraq`s future.

Kemp`s proposal to "wipe the slate clean" of debts incurred by Saddam Hussein and put Iraq`s resources in the hands of Iraqis is a fine example of why he is one of the most thoughtful conservatives in America today. His optimism about what free people can accomplish absent government interference is infectious. But his proposed approach raises a number of practical questions.

Kemp`s optimism about what free people can accomplish absent government interference is infectious.



First, why wipe the slate clean only in Iraq? If the condition for honoring Saddam`s debts is that "the action taken by the Hussein regime that gave rise to the sanctions, contract or loan was taken with the consent of and for the benefit of the Iraqi people," as Kemp suggests, why stop there?

Should the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), who suffered under decades of the brutal kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko, be responsible for the debts he ran up to maintain multiple residences and fat Swiss bank accounts? In the event of a democratic revolution in Saudi Arabia, should that nation`s people pay for the massive corruption and lavish lifestyles of the Saudi Royal family? If slate-wiping is good for Iraq, why shouldn`t the same principle apply to scores of other nations that have suffered under decades of corruption and oppression?

This leads to the second problem. If, as Kemp claims, no authority is needed to "confer legitimacy" on a new Iraqi government or on the sale of Iraqi resources, what`s to keep the faction with the most guns from seizing Iraq`s assets? And who represents the Iraqi people? Is it Ahmed Chalabi, the playboy/embezzler favored by the Pentagon, who had not set foot in Iraq for 45 years until Donald Rumsfeld had him air-dropped into the country a few weeks ago? Is it the Shiite clerics, who certainly seem to have a much stronger social base than any Iraqi exile leader? And if the decision about what constitutes a legitimate government for Iraq is not a decision for the international community, who should decide? Donald Rumsfeld?

If Kemp`s vision of "Iraq for the Iraqis" is to be realized, he needs to speak out much more forcefully against the current Bush administration plans, which will almost certainly not achieve that result. The big winners in the Rumsfeld/Garner rebuilding plan are private U.S. companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorps, Research Triangle Institute and SAIC, which have been hired to do everything from putting out oil fires, to rebuilding Iraq`s infrastructure, to grooming a select group of 150 Iraqi exiles for the U.S.-run "transitional authority" that will be the shell of a new Iraqi government. For the most part, they have received secret, no-bid, cost-plus contracts. Is that what democracy looks like?


Bush`s "crony capitalism" is reminiscent of ... the military-dominated Suharto regime.



Former Shell Oil executive Philip Carroll is set to chair an advisory committee that will determine the future of the Iraqi oil industry, in consultation with the Pentagon. Not exactly Iraq for the Iraqis, one might say. Most of the companies involved in rebuilding Iraq have close ties to the Bush administration, and are likely to funnel some of the money they make on rebuilding Iraq into the Bush 2004 campaign coffers. This raises serious questions about the future of democracy -- not only in Iraq, but in America as well. Bush`s "crony capitalism" is reminiscent of the practices that thrived in Indonesia under the military-dominated Suharto regime. Is that the kind of democracy the United States wants to export to Iraq?

As a final irony, one of the people hired to help revive the Iraqi legal system is a lawyer from a high-priced Washington law firm. And not just any firm -- the one that worked for the Bush-Cheney 2000 legal team contesting the vote counts in key counties in Florida. That and the secretive bidding process being used to rebuild Iraq while profiting Bush`s corporate cronies indicates that this administration has little respect for democracy anywhere, be it in Baghdad or Tallahassee.

If Jack Kemp truly wants "Iraq for the Iraqis," he should explicitly denounce George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld`s top-down, privatized sellout of democracy in Iraq. He may be uniquely positioned to do so, given his continuing popularity among Republican party activists, and his ties to both the most powerful man in the current Bush administration -- Don Rumsfeld -- and Republican moderates like Bob Dole.

If Kemp could chart a genuine plan that would give Iraqis control of their resources and remove the stranglehold that pro-corporate cowboys like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have over the Republican party, he would be doing a service to the evolution of democracy not only in Iraq, but in America as well.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7719

Published: May 05 2003

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May 5, 2003

Words of the war:
"What do I think of the Americans? Look at where my foot used to be, look at my dead brother and the rest of my family."
-- Muthana al-Ani, a resident of Falluja, where 15 Iraqis have been shot to death by US troops.
"I think our welcome`s worn out... We don`t even get that fake wave anymore. They just stare."
-- Lt. Tom Garner of the Fourth Infantry Division.

Victory Laps and Photo Ops
There`s a lot of symbolism washing around these days -- some aimed at election 2004, some just aimed.
Victory Laps and Photo Ops
So it turns out that I have something in common with Don Rumsfeld and George the Younger. Our triumphant Secretary of Defense has just been taking his "victory lap" (or "victory tour") through the imperium via Afghanistan (where he declared the Afghan war officially over, though the country is so unreconstructed that the Taliban is still evidently attracting followers), Saudi Arabia (where we`re withdrawing our troops -- watch out Saudi royal house), and Iraq where in Saddam`s Abu Gharyb palace in Baghdad our homey conquering prince addressed the Iraqi people by TV and radio, a talk which, in most of that electricity-deficient country, no one could see or hear ("Back home in America, I have three children and six grandchildren... I want the same things for them that each of you wants for your children and grandchildren..."). Our triumphant president just took his "victory lap" in an S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance jet that gave him his "top gun" moment -- and his ultimate photo op -- landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose planes had released over a third of the three million pounds of ordnance that hit Iraq. After carefully taking off his helmet in private -- no goofy Michael Dukakis moments here -- he then made a top-gun victory speech carefully billed as a not-quite-victory speech.
And I too am on my modest victory lap, heading home after two weeks of teaching, coach class across an appropriately cloud-covered land at 35,000 feet. I`m on a Continental Airlines jet where, to judge by the space available, new rows of seats must have been inserted between already existing rows. Though no giant, I`ve been left with the sort of leg space that would suit a contortionist and, when the fellow in front of me leans back to catch the postage-stamp sized in-flight movie, not even the space to straighten out my computer screen. But as I was looking down on a land I can`t see -- as we all look into a future none of us can see -- I suddenly realized that, like my leaders, I had had my own pleasurable photo-op moment this morning. Before I left the journalism school where I`ve been teaching, one of my students took my picture, as I sat at my "command" post, a computer in the school`s pressroom. But I tell you, enjoyable as my brief circuit of my little imperium was, I`m quite sure I haven`t had a hundredth as much fun as Rummy and W.

There`s so much symbolism washing around right now, some aimed at election 2004 but some just aimed, that it`s hard to know where to begin. There`s that carrier, for starts, that was heading for San Diego when the President landed -- and was actually slowed down so that the photographers could take their perfect victory-at-sea pictures with no hint of land to mar the occasion. That ship the size of a large town with a crew of 5,000 was named for, god rest his soul, Abraham Lincoln. I try for a moment to imagine Abe piloting a plane with "Navy 1" and "Commander in Chief" carefully stenciled on its side, or giving anything like Bush`s 1,800-odd word speech filled with his usual mix of threats, orders, prayers, and lies ("Our war against terror is proceeding according to principles that I have made clear to all...") Of course, all that comes to mind are those 272 modest words uttered at that cemetery in Gettysburg, words from a man with an awareness that war is an unbearable tragedy, not a photo op or a victory lap.

Then again, Abe didn`t have the benefit of a childhood filled with glorious World War II movies or their triumphalist clones in our own times (like the recent Disney film Pearl Harbor, which also appropriated an aircraft carrier for its premiere and major photo op). Then again, Abe actually stood up in the House of Representatives to oppose an imperialist war against Mexico, and he never managed to utter a sentence like, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes." That`s how David Corn in his Nation weblog recently quoted our president on his decision to join the Texas Air National Guard to do his best for our "noble cause," as Ron Reagan later dubbed it, in the now-forgettable Vietnam era (after which, it seems, he absented himself from that tour of duty for a healthy year and a half.)

So, for George, there may have been no victory laps back then. But -- rare as it may be -- sometimes the remake just turns out to be so much better, so much more satisfying than the original. (Note by the way, that in a bow to Reagan, who directed the first partly successful reshoot of defeat in Vietnam, Bush had this line in his speech at sea: "This nation thanks all the members of our coalition who joined in a noble cause...") Vietnam itself naturally went unmentioned in that shipboard speech. In fact, only one war was mentioned, and not just once either. So here`s my quiz of the week. The first of you to guess which war that was gets a coach flight on Continental to the nearby city of your choice, but you have to pay for the physical therapist you`ll bring along to unknot you afterwards. Okay, and the answer is.... "The character of our military through history -- the daring of Normandy, the fierce courage of Iwo Jima [I think he means from Saving Private Ryan to The Sands of Iwo Jima] -- the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies -- is fully present in this generation," whose "greatness" he didn`t quite add seems to lie in turning allies into enemies. The speech, which is well worth reading, has World War II on the brain, even down to the cribs from Churchill ("We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide...")

Well, give the guy credit. He`s proved himself the anti-Dukakis of presidential mock-battle footage, the man who could don a military uniform get in a military vehicle and carry it off. He may be a better actor than old Ron R himself. (His on-board Tom Cruise "swagger" was a staple of press coverage yesterday.) And let`s get with the program here -- he loves it. He`s visibly having the time of his life, going from army base to naval vessel to defense contractor -- today he was at United Defense Industries in Northern California, the maker of the Bradley fighting vehicle, for yet another military photo op and speech. His is a domestic victory tour of the skeletal structure of the military-industrial complex -- the bases, weaponry, and corporate sinews of a great military empire. His Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was taking a spin through the foreign version of the same out there at the peripheries where the snipers still snipe and the Iraqi oil will someday flow again. But the president knows where the key screens are for showing the movie he`s enacting and Karl Rove and his other handlers are directing. For the unilateralist president of the fiercely unilateralist last empire, it turns out that there is only one real audience on earth -- and it`s in living rooms and bedrooms all across America.

And so far he`s proved skilled indeed at playing to it. Who else matters? Not even the Brits, who, as Anatol Lieven comments, are only likely to be offered a role in a US empire of the sort "fulfilled by Nepal in the British Empire -- a loyal provider of brave soldiers with special military skills," and who have been thrown the bone of dominion in the satrapy of Basra to relieve the Americans of the need to tie down troops everywhere in Iraq. In the eyes of the men directing "Bush at War," after all, the American people are all that potentially stands between them and endless dominion, endless fun, endless victory laps and photo ops.

What a change between two administrations, both shepherding the world`s hyperpower through its paces. The last president was selling sleeping space in the Lincoln bedroom and having sex in the oval office; this one slept over on Lincoln, the aircraft carrier, and seems to be getting what can only be called an erotic charge out of war, which for the overgrown boys of this administration (as opposed to the overgrown boy of the last one) seems to be the sexiest thing on earth. If you oppose empire and, in fact, everything this administration stands for, then you have to imagine yourself right now on the Peter Brooks` film version of that Lord of the Flies island, and those wild boys armed with spears, streaked with ochre, hunting boars out in the wild, have just smashed your glasses, so you know where you`re likely to end up.

The public photo ops have not only been masterful, they`ve been based on the pleasure principle and enacted by men who can hardly bear to keep the grins or smirks off their faces. Sometimes, however, private photo ops can tell you a great deal about the more carefully planned public ones. Here, for instance, from Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post is a description of a telling series of snapshots:


"Numerous members of Rumsfeld`s staff expressed disbelief, after working virtually nonstop for months on the war, that they were inside one of Hussein`s palaces in Baghdad. They took turns having their pictures taken in a vast throne-like chair with lion`s heads on each arm."
Sounds like a kind of imperial Huey Newton fantasy moment.

But of all the photo ops I`ve seen in recent days, the one I happened to find stunning took up a staggering four columns across and close to a third of the page top to bottom, smack in the top center of Wednesday`s New York Times. It was a shot -- and I`ve never seen the like -- of the inside of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld`s plane on his recent victory lap. The caption said, "Defense Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, right center [for those who might have mistaken him for the military man bent over a note pad at left center of the first row of seats], on his aircraft in Saudi Arabia yesterday. U.S. forces will leave the kingdom within months."

Rumsfeld, a small man in a dark suit and a red tie, sits in that front row slightly slumped, perhaps cracking his knuckles, looking modestly satisfied, a battered briefcase on a surface in front of him and not a bit dwarfed by the vastness of the C-17 -- that looks like a cross between the Death Star and somebody`s emptied attic -- filled with military men, assumedly aides, possibly traveling reporters, undoubtedly guards in rows behind him and along the walls. You certainly don`t need the Times caption to know what you`re looking at -- a traveling world. And Rumsfeld himself looks -- call it my overheated imagination -- a little like a rumpled, down-home Darth Vader surrounded by a pile of pillows, a mess of suitcases and hanging clothes and in the distance what looks like a mountain of duffel bags. It`s not beautiful. It`s not slick like the Bush photo ops. It`s an actual working space and he`s distinctly at home in it. But the Times, having given the photo imperial space on its front page, made a statement. And the statement is, I think: This is the imperial space that our new Khans carry with them whenever they decide to survey the distant frontiers of their new realms and meet the satraps. (For a vivid sense of the "bubble" in which Rumsfeld and his entourage zip around the world, see Vernon Loeb`s piece in The Washington Post.

And make no mistake, those new realms are being reorganized in a major way right now. Basing emphases are being changed. Significant numbers of troops are about to be moved out of bases in the "old Europe" (perfidious Germany) and into the "New Europe" (Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria), where, as Duncan Campbell of The Guardian notes, it`s cheaper, closer to the oil and the geopolitical action, and a slap in the face to the Germans.

They`re also being moved out of Saudi Arabia, where American forces will be reduced perhaps to pre-Gulf War levels (though still undoubtedly with access to the impressive base structure that`s there should we need it), and into Qatar and Iraq -- or, as David Hirst writes, also in The Guardian, rotated home to await the beginning of Gulf War III or Asian War IV or some such.

We`re now undergoing the beginnings of what may prove a significant redistricting of the overstretched American imperium which is so purely military that we rule no territories, just stake out vast bases and move in for the duration. (I say, by the way, that any time we move out, however provisionally -- whether in Saudi Arabia, Germany, or South Korea and whether or not the government in a given country requested the move -- I would feel distinctly nervous.) Let`s remember that these are men organizing for the future, who see themselves at the beginning of something like a thirty-year global war against "terror." In the pack of striking lies and quarter-truths that made up the President`s speech on the Abe Lincoln is, for instance, this summary of the war against Iraq: ""The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because that regime is no more."

The real question is: where will the next frontier war take place and under what conditions? This is probably something that the members of this administration don`t know. Events -- even disasters at home or, say, the inability to bring Iraq to heel -- may determine this for them. There are numerous potential targets of opportunity from Syria and Iran to North Korea. The other question, of course, is how you can run a distinctly overstretched empire, whose bases now extend from "Old Europe" (or for that matter Missouri) to the Horn of Africa and the Central Asian borders of China, on the single leg of military power and threats of force. The Romans may have been willing to slaughter resisters down to the last dog and cat, but they also offered their conquered lands a kind of universal citizenship in the empire. There was a way to join. Except at a military-to-military level there is simply no way to "join" our imperium, no way in the minds of the men of this administration short of obedience and subservience.

Honestly speaking, it`s hard to imagine how such a conquering country will ever manage to translate its military power into any kind political power whatsoever (See Gabriel Kolko`s essay below on this). Certainly, this is already a problem in Iraq as can be seen in the staggeringly woeful planning for a post-war occupation, which left even some of the oil fields we so wanted to preserve as a "patrimony" for the Iraqis looted.

The recent decision to appoint a "civilian," an expert on "counter-terrorism," L. Paul Bremmer III, a former assistant to six secretaries of state, beginning with Henry Kissinger, then a member of Kissinger Associates and now chairman of the crisis consulting practice of Marsh Inc, a global "risk services" company (whatever that may be), to oversee former General Jay Garner and his woeful crew in Baghdad is interesting. It`s certainly a signal of how ineptly even Washington must think matters are being handled.

I happen to think that we`re at a moment of almost incomparable peril. As historian Gabriel Kolko writes in "The Age of Unilateral War": "The Iraq war is only the first step in the United States` astonishingly ambitious project to recast the world... [it is] the beginning of a cycle." It may be an even more frightening moment if events spiral out of control in Iraq or for whatever reason this administration begins to lose its domestic audience, and so its ticket to the pleasure principle. As Kolko also says, "The men who lead [our country] are capable of anything."


http://www.motherjones.com/news/warwatch/2003/19/we_412_01.h…


-- Tom Engelhardt

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Antiwar troika getting ready for next battle

By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer

ATHENS, May 3, 2003—The idea that France`s aristocratic president, the suave and deliciously animated Jacques Chirac, is on tenterhooks wondering when he will be invited to mosey on down to his American counterpart`s favourite burger joint in Crawford, Texas is, frankly, laughable.

U.S. President [sic] George Bush doesn`t see it that way, of course. He believes that depriving Chirac of the ritual helicopter ride to his ranch and the chance for an intimate tete-a-tete with the anorak-clad new world emperor is a form of punishment.

Bush appears to attach a certain cache to not only his granting of audiences but also their location. The Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, for example, never got an invite to the Bush White House, although the newly appointed Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), has been graced with this honour.

Abu Mazen, however, is prepared to wait for his presidential anointing until Israel allows the veteran Arafat to travel freely—a move that is likely to infuriate the Bush cabal, long bent on rendering Arafat as irrelevant. Snubbed by Abu Mazen, who is eager not to be perceived as a White House puppet, it is Bush who is doing the snubbing when it comes to the French President.

Banishment

"I doubt he`ll (Chirac) be coming to the ranch any time soon," said Bush, adding that many in his administration have viewed the French position as "un-American." One can only wonder about Chirac`s thoughts upon hearing of his banishment. In his shoes, mine would be unprintable. In any event, the French president is far too dignified to indulge in exchanging insults. Except, of course, with Tony Blair, whom he has accused of being "very rude."

The American leader further warned the French not to use their position within Europe to create alliances against "the U.S., or Britain, or Spain or any of the new countries that are the new democracies in Europe."

Since the French took a principled stand over Iraq, demanding a peaceful resolution to America`s differences with the Iraqi regime, the invective out of the U.S. grows more malicious by the day.

Former dove, turned hawk, Colin Powell, admitted during a television interview that France would be punished. He is obviously still smarting from being outshone and taken to task by the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, whose speech received an unprecedented ovation during a Security Council meeting on Iraq.

One report says that a French official was told by one of Bush`s representatives: "I have instructions to tell you that our relations have been degraded."

After congressmen were seen pouring fine French wines down the drain and munching on `Freedom Fries` with descriptions of the French as `cheese-eating surrender monkeys` being bandied about in American publications, one wonders how much worse Franco-American relations can get.

We won`t have to wonder for long, however. A Franco-German-Belgian summit is being held in Brussels this week to discuss the strengthening of European defence. France has long wanted a European rapid-reaction force, entirely independent from NATO and the U.S.

According to France`s defence minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, Russia will be involved in discussions on European defence. At a press conference held in Moscow she stressed: "The larger the peace zone, the more people will feel safe, which is a goal all politicians share." All politicians? Surely you jest, madame.

Robert Bradtke, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, has described the summit as "unhelpful." By this, he probably means that the anti-war trio are adding fuel to the flames of suspicion across the Atlantic that some members of Donald Rumsfeld`s "Old Europe" are opposed to America`s hegemony and uncomfortable with their own increasingly vulnerable niche in a lopsided world.

There is a lively discussion on this subject in the European corridors of power with Britain, Spain and Italy leading most of Europe`s newcomer nations in desiring amicable engagement with the U.S, as opposed to confrontation.

France, Germany and Belgium would also like engagement but not if this means that they will be relegated to a subservient role in the New World Order. They believe that there are times when allies will disagree and that such disagreements are normal and healthy.

The U.S., on the other hand, is clearly displaying that it is not prepared to agree to differ. "You are either with the U.S. or with the terrorists." Remember? Without a universal definition of "terrorists," this can mean any individuals or states on Washington`s lengthening blacklist.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has come up with a format for reacting to the anti-war alliance she terms as non-nein-nyet: France should be punished, Germany ignored and Russia forgiven.

Lucky President Putin! He`s to get an olive branch even though his anti-war stance was just as firm as Chirac`s. Although Washington has once again taken up the gauntlet over Chechnya and began sniping over Russia`s alleged human rights abuses—a definite `no-no` post 9–11 so as to keep Russia on board the "war-on-terror" bandwagon.

The passionate German foreign minister, Joshscke Fischer, who once waggled his finger at a tight-lipped Donald Rumsfeld, must be wondering where he went wrong. Being ignored is not his personal forte.

Notice how China doesn`t come in for any criticism at all even though it, too, opposed the war, while North Korea is offered diplomacy even while it busies itself re-processing more than 8,000 spent fuel rods and waving photographs of its missiles under the noses of American delegates engaged in politely urging Pyongyang to disarm.

Let`s face it. Attacking the French is almost de rigueur among the pro-U.S. camp, an obligation to which some British members of Parliament have rigorously adhered, going as far as to blame France`s pacifist stance for the invasion of Iraq.

The Americans have told the objects of their displeasure that they will be scaling down their official presence at the upcoming Paris Air Show, but sweetened the pill by saying that Bush will deign to overnight in Evian during the forthcoming G8 Summit. What a relief! Canada hasn`t been as fortunate. Bush has indefinitely postponed a visit to his wayward neighbour due to Ottawa`s refusal to provide military assistance in Iraq.

Never mind that the French are likely to be sidelined in NATO, crossed off Washington`s invitation lists and ignored when it comes to benefiting from Iraqi contracts, France must surely be grateful that the American administration is still on speaking terms, if only just.

As the two protagonists line up to do battle once more in the Security Council over the permanent lifting of UN sanctions on Iraq and the cessation of the `Oil for Food Programme,` France has promised to adopt a `pragmatic` stance. Given that Paris was initially reluctant to afford any legitimacy to the Anglo-American invasion, we have yet to see how this will translate. Dominique de Villepin has stated, somewhat ominously: "France has acted throughout the Iraq crises, along with a very large majority of the international community, in accordance with its convictions and principles in order to defend international legality. It will continue to do so in all circumstances."

In the meantime, the not so cordial détente has spilled over into the streets of American and European cities. A survey organised by public relations firm Weber Shandwick showed that 12 per cent of French, German and British consumers would be prepared to boycott American products due to the invasion of Iraq, which could translate into billions of dollars in losses for U.S. exporters.

Survey

The same survey indicated that 43 per cent of American citizens were likely to boycott French items, while 36 per cent might shun `made in Germany` brands. French exporters of cheese, pate and wine are already feeling the pinch.

Aage Bjerre, owner of a pizzeria in Denmark, has gone one step further by refusing to serve French and German tourists whom he calls `anti-American` and has been charged with discrimination under Danish law.

Here, in Athens, American fast-food franchises witness a trickle of customers, while cocktails of the Molotov variety are regularly thrown at the U.S. and British embassies. During the recent fleeting visit of Blair, the British Airways office was taken over by anti-war protestors who hung a sign over the entrance urging Brits to go home.

Ignoring this popular demand, I`m still around, although I must admit to having taken to carrying baguettes under my arm and whistling a fair rendering of Le Marseillaise, after unsuccessfully trying to pass myself off as Greek.

In one of the world`s oldest democracies, being French is in, being American or British isn`t. Bush and Blair have much to answer for and would do well to remember the clarion call of the French Revolution Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite especially the fraternity bit. It`s about time we got along. Doling out punishments to friends, whose only crime is to differ, is hardly American and definitely not cricket.

Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at [e-mail]@yahoo.co.uk.


http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/050303Heard/050303he…

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[CheapThrill]

Spin behind Jessica Lynch story?

Discrepancies in reports of POW`s capture, rescue raise questions

Posted: May 6, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Diana Lynne - 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=324…


Hollywood writers could not have imagined a more gripping and rousing story as that of the Iraqi capture of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch and the dramatic Special Ops rescue caught on videotape and instigated by an Iraqi lawyer who reportedly put his life on the line for hers. But some question whether elements of the saga are more hype than fact, created to spin the POW`s experience to serve political purposes.

An avalanche of movie and book offers reportedly flooded the Lynch family days after her April 1 rescue amid a Washington Post report of her defiant stand against the Iraqi soldiers that ambushed her convoy in Nasiriyah on March 23. According to the Post, Lynch "sustained multiple gunshot wounds" and also was stabbed while she "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers ... firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition." The paper cited an unnamed U.S. military official as saying "she was fighting to the death."

The front-page story was picked up by news outlets all over the world.

But hours after it hit the newsstands, Col. David Rubenstein, commander of the Army hospital in Germany where Lynch was taken, told reporters medical evidence did "not suggest that any of her wounds were caused by either gunshots or stabbing." Lynch`s father echoed that report the following day, telling reporters that Army doctors told him Jessica hadn`t been shot, but suffered arm and leg fractures.

Three days later, an Associated Press report from Germany quoted a medical staff statement as saying: "There is a possibility [her wounds] were caused by a low-velocity, small-caliber weapon."

Nearly two weeks after its initial report, the Post quoted a physician at the Iraqi hospital in Nasiriyah as saying Lynch had sustained a head injury and arm and leg fractures, but "there were no bullets or shrapnel or anything like that."

The Toronto Star quotes a physician who treated Lynch at the Nasiriya hospital as describing her injuries as "blunt in nature," possibly stemming from a fall from her vehicle.

"She was in pretty bad shape. There was blunt trauma, resulting in compound fractures of the left femur [upper leg] and the right humerus [upper arm.] And also a deep laceration on her head," said Dr. Harith Houssona.

More recent reports indicate Lynch suffered a head wound, spinal injury and fractures to her right arm, both legs and her right foot and ankle. She is undergoing occupational and physical therapy at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The Post writers couched their report with a cautionary paragraph, which stated that Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch`s heroics but had no confirmation. It said the account was based on "battlefield intelligence" and information from Iraqi sources "whose reliability has yet to be assessed."

In response to critical feedback on the article, Post ombudsman Michael Getler concluded "what really happened is still not clear." He questioned the "thin sourcing" used in the article and suggested portions of it were overblown.

"I smell an agenda," he quoted one reader as writing. The reader suggested the Post account of the ambush amounted to wartime "propaganda."

The dramatic footage of the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs swarming the Nasiriyah hospital and carrying Lynch out on a stretcher provided a proud moment for the military and America. The subsequent surge of patriotism muted the catcalls of the anti-war naysayers.

Military advocate Elaine Donnelly sees another political agenda behind the Post`s apparent misinformation.

"I think someone in the Army - probably a woman - leaked the story to the Washington Post to spin it," she told WorldNetDaily. "If you plant the story first, it`s almost impossible to turn."

Donnelly, who heads the Center for Military Readiness, is a longtime opponent of allowing women to serve in combat positions. Donnelly suspects "Pentagon feminists," who she says have actively pursued the advancement of women in the military beyond the dictates of common sense and at the cost of military effectiveness, are behind the unsubstantiated report of Lynch`s valor and erroneous report of her injuries. She suspects the information given to the Post was part of an attempt to tip the long-simmering debate about women in combat in proponents` favor and possibly dampen the potential public outrage over any future reports of torture.

Recent editorials indicate Lynch`s ordeal is critical to the debate. A commentator writing in USA Today argued it proves "the time is right to blast through the armored ceiling that keeps women second-class citizens in the military." Another columnist wrote in the Orlando Sentinel that Lynch`s story offers conclusive evidence that "women can be as fierce as men."

"I would like to know what happened to those men who were shot right away," Donnelly continued, in reference to the nine members of Lynch`s unit recovered from a makeshift morgue at the Iraqi hospital. Gruesome footage of the bodies broadcast by the Arab television station Al Jazeera sparked reports the soldiers were shot in the head, execution style.

Donnelly suspects the men may have been trying to protect the women in the company. She bases her hunch on interviews of military servicemen and other research she conducted for a presidential commission studying the impact of women in the armed forces in 1992.

"Why is nobody asking any questions?" she said. "Something fishy is going on here."

For its part, the Pentagon says it will not release the full account of what happened to the 507th Maintenance Company until debriefings are completed with Lynch and five other company members held captive for three weeks before U.S. Marines rescued them south of Tikrit. Officials are also interviewing soldiers who escaped the ambush.

On Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ducked a question about Lynch`s condition:

"I believe that`s a matter for her doctors and her family and not for us to talk about," he said on "Fox News Sunday."

Whatever happened when Lynch`s convoy took a wrong turn in the Iraqi desert, most would agree that Lynch is an American hero for answering the call to duty and putting her life on the line in service to her country.

But legend precedes reality even for Lynch. The Associated Press reported she told debriefers in Washington she doesn`t remember anything between the time she said her vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and when she regained consciousness at an Iraqi hospital.

Fox News reports her amnesia extends through the duration of her ten days in captivity, and that she has no memory of the brutality U.S. military officials believe she endured.

"She basically has amnesia, and has mentally blocked out the horrible things we strongly believe she went through," one official told Fox.

"These things usually take months - sometimes years - but usually months to eventually clear up," and the patient recovers, Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld said.

Fox reports the military may have the surviving soldiers from her unit visit her to help refresh her memory.

Officials say she "has to be brought back to reality," since she may be the last living witness to war crimes in Iraq - crimes possibly committed against her unit members and herself.

Torture or VIP treatment?

In addition to the issue of how the 20-year-old Army supply clerk was taken prisoner by Iraqi soldiers, reporting discrepancies raise questions about Lynch`s treatment in captivity and her rescue.

The Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh Rehaief, who also became an American hero for alerting U.S. military forces to Lynch`s presence at the hospital, conducting surveillance of the facility and relaying the information back to coalition troops, reportedly put her safety before his after seeing her being slapped on the face by an Iraqi security officer. The 32-year-old, his wife and their 5-year-old daughter were granted political asylum in the U.S. as reward for his courage.

NBC News reported coalition forces were told an American soldier was being tortured at the hospital.

But the treating physicians at the Iraqi public hospital dispute the claims.

The medical team interviewed by the Toronto Star said the Iraqi intelligence officers took no interest in her.

As they describe, Lynch was given VIP care, which included extra juice and cookies and the attention of the hospital`s "most nurturing" nurse.

"We all became friends with her, we liked her so much," Houssona said. "Especially because we all speak a little English, we were able to assure her the whole time that there was no danger, that she would go home soon."

The Nasiriya doctors offer up inconsistent details on Lynch`s condition, however, which leaves room for doubt about the accuracy of their accounts.

While Houssona told The Star that Lynch required a transfusion of two pints of blood, her colleague Haitham Gizzy told the Charleston Daily Mail - the local paper in Lynch`s hometown of Palestine, W. Va. - that Lynch lost "not a drop of blood."

Gizzy also said Lynch was first treated at an Iraqi military hospital before being transferred to the public hospital in Nasiriya.

There are no reports regarding what happened to Lynch at that military facility, nor is there confirmation the "hospital" was in fact a hospital. It has been widely reported that many of Iraq`s torture chambers were disguised as innocent buildings such as hotels and sports centers.

Human rights organizations report torture was systematically used by Saddam Hussein`s regime against political detainees. Beatings with canes, whips, hose pipes and metal rods were common, especially on the soles of victims` feets. Raping female political prisoners was also part of the regime`s policy.

The rescued POWs told The Post and the Miami Herald they were kicked and beaten when captured, and were taunted and interrogated by their captors and some feared they were going to die.

One of the POWs, Army Sgt. James Riley, described the experience as "sheer terror" on ABC`s "Good Morning America" this morning.

The `big show`

The Star reports the three Nasiriya doctors, two nurses, one hospital administrator and local residents also ridiculed the U.S. military for its clandestine, midnight raid of the hospital to rescue Lynch. They claim Iraqi soldiers and commanders left the hospital two days earlier.

"The night they left, a few of the senior medical staff tried to give Jessica back," said Houssona. "We carefully moved her out of intensive care and into an ambulance and began to drive to the Americans, who were just one kilometer away. But when the ambulance got within 300 meters, they began to shoot. There wasn`t even a chance to tell them `We have Jessica. Take her.`"

The next night, the sound of helicopters circling the hospital`s upper floors drove staff into the windowless X-ray department, according to the physicians` account. As the rescue unfolded, the power was cut and the U.S. soldiers blasted through locked doors.

"We were pretty frightened," Dr. Anmar Uday told the paper. "Everyone expected the Americans to come that day because the city had fallen. But we didn`t expect them to blast through the doors like a Hollywood movie."

"They made a big show," Gizzy told the Daily Mail. "It was just a drama. A big, dramatic show."

Gizzy and other doctors told the paper most of the Saddam`s Fedayeen fighters and the entire Baath Party leadership had come to the hospital earlier in the day, changed into civilian clothes and fled barefoot.

"They brought their civilian wear with them," said Mokhdad Abd Hassan, pointing to green army uniforms piled on the lawn. "They all ran away, the same day."

Were the Fedayeen soldiers long gone from the hospital, or did they flee just hours before the raid?

The conflicting doctors` reports leave one WorldNetDaily reader suspecting the Iraqi doctors have an agenda.

"I am very concerned that this young woman will be more traumatized by the media and critics (who will try and blame her for these inconsistencies) following her recovery," the reader, who does not wish to be named, wrote. "In other words we need a second `Saving Private Lynch`... this one saving her from the media."

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

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The President`s 77% Solution
By Arianna Huffington
May 7, 2003

"Seventy-seven percent."



For weeks now, those three little words have served as the ultimate discussion stopper. A conversational coup de grâce. Whether offered up on TV talk shows or tossed across dining room tables, that magic number — the president`s robust postwar job approval rating — has been as effective at quelling any disagreement with the Bush administration`s selectively bellicose foreign policies or its suicidal tax cuts as a laser-guided bunker-buster bomb.

Seventy-seven percent. The president is triumphant. Seventy-seven percent. The president can do no wrong. End of discussion. End of democratic debate. Or so Bush and his handlers fervently hope.

Only it`s not. It`s just the beginning.

For starters, majorities can be — and very, very often have been — dead wrong. For instance, "Macarena" held the top spot on the Billboard singles chart for 14 straight weeks. Need I say more?

And I`m not even pointing out to the president that a majority voted against him in 2000.

But let`s put aside for the moment the ludicrousness of basing anything on increasingly inaccurate opinion polls — with their plummeting response rates, laughably small samplings and precision-flouting margins of error — and take a closer look at the latest numbers. You`ll see that the president isn`t flying anywhere near as high as Karl Rove would like us to believe.

For one thing, in the latest Newsweek poll, the president`s approval rating has already slumped to 65% — a 12-point drop since the post-fall-of-Baghdad euphoria that goosed him up to the double sevens. And even that pales in comparison with the 89% rating his father sported after the Gulf War.

The instability of the president`s putative popularity becomes even more apparent when the subject of the polls is switched from the war in Iraq to the floundering economy at home. Only 49% of Americans approve of Bush`s handling of the economy, and more than half think that he is not paying enough attention to the issue. That is a big problem for the White House because a majority of those polled cite the economy as their top concern. I`m sure Team Bush wishes the rest of us were paying as little attention to the economy as he is.

It`s no wonder Rove is struggling so mightily to make 2004 about little more than picking a cockpit-ready commander in chief. But being president entails a lot more than making tail-hook landings and ordering last-minute bombing runs on restaurants and mosques where Saddam Hussein might be hiding. It requires vision and leadership and the ability to come up with a way to deal with 6% national unemployment that doesn`t include hammering Congress to pass yet another tax cut for the rich or repeating the word "jobs" close to three dozen times in a single speech, as the president did two weeks ago.

But even if you put all that aside and focus exclusively on the "endless war" the administration seems determined to wage — or at least determined to campaign on — the White House`s reliance on polling seems destined to blow up in all of our faces.

Can you think of anything more preposterous and dangerous than determining matters of war and peace on the basis of public opinion surveys? Yet all indications are that Bush and chief strategist Rove are chronic poll watchers and takers. A scary thought when you consider how consistently unreliable polls are.

Take the case of a Los Angeles Times poll conducted during the early days of the Iraq invasion. According to the survey, 50% of Americans were in favor of expanding the fighting in the Middle East to include Iran if it continued to develop nuclear weapons. Impressive. And utterly dubious. Just one week after the L.A. Times` headline-grabbing findings, a Gallup poll on the same subject came up with wildly contradictory results, determining that a whopping 69% of Americans opposed an invasion of Iran, even if it was proved to be developing WMDs or aiding terrorists.

So which was it? Were Americans gung-ho to take on Iran, or did the thought send a shiver up our collective spine? And what if the Wolfowitzes of the world had used the first numbers to convince Rove that a preemptive strike against Iran would be a good political move? Would the Gallup findings have then led the president to make an apologetic call to the ruling ayatollahs in Tehran: "Sorry, fellas, my bad. But that`s polling for ya!"

It`s bad enough taking a poll to determine whether the public is in favor of requiring schoolkids to wear uniforms; it`s downright Strangelovian to ask them whether they are in favor of attacking a sovereign nation. Even if your approval rating is 100%.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[Joerver]

Karl Rove: Counting Votes While the Bombs Drop
By James C. Moore
James C. Moore is the co-author of "Bush`s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential" (John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2003).

May 7, 2003

Karl Rove led the nation to war to improve the political prospects of George W. Bush. I know how surreal that sounds. But I also know it is true.

As the president`s chief political advisor, Rove is involved in every decision coming out of the Oval Office. In fact, he flat out makes some of them. He is co-president of the United States, just as he was co-candidate for that office and co-governor of Texas. His relationship with the president is the most profound and complex of all of the White House advisors. And his role creates questions not addressed by our Constitution.

Rove is probably the most powerful unelected person in American history.

The cause of the war in Iraq was not just about Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction or Al Qaeda links to Iraq. Those may have been the stated causes, but every good lie should have a germ of truth. No, this was mostly a product of Rove`s usual prescience. He looked around and saw that the economy was anemic and people were complaining about the president`s inability to find Osama bin Laden. In another corner, the neoconservatives in the Cabinet were itching to launch ships and planes to the Mideast and take control of Iraq. Rove converged the dynamics of the times. He convinced the president to connect Hussein to Bin Laden, even if the CIA could not.

This misdirection worked. A Pew survey taken during the war showed 61% of Americans believe that Hussein and Bin Laden were confederates in the 9/11 attacks.

And now, Rove needs the conflict to continue so his client — the president — can retain wartime stature during next year`s election. Listen to the semantics from Bush`s recent trip to the aircraft carrier Lincoln. When he referred to the "battle of Iraq," Bush implied that we only won a single fight in a bigger war that was not yet over. I first encountered Rove more than 20 years ago in Texas. I reported on him and the future president as a TV correspondent there, traveling with them extensively during their race to the governor`s mansion in Austin. Once there, Rove was involved in every important decision the governor made and, according to Bush staffers, vetted each critical choice for political implications.

Nothing is different today in the White House. The same old reliable sources from his days in Texas are in Washington with him. And they say Rove is intimately involved in the Cabinet and that he sat in on all the big meetings leading up to the Iraq war and signed off on all major decisions.

Rove fancies himself an expert in both policy and politics because he sees no distinction between the two. This matters for a number of reasons. There is always a time during any president`s administration when what is best for the future of the country diverges from what best serves that president`s political future. If Rove is standing with George W. Bush at that moment, he will push the president in the direction of reelection rather than the country`s best interests.

The United States is best served when political calculations are not a part of the White House`s most important decisions. Rove`s calculus is always a formula for winning the next election. He was less concerned about the bombing of Iraqi civilians or the bullets flying at our own troops, according to people who have worked for him for years, than he was about what these acts would do to the results of the electoral college, or how they influence voters in swing states like Florida.

There needs to be something sacred about our presidents` decisions to send our children into combat. The Karl Roves of the world ought to not even be in the room, much less asked for advice.

Rove has influenced dealings with Iraq and North Korea, according to Bush administration sources. For instance, when the U.S. was notified, through formal diplomatic channels, that North Korea had nuclear technology, Congress was in the midst of discussing the Iraqi war resolution. Rove counseled the president to keep that information from Congress for 12 days, until the debate was finished, so it would not affect the vote. He was also reported to be present at a war strategy meeting concerning whether to attack Syria after Iraq. Rove said the timing was not right. Yet. Having the political advisor involved in that decision is wrong.

War, after all, is not a campaign event.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

[CheapThrill]

The Pope thinks 9-11 was an inside job


Never mind the Pope, he`s a pinko commie "hate-America-first" conspiracy wack-job.


"...According to journalists close to the Vatican, the Pope and his closest advisers are also concerned that the ultimate acts of evil - the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon - were known in advance http://www.libertythink.com/911.htm by senior Bush administration officials.

By permitting the attacks to take their course, there is a perception within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy that a coup d`etat was implemented, one that gave Bush and his leadership near-dictatorial powers to carry out their agenda."

"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor"
-- Project for a New American Century http://www.newamericancentury.org/ (2000)






Bush`s "Christian" Blood Cult

Concerns Raised by the Vatican

by WAYNE MADSEN

George W. Bush proclaims himself a born-again Christian. However, Bush and fellow self-anointed neo-Christians like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, and sports arena Book of Revelations carnival hawker Franklin Graham appear to wallow in a "Christian" blood lust cult when it comes to practicing the teachings of the founder of Christianity. This cultist form of Christianity, with its emphasis on death rather than life, is also worrying the leaders of mainstream Christian religions, particularly the Pope.

One only has to check out Bush`s record as Governor of Texas to see his own preference for death over life. During his tenure as Governor, Bush presided over a record setting 152 executions, including the 1998 execution of fellow born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer who later led a prison ministry. Forty of Bush`s executions were carried out in 2000, the year the Bush presidential campaign was spotlighting their candidate`s strong law enforcement record. The Washington Post`s Richard Cohen reported in October 2000 that one of the execution chamber`s "tie-down team" members, Fred Allen, had to prepare so many people for lethal injections during 2000, he quit his job in disgust.

Bush mocked Tucker`s appeal for clemency. In an interview with Talk magazine, Bush imitated Tucker`s appeal for him to spare her life - pursing his lips, squinting his eyes, and in a squeaky voice saying, "Please don`t kill me." That went too far for former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer, himself an evangelical Christian. "I think it is nothing short of unbelievable that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death," said Bauer.

A former Texas Department of Public Safety officer, a devout Roman Catholic, told this reporter that evidence to the contrary, Bush was more than happy to ignore DNA data and documented cases of prosecutorial misconduct to send innocent people to the Huntsville, Texas lethal injection chamber. He said the number of executed mentally retarded, African Americans, and those who committed capital crimes as minors was proof that Bush was insensitive and a "phony Christian." When faced with similar problems in Illinois, Governor George Ryan, a Republican, commuted the death sentences of his state`s death row inmates and released others after discovering they were wrongfully convicted. Yet the Republican Party is pillorying Ryan and John Ashcroft`s Justice Department continues to investigate the former Governor for political malfeasance as if Bush and Ashcroft are without sin in such matters. Hypocrisy certainly rules in the Republican Party.

Bush`s blood lust has been extended across the globe. He has given the CIA authority to assassinate those deemed a threat to U.S. national interests. Bush has virtually suspended Executive Orders 11905 (Gerald Ford), 12306 (Jimmy Carter), and 12333 (Ronald Reagan) which prohibit the assassination of foreign leaders. Bush`s determination to kill Saddam Hussein, his family, and his top leaders with precision-guided missiles and tactical nuclear weapon-like Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bombs is yet another indication of Bush`s disregard for his Republican and Democratic predecessors. It now appears that in his zeal to kill Hussein, innocent civilian patrons of a Baghdad restaurant were killed by one of Bush`s precision Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). Like it or not, Saddam Hussein was recognized by over 100 nations as the leader of Iraq -- a member state of the United Nations. Hussein, like North Korea` Kim Jong Il, Syria`s Bashir Assad, and Iran`s Mohammed Khatami, are covered by Executive Order 12333, which the Bush mouthpieces claim is still in effect. Bush`s "Christian" blood cult sees no other option than death for those who become his enemies. This doctrine is found no place in Christian theology.

Bush has not once prayed for the innocent civilians who died as a result of the U.S. attack on Iraq. He constantly "embeds" himself with the military at Goebbels-like speech fests and makes constant references to God when he refers to America`s "victory" in Iraq, as if God endorses his sordid killing spree. He makes no mention of the children, women, and old men killed by America`s "precision-guided" missiles and bombs and trigger-happy U.S. troops. In fact, Bush revels in indiscriminate blood letting. Since he never experienced such killing in Southeast Asia, when he was AWOL from his Texas Air National Guard unit, Bush just does not seem to understand the horror of a parent watching one`s children having their heads and limbs blown off in a sudden blast of shrapnel or children witnessing their parents burning to death with their own body fat nurturing the flames.

Bush and his advisers, previously warned that Iraq`s ancient artifacts and collection of historical documents and books were in danger of being looted or destroyed, instead, sat back while the Baghdad and Mosul museums and Baghdad Library were ransacked and destroyed. Cult leaders have historically attempted to destroy history in order to invent their own. The Soviets tried to obliterate Russia`s Orthodox traditions, turning a number of churches into warehouses and animal barns. Cambodia`s Pol Pot tried to wipe out Buddhism`s famed Angkor Wat shrine in an attempt to stamp out his country`s Buddhist history. In March 2001, while they were negotiating with the Bush administration on a natural gas pipeline, Afghanistan`s Taliban blew up two massive 1600-year old Buddhas in Bamiyan. The Bush administration, itself run by fanatic religious cultists, barely made a fuss about the loss of the relics. It would not be the first time the cultists within the Bush administration ignored the pillaging of history`s treasures.

The ransacking of Iraq`s historical treasures is explainable when one considers what the blood cult Christians really think about Islam. Franklin Graham, the heir to the empire built up by his anti-Semitic father, Billy Graham, has decided being anti-Muslim is far more financially rewarding than being anti-Jewish. Billy Graham, history notes from the Nixon tapes, complained about the Jewish stranglehold on the media and Jews being responsible for pornography.

Franklin Graham continues to enjoy his father`s unfettered and questionable access to the White House. But in the case of Bush, the younger Graham has a fanatic adherent. Graham has called Islam a "very evil and wicked" religion.

He then announces he wants to go to Iraq. Graham obviously sees an opportunity to convert Muslims and unrepentant Eastern Christians, who owe their allegiance to Roman and Greek prelates, to his perverted form of blood cult Christianity. Graham says he is ready to send his Samaritan`s Purse missionaries into Iraq to provide assistance. Muslims and mainstream Christians are wary that Graham wants to exchange food, water, and medicine for the baptism of Iraqis into his intolerant brand of Christianity. In the last Gulf War, Graham could not get away with his chicanery. The Desert Storm Commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, stopped dead in the tracks Graham`s plan to send 30,000 Arabic language Bibles to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Today`s Pentagon shows no such compunction to put a rein on Graham. It invited him to give a Good Friday sermon at the Pentagon to the consternation of the Defense Department`s Muslim employees. To make matters worse, under Bush`s "Faith Based Initiative," Graham`s Samaritan`s Purse stands to receive U.S. government funds for its proselytizing efforts in Iraq, something that should be an affront to every American taxpayer.

Bush`s self-proclaimed adherence to Christianity (during one of the presidential debates he said Jesus Christ was his favorite "philosopher" ) and his constant reference to a new international structure bypassing the United Nations system and long-standing international treaties are worrying the top leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Well-informed sources close to the Vatican report that Pope John Paul II is growing increasingly concerned about Bush`s ultimate intentions. The Pope has had experience with Bush`s death fetish. Bush ignored the Pope`s plea to spare the life of Karla Faye Tucker. To show that he was similarly ignorant of the world`s mainstream religions, Bush also rejected an appeal to spare Tucker from the World Council of Churches - an organization that represents over 350 of the world`s Protestant and Orthodox Churches. It did not matter that Bush`s own Methodist Church and his parents` Episcopal Church are members of the World Council.

Bush`s blood lust, his repeated commitment to Christian beliefs, and his constant references to "evil doers," in the eyes of many devout Catholic leaders, bear all the hallmarks of the one warned about in the Book of Revelations - the anti-Christ. People close to the Pope claim that amid these concerns, the Pontiff wishes he was younger and in better health to confront the possibility that Bush may represent the person prophesized in Revelations. John Paul II has always believed the world was on the precipice of the final confrontation between Good and Evil as foretold in the New Testament. Before he became Pope, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla said, "We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel." The Pope, who grew up facing the evils of Hitler and Stalin, knows evil when he sees it. Although we can all endlessly argue over the Pope`s effectiveness in curtailing abuses within his Church, his accomplishments external to Catholicism are impressive.

According to journalists close to the Vatican, the Pope and his closest advisers are also concerned that the ultimate acts of evil - the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon - were known in advance by senior Bush administration officials. By permitting the attacks to take their course, there is a perception within the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy that a coup d`etat was implemented, one that gave Bush and his leadership near-dictatorial powers to carry out their agenda.

The Pope worked tirelessly to convince leaders of nations on the UN Security Council to oppose Bush`s war resolution on Iraq. Vatican sources claim they had not seen the Pope more animated and determined since he fell ill to Parkinson`s Disease. In the end, the Pope did convince the leaders of Mexico, Chile, Cameroon, and Guinea to oppose the U.S. resolution. If one were to believe in the Book of Revelations, as the Pope fervently does, he can seek solace in scoring a symbolic victory against the Bush administration. Whether Bush represents a dangerous right-wing ideologue who couples his political fanaticism with a neo-Christian blood cult (as I believe) or he is either the anti-Christ or heralds one, the Pope should know he has fought the good battle and has gained the respect and admiration of many non-Catholics around the world.

[Joerver]

[Joerver]

Senator Robert Byrd: `Making the military a stage prop for politics`
Posted on Wednesday, May 07 @ 10:06:39 EDT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Senator Robert Byrd

In my 50 years as a member of Congress, I have had the privilege to witness the defining rhetorical moments of a number of American presidents. I have listened spellbound to the soaring oratory of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. I have listened grimly to the painful soul-searching of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Presidential speeches are an important marker of any President`s legacy. These are the tangible moments that history seizes upon and records for posterity. For this reason, I was deeply troubled by both the content and the context of President Bush`s remarks to the American people last week marking the end of the combat phase of the war in Iraq. As I watched the President`s fighter jet swoop down onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, I could not help but contrast the reported simple dignity of President Lincoln at Gettysburg with the flamboyant showmanship of President Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.



President Bush`s address to the American people announcing combat victory in Iraq deserved to be marked with solemnity, not extravagance; with gratitude to God, not self-congratulatory gestures. American blood has been shed on foreign soil in defense of the President`s policies. This is not some made-for-TV backdrop for a campaign commercial. This is real life, and real lives have been lost. To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the President to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech. I do not begrudge his salute to America`s warriors aboard the carrier Lincoln, for they have performed bravely and skillfully, as have their countrymen still in Iraq, but I do question the motives of a deskbound President who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech.

As I watched the President`s speech, before the great banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," I could not help but be reminded of the tobacco barns of my youth, which served as country road advertising backdrops for the slogans of chewing tobacco purveyors. I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw.

What I heard the President say also disturbed me. It may make for grand theater to describe Saddam Hussein as an ally of al Qaeda or to characterize the fall of Baghdad as a victory in the war on terror, but stirring rhetoric does not necessarily reflect sobering reality. Not one of the 19 September 11th hijackers was an Iraqi. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to link the September 11 attack on the United States to Iraq. There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was an evil despot who brought great suffering to the Iraqi people, and there is no doubt in my mind that he encouraged and rewarded acts of terrorism against Israel. But his crimes are not those of Osama bin Laden, and bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not bring justice to the victims of 9-11. The United States has made great progress in its efforts to disrupt and destroy the al Qaeda terror network. We can take solace and satisfaction in that fact. We should not risk tarnishing those very real accomplishments by trumpeting victory in Iraq as a victory over Osama bin Laden.

We are reminded in the gospel of Saint Luke, "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." Surely the same can be said of any American president. We expect, nay demand, that our leaders be scrupulous in the truth and faithful to the facts. We do not seek theatrics or hyperbole. We do not require the stage management of our victories. The men and women of the United States military are to be saluted for their valor and sacrifice in Iraq. Their heroics and quiet resolve speak for themselves. The prowess and professionalism of America`s military forces do not need to be embellished by the gaudy excesses of a political campaign.

War is not theater, and victory is not a campaign slogan. I join with the President and all Americans in expressing heartfelt thanks and gratitude to our men and women in uniform for their service to our country, and for the sacrifices that they have made on our behalf. But on this point I differ with the President: I believe that our military forces deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and not used as stage props to embellish a presidential speech.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=11312&mode=nest…

[Joerver]

May 5, 2003


George W. Bush
The Little Snot, the Little Bully
by SAM HAMOD

I was talking with a friend the other day and she said, "Bush runs around like a little bully, like a little snot." I thought, bingo! That`s what he is, a little snot, a little bully.

Remember the kids who whined, were spoiled, and wanted their way, and were nasty to you and everyone else if they didn`t get it? Remember the shrubs you knew who had thugs for friends who would come after you, but the little bully wouldn`t dare do it by himself--but always wanted others to do his dirty work for him. Well, there you have our dear president, GW Shrub.

Interestingly, Norman Mailer recently wrote that the war in Iraq may have also been about the white male ego needing to assert itself. This may be so, for in GW Shrub`s case, he has always been a failure; he failed in school, he failed in baseball, he failed in the oil business, he has failed as a father if you look at his two young lost daughters, he actually failed as Governor of Texas but kept the financial and education mess he made covered up until after the presidential election; ironically, he failed to get the majority of votes when he ran for president against Al Gore (but he won with the help of his brother Jeb, Gov. of Florida and the infamous hanging chads, and the US Supreme Court that was loaded with right wing Republicans left over from Ronald RayGun).

Poor GW Shrub had to win at something-so he did, he beat another bully, Saddam Hussein-but a lot of American, Iraqi and British lives were lost in the process and more will die in the future before the Iraq mess is finished (and believe me, it is a long way from over). So, perhaps Mailer is right, poor Shrub had to assert his "manhood"-or what he little he has. He certainly doesn`t behave like a mature, intelligent or just man-he behaves more like the little snot, the little bully I alluded to. Read on for the adventures of GW Shrub versus Mexico, France, Germany, Russia and the US Congress.

Look at the way he has decided to snub Mexico on Cinco De Mayo Day this year-this is all the rage on the Mexican and American talk radio stations out here in San Diego, it even made a headline in the second A section of the San Diego Union Tribune. All this because Presidente Fox of Mexico did not support him in his illegal and immoral attack on Iraq. Remember back when GW became president, then it was, "Me Amigo, Presidente Fox, border friends, like brothers, we understand each other and we`re going to work to make those border crossings easier and make it easier to get more Mexican workers into America and give them their citizenship."

Well, as you know, when 9/11 came along, GW became larger than life, at least in his own eyes and in the eyes of the American toadish media. He suddenly started to "worry about those Mexican illegals coming across the border, they could be terrorists." Fox kept his part of the friendship, but Bush began pulling away from it. Bush kept it at a very cold distance, until he wanted Fox`s help at the UN, wanted his support for a war resolution against Iraq. When Fox didn`t come through for the little bully, a faux Napoleon, Bush decided he`d take revenge. He cut back on immigration, he made border crossings harder, he sent money into Mexico to help defeat Fox and his party and started publicly attacking Fox for not being a good neighbor. Now that Cinco De Mayo, one of the major Mexican holidays, is coming up, Bush is going to use the occasion to snub Presidente Fox. The little snot will show him who is boss; he`ll let Fox know that he`s not only a little snot, but that he`s a little bully.

Of course, you are aware that the Shrub has been playing out the same scenario toward France, Germany, Russia and China-but especially toward France and Germany. He`s made clear he`s going to "punish them" for not supporting his illegality in Iraq.

But, as soon as he had a ground victory in Iraq, GW Shrub went to the UN to ask them to give him help in "reconstructing Iraq" and "helping to restore order"-but of course, it all had to be done under the aegis of American control, with American corporations raping the profits out of Iraq-all that France, Germany, Russia and others would get to do was to support this rape, the pillage, give money and men to help, then shut up and stay out of the way.

Even when France tried to compromise with GW at the UN 10 days ago, it did no good-he made clear he was still "going to punish France, teach them a lesson." Sound like that little snot, that little bully you remember from your childhood, or saw in your classroom if you are an elementary school teacher or principal? Of course you do-we all do-the only terrible thing is that this little monster is the president of the most powerful country in the world (no, he didn`t make it powerful, it was powerful before he came into office) and can damn near get away with whatever he wants because he controls the Congress, the Senate and the Supreme Court as well as having the world`s largest budget and military at his beck and call!

Intelligent Americans are aware of these poor qualities in Bush by the way he has run roughshod over American civil rights through his minion/thug, Attorney General John Ashcroft. Ashcroft has made declarations about the law as head of the Department of Justice that most legal scholars say are clearly illegal and wrong. He then carries out illegal and immoral detentions of innocent people without warrants, disallows them legal counsel and refuses them visits; this has been true of the prisoners in Guantanmo, Cuba and in the US itself where even US citizens have been "detained" in this same illegal way (see Padilla and others). But few in the Congress and in the law are willing to stand up to Ashcroft.

Even legislators fear Bush; they give him whatever he wants, that is aside from Senator Byrd, Congressman Kucinich and the Black Caucus. When Bush wanted his Patriot Act passed, most of the congress just lay down before him and let him run over them. Seeing this, the bully decided to take more action, so he sent his minions to the Hill and pushed for more and more of his way--in the budget, in Homeland Security, in economic and political attacks on his alleged "enemies" in the congress, so that now he has his minions in control of the most important roles in Congress.

He has even intimidated the media so they are afraid to be critical of Bush or his ways. Thus, during the recent illegal invasion of Iraq, most of the US media did little critical questioning or thinking--they just waved the flags the way the Bush team waved them, and all were happy in their ignorant bliss. On TV and radio, anyone who didn`t agree with the Bush line was attacked from the show, or if they appered on the shows. Thus, even the 4th Estate was bullied so that now they are part of the first three estates, Money, Politics and Military--most can no longer lay claim to being "independent media." One has but to look at Faux News, MSNBC, Brokaw`s posturing on NBC, even Mike Wallace on CBS and the rationalizing on behalf of Bush by the previously independent CNN.

When foreign media criticized Bush or gave differing versions from his, their sites were hacked, their transmissions often interrupted and all were attacked on a daily basis by the Bush administration as being liars, anti-peace, anti-justice and worst of all, "anti-American." In Afghanistan, one of the media most critical of Bush, Al Jazeera television, was attacked and their headquarters destroyed even though they had been promised safety by the Shrub`s men. In Iraq, Al Jazeera`s headquarters were bombed with two of their people being killed; then to top it off, when it was apparent that many of the independent, not the embedded journalists, were showing and writing about the brutality of the American and British troops in Baghdad, an American tank fired a direct hit into the Palestine Hotel which also killed and wounded more journalists. At first, General Brooks, the spokesman for the US in the Iraq fiasco, tried to say that shots had been fired from the lobby of the hotel and that`s why the tank shot into the hotel. But when he was corrected, that the tank shot at the 15th floor, Brooks stumbled and mumbled, but never apologized for the killings at either the Palestine Hotel or at Al Jazeera, Bush`s man at the Pentagon, Rumdum only said, "It`s war and things happen." Once again, no apology; thus, the bully affect again.

So how do we handle the snot and bully? I say we stand up to him, not just in America, but others in the world should do the same. Start making defense treaties, start making trade treaties, start shutting him and his kind out so that they lose their bearings-so that they realize the world can go on without him and his thugs. Let his lackey, Tony Blair, realize that he won`t be part of the European Union much longer if he continues to be more a part of Bush`s team (no, not of America, hopefully America is larger than Bush) than an EU member. Then, if the bully begins to think he can start another war in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa, the nations of that area should stand shoulder to shoulder and say, NO! Don`t you dare come in here and start another mess like you created in Iraq. If you come, you may kill some of us, but you can`t take us all on, and even if you bomb us into some sort of hell, you still won`t be able to occupy us because we`ll fight harder than Saddam Hussein, and we won`t be bought or scared off by your money or your arrogant rhetoric.

Remember, this shrub is nothing but a little snot, a little bully-he is not America, he`s a not a shrub interested in democracy, and he is not for peace or justice.

Sam Hamod is an expert in world affairs. He publishes articles on the Middle East, politics, economics and poetry. he may be reached at [e-mail].

[Joerver]

Paul Corrigan: `Guns don`t equal butter`
Posted on Wednesday, May 07 @ 09:58:13 EDT
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By Paul Corrigan, Bear Left!

The United States invaded Iraq because the Bush administration believes that economic prosperity (and political popularity) in America is intrinsically tied to military power. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "the single most important thing for the economic prosperity and well-being of the American people is that we have a reasonably safe, a reasonably stable, world." Rumsfeld`s faith in this proposition is so great that he is willing to open up the American Treasury for the cause: "We can afford to spend on national defense any absolute amount of dollars and any percentage of GDP that is necessary to have that reasonably stable, reasonably peaceful world, because without that we do not have the opportunity to enjoy our freedoms."

For Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration, freedom is just another word for corporate access to all of the world`s natural resources, cheap labor, and markets—and for the members of the administration to cash in on the largesse. Their view of democracy is a system of government and political institutions that facilitate such access. It is no less than laissez-faire capitalism. This administration believes that American business should no more have to answer to workers and communities than it should have to grovel on bended knee to dictators like Saddam Hussein who just happen to control oil reserves or other resources. There is an odd consistency in their policy of tax cuts at home and the overthrow of governments abroad.



The Bush administration displays an open disdain of the role that governments play in regulating American business. Bush revealed the antipathy that he and his administration feel about the democratic process when he joked that being dictator would be much easier than being president. Rumsfeld has complained that dealing with governments makes business "slow" and "bureaucratic." Cheney wants Americans to believe that Haliburton`s financial success has nothing to do with government. These three guys, and their families and friends, are complaining all the way to the bank.

The Bush administration operates in a time warp that lets its members ignore that government has saved business and capitalism from the excesses of laissez-faire. Government has also been the incubator of some of the business segments in our society that have greatly aided the economy, especially new technologies. Now is hardly the time to let business regulate business. Corporate abuse is so rampant that even Fortune magazine is referring to CEOs as pigs. Fortune looked the other way when workers and communities were getting abused by the managerial class, but its editors stood up and took notice when investors were treated to the same abuse. Today, although the pages of the domestic and international business press depict in detail all manner of corporate abuse, the Bush administration wants to return the pigs to power. International relations, worker pension programs, and the environment be damned!

The Bush administration is carrying on domestic and foreign policy as if economic prosperity will be the natural byproduct of tax cuts and military victory over small countries 7,000 miles away from our borders. It remains to be seen how much damage it has done to America at home and abroad.

Bush and many of his key advisors came into the government after doing quite well for themselves as leaders of companies that did much less for their investors. The managers at Global Crossing, Enron, and WorldCom promised investors that they were concerned only with increasing shareholder value. Bush and his administration are in turn bankrupting our country while telling us that they are increasing taxpayer value. Don`t you believe them.

© 2003, Paul Corrigan.

Reprinted from Bear Left!:
http://www.bear-left.com/
original/2003/0506guns.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow ugc noopener">http://www.bear-left.com/
original/2003/0506guns.html

[Joerver]

THE METAMORPHOSIS
By David Podvin

As I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, I found I had been transformed in my bed into something reptilian. I had fangs that were filled with venomous poison. My tongue was forked. My mouth foamed, spewing forth bile. My blood ran cold. My instincts were now predatory. I intuitively realized that anyone who disagreed with me was dangerous and must be destroyed. When I tried to comprehend what had happened, the enormity of the situation suddenly overwhelmed me. “Oh, my God!” I screamed in horror. “I have become a conservative!”

My first impulse was to blame Bill Clinton - not just for this, but for all things. And if not him, I thought, then the wrongs of the world must certainly be the fault of teenage, crack addicted black welfare mothers who yearn to recruit public school students to alternative lifestyles that involve farm animals.

But, wait! This wasn’t like me. What was I doing? Blaming others for my misfortune? Scapegoating innocent people? Engaging in pernicious ethnic stereotypes? Exhibiting a reckless disregard for the truth?

Yes! That is exactly what I was doing. And it felt so right! Gone was the burden of so-called “fairness”. I now knew what was really fair - for me to get my way. Suddenly, being narrow minded and intolerant was a viable means to an end, like assassinating every effective liberal American leader of the 1960s.

I soon needed to slither outside and sun myself on a nearby rock. Gone was my weakness masquerading as a “social conscience”. Where once I had been emotionally vulnerable, I was now protected by the fortitude that can only be achieved through total indifference to the suffering of others. I saw things with absolute moral clarity, completely unencumbered by nuance. I recognized that it was my duty to speak on behalf of God.

Through my new incarnation as a conservative, I had finally gained the maturity to accept the fact that logic is for losers. I deplored humanity, but adored the unborn. I understood that if women were meant to have the right to vote, then they would be men. I realized that patriotism is not so much love of country, but a brutally effective political weapon with which to destroy anyone who dissents. I was able to hate the sin of homosexuality and still love the sinners, although my love for the sinners was somewhat tempered by my absolute disgust at their very existence.

By far, the most revealing new conservative insight was the realization that there is nothing wrong with America we can’t solve by ridding ourselves of the poor. Lack of money is merely the symptom of poverty; the root cause is lack of character. I now know that the wealthy have so much more money because they are so much more virtuous. It is equally true that poverty is created by moral decay. When taxpayers help the destitute to stay alive, we indulgently make ourselves feel better. In the process, however, we do a terrible disservice to homeless orphans, mentally disordered vagrants, quadriplegic war veterans, and the terminally ill by teaching them that it is unnecessary to become self-sufficient.

Rush Limbaugh has it just right: The last thing starving children need is free food – all they really require is intensive bible study and a swift kick in the ass. As the Heritage Foundation Report on the scandal of prepubescent welfare has documented, “There is no such thing as a free school lunch. Every penny that goes to provide milk for some kindergarten parasite is one less penny available for space-based missile defense.”

What had begun as a traumatic transformation for me now seemed like the natural order of things. Corporate America has been right all along: the law of the jungle is not just a shallow cliché – it really is the one true path to contentment.

Conservatives strongly believe in compassion, but we insist that it be based on the merit system. As Barry Goldwater so wisely observed, when you reward bad behavior, you get more of the same. It therefore stands to reason that, when you create special parking spaces for the handicapped, you are showing people it pays to be a cripple. When you tolerate Special Olympics, you are encouraging those who lack the athletic ability to compete in the real Olympics to become retards. In the name of empathy, well meaning but destructive liberals are turning America into a nation of freaks.

I was now exhausted but euphoric by my metamorphosis from mere primate to scaly champion of personal responsibility. The only negative aspect of the experience was the tormented screaming inner voices that had arrived with my newfound conservative perspective. Agonizing shrieks constantly reverberated in my head, and I soon understood why Justice Scalia had gone stark raving mad. Yet even the banshee wailing in my skull proved to be a blessing – it drowned out the much more disturbing voice of any subversive who tried to convince me I was wrong. I wearily checked under my bed for communists, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the coast was clear. I fell into a restful sleep by counting the number of child abuse prevention clinics that were closed last year by fiscal conservatives bravely waging the war against government waste.

I relate this serpentine story of personal growth to the reader in hopes that the shedding of my decadent liberal skin can inspire progressives to change their evil ways. Forsake the siren song of leftism, even though it means giving up your sincere desire to model the American family after Charles Manson and Squeaky Fromme. Choose instead to support the holy goal of the conservative movement: to revert to a simpler and more wholesome time, when everyone knew their place, and chose to embrace a pious societal norm for the good of our blessed nation (and because federal anti-lynching laws had not yet been enacted).

In the final analysis, the best part of conservatism isn’t cutting taxes for corporations while simultaneously bankrupting Social Security for everyone else. It isn’t decimating weaker countries around the world in the name of freedom while subverting democracy here at home. It isn’t cynically advocating free enterprise for the middle class while practicing socialism for the rich. It isn’t packing the federal courts with strict constructionists who make rulings by interpreting the original intent of the Republican platform. It isn’t even the joy of defunding shameful programs that provide handouts to the elderly who saved our country during World War II…but who are now basically geriatric deadweight.

No, all of those things are great, but the best part of being conservative – aside from the ability to catch flies with your tongue - is the rhetorical magic that transforms bigotry into ideology. You don’t hate the poor – you’re pro-supply side. You don’t hate blacks – you’re pro-states rights. You don’t hate homosexuals – you’re against special rights. You don’t hate Hispanics – you’re against illegal immigration. You don’t hate women – you opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because it would have required every American female to become a paratrooper. You don’t hate children – you accept the well documented fact that the more society spends on prenatal care and education, the worse things get for the little bastards. And you don’t hate endangered species – you love them so much you enthusiastically support policies that will create as many as possible.

What my recent experience has taught me is that conservatism is the very essence of God’s love. We praise you, Holy Savior, for intervening in the last election to provide our nation with a conservative president who is righteous enough to confiscate civil liberties first and ask questions later. We honor you, Almighty Lord, for providing our wonderful leader with sufficient nuclear and biological capability to – if necessary - annihilate every living thing on Earth. We exalt you, Beloved Prince of Peace, for guiding George W. Bush to realize that the world will be safe only when those of us who are filled with love obliterate those who are filled with hate - and also kill their offspring in order to minimize the potential for revenge.

It is no coincidence that Republican appears in the dictionary right after reptile. Nor was it by chance that we regained control of Congress under the leadership of someone named Newt. Join with us today, and together we can create a paradise based on the beautiful philosophy that is common to reactionary House members and reticulated Gila monsters: the survival of the fittest.

Tens of millions of conservatives - and tens of billions of reptiles - can’t possibly be wrong.
More David Podvin
http://www.the-broadside.com/

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Work For The Bush Government! Earn Big Bucks!

by Heather Wokusch

So let`s see - you`re in your last year of school and freaked out about the gloomy job picture? Just heard about those 250,000 laid off last month and wondering how you`ll be able to make a decent living? No problem! With the new "War on Terrorism" and billions of war dollars suddenly floating around, a whole world of opportunity has opened up! Ok, so it would be much easier just to own a big airline, make major contributions to Bush`s presidential campaign, receive billions in subsidies and then lay off 100,000 workers anyway. You can be sure someone made a nice little profit out of that. But for the rest of us there are some great options too.

Like, how about joining the military industrial complex! The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is hiring. Their website (www.cia.gov) says that if you have "unquestionable loyalty" then you can "play a key role in the intelligence process" in areas like technology or "clandestine service." You only have to be 18 years old to apply, and "students are given a salary and excellent benefits." Of course a major advantage is being based at Virginia`s George Bush Center for Intelligence with its "lovely grounds" and artwork that "adds extra interest to the busy day." Former CIA officer Greg Poteat was on MSNBC just last week talking about how many new jobs are opening up for those who "have what it takes," and with both (Former CIA Director) Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. aboard the CIA bandwagon, you can bet those jobs are secure.

You prefer equation solving to spying? How about cracking codes for the National Security Agency (NSA, www.nsa.gov)? The largest employer of mathematicians in the United States, the NSA searches for "weaknesses in adversaries` systems" and according to its website, is "constantly asking the big questions." Too bad it doesn`t mention what those big questions are, but they must be really important. You only have to be 16 to apply for student programs, and the website even has a Kid`s Page where you can play a game with Codey (get it?) The Owl. And with all of the eavesdropping/wiretapping/surveillance legislation that US attorney-general John Ashcroft would like to push through, this group will definitely not have to worry about funding for a very long time.

But maybe you can`t stand desk jobs and prefer a little excitement and variety in your daily life. So ... why not become a terrorist? The US government has a long history of financing terrorist groups - Osama bin Laden and Co. included. It`s common knowledge that in the 80`s, the US-Egypt-France and others organized radical Islamic forces to fight against the Russians, and that "anticommunist freedom fighter" Osama bin Laden and other members of the Afghan mujahadeen were funded to the tune of $2 billion. Just months ago, Washington offered $43 million to the Taliban to reduce the number of opium poppies in Afghanistan; the Taliban`s sheltering of terrorists and human rights track record didn`t seem to matter so much back then. In fact, the definition of terrorist changes so often, and is so politically based - one day you might even be called a hero!

Before 1990, Saddam Hussein got great reviews from the US government, even as he was gassing the Kurds. And wasn`t Indonesia`s Suharto "our kind of guy," even while butchering East Timor? Looks like Putin`s slaughter in Chechnya will be ignored, now that he has become a "War on Terror" freedom fighter; same with abusive governments in Turkey, Sudan etc. So don`t worry about social stigma - you`ll be in great company. After all, remember that the US is the only country ever condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (for the "unlawful use of force" for political ends in `80s Nicaragua). Hey - if it`s OK for Uncle Sam, then it`s OK for you.

Prefer a life of leisure? Then dump those moral convictions and become a weapons manufacturer. The US has pumped $60 billion of arms into the Middle East since the Gulf War, 80% going to the Arab States. At the same time, Israel has been granted almost $3 billion in military aid annually, presumably to buy weapons to protect itself against all of those Arab arms. So, no matter how you slice it, looks like great business! And even if you`re the Pentagon`s second largest defense contractor and a massive recipient of tax-payer-funded corporate welfare, there`s no need for patriotism in profit sharing! In 1999, Boeing joined a European company (MBDA) to compete against fellow US companies to win a prized air-to-air missile contract (The Wall Street Journal Europe, 10-04-01) and Mike Marks, vice president for weapons programs at Boeing, sees a winner in the new war market: missile related income is up 50%, and while Boeing planned to hit the billion dollar missile business in four years, Marks says "We`d really like to exceed that target significantly." Noble goal. And don`t worry about international laws aimed at curbing the weapons flow - laws such as UN Security Council resolution #687 which calls for region-wide disarmament efforts in the Middle East, or that pesky Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty threatening Bush`s beloved Star Wars. Laws that get in the way of corporate profit don`t count.

Did you major in public relations? Then why not become a journalist and read governmental press releases on TV! You can think of cool movie-related names for war (i.e. CNN`s "The United States Strikes Back" - get it?) and report at length on the army`s latest sexy weapons. But it`s really important not to talk about certain stuff. Like DON`T mention the US government`s long-term support of the Afghan mujahadeen, or the fact that many of the US national security strategists who made the original mistake years ago are right back in office now. And don`t bring up the fact that the States has a record of fighting against legislation to curb (terrorist and other) money laundering, like the fact that last May it strongly opposed the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiative for greater transparency in tax and banking matters. But be sure to say good things about John Negroponte, the new Ambassador to the United Nations, in his "fight against terror" even though Negroponte directly supported state terrorism in the `80s by covering up right-wing death squad abuses in Honduras when he was ambassador there. You get the idea.

So remember - there`s a world of opportunity out there for those who "have what it takes." And it`s OK to ask the big questions once you`re told what they are. 05.08.03

[CheapThrill]

I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world

By Margaret Drabble
(Filed: 08/05/2003)

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny.

I was tipped into uncontainable rage by a report on Channel 4 News about "friendly fire", which included footage of what must have been one of the most horrific bombardments ever filmed. But what struck home hardest was the subsequent image, of a row of American warplanes, with grinning cartoon faces painted on their noses. Cartoon faces, with big sharp teeth.

It is grotesque. It is hideous. This great and powerful nation bombs foreign cities and the people in those cities from Disneyland cartoon planes out of comic strips. This is simply not possible. And yet, there they were.
Others have written eloquently about the euphemistic and affectionate names that the Americans give to their weapons of mass destruction: Big Boy, Little Boy, Daisy Cutter, and so forth.

We are accustomed to these sobriquets; to phrases such as "collateral damage" and "friendly fire" and "pre-emptive strikes". We have almost ceased to notice when suicide bombers are described as "cowards". The abuse of language is part of warfare. Long ago, Voltaire told us that we invent words to conceal truths. More recently, Orwell pointed out to us the dangers of Newspeak.

But there was something about those playfully grinning warplane faces that went beyond deception and distortion into the land of madness. A nation that can allow those faces to be painted as an image on its national aeroplanes has regressed into unimaginable irresponsibility. A nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane.

There, I have said it. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can`t keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history.
I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn`t even win.

On April 29, 2000, I switched on CNN in my hotel room and, by chance, saw an item designed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. The camera showed us a street scene in which a shabby elderly Vietnamese man was seen speaking English and bartering in dollars in a city that I took to be Ho Chi Minh City, still familiarly known in America by its old French colonial name of Saigon.

"The language of Shakespeare," the commentator intoned, "has conquered Vietnam." I did not note down the dialogue, though I can vouch for that sentence about the language of Shakespeare. But the word "dollar" was certainly repeated several times, and the implications of what the camera showed were clear enough.

The elderly Vietnamese man was impoverished, and he wanted hard currency. The Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace.

Just leave Shakespeare and Shakespeare`s homeland out of this squalid bit of revisionism, I thought at the time. Little did I then think that now, three years on, Shakespeare`s country would have been dragged by our leader into this illegal, unjustifiable, aggressive war. We are all contaminated by it.

Not in my name, I want to keep repeating, though I don`t suppose anybody will listen.

America uses the word "democracy" as its battle cry, and its nervous soldiers gun down Iraqi civilians when they try to hold street demonstrations to protest against the invasion of their country. So much for democracy. (At least the British Army is better trained.)

America is one of the few countries in the world that executes minors. Well, it doesn`t really execute them - it just keeps them in jail for years and years until they are old enough to execute, and then it executes them. It administers drugs to mentally disturbed prisoners on Death Row until they are back in their right mind, and then it executes them, too.

They call this justice and the rule of law. America is holding more than 600 people in detention in Guantánamo Bay, indefinitely, and it may well hold them there for ever. Guantánamo Bay has become the Bastille of America. They call this serving the cause of democracy and freedom.

I keep writing to Jack Straw about the so-called "illegal combatants", including minors, who are detained there without charge or trial or access to lawyers, and I shall go on writing to him and his successors until something happens. This one-way correspondence may last my lifetime. I suppose the minors won`t be minors for long, although the youngest of them is only 13, so in time I shall have to drop that part of my objection, but I shall continue to protest.

A great democratic nation cannot behave in this manner. But it does. I keep remembering those words from Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the dynamics of history at the end of history, when O`Brien tells Winston: "Always there will be the intoxication of power… Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."

We have seen enough boots in the past few months to last us a lifetime. Iraqi boots, American boots, British boots. Enough of boots.

I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn`t been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn`t be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2…

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Faith and freedom
With a tradition of justice and secularism, there is no reason to fear Iraq`s Shia resurgence

Karen Armstrong
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

The sight of millions of Iraqi pilgrims flocking to the holy Shia city of Kerbala has caused disquiet in Washington. Since Shias comprise about 60% of the population of Iraq, it is not inconceivable that the ousting of Saddam Hussein could result in a democratically elected Shia government - a nightmare scenario to many in the west, where Shi`ism has been regarded as the epitome of fanaticism since the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. Among many the mention of Shi`ism immediately evokes thoughts of sinister ayatollahs, processions of flagellants, and an implacable hostility to progress and democracy. But how accurate is our perception of the Shia, and would a Shia Iraq necessarily be a disaster?

Unlike the governments of Europe and America, Iraqi Shias have consistently and heroically opposed Saddam. During the 70s and 80s, while we in the west seemed to find the Ba`ath regime quite acceptable, the Shias of Iraq regularly risked their lives in the arba`in pilgrimage, a three-day march from Najaf to Kerbala, braving police bullets, waving the bloodstained shirts of those who had fallen, and shouting: "Oh Saddam, take your hands off the army! The people do not want you!" It was not Saddam`s secularist policies, his initial courting of the west, nor his neglect of Islamic law that principally offended them. Their resistance to Baghdad was fuelled by a visceral and religiously inspired rejection of tyranny.

The shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala take us to the heart of Shi`ism. Najaf contains the tomb of the Prophet Mohammed`s cousin and son-in-law, Ali bin Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam, who was murdered in 661. After his death, Islam was never the same. Ali had been a devout Muslim and had an outstanding reputation for justice, but the Umayyad dynasty that followed him was increasingly worldly, inegalitarian and autocratic. To many this seemed a betrayal of the Koran, which insisted that the first duty of Muslims was to create a just and equal society. Malcontents who called themselves the Shia i-Ali (Ali`s partisans) developed a piety of protest, refused to accept the Umayyad caliphs, and regarded Ali`s descendants as the true leaders of the Muslim community.

In 680, the Shias of Kufa in Iraq called for the rule of Ali`s son, Husain. Even though the caliph, Yazid, quashed this uprising, Husain set out for Iraq with a small band of relatives, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet`s family, marching to confront the caliph, would remind the regime of its social responsibility. But Yazid dispatched his army, which slaughtered Husain and his followers on the plain of Kerbala. Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms.

For Shias the tragedy is a symbol of the chronic injustice that pervades human life. To this day, Shias can feel as spiritually violated by cruel or despotic rule as a Christian who hears the Bible insulted or sees the Eucharistic host profaned. This passion informed the Iranian revolution, which many experienced as a re-enactment of Kerbala - with the shah cast as a latter-day Yazid - as well as the Iraqi arba`in to Kerbala.

Shi`ism has always had revolutionary potential, but the Kerbala paradigm also inspired what one might call a religiously motivated secularism. Long before western philosophers called for the separation of church and state, Shias had privatised faith, convinced that it was impossible to integrate the religious imperative with the grim world of politics that seemed murderously antagonistic to it. This insight was borne out by the tragic fate of all the Shia imams, the descendants of Ali: every single one was imprisoned, exiled or executed by the caliphs, who could not tolerate this principled challenge to their rule. By the eighth century, most Shias held aloof from politics, concentrated on the mystical interpretation of scripture, and regarded any government - even one that was avowedly Islamic - as illegitimate.

The separation of religion and politics remains deeply embedded in the Shia psyche. It springs not simply from malaise, but from a divine discontent with the state of the Muslim community. Even in Iran, which became a Shia country in the early 16th century, the ulama (the religious scholars) refused public office, adopted an oppositional stance to the state, and formed an alternative establishment that - implicitly or explicitly - challenged the shahs on behalf of the people.

I n his opposition to Shah Reza Pahlavi`s brutal dictatorship, Ayatollah Khomeini was thus a typical figure, though in declaring that a mullah should be head of state he was breaking with centuries of sacred Shia tradition. Yet at the end of his life, even Khomeini insisted that government must be emancipated from the constraining laws of traditional religion. The experience of running a modern state had convinced him of the wisdom of Shia "secularism".

It would be a mistake to imagine that Shias are reflexively opposed to modern, western ideals. In 1906, leading mullahs in Iran campaigned alongside secularist intellectuals for a modern constitution on European lines, and parliamentary rule. Because representative government would limit the tyranny of the shahs, it was a project worthy of the Shia. Today, 25 years after the revolution, Iran has moved beyond Khomeini. It has a freer press than any of its Arab neighbours. The conservative clerics whose ideas were forged in the 1950s seem increasingly irrelevant to the young, who want Iran to remain a religious country, and are proud to be Shia, but support President Khatami in his demand for greater democracy. Abdolkarim Sorush, the chief intellectual of Iran, argues that every Iranian has three identities: Shia, Persian and western.

The US administration has recently spoken darkly of Iranian "agents" infiltrating Iraq to spread revolutionary Islam. One of the Shia movements in Iraq, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution, was indeed founded in Tehran in 1982 as an umbrella organisation for all Iraqi Shia opposition groups. But it never fulfilled this function, since Iraqi Shias resist Iranian control. Today Iraqi clerics, who were in exile in Iran, are now returning home. They have had enough of Iranian-style theocracy, and are reverting to traditional Shia "secularism".

Hizb al-Da`wa al-Islamiyya, the other main Iraqi Shia movement, has always operated independently of Iran, has a modern organisation and a strong lay membership. In the past, Da`wa has asserted that if it is elected, it will not impose Islamic law against the will of the people, and that it wants a liberal democracy, a multiparty system, modern education, free elections and a free press. Like any religious tradition, Shi`ism has had its share of belligerent, narrow-minded hardliners, but from the very beginning, leading Shia thinkers promoted ideals that are familiar to us in the west, not least that criticism of their own society is the basis of the democratic ethos. After decades of Saddam, western-style secularism may not appeal to many Iraqis, and Shia leaders, who have so bravely opposed the Ba`ath regime, are likely to be more respected than an Iraqi exile parachuted in by the Americans. If Iraqis choose a Shia government in free and fair elections, we should at least give it the benefit of the doubt.

Karen Armstrong is the author of Islam: A Short History (Weidenfeld) and The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (HarperCollins)

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Ahmad Chalabi
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`His reputation is far from unblemished`
Opinion is split over proposed leader of Iraq

Toby Manhire
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

In the search for leadership in postwar Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi`s name crops up again and again. The 58-year-old leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) returned to his homeland last month after 45 years in exile. This week he was named by the US admin-istration in Iraq as part of the likely "nucleus of leadership" for the country.

Mr Chalabi`s repeated denials of any ambition to gain political office in Iraq have been met with widespread scepticism. At Slate.com, Chris Sullentrop raised an eyebrow at statements that "sound suspiciously like the carefully crafted formulations that American presidential candidates use when they`re pretending not to be presidential candidates".

Newsweek set out the central uncertainty: "To his American friends, Mr Chalabi is a democrat and a paragon of Iraqi patriotism. To his enemies, he`s a crook." To others, he is little more than an American tool. In the London-based pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, Kanan Mikiya dubbed him "the Pentagon`s favourite puppet"; the Independent called him "the Pentagon`s place-man".

Though Mr Chalabi is favoured by key figures in the US administration, including the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, as well as by Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, his popularity knows bounds. "The prospect of Mr Chalabi heading anything appals British and US diplomats, including the entire [US] state department," said Simon Jenkins in the Times.

Nor is Mr Chalabi`s profile in Iraq especially high. The Asia Times noted that his "Pentagon patrons" were this week "being forced to admit that their hero appeared to have less of a following in Iraq than they had been led to believe".

Mr Chalabi`s reputation is one of his main problems. In the early 90s, he was convicted, in absentia, by a Jordanian military court for embezzling more than £40bn. He disputes the legitimacy of the charges, but members of the Jordanian financial community talked to by the Village Voice said that "at best ... he was grossly negligent, at a tremendous cost not only to the Jordanian economy, but to thousands of shareholders ... and at worst, in the words of [the former head of Jordan`s Central Bank] Mohammed Said Nabulsi, he `was a crook who absolutely cooked the books to hide his crimes`".

The New York Times`s Maureen Dowd was in no doubt about his character. Mr Chalabi was "the Richard Perle pal, Pentagon candidate and convicted embezzler". Conservatives in the Bush administration, argued Dowd, were "protecting their interests by backing a shady expat puppet". This was too much for Jay Nordinger, at National Review Online. "That Mr Chalabi, Iraq`s great democratic hope, should be a hatefigure for liberals is extra- ordinarily revealing," he railed. Dowd was delivering "the sort of vitriol Saddam`s `information minister` would have used against opponents of the regime".

In the Iraqi Crisis Report of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Julie Flint agreed that criticism of Mr Chalabi, a friend of hers, had gone overboard. "His critics say his long struggle against Saddam`s cruel regime boils down to personal ambition. But many of those who know him well believe that nothing could be further from the truth. [He] has been seeking democracy for Iraq single-mindedly, without regard for his comfort or safety, for much of his life."

American Prospect Online, meanwhile, recoiled at reports that Mr Chalabi`s INC was sniffing out Saddam Hussein. "On the face of it, this is ridiculous. What is the INC doing running a freelance Saddam-tracking operation in Iraq? ... If the INC did have information about Saddam`s whereabouts, you`d think the US would have it, too." But maybe there was something more sinister at work: "It wouldn`t surprise us if in the coming weeks the Pentagon handed over a couple of Iraqi leaders - maybe even Saddam himself, if he`s found - to Mr Chalabi`s gang to `catch`; that is, US troops do the hard work, but Mr Chalabi and his goof-offs get to make the collar. What else will the Pentagon hawks do to promote Mr Chalabi?"


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The power behind the Bush throne will fight on
Despite heart and image problems, Cheney will run for vice-president in 2004

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

Dick Cheney confirmed yesterday what Washington had long assumed: that when President George Bush stands for re-election next year, the most powerful but least visible vice-president in US history will be standing by his side.

Mr Cheney`s place on the ticket was not always a foregone conclusion. After all, this is a man who has had four heart attacks and carries a piece of plastic and metal known as a "pacemaker-plus" inside him to give his heart an electric shock should it lose its normal rhythm.

But the vice-president insisted yesterday that his health could make it through another campaign and another presidential term.

"It`s good enough. Everything is fine," he said. "If I ran into problems where I felt I couldn`t serve, I`d be the first to say so and step down.

"I`ve got a doc with me 24 hours a day who watches me very carefully. There`s one outside there now," he added by way of reassurance, pointing to a nearby door. "He`s part of the entourage who supports me. The president has one and I have one. So everything looks good to go."

As rallying cries go, it was less than inspiring. Particularly as the bionic vice-president has other flaws as a running mate. In polls, Americans appear evenly divided over whether to trust him or not. His recent past as chief executive at the Halliburton oil services company at a time when it dabbled in questionable accounting make him an embodiment of America`s corporate ills.

Now, Halliburton`s prominent role in rebuilding Iraq`s oil industry has become a serious embarrassment for an administration trying to project an image of altruism in the Middle East.

Moreover, Mr Cheney is no natural politician. When he joined the Bush campaign, its organisers had planned some traditional meet-and-greet events, only to be told by his minders that "Mr Cheney does not like to shake hands".

His public speaking sometimes betrays the less huggable side of Mr Bush`s "compassionate conservatism" and borders on snarling. Two years ago, he famously derided environmentalism as "a personal virtue" which had no place in policymaking. He also broke the White House "no-gloating" rule after the fall of Baghdad, jeering at critics of the military strategy.

As a rule, the White House lets him loose in the media when it wants to bare its teeth, and the rest of the time it keeps him out of sight.

Mr Cheney more or less conceded as much yesterday when he said: "From time to time, they trot me out when it makes sense to do so. I`m sure as we get closer to the campaign, I`ll be more visible."

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, confirmed that Mr Cheney had been signed up for 2004, pointing out that the president had asked him to run again as long ago as last November. Mr Bush clearly believes that, for all his political flaws, Mr Cheney is indispensable.

"He chose Cheney to get help in governing, not to win the election," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Before being elected president, Mr Bush had five years experience as a state governor; Mr Cheney had been White House chief of staff and defence secretary for the first President Bush in the 1991 Gulf war.

In 2000, the presidential candidate originally asked his father`s trusted aide to help pick a running mate, before apparently coming to admire Mr Cheney`s businesslike demeanour.

That ability to exude quiet solidity had secured jobs for the Nebraska-born, Wyoming-bred Mr Cheney in the past. Legend has it that he was asleep on a fishing trip in 1994 when his executive travelling companions decided that he would make a great chief executive for Halliburton. They told him the news when he woke up.

Mr Bush has been happy to delegate much of the day-to-day running of the government to the vice-president. He was put in charge of the incoming administration`s transition team, allowing him to pick a lot of the new White House staff. In government, he was immediately given the job of running a task force to put together a long-term energy plan, a flagship programme.

The new vice-president was given a staff to match his responsibilities, and his people command respect in the White House. His chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, attends deputy-level meetings with the Pentagon`s Paul Wolfowitz and the state department`s Richard Armitage.

"He`s the most influential vice-president in history," Mr Mann said. "He has assembled an extraordinary talented team. Scooter Libby is part of the deputies committee and is actively involved in crucial levels of decision- making. His staff apparatus allows him a role in foreign policy matters and domestic policy."

Mr Cheney has become steadily more influential since September 11 because, when disaster struck, he had a ready-made plan: one which we have come to know as the Bush doctrine, but which in fact came along in the vice-president`s baggage.

Hawkish


Back in 1992, when he was defence secretary, he asked his two hawkish policy aides, Mr Wolfowitz and Mr Libby, to draw up a long-term vision for national security, known as a defence planning guidance document, which stated that the world`s only superpower should not be cautious about wielding its authority.

"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," it said, and played down the role of the UN in global management: "The world order is ultimately backed by the US."

The document, when leaked in 1992, caused embarrassment for the elder Bush and was toned down. But it has been reborn in its original extra-strength version in the younger Bush`s doctrine of strategic pre-emption. The Iraq "project" was enthusiastically pushed from the moment the younger Bush came to office; Mr Cheney had always regretted not pushing on to Baghdad during the Gulf war in 1991.

But he does not always get his way. He advised Mr Bush against taking his campaign against Saddam Hussein to the UN; in the president`s eyes, that makes him all the more reliable in retrospect.

And he has an additional quality that endears him to the president. He does not covet his job. That partly explains why he is so seldom seen. Vice-presidents are usually keen to be on television because they plan a run at the top job. Mr Cheney suffers from no such impulses.

Then there is his uninspiring public speaking manner, and the security concerns since September 11, which mean that the vice-president has recently spent a good deal of time in the famous "undisclosed location" - a bunker somewhere in Pennsylvania.

Mr Cheney appears content to wield power in a less visible manner. As long as his heart does not give out, he will continue to be the administration`s hidden hand, and his ideas of America`s role in the world will continue to hold sway.

Rightwinger who had the ear of five presidents

Born January 30 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska

Criminal record Two arrests for drunk driving at age 21 in Wyoming

First big break Hired in 1969 by the White House office of economic opportunity after he wrote an unsolicited letter of advice to its new boss, Donald Rumsfeld

Big jobs Youngest White House chief of staff in history (at age 34) for President Gerald Ford, defence secretary for the first President George Bush, chief executive of Halliburton Inc 1995-2000

Things he voted against while a congressman Equal Rights Amendment, Nelson Mandela`s release from prison, busing to desegregate schools, abortion even in cases of rape or incest, a holiday to commemorate Martin Luther King

Heart attacks June 1978, September 1984, June 1988, November 2000.

Bionic spare part Implantable cardioverter defibrillator, known as a "pacemaker-plus", installed in June 2001

Famous quotes

"Yeah - big time", in reply to the current president George Bush informing him on the presidential campaign trail in September 2000 that a certain journalist was a "major-league asshole".

"Conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy strategy," he said at a speech in May 2001


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[CheapThrill]

The virus that has infected the American mind

By Ken Hillman
Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 7, 2003—America, this society, its people have been exposed to a particularly deadly virus, one that has rapidly escalated and has infected the American mind with a debilitating disease. This formerly unknown virus has infected the majority of Americans with an insidious disease that does not attack the body, but instead, attacks the mind with an intensity that, thus far, cannot be rejected or even impeded. It has proven to be very deadly indeed.

After more than two years of study, from the elections of the year 2000 to the present, it has been determined that this virus was formed when the currently imbedded administration came into power—when it quickly initiated an agenda intended to eliminate important treaties with other nations, cancel many environmental regulations, reject global warming as useless thinking, condone corporate misdeeds, and then to decide that the world community of nations must simply cower and accede to its doctrine of preemptive military interventions.

Every virus must have a carrier or the virus cannot spread. In this instance, the carrier has clearly been identified as the corporate-controlled media, the majority of which have totally lost their credibility, integrity and journalistic soul. They have poisoned the American mind by their efforts to not only cloud America`s vision and understanding of what is going on, but they have undertaken massive efforts to infect the American mind with misinformation. In effect, this virus takes seemingly intelligent minds, paralyzes them and tunes them into only one frequency that gives them just one message—the message broadcast every moment of every working day that trumpets the call for America to wage war against any nation that we may wish to invade and occupy for whatever reason we deem necessary. And, very cleverly, ties that aim directly to the need to avenge 9/11.

The people of America sense that something is terribly wrong. They try to focus on what has happened to them, but this sickness has ravaged their minds, rendered them immobile, unable to rise up and speak out with their real feelings—and only allows them to exhibit their flags on their homes, their cars, their lapels. They sometimes hear that America has now become the most hated nation in the world for the unjustified and immoral destruction of the nation of Iraq, but their ability to reason continues to be clouded by the corporate-controlled media.

During these mind-controlled times, I have to ask this question. Is there any cure for this virus that threatens our very future existence and that of the entire world? Can we in the Progressive movement come up with any form of cure, do we have the motivation; can we come up with the ideas and the drive needed to defeat this insidious disease? So far, many progressive writers and websites have tried very valiantly, but have not yet succeeded; they have been impeded time and time again by the money, power, and influence of the corporate-controlled media. And we have watched as the subservient Democratic Party and its leaders have shown no backbone whatsoever and have caved in completely to the powers that now rule Washington.

Speaking of coalitions, a term that is now completely worn out, is there not some sort of progressive coalition that can and will rise up in a coordinated effort to develop such a cure? Is there not this assembly of great talent that is standing in the wings just waiting to be formed and organized into a tremendous voice that will use the Internet, together with other venues, in ever more innovative ways to develop some kind of "serum," some new method to kill the infection of the American mind?

I need not mention the many qualified potential leaders and coalition members by name. They are well-known writers on progressive websites, newspapers from all over the world, many gifted writers with much energy and a grasp of what has happened to our country, this government and the people themselves. These are the voices of journalistic honesty, integrity; voices that are very powerful, will never be silenced and are the patriots of modern-day America. Just like Thomas Paine, they can be the difference between a nation thrown into chaos and division as compared to a nation of informed Americans that suddenly discover that they can be healed if they just listen and understand that a cure is possible.

I refuse to accept the current sickness of the American mind, the disease that has infected it, or that we progressives simply cannot stand up and defeat the ultra-powerful mass media that, like a pitbull, has Americans in a giant vice grip of its powerful jaws. Thus far, we have been like many doctors in exerting great efforts to treat the symptoms of a disease. Now it is time that we realistically acknowledge the symptoms but concentrate all future efforts on getting to the root problem—to find the way to free the American mind, knock out the incessant calls to imperialistic objectives and bring America back to logical, clear thinking.

But how to do this? How can we establish some sort of effective coalition? What will be our game plan? How long will it take to free the American mind? Right now, we do not have these answers. However, some one person or a group of patriots must step forward. I have no idea who or what entity that might be, but I can think of a lot of potential candidates whose writings I read every day. Someone out there who reads this and who has been thinking about a similar objective will know that it is time to provide the leadership that will lead to the necessary cure.

And now, we wait for that leader, or leaders, to emerge and ignite a creative movement to treat the sickness, cure the American mind and bring back the real America. TwoThousand-Four is rapidly approaching. There is no time to be lost. We must rid America of this terrible disease by making a wholesale change of the administration currently in place in Washington. The initiators of this virus that was spawned in the inglorious year of 2000 must be voted out in the greatest landslide in American history. The prescription for the cure includes the Internet, the Progressive movement and its great and growing voice. But to be really successful, it must involve others outside our own Progressive family.

There is a group and a man of influence who will, undoubtedly make a great difference in the 2004 elections. Ralph Nader and his Green Party are often credited with giving Bush the win in 2000 (ratified, of course by the state of Florida and the Supreme Court). Mr. Nader may run again in 2004 and, if he does, we will probably see the same result—or he and his party can somehow rise above their dislike and differences with the Demos. He can be a true American patriot and refuse to allow the current madness to continue. He does not have to align himself with the Demos, all he needs to do is not be a candidate. To step aside knowing that, in doing so, one can have a tremendous positive impact on the future of America and, no doubt the world, would be the greatest form of patriotism.

When I speak of a progressive coalition and how it might start a great movement to dethrone the current selected incumbent and his band of imperialists, could it be that such a group of very dedicated, influential progressives might, collectively, use their widespread influence on Mr. Nader and the Greens? Mr. Nader`s most recent writings indicate that he understands that this nation has undertaken a radical change in policy and direction, and he is now speaking out against it. If there could be a meeting of these minds to mutually address the critical issues before America, the result could be a new coalition of the truly willing and able that finally destroys this extreme virus that controls the American mind.


http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/050703Hillman/050703…

[CheapThrill]

Rumsfeld And Saddam

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared the fall of Baghdad to the liberation of Paris and the fall of the Berlin Wall. This shows he is as out of touch with reality as Saddam Hussein and probably for the same reason: a pathologically enlarged ego.

It took years and tens of thousands of Allied lives to liberate Paris, and the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of a 70-year empire that at its peak could have obliterated the United States from the face of the earth. The fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq is more comparable to the fall of any other petty dictator of a Third World country — say, Idi Amin of Uganda. I can think of nothing more dangerous for the future of America than to crow about the accomplishment of the obviously easy and to distort deliberately what has happened.

Our $400 billion-a-year defense establishment used its ultramodern weapons to crush a $1 billion-a-year defense establishment equipped with obsolete weapons wielded by a corrupt, poorly trained, poorly led and demoralized army. It is, to use the vernacular, no big deal, and we make a big deal out of it to our detriment. It is really insulting to the veterans of World War II to compare their accomplishments to the short, largely unopposed ride into Baghdad. A campaign that cost 137 lives is hardly comparable to one that cost 400,000 American lives and 55 million lives in total.

As for the fall of the Berlin Wall, more than 100,000 Americans died during the Cold War, mostly in proxy wars, and more tens of thousands of people died behind the Iron Curtain before the Soviet Union collapsed. Moreover, the Cold War put us trillions of dollars in debt, which might yet have disastrous consequences for us.

This war was sold with lies, and it now appears that the administration intends to sustain the occupation with lies. Rumsfeld and President Bush both ought to read more than their little briefing papers. An Arabic-speaking British reporter has written that some Iraqi children get great glee from smiling and waving at American troops while shouting insults at them in Arabic. It amuses them that the Americans, not realizing that they are being insulted, smile and wave back.

When 200 or 300 handpicked Iraqis have to go through three checkpoints and have their names kept secret while thousands outside demonstrate against the United States, it hardly is a sign that installing an interim government acceptable to the Iraqis is going to be easy. The campaign to drive us out of Iraq has already begun.

First, there were the flares fired into an ammo dump, the explosion of which killed and injured several innocent Iraqis. The people were so enraged at the United States, they fired on our troops even as the troops were trying to assist them.

Now we have the incident at Fallujah. There a large crowd assembled to demonstrate against us, and someone fired a few rounds at the American troops, who opened fire on the crowd, killing a number of them. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book — provoking an army to fire on civilians. Whoever did it expended only a couple of magazines of rifle ammo, but reaped a huge prize in the rage the Iraqi people feel toward the Americans as a result of the incident.

You can expect more such incidents. Who these people are, and who, if anyone, is directing them, I don`t know, but clearly we are seeing the start of a campaign to make our occupation of Iraq untenable. As I have pointed out before, modern armies are not equipped or trained to occupy successfully a territory inhabited by a hostile population. We have the example of the Soviet army in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the Israeli army in Lebanon and the occupied territories.

Rumsfeld has said that the Iraqis might not have an Islamic government. Oh? Suppose that is their democratic choice? He will play hell trying to pretend we are not an occupying power while opposing the democratic choices of the Iraqi people.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.


http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20030507/index.php

[Joerver]

Trouble in Bush`s America
By BOB HERBERT


While our "What, me worry?" president is having a great time with his high approval ratings and his "Top Gun" fantasies, the economy remains in the tank. And the finances of state and local governments are sinking tragically into ever deeper and ever more unforgiving waters.

You want shock and awe? Come to New York City, where jobs are hard to find and the budget (as residents are suddenly realizing) is a backbreaking regimen of service cuts, tax increases and that perennial painkiller, wishful thinking.

The biggest wish, of course, is that the national economy will suddenly turn around and flood the city and state with desperately needed revenues. Meanwhile, the soup kitchens and food pantries are besieged.

"This is the worst situation I`ve been in," said Alfonso Shynvwelski, an unemployed waiter who stood in a long line of people waiting for food at the Washington Heights Ecumenical Food Pantry on Broadway in upper Manhattan. Mr. Shynvwelski, 36, has worked at a number of upscale restaurants, including the Russian Tea Room, which has closed. He`s been unemployed for a year.

"It`s the first time in my life I`ve had to look for food this way," he said.

This lament is being heard more and more often in the city, which has an official jobless rate of nearly 9 percent. The real rate is substantially higher, which means that more than 1 in 10 New Yorkers who would like to work cannot find a job.

Last week Local 46 of the Metallic Lathers Union announced that it would allow 200 people to apply for membership, which would mean a shot at high-paying work. The line of applicants began at Third Avenue and 76th Street and almost circled the block. The earliest arrivals waited in line for three days. They slept on the sidewalk.

In George Bush`s America, jobs get erased like chalk marks on a blackboard. More than 2 million have vanished on Mr. Bush`s watch. There are now more than 10.2 million unemployed workers in the U.S., including 1.4 million who are not officially counted because they`ve become discouraged and stopped looking.

There are also 4.8 million men and women who are working part time because they can`t find full-time jobs.

John Challenger, the chief executive of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, offered a cautionary word to the wishful thinkers who insist that prosperity is just around the corner. "The sharp increase in the job cuts last month," Mr. Challenger said, "should serve as a warning that it is premature to conclude that the quick end to the war in Iraq will bring a quick turnaround in the economy and job market."

The high unemployment and sharply reduced social services are having devastating consequences. In some cases people are being driven to destitution.

"This is a really spooky time for us," said John Hoffmann, who runs a food pantry and soup kitchen in the Bronx. He`s faced with both a surge in demand and, because of government budget cuts, a threat to his financing.

"These are folks who are new to services like ours," Mr. Hoffmann said of his latest wave of clients. Many of them are working men and women who were struggling to support their families from one paycheck to the next. When workers in that situation are laid off, they have nothing to fall back on.

Nearly a quarter of a million jobs have been lost in New York City in the past two and a half years. Taxes are going up and services are going down — and still that is not enough. Similar scenarios are being played out in city and state governments throughout the country.

California is trying to borrow its way out of a nightmarish crisis. Texas, already near the bottom nationally in social services, is heading further south.

Two forms of help from the federal government are needed. One is direct assistance to local governments to help alleviate the disastrous budget shortfalls. The other is an economic stimulus program that really works, that boosts the economy and creates jobs through investments in some of the nation`s real needs, rather than simply transferring trainloads of money to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts.

Mr. Bush has no interest in such remedies. Easing the economic struggles of poor and working families in America is not part of his agenda.

[Heizkessel]

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washingtonpost.com
Reviving NATO




Thursday, May 8, 2003; Page A30


THE GOOD NEWS for seven countries of Central and Eastern Europe is that the Senate today is likely to overwhelmingly approve their entrance into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has been the foundation of Western security for more than a half-century. The bad news is that they have real reason to worry whether the exclusive club they are joining will survive much longer. The end of the Cold War weakened NATO`s cohesion and sense of purpose; the war in Iraq threatened to shatter it altogether. France`s obstruction of a NATO decision to defend Turkey, a member, against possible attack raised the question of whether the alliance`s 19 members still have a common vision of security, much less the ability to agree on concrete actions. The danger that the alliance could dissolve, formally or as a practical matter, still exists. But the U.S. ratification of membership for Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania offers reminders of why a NATO with 26 members is needed -- and why the Bush administration should be working to save it.

NATO`s best advertisement is the presence in Washington this week of democratic leaders from states that endured authoritarian or totalitarian rule for much of the 20th century. For these nations, the embrace of democracy and free-market economies was not by any means automatic after liberation from the Soviet bloc. That they all now swear by elections, civilian control of the military, acceptance of Europe`s existing borders and fair treatment of their ethnic minorities has much to do with NATO. All sought membership in the alliance as a guarantor of their independence and security, and as a way of bonding with the United States. NATO`s leaders wisely responded by opening the door while setting strict requirements. The alliance has thereby played a vital role in stabilizing and democratizing the eastern half of Europe -- but the job is not yet done. More than a half-dozen European countries, including giant Ukraine and volatile Serbia, still lie outside NATO. None is yet a stable democracy, but most would like to join the alliance. That gives NATO another valuable mission of tutelage for the next few years, one that is surely security-centered if not purely military, and one the Bush administration and "old Europe" can agree on.

The swift U.S.-led victory in Iraq has also given NATO a chance to revive itself as a military alliance and instrument of transatlantic partnership. Despite the lingering bitterness over the Iraq debate, the allies managed to agree two weeks ago that NATO would take over the peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan, a vital mission and one that, in its reach far beyond Europe, would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Even more significant are the discussions now quietly taking place in Brussels about a possible NATO role in Iraq -- an operation that would greatly relieve the postwar burden on the United States and go a long way toward overcoming the split over the war. If well managed, a NATO mission in Iraq could be the beginning of a larger collaboration between Europe and the United States to promote stability and democracy in the greater Middle East. The manifest success of Central Europe should encourage NATO to take on that challenge.




© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Joerver]

washingtonpost.com
The War, As Told To Us


By Diana Abu-Jaber

Thursday, May 8, 2003; Page A31


So now we are told by President Bush that the hostilities against Iraq have drawn to a close. Now, we`re told, with an imperious wave of the arm, this chapter has ended. And Americans are meant to feel closure and satisfaction over an event that few of us have been given much insight into. From the buildup for the war to the bombing to the final days, Washington has constructed a simple, heroic narrative of freedom and asked us to ignore the much messier human devastation and tragedies of this war -- stories that, sadly, have little to do with the heroic legend. There are angry outbursts against America across the Middle East, and most Americans have almost no idea why.

Trying to get the story straight on any of these recent events has been incredibly difficult. This war supposedly came about because Iraq has been hiding weapons of mass destruction. And yet the war has come and gone, revealing no such threatening cache. Saddam Hussein, it seems, has eluded capture. And another narrative -- linking Hussein, on an almost subconscious level in the American psyche, with Osama bin Laden -- has been fostered in the media in a deliberate attempt to justify and bolster support for the war. One fighter pilot said in a TV interview that flying over New York City reminded him of why we were in this war. And yet this connection is an artificial creation, maintained by the media and supported through innuendo and rumor -- playing on Americans` fears and revenge fantasies.

Our news programming has been instrumental in the marketing of this war, as I can attest from my own experience with the media. Because I`ve written about Iraqis in America, the interviewers turn their questions to the war on Iraq, but it`s clear that they`re interested in specific sorts of answers. One journalist who repeatedly asked me about "Arab rage" and the "innate Arab hatred of America" openly scoffed when I said that actually I`ve found that Arabs tend to admire Americans and American culture.

When I said on one radio show that I`ve traveled throughout the Middle East as an American, with American friends, and have felt nothing from the Arabs but friendship and hospitality, I received an e-mail from one listener who wrote, "Don`t you know that Arabs hate us? It`s all over the news."

Of course, if Arabs are systematically portrayed as an essentially hate-filled people, that makes the marketing of a very expensive war and occupation much easier to manage.

Recently such publications as Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and Time featured glorious covers and photo spreads documenting images of jolly GIs playing Ping-Pong in Saddam Hussein`s palace, and supposedly joyous Iraqis throwing their arms around American soldiers. The alternative media, weeklies, online sites and foreign news services (which are often cast in the role of villain) offer a much grimmer picture of this war -- but how many of us have time to read as widely as we want to or need to? Why should we, when Fox News regularly tells us that its news coverage is "fair and balanced" -- a motto that`s just vague enough to include nearly any sort of political agenda? And indeed, at a recent press conference, Gen. Tommy Franks, commenting on the firing of reporter Peter Arnett, stated that the news should be "fair and balanced." Afterward, the Fox anchor underscored Frank`s comment, as if to tell viewers that the network had now been approved by the U.S. military. It seems to me that this is a development that should chill the blood of any truly objective journalist. Do we really want our news to be dictated by our military? Do we want it to be dictated by any one special interest group, or even by one side of a question?

In an op-ed piece in October, I urged readers to be courageous and direct in expressing their feelings and questions about Iraq. I was inundated with e-mails from people telling me about their fear of doing just that. Over and over people spoke of their fear of being labeled un-American, unpatriotic or, more recently, of being accused of not supporting the troops. This is not the sign of a free society.

This fearfulness strikes me as pernicious, because variety, complexity, even contradiction are signs of strength -- in a person, in a family and certainly in a nation. Now we are presented not only with our own private fears but with the shrinking of our own media. If the world is ever going to close the fatal cracks opening up between nations and peoples, it`s crucial that we start questioning the omnipotence of our mainstream media, for all of us to ask for more searching queries about the true effectiveness of war and occupation, and to demand -- of our media, our writers, our scholars and leaders -- a narrative of Iraq and the United States that is more than a small sliver of the true story.

Diana Abu-Jaber is a novelist.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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WAR
................................................

By David Podvin

A Vietnam veteran once described war as being the worst experience a human being can ever endure. Recall the darkest moment of your life – the most degrading, the most agonizing, the most traumatizing. War is worse, even for those who survive. Far worse.

The sanitized version of war that Americans will soon see on television is going to be a lie. Viewers will witness a clean, high tech victory designed to produce soaring presidential approval ratings and ticker tape parades. What they will not witness is war. War is panic and confusion, heartbreak and cruelty, suffering and death. It is not glorious – it is tragic. War is a pair of lifelong friends never seeing each other again. War is an inconsolable mother clutching an empty crib. War is a village of loving families becoming a village of rotting corpses.

War is barbaric. It is evil. Declaring war is the most serious act that can possibly be undertaken. It is an announcement that we are morally obligated to kill people, and an acknowledgment that many innocents will die in the process. When done in good faith, a declaration of war is made only after all other options have failed, and then with the greatest reluctance and lack of enthusiasm. This is the way moral leaders approach war, because they understand that war means doing something that is totally depraved until you consider the extenuating circumstances, and even then…

That is why war cannot be justified except in the most extreme situations. The difference between war and murder is the element of self-defense; absent that factor, there is no distinction. When the need to conduct a war cannot be easily explained, and the evidence to warrant a war is nowhere to be found, and the war happens anyway, then something is horribly wrong.

World War II is an example of a justifiable war. The United States was militarily assaulted, innocent Americans were killed, and a real axis of evil was vowing to conquer the world. That explains why President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not have to endlessly flail for justification – it was obvious. When you resolve to kill people, the rationale should be crystal clear.

Roosevelt chose to kill the people who had declared war on America. There was no sleight of hand; he did not have to embellish the threat or invent nonexistent enemy alliances. He did not use the war as a pretext to create an empire. He fought the war in the way wars should be fought on those horrible occasions when they are absolutely unavoidable – he counterattacked the forces that were aggressing.

FDR refrained from massacring civilian noncombatants in countries that were unable to harm us. He avoided annihilating nations that had not threatened to hurt us. And there certainly is no example of him preemptively attacking a sovereign state that had neither the proven ability nor the expressed intention to destroy us.

As a result, Franklin Delano Roosevelt must be classified as a “wartime president”, which is not to be confused with a “warlord president”.

While there is only one valid reason for going to war, there are numerous vile reasons. Craving another country’s resources is a vile reason to go to war. Diverting the nation’s attention from domestic problems is a vile reason to go to war. Seeking to prove your manhood is a vile reason to go to war. Avenging your father is a vile reason to go to war.

This nation despises Charles Manson, who never personally murdered anyone, but who organized the killings of several unarmed people in an attempt to expedite a race war that he believed was inevitable. People abhor Manson because he embodies the evil side of our nature, the brutal slaying of innocent human beings who pose no threat.

On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell will publicly present the case for the United States to go into Iraq and kill countless unarmed people with what one Pentagon official has described as “an unprecedented high tech assault that will leave no safe place in Baghdad for anyone to hide.” If Powell cannot show compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, it means that we are preparing to engage in the brutal slaying of innocent human beings who pose no threat.

War will be justified when Powell can present an evidentiary case that the people of America are facing imminent danger from Iraq. George W. Bush has never been able to offer any proof, which does not inspire confidence in the credibility of his subordinate`s eleventh hour presentation. What should be required is indisputable evidence, not a cynical ultimatum to "side with us or side with Saddam” – such a gambit would merely confirm that the administration is desperate for an easy military victory to keep its poll numbers from plunging back to their pre-Osama depths. In the absence of new evidence, the upcoming war will be nothing but a mass murder conducted under the pretext of protecting this country.

The American people have a choice to make. We can risk being smeared as unpatriotic by now demanding honest answers from those who claim that war is the only true path to peace. Or we can play it safe, go along with the program, and obediently allow a slaughter of civilians to be committed in our name. It is finally decision time here in the home of the brave.

http://www.makethemaccountable.com/podvin/more/

[Joerver]

Is It OK To Hate Bush?
In which the president`s carefully orchestrated dumb-guy shtick proves hollow and dubious
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 7, 2002
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2002/06/07/not…




Of course "hate" is too strong a word. You should not hate anyone. Especially not jittery world leaders who are striving to justify war and make it look all fierce and necessary.

Look, there they are, trying so hard. Especially Bush. Look at that earnest, constipated, caught-in-the-headlights expression. Trying trying trying. Please do not hate him.

GW Bush`s image is extremely carefully managed, probably more intensely than any president in recent history. He gives almost zero unscripted talks, expresses minimal extemporaneous thoughts, still mispronounces "nukuler" even when reading from a teleprompter.

He is protected from difficult questions, schooled in basic sentence structure, makes sudden political maneuvers to deflect increasingly troubling accusations that his administration had plenty of advance warning of 9/11 and did little to prevent it. And please do not mention his major ties to Enron at this time. Thank you.

Bush has undoubtedly been told to try and look less scared and squinty on camera. He makes cute self-deprecating jokes about his horrible command of the English language.

Rumor also has it that during a meeting with Brazil`s President Cardoso, Bush allegedly interrupted to ask, "Do you have blacks, too?" Condi Rice, ever the trouper, visibly cringed before quickly informing Dubya that Brazil is indeed home to more blacks than any country outside Africa. White House Press corps coverage? None. Just too embarrassing. This is the leader of the free world. Are you sure you want to know this sort of thing?

Besides, Dubya has proven again and again and you read it just about everywhere and the man has it tattooed on his thigh and it veritably oozes from the pores of his happily myopic followers, he is indeed a Very Nice Man with a Very Swell Disposition and Good Christian Manners and gosh darn it, people like him so please quit being so mean.

Ashcroft has scowled about it and Rumsfeld has squinted angrily about it and Cheney has shown twitching signs of life about it and it`s been made very clear again and again: You are not allowed to openly abhor the president or his decisions because doing so clearly indicates traitorous inclinations and this is wartime which is a Very Difficult Time for Us All.

If you insist on calling it wartime, that is. Which of course it`s not, given how we`ve killed untold thousands of barely armed Taliban and untold numbers of innocent Afghan civilians and over a dozen of our own soldiers and even some Canadian troops (whoops) and we have suffered exactly two combat casualties. This is not a war. But you can`t really say that either.

So let`s just go with it, the common wisdom: It is unpatriotic to criticize the president and we need to rally and be strong now, united we stand, especially in our collective misunderstanding of foreign policy and oil stratagems and the deeper root causes of 9/11.

Or rather, you can criticize if you like, but Bush`s image is now being so carefully controlled you feel a little ashamed and slightly guilty doing so, like that feeling you`d get if you teased, say, a quadriplegic. Or a child. And this is exactly how they want you to feel.

It is a bizarre duality, a cleverly wrought irony: Bush is spun so he appears rather plain and simpleminded and not really mentally agile enough to be openly complicit in the coverup-related decisions he`s being accused of, a feeling that, aww shucks, he`s still just a good ol` daddy`s boy from the oilier parts of Texas who don`t know no better and how dare you accuse this Very Nice Man of leveraging the horror of 9/11 for political gain. Besides, that`s Cheney`s job.

Yet you can`t believe Bush is truly a man of nuanced intelligence because that implies that he probably did know something about the possibility of a terrorist attack and how it could fortify his political career, but you can`t call him flagrantly stupid because that`s unpatriotic and un-American and embarrassing, and hence you`re just left with this feeling of unease and vague despondency about the nation`s overall direction and whatever happened to your civil liberties.

And then there are people like Lt. Col. Steve Butler of the Air Force who openly bashed the president in print, called him a fool who let 9/11 happen to boost his stagnant presidency and that`s very bad indeed, can`t be slamming the commander-in-chief when you`re in the military, understandably, but it certainly does get you thinking, maybe Bush really is dumb as a post -- but in a rather sharp, deeply sinister way.

Better take the Dan Rather approach. There he was, America`s anchorman, with the odious Larry King, responding to a phone-in question asking how he, Rather, would advise the president about possibly invading Iraq and Rather replying, well caller, I`d probably say, Mr. President, whatever decision you make in this very difficult matter I will support it because you`re the president and I`m a patriot and that`s that, and he said it with a straight melodramatic face you immediately wanted to slap.

And there it is. Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is patriotism. We don`t want to believe the Bush administration could`ve done something to prevent the horrors of 9/11, can`t imagine Bush would use the tragedy to bolster his re-election hopes while simultaneously pummeling Afghanistan into docility in the name of oil pipelines and his friends in the military-industrial complex. Increasing piles of evidence be damned. It`s just too painful.

So then, please do not openly hate Mr. Bush or call him names or believe his decisions are all too often terribly detrimental to the progress of the human animal. He is too nice. He is too dumb. He is too nicely dumb, in a really smart way. Clever, isn`t it? Aww, shucks.


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Thoughts for the author? Email him.
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 email column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/

©2003 SF Gate

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Die TAZ in USA

A man reads a copy of the left-leaning German newspaper "Tageszeitung" in Berlin May 24, 2002, one day after U.S. President George W. Bush gave a key note speech in the German lower house of parliament Bundestag..... The front page of the Friday edition is almost completely blank and shows a cartoon of Bush with an empty speech bubble under the headline "Bush`s historic speech".– Reuters, May 24, 2002

http://www.makethemaccountable.com/real/index.htm

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Die ausführlichste Auflistung von Bush`s Guard Zeit.
Links über URL:http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/3671

FINALLY, THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH`S MILITARY SERVICE RECORD
George W.`s Missing Year

Marty Heldt is a farmer. He told us, "I spent 17 years as a brakeman [for the railroad] before moving back to the farm. That job had some long layovers that gave me a lot of time to read and to educate myself." He lives in Clinton, Iowa.


Nearly two hundred manila-wrapped pages of George Walker Bush`s service records came to me like some sort of giant banana stuffed into my mailbox.

I had been seeking more information about his military record to find out what he did during what I think of as his "missing year," when he failed to show up for duty as a member of the Air National Guard, as the Boston Globe first reported.

The initial page I examined is a chronological listing of Bush`s service record. This document charts active duty days served from the time of his enlistment. His first year, a period of extensive training, young Bush is credited with serving 226 days. In his second year in the Guard, Bush is shown to have logged a total of 313 days. After Bush got his wings in June 1970 until May 1971, he is credited with a total of 46 days of active duty. From May 1971 to May 1972, he logged 22 days of active duty.

Then something happened. From May 1, 1972 until April 30, 1973 -- a period of twelve months -- there are no days shown, though Bush should have logged at least thirty-six days service (a weekend per month in addition to two weeks at camp).

I found out that for the first four months of this time period, when Bush was working on the U.S. Senate campaign of Winton Blount in Alabama, that he did not have orders to be at any unit anywhere.

On May 24, 1972, Bush had applied for a transfer from the Texas Air National Guard to Montgomery, Alabama. On his transfer request Bush noted that he was seeking a "no pay" position with the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron. The commanding officer of the Montgomery unit, Lieutenant Colonel Reese R. Bricken, promptly accepted Bush`s request to do temporary duty under his command.

But Bush never received orders for the 9921st in Alabama. Such decisions were under the jurisdiction of the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, Colorado, and the Center disallowed the transfer. The Director of Personnel Resources at the Denver headquarters noted in his rejection that Bush had a "Military Service Obligation until 26 May 1974." As an "obligated reservist," Bush was ineligible to serve his time in what amounted to a paper unit with few responsibilities. As the unit`s leader, Lieutenant Colonel Bricken recently explained to the Boston Globe, ``We met just one weeknight a month. We were only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing.``

The headquarters document rejecting Bush`s requested Alabama transfer was dated May 31, 1972. This transfer refusal left Bush still obligated to attend drills with his regular unit, the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron stationed at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston. However, Bush had already left Texas two weeks earlier and was now working on Winton Blount`s campaign staff in Alabama.

In his annual evaluation report, Bush`s two supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, made it clear that Bush had "not been observed at" his Texas unit "during the period of report" -- the twelve month period from May 1972 through the end of April 1973.

In the comments section of this evaluation report Lieutenant Colonel Harris notes that Bush had "cleared this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama" (the Air National Guard Tactical Reconnaissance Group at Dannelly Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama).

This was incorrect. Bush didn`t apply for duty at Dannelly Air Force Base until September 1972. From May until September he was in limbo, his temporary orders having been rejected. And when his orders to appear at Dannelly came through he still didn`t appear. Although his instructions clearly directed Bush to report to Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed on the dates of "7-8 October 0730-1600, and 4-5 November 0730-1600," he never did. In interviews conducted with the Boston Globe earlier this year, both General Turnipseed and his former administration officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott, said that Bush never put in an appearance.

The lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills through regular training.
Bush campaign aides claim, according to a report in the New York Times, that Bush in fact served a single day -- November 29,1972 -- with the Alabama unit. If this is so it means that for a period of six weeks Lieutenant George W. Bush ignored direct instructions from headquarters to report for duty. But it looks even worse for Lieutenant Bush if the memory of Turnipseed and Lott are correct and Bush never reported at all.
After the election was over (candidate Blount lost), Bush was to have returned to Texas and the 111th at Ellington Air Force Base. Bush did return to Houston, where he worked for an inner-city youth organization, Project P.U.L.L. But, as I mentioned already, his annual evaluation report states that he had not been observed at his unit during the twelve months ending May 1973. This means that there were another five months, after he left Alabama, during which Bush did not fulfill any of his obligations as a Guardsman.

In fact, during the final four months of this period, December 1972 through May 29, 1973, neither Bush nor his aides have ever tried to claim attendance at any guard activities. So, incredibly, for a period of one year beginning May 1, 1972, there is just one day, November 29th, on which Bush claims to have performed duty for the Air National Guard. There are no dates of service for 1973 mentioned in Bush`s "Chronological Service Listing."

Bush`s long absence from the records comes to an end one week after he failed to comply with an order to attend "Annual Active Duty Training" starting at the end of May 1973. He then began serving irregularly with his unit. Nothing indicates in the records that he ever made up the time he missed.

Early in September 1973, Bush submitted a request seeking to be discharged from the Texas Air National Guard and to be transferred to the Air Reserve Personnel Center. This transfer to the inactive reserves would effectively end any requirements to attend monthly drills. The request -- despite Bush`s record -- was approved. That fall Bush enrolled in Harvard Business School.

Both Bush and his aides have made numerous statements to the effect that Bush fulfilled all of his guard obligations. They point to Bush`s honorable discharge as proof of this. But the records indicate that George W Bush missed a year of service. This lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills and preparedness through regular training.

And we know that Bush understood that regular attendance was essential to the proficiency of the National Guard. In the Winter 1998 issue of the National Guard Review Bush is quoted as saying "I can remember walking up to my F-102 fighter and seeing the mechanics there. I was on the same team as them, and I relied on them to make sure that I wasn`t jumping out of an airplane. There was a sense of shared responsibility in that case. The responsibility to get the airplane down. The responsibility to show up and do your job."

Bush has found military readiness to be a handy campaign issue.
Bush`s unsatisfactory attendance could have resulted in being ordered to active duty for a period up to two years -- including a tour in Vietnam. Lieutenant Bush would have been aware of this as he had signed a statement which listed the penalties for poor attendance and unsatisfactory participation. Bush could also have faced a general court martial. But this was unlikely as it would have also meant dragging in the two officers who had signed off on his annual evaluation.
Going after officers in this way would have been outside the norm. Most often an officer would be subject to career damaging letters of reprimand and poor Officers Effectiveness Ratings. These types of punishment would often result in the resignation of the officer. In Bush`s case, as someone who still had a commitment for time not served, he could have been brought back and made to do drills. But this would have been a further embarrassment to the service as it would have made it semi-public that a Lieutenant Colonel and squadron commander had let one of his subordinates go missing for a year.

For the Guard, for the ranking officers involved and for Lieutenant Bush the easiest and quietest thing to do was adding time onto his commitment and placing that time in the inactive reserves.

Among these old documents there is a single clue as to how Bush finally fulfilled his obligations and made up for those missed drill days. In my first request for information I received a small three-page document containing the "Military Biography Of George Walker Bush." This was sent from the Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel Center (ARPC) in Denver Colorado.

In this official summary of Bush`s military service, I found something that was not mentioned in Bush`s records from the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia. When Bush enlisted his commitment ran until May 26, 1974. This was the separation date shown on all documents as late as October 1973, when Bush was transferred to the inactive reserves at Denver, Colorado. But the date of final separation shown on the official summary from Denver, is November 21, 1974. The ARPC had tacked an extra six months on to Bush`s commitment.

Bush may have finally "made-up" his missed days. But he did so not by attending drills -- in fact he never attended drills again after he enrolled at Harvard. Instead, he had his name added to the roster of a paper unit in Denver, Colorado, a paper unit where he had no responsibility to show up and do a job.

Bush has found military readiness to be a handy campaign issue. Yet even though more than two decades have passed since Bush left the Air National Guard, some military sources still bristle at his service record -- and what effect it had on readiness. "In short, for the several hundred thousand dollars we tax payers spent on getting [Bush] trained as a fighter jock, he repaid us with sixty-eight days of active duty. And God only knows if and when he ever flew on those days," concludes a military source. "I`ve spent more time cleaning up latrines than he did flying.">

Published: Sep 27 2000

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Quote:
"They wouldn`ty let me fly because they found cocaine in by blood.
Since I couldn`t fly I went to Mexico and drank Jim Beam and screwed hookers."

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The monkeyboy wants to wear his costume all the time.

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Fake president,
thinks he`s Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2

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WASHINGTON, DC—During a speech Monday, President Bush disclosed for the first time the pivotal role the 1984 science-fiction adventure film The Last Starfighter played in his decision to enter politics.


Above: Bush at work in the Oval Office, with a poster of his favorite movie nearby.
"My whole life, I`d grown up around politics, but it wasn`t until that fateful day in 1984, at a matinee screening of The Last Starfighter at the old Orpheum Theater in Midland, TX, that I finally realized that my destiny lay in public service," said Bush, speaking at a Republican National Committee fundraiser at the Washington Hilton. "The movie showed me that no matter who you are and where you come from, you can make a big difference."

The comments surprised the estimated 600 RNC members in attendance, as well as Bush`s aides, who expected the president to discuss his proposed tax cut and plan for governing post-war Iraq. Not even his closest advisors knew of Bush`s passion for the Reagan-era space epic.

Straying from his scripted remarks, Bush described at length his "lost" years of the early 1980s in Midland.

"I was holding down two jobs, one at an oil well, the other for a third-rate professional baseball team," Bush said. "I had gotten a local girl pregnant, and I spent my weekends watching golf on TV and drinking with my buddies. My dad was vice-president then, and occasionally he`d offer me some vice-presidential stuff to do, you know, just to get a taste for politics. But I was too distracted by other things. Basically, I was your typical unfocused kid."

One idle Saturday, Bush said he purchased a ticket to a matinee showing of The Last Starfighter. The seemingly inconsequential act would have profound repercussions on the young man—and, ultimately, on the entire nation.

"Just minutes into the film, I found myself relating deeply to Alex, the lead character played by Lance Guest," Bush said. "He lived in a trailer park and had little opportunity to advance himself. His only escape was playing video games."

After achieving a record score on a video game called "Starfighter," Alex is contacted by a mysterious man who invented the game. The man, named Centauri, proves to be a space alien whose home planet, Rylos, is under impending attack by a sinister invasion force known as the Ko-Dan Armada. Centauri had invented the game as a means to recruit standout video gamers who could pilot the real-life versions of the Gunstar spaceships featured in the game.

Bush was enthralled.

"Here`s this kid, with nothing going on in his life, and it turns out that his only talent, one that seemed so trivial and ridiculous, could alter the fate of the galaxy forever," Bush said. "That really inspired me."

Bush said he could also identify with Alex`s initial reluctance to becoming a Starfighter.

"At first, Alex didn`t want to do it," Bush said. "He figured, why should he fight for the Star League and risk his life battling an enemy he knew nothing about? But then, when the other Starfighters were killed in an attack on their base and [evil emperor] Zur sent his vicious Zan-Do-Zan assassins to Earth to kill him, Alex began to realize that the only thing standing between the Ko-Dan and universal conquest was himself."

Continued Bush: "I realized that if Alex turned down the chance to be a Starfighter, he would have been assassinated, and Earth would have been destroyed. It made me think long and hard about my own place in the world: Was I making the right decisions? Was I helping people as much as I could? Was I missing out on a chance to save mankind?"

Bush added that he loved the film`s breakthrough computer-generated special effects, as well as the fact that Alex had a robot double—something he had dreamed of having in his youth.

Transfixed by the film, Bush would go on to see it seven times that summer, memorizing its dialogue and buying a VHS copy on the day of its release. But The Last Starfighter`s most profound impact on Bush was the way it motivated him to leave the private sector and enter politics.

"It made me realize that politics truly was in my blood," Bush said. "Who cares if I wasn`t a good businessman or a sharp scholar? Alex was even worse off than me, and look what he achieved."

Bush admitted that, while running for Texas governor in 1994, he kept his Last Starfighter videocassette cued up in his campaign bus` VCR, ready for rewinding or fast-forwarding to his favorite scenes on a moment`s notice.

"When my spirits were sagging, I`d watch the scene where Alex tells Centauri that he`s just `a kid from a trailer park,`" Bush said. "Centauri replies, `If that`s what you think, then that`s all you`ll ever be.` It helped me remember that the only boundaries that exist are those you create in your mind."

Continued Bush: "Or, as Alex says to [his girlfriend] Maggie, `Don`t you see this is it? This is our big chance. It`s like, whatever this is, when it comes, you`ve got to grab on with both hands and hold tight.`"

The fundraiser audience reacted to the Bush speech with near-silence.

"I sort of remember the movie when it first came out, but I never saw it," RNC chairman Marc Racicot said. "As a Bush supporter and GOP policymaker, maybe I should rent it sometime."

Former White House communications director Karen Hughes, a close advisor to Bush in the early days of his presidency, said she had failed to realize the full significance of The Last Starfighter during her time in the administration.

"When I first started working for the president, he would sometimes mention the movie. Once or twice, he even tried to get me to read his Last Starfighter fan fiction," Hughes said. "But I always assumed that his decision to enter politics was shaped by his desire to continue his family`s long history of public service. The Last Starfighter. Wow."

Added Hughes: "That probably explains why [Last Starfighter co-star] Catherine Mary Stewart is our ambassador to Zambia."

http://www.theonion.com/onion3917/bush_cites.html

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Diplomats on the Defensive
State Dept. loyalists say the Pentagon is usurping foreign policy and undermining Powell. Conservatives say 9/11 has changed the rules.
By Sonni Efron
Times Staff Writer

May 8, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Diplomats are paid to have cool minds and even cooler temperaments, but inside the State Department, plenty of America`s elite diplomats are privately seething.

They are up in arms over what they see as the hijacking of foreign policymaking by the Pentagon and efforts to undercut their boss, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

"I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, `There`s been a military coup,` and then it all makes sense," said one veteran foreign service officer.

The first two years of the Bush administration have seen what the diplomat called a "tectonic shift" of decision-making power on foreign policy from State to the Defense Department, one that has seen the Pentagon become the dominant player on such key issues as Iraq, North Korea and Afghanistan.

"Why aren`t eyebrows raised all over the United States that the secretary of Defense is pontificating about Syria?" the official, who declined to be identified, said, fuming.

"Can you imagine the Defense secretary

after World War II telling the world how he was going to run Europe?" he added, noting it was Secretary of State George C. Marshall who delivered that seminal speech in 1947.

Leading conservatives and Pentagon officials say such comments show the State Department`s failure to grasp how profoundly global politics and U.S. foreign policy interests have been redefined, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush`s national security strategy calls for a forward-leaning, muscular foreign policy to prevent terrorists and "rogue" states from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction and to confront such threats, by military force if necessary, before they reach American shores.

"Anyone who thinks that you can conveniently separate foreign policy, diplomacy, national security and war-fighting is clueless about the realities of global affairs, power politics and modern" war, a senior Pentagon official said.

Neoconservatives argue that the Pentagon is ascendant because it has better internalized the president`s worldview. The State Department, they say, has not succeeded in its main task of explaining U.S. policy to the world and winning support for it.

Pentagon officials stressed that they are cooperating with State, but the military`s swift victories in Afghanistan and Iraq have boosted its stature. "When there is a track record of success, that tends to earn a heavier and heavier workload," the senior Pentagon official said.

In public, Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have friendly relations, and their policy differences are cordial, if hard-argued. In private, Powell is said to roll his eyes at the volume of "Rummygrams" routinely sent his way that offer the Defense secretary`s views on foreign policy.

However, at the day-to-day working level, mid-level State Department bureaucrats say they are alarmed by the ideological fervor of the Pentagon`s civilian decision-makers and by how they leave State out of important decisions, brush aside the diplomats to get things done, or ignore tasks they do not want to perform.

After months of bitter battle over who should run postwar Iraq, the two departments finally agreed on L. Paul Bremer III, who was appointed Tuesday by Bush to be the top civilian administrator.

But in the larger ideological struggle, there is no compromise in sight.



Diplomats interviewed for this story — all of whom insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the political infighting — said they are profoundly worried about what they describe as the administration`s arrogance or indifference to world public opinion, which they fear has wiped out, in less than two years, decades of effort to build goodwill toward the United States.

They cite as an example fallout from Iran being included in Bush`s "axis of evil." Under the Clinton and Bush administrations, the State Department had been ordered to try to befriend Iranian moderates in order to counter that nation`s Islamic fundamentalists. During the war in Afghanistan, American diplomats persuaded Tehran to allow U.S. military jets to fly over Iranian territory, a surprise foreign policy success.

However, within hours of Bush`s State of the Union speech last year linking Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil," Tehran canceled U.S. overflight rights, according to two sources familiar with the negotiations.

"It has taken them an incredibly short time" to anger many other nations, said one veteran senior diplomat.

A mid-level official complained that intemperate remarks by administration hawks have damaged long-term American interests. "Goodwill is an element of national security — and perhaps one of the most profound elements of national security," he said.

The long-simmering interagency battle burst into the open last month when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close friend of Rumsfeld, accused the State Department of being "ineffective and incoherent" and of a near-treasonous failure to advance U.S. interests on the eve of the Iraq war.

Gingrich portrayed the foreign policy disputes within the administration as a clash of worldviews between a president focused on "facts, values and outcomes" and a State Department focused on "process, politeness and accommodation." Instead of taking advantage of the diplomatic momentum created by the Iraq war, "now the State Department is back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard-won victory," Gingrich charged.

Rumsfeld has said Gingrich was speaking only for himself. But the address and other attacks from neoconservatives are being viewed within the State Department as an effort to politically "decapitate" Powell.

Gingrich`s speech triggered a bitter public response from the State Department. Powell noted during Senate testimony that diplomats are supposed to craft alliances and find diplomatic solutions. "That`s what we do," he said. "We do it damn well, and I am not going to apologize to anyone."

In an interview with USA Today, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said sarcastically, "Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy."

Gingrich "said there`s been this `massive failure of diplomacy,` " noted a mid-level State Department official. "There has been a massive failure of diplomacy, but it`s because of the president and Don Rumsfeld. This is blame-shifting at its best."

Rumsfeld`s dismissal of opposition among some allies

to the Iraq war as the political weakness of "Old Europe" and other comments are cited by moderates in and out of government as having sabotaged Powell`s efforts before the war to get a second United Nations resolution authorizing force against Iraq. A New York Times columnist recently dubbed Rumsfeld "the anti-diplomat," a moniker that has caught on in Washington.

"The votes [against the U.S.] in the U.N. had nothing to do with Iraq. It was personal" toward America, a senior diplomat said. "I don`t think this group realizes how arrogant they come off. It`s a PR nightmare."

The official said he agreed with the president`s decision to go to war in Iraq, and so did most officials at State, contrary to the department`s reputation among neoconservatives as a bastion of wimpy multilateralism. "The issue for a lot of us is the way it`s been done," he said.

Many within the department dismissed Gingrich as a political has-been whose speech had overreached and backfired, causing the president to defend and side with Powell. But among some conservatives, Gingrich gave voice

to complaints about the State Department that they feel have been ignored for years.

Conservatives cite a long-standing situation within the department of what is often called "local-itis," the process by which foreign service officers come to identify and sympathize more closely with the countries in whose affairs they specialize than with American interests as defined by the sitting president.

Some also see failures during Powell`s leadership. John Tkacik, a 24-year veteran of the State Department now at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, said there is a perception among conservatives that the U.S. inability to secure Turkey`s cooperation in the war on Iraq was a diplomatic

defeat for which the State Department should shoulder responsibility.

Many inside the Beltway regard the increasingly public rift between the agencies as just another in unending bureaucratic wars that mark life in Washington, but one that could damage U.S. interests if it encourages foreign countries to try to exploit the conflict. In South Korea, for example, many officials believe the North Korean leadership is more likely to miscalculate U.S. intentions because of the policy rift between administration hawks and doves.

Neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer argue that it is precisely the message that the U.S. is willing to use military force — preemptively if necessary — that will convince regimes such as North Korea and Syria to behave.

And America should not shirk from using this power to achieve democratic transformation in the Middle East and elsewhere, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz often says.

For decades, the State Department has been fighting a mostly losing battle with critics from successive incoming administrations who have accused it of everything from harboring Communists to coddling China.

"This building is chock-full of people who are deep, deep believers in this country and its principles and its defense," said a young diplomat who opposed the Iraq war.

The current ideological spat "has nothing to do with whether U.S. interests are being defended and everything to do with trying to check a Pentagon run amok. It`s the `Dr. Strangelove` syndrome: There`s very much the dominance by this institution whose sole role ultimately ... is to kill people and blow things up and they do that very well."

"I, like many others, am carrying a great deal of anger and at times even shame over the way we as a nation are conducting ourselves," he said.

Such impassioned sentiments do not appear to be widely shared.

But what is widespread within the State Department is the view that the U.S. intervention in Iraq ultimately must be judged in part by whether it generates more anti-American terrorism. Diplomats worry that the administration is insensitive to the risks its policies carry.

"When I was a kid, conservatives were the ones who did not want to take big risks" to change the world, recalled one middle-aged veteran at State, adding that "these people seem willing to take huge risks" that can truly be termed radical.

"Their willingness to roll the dice with people`s lives I find troubling," he said.

Powell remains highly popular within the State Department. But some wonder whether the former general is too loyal to Bush and should consider resigning if his powers are being usurped with presidential approval by the hawks agitating on his right flank.

Others note that most such resignations on principle do almost nothing to change the political system.

Powell reportedly has told close associates he doesn`t need the job, but Bush knows he is loyal and will carry out the president`s decisions. "If you come after us, you`re in for a fight, and I`m going to fight back," Powell told senators last week.

And senior officials say Bush, though more conservative than Powell, has frequently sided with the former general on key issues.

But some of Powell`s underlings, much as they revere their boss, are worried that their team is losing more battles than they`d like to admit.

"If you`ve got to deal with the Pentagon at the working level, it`s a difficult existence," one senior official conceded. "They`re so ideological, and they`re so over the top now that the testosterone is flowing" since the Iraq war.

"But morale here is not crashing," he said. "On the contrary, we are entering a period in which we are going to need to turn to diplomacy — in the Middle East and beyond."


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL

Shadow Over the Oil Fields
The administration`s no-bid contract with a Halliburton subsidiary gives the impression of a grab of Iraqi resources for American business.

May 8, 2003

The Bush administration is becoming its own enemy in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and other top-ranking officials have clearly stated that the country`s oil fields will belong to Iraqis. But a May 2 letter from the Army Corps of Engineers to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) indicates that it has awarded a no-bid contract to a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. called KBR to run the oil fields until August — and maybe longer.

The administration has revealed as little about the contract as possible, a withholding of information that is compounded by Vice President Dick Cheney`s long-standing ties to Halliburton. The contract was issued March 8 but not disclosed until March 24. Then the corps revealed April 8 that the contract was worth up to $7 billion.

All along, the administration has left the impression that the no-bid contract was only for extinguishing oil wells and repairs. And Halliburton gave no indication that it was doing anything more than putting out oil fires. Now the corps is indicating that the company will basically operate the oil fields. It also says the "best estimate" for awarding a new contract is "approximately the end of August" but the current contract could last until January 2004. The corps is also preparing a new, long-term contract for operating the fields. Why? Aren`t the Iraqis supposed to do this themselves? Shouldn`t they at least be the ones to cobble together the contracts?

The administration`s failure to be forthright about the bid is creating the impression of impropriety. KBR may indeed be the best company to work on the oil fields, but the no-bid contract didn`t give anyone else a chance to present their capabilities. What`s more, the company has a history of overcharging the government. In 1997, the General Accounting Office found that the firm had billed the Army for questionable expenses. Last year, KBR paid $2 million in fines to resolve fraud claims over work at a military base.

Now the Halliburton subsidiary is being rewarded with potential control over Iraqi oil fields. The administration may be guilty of cronyism or nothing more than having murky plans for Iraq. Either way, it needs to quickly resolve the impression that it`s grabbing Iraq`s oil fields for American companies.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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Pulling FBI`s Nose Out of Your Books
By Bernie Sanders
U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders represents Vermont as an independent.

May 8, 2003

An unnecessary chill has descended on the nation`s libraries and bookstores: The books you buy and read are now subject to government inspection and review.

After 9/11, the Bush administration, particularly Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, pushed hard for passage of the Patriot Act, which contained sweeping changes to our nation`s surveillance laws and new intelligence powers for the FBI and other agencies. At that time of national outrage, Congress passed with little debate a bill the attorney general had crafted.

Few who voted for the Patriot Act — I did not — knew that among its provisions was one that gave FBI agents the authority to engage in fishing expeditions to see what Americans read. Although it does not mention bookstores or libraries specifically, the sweeping legislation gives the FBI the power to seize all of the circulation, purchasing and other records of library users and bookstore customers on no stronger a claim than an FBI official`s statement that they are part of a terrorism investigation. Surely the powers the government needs to fight terrorism can be subject to more meaningful checks and balances than that, especially when the right to read without government intrusion is at stake.

Until the Patriot Act, the FBI had the authority to obtain bank records, credit records and certain other commercial records only upon some showing that the records requested related to a suspected member of a terrorist group. The Patriot Act expanded the FBI`s authority in two ways. First, it gave the FBI the authority to seize any records of any entity. Most members of Congress probably didn`t realize it, but this included libraries and bookstores. Second, Congress dropped the prior requirement that the FBI actually have some evidence that the person whose records it sought was a member of a terrorist group or otherwise involved in terrorism.

Now, one Patriot Act provision allows the FBI to obtain whole databases, including records of citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing. The FBI has a history of abusing its power: monitoring, keeping records on and infiltrating civil rights organizations, Vietnam War protest groups and others that had broken no laws but were considered controversial. Little has changed to prevent the FBI from abusing its powers again if it is left unchecked. The new powers appear to have been used already — a University of Illinois survey shows libraries were targeted at least 175 times in the year after 9/11 — yet the FBI refuses to explain how or why.

Such is the state of affairs that librarians in California and across the country are putting up signs warning patrons that the FBI may be snooping among their records. These librarians, along with booksellers, are particularly concerned because the proceeding for these warrants takes place in a closed court and the new law has a built-in gag order: Those who are asked to turn over records are not allowed to say that the search has occurred or that records were given to the government. In addition, under this provision the courts are no longer an arbiter of individual rights because judges are not allowed to determine whether there is probable cause to justify such sweeping searches.

We need law enforcement to track terrorists down before they do their evil deeds. But if we give up some of our most cherished freedoms — the right to read what we want without surveillance; the need for "probable cause" before searches are made — the terrorists win, for their attacks will have struck at the very heart of our constitutional rights.

To remedy the excesses of the Patriot Act that threaten our right to read, I have introduced the Freedom to Read Protection Act. The bill, which has the support of Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, will establish once again that libraries and bookstores are no place for fishing expeditions. Because this new legislation will allow the FBI to use the constitutional routes at its disposal, including criminal subpoenas, to get library and bookstore records, it will not tie the hands of investigators. At the same time it will require — as had always been the case — that investigations be focused and that the reasons behind them be subject to judicial scrutiny.

Before Congress begins any discussion of new powers for the FBI, as some in Washington are advocating, we must first focus on correcting the unchecked authority the Patriot Act already grants the government.


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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TV watchdog checks claims of bias on Murdoch channel
Matt Wells, media correspondent
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

The Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel, whose determinedly patriotic stance during the Iraq conflict brought it critical notoriety but commercial success, is under investigation by television regulators in Britain for alleged bias.

The independent television commission is investigating nine complaints by viewers of the channel, broadcast on Sky Digital satellite, also controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

If the network is found to have breached the ITC`s "due impartiality" rules, it could be forced out.

In 1999 the ITC revoked the licence of Med TV, a channel aimed at the Kurdish diaspora, for failing to conform to the impartiality rules.

Julian Petley, chairman of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, called on the ITC to act against Fox News: "I`m not in favour of censorship, but Murdoch would like to do with British television news what he has done with newspapers, which is to force people to compete on his own terms.

"So if we allow into Britain the kind of journalism represented by Fox, that would bring about a form of censorship ."


MediaGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Cheney`s pals at Halliburton are now in control of Iraq`s oil industry
Posted on Thursday, May 08 @ 09:52:14 EDT
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By William Neikirk, Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON -- A business once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney has gone from fixing Iraq`s oil wells to actually running them, parlaying a no-bid federal contract into an increasingly lucrative deal to supply Iraq`s emergency energy needs.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Wednesday disclosed this wider role for a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., Cheney`s old company. This prompted criticism from some congressional critics who were under the impression that the company`s job would be limited to putting out fires and repairing damage to Iraq`s rich petroleum fields.

The agency said the subsidiary, KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), actually had been authorized under the original contract to operate and distribute oil produced in Iraq, but the Corps of Engineers played down that aspect of the deal in its initial communications with Congress and the media.



For pumping oil from Iraq`s oil fields and importing gasoline and propane from Turkey and other countries, Halliburton will receive $24 million, raising to $76.8 million the amount it will have received since being awarded the contract in March, said Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers.

Saunders said the Halliburton subsidiary now is pumping 125,000 barrels of oil a day, far short of the demand that is expected to reach 400,000 barrels a day this summer.

Asked if Cheney had anything to do with the awarding of the Halliburton no-bid contract, his press secretary, Jennifer Millerwise, said, "Nope." Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall also said Cheney played no role.

The Cheney-Halliburton connection has been a point of controversy almost from the day the Bush administration took office. Democrats said the Houston oil services company influenced the writing of the administration`s energy plan in 2001 by a task force headed by the vice president.

Attempts to obtain the records of the task force were rebuffed by the vice president, prompting a suit by the General Accounting Office that is still pending.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, triggered the latest controversy when he questioned Halliburton`s role as an operator and distributor of oil in Iraq in a letter to Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, head of the Corps of Engineers.

"The contract actually has a much broader scope than simply extinguishing oil well fires and repairing broken oil well infrastructure," Waxman wrote. The White House dismissed the criticism and added that Cheney has nothing to do with federal contracting.

The "bridging" contract with Halliburton, as the corps called it, has a cap of $7 billion, but Saunders said Wednesday that it is expected Halliburton will receive less than $600 million because oil field damage in the war is less than expected.

Saunders said Halliburton will not export any Iraqi oil under its contract. But he added that when a second, competitive contract is awarded within the next four to nine months, the winning American bidder may be allowed to export Iraqi oil for a limited time.

The Iraqis might be able to do their own exporting "if they can reconstitute their oil industry and bureaucracy quickly enough," said Saunders. But if not, the U.S. contractor could well be permitted to export Iraqi oil so that the country could generate revenues to help in the rebuilding process, he said.

Waxman questioned the wisdom of awarding a second, longer-term oil contract to an American corporation, saying that it "raised significant questions about the administration`s intentions regarding Iraqi oil." He quoted presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer as saying: "The oil fields belong to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq, all of Iraq. All the resources of Iraq need to be administered by the Iraqi people."

The United States is developing a plan to privatize Iraqi oil fields, according to administration officials, but progress on that initiative may be slow until Iraq gets a government in place and order is restored.

At least in the short run, Halliburton will be doing the administering until the oil fields are ready to be turned over to the Iraqi government, said Saunders. He said it`s not clear when this transfer will happen.

In an e-mail response, Halliburton spokeswoman Hall said that KBR will "repair systems and distribute fuel products in order to meet the domestic demand requirement for the commercial and private use of fuels within Iraq." The damage to the oil fields has resulted in a "shortage of fuels and the ability to distribute these fuels," she said.

As for bidding on the second, competitive contract to continue to rebuild Iraq`s oil fields, Hall said Halliburton might submit a bid "if we determined the opportunity was a good business decision."

Halliburton was one of a few companies invited to bid on a $680 million contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development to rebuild roads, bridges and other civil infrastructure in Iraq, but amid signs that it would not win the award, it dropped out of the bidding. Now, the company says it does not want to be a prime contractor in the agency`s projects.

On Capitol Hill, Flowers came under criticism for the no-bid contract from Rep. Jerry Costello (D-Ill.) during a committee hearing. "It sounds a little like Halliburton is running the oil industry in Iraq," the congressman said.

Flowers said the contract was awarded to Halliburton because in 2001 it had won a competitive contract for planning the rebuilding of oil fields in Iraq in case of a war. When hostilities broke out, he said, it was the only business in a position to handle the work of oil field repair quickly.

Costello questioned whether the administration should have awarded a no-bid contract to a company he said had done work in Iran, Libya and Saddam Hussein`s Iraq, but Flowers said, "I know nothing about that."

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

Reprinted from The Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/
chi-0305080213may08,1,271244.story

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Bush`s Big Lie
By Dave Chandler, Publisher of www.earthside.com
May 8, 2003

`If you tell a big enough lie, and keep on repeating it, in the end people will come to believe it." So said Joseph Goebbels, master propagandist of the Nazi regime. It`s a quotation that has become almost hackneyed because of its overuse by politicians seeking to belittle the claims of competitors. In reality, however, the "Big Lie" is a tactic that often works for politicians and officeholders ... who continue to use it especially to try and make uncomfortable truths disappear.

Today, Goebbel`s political propaganda strategem appears to be the chosen course of action to diffuse the looming scandal haunting the Bush administration`s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the cause belli for the war. As noted in my previous article "Is Bush a War Criminal," this problem is of great consequence to future of freedom and global peace.

There is a growing contention from apologists of the Bush administration that not finding weapons of mass destruction just doesn`t matter anymore, it`s merely an `embarrassment.` This idea is eerily like the "memory hole" of George Orwell`s 1984. In the fictional nation of Oceania the truth about the past was excised from history and people`s memories whenever it didn`t fit with what Big Brother was actually doing. Orwell wrote that if the "[government] could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death." There can scarcely be a more dangerous harbinger of totalitarianism than the power to remake truth.

Ironically, if one accepts the notion that the weapons of mass destruction don`t matter anymore, then the reason for the war becomes solely "liberation" ... which, by itself, becomes "nation-building"-- a policy Bush specifically rejected in the 2000 presidential debates and promised he would not engage in ... making Bush a man who does not keep his word. Furthermore, the pro-war faction often now argues that ridding the world of a tyrannical dictator may be a good idea by itself, worth war. But under virtually every legal system in the world, killing a bad man, without due process of law, is still murder. Should we expect any less a standard of ethical conduct from our leaders in foreign affairs?

But in case you`ve forgotten, the truth is that Bush`s own words demonstrate most graphically that the paramount reason for the move to war was disarming Saddam of illegal weapons of mass destruction, because they were an immediate threat to the United States and the world.

Yes, Bush`s very words. By my rough count, in his 2003 State of Union delivered in the U.S. Capitol building before government officials, foreign ambassadors, and millions of Americans on television and radio, Bush spoke 950 words on Iraqi`s weapons of mass destruction. He spoke about 150 words about the plight of the Iraqi people under the dictator Hussein. In his October 2002 United Nations speech, Bush uttered only about 200 words about the state of Iraq`s residents out of an address of over 2700 words most all of which was about the disarmament issue.

Make no mistake, Bush did not threaten war to "liberate" Iraq, he threatened war over those weapons: "If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him."

And what was in Bush`s thousands of words that was of such great import that the orderly process in effect through the United Nations had to be discarded and war waged instead? Not just a few left over banned weapons from the 1980s but copious quantities existing now: over 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several mobile biological weapons labs, and a nuclear weapons program. (From the 2003 State of the Union)

Again, make no mistake, Bush was not simply alleging that Saddam had hidden weapons. Bush was saying that he "knew" that they existed and that Blix couldn`t find them because: "From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors ..." It follows that one can`t hide documents and materials that don`t exist. Secretary of State Powell also was unequivocal and specific in his U.N. Security Council presentation. "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," Powell said. "These are not assertions."He said he knew that Baghdad was "dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations."

Of course we now know that those ended up being assertions after all. So, either Bush was lying, his national security staff was too incompetent to understand the data, or United States intelligence capabilities were so flawed that there was no basis upon which to make the kinds of statement of fact that justified war.
Though there was there relatively little talk of "liberation" before the war, even the most recent pronouncements of Bush and others betray their culpability in the deceit about the urgent necessity to disarm Iraq. They are admitting that the weapons may not have exited at the time the attack was ordered, or are admitting that Iraq could not have used their fearsome arsenal.

Bush, quoted in an April 25, 2003, Washington Post article, is reported to have "raised the possibility that Saddam Hussein`s government destroyed the chemical and biological weapons that were the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq." And Bush is cited at a triumphal speech given to defense industry workers in Lima, Ohio saying: "But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we`re going to find them." From the same news article Bush tells Tom Brokaw that Saddam Hussein "destroyed some, perhaps dispersed some."

Which raises some big questions. When did Saddam destroy these weapons? When did Bush find out he might have destroyed them? If Saddam destroyed them even the day before the war started then why was the war prosecuted? If U.S. intelligence was so good that Powell knew Iraq was "dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations," then why didn`t he know that those weapons were being destroyed? If Saddam moved or hid them to the point where they could not be used, where was the imminent threat, and why, therefore, couldn`t the UN inspectors have continued their mission?

This is truly amazing. Bush concedes the argument he pushed for month after month. Where is the urgent reason for war? How can even the doctrine of `preemption` have meaning if there isn`t anything threatening to preempt?

Even more revealing is an article in the May 1, 2003, Sidney Morning Herald where Bush`s National Security advisor Condeleezza Rice is reported to be "saying publicly that it is less likely many actual weapons will be found. Rather, she described the programs as being hidden is so-called "dual use" infrastructure." In other words, Rice is saying that it is likely that the chemical and biological agents that Bush "knew" were being utilized for banned weapons may have really been just baby formula or fertilizer manufacturing factories all along. Why, therefore, couldn`t the US have allowed Blix and his inspectors to do their work and thereby avoid the death and destruction of war?

At the minimum, this backfilling and double talk cries out for an investigation at the highest levels of the American government. We need to find out if the inflammatory charges directed towards Iraq by the Bush administration and its apologists were ever true.


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Condeleezza Rice is famous for first saying that we couldn`t let the "smoking gun" of banned weapons be a mushroom cloud. Well, we actually do know that Mr. El Baradei validated the non-existence of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program and we know that Powell relied upon forged documents to claim an on-going nuclear program in the first place. Instead, the "smoking gun" in the post-Iraq war era will be any documentable evidence that Bush knew in advance that Iraq did not possess any real weapons of mass destruction capability, or that it did not pose any imminent threat to the United States, or that he knew Saddam had destroyed such weapons before the attack order was given. This would literally be a "smoking gun" since 128 American military personal lost their lives violently (not to mention the thousands of Iraqi military and civilians lives taken) through a premeditated, unjustifiable order from George W. Bush. Without the justification of self-defense, an unprovoked attack leading to so many deaths is simply murder.
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"Nothing succeeds like success" is how the old saying goes. And it is sure that Americans right now are probably not in the mood to face even the possibility that their sons and daughters might have been pawns used by an elite power structure in Washington for an illegitimate purpose. The nationalistic propaganda from the White House is revving at full throttle to turn the war of disarmament into the war of "liberation"; to turn an aggressive war into a tribute to the American military`s tactical and technological superiority; to turn questioning of the war into being unpatriotic; to turn U.S. unilateralism into an attack on the relevance of the United Nations and international diplomacy.

Nevertheless, it is important to ask the difficult questions, find out the truth, and hold the country`s leaders accountable. It is important because Bush tells us that Iraq is just a single battle in a war against terrorism that may go on for decades. It is important because the same strategy to agitate for the war on Iraq is now being heard about Syria and Iran and North Korea.

It is most important because finding out the truth, and accepting that truth, defines and characterizes us as a people. The United States has traditionally held itself up to be a nation committed to fair play and the rule of law. If we are going to hold ourselves out as a truly moral and ethical nation, then we cannot indulge in the easy but pretentious sophistry of "might makes right."

We can settle the political debate about whether this country is still a republic or the 21st century`s new global empire if, in a moment of "glory" and "triumph," we can still insist that truth is the highest quality we demand from our leaders. We will continue to be a great nation if we can still value the rule of law and honesty. It means that a war crimes investigation into the actions of George W. Bush is indeed truly reasonable and consistent with our most profound values.
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Dave Chandler lives in Arvada, Colorado.
He is publisher of the environmental and political web site: earthside.com

Comments to: [e-mail]

http://www.earthside.com/bush-war-crimes.html#anchor183542

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Gene Lyons: `Welcome to the Virtual U.S.A.`
Posted on Thursday, May 08 @ 09:43:11 EDT
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By Gene Lyons

George W. Bush`s swaggering, cinematic landing aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln last week dramatized more than the end of the Iraq war and the beginning of Bush`s 2004 campaign. It also represented the triumph of symbol over substance in American politics. The president`s handlers appear to believe that a public giddy with TV images of U.S. military omnipotence can no longer distinguish between reality and make-believe.

Evidently, Bush will run as a one-man reunion of the Village People, the dreadful disco act. Having previously costumed himself as a Businessman (his ventures mostly failed), and Owner of the Texas Rangers (he had a one percent share), he`s added Cowboy and Fighter Pilot to his repertoire. In reality, his Texas ranch was acquired in 1999; Bush`s time in the saddle is limited to golf carts.



The Fighter Jock pose has more substance, as Bush did learn to fly F-102s during his foreshortened service in the Texas Air National Guard`s renowned "Champagne Brigade" 30 years ago. The White House seemed to hint that the president himself would perform the landing aboard the Abraham Lincoln hundreds of miles at sea--far beyond helicopter range, Ari Fleischer assured the press.

That would have been a reckless stunt. Formally grounded for failure to take a required medical exam soon after completing his pilot`s training, Bush hasn`t flown a military aircraft since. As you`d think Junior`s handlers wouldn`t want to remind anybody, the Boston Globe pretty conclusively proved in May 2000 that Bush went AWOL for more than a year during 1972-73-arranging a transfer from the Texas to the Alabama Air National Guard, but never showing up for duty.

The commanding officer of the Alabama unit, Gen. William Turnipseed, unequivocally told the newspaper that Bush failed to report. Back in Texas, Walter Robinson wrote, "his two superior officers at Ellington Air Force Base could not perform his annual evaluation covering the year from May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973 because, they wrote, `Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report.`"

Having falsely assured the press that his Guard enlistment involved no preferential treatment (former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes has since admitted making phone calls on Junior`s behalf) Bush also claimed to have done light duty in Alabama, but could provide neither documentary evidence nor witnesses.

This is a dead giveaway. As somebody roughly Bush`s age with no eminent connections, I could easily prove my whereabouts, job or institutional affiliations at any time since entering kindergarten. The conclusion is inescapable: Bush took a powder.

Speaking of powder, there`s been considerable speculation, based on what he says and doesn`t say that Junior took may have experimented with the drug known as "Peruvian marching powder" or cocaine. His failure to submit to a physical exam coincided with the Pentagon`s decision to begin drug testing. He`s denied using illegal drugs only since 1974, by which time he`d returned to Houston and been granted an honorable discharge.

Does it matter thirty years later? Not much, unless you consider the lying important. Many people did things 30 years ago they wouldn`t want in the newspapers. Even so, national media`s eagerness to protect Junior from his youthful folly approaches the pathological. Amply documented, the Globe article was all but ignored during the 2000 campaign by a Washington press clique obsessed with made-up tales about Al Gore "inventing the internet" and such.

So does it matter that the Abraham Lincoln was only 39 miles out to sea, and that the Navy admits turning the ship so as to afford President Fighter Jock a backdrop of open ocean instead of the San Diego skyline for his speech? Or, as Paul Krugman points out in the New York Times, that Bush`s posturing in military garb breaks an American tradition dating back to the Revolutionary War? Presidents George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower never did. Real soldiers, they emphasized their civilian status as commander-in-chief.

Not so ex-Lt. Junior of the Champagne Brigade. Meanwhile, cable TV pundits swooned. Bob Somerby`s dailyhowler.com lampoons the way Chris Matthews of MSNBC`s "Hardball" gushed over Bush`s rugged masculinity. Casting the presidency in purely cinematic terms, Matthews doubted that a Democratic "casting director" could match Junior: "Nobody looks right in the role Bush has set for the presidency--commander-in-chief, medium height, medium build, looks good in a jet pilot`s costume--or uniform, rather--has a certain swagger, not too literary, certainly not too verbal, but a guy who speaks plainly and wins wars."

The enraptured Matthews specifically derided Sen. John Kerry, who won the Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam, and George McGovern, whose heroic exploits as a WWII bomber pilot are documented in Stephen Ambrose`s book "Wild Blue Yonder."

Reality sucks. Welcome to the Virtual U.S.A.

[Joerver]

May 7, 2003


Winning a War; Alienating the World
10 Lessons of the Iraq War
by DAVID KRIEGER

There are always lessons to be learned after a war. Often governments and pundits focus only on lessons having to do with military strategies and tactics, such as troop deployments, engagement in battles, bombing targets and the effectiveness of different weapons systems. There are, of course, far bigger lessons to be learned, and here are some of the principal ones from the Iraq War.

1. In the eyes of the Bush administration, the relevance of international organizations such as the United Nations depends primarily upon their willingness to rubberstamp US policy, legal or illegal, moral or immoral.

2. The Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War may be employed against threats that have no basis in fact.

3. The American people appear to take little notice of the "bait and switch" tactic of initiating a war to prevent use of weapons of mass destruction and then celebrating regime change when no such weapons are found.

4. A country that spends $400 billion a year on its military, providing them with the latest in high-tech weaponry, can achieve clear military victory over a country that spends 1/400th of that amount and possesses virtually no high-tech weaponry.

5. Embedding journalists with troops leads to reporters providing only perspectives sanctioned by the military in their reports to the public. It is analogous to the imprinting of ducklings.

6. The American people can be easily manipulated, with the help of both embedded and non-embedded media, to support an illegal war.

7. An imperial presidency does not require Congress to exercise its Constitutional authority to declare war; it requires only a compliant Congress to provide increasingly large sums of money for foreign wars.

8. It is far easier to destroy a dictatorial regime by military might than it is to rebuild a country as a functioning democracy.

9. If other countries wish to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein and Iraq, they better develop strong arsenals of weapons of mass destruction for protection against potential US aggression.

10. In all wars it is the innocent who suffer most. Thus, Saddam Hussein remains unaccounted for and George Bush stages a jet flight to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, while Ali Ismaeel Abbas lies in a hospital bed without his parents and brother, who were killed in a US attack, and without his arms.

The most important lessons of the Iraq War may remain as yet unrevealed, but there is a sense that American unilateralism is likely to continue to alienate important allies, while the triumphalism of the Bush administration is likely to taunt terrorists, making them more numerous and tenacious in their commitment to violent retaliation.

David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the editor of Hope in a Dark Time (Capra Press, 2003), and author of Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age (Middleway Press, 2002). He can be contacted at [e-mail].

http://www.counterpunch.org/krieger05072003.html

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This is
LONDON
08/05/03 - News and city section

Mayor lashes out at `corrupt` Bush
Jeremy Campbell in Washington and Ross Lydall in London, Evening Standard

Ken Livingstone today launched an astonishing attack on US President George W Bush.

He called him "corrupt" and said he would get as much pleasure from Mr Bush being forced from office as from the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

The outburst was immediately criticised by London politicians who fear a negative effect on the Mayor`s efforts to attract American tourists here.

Mr Livingstone was answering questions on the Iraq war and other subjects during a two-hour meeting with 200 schoolchildren this morning at City Hall.

After making a pointed reference to Mr Bush, he was asked by Channel 4 broadcaster Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who was chairing the meeting, to explain his making a personal attack on the US President when he disliked answering personal questions himself.

The Mayor said: "I think George Bush is the most corrupt American president since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the legitimate president."

He later added: "This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

Meanwhile, concern was growing today over the health risk posed by vaccines used to protect soldiers and civilians from biological attack in the war against Saddam.

It follows a decision by the US government to limit the use of the smallpox vaccination programme after a number of deaths.

The original plan was to vaccinate 500,000 American health care workers as a first defence against possible biological terrorism. So far, only 35,000 have been given the vaccine.

Only a handful of British servicemen and women serving in the Iraq war were given the suspect cocktail of smallpox and anthrax vaccinations, according to the Ministry of Defence, which said it would be monitoring the situation.

The latest fears come after a US government surveillance unit discovereda link between the vaccines and cases of "unusual heart inflammation".

So far 11 instances have been found among military personnel who were given the vaccine. Three civilian deaths are also being investigated, including that of leading TV newsman, David Bloom.

Mr Bloom, one of the stars of the NBC Iraq war team, died suddenly of a blood clot only weeks after taking the smallpox and anthrax vaccines. He was one of thousands in America who were inoculated amid fears of terror attacks.

The committee advising President Bush has recommended him either to put the brakes on or completely halt the vaccination programme.




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Find this story at http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/4743047?version=…
©2003 Associated New Media

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The two faces of Rumsfeld
2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea
2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change

Randeep Ramesh
Friday May 9, 2003
The Guardian

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.

The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton`s policy of persuading the North Korean regime of positively engaging with the west.

The sale of the nuclear technology was a high-profile contract. ABB`s then chief executive, Goran Lindahl, visited North Korea in November 1999 to announce ABB`s "wide-ranging, long-term cooperation agreement" with the communist government.

The company also opened an office in the country`s capital, Pyongyang, and the deal was signed a year later in 2000. Despite this, Mr Rumsfeld`s office said that the defence secretary did not "recall it being brought before the board at any time".

In a statement to the American magazine Newsweek, his spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said that there "was no vote on this". A spokesman for ABB told the Guardian yesterday that "board members were informed about the project which would deliver systems and equipment for light water reactors".

Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton - saying he did not trust North Korea and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence-building steps, key to Mr Clinton`s policy of detente, halted.

By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. If there was any doubt about how the White House felt about North Korea this was dispelled by Mr Bush, who told the Washington Post last year: "I loathe [North Korea`s leader] Kim Jong-il"

The success of campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have enhanced the status of Mr Rumsfeld in Washington. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime ... teetering on the verge of collapse" and which was on the verge of becoming a proliferator of nuclear weapons. During a bout of diplomatic activity over Christmas he warned that the US could fight two wars at once - a reference to the forthcoming conflict with Iraq. After Baghdad fell, Mr Rumsfeld said Pyongyang should draw the "appropriate lesson".

Critics of the administration`s bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not "speak up against it". "One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation," said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton`s plans - saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld`s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department`s number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser. One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.

The Clinton package sought to defuse tensions on the Ko rean peninsula by offering supplies of oil and new light water nuclear reactors in return for access by inspectors to Pyongyang`s atomic facilities and a dismantling of its heavy water reactors which produce weapons-grade plutonium. Light water reactors are known as "proliferation-resistant" but, in the words of one expert, they are not "proliferation-proof".

The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as "nuclear bomb factories". North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB`s reactor project going.

North Korea is thought to have offered to scrap its nuclear facilities and missile pro gramme and to allow international nuclear inspectors into the country. But Pyongyang demanded that security guarantees and aid from the US must come first.

Mr Bush now insists that he will only negotiate a new deal with Pyongyang after the nuclear programme is scrapped. Washington believes that offering inducements would reward Pyongyang`s "blackmail" and encourage other "rogue" states to develop weapons of mass destruction.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Al-Qaida `restructured and ready for spectacular attacks on US`
Owen Bowcott and Julian Borger in Washington
Friday May 9, 2003
The Guardian

Al-Qaida has restructured itself and is planning spectacular attacks against the United States, according to an interview obtained by a London-based Arabic magazine which has previously reported contacts with the organisation.

In the latest edition of al-Majalla, published today, a spokesman for al-Qaida denied it had been rendered inoperative and explained that familiar faces had been replaced by newcomers "who have a very good security cover".

The interview was conducted on the internet by al-Majalla`s Dubai correspondent, Mahmoud Khalil, who received an email two months ago from a man who gave his name as Thabet bin Qais and described himself as al-Qaida`s new spokesman.

Mr Khalil had been in contact with Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the previous spokes-man. Mr Bin Qais, who offered no information about his own nationality or background, stated that he took on the job of media contact as part of al-Qaida`s internal reorganisation. He said he was using a list of contacts maintained by his predecessor.

"The Americans only have predictions and old intelligence left," the magazine quoted Mr Bin Qais as saying. "It will take them a long time to understand the new form of al-Qaida."

The organisation remained "way ahead of the Americans and its allies in the intelligence war; American security agencies still are ignorant of the changes the leadership has made".

Mr Khalil said he was suspicious of his identity until Mr Bin Qais reminded him of a private exchange between him and Mr al-Rashed about an interview he was trying to arrange with an al-Qaida member.

"A strike against America is definitely coming," Mr Bin Qais said. He insisted that the arrests of al-Qaidam members, including the suspected September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would have little effect on the organisation because those held had been replaced.

"Martyrdom operations in the jihad will go on," he said.

Although some members had been killed or arrested in the international clampdown since the September 11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaida`s founder and leader, was still alive and free, he said.

The magazine said that Mr Bin Qais was responding to reports from the United States that al-Qaida had planned suicide attacks against the US consulate in Karachi and that it was using planes laden with high explosives to target US warships in the Gulf. "Let the Americans do what they want but we have changed our plans," he told the magazine. "Karachi is not a target."

The interview is not the main story in the magazine, which focuses on the Pentagon`s decision to pull US troops out of Saudi Arabian bases.

Mr Bin Qais surfaced as the Saudi government announced it had foiled a suspected al-Qaida plot to assassinate members of the country`s royal family.

Saudi authorities seized weapons and explosives in a Riyadh house on Wednesday. Nineteen suspected terrorists escapedafter a gunfight with police, leaving computer records and documents. A Saudi official told Associated Press news agency that the group had been ordered to mount attacks by Osama Bin Laden, and that the main targets were the defence minister, Prince Sultan, and his brother, the interior minister, Prince Nayef.

Prince Nayef said the group included 17 Saudis, an Iraqi-born man holding Kuwaiti and Canadian citizenship, and a Yemeni. He said all had been trained in Afghanistan.

US intelligence experts are divided over how badly al-Qaida has been damaged by recent arrests. Some believe that it is no longer capable of mounting a sophisticated operation like the September 11 attacks.

Others regard that assessment as complacent and argue that junior members are steadily rising in the ranks to replace those killed or captured.

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, the FBI`s counterterrorism chief, Pasquale D`Amuro, described al-Qaida as "wounded and disorganised", but he added that it remained "a severe threat to this nation".


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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May 9, 2003
Into the Sunset
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Chutzpah, according to the classic definition, is when you murder your parents, then ask for sympathy because you`re an orphan. But what do we call it if after you are placed with foster parents, you try the same thing all over again?

I ask this question in light of the tax-cut package the House is expected to pass today — a package that relies on exactly the same bait-and-switch tactics used to sell the 2001 tax cut. Since the scam involved in the 2001 tax cut remains one of the wonders of modern political economy, it is a measure of our leaders` contempt for the intelligence of the public — or maybe for the press — that they think they can use the same tricks a second time.

Here`s the story: in 2001, as now, some swing senators insisted on a budget resolution limiting the size of any tax cut. No problem. House-Senate negotiators pushed through a huge tax cut anyway, "saving" several hundred billion dollars by making the whole thing expire in the 10th year. Among other things, this "sunset clause" implied that heirs to large estates would pay no tax if their parents died in 2010, but would face significant taxes if their parents made it into 2011. At the time I suggested that it be renamed the Throw Momma from the Train Act of 2001.

Needless to say, the bill was silly by design. The administration didn`t intend to compromise: it fully expected to get the sunset clause repealed in a future Congress. And President Bush was soon out there ridiculing the way the tax cut was programmed to expire, implying that the expiration date was imposed by scheming liberals, when in fact it was a trick perpetrated by his own Congressional allies.

Now Congress is voting on more tax cuts. This time we`re already running a record budget deficit, and the long-run prospect is bleak. Still, the administration claims to be making a concession by agreeing to scale back its $726 billion tax cut to a mere $550 billion.

So how does the House bill, which is broadly similar to the administration`s proposal, stay within that $550 billion limit? Sunset clauses! Many of the provisions would supposedly expire in 2005, others in 2012. Otherwise, it`s a bigger tax cut than the administration proposed. And the sunset clauses, like those in the 2001 tax cut, are clearly a mere gimmick: as soon as a tax cut becomes law, the administration will begin demanding that the whole thing be made permanent.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the true cost of the House bill, without the sunset scam, would be $1.1 trillion over the next decade. You know, $550 billion here, $550 billion there, and pretty soon you`re talking real money.

The new tax cut plan echoes the 2001 scam in other ways. In 2001 a tax cut that delivered about 40 percent of its benefits to the richest 1 percent of families was marketed as a tax break for ordinary folks. The same is true this time. In fact, the extent to which the House bill favors the rich is breathtaking: the typical family would get a tax break of only $217 next year, but families with incomes above $1 million would get an average of $93,500 each. The center estimates that over the next decade, 27 percent of the tax cut — about the share that goes to the bottom 90 percent of the population — would go to these very high-income families, who comprise a mere 0.13 percent of the population.

Finally, as in 2001, we`re being told that this tax cut will create lots of jobs. But why should we believe that? It`s hard to find an independent economist who thinks that the Bush proposal would create the 1.4 million jobs claimed by the administration — and as I`ve explained in this column, even that many jobs would be a poor payoff for a tax cut that big.

And bear in mind that Bush-style tax cuts now have a track record. Of the 2.1 million jobs lost over the past two years, 1.7 million vanished after the passage of the 2001 tax cut.

Nonetheless, the odds are that this scam, like the scam of 2001, will succeed. The tax cut will be passed, and the budget will plunge even deeper into the red. And one day we`ll realize that international investors are treating us like a banana republic — that they won`t finance our trade deficit unless they are paid very high rates of interest (have I mentioned that the dollar has just fallen to a four-year low against the euro?) — and everyone will wonder why.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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What the f... ?!?


U.S. Army Officers Say: `Mossad May Blame Arabs`

Sometimes "the most likely suspect" in an act of terrorism is actually a "false flag" working for-or otherwise "framed" by- those who are responsible.

Exclusive To American Free Press

By Michael Collins Piper


Top U.S. Army analysts believe Israel`s intelligence agency, the Mossad, is "ruthless and cunning," "a wildcard" that "has [the] capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

This eye-opening assertion about America`s supposed closest ally was reported in a front page story in The Washington Times on September 10-just one day before the terrorist attacks in America that are being blamed on "Arabs."

The Times reported that this serious charge by U.S. Army officers against the Israelis appeared in a 68-page paper prepared by 60 officers at the U.S. Army`s School for Advanced Military Studies, a training ground for up-and-coming Army officers.

Then, just hours after the terrorist tra gedies, a well-known pro-Israel analyst, George Friedman, proclaimed Israel as the primary beneficiary.

"The big winner today, intended or not, is the state of Israel," wrote Fried man, who said on his Internet website at stratfor.com that "There is no question … that the Israeli leadership is feeling relief" in the wake of the terrorist attack on America as a result of the benefits that Israel will glean.

Considering the U.S. Army`s questions about possible provocations by Israel, coupled with this noted intelligence analyst`s suggestion that Israel was indeed "the big winner" on Sept. 11, a previous report in the Aug. 3, 1993 issue of The Village Voice that Israel`s Mossad was perhaps involved in (or had foreknowledge of) the previous "Arab terrorist" attack on the World Trade Center, takes on new dimensions.

The events of Sept. 11 do require careful attention in light of the fact that Israel has had a long and proven record in planting "false flags"-orchestrated assassinations and acts of terrorism for its own purposes and pinning those atrocities on innocent parties.

Perhaps the best-known instance in which Israel used a "false flag" to cover its own trail was in the infamous Lavon Affair. It was in 1954 that several Israeli-orchestrated acts of terrorism against British targets in Egypt were carried out. Blame for the attacks was placed on the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposed the regime of Egyptian President Gamul Abdul-Nasser. However, the truth about the wave of terror is found in a once-secret cable from Col. Benjamin Givli, the head of Israel`s military intelligence, who outlined the intended purpose behind the wave of terror:

[Our goal] is to break the West`s confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime. The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt.

Ultimately the truth about Israel`s involvement became public and Israel was rocked internally in the wake of the scandal. Competing political elements within Israel used the scandal as a bludgeon against their opponents. But the truth about Israel`s use of a "false flag" had come to international attention and demonstrated how Israel was willing to endanger innocent lives as part of its grand political strategy to expand its influence in the Middle East.

BLAMING `RIGHT WING` EXTREMISTS

A shadowy "right wing" group known as "Direct Action" was accused of the attack on Goldenberg`s Deli in Paris on Aug. 9, 1982. Six people died and 22 were injured. The leader of "Direct Action" was Jean-Marc Rouillan who had been operating in the Mediterranean under the cover name of "Sebas" and had been repeatedly linked to the Mossad. All references to Rouillan`s Mossad links were deleted from the official reports issued at the time.

However, the Algerian national news service, which has ties to French intelligence, blamed the Mossad for Rouillan`s activities. Angry French intelligence officers were believed to have leaked this information. Several top French security officials quit in protest over the cover-up of Mossad complicity in Rouillan`s crimes. However, other Mossad false flag operations also took place on French soil.

FALSE CLUES

On Oct. 3, 1980, a synagogue on Co pernicus Street was bombed in Paris. Four bystanders were killed. Nine were injured. The media frenzy which followed the incident was worldwide. Reports held that "right wing extremists" were responsible. Yet, of all the "right wing extremists" held for questioning, none was arrested. In fact, all were released. In the upper echelons of French intelligence, however, the finger of suspicion was pointed at the Mossad.

According to one report: "On April 6, 1979, the same Mossad terror unit now suspected of the Copernicus carnage blew up the heavily guarded plant of CNIM industries at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon, in southeast France, where a consortium of French firms was building a nuclear reactor for Iraq.

"The Mossad salted the site of the CNIM bomb blast with `clues` followed up with anonymous phone calls to police-suggesting that the sabotage was the work of a `conservative` environmentalist group-`the most pacific and harmless people on earth` as one source put it."

MORE OF THE SAME

o On June 28, 1978, Israeli agents exploded a bomb under a small passenger car in the Rue Saint Anne in Paris, killing Mohammed Boudia, an organizer for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Immediately afterward, Paris police received anonymous phone calls accusing Boudia of involvement in narcotics deals and attributing his murder to the Corsican Mafia. A thorough investigation subsequently established that Mossad special-action agents were responsible for the terrorist killing.

o In October 1976 the same Mossad unit kidnapped two West German students named Brigette Schulz and Thomas Reuter from their Paris hotel. Planted "clues" and anonymous phone calls made it appear that a Bavarian "neo-nazi" formation had executed the abduction. French intelligence established that the two German youths had been secretly flown to Israel, drugged, tortured, coerced into a false "confession of complicity" in PLO activities, and then anonymously incarcerated in one of the Israeli government`s notorious political prisons.

o In February 1977 a German-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named William Jahnke arrived in Paris for some secretive business meetings. He soon vanished, leaving no trace. Paris police were anonymously informed that Jahnke had been involved in a high-level South Korean bribery affair and "eliminated" when the deal went sour. A special team of investigators from SDECE, the leading French intelligence agency, eventually determined that Jahnke had been "terminated" by the Mossad, which suspected him of selling secret information to the Libyans. Along with other details of this sordid case, the SDECE learned that Jahnke had been "fingered" to the Mossad by his own former employer, the CIA.

BLAMING THE LIBYANS

One of Israel`s most outrageous "false flag" operations involved a wild propaganda story aimed at discrediting Libyan leader Muamar Qaddafi. In the early months of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. media began promoting a story that a "Libyan hit squad" was in the United States to assassinate the president. This inflamed public sentiment against Libya.

Suddenly, however, the "hit squad" stories vanished. Ultimately it was discovered that the source of the story was Manucher Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian SAVAK (secret police) agent with close ties to the Mossad. Even the liberal Washington Post acknowledged that the CIA itself believed that Ghorbanifar was a liar who "had made up the hit-squad story in order to cause problems for one of Is rael`s enemies."

The Los Angeles Times had already blown the whistle on Israel`s scare stories. "Israeli intelligence, not the Reagan administration," reported the Times, "was a major source of some of the most dramatic published reports about a Libyan assassination team allegedly sent to kill President Reagan and other top U.S. officials . . . Israel, which informed sources said has `wanted an excuse to go in and bash Libya for a longtime,` may be trying to build American public support for a strike against [Qaddafi]."

In other words, Israel had been promoting the former SAVAK agent, Ghorbanifar, to official Washing ton as a reliable source. In fact, he was a Mossad disinformation operative waving a "false flag"-yet another Israeli scheme to blame Libya for its own misdeeds, using one "false flag" (Iran`s SAVAK) to lay blame on another "false flag" (Libya).

The Mossad was almost certainly responsible for the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on April 5, 1986. However, claims were made that there was "irrefutable" evidence that the Libyans were responsible. A U.S. serviceman was killed. President Ronald Reagan responded with an attack on Libya.

However, intelligence insiders believed that Israel`s Mossad had concocted the phony "evidence" to "prove" Libyan responsibility. West Berlin police director Manfred Ganschow, who took charge of the investigation, cleared the Libyans, saying, "This is a highly political case. Some of the evidence cited in Washington may not be evidence at all, merely assumptions supplied for political reasons."

BLAMING THE SYRIANS

On April 18, 1986, Nezar Hindawi, a 32-year-old Jordanian man was arrested in London after security guards found that one of the passengers boarding an Israeli plane bound for Jerusalem, Ann Murphy, 22, was carrying a square, flat sheet of plastic explosive in the double bottom of her carry-on bag.

Miss Murphy told security men that the detonator (disguised as a calculator) had been given to her by her fiancee, Hindawi. He was charged with attempted sabotage and attempted murder.

Word was leaked that Hindawi had confessed and claimed that he had been hired by Gen. Mohammed Al-Khouli, the intelligence director of the Syrian air force. Also implicated were others including the Syrian ambassador in London. The French authorities warned the British prime minister that there was more to the case than met the eye-that is, Israeli involvement. This was later confirmed in reports in the Western press.

BLAMING THE PLO

In 1970, King Hussein of Jordan was provided incriminating intelligence that suggested the Palestine Liberation Organization was plotting to murder him and seize power. Infuriated, Hussein mobilized his forces for what has become known as the "Black September" purge of the PLO. Thousands of Palestinians living in Jordan were rounded up, some of the leaders were tortured, and in the end, masses of refugees were driven from Jordan to Lebanon.

New data, coming to light after the murder of two leading Mossad operatives in Larnaka, Cyprus, suggested that the entire operation had been a Mossad covert action, led by one of its key operatives, Sylvia Roxburgh. She contrived an affair with King Hussein and served as the linchpin for a major Mossad coup designed to destabilize the Arabs.

In 1982, just when the PLO had abandoned the use of terrorism, the Mossad spread disinformation about "terror attacks" on Israeli settlements along the northern border in order to justify a full-scale military invasion of Lebanon. Years later, even leading Israeli spokesmen, such as former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, admitted that the reports of "PLO terrorism" had been contrived by the Mossad.

It is also worth noting that the attempted assassination in London of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov was initially blamed on the PLO. The attempted assassination was cited by Israel as one excuse for its 1982 incursion into Lebanon. In fact, the diplomat was one of Israel`s "doves" and inclined toward a friendly disposition of Israel`s conflict with the PLO and an unlikely target of PLO wrath.

It appears that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Mossad-under yet another "false flag"-for two purposes: (a) elimination of a domestic "peacenik" friendly toward the Palestinians; and (b) pinning yet another crime on the PLO.

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May 9, 2003
How Iraq Can Get Over Its Past
By IAN BURUMA


Unscrupulous operators, who thrive in dictatorships, have a disturbing knack of surviving the wreckage when dictators fall, and of thriving, just as unscrupulously, under new regimes. In Japan after 1945, right-wing gangsters and bureaucrats who had done well in the war not only survived, but some ended up running the country. Shady figures of the Communist era still wield power in Romania and other parts of the old Soviet Empire. Military thugs of bygone juntas continue to have clout in South America. Nazi collaborators became cabinet ministers in postwar France. And so on.

Now it`s Iraq`s turn, as we saw this week when ranks of doctors and nurses took to the streets to protest the naming of a former Baath Party official as the new minister of health. How can Iraqis make sure that brutes from the old regime don`t poison the wells of post-Saddam Hussein politics? Some form of de-Baathification is clearly needed. Democracy depends on public trust; how can one talk of trust in the rule of law if it is administered by former torturers?

Getting rid of the top leaders is the easy part. Those still alive can be taken care of by international tribunals. Saddam Hussein and his sons and their main satraps deserve their own Nuremberg. The difficulty begins with the middle ranks: the prison wardens, university professors, army officers and pen-pushers who carried out murderous orders. How far down the ranks do you go in purging them? Should they be punished, or simply removed from public office?

One option is to let things be, forget the past and concentrate on the future. This is more or less what happened in Spain after Franco died and in Russia after the Soviet Union crumbled. But in those cases the worst brutalities had taken place decades before the dictatorships fell. Bygones are easier to cope with when they are distant memories. The wounds inflicted by the Baathists are much too fresh to ignore.

That the fall of Saddam Hussein came so swiftly has one advantage: no deals were made, no promises of immunity or of future government posts, as happened in Poland and Chile. The way General Augusto Pinochet agreed to end his dictatorship — in exchange for immunity — was really a form of blackmail, which gave the revived democracy a foundation of injustice.

After the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the new government suspected that the Parliament was filled with informers and other agents of the old regime, and decided to purge officials from public life on the basis of their secret police files. And so old dissidents set upon other old dissidents; political scores were settled; files were abused and misinterpreted; and innocent lives were ruined. This, as most Czechs later acknowledged, was not the way to go.

The East Germans did better. A special commission, headed by a pastor with a reputation for probity, protected the secret police files from misuse. Individuals could see only their own dossiers, and employers or government agencies who wished to know more about their current or potential employees were shown only what was relevant. But the East Germans had the great (though in their own eyes dubious) advantage that tainted officials could be replaced instantly by West Germans. Purges did not leave serious gaps in the bureaucracy, but there was an air of colonialism about the enterprise.

The de-Stasification of East Germany was in many ways more successful than de-Nazification had been in West Germany. After World War II the Allies needed former Nazis to run the country. Countless bureaucrats, lawyers and academics got off too lightly. Still, the country did have an old elite that had survived the Third Reich with its reputation more or less intact. Men like Konrad Adenauer had managed to keep their noses clean under Hitler, and thus enjoyed moral authority after he was gone.

Moral authority is also what made the truth commissions in South Africa a relative success. Without the backing of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the concept of giving amnesty in exchange for confession would not have worked.

This is where Iraq has a serious problem. There are no Iraqi Adenauers, Mandelas or Tutus; "clean" figures have to be brought in from the outside, and exiles never enjoy the same prestige as people who stayed and suffered. Perhaps Shiite mullahs could play a stabilizing role, but that may not prove too popular with Sunnis and Kurds, or lead to a liberal democracy.

The closest parallel to Iraq today might be Ethiopia in 1991, after the fall of the Stalinist Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Ethiopians were actually the first to try their leaders for genocide. Yet these trials met with surprising indifference and cynicism among the Ethiopian people. The British scholar John Ryle, one of the few Westerners to take a serious interest in the trials, observed that Ethiopians were more absorbed at the time by the O. J. Simpson trial than by the proceedings in their own capital.

This lack of popular support was largely because of the ethnic divisions that plague politics in Ethiopia (as they probably will in Iraq). Though all Ethiopians suffered under the Derg, the question of how to divide the country between the Amhara and Tigrean ethnic groups remains a more burning issue than reckoning with the past. Opponents of the trials claimed that they were little more than a way for the Tigreans` minority government to curry favor with the West.

Similar problems could easily occur in Iraq. Arabs will not take kindly to being judged by Kurds, or Sunnis by Shiites. So who can "master the past" after Saddam Hussein? Surely not America. No matter how grateful Iraqis may be to the Marines for their liberation, the Americans have neither sufficient knowledge nor the authority to clean the ranks of Baathists.

This leaves some kind of international effort. It would have to include Kurds as well as Arabs, and ideally should take place in Iraq, where witnesses can be easily summoned. Since neither the United States nor any new Iraqi government would engender the trust to do the job, and the International Criminal Court is not set up to deal with domestic purges, it would have to be an ad hoc institution established under the auspices of that much-abused, highly unpopular, often ineffective, sometimes mendacious but occasionally extremely useful organization: the United Nations.

Not ideal, perhaps, but faute de mieux is the best reason for having the United Nations in the first place.


Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College, is author, most recently, of "Inventing Japan."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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washingtonpost.com
U.S. Seeks Surrender Of Iranian Group
Policy Is Reversed on Exiles in Iraq

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 9, 2003; Page A01


The Bush administration, increasingly concerned about the activities of an Iranian opposition group based in Iraq, has decided to actively seek its surrender, just weeks after the U.S. Central Command arranged a cease-fire that allowed the group to keep many of its weapons and maintain its camps.

The closely held decision was reached by President Bush`s senior foreign policy advisers last week and is part of a larger struggle within the administration over its policy toward Iran. The country shares a long border with Iraq and has alarmed U.S. officials with its links with terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Some State Department officials are eager for a thaw in relations with Iran. But the Pentagon and other administration officials believe the Iranian government is facing severe internal pressures from popular discontent, and see little reason to engage with Iranian leaders.

That left the fate of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq in the midst of a tug of war within the administration, officials said.

Some Pentagon officials had suggested that the exile group, which is seeking to overthrow the Iranian government, could serve as a proxy force against Iranians who have moved across the border into southern Iraq and at least would make the Iranian government worried about U.S. intentions in the region. The group, also known as the People`s Mujaheddin, has maintained for the past decade thousands of fighters armed with tanks, armored vehicles and artillery in camps along the Iraq-Iran border.

But the State Department, which in 1997 labeled the group a foreign terrorist organization, successfully argued that the United States could not condone its existence in the midst of fighting a war against terrorism. Moreover, State Department officials believe, last month`s cease-fire agreement was a betrayal of an arrangement the administration set with Iran before the Iraq war to disarm the group.

In a meeting in January between U.S. and Iranian officials, and through messages subsequently delivered through British diplomats, the United States suggested it would target People`s Mujaheddin as a way of gaining Iran`s cooperation to seal its border and provide assistance to search-and-rescue missions for downed U.S. pilots during the war.

U.S. forces in early April bombed People`s Mujaheddin camps, killing about 50 people, according to the group, before the cease-fire was arranged about three weeks ago, at a time of growing alarm within the administration about spreading Iranian influence among Iraqi Shiites. The People`s Mujaheddin are based in three camps northeast of Baghdad near the Iranian border.

In the aftermath of the U.S. military victory, State Department officials said, Iran has sent signals that it is interested in improved relations with the United States. In what some regarded as a significant development, Iran`s former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said Iran`s resumption of ties with the United States could be put to a referendum.

In an apparent reference to previous failures by the countries to begin a constructive dialogue, he said, "We missed certain opportunities, or took late or wrong measures, or even did not take action."

The cease-fire arranged April 15 by Central Command, which oversees military operations in Iraq, appeared to have convinced the Iranian government it was double- crossed on the issue of the People`s Mujaheddin. The official Iranian news agency has broadcast reports saying the United States was cooperating closely with the group, including allowing its fighters to dress in U.S. military uniforms at border crossings.

Earlier this week, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi declared that the cease-fire "has dealt a severe blow to America`s prestige. It showed that the administration was not honest when it talked about terrorism."

Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, said, "The way this plays out may make the Iranians nervous about what our intentions are."

But, in what could be seen as a victory for the State Department, senior officials decided last week that the cease-fire was counterproductive to the administration`s larger aims in the region and the war on terror.

"The P.C. decided they can continue to exist for now, until Centcom can effect a complete surrender of this group," an administration official said, referring to what is known as the principals committee, the president`s senior foreign policy advisers.

White House, Pentagon and State Department officials declined to comment on the decision, which was communicated over the weekend through a special channel to the Iranian government.

Iran may have signaled its pleasure at the development Wednesday. During a visit to Luxembourg, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi suggested that Iran is seeking to improve relations with the United States, which were severed during the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed shah. "Generally, Iran wants to expand its relations with all countries, even America," he said.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, the Washington representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political arm of the People`s Mujaheddin, said the cease-fire allowed the group to keep its weapons in a noncombat formation and would allow it to respond in self-defense to attacks by Iranian troops.

Jafarzadeh said the United States agreed to the cease-fire because it began to understand that Iran poses a greater danger to U.S. interests in Iraq. "When U.S. forces saw with their own eyes the level of the threat posed by the Iranian regime, they realized this cease-fire was appropriate," he said.

Jafarzadeh said that based on information collected by the People`s Mujaheddin, at least 14,000 Iranian troops, in civilian clothes, and 2,000 clerics have entered Iraq from Iran to try to create a Iranian-leaning Islamic state in the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein. U.S. officials dismiss those figures as exaggerated.

Jafarzadeh also provided copies of documents that he said showed the involvement of the Iranian government, at the highest levels, seeking to influence the political situation in Iraq. One document, dated April 19 and stamped "top secret," dealt with using the Red Crescent (the Islamic Red Cross) as a cover for Iranian efforts to gain control in major cities in the south, he said.

The People`s Mujaheddin -- who U.S. analysts say received funding from Hussein`s government -- has rejected the label as a terrorist group, saying it is on the same side as the United States. Clawson said he believes it was "silly to list them as a terrorist group," because they have not attacked U.S. targets since the shah of Iran fell in January 1979. "They are not engaged in terror attacks," he said. "They do armed attacks against Iran."

One U.S. official said that about three months ago, 300 to 400 Iranian troops entered northern Iraq to join forces with Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, who is close to senior officials in the Pentagon. The arrangement was troubling to officials in the State Department, but the official said the Pentagon did not appear concerned.

Later, as concerns mounted about Iranian influence in post-Hussein Iraq, some of the same officials who had shrugged off the earlier insertion of Iranian troops began to maintain that the presence of Iranian forces was proof a tougher stance against Iran was necessary. Some officials even began to press for using the People`s Mujaheddin as a proxy force against the Iranians.

"I know it sounds Machiavellian, but it played out that way," the official said.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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DURST: The Warrior Moth

By Will Durst, AlterNet
May 6, 2003

So George "Top Gun" Bush hits the deck of an aircraft carrier in full battle attire, and leaves in a suit. Get It?! The warrior caterpillar matures into the diplomat moth. Genius public relations move. Simple. Uncomplicated. Obvious. Next week, maybe he can do a reversal on "The Little Mermaid" and grow a tail.


Then he flew to a defense plant in Santa Clara, California and said the unemployment rise to 6 percent is the very reason Congress should pass his tax cut because it will create jobs. In the space of one day, he`s morphed from the Potentate of Symbolism into Captain Segue. Tax cuts creating jobs. Yeah, right, and corporate bonuses fund school hot lunch programs.


Hasn`t anybody noticed in terms of creating jobs, the last tax cut tanked like a double wide in a free fall off a hairpin turn on the way up to Pike`s Peak. That`s the typical agenda: Connect two totally disparate cause and effect links, then get increasingly strident about it. And presto: instant policy. It does make one wonder: What other spurious couplings can we next expect to be trumpeted by Fox News anchors and other administration flunkies?

Condoms are responsible for teenage sex.

Faith based charities are an effective replacement for government social programs. Got to be the right faiths, of course.

Pre-emptive strikes encourage pro-Americanism around the world.

The liberal myth of corporate greed is what is really causing the recession.

Once Country & Western radio stations are convinced another nation`s leader is a bad guy, we got policy.

Anti-war dissent is the reason Saddam is still alive.

Anti-administration dissent is the reason Osama bin Laden is still alive.

Homeless people are the result of failed 1960`s policies.

Medical marijuana causes junkies to kick and rob old people.

Looting Social Security means money will always be available from Social Security.

The class warfare of criticizing tax cuts as favoring the rich is deepening the rift between America`s benevolent bosses and its little people.

Democrats are the friends of our enemies.

Allowing more pollution results in cleaner air.

Susan Sarandon was always an uppity bitch.

Fuck the poor.


Will Durst is not a friend of the enemy but our enemies` enemy thinks he is. Okay, he`s poor. Happy?

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April 30, 2003

The Freislers of the Media
The Fourhorsemen of Propaganda
By WAYNE MADSEN


History has all but forgotten Nazi Germany`s most feared judge, Roland Freisler, the President of the Volksgericht (People`s Court). Known as the "hanging judge," Freisler was known for yelling at and berating prisoners paraded before him. Newsreels of Freisler`s trials show an animated judge constantly playing up to German public opinion, already whipped into a fanatic frenzy by the intensive propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. Freisler was ultimately killed in an Allied bombing raid in 1945. Ironically, he was presiding over one of his kangaroo courts at the time his courtroom received a direct hit.

Today we are faced with the Freislers of the airwaves - those right-wing hate mongers who act as judges, juries, and character executioners. Chief among these are the typical promoters of neo-conservative (read that as extreme right-wing) policies. Among the most outrageous are Rush Limbaugh, Fox`s Bill O`Reilly and Sean Hannity, and G. Gordon Liddy.

One good joke about Rush Limbaugh goes like this -- Question: What does the airship Hindenburg and Rush have in common? Answer: they are both flaming Nazi gasbags. But Limbaugh, beyond being a gasbag, is also a complete phony. Many have heard that Limbaugh avoided the draft by claiming a problem with rectal hairs and fissures (no pain in the ass jokes please). Not so well known is Limbaugh`s jaundiced opinion of his fans.

When Limbaugh hosted a short-lived television program, the executive producer of which was Roger Ailes -- the current President of Fox News and former Ronald Reagan toady - the gasbag demonstrated what he really thinks about his beloved "ditto heads." A technician who worked on the show`s set in New York City reported that a group of Ohio fans once arrived by bus to sit in as members of Limbaugh`s studio audience. After taping the show and after the audience left the studio, the technician overheard Limbaugh saying, "Can you believe these fucking ditto heads? They sit on a bus for eight hours to sit for a half hour show, what morons." It`s about time for Limbaugh fans to face up to what their hero thinks about them. You are money making morons for Mr. "Excellence in Broadcasting." Limbaugh - phony number one.

Then there is Bill O`Reilly. His favorite targets are all those anti-war liberals in Hollywood. O`Reilly would rather his fans not know about his own sycophantic Hollywood past. After having been a reporter for ABC and CBS News, O`Reilly opted for the Hollywood route, becoming the co-anchor of the tabloid program Inside Edition. From 1989 to 1995, O`Reilly fawned all over those nasty Hollywood lefties he now pretends to despise. There was O`Reilly, at his phony best, covering such Hollywood lefties as Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Ed Asner. Imagine O`Reilly working the phones in 1993 to get that big exclusive interview with the liberal environmental activist Ted Danson to ask him about the final episode of Cheers. "Hi Ted, it`s Bill O`Reilly from Inside Edition. I know you`re busy trying to save the oceans and all that stuff, but do you have time to come on my program to talk about doing the last Cheers? I`d be so ever grateful." Right O`Reilly, grateful until you get your own political platform to beat up on environmentalists like Danson.

Having made his career, courtesy of left-wing Hollywood, O`Reilly was plucked from Los Angeles by Roger Ailes, who had just taken over the helm at Fox News after having blown it ratings-wise with Limbaugh`s ill-fated TV program. A few months ago, I had a discussion with one of O`Reilly`s Fox producers. She asked me what I would want to talk to O`Reilly about if I went on his program. I said, "that`s easy, let`s talk about Hollywood making O`Reilly`s career and how he now rants and raves about Hollywood`s lack of patriotism." Never heard anything back. What a surprise! It seems O`Reilly is better at dishing out criticism than taking it. No spin? Really O`Reilly! O`Reilly - phony number two.

And what about Sean Hannity? Is this some experienced inside-the-beltway political sage who has always had his hand on the political pulse of Washington? No, alas Sean started out as a deejay in the radio mega-market of Huntsville, Alabama - a town that abounds with Wal Marts, fast food joints, and military employees and contractors but little full spectrum political discourse. Before ending up at WABC-AM in New York, Hannity honed his Freisler-like skills in Atlanta, where his audience, while larger than the one he had in Huntsville, was still demographically largely male, white, and red neck. Hannity, of course, was chosen by WABC to replace Bob Grant, who was fired for expressing glee over the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in a plane crash in Croatia. Grant said that there were initial reports that there was one survivor of the crash, adding, "it`s probably Ron Brown, but then again I`m a pessimist." Hannity, who now spins right-wing muck instead of America`s Top 40, was the perfect choice to replace Grant.

When I appeared on "Hannity & Colmes" to defend former Representative Cynthia McKinney`s statement about what George Bush might have known about the terrorist attacks in the months leading up to 9-11, I was pitted against Florida`s GOP Representative Mark Foley. During a commercial break, Hannity said he enjoyed his recent trip to Florida and his golf outing with Foley. Can anyone even spell "conflict of interests?" Hannity: phony number three.

Then there is G. Gordon Liddy. A former long-term guest of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Liddy was the team leader for the botched 1972 attempt by Richard Nixon`s "Plumbers Unit" to bug Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. Libby now shills for the neo-conservatives and the Israeli right-wing. He constantly features Jerusalem Post publisher Tom Rose on his radio show. Rose is tied at the waist to Richard Perle, the neo-conservative`s Prince of Darkness. Liddy constantly makes racist comments about Arabs and parrots the Israeli expansionist line. He often mentions his parachute jumps with the Israeli Defense Forces. People have their price. If Liddy had been offered a chance to fly Russia`s latest MIG, perhaps he would be singing the praises of Vladimir Putin`s brutalizing the Chechens.

Liddy once said he would stand on a Washington street and take a bullet for Richard Nixon`s administration, if that`s all it took to save it. Apparently, in his zeal to defend Israeli expansionism, Liddy fails to remember that Nixon was one of America`s most anti-Semitic presidents - he always complained about Jews to people like Billy Graham and his German-descent gauleiters, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman. And no one can forget where Nixon went for a ticker tape parade as his administration was crumbling in 1974: Damascus, Syria where he was hailed by one Hafez al Assad, whose son Bashir is routinely demonized by Liddy and his Israeli lobby guests. Liddy: phony number four.

Roland Freisler is gone but his ideological grand-standing descendants rule the airwaves. The Federal Communications Commission, which, under Colin Powell`s son Michael, is now bought and paid for by the corporate infotainment industry, should investigate America`s radio phonies and their connections to the GOP right-wing. In a perfect world, there would be such an investigation. But in a nation gone mad, the hate mongers of the airwaves continue to spew forth their venom. Freisler would have loved it.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.

Madsen can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.com/madsen04302003.html

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May 06, 2003


Top Ten President Bush Excuses For Not Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction


10. "We`ve only looked through 99% of the country"

9. "We spent entire budget making those playing cards"

8. "Containers are labeled in some crazy language"

7. "They must have been stolen by some of them evil X-Men mutants"

6. "Did I say Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? I meant they have goats"

5. "How are we supposed to find weapons of mass destruction when we can`t even find Cheney?"

4. "Still screwed up because of Daylight Savings Time"

3. "When you`re trying to find something, it`s always in the last place you look, am I right, people?"

2. "Let`s face it -- I ain`t exactly a genius"

1. "Geraldo took them"

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My Country: The World


Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A People`s History of the United States.


Our government has declared a military victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. I will mourn the dead -- the American GIs, and also the Iraqi dead, of which there have been many, many more.

I will mourn the Iraqi children, not just those who are dead, but those who have been blinded, crippled, disfigured, or traumatized, like the bombed children of Afghanistan who, as reported by American visitors, lost their power of speech. The American media has not given us a full picture of the human suffering caused by our bombing; for that, we need to read the foreign press.

We will get precise figures for the American dead, but not for the Iraqis. Recall Colin Powell after the first Gulf War, when he reported the "small" number of U.S. dead, and when asked about the Iraqi dead, Powell replied: "That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in."

As a patriot, contemplating the dead GIs, should I comfort myself (as, understandably, their families do) with the thought: "They died for their country." If so, I would be lying to myself. Those who die in this war will not die for their country. They will die for their government. They will die for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. And yes, they will die for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the President. They will die to cover up the theft of the nation`s wealth to pay for the machines of death.

The distinction between dying for our country and dying for your government is crucial in understanding what I believe to be the definition of patriotism in a democracy.

According to the Declaration of Independence -- the fundamental document of democracy -- governments are artificial creations, established by the people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Furthermore, as the Declaration says, "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."

When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, always claiming that its motives are pure and moral ("Operation Just Cause" was the invasion of Panama and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in the present instance) it is violating its promise to the country. It is the country that is primary -- the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty. War is almost always a breaking of those promises (although one might find rare instances of true self defense). It does not enable the pursuit of happiness, but brings despair and grief.



Tom Paine said: "My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind."



With the war in Iraq won, shall we revel in American military power and, against the history of modern empires, insist that the American empire will be beneficent?

The American record does not justify confidence in its boast that it will bring democracy to Iraq. Should Americans welcome the expansion of the nation`s power, with the anger this has generated among so many people in the world? Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one-fifth of whom grow up in poverty?

I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights.

Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade -- we call it globalization -- should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?

Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways.

Tom Paine used the word "patriot" to describe the rebels resisting imperial rule. He also enlarged the idea of patriotism when he said: "My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind."


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Published: May 05 2003
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The Great San Francisco Bubble
Life in America`s last great progressive cocoon, as conservatives snicker and pule
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 9, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/



It`s that odd dumbstruck jolting feeling you get as soon as you step more than 25 miles away from this most progressive and funked-out and deeply flawed and self-consciously screwy of kaleidoscopic American urban metropoli: oh my freaking God, what is happening to the world? This is what you say. To yourself. Probably.

Because suddenly you find yourself pummeled with many of those lovely bleak horrible things you`ve somehow become so inured to while living in S.F., those things you might`ve slowly come to hope don`t really exist quite so violently and vehemently anymore. But of course they do.

It happens when you step off that plane in some -- let`s say -- "differently evolved" part of the country and don`t see a single ethnic person for four days and can`t get a decent organic basil-and-goat-cheese omelet to save your life and all the theaters are playing Adam Sandler and the concept of fresh sushi means "less freezer burn than the corn dogs." Elitist? Whatever.

Sexism. Racism. Guns. Jingoism. Jesus fetishism. Psychopatriotism. Rampant pseudo-religious family-values faux-ethical circle jerking masquerading as Christian humility. Wal-Marts like giant florescent-lit viruses. Strip malls like a stucco plague. Ho hum, ain`t that America. It so is.

Let`s face it: We in S.F. live in a cultural bubble. A giant tofu-huggin` gay-lovin` lusciously fed hippie liberal sunshine-y cocoon that might as well get blasted by terrorists and die of AIDS and drop off into the ocean for all the relevance it has to the rest of the world -- that is, if my rabid monosyllabic gun-lickin` hate mail from, say, the psychopatriot Freeps over at freerepublic.com or the bilious dittoheads of lucianne.com is to be believed.

And they`re right -- sort of. It`s so very true. We are freaks and crazies and tend to shrug it all off, we in our radical prosaic goofy normalcy. We live in "the Granola State," full of "fruits and nuts and flakes." (Isn`t that cute? That`s about as clever as it gets, slam-wise. The poor things. They try so hard).

We are indeed anti-gunlicking and pro-organic and avidly orgasmic. We are more flagrantly enthusiastically balls-out do-it-now feel-good suck-me hell-yes tolerant than Austin and Chicago and Seattle put together.

We are a danger to the status quo, a nipple-twisted threat to the "nukular" family, a pantheistic whip on the ass of the Bible Belt, a pox on the house that oil built. Or at least we try to be. Sometimes. Depends on how much Peet`s we`ve imbibed.

Because despite S.F.`s adorable slew of brazen flaws, despite our frequent hypocrisy and suckass mass transit and decimated music scene and shameful homeless issues and ridiculous housing prices and a desperate lack of exceptional pizza and an ongoing invidious adherence to snippy politically correct mind-sets and Good Vibrations closing at a tragically early 7 pm on Valentine`s Day ...

Despite all of this, we sense that San Francisco still remains the most luminously progressive and culturally frappeéd and perfectly climated major metropolis in the nation, if not the entire goddamn universe, and for that we can only kneel down and be forever grateful.

Like my good friend just did. The one who recently returned from a jaunt to Italy and literally fell to her knees and kissed the glorious grungy S.F. ground when she returned, breathlessly grateful to be back on relatively free-thinking ground, as she felt all the ills of the perturbed and uptight and backward world drain right out of her.

Not that Italy wasn`t beautiful and culturally intoxicating, she said, but that it was, as she was painfully reminded, sexist as hell, homophobic as Rick Santorum, intolerant as Utah, what with the example of my friend`s young shy half sister casually molested and possibly worse by a drunken Italian suitor and then everyone pretty much shrugging it off and brushing it aside and asking what she did to deserve it and no one standing up for the girl or smacking the dolt with a brick before castrating him with a rusty pizza cutter. Just one example.

And on one leg of her return flight my normally kind and gentle friend found herself taking a sort of savage delight in the oddly perturbed stares she received from the Portland-bound passengers, many rather confused and slightly mortified as they read their Nora Roberts and Michael Crichtons and she, of course, sat there enthusiastically marking juicy passages from "The Ethical Slut" with a yellow highlighter. Ah, perspective.

But maybe the sneering anti-bubblers are right. Maybe S.F. is an entirely pointless, disposable, disease-ravaged wasteland full of perverts and icky gay people and used-up liberalism and way too many amazing organic-produce markets and yoga studios and wine shops and fetishwear outlets and Pulitzer Prize winners and a coastline to nourish your soul.

Maybe that`s why we`re the only city in the entire country whose median home prices are still skyrocketing, into gross obscenity, as the rest of the nation`s real estate prices plummet like Bush`s gutted economy.

Seems millions still want to live here. Go figure. Something about the weather. And the dazzling beauty. And the tolerance. The intellectual buzz. The mind-set. The great food and juicy sexuality and progressive politics and funky architecture and the wide-open encouragement to be as independently minded and screamingly divinely naked as you can possibly be. But hey, only if you want to.

Can you get doses of S.F.`s brand of rainbow acceptance elsewhere, in other major cities? Of course. Small but wonderful hot pockets abound in, say, Austin and N.Y. and L.A., delicious enclaves of Chicago and Miami Beach and Atlanta. Not to mention the dozens of staunchly quirky college towns from Ann Arbor to Ashville to Eugene.

But overall, in a nation where innovative, even anarchic ideas about gender and belief and the violent insult that is our sanctimonious oil-drunk warmongering government are not only frowned upon but also openly mocked and threatened and sneered at, San Francisco still reins as the funk epicenter, the winking liberal stronghold, the ecstatic 69 to the nation`s droning missionary position.

Hey, we know it`s a bubble. Most of us love the bubble, are exceedingly proud of the bubble, kneel at its gloriously flawed but still radiant altar. Anti-progressives want to burst that bubble? Have at it, honey. Go on and burst it -- all over the rest of the country. C`mon, you know you want to.

©2003 SF Gate

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Civil Liability
Life after terrorism
Tom Mockaitis
Friday, May 9, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/09/ED2…


With President Bush confidently declaring victory in Iraq, it is perhaps time to ask an important question. What about the other war? The one he declared to a shocked nation just days after Sept. 11 -- the war on terrorism. Eighteen months and two conquests (Iraq and Afghanistan) later, are we any closer to winning?

The unfortunate answer is that we have no way to tell because no one has yet defined what victory in such a war means. Unless we determine a reasonable objective, however, we risk remaining in a perpetual state of war with all the attendant threats to our way of life.

Extensive research into insurgency throughout the 20th century has taught me that the "new" terrorism is not really so new and that a look into the past often points the way ahead.

One episode from Britain`s long struggle in Northern Ireland seems particularly poignant. In 1971 British Home Secretary Sir Reginald Maudling visited the province to survey the results of a counterterrorism campaign that had no end in site. Upon landing in Belfast he made two memorable comments. "What a lousy place to hand me a gin and tonic!" and "We seem to have achieved an acceptable level of violence."

Far from celebrating the status quo, Maudling acknowledged an unpleasant truth: Military force and security measures can contain terrorism but not entirely prevent it. Only a political solution brings lasting peace. That solution took another 30 years in Northern Ireland.

The United States stands at a crossroads not unlike that faced by the British Home Secretary. We can attack state sponsors of terrorism, establish an office of Homeland Security and take other reasonable precautions to protect critical infrastructure. These measures will lessen but not eliminate the terrorist threat. A change in attitude has to accompany any steps we take to lessen the danger.

As a people we must come to terms with what constitutes an acceptable level of risk. Failure to do so will result in a continued erosion of civil liberties, needless government expenditure and the continued use of `national security` as a cover for partisan agendas.

It can be said with virtual certainty that the country will suffer a terrorist attack in the near future. However, any one of us is far more likely to die in an automobile accident than to become the victim of al Qaeda. With that cold comfort in mind, we might do well to declare a limited victory in the war on terrorism and get on with the business of life.

We can continue to secure the homeland and pursue terrorists whenever and wherever we find them, but at least we will not do so in a climate of fear more dangerous to ourselves than to our enemies.

Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University in Chicago.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

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AFTER THE WAR

Halliburton Unit`s Bill for Iraq Work Mounts
Cost of one contract for aiding U.S. in rebuilding nears $90 million, but little is going to Iraqis.
By Mark Fineman
Times Staff Writer

May 9, 2003

BAGHDAD — The Pentagon has paid nearly $90 million to a subsidiary of the well-connected Halliburton Co. to cater to the Americans who are working to rebuild Iraq, U.S. officials said — while the reconstruction effort has yet to show significant results for ordinary Iraqis.

The Defense Department gave Halliburton`s KBR exclusive rights to the job — which has included fixing up an extravagant presidential palace being used by the Americans — under a broad U.S. Army logistics contract that pays the company a fee based on a percentage of everything it spends, according to Pentagon documents and Halliburton`s corporate filings.

KBR, whose parent firm has had strong ties to Vice President Dick Cheney, has drawn scrutiny for an emergency oil contract in Iraq that is becoming increasingly lucrative.

Under a "task order" from the lesser-known logistics contract, the Defense Department has rung up KBR`s multimillion-dollar bill — which is expected to nearly double — as the number of U.S. officials and Iraqi exiles working for the Pentagon-created reconstruction agency balloons. In blocks-long convoys from Kuwait, the firm is hauling in everything from prefabricated offices, showers, generators and latrines the size of trailer homes to food and bottled water.

As supplies for the Americans continue to arrive by the ton, little of the millions KBR is spending have gone into the Iraqi economy that Washington has pledged to restore. KBR`s logistics job gives it no direct role in the rebuilding of this shattered country; that falls to the Bush administration`s ambitious $2.4-billion reconstruction program, which is being overseen by the State Department.

The company`s most lucrative subcontracts are with trucking, catering and security companies based in neighboring Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, oil-rich nations with the best land routes into Iraq.

KBR and Pentagon officials say hiring Iraqis and buying local goods are a top priority. Although the company subcontracted with one Iraqi-owned firm that has bought local goods and recruited more than 350 Iraqis to work for the Americans, the firm estimates that the move has put just $100,000 into the local economy so far.

Fodder for Critics

Antiwar activists have asserted that U.S. corporate profits were among the motives in waging the campaign in Iraq, which has the second-largest oil reserves on the globe. Other critics have charged that the Dallas-based Halliburton has received preferential treatment from the Bush administration.

Cheney was Halliburton`s chief executive officer for five years until he resigned in August 2000 to be George W. Bush`s running mate. Cheney no longer owns stock in the company, and spokesmen for both the Pentagon and KBR deny favoritism; both said the Army logistics contract sanctioning the company`s work for the Iraq reconstruction agency was competitively bid before it was awarded in 2001.

But another contract that KBR won to repair Iraq`s oil fields and put out postwar oil and gas fires was not competitively bid. And it has been a lightning rod for criticism.

The Army Corps of Engineers, citing urgency and the need for secrecy, awarded KBR the exclusive, classified oil contract March 8, after KBR had done a similarly classified study on how to solve Iraq`s postwar oil problems.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) is spearheading an effort to expose details of the KBR oil contract, and his latest exchange of letters with Army Corps commander Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers this week disclosed that the scope of work for Halliburton`s subsidiary in Iraq`s oil industry goes well beyond firefighting and emergency repairs.

In a May 2 letter, Flowers wrote that the Halliburton contract also includes "operation of facilities and distribution of products" for the Iraqi oil industry.

Flowers added that the contract, which has a ceiling of $7 billion but is expected to cost much less, will continue at least until August, when the corps is planning to issue a competitively bid contract to repair Iraq`s oil infrastructure that could run through 2004.

Lesser-Known Contract

Far lesser known is the contract that the Pentagon used to deploy KBR to set up, cater to and care for the Iraq-based officials of the postwar reconstruction agency here. That contract has no cost ceiling.

Dubbed the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, the contract was awarded in December 2001 and can remain in place for up to 10 years. Specifically, it requires KBR "to deploy within 72 hours of notification and to deliver combat support and combat service support for 25,000 troops within 15 days," according to Halliburton`s corporate documents on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The logistics program "provides the war fighter with additional capabilities to rapidly support and augment the logistical requirements of its deployed forces through the use of a civilian contractor," the company stated in the press release that announced the contract award, which was dated Dec. 14, 2001.

The company has billed the Pentagon for hundreds of millions of dollars for work done under the contract during America`s rapidly expanding military presence abroad since the Sept. 11 attacks. It has built and maintained bases and other facilities and catered to the needs of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and even Djibouti, a key East African outpost in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

An official in Baghdad with the Pentagon`s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, known as ORHA, insisted that the company`s work for the agency is appropriate under the contract: "This was an Army mission. It`s supporting the Army, which is supporting ORHA."

The official said he doubted that KBR`s work for the reconstruction agency would exceed $200 million, but he added that it already has eclipsed original estimates because the agency and its mission have grown exponentially — and far beyond what KBR and the Pentagon had projected when they planned the job in January.

The company`s initial work order for the Iraq job was for $69.5 million, based on an ORHA work force of about 350 in three sectors — the north, the south and central Iraq.

As of this week, ORHA staff has ballooned to more than 1,000 people throughout the country, which the agency has now divided into four sectors, and the ORHA official said he expects the agency`s staff to grow to as many as 2,000 in the months ahead.

A second "task order" for an additional $20 million was issued by the Army last month, and the Pentagon is in the process of awarding a third one. "We`re expecting a significant increase," the ORHA official said, indicating that the increase will be more than what KBR already has spent.

KBR`s task has been logistically taxing and dangerous, and most defense industry analysts say few other companies could manage it.

Its truck convoys move through several hundred miles of desert and urban areas that the U.S. military still has not fully secured. And the massive Republican Palace in Baghdad that serves as the agency`s national headquarters is a contrast in grand opulence and harsh subsistence: More than 650 agency personnel sleep in grand halls of Florentine marble, crystal chandeliers and gold leaf — on cots.

The palace still has no running water. Electricity has been spotty, and until this week, most of the reconstruction agency`s staff was dining solely on military meals-ready-to-eat rations.

The Babel Tourist Hotel, which the agency commandeered last week as the headquarters of its "south-central sector" in Hillah, an hour`s drive south of the capital, is in similar shape. On Wednesday, KBR-contracted trucks were bringing in prefabricated buildings, office pods and generators.

And in Baghdad, a small army of the Iraqi workers hired by the newly formed, London-based Iraq Project & Business Development Co. is grateful for work that starts at $2 a day to clear garbage, clean latrines and mop the palace floors.

A scene at the palace one typical afternoon this week underscored the contrasting economies that are part and parcel of KBR`s job here.

As several Iraqi supervisors assembled a group of carefully selected KBR cleaning recruits from Baghdad`s desperate work force, Saudi and Kuwaiti truckers making as much as 200 times the Iraqis` salaries were bringing in imported computers, desks, chairs and other furniture.

When asked specifically what is covered by KBR`s "task order" to serve the basic needs of the reconstruction agency, the ORHA official in Baghdad replied: "I guess the real question is, what doesn`t it cover?"

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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EDITORIAL


Set the Game Plan for Iraq

May 9, 2003

President Bush has instituted some overdue anger management for the State and Defense departments. His appointment Tuesday of veteran diplomat L. Paul Bremer III, who enjoys the support of both departments, as top civilian advisor for Iraq will help dampen feuding over reconstruction.

But unless the administration can settle on a longer-term plan for creating a more democratic Iraq, one that goes beyond getting U.N. sanctions lifted, Bremer may stumble like the man he`s replacing, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. An Iraqi interim government is supposed to be forming under U.S. protection, but its popular support is in doubt and the fragile coalition binding it could be quickly torn apart by infighting.

State and Defense Department tensions are nothing new. In the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger squabbled over American intervention abroad, including in Lebanon. The Clinton administration saw a replay of such a dispute over the Balkans.

Today, crusading neoconservatives in the Pentagon led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz butt heads with the more cautious Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The standoff infects almost every postwar event in Iraq, from the composition of a new Iraqi government to whether to include the United Nations and European allies in reconstruction. Instead of figuring out how to help Iraq, leading government officials have wasted precious time and energy battling each other. The administration is also now getting sidetracked in confrontations over how hard to pressure Iran over its nuclear facilities.

First things first: Iraq`s oil fields aren`t producing enough oil for domestic consumption and there have been three-day lines at some gas stations. Kuwait has had to supply Iraq with cooking fuel. That`s aside from the mountains of garbage, still-unsafe streets and flickering lights, if there is any power at all. Iran has used the chaos to increase support for radical Iraqi Shiites who want power for themselves.

Garner has relied partly on Saddam Hussein`s old governing apparatus of senior Baath Party members because this is the easiest course. Granted, any functioning Iraqi government will have to employ some ex-Baathists, whom the administration obviously regards as a better choice than the candidates of the Shiite mullahs. But subtlety is required. U.S. authorities need to vet police officers, university administrators and other officials by interviewing them and their neighbors and associates to weed out the torturers and the utterly corrupt.

Bigger questions still hang in the air. Will the European allies participate in economic reconstruction bidding, and if not, how will the administration persuade them to forgive billions in Iraqi prewar debt? What will be the U.N. role?

No matter how capable Bremer is, he can`t reinvent Iraq single-handedly. The longer the mystery remains about the administration`s intentions, the less confidence Iraqis will have that it actually has a plan, even a secret one.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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May 8, 2003


The Other "F" Word
"Chosen by the Grace of God"?
by BEN TRIPP

You could fill your lederhosen with razor blades and ride a bicycle down some steps. You could administer yourself a boiling-hot clyster of Drano and minced cactus. You could irritate a pride of lions whilst bedecked in a ham waistcoat. But why take the easy way out? It`s better to stand and fight. I refer to the deeply Sisyphean task of opposing the neofascist regime which has taken over the United States. There, I did it. I used the word `fascist`, which places me in that camp, even if the word was prefixed with the modifier `neo` as in `o neo f the worst ideas ever`.

It`s been a long time coming, and not just because of Bob Dole`s Viagra (humorous joke, get it? Long time never mind). For all its strenuous efforts, I could never give the Bush administration that much credit before. Fascism is such a heavy term, so loaded with images of greasy newsreel dictators in Sam Browne belts and tall boots. Too many commentators leapt on the `Orwellian` and `fascist` bandwagons too quickly into Bush`s sic volo, sic jubeo term of office. After all, wasn`t the WWI Sedition Act far worse than Ashcroft`s Junior Inquisition? How about the McCarthy Era, when a ventriloquist`s dummy nearly destroyed our nation`s freedoms, just to deny Dalton Trumbo the screenwriting credit for `Roman Holiday`? For a long time I couldn`t quite slap the `F` word, as fascism is coyly known among lefties, on Bush and his minions. No matter how naughty the Man Who Would be President might be, for my tastes he never hit that perfect Kafka note-- until recently. Him and his people weren`t really fascists. Just execrable excrudescent assholes. But 2003 has changed all that.

These people are fascists, and they make Mussolini look like a mezzafinook. There is no component of American liberty of which they are unwilling to relieve us, and no aspect of American life upon which they are unwilling to relieve themselves. Where to begin? First, we must define `fascism`. It is a term like `love`, about which it can be said that everybody knows exactly what it means, and nobody knows what they`re talking about. Luckily I know everything and so can clear the matter up, particularly if I consult Mussolini`s own diary, which I picked up on Ebay for a song (the song was `That`s Amore` as sung by Dean Martin). For those not fluent in Italian, I will paraphrase the definition before me in Il Duce`s crabbed hand:

Fascism is an extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society. The rise of Fascism relies upon the manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis. Based on fundamentalist revolutionary ideas, Fascism defines itself through intense xenophobia, militarism, and supremacist ideals. Although secular in nature, Fascism`s emphasis on mythic beliefs such as divine mandates, racial imperatives, and violent struggle places highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media. What a rush. Must buy Clara a new hat.

I couldn`t have said it better myself. If we accept this general definition of fascism, we can be forgiven for rushing to the bedroom and throwing some clean underwear into a portmanteau ere catching the next train to Toronto. But we must stand our ground, however eroded it may be. Our freedoms have been undermined at home. Our nation has engaged in an outrageous military adventure overseas, the tissue-thin justification for which has disappeared completely, leaving America in the awkward position yclept `hostile invader` by entities such as the United Nations (you remember them, those nice colored folks over on 39th Street?) Meanwhile our states have mostly gone bankrupt, the first tax cut during wartime since the 1840`s ­more wealth for the wealthy- is in the works while corporate feudalism runs rampant, our ability to respond to authentic terrorist threats has been hobbled, the voting system has been co-opted by digital pirates in the Republican party, the electoral system in general is hostage to big money, our healthcare system is in meltdown, our national budget is so far in the red we have to import ink from China just to keep up; the prison population is exploding while our schools implode, civil rights are verklempt and vivisepulturated, our businesses are folding by entire sectors while the military-industrial complex thrives, and our environment is sinking into crisis with the North Pole melted and environmental regulation evaporating like so much ozone. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ is sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom.

But because the American media has ceased to make its own news, relying instead on a kind of government-hosted charabanc tour for journalists, nobody is questioning this lunatic national retrenchment in a public forum- instead, we demonize Arabs and teenagers and black people and homosexuals and poor folks and drug users and anyone, God bless them, who has ever performed fellatio. And that`s only the tip of the scheisseberg. These are all harbingers and symptoms and outcomes of fascism. But still, fascism is such an extreme notion. Once could argue that these many fresh hells are the result of simple criminal mismanagement, and for some time I have been so inclined (to argue thus, not to criminally mismanage. For the latter I`d need an MBA.)

What specific enormity cemented the notion of Bush and his cabal as `fascists` in my mind? If I could sit out all of the above, surely nothing could compel me to apply the scarlet `F` to these vendible quantum-larrikins and their erstwhile leader, the Ivy-League demagogue bogtrotter George W. Bush. I can tell you the very moment, and if you missed it, it`s worth finding a dog-eared copy of the video and viewing it entire, although I caution you to keep a bucket handy- these images are too graphic for many American stomachs.

An aircraft carrier in the Pacific, about an hour from San Diego, California. You could row that far. A couple of jets on deck as props, lots of giddy sailors. Here comes an airplane! It lands in the accustomed manner. Out springs the Boy Prince, the Dauphin of D.C., the VIP of the GOP, George W. Bush in full military flight suit, with his ejector harness giving him the worst moose knuckle in presidential history. A bit of video for the election commercials just in case the Democrats don`t all curl up and die on their own, what`s the harm in that? I wish it was that simple. But what we really saw in that moment was a coup d`etat. The president isn`t supposed to wear a uniform. He`s a civilian. Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt strapped on a pistol now and then and we`ve had generals who made president before. That Kennedy fellow was a war hero, too, and Bush Senior, the one who got elected, did his bit in the Pacific while Grampy Prescott was supporting the Nazis in Europe. But when they were president none of these men put on military uniforms. They understood that there are three sacred lines with regard to American democracy that can never be crossed: the line between privilege and power, the line between Church and State, and the line between civilian and military leadership. Cross any of them, and you`re at fascism`s doorstep. Cross two, you`re on the threshold with your hand on the doorknob.

George W. Bush, son of unimaginable privilege, crossed the first line when he was selected to be president by the Supreme Court and accepted the job. He crossed the second line when he revealed his divine imperative, such as when (after the disaster of 9/11) he spoke of being "chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment." (attributed by Tim Goeglein, deputy director of White House public liaison and a barrel of laughs at any party.) When George climbed out of that airplane in his shiny new war suit, he didn`t just carry his own cute little self across the deck: son of privilege, chosen of God, and wearing a military uniform, he passed through the doorway from mere wickedness to fascism. Our struggle in the time ahead is to resist the urge to follow him.


Ben Tripp is a screenwriter and cartoonist. He can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp05082003.html

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Shadowy evil threatens our democracy


By Curt Andersen
News-Chronicle
The pyramids in Egypt were built about 4,500 years ago. Some of the massive structures were covered with smooth limestone or granite, which must have shimmered in the sunlight.

Over the millennia since their completion, most of the smooth limestone and granite was carted away under orders of this or that caliph to build the nearby city of Cairo.

Now that President Bush wants to bring democracy to Iraq, it appears he means to dismantle our democracy and then cart the chipped and cracked remains of what used to belong to us off to Baghdad.

Bush`s ironically named "Patriot Act" and its successor will undermine the rights of citizens in ways that would make earlier fascist governments smack their foreheads for not thinking of it first. This will become more obvious as Bush`s minions begin to pry into the affairs of regular citizens.

Many people who lead simple lives and commit no crimes might think they would be immune from government prying. Those who secretly buy or sell Packer pulltabs or who deal in the underground economy might be surprised to find themselves being investigated. Then there`s the bad-boy investigator who wants your boat, your car or your house. He might have to get you in trouble. If it can happen in the movies ...

Back in the 1950s, there was a religious television program that had a theme song with the line, "If everyone lit just one little candle, What a bright world this would be."

Evil lurks in darkness. We picture burglars hiding in the shadows, but those are just obvious, petty miscreants. Those who hide their intent pose a greater threat than common cat burglars or cattle rustlers.

The Bush administration has been dealing blow after blow to the environment. They release information in a cleverly worded new attack on environmental regulations on a Friday afternoon, or just as a long holiday weekend is about to begin. That way, the stories are not widely read, even if they are printed. By Monday it`s already "old news."

This is a very clever idea, though manipulative and dishonest. Why is everything kept in the dark?

Bush promised to return integrity to the White House. Instead, he has brought his oil and munitions buddies together to squeeze the lifeblood out of our economy. Many suspect the real reason for attacking Iraq is to steal its oil. Bush is an oilman, and birds of a feather flock together.

We should recognize the real cost of a gallon of gas includes the deaths of service people, poor health for returning veterans, the cost of aircraft-carrier groups and cruise missiles and perhaps revenge attacks for centuries to come.

Because the price doesn`t show up at the gas pump, people don`t care. People like to crunch numbers; how much does gasoline actually cost? If part of the cost is hidden in your income taxes, it`s hard to calculate the real cost of fuel.

If we had to pay the real cost of gasoline, we wouldn`t need any Congressional push for hydrogen fuel cells or efficient engines. Citizens would be voting for both with their pocketbooks. That would tip the oilmen on their heads. You and I know it, the automobile manufacturers know it, and you can bet the oily boys know it.

Andersen is a lifelong resident of the Green Bay area and a Navy veteran. He owns a small business and is an adjunct instructor at NWTC. He is vice president of the Clean Water Action Council. His column runs Wednesdays. Contact him via e-mail at [e-mail]

http://www.greenbaynewschron.com/page.html?article=119809

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SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?
Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-05
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.

The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Com-mittee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities.

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”

The hostility goes both ways. A Pentagon official who works for Luti told me, “I did a job when the intelligence community wasn’t doing theirs. We recognized the fact that they hadn’t done the analysis. We were providing information to Wolfowitz that he hadn’t seen before. The intelligence community is still looking for a mission like they had in the Cold War, when they spoon-fed the policymakers.”

A Pentagon adviser who has worked with Special Plans dismissed any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic whining. “Shulsky and Luti won the policy debate,” the adviser said. “They beat ’em—they cleaned up against State and the C.I.A. There’s no mystery why they won—because they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who won.” He added, “I’d love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won.”



According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.

Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction had been a matter of concern to the international community since before the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past. At some point, he assembled thousands of chemical warheads, along with biological weapons, and made a serious attempt to build a nuclear-weapons program. What has been in dispute is how much of that capacity, if any, survived the 1991 war and the years of United Nations inspections, no-fly zones, and sanctions that followed. In addition, since September 11th there have been recurring questions about Iraq’s ties to terrorists. A February poll showed that seventy-two per cent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks, although no definitive evidence of such a connection has been presented.

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.”

Even before September 11th, Richard Perle, who was then the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was making a similar argument about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Iraq’s weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”

Last October, an article in the Times reported that Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. “I’m told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now . . . were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things.” He went on to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know. So in comes the daily briefer”—from the C.I.A.—“and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. ‘Gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that? Has somebody thought of this?’” At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.”

If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C., an umbrella organization for diverse groups opposed to Saddam, is constantly seeking out Iraqi defectors. The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.

There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years. Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. For years, Chalabi has had the support of prominent members of the American Enterprise Institute and other conservatives. Chalabi had some Democratic supporters, too, including James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A.

There was another level to Chalabi’s relationship with the United States: in the mid-nineteen-nineties, the C.I.A. was secretly funnelling millions of dollars annually to the I.N.C. Those payments ended around 1996, a former C.I.A. Middle East station chief told me, essentially because the agency had doubts about Chalabi’s integrity. (In 1992, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. He has always denied any wrongdoing.) “You had to treat them with suspicion,” another former Middle East station chief said of Chalabi’s people. “The I.N.C. has a track record of manipulating information because it has an agenda. It’s a political unit—not an intelligence agency.”



In August, 1995, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’s weapons program, defected to Jordan, with his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel. They brought with them crates of documents containing detailed information about Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction—much of which was unknown to the U.N. inspection teams that had been on the job since 1991—and were interviewed at length by the U.N. inspectors. In 1996, Saddam Hussein lured the brothers back with a promise of forgiveness, and then had them killed. The Kamels’ information became a major element in the Bush Administration’s campaign to convince the public of the failure of the U.N. inspections.

Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam’s regime “was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.”

The full record of Hussein Kamel’s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates—Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. “You have an important role in Iraq,” Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. “You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found “any traces of destruction,” Kamel responded, “Yes, it was done before you came in.” He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. “We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,” Kamel explained later in the debriefing. “I don’t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”

Kamel also cast doubt on the testimony of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994. Hamza settled in the United States with the help of the I.N.C. and has been a highly vocal witness concerning Iraq’s alleged nuclear ambitions. Kamel told the U.N. interviewers, however, that Hamza was “a professional liar.” He went on, “He worked with us, but he was useless and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. . . . He was even interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go.”

After his defection, Hamza became a senior fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington disarmament group, whose president, David Albright, was a former U.N. weapons inspector. In 1998, Albright told me, he and Hamza sent publishers a proposal for a book tentatively entitled “Fizzle: Iraq and the Atomic Bomb,” which described how Iraq had failed in its quest for a nuclear device. There were no takers, Albright said, and Hamza eventually “started exaggerating his experiences in Iraq.” The two men broke off contact. In 2000, Hamza published “Saddam’s Bombmaker,” a vivid account claiming that by 1991, when the Gulf War began, Iraq was far closer than had been known to the production of a nuclear weapon. Jeff Stein, a Washington journalist who collaborated on the book, told me that Hamza’s account was “absolutely on the level, allowing for the fact that any memoir puts the author at the center of events, and therefore there is some exaggeration.” James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A., said of Hamza, “I think highly of him and I have no reason to disbelieve the claims that he’s made.” Hamza could not be reached for comment. On April 26th, according to the Times, he returned to Iraq as a member of a group of exiles designated by the Pentagon to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure. He is to be responsible for atomic energy.



The advantages and disadvantages of relying on defectors has been a perennial source of dispute within the American intelligence community—as Shulsky himself noted in a 1991 textbook on intelligence that he co-authored. Despite their importance, he wrote, “it is difficult to be certain that they are genuine. . . . The conflicting information provided by several major Soviet defectors to the United States . . . has never been completely sorted out; it bedeviled U.S. intelligence for a quarter of a century.” Defectors can provide unique insight into a repressive system. But such volunteer sources, as Shulsky writes, “may be greedy; they may also be somewhat unbalanced people who wish to bring some excitement into their lives; they may desire to avenge what they see as ill treatment by their government; or they may be subject to blackmail.” There is a strong incentive to tell interviewers what they want to hear.

With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A. Misstatements and inconsistencies in I.N.C. defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of U.N. weapons inspections, which ended a few days before the American assault. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, compiled and examined the information that had been made public and concluded that the U.N. inspections had failed to find evidence to support the defectors’ claims.

For example, many newspapers published extensive interviews with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who, with the I.N.C.’s help, fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed that he had visited twenty hidden facilities that he believed were built for the production of biological and chemical weapons. One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad. Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, that the United States had “firsthand descriptions” of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri’s claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. “No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far,” he said.

Almost immediately after September 11th, the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks. In an interview on October 14, 2001, conducted jointly by the Times and “Frontline,” the public-television program, Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the September 11th operation “was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam,” and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.

In separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain’s MI6. The C.I.A. offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. “We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison,” the former station chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane—which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training—when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.”

Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war.



A former Bush Administration intelligence official recalled a case in which Chalabi’s group, working with the Pentagon, produced a defector from Iraq who was interviewed overseas by an agent from the D.I.A. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi’s people. Last summer, the D.I.A. report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, the London Times described how the defector had trained with Al Qaeda terrorists in the late nineteen-nineties at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received instructions in the use of chemical and biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity and relocated. A month later, however, a team of C.I.A. agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. “He says, ‘No, that’s not what I said,’” the former intelligence official told me. “He said, ‘I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn’t Al Qaeda.’ He never saw any chemical or biological training.” Afterward, the former official said, “the C.I.A. sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing.” But the C.I.A. rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. “I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn’t.”

The former intelligence official went on, “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”



Shulsky’s work has deep theoretical underpinnings. In his academic and think-tank writings, Shulsky, the son of a newspaperman—his father, Sam, wrote a nationally syndicated business column—has long been a critic of the American intelligence community. During the Cold War, his area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. Like Wolfowitz, he was a student of Leo Strauss’s, at the University of Chicago. Both men received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy, and became one of the foremost conservative émigré scholars. He was widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. The Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush Administration. In addition to Wolfowitz, they include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to Rumsfeld. Strauss’s influence on foreign-policy decision-making (he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself) is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.

How Strauss’s views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. As it happens, Shulsky himself explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)”—in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality. In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss’s “gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré’s novels.” Echoing one of Strauss’s major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment.

The agency’s analysts, Shulsky and Schmitt argue, “were generally reluctant throughout the Cold War to believe that they could be deceived about any critical question by the Soviet Union or other Communist states. History has shown this view to have been extremely naïve.” They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an “antidote” to the C.I.A.’s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, “whose intellectual world was so different from our own.”

Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”

Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, told me, “Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way.” Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, put the Straussians’ position this way: “They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views.” Holmes added, “The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s idea—actually Plato’s—that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.”

When I asked one of Strauss’s staunchest defenders, Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political science at Chicago, about the use of Strauss’s views in the area of policymaking, he told me that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount of deception is essential in government. “That people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious—‘If I tell you the truth I can’t but help the enemy.’” But there is nothing in Strauss’s work, he added, that “favors preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgment. If you could have got rid of Hitler in the nineteen-thirties, who’s not going to be in favor of that? You don’t need Strauss to reach that conclusion.”

Some former intelligence officials believe that Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves. Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, “Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group—the Straussian view.” The group’s members, Cannistraro said, “reinforce each other because they’re the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they’ve never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there.”



The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans has been accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. One internal Pentagon memorandum went so far as to suggest that terrorism experts in the government and outside it had deliberately “downplayed or sought to disprove” the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. “For many years, there has been a bias in the intelligence community” against defectors, the memorandum said. It urged that two analysts working with Shulsky be given the authority to “investigate linkages to Iraq” by having access to the “proper debriefing of key Iraqi defectors.”

A former C.I.A. task-force leader who is a consultant to the Bush Administration said that many analysts in the C.I.A. are convinced that the Chalabi group’s defector reports on weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda have produced little of value, but said that the agency “is not fighting it.” He said that the D.I.A. had studied the information as well. “Even the D.I.A. can’t find any value in it.” (The Pentagon, asked for comment, denied that there had been disputes between the C.I.A. and Special Plans over the validity of intelligence.)

In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.” Because the C.I.A.’s analysts are now on the defensive, “they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”

“They see themselves as outsiders, ” a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people. He added, “There’s a high degree of paranoia. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.”



More than a year’s worth of increasingly bitter debate over the value and integrity of the Special Plans intelligence came to a halt in March, when President Bush authorized the war against Iraq. After a few weeks of fighting, Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, leaving American forces to declare victory against a backdrop of disorder and uncertainty about the country’s future. Ahmad Chalabi and the I.N.C. continued to provoke fights within the Bush Administration. The Pentagon flew Chalabi and hundreds of his supporters, heavily armed, into Iraq, amid tight security, over angry objections from the State Department. Chalabi is now establishing himself in Baghdad. His advocates in the Pentagon point out that he is not only a Shiite, like the majority of Iraqis, but also, as one scholar put it, “a completely Westernized businessman” (he emigrated to England with his parents in 1958, when he was a boy), which is one reason the State Department doubts whether he can gain support among Iraqis.

Chalabi is not the only point of contention, however. The failure, as of last week, to find weapons of mass destruction in places where the Pentagon’s sources confidently predicted they would be found has reanimated the debate on the quality of the office’s intelligence. A former high-level intelligence official told me that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. “They came up with nothing,” the official said. “Never found a single Scud.”

Since then, there have been a number of false alarms and a tip that weapons may have been destroyed in the last days before the war, but no solid evidence. On April 22nd, Hans Blix, hours before he asked the U.N. Security Council to send his team back to Iraq, told the BBC, “I think it’s been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been so shaky.”

There is little self-doubt or second-guessing in the Pentagon over the failure to immediately find the weapons. The Pentagon adviser to Special Plans told me he believed that the delay “means nothing. We’ve got to wait to get all the answers from Iraqi scientists who will tell us where they are.” Similarly, the Pentagon official who works for Luti said last week, “I think they’re hidden in the mountains or transferred to some friendly countries. Saddam had enough time to move them.” There were suggestions from the Pentagon that Saddam might be shipping weapons over the border to Syria. “It’s bait and switch,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Bait them into Iraq with weapons of mass destruction. And, when they aren’t found, there’s this whole bullshit about the weapons being in Syria.”

In Congress, a senior legislative aide said, “Some members are beginning to ask and to wonder, but cautiously.” For now, he told me, “the members don’t have the confidence to say that the Administration is off base.” He also commented, “For many, it makes little difference. We vanquished a bad guy and liberated the Iraqi people. Some are astute enough to recognize that the alleged imminent W.M.D. threat to the U.S. was a pretext. I sometimes have to pinch myself when friends or family ask with incredulity about the lack of W.M.D., and remind myself that the average person has the idea that there are mountains of the stuff over there, ready to be tripped over. The more time elapses, the more people are going to wonder about this, but I don’t think it will sway U.S. public opinion much. Everyone loves to be on the winning side.”



Weapons may yet be found. Iraq is a big country, as the Administration has repeatedly pointed out in recent weeks. In a speech last week, President Bush said, “We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.” Meanwhile, if the American advance hasn’t uncovered stashes of weapons of mass destruction, it has turned up additional graphic evidence of the brutality of the regime. But Saddam Hussein’s cruelty was documented long before September 11th, and was not the principal reason the Bush Administration gave to the world for the necessity of war.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a strong supporter of the President’s decision to overthrow Saddam. “I do think building a democratic secular state in Iraq justifies everything we’ve done,” Kerrey, who is now president of New School University, in New York, told me. “But they’ve taken the intelligence on weapons and expanded it beyond what was justified.” Speaking of the hawks, he said, “It appeared that they understood that to get the American people on their side they needed to come up with something more to say than ‘We’ve liberated Iraq and got rid of a tyrant.’ So they had to find some ties to weapons of mass destruction and were willing to allow a majority of Americans to incorrectly conclude that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with the World Trade Center. Overemphasizing the national-security threat made it more difficult to get the rest of the world on our side. It was the weakest and most misleading argument we could use.” Kerrey added, “It appears that they have the intelligence. The problem is, they didn’t like the conclusions.”

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030512fa_fact

[Joerver]

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[Joerver]

Laboring Under False Impressions
May 7, 2003
By monkeyboy

I was at an estate sale recently, and overheard an appraiser tell a potential customer that the reason the coffee table they were discussing in front of them was made with such an incredible attention to detail was that "there were a lot of people working on each piece. Labor was cheap then, and not only could they afford to pay people very little to do a lot of work, but the labor force was so huge in comparison to the number of jobs available, that only the most talented craftsmen were employed."

Knowing that coffee tables didn`t exist until the 1920`s, and judging from its stylings, the piece the appraiser was talking about had to have been made during the Great Depression. This got me to thinking about the history of the labor movement in the U.S.

It seems there was a time that most people had to struggle just to survive. There were numerous economic depressions which put people in a state of absolute despair and caused great hardship, wherein only the strongest survived; Economic Darwinism, if you will.

From that sprang a group of people who were willing to make great sacrifices in order to bring the working people out of the depths, and laws were created that protected the proletariat from the railroad barons and the J. Paul Gettys of the world.

They literally fought in the streets, were killed, jailed, and blacklisted. And what was created out of that was the baby boomers, who in turn gave birth to the Hippies, who in turn gave birth to the X and Y generations.

Now we, the weaklings who never really put in a hard day`s work in our lives (I mean plowing a field behind a mule, on an empty stomach) all sit in front of our surround-sound televisions watching WWF and Faux News, while the powers that be, who have lulled us to sleep, are convincing us that those who are trying to wake us up and tell us that we`re being robbed of our future are nothing but a bunch of socialist, liberal whiners.

Pay no attention to those people. Put a flag on your SUV, fill the tank with Premium, and drive around aimlessly, because ya can, because yer A`murkins. Leave the rest to us, we`ll tell you when to worry and what to worry about (liberals, muslims, atheists).

Never mind the fact that children at one time were worked to death in this country, that accidents claimed lives at an alarming rate, and that once injured, there was no recourse except the charity of friends and family, or in their absence, the gutter.

The right-wingers of this country, safely ensconced in the warm protective bubble of workman`s comp insurance, Social Security (for the time being, at least), OSHA laws, and affordable healthcare (though not by the standards of other first world countries), actually believe what Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and other right wingnut pundits tell them about the evils of socialism, all the while reaping its benefits and forgetting the sacrifices of those in the past.

In places like Chicago and San Francisco, people picked up a stick and waded into the riot, hoping to cause just a little more concern to the powers that be, each individual risking much more to themselves than they could ever cause to their enemies.

And when all is said and done, and when the Cheneys and Bushes and Rumsfields of the world are driving their golf carts into the sunset, we`ll be left outside the country club, our hands grasping the wrought iron gates and peering in after them, wondering why we can no longer afford an SUV, or a plastic flag to fly from it.

It`s all been taken from us, one bit at a time, while we were surfing between Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, wondering why they all looked the same, why we even needed a remote for the television, other than the fact the salesman told us we did.

We`ll survive though, even if we have to send our kids to work in one of Cheney`s factories. The one without ventilation, the one that no longer has to adhere to those pesky, now defunct, fire codes, the one without safety guards on the machines.



© Democratic Underground, LLC

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/05/07_labor…

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The new caliphs
US and Britain seek a free hand in Iraq

Leader
Saturday May 10, 2003
The Guardian

Common sense demands that the UN`s weapons inspectors return to Iraq without any further delay. As Tony Blair reaffirmed recently, the threat thought to be posed by Iraqi weapons was the principal reason for launching the war. Without independent, international verification of Iraq`s capability, any future US and British evidence showing their action to be justified may not be believed, as Britain`s former UN envoy, Sir Crispin Tickell, trenchantly noted yesterday.

The US argument that security concerns prevent the UN`s return will not wash; its own search teams have been at work for weeks, although they have found nothing of any great significance. Suspicions thus gain ground that Washington and London exaggerated the WMD threat for political purposes, that their intelligence was either faulty or used selectively, and that they now have something to hide. John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the UN, says blithely that Washington sees no role for UN inspectors in the foreseeable future. In this, Britain, swallowing private misgivings, appears ready to acquiesce. Despite the centrality of the WMD issue, no mention is made of resumed inspections in the sweeping new US-British security council resolution. No ground is given to Russia`s demand that Hans Blix`s work be completed before the council finally lifts sanctions and surrenders its powers. What an irony, and what a disgrace, that after years of complaining about Saddam`s obstruction of inspections, the US is now itself obstructing them.

The new joint draft resolution is in other respects a deeply unsatisfactory document. Common sense again suggests that the UN should be afforded a leading role, as in Afghanistan, in facilitating the creation of a post-Saddam system of governance. Impartial UN mediators would be far better positioned to instil confidence, among Iraqis and in the wider region, in a process that will at best be complex and arduous. The contrary US-British intention to direct political reform via a new legal entity, the "Authority", controlled by them, and with only an advisory, non-executive role for a UN "special coordinator" is ill-conceived and potentially divisive.

The resolution envisages a similarly tight US-British grip, also for at least one year, on exploitation of and revenue from Iraq`s oil once UN controls, specifically the oil-for-food programme, are phased out. The proposed international oversight by a board of absentee luminaries drawn from the UN, IMF and World Bank is no real safeguard against the sort of abuse EU commissioner Poul Nielson warned about yesterday. Nor is it responsible to assume that the 60% of Iraqis who rely on UN-administered food aid will soon be able to do without it. While the US and Britain now - finally - accept their obligations under international law, what this resolution boils down to is legitimisation of an illegal war and of an open-ended occupation. It gives them a free hand in Iraq. What it will give Iraqis is much less clear.

The US and Britain anticipate less determined opposition at the UN than was the case before the war. Perhaps their calculations will be proved wrong again. Whatever the outcome, Mr Blair still has a lot of explaining to do. Where is the "vital role" for the UN that he promised at Hillsborough? This most definitely is not it. Has he been strung along again by George Bush? It seems that way. Can the US therefore be trusted on the related matter of the Middle East peace process? Just how long will Britain stay in Iraq? And where are the weapons for which the war was ostensibly fought?


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Cholera threat in Basra
Ewen MacAskill in Baghdad
Saturday May 10, 2003
The Guardian

Conditions in hospitals throughout Iraq have descended to new levels of squalor because of a combination of looting, post-Saddam power struggles and the failure of the US and aid agencies to provide medicine and equipment.

International health organisations warn that the Iraqi medical service, having struggled through 12 years of sanctions, could collapse.

In Basra, doctors are awaiting the results of tests into 17 suspected cases of cholera at two hospitals. Residents have been drinking from rivers contaminated with sewage since water supplies were disrupted at the start of the war. The World Health Organisation (WHO), which has a surveillance team in Basra, warned of a possible cholera epidemic.

Even before the war, Iraqi hospitals were short of medicines and equipment that were blocked by international sanctions, mainly for cancer treatment, but conditions have deteriorated sharply over the last month.

Ruth Walkup, from the US department of health and human services, said the WHO was worried "that the very fragile system that worked [before the war] is getting ready to fall apart if it`s not bolstered very quickly".

At Qadissiya hospital in Sadr City, home to 2 million of Baghdad`s poorest inhabitants, doctors are struggling to cope with power shortages, lack of water and severe shortages of medicine. The wards are overflowing and dirty.

With no ministry of health, the doctors are trying to do their jobs in the middle of a power struggle between Shia clerics, supported by gunmen, and US forces for control of Qadissiya and other hospitals.

A western doctor, working for an international aid agency, described the hospitals as the "new frontline". Shia clerics and gunmen took over the protection of Qadissiya to prevent further looting. US patrols initially avoided confrontation but on Thursday night were reported to have seized control of the hospital, only to lose it later in the day.

A month after the fall of Baghdad, neither the US nor international aid agencies are providing enough supplies. Iraqis express resentment that the speed and efficiency of the US war machine is not being directed at postwar problems.

Kevin Henry, the director for the humanitarian group Care, said it remained very difficult to deliver needed health supplies into Iraq. "Things are still quite chaotic and we have only been able to very slowly move additional supplies and people in. That`s in large measure due to the breakdown in law and order, and that has ripple effects on everything else."

He added: "We have now moved in two or three convoys of supplies for hospitals but we have encountered some security problems. Our warehouse in Baghdad was first hit by a missile and then looted."

In Basra, the US-British coalition said almost a month ago that it would be days before the water supply was restored. But, while the pumps are working, the pipes are not.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Blair could destroy euro support
Britain in Europe campaign director warns of mass resignations if the PM offers nothing but `warm words` in his forthcoming statement

Patrick Wintour and Sarah Hall
Saturday May 10, 2003
The Guardian

The pro-euro campaign will suffer mass resignations and speedy collapse if Tony Blair only offers "warm words" about Britain joining the euro in the government`s imminent statement, the Britain in Europe campaign director, Simon Buckby, warned last night.

Mr Blair and the chancellor, Gordon Brown, are finalising their statement on British membership of the euro in the light of the Treasury`s assessment of the five tests. The assessment will state that the British economy has not yet unambiguously converged with Europe.

The cross-party Britain in Europe campaign has been fighting a rearguard action to ensure Mr Blair keeps open the option of a referendum in this parliament.

In his strongest warning yet of the issues at stake, Mr Buckby said the organisation would suffer mass resignations if the government statement did not set out a clear road map to membership of the euro.

Mr Buckby would also feel forced to quit. He said: "How could I motivate my staff, invigorate senior businessmen, trade unionists and voluntary organisations without a believable route map to joining the euro soon?"

The disintegration of Britain in Europe, set up in December 1999, would be embarrassing for Mr Blair who has repeatedly promised that Britain`s destiny is to join the euro.

Mr Buckby said: "Business wants to know it is the government`s intention, not just their hope, that we will join the euro in this parliament. There can be no more wait and see - there has to be a game plan, with a transparent political strategy, to secure membership."

He also warned the prime minister`s credibility was on the line with many businessmen and politicians. "There are many business people who made investment decisions on the basis of assurances about the euro that they believe they were given by the prime minister. If the prime minister lets these people down now, he will lose a lot of political credibility. And to avoid a flight of investors abroad, there has to be a series of measurable steps the government will take to join the euro. We cannot rely on private assurances.

"If the political direction is not clear, the prime minister will be seen by his European colleagues as another John Major or Harold Wilson, weak and dithering and as a consequence Britain will be pushed to the margins.

"After 50 years of vacillation, Tony Blair has got an historic opportunity."

Some pro-European ministers have privately acknowledged that a referendum cannot be won in the next 18 months, making it necessary to defer a referendum until after the general election. The Europe minister, Denis MacShane, made that suggestion in an interview in the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Serra.

But pro-Europeans are privately claiming growing confidence that Mr Blair will commit himself to addressing the issue again in this parliament, even though such confidence has not been reflected in the briefings emerging from the Treasury over the past month.

Euro-enthusiast MPs even believe the chancellor`s statement - which they expect to be delivered in the week before MPs` Whitsun recess - will pave the way for a referendum to be held next year.

One Labour MP who has held discussions with the prime minister and the 11 cabinet ministers he counts as in favour of a referendum, says he is convinced the statement will be far more positive than media reports have suggested, and will rule that four of the five economic tests have been met, with only the issue of flexibility still a problem.

The backbencher said: "Unless I`ve been misled, or have been naive, the papers will have got it totally wrong if they run stories insisting a referendum`s being completely ruled out. A deal is being hammered out at the moment, and is likely to rule out a referendum this year - but not next year."

The MP said Mr Blair and Mr Brown were locked in discussions "every minute of every day", and that, once the statement had been drafted "every line will be fought over".


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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May 10, 2003

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-674857,00.html

Sanctions busting
The US resolution on Iraq deserves support


Almost from the moment they were imposed, sanctions on Iraq have been argued over by members of the United Nations Security Council. Now the second Gulf war is over, and Saddam Hussein has been deposed, but the row over sanctions continues. The parties to the debate, however, have swapped sides. Now the US is trying to end sanctions while France and Russia seek to continue them.

For years France and Russia have been calling for the relaxation of sanctions, pressing, at times successfully, for the measures to be more flexible. As argued by Kenneth Pollack in his masterly survey of US Iraq policy The Threatening Storm, their activities played an important role in persuading members of the US foreign policy establishment that sanctions were unsustainable. Long before George W. Bush arrived at the White House, staff in the State Department and the CIA had become convinced that Saddam was winning his battle to destroy the sanctions regime and that military action was the only remaining method of containing him.

It is therefore a rich irony that France and Russia now find themselves resisting US calls to remove sanctions. The two countries make an entirely logical point. The sanctions were intended to remain until Iraq had been certified as free of weapons of mass destruction. It has not been certified as free, therefore the sanctions must remain. Entirely logical though it may seem, it is also ridiculous. The situation in Iraq has changed so completely that the original conditions for establishing or removing sanctions are irrelevant.

It is only a little unkind to suggest that France and Russia are keener on sanctions against the allied occupation in Iraq than they were when Saddam was in charge. Their motive is not simply spite against President Bush. Control of the oil revenues bestows power and the two nations are reluctant to see the United Nations lose effective control. Yet it makes sense for the countries grappling with the complex problems on the ground to be given the freedom to attempt to solve them. Those UN countries who decided not to be on the ground must now face the consequences of being powerless.

Fortunately, Presidents Chirac and Putin seem unlikely to push their view to a final veto. When the so-called second resolution on the war was being discussed among the permanent member of the Security Council, the dissidents had the comfort of knowing that they might not need to cast their veto. This time, swing states such as Chile are already making it clear that they will back the US on lifting sanctions.

The likely outcome of the Chirac-Putin opposition is not, then, withdrawal or defeat for the US draft resolution. It is a protracted negotiation over its exact terms. There is a natural date by which such discussions must finish - June 3, when the authority of the UN over the Oil-for-Food programme expires. There is the complication of a UN ambassadors` mission to Africa leaving next Thursday for 12 days, but there is still time after their return for agreement to be reached.

The draft resolution is a fairly bold document, perhaps bolder than the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would regard as ideal. This leaves room for minor concessions to be made for the sake of saving sensitive faces. Perhaps, for instance, the UN inspectors might be given a continuing role policing the arms embargo. The international advisory board on oil revenues could also be given a little more power. Essentially, however, the terms of the US resolution are correct. They deserve support.

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May 10, 2003
Defining the U.N. Role in Iraq

Since the diplomatic meltdown at the Security Council in March, the Bush administration has treated the United Nations with disdain, giving it only a minimal role in the reconstruction of Iraq. That would remain largely so under a new resolution presented to the Security Council yesterday, but the American plan would at least bring the U.N. back into play and might begin to heal the divisions produced by Washington`s decision to go to war.

The resolution amounts to a grudging admission by the United States that it needs some help from the U.N. if it hopes to get Iraq back on its feet and on course toward becoming a democratic model for the Arab world. Only the U.N. can confer legitimacy on American occupation, end sanctions, open the door to substantial international reconstruction aid and attest to the representative nature of Iraq`s future government. Judging from the initial reactions, including France`s, Security Council agreement seems likely later this month. Passage of the resolution would show that France, Russia and Germany, all of whom opposed the war, are now willing to cooperate with the United States.

Washington is eager to have the U.N. lift oil export sanctions, which have clearly outlived their original purpose. More questionably, it wants future petroleum revenues to be entrusted temporarily to a new assistance fund, which would largely be under American and British control. The U.N. would have only a limited oversight role through its representation on the new assistance fund`s advisory board, on which the World Bank and International Monetary Fund would also be represented.

The U.N. is also being asked to grant American and British occupation forces legal authority to reshape Iraq`s institutions. The U.N. would have only a small role. A special coordinator to be appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan would take part, along with American, British and Iraqi representatives, in rebuilding local and national governing institutions. Regrettably, the United States seems intent on starting an interim government later this month, before the likely arrival of this U.N. coordinator.

Washington stubbornly insists on bypassing the U.N. altogether on the sensitive issue of unconventional weapons. Unless American claims about weapons discoveries can be independently verified, they will be widely distrusted. The people best suited to verify any findings are the international arms control professionals already assembled and trained by the U.N.

Despite the resolution`s broad reach, it still leaves many important questions unresolved, like, for example, the extent to which the vast debts incurred by Saddam Hussein`s regime will be honored. Even so, its passage would mark a welcome step back toward international cooperation on Iraq.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 10, 2003
Karl Rove`s Campaign Strategy: It`s the Terror, Stupid
By FRANCIS X. CLINES


ANCHESTER, N.H.
Hailed as the White House`s political genius, Karl Rove was as ebullient and unrevealing as the Great Oz in journeying here this week for no apparent reason. He seemed to be scouting restlessly for some Tin Man or Cowardly Lion among the passel of Democrats on the campaign road that passes through here next winter.

"A complete nerd," Mr. Rove said by way of smiling self-introduction to political science students at St. Anselm College.

But a canny enough nerd at that. Crowds of political junkies reached to touch the hem of his garment, but Mr. Rove was no James Carville strewing raw-meat quotations of Machiavellian cuteness. He amiably disclosed very little about the president`s re-election strategy. Until, that is, a student asked about the war in Iraq.

"First of all, it`s the battle of Iraq, not the war," Mr. Rove carefully corrected. He went on to describe a far larger and longer war against terrorism that he sees clearly, perchance fortuitously, stretching well toward Election Day 2004.

If there were any doubt, Mr. Rove served notice to any and all Democratic challengers that feeding the aura of a wartime president, which has been bolstering Mr. Bush`s standing in opinion polls by 15 points and more, would remain his campaigners` first priority across the next 18 months.

He made the Bush strategy clear: It`s the terror, not the economy, stupid, even if the nation is suffering rolling deficits and relentless unemployment, and despite Mr. Bush`s serial tax cuts for the captains of industry. Democrats may want to talk health care and other economic issues, but they will have to grapple their way through a patriotic blitz of a campaign, if Mr. Rove has his red-white-and-blue way. Democrats can rightly fear an "October surprise" coming color-coded by Tom Ridge next time around.

"The country has not been hit since 9/11," Mr. Rove took care to note, as if tracking a new gross domestic product index as he fielded a question about the civil rights strictures of the Patriot Act.

A few days earlier, the president was rarely mentioned in the opposition`s primary debate in South Carolina, where nine Democrats tacitly conceded what a difficult target he is right now. When they cited the Iraq war it was mainly in excoriating one another`s positions rather than Mr. Bush`s handling of it. They could be seen struggling to work out believable critiques of the president`s stewardship of homeland security within the bounds of patriotism and the confines of their long primary trek.

The difficulty of the Democrats` task was exemplified after some party leaders tried to complain about political crassness in the president`s cheeky performance in fighter pilot regalia at the carrier-deck victory tableau. Within half a news cycle, analysts turned back on the Democrats to ask whether they were already slipping into pre-emptive sore losing.

"This is not a country built on envy," Mr. Rove advised. He was speaking of "confiscatory" federal taxes on the wealthy but offering a remark that serves well as a larger caution for campaigning Democrats. They can only watch next year when Mr. Bush carries out a grand Rove strategem and presides at a Republican renomination convention in the heart of Democratic New York City. This will be within staging distance of 9/11`s ground zero, site of an earlier memorable scene of Mr. Bush atop the rubble, exhorting the nation through a bullhorn.

Mr. Rove and the other Bush lieutenants know they cannot afford to be heavy-handed about the campaign implications of the New York visit. At the same time, Democrats must grudgingly concede that Mr. Bush is entitled as president to be leading a commemoration of the nation`s continuing grief within days of his renomination.

Mr. Rove seemed rather pleased at one student`s question about whether the convention was designed to "play off the emotions of 9/11." With obvious relish, he alleged that it was the Democrats who had schemed too much in choosing a July convention in order to "booby-trap" the Republicans into a mid-August date, which would have left them competing for attention with the Summer Olympics in Athens. The choice of New York as August fades into September was the checkmate result, Mr. Rove said, not quite gloating but enjoying the opening call to battle.

Mr. Rove is particularly curious about the Democrats` challenge in terms of a different sort of war. His true passion in the approaching fray seems to test fully a pet theory that in the current 50-50 standoff of the parties, even a narrow G.O.P. incumbency offers a whip-hand opportunity to secure a long-lasting party dominance. "That`s the situation we face, and we are the governing party," Mr. Rove declared, alerting the students to what the Democrats already know.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Das Thema Spam ist eines der Hauptthemen augenblicklich in USA.

washingtonpost.com
Choking on Spam


By Ellen Goodman

Saturday, May 10, 2003; Page A23


BOSTON -- Thus begins another day in the Internet cafe. I arrive at the office, uncap my java, turn on the computer and begin consuming the typical American breakfast: coffee and spam.

On my electronic plate I find the usual fare: several offers to enlarge my penis, an opportunity to lose weight while I sleep, a chance to get a cheaper mortgage, get out of debt and buy prescription drugs online -- all while watching XXX-rated teenagers.

With the only utensil at hand -- a plastic delete button -- I pick at my food. Fifteen minutes, 138 deletes, one carpal and one tunnel later, I have been tricked into opening three spams and, probably, trashing as many real e-mails with "Hi" in the subject line. Good morning, Spamerica.

In case you didn`t notice, this month marks the silver anniversary of that fateful moment in 1978 when a salesman at Digital Equipment Corp. typed out the first hundred unsolicited sales pitches one address at a time. Today, spam has become cheap, portable and as indigestible as its namesake.

As much as half of all e-mail is spam, clogging the central artery of the electronic communications body. AOL blocks as many as 2.3 billion spams a day. One Internet service provider pays 12 percent to 15 percent of its gross revenue for anti-spam services. And anti-spammers figure that it`s costing businesses $10 billion a year in time spent riding the delete button.

In the e-world, spam has become the real four-letter word, called everything from "pollution" to "the organized crime of the Internet" to "the toxic sea." We`ve officially arrived at a tipping point where even techies notorious for wanting the government to keep its hands off the Internet are calling for help.

In just the past few weeks, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo formed a joint assault on spam. Virginia passed a law that would send a spammer to the slammer. The Federal Trade Commission held a conference that bravely put spammers and anti-spammers in the same room. And in Congress, Sen. Charles Schumer has announced legislation to create a "do-not-spam" registry, while Rep. Zoe Lofgren wants a law to force labels on spammers and offer bounties to the e-vigilantes who track down the violators.

But amid the cries to do "something," we are just beginning to decide how to label spam, let alone how to stop it. Most of us define spam the way Justice Potter Stewart defined its most important product, porn: We know it when we see it. The FTC figures that two-thirds of unsolicited bulk e-mail is deceptive or fraudulent. But what about the other third? Is that spam or marketing?

These are some of the questions facing lawmakers. Is a legitimate ad in the in-box worse than a flier in the mailbox? Can you legally ban e-marketing without banning snail-mail marketing? Is it enough to demand a label on any e-pitch with "ADV" and a return address? Or does a frustrated public justify a ban on all unsolicited bulk mail?

Over breakfasts with the delete button, I have come to believe that the most annoying aspect of unwanted bulk mail goes beyond the con, the clutter and the porn. It`s wrapped up in the single word "unwanted." Today most of us take our personal computers personally. We`ve come to regard an e-mail as being as private as a letter. Spam is less like a flier coming in the mail slot than a sales pitch crammed into an envelope from a friend.

In a world of instant messages on cell phones and computers, it seems that every new technology that makes it easier, cheaper, faster to communicate makes it easier, cheaper, faster to intrude. So the problem with spam is not just the criminal but the commercial ruin of a personal good thing.

I was in the first class to join the do-not-call list that bumped telemarketers from my dinner table. I`ll be in the first class to sign up for a do-not-spam list to change my breakfast menu. I say that, realizing that it`s going to take a continuing effort of law and technology to control this electronic pollution.

Here is the view from my steaming breakfast table: Anyone with an in-box is in a battle for control of the private space against a commercial wrecking crew. If Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were starring in a movie called "You`ve Got Spam," it wouldn`t be a romantic comedy, it would an international thriller. The only plot line is whether we`ll take down the culprits before they take down the system.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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An American kind of Hell is quickly descending on the poorest Black children, nearly one million of whom now live in "extreme poverty," according to a study by the Children`s Defense Fund.http://www.commondreams.org/news2003/0430-03.htm Most disturbingly, desperate poverty among African Americans under 18 years of age has increased 50 percent since 1999. Newly reviewed census data show 932,000 Black kids live in households with after-tax earnings less than half the official poverty level - $7,064 a year for a family of three.

The figures are the highest since the government began compiling such data in 1979. The extreme poverty rate for Black kids is 8 percent, double the average for the general population. All told, 3.4 million Black children live in poverty, a proportion that had been shrinking until the beginning of the current recession, in 2000

When the Nineties bubble burst, the children tumbled, this time without a net.

"In the first year of the economic downturn, much progress made by families was wiped out," said Children`s Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman. "We need welfare policies that work in tough times as well as good times.

"It is shameful that one million Black children are left behind in extreme poverty. It is hard to be poor. It is harder to be an extremely poor Black child in America when our president who says we should Leave No Child Behind is proposing massive new tax breaks for the richest Americans."

Edelman and traditional liberals rightly invoke morality and fairness in denouncing the Bush men, who answer with contempt for the "bleeding hearts." The class that seized power in the United States in 2000 does not share the values of what normal human beings consider "civilization." Human progress, as they define it, is not measured in the general good, but in the "freedom" to accumulate wealth unfettered by the needs and claims of other human beings. One million desperately poor Black children represent, to them, two million grasping hands to be employed at terms dictated by "the market" (themselves) or manacled so as not to threaten the rich man`s "freedoms."

In the Bush men`s world, populated mainly by persons who create nothing of value to society, the safety net is a profound evil, against which they wage war. They tear down social support structures in order to create insecurity among the people, a state of affairs they believe is conducive to "virtue" in that it enforces the rules of the "marketplace" in which their acquisitive values rule. The Bush men believe absolutely that reformers such as Edelman threaten the destiny of mankind - a sacred reserve of the rich. If they actually feared Edelman, they would kill her, and feel themselves righteous.

They are killing these one million Black children, as surely as if they shot them at birth. Many of the kids` brothers and sisters never made it into the statistical tables - African American women have by far the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world: 13.6 deaths per 1,000 births, just ahead of impoverished French Guiana, in South America. (See , "Persistent Peril," March 6.)http://www.blackcommentator.com/32/32_reprint.html

It is already inevitable that a majority of the boys in the extreme poverty cohort and a very substantial portion of the girls will go to prison. Twenty-eight percent of adult Black males of all incomes have spent some time in jail - these children of extreme poverty will easily double or triple that proportion when they reach the age of incarceration. Indeed, with 3.4 million African American kids living at or below $14,000 a year, and one million subsisting on half that much money, there can be little doubt that the current Black prison population of one million will at least double in the next 13 years or so, just as it did during the past 13 years.

The Bush men accept the inevitability of such consequences - or may even revel in the thought. Who knows? These are people that operate in a different moral framework than the rest of us.

What we can easily observe, once we cease listening for signs of a compassion that does not exist, is that the Bush men celebrate every step that is taken in the forced march to a society of vast inequalities, spreading squalor, and premature death. What decent people recoil from, they embrace. In place of general prosperity, they seek to impose general insecurity. Their vision of Heaven is our Hell.

When the Bush men promise to leave no child behind, they mean that no child will be spared the full rigors of the marketplace, to sink or swim unaided, so that the freedoms of the rich are unimpeded.

The Bush regime is less than two and one-half years old, and already they have condemned hundreds of thousands of additional Black children to incarceration, moral degradation, and early death. Yet they stomp across the social landscape as if killing roaches, determined to purify the nation (and world) of all material and ideological traces of egalitarianism.

There can be no common, human dialogue with a class that is, essentially, misanthropic. One million Black children are on a conveyer belt to death, George Bush`s Harvest of Shame. Yet Bush is not ashamed, but proud of the fruits of his exertions, and believes that his God approves of his work.

This is an enemy who plays for keeps - a happy, smirking child killer.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/41/41_cover_pr.html

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When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics, the grandfathers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

—Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf,
former Iraqi minister of information

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MAY 9 -15, 2003

George of the Jungle
by John Powers
(Illustration by Peter Bennett)

When George Bush made his daredevil landing last week on the USS Abraham Lincoln — an aircraft carrier obviously chosen to give him some Great Emancipator mojo — the event’s iconography came straight from Top Gun, but its essence was worthy of Hot Shots! Everyone knew the whole thing had been choreographed to provide the president with big-dick footage for his 2004 re-election commercials. Reducing the sailors to extras in the war they actually fought, Bush wrapped himself up in the bright banner of their triumph. He knows that America likes winners.

Rupert Murdoch’s minions know it, too. Even as Fox News portrays Saddam’s ouster as being only marginally less heroic than World War II (and with much cooler visuals), Fox’s American Idol 2 doesn’t merely grab millions of viewers — it keeps reassuring them that they’re players in a hit show. A couple of weeks ago, smirking host Ryan Seacrest, who resembles a tree slug impersonating the MC in Cabaret, welcomed us with exciting news: American Idol 2 wasn’t just the highest-rated program, but a song by the contestants, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” was the number-one single, and the new album by last year’s winner, braying Kelly Clarkson, had reached the top of the charts. The studio audience roared, thrilled to feel itself at the center of — what? Bush culture?

By now, everyone is aware that America has become a two-tier society in which CEOs make 200 times more than their workers (it was only 40-1 in 1980) and political candidates woo wealthy contributors but scrupulously avoid even mentioning the poor. What makes the Bush administration distinctive is its embrace of a philosophy we might dub Populist Social Darwinism. It boasts of returning power to ordinary people (“we want to give you back your money”), then pursues policies that will produce a few highly visible winners and unravel the social safety net, leaving the majority of people to fend for themselves.

Naturally, such political values don’t flourish in a vacuum, and it’s no surprise that today’s most memorable TV shows are reality programs such as Joe Millionaire, The Bachelor and, of course, the aptly named Survivor, all of which are essentially Darwinian games of selection, extinction and survival. Supreme among them is the riveting American Idol 2, whose calculated junkiness is so transcendent that I can’t decide whether to be aghast or genuflect. The show succeeds in taking the hoariest of ideas — the old-fashioned talent contest — and transforming it into the mirror of our national life.

One must envy the cunning (or luck) that led its producers to scuttle the first word of the original British title — Pop Idol — and replace it with “American,” a depleted adjective suddenly reinvigorated by 9/11. As it turned out, the renewed patriotic flourish of this word could hardly have proved more fitting. The winners of American Idol aren’t so much genuine pop stars, who succeed through the mysterious workings of talent and mass taste, as they are manufactured American idols. In the end, success has far more to do with fulfilling cultural fantasies than knowing how to put across a song.

You don’t need to be a music whiz to understand this. You need merely listen to Joshua Gracin, one of the four remaining finalists, who’s been hailed in Entertainment Weekly for his “Garth Brooks twang.” Wrong. There’s only one striking thing about the 22-year-old Josh: He can’t sing a lick. Yet week after week, the public votes to keep him on the show, even as affable panelist Randy Jackson declares that Josh’s pitch was too sharp and fussy Simon Cowell gripes that a singer so rotten wasn’t kicked off the first week. (What a masterstroke of cliché to make the truth-telling villain a bitchy Brit!) But Josh does have two things going for him. He’s a Marine and this is wartime. And evidently that’s enough in the current climate. “When Josh crooned the first few lines in the group’s ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ performance,” wrote E.W., “he left no doubt that he’s proud to be an American. And we should be proud to have him as an Idol.” Josh may not have the stuff of a real idol, but he’s got a uniform to prove he’s American.

So are the other contestants, of course, but some Americans are more equal than others. After the April 30 show, a friend who’d never seen the series called to ask, “Is it just me, or is that show blatantly racist?” Actually, neither. From the beginning, one of American Idol’s scariest features is watching this country’s invisible voters boot off accomplished black performers in favor of lousy white ones. This may have reached its nadir last week, when the talentless Josh was one of three “safe” contestants while the two dark-skinned African-Americans, single-named Trenyce and mountainous Ruben Studdard, were made to sweat — one of them had been voted off. The shocker was the possible elimination of Ruben (one comes to know them all by their first names), a Luther Vandross in waiting who is so clearly the competition’s best singer that the panelists were rolling their eyes and suggesting, not all that subtly, that the public needs to kinda, you know, vote honestly.

This isn’t to say that last week’s vote was an overt racist attempt to knock black singers off the show, though such feelings are doubtless part of it. At my parents’ lily-white retirement home in the Midwest, all the golfers root against one guy. Guess who? Still, the show’s skewed balloting probably has more to do with an insidiously casual racism based on familiarity and comfort. Just as NFL owners pass over promising black coaches in favor of white retreads with whom they feel socially at ease, so perhaps American Idol 2’s viewers tend to vote for the contestants who somehow seem the most like themselves — or their dreams of themselves. Which tells you something about the demographic for flag-waving “event” television. If this show were broadcast on wigger-happy MTV, both the music and the voting would have a different racial cast.

In the end, Ruben lived on to sing again, and Trenyce, who may now want to reclaim her real name, got the hook. But she didn’t depart without doing her bit to fatten the Murdoch fortune. It’s part of the diabolical genius of American Idol 2 that the contestants aren’t merely enlisted into commercials for the show’s sponsors — you know, Ruben and Clay crooning for Ford — but are also used to cross-promote other Fox product. Last week, Josh, Ruben, Clay, Trenyce and Kimberley were filmed at the premiere of X2. Afterward, they told us how fab the movie was (could they have actually seen this dud?), and their praise was folded into the show. In Trenyce’s last hurrah, they even used digital effects to turn her eyes milky-white, just like Halle Berry’s Storm. As she walked off the stage for the last time, leaving behind America’s most popular Marine to mangle more music, she may well have been pondering the cruel law that still underwrites American Idol and, for that matter, American Populist Social Darwinism: survival of the whitest.



Connoisseurs of schadenfreude have had a delightful week. Alabama fired its football coach, Mike Price, after it was revealed he’d spent $1,000 on (and an unconscious night with) a stripper whose name, Destiny, proved all too uncannily true. Iowa State’s basketball coach, Larry Eustachy (the state’s highest-paid government employee!), was forced to resign after photos showed him at a post-game Mizzou party guzzling beer and nuzzling a coed. Dude, never kiss the chick whose boyfriend is holding the camera. While these Coaches Gone Wild moments allowed sportswriters to mount their high horses — does anyone worship and loathe their subjects more intensely than these wannabe jocks? — these stories gave me no pleasure. One shouldn’t exult in another man’s frailty. But I must confess that I hooted when Newsweek and The Washington Monthly reported that manatee-shaped Republican William Bennett, America’s former drug czar, ex–secretary of education and tireless Clinton scold, has gambled away up to $8 million in casinos over the last decade.

To be fair, for all his well-paid sanctimony about America’s moral decline — he gets 50 grand for a speech and made a small fortune from The Book of Virtues — Bennett has done nothing illegal, nor has he ever spoken out against gambling. But it does seem convenient that the only victimless vice that he doesn’t denounce just happens to be his own — the guy seemed plenty happy to imprison poor drug addicts. Still, the most pathetic part of the story isn’t that Bennett lost all that money but that he lost so much of it in the dehumanized realm of the slots and video poker. I don’t know what grandiose fantasy Bill thinks he’s living, but it ain’t exactly 007 at the chemin de fer table in Monte Carlo.

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Nochmals LAWeekly. Möchte nochmals auf die sehr gute Zusmmenfassung in LAWeekly über den Aufbau des Iraks durch europäische und amerikanische Firmen hinweisen. Es ist auch in diesem Thread in voller Länge dokumentiert.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/23/news-crogan.php

Feed the Goats
Nine Democrats in search of a message
by Doug Ireland


Running for president requires a capacious ego and a boundless optimism about one’s chances. But even the most Pollyanna-ish and swell-headed among the nine Democratic presidential candidates who squabbled for 90 nationally televised minutes last Saturday had to experience a severe case of agita after reading the latest Zogby poll, released May 6: It showed that 61 percent of Democrats believe George Bush will be re-elected in 2004.

The Democrats’ so-called debate in South Carolina — in a “Dating Game” format cooked up by ABC and moderated by George Stephanopoulos — helps explain those numbers. The White House postulants were, at best, mediocre.

John Kerry was probably the biggest loser. The putative front-runner in New Hampshire in the primary polls, Kerry — tanned but audibly hoarse — was predictably prolix and kept falling over his words. At one point in an exchange over civil rights for gay people, Kerry referred to the “non-employment discrimination legislation” — a mangled citation of
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), of which, he boasted, he’s the chief sponsor. Too bad he couldn’t get the name right. Worse, Kerry “never got around to developing the rationale for his candidacy,” as David Broder, Washington’s Pope of the Obvious, sniffed in his post-debate column.

Joe Lieberman, who partnered with Dick Gephardt in the Rose Garden sellout to Dubya (where they announced their co-sponsorship of Bush’s Iraq war resolution), trumpeted his ardent support of the war as making him the electable candidate. In the process, he accused Kerry — who voted for that resolution, which gave away Congress’ war-making powers to the White House — of being “ambivalent” on the war. Kerry — who’s been chirping some criticisms of the war’s conduct in an attempt to undercut Howard Dean’s appeal to anti-war primary voters — insisted “there’s no ambivalence” in his position. Uh-huh. After the debate, the Lieberman campaign sent out a newspaper clip quoting Kerry’s chief spokesman, Chris Lahane, saying, “The country is clearly ambivalent about Iraq. Kerry has been exactly where the country is.” In other words, Big John has his finger in the wind.

When Stephanopoulos told Lieberman that many considered him “too nice to take on Bush” — translation: too much of a me-too-er — the former veep candidate said he’d showed he was tough “by taking on Hollywood for peddling sex and violence to our kids.” This reminder to civil liberties–minded primary voters of Lieberman’s censorious partnership with the moralizer/gambling degenerate Bill Bennett (now baptized “The Holy Roller” by Washington wags) won’t do Holy Joe much good outside the South.

Florida’s Senator Bob Graham — visibly thinned by the heart surgery that delayed his declaration of candidacy — tried to out-hawk Lieberman by restating his desire to extend the war beyond Iraq to take on Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. None of the other eight challenged Graham’s incendiary proposal for a bloodbath encompassing the entire Middle East. In fact, Graham was virtually ignored by the other eight.

Of the left-positioned Democrats, Al Sharpton was on his best behavior, saying nothing outrageous but also little of substance. And the vapid niceties from the mouth of Carol Mosely Braun seemed to confirm Stephanopolous’ diagnosis that “you’re running [only] to take votes from Al Sharpton.” Only Dennis Kucinich, the anti-war Ohio congressman, noticeably ignored by his competitors, managed to squeeze sharply defined programmatic alternatives into his allotted minutes — he called for flat-out “cancellation” of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization treaty, for repeal of the civil-liberties-shredding Patriot Act, and painted himself as the anti-monopoly, anti-corporate candidate. But the press paid little attention — for example, The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney didn’t even mention Kucinich in his post-debate report for “the paper of record.” It didn’t help that Kucinich’s unsmiling, black-suited, funereal performance made him look like an unhappy warrior. And no one wants to hear a message of hope from a mortician.

Gephardt the Constitution shredder — who winced when Stephanopoulos told him he’s considered by many Democrats to be “this year’s Bob Dole” — looked tired and baggy-eyed. And when he lapsed into obscure Congress-speak acronyms in references to China trade and fuel-emission standards, he was quite Dole-like. When his cumbersome health-care plan, financed by tax breaks, came under attack from some of his competitors, Gephardt launched into an explanation of the plan that was incomprehensible to the average voter, and he kept insisting, “I can pass it!” This was a hollow promise: Since he couldn’t do so when the Dems still had a House majority, it’s hard to see how he could do so in a Republican Congress — especially since early forecasts suggest the Democrats will lose still more seats in both chambers next year.

Howard Dean scored points against Kerry and John Edwards as me-too-ers when he chided them for having just helped block an attempt by Senator Fritz Hollings to annul a huge chunk of Bush’s pro-corporate tax cuts. Dean’s reiteration of his opposition to the war in Iraq, which has motored his candidacy thus far, was noteworthy for his newly minted emphasis on opposition to the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” — given that he’d endorsed the concept in a speech just a few months ago. And the Vermont Doctor’s predominantly grim facial expression made him look like he was telling a patient of the need for a costly operation when Dean plumped for his health-care plan. Dean claimed credit for increasing Vermont’s health-insurance program to cover “96.4 percent of all our people.” Kerry challenged the numbers, claiming the percentage of Vermonters covered actually declined under Dean, from 90.5 percent to 90.4 percent. Neither Kerry’s claims nor Dean’s turned out to be true: A post-debate analysis by AP Vermont correspondent Christopher Graff put the real number at 91.6 percent, and it hadn’t changed much while Dean was guv.

John Edwards, the sex-appeal candidate, looked pretty. Informed by Stephanopoulos that he was viewed by Dems as “having plenty of charisma but no policy depth or experience,” Edwards kept returning to his poor-boy rap about his origins making him “someone who understands people.” Well, he’s a multimillionaire now, and the sympathetic-sounding but vague generalities he delivered did little to dispel the notion that he was a policy-lite DLC centrist with a populist rhetorical face-lift.

On this crowded platform, with each contender limited to 90-second responses, no one shone, none broke through with a clear and concise message. As George Wallace advised Jesse Jackson when he came to visit the old ex-seg during the Rev’s first presidential campaign, “You’ve got to keep your message so close to the ground the goats can get at it.” But none of the nine has yet honed his message into a simple and comprehensible soundbite or a slogan that can fit on a bumper sticker — at least not one that has the power and appeal of Bush’s simplistic (and oh-so-wrong-headed) mantra, “Cut Taxes.”

Moreover, Bush came under little fire in this internecine jockeying for advantage among those who would replace him. The leading Dems have been cowed for so long by Bush’s war-driven poll numbers that they seem to have gotten out of the habit of attacking him. And “the vision thing” was noticeably lacking in the South Carolina Democratic cattle call.

If the Democrats can’t get their act together, you’d better get used to those chants of “Four More Years!”

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/25/news-ireland.php

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MAY 9 -15, 2003
Dissonance


Beat Bush
But don’t lose your sanity
by Marc Cooper

An American friend of mine visiting from South America walked away from one of last month’s parties around the L.A. Times Books Festival rather shaken and bewildered. “I felt like I was in a loony bin,” he said as we emerged from a chic book-launch party in the Hollywood Hills. “If one more crazy person came up to me with some crackpot theory, I swear I would have thrown him off the balcony,” he said.

I know what he meant. With the 2004 presidential campaign now under way, it seems clear that as whacked out as George W. Bush may be, he’s driving his opponents even crazier. Nothing short of some sort of mass hysteria has gripped everyone to the left of Condi Rice.

Within one 30-minute period during that book gathering, my friend and I logged the following revelations offered us by some of our fellow partygoers: Bush will steal the 2004 election because “It’s all in the voting machines — keep your eye on those machines.” There will be no next election because Bush will stage an auto-coup. Bush’s 70 percent approval rating for the war isn’t real — it’s a made-up number. American, not Iraqi, troops set the oil wells on fire in 1991. U.S. Marines directed and orchestrated the looting of Baghdad. Fidel Castro didn’t really want to lock up all those writers and execute those three hijackers without a proper trial, but the Bush administration forced him to do it. We’ve entered a period of cultural repression worse than McCarthyism. And, my current favorite, Michael Moore wasn’t really booed at the Oscars — instead, the network ran an amplified and prerecorded loop to discredit him. (I know this one is crazy because I alone booed loudly enough from my Woodland Hills living room to be clearly heard in the Kodak’s upper deck.)

Where does all this paranoia come from? Fluoride in the water? And these hyperbolic views are hardly confined to the political amateurs drawn to Sunday-evening gatherings by finger food and Chardonnay. In the current edition of The Nation, Princeton professor emeritus of politics Sheldon Wolin argues that the Bush administration has embarked on building a regime akin to that of Nazi Germany and that ordinary GOP voters might be no less than the “mass base” needed for totalitarian rule (wait till my poor blue-rinsed Aunt Gertie finds out she actually joined up with the Sturmabteilung when she voted last March for that nice-looking Billy Simon).

Even this month’s liberal American Prospect proclaims George W. Bush as “The Most Dangerous President Ever.” I can buy the notion that Dubya might be the worst president ever. But the most dangerous? More dangerous than nuke-slinging Harry Truman, who also set up the CIA, helped spawn the Cold War and opened the doors to Senator Joe from Wisconsin? More dangerous than LBJ, who murdered a couple of million Vietnamese? What about a drunken and pilled-out Dick Nixon playing atomic roulette during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War?

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s galling to watch a smirking C-minus daddy’s boy like George W. Bush get away with so much. But let’s not lose our grip on reality. Things are bad enough that we need not exaggerate or fabricate. What really worries me is that by magnifying the damage Bush wreaks, we pave the way to settling for some really, truly sorry alternative — like, say, Dick Gephardt. We also make it much harder to beat him.

Those who deny Bush’s popularity and his appeal aren’t so much living in Nuremberg as in la-la land. To millions of Americans still traumatized after September 11, watching Bush strut onto the flight deck of that aircraft carrier in his TV-friendly pilot’s suit last week was a much more reassuring image than that of Big Bill getting his weenie waxed under the desk while taking congressional phone calls about Bosnia.



So let’s do a quick reality check. No, Mr. Wolin, we are not living in Nazi Germany nor anything vaguely resembling it. And arguing that Bush is some sort of Nazi isn’t going to win over a single undecided vote. Bush has shown more or less the same zeal to roll back civil liberties as Clinton did after Oklahoma City. And you can be sure John Ashcroft has a soft spot in his heart for Janet Reno, who didn’t flinch on extending the death penalty.

Tim Robbins, Janeane Garofalo and the Dixie Chicks are going to continue to make millions of dollars, thank you very much. And some deluded right-wingers pushing commercial boycotts and attack Web sites are a far cry from the blacklists, loyalty oaths and mass firings of teachers of a half century ago.

What we are instead confronted with is a highly ideological conservative administration that wants to go even further than the Democrats in lavishing tax giveaways and regulatory benefits on the corporate elite. We’ve seen this before in American history, and we have survived, without having to learn German.

With unemployment at an eight-year high, consumer confidence stalled, and even some moderate Republicans bailing on the most insidious tax-cut measures, the administration’s domestic program is in tatters. Plans for privatizing Medicare and Social Security have been scuttled by the soured stock market. Dreams of endless war seem to be crashing on the hard beach of Iraqi Shia intransigence and decaying security in Afghanistan. With the unexpected demotion of Occupation Proconsul Jay Garner this week, there are even suggestions that the balance of power in the administration might be tipping away from the neoconservative Jacobins and back toward the corporate types.

Bush can be beaten. But not if we speak in a language that is alien and offensive to those we wish to convince. Their fears are real and legitimate and should not be dismissed as solely effects of watching too much Fox TV.

As a teenager, I was attracted to the left because of its commitment to rational and cool-headed analysis. It was amusing to watch the Birchers and the extreme right twist themselves up into feverish rants against secret U.N. cabals, one-world government and, yes, water fluoridation. Let’s not become like them.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/25/dissonance-cooper.php

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[Joerver]

Liberation, one month on: Chaos on the streets, cholera in the city and killings in broad daylight
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad
09 May 2003


Every war has its winners, and the sparkling eyes and vulpine grin of Uday Qais al-Sa`aba confirmed that he considered himself among them. "Welcome to my new home," he cried, arms outstretched, as he stood in his doorway.

Until the American tanks rolled under Saddam Hussein`s great Hands of Victory monument, he lived with his mother and 13 others in two rooms in south Baghdad, protected from the elements by a corrugated iron roof. A personal talent for opportunism and the lawlessness on the capital`s streets prompted him to try to move up in the world by leaping to the top of the pile in one bound.

Exactly a month has elapsed since the toppling of the statue of Saddam in the centre of Baghdad confirmed that the capital and the regime had at last fallen. Since then the country has seen an extraordinary redistribution of wealth, in which many thousands of impoverished Iraqis have embarked on a round-the-clock looting spree.

The lawlessness continues. Yesterday an American soldier was shot dead in broad daylight by an Iraqi who approached him with a pistol. US forces exchange fire with armed Iraqis almost daily across the country.

The continued failure to impose law and order on the streets of many towns and cities is drawing harsh criticism. "The last month has been pretty catastrophic in terms of building a new government," said Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador who has spent the last three weeks in Iraq.

"The authority of the occupying power of the United States was very much diminished by this orgy of looting and destruction," he said.

There are some small successes. Thousands of manu-scripts and hundreds of artifacts missing from the National Museum have been recovered. Among them are a 7,000-year-old clay pot and a cornerstone from King Nebuchadnezzar`s palace.

But it is the rapidly deteriorating public health system – as summer temperatures take hold – that is most worrying. After a month of occupation it remains in a state of collapse. Drinking water, from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, contaminated with sewage, has caused outbreaks of cholera and thyphoid among children in Basra. And the World Health Organisation warned yesterday that unless the security situation improves and medical staff can work in safety, the cholera outbreak could become an epidemic.

The US forces make sporadic efforts to stop the tide of looters – for instance, by occasionally throwing some people out of their new – stolen – riverside homes, and by detaining young looters for a few hours to scare them. But the effects are limited.

Mr al-Sa`aba, an unemployed clerk, just went one step further than most by trying to steal an entire house. This week he pronounced himself master of a property so lavish that if you swapped its commanding views of the Tigris for those of the Thames, it would be worth at least £3m.

It has a spiral staircase, balconies on all four floors, and a rooftop sundeck from which you can gaze down on the river`s brown expanse and across the seething cityscape. It has ceiling-to-floor windows, solar heating, loos on every floor – in fact, everything you would expect of a modern town house for the highest level of the security apparatus that protected Saddam`s dictatorship. In this case, the occupant was one of most senior officials in the secret police and intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.

The spy has disappeared, to avoid capture by the Americans. All that remains of him in his former home are a black-and-white photograph of a haughty looking young man with a Saddam moustache, some marksman`s shooting targets, a book called The Principles of Life are Paramount, by Saddam Hussein, and a recipe – in French – on the kitchen wall.

Yesterday, American soldiers were sunning themselves behind a barrier of razor wire beside the city`s main bus station. They and their Bradley fighting vehicle were less than 100 yards from the new "thieves` market" in al-Maydan Square, where looters gather to sell their spoils.

Bullets and magazines for Kalashnikovs were openly on sale. You could buy a stolen door for £4.40. Six pence will secure you a stolen floppy disc which – according to the labels – contains the accounts of Amoco Oil`s operations. Someone fired a pistol; the Americans did not react, and nor did the crowd.

When the US forces first invaded, as Iraq ministries burned before the eyes of the occupying forces, building after building was stripped to its bones as if attacked by a shoal of human barracudas. Now the epidemic of thieving is less intense, but still continuous.

Looters searching for construction materials have been shovelling away at the ground at Abu Ghraib prison alongside relatives digging for the bodies of those hanged by Saddam`s executioners. Armed gangs compete for bounty, shooting and stabbing their rivals. Gunfire has become as much a feature of occupied Baghdad as the piles of rotting rubbish that now cover the entire city.

Mr al-Sa`aba made his big move on the basis of a rumour. Word reached his neighbourhood – a drab suburb called al-Dura – that senior Iraqis had abandoned their homes in Abu Nuas Street. Realising that the Baghdad police and government had more or less ceased to function, the family packed up. It was like moving from Walthamstow to Chelsea.

"This place is enough for us, and even more than we need," he exclaimed happily, as his relatives humped in their tatty mattresses and battered furniture from a removal truck outside. He was still overcome by the luxury – wholly unfamiliar to most working-class Iraqis and well beyond his pre- war salary of £47 a month.

So, evidently, was his mother. As she wandered around the kitchen, gazing at its stainless steel surfaces and battery of cupboards, she burst into tears. "We had nothing like this in our old kitchen," her son explained.

Their excitement was not universally shared. A few of the pre-war residents have stayed on. Watching the arrivals unload their belongings, with an expression frosty enough to freeze the Tigris, was a 40-year-old Republican Guardgeneral. A sallow-faced man with a comb-over, he said his name was General Radr al-Hayatti. "They won`t be allowed to stay," he said, dragging on a cigarette and scowling.

He had remained in his apartment, he explained, because he was waiting to see what evolves in post-war Iraq; he said he would not be willing to work with the Americans, but would serve an Iraqi government.

His wife, Suha, was more garrulous: "I`m not going to allow my children to mix with the children of these people. I am not sending them to school with them. It`s not safe. In a month Iraq has gone back centuries. The Americans came and promised every one paradise, but where is it? This is hell."

Such concerns about the wild and lawless nature of the city are widespread. They have combined with a general frustration over the lack of jobs, electricity, clean water, and health care to create a groundswell of resentment against the country`s new masters, counter-balanced only by the dislike of the old.
10 May 2003 16:16


© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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May 9, 2003


G.W. Bush:
Drunk on Power
by SAM HAMOD and ELAINE CASSEL

The president he got his wars
folks don`t know just what it`s for;
No one gives us a rhyme or reason
have one doubt they call it treason.

Eugene McDaniels
"Compared to What?"


An addicted brain is a changed brain. When you ingest a substance like alcohol, cocaine, or nicotine, your brain recognizes those substances as dopamine. These substances "bind" to dopamine receptors in the brain. Dopamine is also released every time you do something pleasurable. But you get your dopamine kicks, so to speak, in a different way from your friend. Your friend may get a jolt from winning a tennis match; you might get it from accomplishing some task at the office.

Dopamine is the brain chemical (neurochemical) that produces the "high," the sense of satisfaction and well-being that you think came from the alcohol or the pleasurable activity. The little-known secret, demonstrated amply by recent neuroscience, is that that "feel-good" state actually arises from the dopamine. The person continues to use the substance because he is trying to feel normal. But he (or she) cannot feel normal without the substance-or a substitute. That is why people recovering from one substance addiction often choose a substitute-recovering alcoholics are notorious smokers, for instance. They are replacing alcohol with nicotine, because nicotine also binds to the brain`s dopamine receptors. But the more they do it, the more they have to do it. Why? To try to feel normal. The brain is not making the stuff anymore, or making little of it, and they have to help it along by continuing substance use or activities that cause great pleasure.

What does this explanation of the brain`s dopamine system have to do with President G.W. Bush?

George Bush is an alcoholic. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, according to neuroscientists. Bush`s brain was changed by his substance use. And his brain did not return to its "normal" or predrinking state after he stopped drinking. Proof positive of that is that he is showing signs of a new addiction-an addiction to power. (See Katherine Van Wormer`s prescient piece in CounterPunch: Dry Drunk Syndrome and George W. Bush, from October, 2002.)

He has gone from being a drunk, to being drunk on power. Iraq, rather than cooling his addiction, fueled it. As he said on the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln, off the "perilous" coast of San Diego, "This is but ONE victory." He implied there will be more victories; thus, he will need more conquests to feed this new addiction to power.

Before September 11, The Washington Post focused more on his long, intense morning workouts than on his domestic policy. He had no foreign policy; he looked upon that with disdain. But with the tragedy of September 11 came a plethora of unexpected ways to get high.

We all know the famous dictum from Lord Acton, "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely." Today, we have a situation that is rare in history. Today, the US is an absolute super power. Bush is its Commander-in-Chief and president, and there is no one to stop him from using the awesome power of the US military might. Having tasted power, first with the ability to pass virtually without objection a sweeping law that changed what it means to be free (and unfree) in America today-the USA Patriot Act, then with so-called "success" in Afghanistan (though the big fish got away), he had a new substance to give him his dopamine jolt -- Power. Power became his new addiction. Clearly, from the changed tone of his rhetoric, his adrenaline is working on Power. He has it and craves more. And not just in America, but in the world.

His addiction to power has corrupted his view of what America is about. He has decided, along with his "enablers," Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Rove and Perle, that he should make pre-emptive strikes against any possible future foes and justify those strikes to the American people wrapped in a cloak of "I protected you for the sake of your future and that of your children." He has also created a rhetoric of exclusion, wherein anyone who does not buy his side of the argument or its premises, is labeled a "traitor." And in his rhetorical and psychological scheme, the patriots are those who buy into his vision.

His rhetoric of exclusion has frightened and intimidated the Congress and the media. Neither of them is willing to stand up to his ad hominem attacks for fear of being called a "traitor." Thus, Bush and his Iraq invasion advisor, Rumsfeld, attacked any journalist who made negative or critical comments. Even the celebrated Christine Amanpour had to defend herself and her fellow journalists because they`d reported the killing of civilians and the looting of the Iraq Museum.

And this is the problem with an addict: His world must be under his control; he cannot tolerate any ambiguity or threat to his perfection. At times we have heard addicts say, "Man, this cocaine is better than sex, better than heaven itself." Because they have control of that world and only they inhabit it and they circumscribe its realities.

We need not mention what happened to Al Jazeera and other foreign media when they criticized Bush or US actions in Afghanistan or Iraq. They were bombed, killed or shelled until they went off the air, fled or were forced out. No one is allowed to disrupt the perfection of the addict`s power hungry world. This was seen in dictatorships of Joseph Stalin, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, and even Bush`s contemporaries, Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe. They were all men who were addicted, drunk with power and did, and would do, anything necessary to assert their perfect control over their universe.

Of course, this is anathema to a real democracy. But kind of democracy do we have? Secret searches, secret detention, secret trials? What`s next? Secret executions?

Bush is destroying the country he swore to protect. As Paul Krugman wrote on May 7, in the New York Times, "that was another country", referring to America and where it is today in comparison to what we were before Bush got drunk on power. September 11 gave Bush the dopamine substitute he needed, and the need for more grows each and every day.

Bush`s speech aboard the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln, was pure theatre, designed to exult in maximum power. The tactics included arriving by jet fighter, which he proudly claimed to have piloted when he could have more safely arrived by helicopter (the carrier was not at sea, but close in to San Diego). Then, the ship was positioned in such a way to give Bush the maximum effect with the ocean behind him, as if he was an admiral of the open sea, of the world-not just aboard a ship close in to a safe port. And in wearing the official flight suit of the ship`s squadron (when he shunned the trappings of his National Guard squadron), it was transparently clear that Bush was on a high like no other. Doubtless, it surpassed any alcohol binge.

But of course, like the family of an alcoholic, we, the family of G.W. Bush, the citizens of the United States, pay a heavy price for the drunkenness of our "father," if you pardon the analogy. This week, the Dean of the U.S. Senate, Senator Robert Byrd, lashed out at Bush for making a "campaign speech" that "disrespected" the U.S. military and shamed the country. Ask any one who has had a parent or a spouse who is an alcoholic-they will tell you what shame is all about. Shame and disgrace aptly describe Bush`s drunken excess on board that Navy vessel.

Bush is now demonstrating what Alcoholics Anonymous refers to as the "dry drunk syndrome"--a sense of false self-aggrandizement, a belligerency against those who disagree with him, a logic that brooks no shades of gray or complexity, a glorification of having "conquered alcohol" (but not realizing that another addiction has taken its place) and an unsatisfied feeling at the core of his being that must constantly be fed by new and exhilarating experiences or adventures to satisfy his new addiction.

Sam Hamod is an expert on world affairs, especially the Arab and Muslim worlds, former editor of THIRD WORLD NEWS (in Wash, DC), a former professor at Princeton University, former Director of The National Islamic Center of Washington, DC, an advisor to the US State Department and author of ISLAM IN THE WORLD TODAY. He is the editor of www.todaysalternativenews.com, and may be reached at [e-mail]

Elaine Cassel teaches law and psychology and practices law in the District of Columbia and Virginia. She is a contributor to CounterPunch and Findlaw.com`s Writ, and keeps a watch on the Bush Administration`s rewriting of the Bill of Rights on her Civil Liberties Watch site hosted by Minneapolis, Minnesota`s City Pages. Cassel can be reached at: [e-mail]

http://www.counterpunch.org/hamod05092003.html

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May 9, 2003, 10:30PM


Dissent is a great American tradition
By HELEN THOMAS

Should critics of the U.S. attack on Iraq hang their heads now that the United States has won the Second Persian Gulf War?

Absolutely not!

People who opposed the attack on Iraq never had any doubt that the United States -- the world`s lone military superpower -- would roll over a pitiful Third World country. That wasn`t the point.

Instead, it was a question of why should the U.S. military kill thousands of innocent Iraqis, maim thousands more and ruin their country to take out one man. All of that, for questionable U.S. motives.

Under its historic principles and treaty commitments, the United States does not invade sovereign countries, unless it is attacked. That was the old way of looking at our national values, pre-Iraq.

Americans who disagreed with the Bush policy were guided by their consciences. They saw an unprovoked war as simply wrong, as judged by our national traditions and values, including the Golden Rule: "Do unto others. . ." etc.

Administration officials told the American people that we faced a direct and imminent threat from Iraq. Who believed that?

We dropped tons of bombs on Iraq but many of the victims were civilians. The much-touted Iraqi Republican Guard disappeared without putting up much of a fight. The U.S. military`s invasion force romped in what has been likened to an elephant stomping on a gnat.

We will never know how many Iraqis perished and nobody in the administration seems interested in finding out. "We don`t track that," a Pentagon spokesman said.

Of course, no one is unhappy that the "shock-and-awe" campaign is over and that it was relatively brief and successful. Success doesn`t make it right for those who don`t necessarily agree with the late Vince Lombardi that "winning isn`t everything, it`s the only thing."

The war is far from over for the Iraqis. They are grieving over family losses and trying to cope with the presence of yet another occupier after having lived past centuries under other "liberators" -- not to mention a ruthless dictator.

The New York Times reported Monday that abandoned munitions in northern Iraq have wounded dozens of Iraqi children. Unexploded American bombs, including cluster bombs, around Mosul are a problem.

Even in victory we Americans have a price to pay in the loss of our prestige as a peace-loving nation, once known for its magnanimity in victory. We used to spread democracy with the Peace Corps, the story of our inspiring struggle for independence, our values, our Constitution, our ideas, exchange students, the Voice of America, cable news, etc.

In diplomacy, old friends now fear us and wonder whether they can deal with us. We have alienated longtime allies who felt that Iraq already had been reined in over 12 years under tight trade restrictions and U.S. and British enforcement of no-fly zones. They worry where our pre-emptive attack policy will take us next.

Feeling newly empowered Bush and his Cabinet officials have been sternly warning other nations to toe the U.S. line or face "serious consequences." It`s diplomacy with not-so-veiled threats.

The United Nations is another casualty of the war, weakened because the United States rejected its authority and took unilateral military action.

On May 7, 1918, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in an editorial in the Kansas City Star during World War I that standing by a president when right or wrong "is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

He said it was his duty as a citizen to get as much information as he could "to keep the government in check."

Roosevelt also said "patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official ... "

The adage "my country right or wrong," is a deeply embedded tradition with Americans. It is also a dangerous one when our government is pursuing the wrong goals.

If the new Bush doctrine of pre-emption means more U.S. armed attacks on countries perceived as potential threats, we will incur more bitter enemies and continue to deeply disappoint our remaining friends. This policy carries a steep price.

Thomas is a Washington, D.C.-based columnist for the Hearst Newspapers. [e-mail]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.hts/editorial/1903150

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Bremer of Iraq
Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange

05.09.03 - When L. Paul Bremer III sets down in Iraq as the U.S.`s new overseer of reconstruction, he`ll be bringing a lot of baggage along with him. Chosen by President Bush for his expertise in counter-terrorism, crisis management and diplomacy, Bremer has a resume that includes extended service in the Reagan Administration, an eleven-year stint at Kissinger & Associates, and the co-chairmanship of the Heritage Foundation`s Homeland Security Task Force.

That President Bush has turned to a civilian and a skilled negotiator -- the president called Bremer a "can-do-type person`` -- is indicative of the administration`s fear that events in post-war Iraq are in danger of spinning out of control. Bremer, the current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marsh Crisis Consulting, a subsidiary of the Marsh & McLennan Companies (MMC), will take the reins of the multi-billion dollar reconstruction project from retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the administration`s first civil administrator, and assume command over the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs.

Early commentary on this leadership change focused on whether Bremer`s appointment was a victory for a beleaguered State Department. While Secretary of State Colin Powell may be in need of victories, the Washington Post pointed out that Bremer is "a hard-nosed hawk who is... supported by Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.” Furthermore, “White House aides said the appointment affirms Bush`s satisfaction with Pentagon control over Iraq until a new government is in place." Bremer`s appointment indicates that there continues to be substantial support for the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Dr Ahmad Chalabi.

Robert Gelbard, a retired career diplomat who led post-conflict efforts in Haiti, Bosnia and East Timor, told Newsday that "In terms of finding someone to manage this process, which has not started out well, I do not believe that [the White House] could have done better" than to select Bremer. According to Gelbard, administration sources believed that Garner "was not sophisticated enough to supervise the transition."

Who is L. Paul Bremer and why is the White House counting on him?

Bremer is a consummate insider with roots in several presidential administrations: During his twenty-three year diplomatic service career, he was stationed in Afghanistan, Malawi, Norway, and also served as Ambassador to the Netherlands. In 1989 he joined the powerful New York-based Kissinger Associates, and in late 2001, along with former Attorney General Edwin Meese he co-chaired the Heritage Foundation`s Homeland Security Task Force, which created a blueprint for the White House`s Dept. of Homeland Security. For two decades Bremer has been a regular at Congressional hearings and is recognized as an expert on terrorism and homeland security.

According to the Web site of Financial Executive International, Bremer currently sits on the board of directors of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Akzo Nobel NV, the Harvard Business School Club of New York and The Netherland-America Foundation. He is also a Trustee of the Economic Club of New York, and is a member of The International Institute for Strategic Studies and The Council on Foreign Relations.

Bremer`s bread and butter issue is terrorism. According to the World Socialist Web Site, in 1981, President Ronald Reagan`s Secretary of State Alexander Haig appointed him as his special assistant in charge of the department`s "crisis management" center. From there he became Reagan`s ambassador-at-large for counter-terrorism -- a tenure that coincided with Reagan Administration-sponsored "low intensity" wars in Central America and Africa. Although Bremer co-chaired the Operations Sub-Group at the National Security Council along with Oliver North, according to Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive, Bremer was on the "periphery" of the Iran/Contra Scandal.

Bremer has consistently espoused a get-tough stance towards terrorists. In an August 5, 1996, Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled "Terrorists` Friends Must Pay a Price" Bremer called on the Clinton administration to "get serious about the fight against terrorism." Bremer advised Clinton to deliver ultimatums to Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan telling them to close down terrorist bases or they will "receive the full weight of American might." Ironically, Iraq was not mentioned in the piece.

In September 1999, Speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert named Bremer Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism. This commission reviewed America`s counter-terrorism policies and, in June 2000, it reported its recommendations to the President of the United States and to the Speaker.

Two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bremer wrote: "Our retribution must move beyond the limp-wristed attacks of the past decade, actions that seemed designed to "signal" our seriousness to the terrorists without inflicting real damage. Naturally, their feebleness demonstrated the opposite. This time the terrorists and their supporters must be crushed. But," he added, "we must avoid a mindless search for an international `consensus` for our actions. Tomorrow, we will know who our true friends are."

In October 2001, the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation named Bremer and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III as co-chairs of its Homeland Security Task Force. The Task Force`s January 2002 report titled "Defending the American Homeland" claimed the U.S. was "dangerously vulnerable" to terrorist attacks. It made a number of recommendations including: increasing security at U.S. borders, encouraging greater sharing of information among various federal law enforcement agencies and with local law enforcers, changing federal law to allow greater monitoring of foreigners in the United States, securing federal computer networks and information systems better, moving ahead with the plan to bury nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, improving communications with the public in the event of attack or increasing threats and "unleash[ing] market forces to mobilize the private sector to promote infrastructure security." A number of these recommendations have already been put in place.

The Homeland Security Task Force fused the war against terrorism to the mission of the Heritage Foundation -- privatization, de-regulation and smaller government -- maintaining that "many government initiatives, such as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), antitrust legislation, liability concerns, and current tax policies, inhibit the development of a true partnership for security between the private sector and the government."

In June 2002, President Bush appointed Bremer to the President`s Homeland Security Advisory Council. Composed of American businessmen, academics and political leaders, the Council ostensibly provides the President with independent advice on the defense of the American homeland.

Bremer is also listed as a senior advisor to William J. Bennett`s Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT). A few months back he was a featured speaker at the AVOT-sponsored "teach-in" at UCLA. At that event, former CIA chief R. James Woolsey described the war against terrorism as a "fourth world war."

A month after 9/11, Jeffrey W. Greenberg, Marsh & McLennan Companies` chairman and chief executive, recognized that the terrorist attacks, which killed 295 of its employees, was also a new business opportunity. "Within days of the twin towers` destruction," the Wall Street Journal reported, Greenberg and top company officials "began planning to form a new subsidiary to sell insurance to corporate customers at sharply higher rates than were common before Sept. 11." The company also "accelerated plans to launch a new consulting unit to capitalize on heightened corporate fears of terrorism." On October 11, Marsh Crisis Consulting was launched with Bremer at its head. Bremer told the Journal that the unit would concentrate on catastrophic risks, those that in some cases could put a company out of business.

In addition to retaining retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, Bremer`s team in Iraq is being peopled with former Iraqi exiles and assorted Reagan and Bush I retreads. Doug Henwood, editor of the Left Business Observer, told Inter Press Service`s Emad Mekay in late April that the selection process is "very much like the Bush administration itself -- a bunch of private sector alumni called upon to perform the task in government they were performing in the private sector."

Mekay noted that recent appointees included "agricultural industrialist" Dan Amstutz, who will "lead the US government`s agriculture reconstruction efforts in Iraq" and Peter McPherson, a long-time Washington insider and deputy US treasurer in the Ronald Reagan administration, who will be "financial coordinator" for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). His deputy in Iraq will be George Wolfe, a senior US Treasury Department lawyer.

Bremer`s greatest challenge will be to create the trappings of a democracy while ensuring that a fundamentalist Islamic government does not win control over the country. If the Shiite majority prevails in democratic elections, post-war Iraq could take on a decidedly anti-American cast. Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told WBAI Radio`s Doug Henwood in late April that such a government would not want the U.S. to control its oil or establish military bases on its soil -- and would not be likely to recognize Israel.

What special expertise about Iraq or the Middle East is Bremer bringing to Iraq? None, says a former senior State Department official who has worked with Bremer. He is a "voracious opportunist with voracious ambitions," the official told Newsday. "What he knows about Iraq could not quite fill a thimble. What he knows about any part of the world would not fill a thimble. But what he knows about Washington infighting could fill three or four bushel baskets."

©Working Assets Online. All rights reserved.


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=14966

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washingtonpost.com
Occupation of Iraq Has No Time Limit
Troops Will Stay as Long as Necessary, Rumsfeld Pledges

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 10, 2003; Page A01


Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday pledged to keep as many U.S. troops in Iraq as necessary to stabilize the country and said it could take longer than a year to create the conditions necessary for a new Iraqi government to assume control of the nation.

Rumsfeld spoke shortly after the United States, Britain and Spain formally presented a draft resolution on Iraq`s interim governance to the United Nations Security Council. The draft calls for the United States and Britain to assume the responsibilities of "occupying powers" under international law. It would grant the two countries broad authority for managing Iraq`s political and economic life, including control over its oil revenue, for an initial period of a year and longer, if necessary.

Rumsfeld, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said the resolution`s reference to "an initial" occupation of a year "is probably just a review period, because anyone who thinks they know how long it`s going to take is fooling themselves."

"The United States is prepared to keep any number of troops that are appropriate and necessary in Iraq for as long as it takes to create a secure and permissive environment so that [the Iraqis] can go about their business of reconstructing their country," Rumsfeld said.

Amid complaints from U.S. officials and military personnel in Iraq about continuing instability and lagging reconstruction efforts, Rumsfeld and his top military commander, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, conceded problems existed. But they said considerable progress has been made since the war to topple the government of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein began 53 days ago.

Insisting that conditions are improving "in almost every corner of that country," Rumsfeld urged patience. "It`s going to take some time," he said at a news conference at the Pentagon. "And we accept that, and we`re there to create an environment where that process can take place. And we have patience and we accept the fact that it`s untidy. And I hope that others can recognize that and accept it, and put it into some historical context."

With about 135,000 U.S. forces and another 40,000 British troops now in Iraq, Rumsfeld has avoided estimating how many will be necessary over what time period to stabilize the country and ensure its return to self-governance, other than to say that U.S. troop levels could ultimately be reduced.

He has said this would depend in part upon the number of peacekeeping forces contributed by other countries.

But Rumsfeld has in recent weeks left the impression that he was interested in committing as few troops as possible for as short a time as necessary for stabilizing Iraq, given his long-standing assertion that U.S. combat forces in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan should return home as other countries assume peacekeeping obligations.

Yesterday, however, both Rumsfeld and Franks emphasized the open-ended nature of the Pentagon`s troop deployments in Iraq.

"I think right now what the future will hold a year, two, three . . .ahead of us is not exactly knowable," Franks said.

Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, which ran the war, acknowledged that basic services such as health care, electricity and water are improving but are "not where they need to be, and certainly not where they will be."

"Iraq`s best days are yet to come," Franks said, "and the Iraqi people are already taking steps to build a new government that will, in fact, be of their choice."

Rumsfeld and Franks commented one day after Army Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the commander of allied ground forces in Iraq, said in Baghdad that his forces could not guarantee total security in a country the size of California that has 25 million people.

Now that the 1st Armored Division, based in Germany, is heading into Iraq, the total number of U.S. forces on the ground could increase, with Pentagon officials saying that the 3rd Infantry Division -- the main force that invaded Baghdad -- could delay its departure until June.

"Security in that country is absolutely critical to everything else that`s going to be done there," Franks said. "A condition has to be established so that the people of Iraq can feel free to unshutter the windows of their shops and go to work and so forth."

He said change in the composition of U.S. forces is likely to take place as heavy combat units are withdrawn and replaced with military police, engineers and less heavily armed forces more suitable to stability operations. But Franks declined to estimate how many troops would be needed over time. "I`m not sure at this point we know exactly what the force structure or size is going to look [like] -- or what the international content is going to look like as we move forward," Franks said.

Last week, senior Bush administration officials revealed a plan for creating three separate commands for managing postwar Iraq to be headed by the United States, Britain and Poland. While the U.S. command would involve primarily U.S. forces, they said, the British and Polish would command multinational forces, with Italy, Spain, Denmark, Bulgaria, Netherlands and Ukraine all agreeing to provide troops.

But by and large, these countries do not seem to be offering large numbers of troops. Earlier this week, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, Poland`s defense minister, met with Rumsfeld and said that his country would need $50 million in financial assistance to provide headquarters elements and about 1,500 troops in Iraq for six months. A full year`s stay would run about $90 million.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar pledged during his visit to Washington this week that Spain would send as many as 1,500 troops but said they would be forbidden from engaging in combat.

Britain, which has already reduced the number of its forces in Iraq from 45,000 to 40,000, held a meeting this week in London with representatives of nations interested in committing peacekeeping forces to the British command in Iraq. But a British official in Washington said it is "too early to [talk] about force commitments, force rotations and length of stay."

Rumsfeld said that "a large number of countries are stepping forward," adding that only a minority of them have said that their commitment of troops would be contingent upon successful passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

But questions remain about how many forces NATO allies would be willing to commit, particularly now that NATO is preparing to assume control of a 5,500-troop international force in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld has complained that the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan has been confined to the Kabul area and not deployed across the entire country because so few countries have been willing to commit forces.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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September 22, 2001


It Isn`t America They Hate: It`s the Open Society

By Jonathan Rauch



The terrorists who attacked Washington and New York on September 11 had the whole world to choose from, and they chose America. Why? Why do the attackers and their supporters hate us? What, exactly, do they hate? What can they hope to accomplish or prove? Who, exactly, are "they"? Some of the answers will be found in the newspapers. Others will be found in a book first published in 1945 by a philosopher named Karl R. Popper.

After World War II, Popper (1902-1994) settled in Britain, where, at the London School of Economics, he became Sir Karl and confirmed his standing as the 20th century`s greatest philosopher of science. In 1945, however, he was laboring at an obscure university in New Zealand, where he`d been driven in 1937 by the threat of Nazi occupation of his native Austria. In March of 1938, as the Nazis rolled into his homeland, Popper began work on a comprehensive attack on the philosophers -- Plato, Hegel, Marx -- whose ideas he believed underpinned what later came to be called totalitarianism; he wrote through 1943. Those were the darkest years of the war and possibly of human civilization. The work that resulted was The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Quite a few commentators have said that even if Israel did not exist, Islamist extremists would still view the West in general, and the United States in particular, with anger and resentment and, above all, fear. Israel, according to this view, is the spark, not the fire. That is probably true. But what caused this explosion of wrath? The commentators offer a cacophony of explanations: unipolar American power, the historical roots and modern idiosyncrasies of Islam, the legacy of colonialism, blowback from U.S. policies, failing regimes` need for scapegoats, the pervasiveness of American cultural exports, and on and on. Yet most of us sense that none of those reasons quite touches bottom -- that even taken together, they do not quite touch bottom. Something old and deep and in some respects hauntingly familiar is at work: something as old and deep and familiar as Plato, who stands at the very wellspring of Western philosophy. So suggests Popper.

For Popper, Plato was the first and greatest of all opponents of the open society. Plato holds that the things of this world are corruptible copies of perfect ideals, or Forms. A copy may be good or bad, but what is certain, Popper wrote, is that "every change, however small, must make it different, and thus less perfect, by reducing its resemblance to its Form." From that premise, argued Popper, Plato derives a deeply reactionary view of historical development: "All social change is corruption or decay or degeneration." (The italics, here and in other quotations, are in the original.) >From that premise, in turn, a political conclusion directly follows: Plato "certainly believed... in a general historical tendency toward corruption, and in the possibility that we may stop further corruption in the political field by arresting all political change."

Plato was not content to talk in generalities. Instead, he provided a blueprint of what he thought would be an ideal state. It is not a democracy. It is a martial, hierarchical regime headed by a philosopher-ruler -- someone, Plato imagined, like himself, though recent experience suggests it is more realistic to imagine a cruder sort of philosopher, a Lenin or Mao or Khomeini, in charge. The regime`s administrators and enforcers would be a military-bureaucratic elite of "guardians," to be specially trained (today we might say indoctrinated) and specially privileged.

Plato`s brittle hierarchy remains stable and pure only so long as the administrative class remains uncorrupted and united; otherwise, the state will fall victim to decadence or infighting. The elites are thus not to mingle with the common people, so as not to go soft. Poetry, music, and other expressive arts are to be controlled by rigid censorship serving state interests, lest the guardians be distracted from their duties. Private property, private education, and even private families would also be distracting. Thus, writes Plato (in The Republic): "The state which is to achieve the height of good government must have community of wives and children and all education." To create this uncorrupted state, it will first be necessary, he says, for the rulers to clear the ground by expelling everyone above the age of 10 and then re-educating the children to erase the subversive influences of their parents.

In the 1940s, fascism and Stalinist Communism were uppermost in Popper`s mind, but other regimes before and after have combined elements of Plato`s vision. The Communists of Cambodia and Vietnam sought to kill or expel educated adults to clear the way for a fresh start. Soviet and Maoist Communism eliminated the antisocial distraction of private property. Plato`s eugenic scheme to preserve the integrity of his ruling class found its echo in Nazi Germany. The strict control of music, poetry, and other expressive arts finds its expression in some of today`s fundamentalist Islamic regimes.

Today, radical environmentalists crusade to stop the advance of biotechnology and commerce. Protesters against globalization -- really against capitalism -- take to the streets to rage against corporations and trade. The Rev. Jerry Falwell says that feminists, gays, abortionists, and "all of them who have tried to secularize America" made God turn his back on the United States so the terrorists could strike. Radical Islamists raise what they imagine to be God`s own fist against the West.

It would be nutty to claim that these groups are linked, or that anti-globalists or environmentalists or Falwell had anything to with the 5,000 dead in New York. Trashing a Starbucks is certainly not the same as incinerating the World Trade Center. Yet the two impulses are related, and Popper put his finger on the kinship. What they have in common are two principles that Plato pioneered. One was: "Arrest all political change!" The other: "Back to nature!" (The "natural," remarked Popper, signified to Plato "what is innate or original or divine in a thing, while `artificial` is that which has been later changed by man or added or imposed by him.")

In other words, today`s anti-modern crusaders, different from each other though they undoubtedly are, all share Plato`s horror of uncontrolled political and social change. They also share his belief that only a society that is "natural" (or godly in the one natural way, which amounts to the same thing) can justly stand.

Popper understood that Plato`s instincts were deep and incorrigibly human: instincts grounded in the yearning for simplicity, stability, and the comforts of the known. He also understood that the open society stands unalterably opposed to Plato`s vision. The open society replaces personal and tribal bonds with shifting and abstract ones; it replaces the comforts of apparent stability with the turmoil of all-too-obvious change.

And so the open society introduces what Popper called "the strain of civilization." He said: "This strain, this uneasiness, is a consequence of the breakdown of the closed society. It is still felt even in our day, especially in times of social change.... We must, I believe, bear this strain as the price to be paid for every increase in knowledge, in reasonableness, in co-operation, and in mutual help, and consequently, in our chances of survival." For, Popper said: "There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way -- we must return to the beasts."

Such a return, he felt in 1945 -- in the wake of the Nazi calamity and with Stalin`s empire glowering over the horizon -- was a real possibility. "We can return to the beasts," he said. "But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom."

Although Popper`s reading of Plato was and remains controversial, his reading of society appears sounder than ever. In the face of the open society`s irrepressible effervescence and astonishing durability, the followers of Plato are pushed ever further to the margins of the world. They see the eddies of uncontrolled change and spontaneous creativity lapping at their ankles. In the long run, there is no contest; but in the short run, there is always a fight.

That is why they lash out today in the name of Islam and will lash out in some other name tomorrow and for centuries hence. It is why President Bush is right to say that the battle will be a long one -- though he means hundreds of days, and the reality is more like hundreds of years. It is why he is right to say that the argument is about freedom -- freedom from the tyrannies of Platonic overlords, freedom to build and inhabit a fluid, creative culture. And it is why the open society will prevail.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to REASON. This article was published by National Journal on September 22, 2001.

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Bush Didn`t Squander The World`s Sympathy. He Spent It.

By Jonathan Rauch
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, May 9, 2003

Quagmire? Sure, the war in Iraq was a quagmire. It was just a short quagmire. On the spectrum of quagmires, it was the shortest since the Six Day War.

Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue of knowing a dead policy when he sees one.

In fairness, the war`s critics feared a quagmire not so much during the fight as after, and they had a point. One reason the first Bush administration didn`t drive to Baghdad in 1991 was to avoid an American occupation of a major Arab country. And now there we are.

Still, George W. Bush can probably do a better job in Iraq than Saddam Hussein did. The new quagmire is unlikely to be as bad as the old one. The stronger objection to the war invokes not the "Q" word but the "S" one: squander. As in: President Bush won in Iraq, but in the process he has squandered the world`s goodwill.

Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont governor, blames Bush for turning the "tidal wave of support and goodwill that engulfed us after the tragedy of 9/11" into "distrust, skepticism, and hostility.... It could well take decades to repair the damage." George McGovern accuses Bush of converting "a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others." And so forth.

Poll numbers suggest that America`s war in Iraq did indeed come at a very high cost in international support and sympathy. In countries throughout Europe -- including Britain, Italy, and Spain, all of whose governments supported the war -- public opinion turned sharply against the United States. Favorable ratings of well above 60 percent in many countries declined to the 30s, 20s, and even teens.

In March, on the eve of the American invasion, Ipsos (an international public-opinion research firm) asked people in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Spain whether their government`s foreign policy should "get closer to the U.S. or distance itself more from the U.S." In all of those countries except Germany, respondents called for more distance from the United States, usually by large ratios: 63-28 percent in Japan, 60-13 in Spain, 54-38 in Canada, and 52-36 even in the U.K. The Germans split 44-46 percent, hardly a vote of confidence.

Bush`s supporters retort that post-9/11 sympathy was ephemeral. At the end of the day, they argue, a strong America will attract more support than a weak one. In any case, France and Russia were determined to play the spoiler; it was the world that squandered America`s goodwill, more than the other way around.

Probably, possibly, and maybe. It`s all very complicated. But those arguments miss the larger point. The talk of squandering is fundamentally misconceived. Bush did not squander the world`s goodwill. He spent it, which is not at all the same thing.

The Cold War was a five-decade confrontation in which the United States often found itself aligned in awkward and even obnoxious ways but remained, through it all, on the right side of history. In the end, the Soviet Union fell not because of Star Wars or glasnost, but because Communism was a dysfunctional system that lost the ability to fool even its friends.

Perhaps the most awkward and obnoxious of America`s Cold War alignments were in the Arab world. Washington supported tyrannies and monarchies that wrecked their economies and stunted their politics. The Arab regimes wallowed in corruption and incompetence. They entrenched poverty and blocked middle-class aspirations. They jailed liberal dissidents and political moderates. They fertilized the soil for militant Islamists who provided the only outlet for dissent. They then attempted to neutralize Islamism by diverting its energies to hating liberalism, Americans, and Jews.

In both Iran and Iraq, Washington supported or tolerated corrupt and brutal regimes, with disastrous results in both places. Saudi Arabia has been a different kind of disaster, propagating anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism all over the world. Syria and Libya are disasters. Lebanon is between disasters. Egypt is a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe Jordan is, too.

In short, the United States has been on the wrong side of Arab history for almost five decades, and it is not doing much better than the Soviets. The old policy had no future, only a past. It was a dead policy walking. September 11 was merely the death certificate.

Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue -- not shared by most sophisticates -- of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. So he gathered up the world`s goodwill and his own political capital, spent the whole bundle on dynamite, and blew the old policy to bits. However things come out in Iraq, the war`s larger importance is to leave little choice, going forward, but to put America on the side of Arab reform.

Reform will take years, decades even, and it will mean different things in different countries. In Iraq, it meant force. In Syria, it means hostile prodding; in Saudi Arabia, friendly prodding. It means setting a subversive example for Iran, creating the region`s second democracy in Palestine, building on change in Qatar and Kuwait, leading Egypt gently toward multiparty politics. Progress will be fitful, at best. But the direction will be right, for a change.

This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past. It is not dead. It puts America on the right side of history and on the right side of America.

Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris`s or Amsterdam`s or Bremen`s point of view, what`s not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?

Not long before the Iraq war began, the Heinrich Böll Foundation sponsored a debate in Washington between Richard Perle and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Perle, of course, is a hawkish American neoconservative who supported the Iraq war. Cohn-Bendit, a Frenchman, leads the Green faction of the European Parliament, but is perhaps better known as "Danny the Red" for leading student uprisings in France in the 1960s. In a telling moment, Cohn-Bendit blurted out that Perle, the conservative, was now the revolutionary, trying to reform the whole Arab world -- whereas Cohn-Bendit, the former radical, was now the conservative.

"Suddenly you want to bring democracy to the world," Cohn-Bendit said. "Recently, your government has been behaving like the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. You want to change the whole world. Like them, you claim that history will show that truth is on your side." Savoring the irony, Danny the Red accused America of "revolutionary hubris."

He was right about "revolutionary," though the administration would prefer a gradual revolution. But "hubris"? Not exactly. The effort to reshape the Arab world would indeed seem hopelessly overweening but for the fact that the old policy had already collapsed beneath America`s feet. It had also collapsed beneath the Arab world`s feet. The question is whether the fall of Baghdad might be the sort of wake-up call for Arabs that September 11 was for Americans.

On April 14, The Washington Post rounded up some examples of what it aptly called "fear and rethinking in the Middle East" -- there being plenty of both. "With the fall of Baghdad," wrote Shafeeq Ghabra, the president of the American University of Kuwait, in Lebanon`s online Daily Star, "Arab thought as we knew it since the 1967 defeat collapsed. The nationalism that misled Saddam and our peoples has also collapsed, as well as a pattern of Arabism many of us exploited in favor of autocracy, oppression, dictatorship, and the confiscation of other people`s rights."

Abdul Hamid Ahmad, the editor of a United Arab Emirates-based Web site called Gulf News, wrote, "With the stunning and shameful collapse of the Iraqi regime and its Baathist reign, another Arab era has vanished.... And a stark reality was revealed: that these institutions were virtual phantoms as far as the people were concerned." Single-party monopolies "only lead to the suffocation of people, politically and socially."

Just straws in the breeze, those opinions; but at least now there is a breeze. Spending the world`s goodwill on reform in the Arab world is the most dangerous course the Bush administration could have set, except for all the others.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, where "Social Studies" appears.

http://nationaljournal.com/rauch.htm#

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May 11, 2003
Back in Iraq, a Cleric Urges Islamic Rules
By SUSAN SACHS


ASRA, Iraq, May 10 — An influential Shiite Muslim cleric whose views will help shape Iraq`s political future returned today from exile in Iran and immediately rejected a liberal Western-style democracy as incompatible with the country`s Islamic culture.

The cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, said Iraq must base its laws on Islamic strictures and prohibit the kind of behavior that may be acceptable in the West but is forbidden in Islam.

But he also hedged on his precise vision, saying a new Iraqi government must be elected and be representative of all ethnic and religious groups — not only the majority Shiites but also the minority Sunni Muslims and Christians.

"We don`t want an extremist Islam," he told a cheering, chanting crowd of men at a former military parade ground in Basra, Iraq`s second-largest city. "We don`t want a Taliban brand of Islam. We want an Islam of independence, justice and freedom."

His emphasis on an elected government and national unity reflected the marked shift in tone for Shiite leaders after the fervent calls for an Islamic state in the initial euphoria after the collapse of Saddam Hussein`s rule.

Ayatollah Hakim, who is 63, spent much of his life outside the country fighting to overthrow Mr. Hussein, who deported and killed thousands of Shiites in a relentless campaign to silence dissident religious leaders.

The ayatollah is also one of the few senior clerics who openly challenged Mr. Hussein and survived assassination, chiefly because Iran sheltered and financed him for 23 years.

The ayatollah`s ties to Tehran have made him a suspect figure in Washington, although his organization has maintained indirect contacts with various American administrations because of its consistently virulent opposition to the Hussein government.

Three years ago, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which the ayatollah founded in Tehran in 1982, was officially recognized by the United States as an opposition group eligible for financing under the Iraqi Liberation Act.

Ayatollah Hakim`s group apparently did not accept any American financing. But it is one of the seven exile opposition groups under the umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress, which has been working with American officials in Baghdad to form an interim government.

Seeking to distance itself from the United States, the ayatollah`s group has refused to take part in meetings of other Iraqi groups organized by the Americans.

But his representatives are part of a core group of opposition parties that meet regularly in Baghdad to devise a formula for choosing a transitional national assembly.

Along with the Bush administration, the other main opposition groups also fiercely reject the Iranian model of a cleric-run state. But they acknowledge privately that the Shiites`s long political subjugation must be redressed.

Many Iraqis have begun to question the credibility of some returning opposition leaders who now have a political advantage thanks to their contacts with the United States, but did not live through the repression and torture of Mr. Hussein`s rule.

Ayatollah Hakim sought to present himself as a partner in their suffering, announcing to a gathering of tribal and religious leaders in Basra that he had recently confirmed that 25 of his relatives were killed by the former government.

"We diagnosed 34 years ago the nature of the Saddam regime," he said. "We launched the fight because we had a wider vision."

Just after the fall of Mr. Hussein, crowds of Shiites, who have traditionally been locked out of power, loudly demanded an Islamic state. The demonstrations prompted sharp words of disapproval from Bush administration officials.

But in more recent Friday Prayer sermons and in interviews, Shiite clerics and political activists have spoken in much more moderate terms of creating a multiparty democracy in Iraq that would not provoke American hostility or frighten other Iraqis.

Postwar Iraq, however, remains a political free-for-all, and a number of younger Shiite clerics are jostling for public attention, either with incendiary anti-American speeches or by dispatching gangs of young men to ostensibly guard hospitals and other public buildings.

It is not clear what role Ayatollah Hakim intends to play now that he is home and Iraqi politicking is in high gear. He has denied published reports that he would immediately resign as head of the Supreme Council and act only as its spiritual leader, a move that would remove him from direct political activity.

While he has broad appeal among ordinary Shiites, the ayatollah must also re-establish himself as an influential religious scholar in the more secretive world of Najaf, the seat of Shiite learning in central Iraq.

His council also has political rivals in the Dawa Party, which has wide support as a long-persecuted underground opposition group inside Iraq. Some Shiite activists have also been coalescing around Moktada al Sadr, the son of another revered cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was killed in 1999.

The ayatollah`s aides said he would slowly make his way to Najaf over the next three days, stopping in other southern cities along the way to meet with supporters and tribal and civic leaders.

His reception in Basra was enthusiastic — a surge of men swarmed onto his car as it crossed over a bridge over the Shatt al Arab into Iraq — but not wildly unruly. Crowds shouted his name, called out "Yes to Islam" and waved banners calling him "leader of the courageous."

Unlike other opposition leaders who returned to Baghdad soon after the government`s collapse last month, Ayatollah Hakim had lingered in Tehran while his aides negotiated with American officials to ensure that he would be permitted to keep a 200-man personal militia.

Other opposition leaders also have small private armies that accompany them and guard their offices. But unlike their men, who strut through Baghdad with Kalashnikov rifles conspicuously slung over their shoulders, the ayatollah`s guards did not openly display their weapons at the public gatherings today.

Also today, the commander of British forces in the Persian Gulf, Air Marshal Brian K. Burridge, returned to Britain. Maj. Gen. Robin Brims, commander of British land forces in Iraq, is now the ranking officer in the region.

Britain, which had about 45,000 troops in and around Iraq during the war, has been reducing its military presence, the Defense Ministry said.

Meanwhile, The Times of London reported that Queen Elizabeth II had indicated that she was not in favor of a victory march for returning British troops.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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May 11, 2003
Look Good, Act Cool
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

Pressured by Christian groups, Wal-Mart announced last week that it would no longer carry Maxim, Stuff and FHM, the British laddie magazines that boil life down to a simple earthy equation of babes, beer, gear, cars, sports, abs and how to deal with a unibrow.

It`s tough for the wholesome to know where to draw the line against the racy. F.A.O. Schwarz is still displaying Lingerie Barbies wearing merry widow bustiers, peekaboo peignoirs, black satin bra and panties with pale blue bows, stockings and garters.

Except for Lingerie Barbie No. 6. There were so many protests from parents about "Porn Barbie," as one L.A. dad dubs her, with her waist-length red hair, silver satin teddy with black lace trim, textured stockings with black seams, black bondage stilettos and black "soft ribbons to gently hold your Barbie doll," as an ownership manual puts it, that many of the toy store branches decided to hide her behind the counter and admit her existence only if a customer requests her by number.

"I really don`t want the experience of looking at a Maxim cover and shopping with my 2-year-old for a Wiggly Worm to be the same," said one creeped-out dad.

Still, it`s funny that Wal-Mart decided to censor laddie magazines the very same week the Bush administration soared with laddie politics.

The fabulously successful British glossies were inspired by the American "guy culture" of "Top Gun," "Animal House" and "Cheers."

The hormonal graphics and absence of erudition were designed to appeal to what one media expert called "high-tech cave men."

The May Maxim offers a "Wingman Training Manual" for "trolling for the ladies": "What kind of friend are you? Would you lie like a rug, fight like a man, and willingly take home a clock-stopper for the sake of a pal?"

The magazines represent the most extraordinary collection of testosterone, of crank-it-up, raging-rhinoceros attitude ever — with the exception of when Rummy dines alone.

The Republicans have been exuding that self-satisfied air of masculine conquest, that Maxim bravado of "If it doesn`t come with a side of meat, it ain`t breakfast," and "Drinking a diet soda doesn`t make you gay, but it does make you look gay."

And the Democrats have been flailing against it, harping on the cost of President Maverick`s "Op Gun" moment that forced an aircraft carrier to make lazy circles so the California coastline wouldn`t pop up behind his head.

The White House admitted that its original stated reason for using the Viking jet instead of the presidential helicopter — that the ship was too far offshore — was bogus.

The real reason for the stunt was that the president wanted to have fun and film a campaign ad.

Lisa Schiffren, a Quayle speechwriter who wrote the "Murphy Brown" rant, gushed in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled "Hey, Flyboy" that President Bush in a flight suit was "really hot . . . as in virile, sexy and powerful."

She polled her soccer-mom girlfriends in Manhattan and got the same reaction. "He`s a hottie," said one. "Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!" said another. And a third panted, "That swagger. George Bush in a pair of jeans is a treat to watch." (If it gets any hotter, Wal-Mart may have to ban The Journal.)

From facing off with Anita Hill and Al Gore, Republicans know America prefers winning, even under dubious pretenses, to whining.

The Democrats never had the nerve to press the administration on the right stuff — when the Bushies exploited 9/11 to hype the case against Saddam, or when the president and vice president cloaked themselves in the mantle of Caesar with their pre-emption policy, or when the Bush crowd kept all its empire plans secret, or when Dick Cheney repaid the favor and gave Halliburton ever-bigger windfalls on Iraqi contracts.

So they carp about the president spending too much on a photo op, like a nagging wife upset that hubby went out with the guys and spent too much money on gadgets. They don`t know how to combat the Bushies` visceral belief in action over explanation, juice over justification.

The laddie ethos may be too much for Wal-Mart, but it suits Karl Rove just fine.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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Iraq in danger of starvation, says UN
Helena Smith, Nicosia and Ed Vulliamy in Baghdad
Sunday May 11, 2003
The Observer

Iraqi agriculture is on the brink of collapse, with fears that many of its 24.5 million people will go hungry this summer, according to a confidential report being studied by the UN`s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

A special assessment prepared by the UN agency`s staff in Rome, which has been seen by The Observer, reveals a catastrophe in the making, with crops and poultry being especially hard hit.

Government warehouses that would have served as the main suppliers of seeds, fertilisers and pesticide sprays have been looted, particularly in the centre and south of the country.

Iraqi farmers should now be planting tomatoes and onions, potatoes, cucumbers, water melon, peppers, beans and squash. But without seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, that will be hard - a situation exacerbated by the collapse of the pumping stations that powered the irrigation schemes on which the vegetable crop depends.

`Vegetables and poultry are particularly important because they are the main source of protein, vitamins, minerals and a host of micro-nutrients that are missing from the oil-for-food basket which is also why malnutrition is endemic in Iraq,` said spokesman Barry Came.

Sixty per cent of the population has depended on the oil-for-food programme, instituted at the end of the 1991Gulf war. Under the programme, Iraq received supplies of wheat, pulses and flour in exchange for oil.

The FAO calls the report a `preliminary desk assessment` and is expected to release a statement commenting on its main points by Wednesday.

In the southern and central areas, vital irrigation networks have been destroyed, a once-thriving poultry industry has been ruined and there are predictions of disease and pestilence among both plants and animals.

Enormous difficulties are anticipated in harvesting winter crops, 1.2 million tons of wheat, barley, rice and maize. Under Saddam, harvesting normally started this month, with a touring fleet of ageing combined harvesters.

Lack of spare parts had long put a strain on the harvesters available and now no mechanism exists for purchasing the yield. In previous years, the Ministry of Trade bought the crop, stored it and arranged for banks to pay farmers, who in turn used the revenues to buy the seeds for their summer vegetable crops.

But this year no seeds have been planted because, even if the farmers had money to buy them, most of the seed stock has been looted or destroyed.

Iraqi`s poultry industry, source of the half of the animal protein eaten by the population, is also in dire straits. All the soybean and protein concentrate feed stored in government warehouses was stolen, along with vaccines, drugs and medicines required to keep the stock healthy.

Both the major poultry projects that once supplied Iraqi chicken farmers with layers and hatching eggs have collapsed. Thousands of birds have starved to death.

Animal health is another major concern. Most of the veterinary hospitals and clinics were looted or destroyed, and vehicles, drugs, medicines and food ingredients disappeared.

The impact could be severe in a country where disease is rife among the 18 million sheep and goats and three million cattle. Some are capable of transmission to humans, so constant control is required.

The warning came as America`s efforts to get Iraq`s Health Ministry up and running twisted into farce yesterday, when it emerged that the new Minister concerned was a Saddam crony.

Dr Ali Shnan Janabi, former number three in Saddam`s infamously corrupt Ministry, was presented to an all-day conference of doctors. His appointment was greeted with disbelief and charges of corruption from many doctors.

Dr Hussein Harith, a senior registrar at the al-Mansour teaching hospital, said Dr Shnan was one of a `group of senior Ministers who asked the directors of hospitals to report that they did not need drugs and medicines [supplied to Iraq under the oil-for-food programme], even though they were desperate for them.

There were happier scenes in Basra, where the 63-year-old leader of Iraq`s biggest Shia group returned from exile yesterday. Supporters waved flags and chanted slogans when the convoy of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim crossed into Iraq from Iran, where he has led the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq since 1980.

Thousands lined the 12-mile road from the border to Basra, where up to 100,000 people packed a stadium to listen to him address them for the first time in 23 years.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Bush ally set to profit from the war on terror
Antony Barnett and Solomon Hughes
Sunday May 11, 2003
The Observer

James Woolsey, former CIA boss and influential adviser to President George Bush, is a director of a US firm aiming to make millions of dollars from the `war on terror`, The Observer can reveal.

Woolsey, one of the most high-profile hawks in the war against Iraq and a key member of the Pentagon`s Defence Policy Board, is a director of the Washington-based private equity firm Paladin Capital. The company was set up three months after the terrorist attacks on New York and sees the events and aftermath of September 11 as a business opportunity which `offer substantial promise for homeland security investment`.

The first priority of Paladin was `to invest in companies with immediate solutions designed to prevent harmful attacks, defend against attacks, cope with the aftermath of attack or disaster and recover from terrorist attacks and other threats to homeland security`.

Paladin, which is expected to have raised $300 million from investors by the end of this year, calculates that in the next few years the US government will spend $60 billion on anti-terrorism that woul not have been spent before September 11, and that corporations will spend twice that amount to ensure their security and continuity in case of attack.

The involvement of one of the most prominent hawks in Washington with a company standing to cash in on the fear of potential terror attacks will raise eyebrows in some quarters.

In 2001 US Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz sent Woolsey to Europe, where he argued the case for links existing between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. He was one of the main proponents of the theory that the anthrax letter attacks in America were supported by Iraq`s former dictator.

More recently Woolsey told CNN about Saddam`s attempts to produce a genetically modified strain of anthrax. He told the US broadcaster: `I would be more worried over the mid to long term about biological weapons, because the chemical gear, we`re - I think we`re pretty well equipped to deal with. But there have been stories that Saddam has been working on genetically modifying some of these biological agents, making anthrax resistant to vaccines or antibiotics.`

Little evidence was provided for the Iraq link to the anthrax attacks and the FBI is now investigating a lone US scientist whom it believes was responsible. But Woolsey`s assertions added to a political atmosphere in which spending on equipment designed to protect individuals and firms from terror was predicted to mushroom.

One of Paladin`s first investments was $10.5m in AgION Technologies, a firm devising anti-germ technology that it hopes will `be the leader in the fight against bacterial attacks initiated by terrorists on unsuspecting civilian and military personnel`.

Woolsey is not alone among the members of the Pentagon`s highly influential Defence Policy Board to profit from America`s war on terror.

The American watchdog, the Centre for Public Integrity, showed that nine of the board`s members have ties to defence contractors that won more than $76bn in defence contracts in 2001 and 2002. Woolsey`s fellow neo-conservative, Richard Perle, had to resign his chairmanship of the board because of conflicts of interest, although he remains a board member.

The hawks and their money

DICK CHENEY, Vice President

Cheney once ran oil industry giant Halliburton whose subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, has won lucrative contracts in post-Saddam Iraq. The Defence Department gave KBR exclusive rights to a $90m contract to cater for the Americans who are working on rebuilding Iraq. KBR also won a lucrative contract to repair Iraq`s oilfields.

DONALD RUMSFELD, Defence Secretary

Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of European engineering giant ABB when it won a £125m contract for two light water reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the `axis of evil`. Rumsfeld earnt $190,000 (£118,000) a year before he joined the Bush administration.

RICHARD PERLE

An influential member of the Pentagon`s Defence Policy Board, Perle is managing partner of venture capital company Trireme, which invests in companies dealing in products of value to homeland security. It sent a letter to Saudi arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi arguing that fear of terrorism would boost demand in Europe, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

GEORGE SHULTZ, ex-Secretary of State

Shultz is on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group, the largest contractor in the US and one of the favourites to land lucrative contracts in the rebuilding of Iraq. Shultz is chairman of the the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a fiercely pro-war group with close ties to the White House.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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Blair`s road map to euro entry
By Andy McSmith, Political Editor
11 May 2003


Tony Blair is seeking to persuade Gordon Brown to agree a road map for the UK to join the single European currency, preferably before the next general election.

With the stand-off between the two most powerful figures in the Government dragging on, Mr Blair has been warned by his own supporters that he will look like a man who has "lost his bottle" if he gives in.

If the Blair camp gets its way, the map will include the promise of another review of the Treasury`s tests for euro membership in a few months, keeping open the possibility that Britons might go to the polls in a referendum in 2004.

Blair`s allies also want Parliament to push ahead with legislation to enable a referendum to be called at short notice. They want a parliamentary Bill to specify the exact words that would appear on a ballot paper, a point that could provoke fierce controversy because of the possibility that the wording of the question could influence the way people vote.

Giles Radice, a former chairman of the Commons treasury committee and an ally of Mr Blair, said that the stand-off will decide which of the two men is actually running the Government.

"Tony wants a road map to entry, partly for economic reasons, partly for political reasons. He wants to be able to say it`s a question of `when` not `if` – whereas Gordon is trying to say `if`," Lord Radice said. We are now going to see who is the real prime minister. The Britain in Europe campaign is right to put the question: `Have you got the bottle, Tony?`"

To increase the pressure on the Prime Minister, the main pro-euro pressure group, Britain in Europe, this morning publishes a long list of leaders of foreign firms, including the heads of Ford and Toyota, which have invested in the UK economy but might pull out if the UK loses interest in joining the euro.

The Chancellor wants to rule out a referendum this side of a general election, and to put the onus on the EU to reform institutions like the European Central Bank before Britain joins.

On Tuesday, he will take part in the first meeting of EU finance ministers since 10 new countries from eastern and southern Europe were admitted to membership. Seated between the finance ministers of Latvia and Cyprus, Mr Brown will put the case for sweeping reforms to free up trade between EU countries.

Interviewed for today`s GMTV Sunday programme, Mr Brown said: "I believe that there is a strong determination on the part of many people that the pro-Europeans should unite on an economic reform agenda."

Mr Blair and Mr Brown had a long private meeting in Downing Street, with no officials in the room, before last Thursday`s Cabinet meeting, but failed to agree.

The Treasury has completed 18 separate studies of the potential impact of joining the euro, which are said to amount to one of the most impressive and authoritative bodies of work ever produced by civil servants. The political argument between the Treasury and No 10 is not about the studies themselves, but about the accompanying set of conclusions, drafted by Mr Brown and his chief adviser, Ed Balls.

It had been hoped that the studies would be published this week, with a statement in the Commons delivered by Mr Brown. But his inability to reach agreement with the Prime Minister has meant the statement has been delayed for at least a week, and possibly until June.

The final deadline, set by Mr Blair, is 13 June – the second anniversary of when Parliament first met after the last general election – but both Mr Blair and Mr Brown would prefer that it was delivered before MPs go away for their Whitsun break, on 22 May.

One insider suggested that the gulf between them is so wide that it will be impossible to bridge it before June. He said: "Don`t be surprised if they go right to the wire."

The Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, a long- standing opponent of British membership of the euro, yesterday told Mr Blair that he should either call a referendum quickly or cancel the idea.
11 May 2003 10:02

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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